Church bells were pealing in the small towns they passed as they drove down country roads to arrive at the river's edge this morning: it's early on Sunday. They didn't have to drive far, because some cities in the plains are like this: urban trappings fade rapidly, within minutes even, to give way to fields and forests. Greys and browns yield beneath fields of gold and emerald hills covered in tiny purple flowers.
He takes her here because places like this are where he first learned magick, and where he first learned to sense Time for himself.
Eventually they come to the river, and he has been here before so they don't have far to walk at all, at least in the estimation of people who walk a lot. This river was once a glacier; it began as the heartbeat of a mountain, and who thought a mountain's lifeblood would rush so? It crashes and eddies and rages because that's what young rivers do, before they've had a chance to shape their beds and lie in them more comfortably.
The day too is young yet and so the light is still a soft gold. Nicholas does not come alive in this the same way as he does in the half-light where he is silver gilt ebony, but he is still settled in his movements as they arrive there at the edge of the water. He has a pack slung over his shoulder, which clicks and rustles as he moves though his boots are soundless, and he is wearing a sweater and a pair of heavy canvas pants, neutral tones all.
"Will this be easier for you with a timer?"
Penny Mercury
"I don't know. Won't you be my clock, if I need one?" Pen says, squinting one eye as she cants her head, looking off toward the East. She shifts her weight from one hip to the next, and it is not a restless motion; she is assured of her space, assured of the measure of her own skin and her presence in her own skin. It has nothing to do with knowing her own body; it has all to do with knowing her own mind; knowing the measure the world around can be moved by.
Pen, hiking with Nicholas, is this picture:
braided red hair, burnished by the soft Spring-sun gold, wrapped around her head, bangs sleek two longer spikes of hair sleek curling against her strong Joan of Arc jaw her Boudica bone structure her bone stucture that would suit according to any painter's eye some mythical creature a woman able to lure beguile able to be limned in angels to command salt.
Hiking boots, pants with many pockets gray as a stone waiting to be home to a sword gray as a lake under a rainswept sky, a t-shirt with David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust face, some colorful but thin long-sleeved patterned thrown over more laces at the elbow up the upper arms it's left open (it could be tied closed), and an intricate slithery metal collar with a prominent stone at her neck, ring on the finger of Saturn, Mercury, Mars; ring on the other finger of Saturn, Mercury. Three bracelets on her left hand. Two earrings per ear, one of which is a stone that doesn't match the rest, another of which is a very delicate silver fish. She has one of those leather packs which you wear at your hip, which is closed by pewter or steel, which you can buy at a Renaissance Faire or craft show, and which adds a certain rakish something to Penny Mecury, Expert Hiker.
"What 'this'? What are we going to do?"
crow
"If I'm your clock, how will you learn to be your own clock?" he asks, and he meets that squint sidelong, and there's a little glint here, something that toes the edge of playful. "I guess if you decide it's easier there's always your phone or mine."
We have mentioned that Nick stopped near the water and so he has; he is eyeing it now, he is looking from it and around the clearing at the light that slants through the branches. He is remembering coming to a clearing like this one not too long ago. Different purpose then, though: he has not yet gone to speak to the City Crow as he'd intended. He recalls this now.
"I was planning to help you start to get a better sense of Time and how it passes," he says. "And a sense for how you can make it loop back around on itself. I thought a timer might be helpful for that, so you...have a metric or something, I suppose." Nick reaches back over his shoulder as though were he some country knight or armored fey thing he might grip a sword.
He's not reaching for a sword just his water bottle. He takes a swallow from it. "What do you think would be helpful for you?"
Penny Mercury
"In what sense? Are we, do you want me to sit and feel - " there is a certain almost but not quite caution to her tone of voice here, because though she often comes across as a celebrant, although she enjoys life to its fullest, is an intuitive creature and Will-worker, something about this ('feel') is not necessarily a comfortable idea to the Hermetic. " - the passage of time? Should I count out a minute and then try to keep the minute in my head and multiply it, but real time? If you think it useful, I suppose I could start a timer, but for how long?"
crow
"Multiply...minutes?" Nick has turned to face her in full just now, and there is an arch there in his brows that suggests that such an approach is not one that would have occurred to him. "The actual passage of time isn't what's important. What's important is the way it shifts and the way different experiences are like other experiences, the...the comparison, I suppose. The timer is only useful if it helps with that."
He sets his pack on the ground now, eases down into a crouch beside it so that he can unzip it. From it he draws a candle, a solid blunt red thing. "How aware are you of time, usually? How much time has passed?"
Penny Mercury
Pen doesn't answer immediately. Quick-witted, but thoughtful too; she casts her gaze out over the river rather than on Nicholas's bent head, the darkness of it, lets the glassy curls of water, torrential, sweep her gaze onward and downward, and finally she says:
"'Usually.' I don't know; I don't pay attention. In the past I have not often lost track of time, if I set myself to being aware that I must do X by Y, but I wouldn't say there's any precision, and if I am reading or studying I'm sometimes only aware at the end. In certain physically demanding trials, everything seems quicksilver but suspended, and afterward I suppose I couldn't tell you how many seconds passed."
crow
"Precision isn't necessarily the key," Nick says, and if she looks over at him she'll find him watching her and not the water, one of his hands gripping the elbow of the other arm. His expression too is a thoughtful one. "Quicksilver but suspended. When you're saying that you aren't aware of the passage of seconds, it sounds like you're still aware that the perception of time is something that changes. When else have you been aware of that?"
Penny Mercury
Pen does not look over at Nick. Pen cants her head to hear him as she peers across the river and if his voice is too quiet she moves nearer. Her gaze begins to travel back across the glassy rills against the current of the river when he echoes her own words back at her.
"Aware of the perception of time being something that changes?" The short hike and the whisper of motion in the air have both pulled fine as glass filaments shining red strands one two three four five six seven out of the braids wrapped around her head out of the long spikes of hair left loose and one of the filaments catches on her eyelash a spider-web piece of witchery and certain Sorceresses could cast their spells with their hair with knots love-knots and curse-knots ill-spells and fair. "I'm n - " Quick stop.
Flick of a two looks in quick succession Nickwards, a rapid blink blink blink. The strand of hair loses its place caught on her eyelashes and she says, "At the same time it is happening?"
crow
Quick stop, and Nick raises his eyebrows, and that is how she'll see him when she looks over at him with that strand of hair clipping just in front of her eyes. He might have prompted her, but thankfully a sense that she is gathering her thoughts keeps him from it, and so he waits.
He is leaning down to unlace his boots, one after the other, and just now his head is raised so he can watch her, so he can listen to her reply. Her question makes him smile, the way that it will make him smile when he can tell that she has to think about something he is saying, as though they are sharing a secret. (And they are, aren't they? What else is magick if not that?) "At the same time, or afterward, if you've thought about it afterward."
Penny Mercury
Back to gazing at the river, most determinedly this time; sediment, settling into the line of her shoulders; her chin, lifted in a manner some might describe as proud. Certainly, the painters would, were she as enthralled and enchained as a muse. Pen hooks her thumbs into her pockets, but there is a sense, isn't there, that she might be about to draw forth a sword, or might at least be waiting (forever) for one to be laid at her feet: no flowers, understand, just swords; if the swords happened to be wreathed in flowers, well fine and good, but the sword itself would do just shine, as long as it can still catch the shining of water on its blade and cut with that shining, as long as it was still the right sword - the one which is compass needle to a heart. Her boot lace has come somewhat undone.
"I told you about keeping vigil. During part of them, not the whole thing, not even once, but during part of them I've been aware. During physical trials, during fights, I told you that just now. Sometimes when a moment is sublime, I know it is brief, but it is still suspended. When I have been with you, Nicholas, sometimes - "
Caesura. Not quite a full-stop; she turns her face a little toward Nick, as if she is going to glance at him, but she isn't; she keeps her eyes away.
"Before I could swim very well, when I was pulled under the wave. Walking home from the bus stop at two am, then I know not much time is passing, but it has felt like an age, with many little passages hiding who knows what."
crow
Sometimes, she says, and her face half-turns toward him but his is already turning away, his gaze finding the laces of his boots as they finally come undone. Her words still find him like a flight of arrows, they strike him as though physically, and his smile is a private thing. He straightens back to his feet, still watching them as he steps on the heels of his boots to wiggle his feet out of them, first one and then the other. He lifts his foot to hook a finger underneath his sock and tug it free. Repeat. Into his boots they go, until he is barefoot in the soil.
"All of those things are things that you have done before and will do again. Time is cyclic, it repeats itself. I think sometimes, when I..." A beat. "When I am with you, or when I'm driving home from work, or when I meditate at home sometimes those are times when it is suspended for me, or when it goes too quickly. I think it's because those moments carry the echoes of all those other times."
He leans down once more, begins to cuff his pants high on his shins in precise little folds. "Pick one of those things, and tell me about a specific moment in time that you remember then."
Penny Mercury
Pen is quiet as much because she is reserved (stories about herself) as because she has taken her gaze from the river and let it rest on Nicholas's shoulders until he straightens at which point it lingers on the planes of his face instead (a poem) as because she is picking her words (care full). Her neat little mouth slants to the side and there is something of her reserve in the quirk - yes - but also something of dissatisfaction and trustfulness. Her gaze draws a line from Nicholas's face to his shins to his bare feet. There is something about her air which beguiles: she does not want to beguile right now, but a moment both quicksilver and suspended -
- and so. "Not long ago, Nick, you were asleep in the way you sleep, as if flirting with irrevocability, but I was awake. I like to be awake and to hear somebody breathing other than myself, and the sunlight was coming in around the curtains, and when I looked over toward you it was hitting your cheekbone and your shoulder and your mouth was the quietest I'd ever seen it and I was too warm because you were like a rock that had just been taken out of the fire and you were heavy and I knew you wouldn't wake up if I pushed you away and got out of bed and I was thinking about how you wouldn't wake up if I did that but I wasn't doing that because I liked to look at you and I knew I had to leave if I was going to begin my day according to schedule. I did not want to leave. I did not not want to leave. The sun was going to move; it was already moving. But it felt like a long time and it felt like no time at all, like air bubbles frozen in ice or air bubbles in crystal."
"Is that the kind of specific moment you want? Do you want something more specific or less? Less context or more? Stories in the middle of a fight are all the same story. Some thing happened; I had to be some thing in order to happen as some thing was happening."
crow
This is the sort of retelling that cannot help but be intimate, deeply personal, and now he does laugh once, and it short and quiet and all in the exhale. He has finished rolling his pants to just the middle of his calf, enough to step into the river and over the rocks without soaking them, and he turns to her now, his toes curving as they find purchase in the forest soil.
His eyes are dark because sometimes they are without the silvered shadow of night, because the light isn't hitting them in precisely that way. Pen is not wanting to beguile just now and yet she does; he cannot look away and he'd paint her just now if he had the skill or talent.
After a moment he says, "You said the sun was moving. Do you remember where it was when you first woke, and where it was when you finally did get up?"
Penny Mercury
Pen shakes her head no. Pauses; touches her own cheekbone with her left hand, head canted as she brushes her fingertips across it (grazes her skin, neatly but imprecisely for memory is imprecise) then brushes her thumb across her mouth and the tip of her chin and then her collar bone and she takes her hand away and then puts it back on her own breast. There: that's how far the sunlight moved; morning light can be so quick.
crow
Nick watches her as she shakes her head and then: considers his question, moves her hand from her thumb and the tip of her chin to her breastbone. His eyes are half-lashed, half-lidded, perhaps imagining her in that morning light not so long ago even though he was asleep then. "How many seconds do you think passed? How many heartbeats? Has it taken the same number to recall and shape the memory as it did when you were there living it?"
Penny Mercury
[Hmm... what a good question, Wits what do you say Pen thinks?]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 6, 9) ( success x 2 )
Penny Mercury
"No." Pen lets her hand fall; her gaze is occulted, but direct, and there is a slight lift to the curve of her eyebrows, expressive of attention or the intensity (restrained) of attention. Pen is not very good at meditating, at emptying her mind; she finds it easy to concentrate, but difficult to empty herself and just be. Vessel. "It's just a a card now it's here playing a page," she taps her temple (rakish), lowering her brow to do so. "Maybe seven seconds," and this is grave, like she's telling one of her martial tutors how long it took to be knocked out in a fight (seven seconds, not too bad, not too good).
crow
This isn't precisely how he had planned to teach her today: they came to the woods for a reason. And yet that's how one ought to teach and teach well, isn't it? Teach to the student, and Pen is: a soldier. There is a gentle curve to his mouth as he watches her tap her temple. "Go back there and recall the memory more, now. For seven seconds. I'll count for you, when you're ready."
Penny Mercury
Pen studies Nicholas for a second, her brows rising slowly higher. Can she tell he is adjusting his teaching plan to her reactions? She would not like it if she could, whether that makes him a good teacher or not.
"Ready," because pft no preparation needed, bro.
Pen's gaze drops, because Nicholas standing in a river is a distracting image eidolon portent from Nicholas sleeping while morning sun creeps across him.
crow
He hasn't stepped into the river, just yet. When he does it will be cold (though not so cold as that time they went diving into the heart of winter, back at the Hanging Lakes.) The soil is cold too, though his skin hasn't yet begun to redden.
So he counts, and his measurement of seconds is precise. "One...two..." Up to seven.
Penny Mercury
Pen's lashes stay low until five; her gloaming, churchyard fog and moonlight gaze, sword-lady eyes and their expression kept private and aloof. A second is a longer period of time, or seems like a longer period of time, when one is at attention, when one is paying attention in tithe, than one would otherwise think; she feels it now though it doesn't make her wry. Maybe it will later; her attention is not wandering. She is thinking about Nick in the morning until seven which is the number of truth, of seeking, and it is not a master number but it has a master vibration and belongs to the modern planet of Neptune. Things can change; seven stays the same, a divine number; lucky, in the vernacular.
crow
Seven seconds is a long time, when one is marking them. Pen does this and he too is placing himself there, though see his mind turns perhaps a little farther ahead to what could have been the same morning, turns ahead because he was asleep. Nick begins his mornings with a mantra, with a memory of the night: I will lose my youth, my health, my loved ones, everything I hold dear and finally life itself. I am not afraid.
It's a Buddhist prayer. It's the kind of Buddhist prayer that one doesn't often find in the prolific feelgood texts found in new age circles.
Seven belongs to Neptune. Doesn't Time, too?
Pen opens her eyes and Nick is watching her when she does. "What was it like, trying to recall that way?"
Penny Mercury
"Painting." Pen brushes her bangs out of her eyes, holding them back against her skull and revealing her forehead for a moment. Then she lets her hair flop back, and the light glitters on her rings, it touches a shadow under her ear, twists in the bright braided tresses.
crow
Painting, she says, and his lips move after she says it though not quite in the shape of that word. It's only as though it would not have occurred to him, that sort of frame for what she is doing, because he is not a painter and his concession to whatever artistic inclinations he may have lie in photography. "Remember when we went swimming in the lake?"
Of course she does: it can't have been that long ago. He glances to her feet now, too. "You might want to take off your boots."
Penny Mercury
[Oh man, I am kind of lazy, let's do this. >.> Matter2/Corr 2. -1 instrument, -1 practiced. All too practiced.]
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (1, 6, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
Penny Mercury
Pen leans over and, rather than unlace her boots, slips from the right one her wand, unsheathes it in the manner of drawing a sword for a purpose and the sword has more than one purpose although the narrow-minded might say otherwise. Then she sketches a sigil in the air with its tip; the morning light gilds the wood, touches on the metal and stones chased within; then she flicks the end of the wand, supple, see, and her boots are off and neatly resting by Nicholas's own and the air feels of Daring, of Ardence and Resplendence, and there was a moment of adjustment when the soles disappeared from under her feet but she is practiced enough in this (boots are hard) that she doesn't lose her balance and she says, "Mm. What else should I discard?"
crow
Watching Pen work magick is like watching a painter or other artist, her motions practiced and deliberate as she materializes something out of nothing, whether it be fire or moving her clothing from here to there. Nick likes to watch her Work because as he said to her brother once: he likes to be awed. And Pen does awe.
He smiles. "You can discard whatever you like, but keeping me focused on magick instead of you might get tricky."
Penny Mercury
Her lashes flicker; it isn't quite a blink but the intensity goes diffuse for an instant, softens to pastels to light scattering on water moving; water is always moving, always waltzing with a shadow. Pause. Her lashes flicker once and twice and then there's a quiet lift to one corner of her mouth; it isn't quite a blink; the intensity returns.
With an economical movement, no flourish, Pen takes her socks off, first the left and then the right, rolls them into a ball which she tosses in the general direction of the boots.
Brief flash of a dimple, at the last, and unquiet; it's a quickening expression (I Dare You) and there is a poet who says he is as one whose name is writ in water. Spring, and Pen should be wearing flowers; she should be trailing yellow flowers, scattering petals in her wake; she should be plucking the petals from above her, where they lie on mirror-glass flat water.
crow
His eyes find hers as her lashes flicker, as her dimple appears as though summoned by circle disappears, as she leans down to shuck her socks and throw them over by her boots. Spring, and Pen should be wearing flowers to cast down into the river where the water would curl and whisper around them, and Nick should be wearing very little at all and crowned with new growth, with the greening leaves.
His gaze lingers a second more and then he steps forward into the water, his toes careful as they seek purchase on the slick rocks, and his breath catches because this is cold. Not as cold as that day in March, but cold. "Tell me about a moment that you remember best, from when we went swimming."
Penny Mercury
"Hitting the water like a knife; I don't know which was the knife. The water or me. The forward momentum of going right through it and the scrape of air pulling away, all those bubbles pearling up as the current began to tug but gliding forward and forward anyway, the curve upward like the line of a harp until my head broke the surface and the ice being the first thing I saw but smeared and blurry, the moon and an adventure."
crow
"Paint it," he says, his voice quiet as he looks around for her over his shoulder. "And when you step in the water now, tell me how long it takes for the water to hit your ankles, or your shins. How many heartbeats it is until you stop feeling the cold, and how long after that until your skin begins to ache. Use what's come before to understand what will be, and to understand all the things around you that you can measure Time against."
Penny Mercury
[Let's give it a go, Pen. How's your time sense-y-nss? Let's try Perception. Can you distinguish?]
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 5) ( fail )
Penny Mercury
Pen did discard her outer layer, the lace-up shirt-smock long-sleeved thing, pulled the laces undone let it blow toward the boots and socks and catch there, and the morning air is cold enough that her arms are goose flesh and starkly pale in a way that anticipates the cold. David Bowie's ageless and alien angular beauty stares fierce from her shirt from her breasts and the metal bracelets at her wrist are dull because they're in the shadow of her body. Pen sucks on her lower lip thoughtfully, and: a lack of concentration is not her fault. The cold of the river does not distract her; neither does the feel of pebbles against her toes, of wet grit and of stone, of some water-weed caught some slippery slimy thing. The movement of the river does not distract her either; the sudden push of it, the joyful leap of it as wavelets lap one over the other and hit at her ankles and then at her calf, soaking her gray pants into a shadow color, something church-side and granite at midnight. She is not distracted at all, but she loses track of seconds and her heartbeat and time almost immediately, because she is thinking this: about laying one moment over the other, see, about onion skins and how they are imprecise, how strange to put everything in a layer like that to stack it up so tight; she is thinking about making prints, intaglio, and how maybe that is time, but then there'd be erosion and she is wondering if this is what Nicholas did (this is when you go into the water, like a knife [Nicholas was right there, treading water, already as pale as a ghost]) when he just stayed still stayed still like he'd not move until he turned blue (and you surfaced [and went right for the ice - C'mon!]) and -
Wait, fuck. Was she supposed to -
Think back think back how long has it been, Pen? Wait, pay attention to the cold so you know when to stop feeling it. Fuck. Pen twists one of her rings, crinkles her nose at herself. The expression is caught-out.
"I lost track."
crow
Her shirt was cast aside next to her boots. Before, on the morning he has asked her to remember, Nicholas was the first one into the water and it had immediately frosted his skin, pulled him down down and closer to death, and so he had not been able to mark the alabaster of her skin or the red of her hair, tangled caught around her throat as the wind toys with it. Nick likes to keep pace with her, to feel what she is feeling, and so he reaches down to the hem of his shirt and tugs it over his head and flings it haphazard back toward their boots. It lands nearby, or near enough. Not in the water.
The sunlight where it lances through the overhead canopy dapples his skin like a new faun, and he watches her as she enters the water. Her nose crinkles, and his smile is back: warm, see, because it is easy for him too to become lost. "It happens. That kind of focus on Time isn't natural for us. Try again. Tell me how Time is like water. Tell me how you're aware that it's passing."
Penny Mercury
Pen lifts a finger near her ear, curls it around and under the loose strands of hair and she curls them away from her cheekbone and her throat, curls them behind her ear. Her nose doesn't stay crinkled up, though her mouth stays firmed and somewhat pursed for a heartbeat after. She lifts one foot from the water, pointing her toes deliberately, kicking a spray of water up and out and over, scatter droplets, catch light; then the other one, a little bird-hop, now she's a little deeper in the river. Okay; focus.
Tell Nicholas how Time is like water. Tell him how she is aware that it's passing. The first one is easy, because it is poetry, and she says, "Time is like water because it holds no memory; there's no history in water. But water contains everything else: anything can be taken by it or suspended by it; it can be inside anything. You can't write your name on water and you can be a shape in water but water doesn't hold your shape. I think that's how time is. Time is something you're in or on or it's in you and your shape is there but it isn't shaped by you."
"How I'm aware that it is passing, hmm..."
Her bright gray eyes stay on Nicholas, beseeching.
crow
Nicholas meets her eyes, and he sees here that there is something she is struggling with, fingertips grabbing at a thread she has yet to grasp. He takes a step forward and reaches for one of her hands, and their fingers lock. "How long did it take me to come over here and reach you like this? What will you be feeling and doing thirty seconds from now? Thirty seconds after that?"
A beat. "Water encompasses. It moves forward and carries us in a way that is indifferent to us, but we can still swim through it. Each moment is a moment of individual suspension, past and present and future. That's why we mark seconds."
Penny Mercury
[Can you pay attention to the passage of time now, Penny-Pen?]
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 7) ( success x 1 )
Penny Mercury
And then their fingers unlock. Pen takes Nicholas's hand and turns his wrist up. "This long," she says, and she gently traces her finger down the mount of Venus over the inside of his wrist, and 'this long' is indeed a measure of the time it took him to come over here and reach her like this. But then, "If I told you the answer to those questions, right now, it would be planning."
crow
Nick's arm is covered in goosebumps, which have raised the sparse hair on his arms all the way around, glimpsed briefly as she turns his wrist around so that she can trace her fingers over his palm. This is an accurate measure of time and so the corner of his mouth turns up too. "Some of it would be planning," he says. "Some of it would be the knowledge of the things that must happen, as time passes. That our bodies are going to adjust to the cold. That our hearts are going to continue to beat, for the next thirty seconds. If we threw a stick in the river we could mark where it will be thirty seconds from now. Some of it is planning, and some of it is accepting the limits of our control. Time magick is inherently paradoxical that way."
Penny Mercury
Pen lets go Nicholas's arm as he speaks. When he's finished she takes her studious gaze from his face and lets it roam over his shoulder, at the landscape framed by dark curls and bare skin (?).
Listen, there's a bright sound in the back of her throat: a bright as silver-light on rain-puddles glint, peaked, angular, lifting; it's a sound of resolution, of something resolving into shape.
Morning in Spring, and there is bird-song of course: the kind to wrap a voice around, twitter like stars twitter which is to say sparkle bright cutlery delicate as hollow bones echo clatter gleam.
crow
Over his bare shoulder, around the side of his curls she can see down the river; it winds, it disappears around a bend. The bend is sharp; the river cuts beneath it, chews at the roots that are below which will sooner or later bring the tree above crashing and falling down, a bridge over hissing waters. Those things are interconnected. Those who keep to the old ways have always known it.
Pen's gaze is over his shoulder, and Nick's is on her. He does not say anything yet, does not prompt her or ask what she is thinking though he wants to. And he does want.
He waits, because she is resolving, because she is shaping.
Penny Mercury
He waits, and when Pen's eyes return to Nicholas it is clear to her that he is waiting. Pen is quite a serious young woman, but radiance creeps into her dark gray eyes with Nicholas standing in the river like that; it is an echo of the sound she made, an echo of some further realization about: well. Pen is often a clear pool of water; choose to look through it and see whatever there is to see. But a clear pool of water is also occulted when there is light; it keeps its mysteries sometimes, and she doesn't give it any voice. What she does give voice is -
"You want me to tell you what I'm thinking. I'm thinking that you have dug a tunnel from one moment to the next with sympathetic magick; it is like having a strand of hair or a drop of blood to close a distance; it is like knowing the names of the guardians of space and being able to conjure by them, but instead using the sure knowledge of the next breath. Is it really about accepting the limits of our control? I guess I'm thinking only of spring-boards instead of tenses."
crow
Nick's head tilts to the side, and in this moment he looks all the more like a creature that belongs on a little fairy hill, wonder and wandering eyes and thoughtful repose, somehow all three. There's a fresh rill of goosebumps that work their way up and over his arms and shoulders as he snaps back into awareness of his own body, of the morning chill.
"I'd never thought about it that way," he says, which he had not because the two of them Work so differently. "I meant only that the progression of time is one of the only certain things we have. Regardless, you need to be able to distinguish each moment before you can springboard to the next."
Penny Mercury
Pen's eyes gleam and she lifts her chin in what seems to be agreement or sympathy (sympathetic echoes) or understanding. Her head is canted when she says, her voice low but vibrant,
"Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons."
Maybe there's something arch there, too, behind the earnest smoke of it all -- the controlled cadence of her poet's voice; bright and arch, a smile tucked neatly away in the cant of her hips the sudden cock of her mouth which lingers dissolves unresolves. She has not forgotten his Hollow One trick.
She never will. TS Eliot indeed.
"So you focus by feeling out a change you know must come, Nicholai?"
crow
His smile spreads wider now as she recites Eliot, recognizable to him (iconic lines) in spite of the fact that he can't command such lines from memory. It is a reflection of what is arch in hers, of the brightness but also, see: there's something poignant there too. It underlies their every interaction, until it suddenly leaps to the fore, and sometimes it is just as quick to retreat.
"I focus by finding the future in the present, because they coexist. I understand what must come from what is happening now."
Penny Mercury
"I think that's what I meant," Pen says, and her eyes narrowed when his smile widened, but now are back to their usual width (their usual direct clarity, see). There's a note of what might be apology in her voice, but if it is apology it is dismissive. "Being present in a way."
crow
Pen restates, and she has her usual direct clarity once more and so it does illuminate. So here Nick nods in response. "Yes," he says. "I try to be present, but...hyper present. Aware of what's led up to now and all the things that could happen next." A beat. "So how do you think you'll focus?"
Penny Mercury
"I don't know. I'll try to be 'hyper present' until I feel my way into what suits me more. How long will it take until you feel the pins and needles?"
Pen takes a slow step toward Nicholas; she is trying to be aware, as she said, she is devoted and earnest in it, devout: the water feels like this; the distance is that; and this is where she will stumble or find an epiphany:
This constant echo or reminder of space; the correspondence of things. Transition it.
crow
"About forty-five seconds more," Nick says, without feeling the need to be precise to the second because knowledge of Time doesn't necessarily make one pedantic, does it?
He extends a hand to her as she takes a step toward him, because he is cold and even if he were not reaching for her is natural. "How long is it taking you to step toward me?"
Penny Mercury
[Pay attention, Pen. Perception!]
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 3) ( fail )
Penny Mercury
[C'mon, pay attention!]
Dice: 3 d10 TN7 (5, 6, 6) ( fail )
Penny Mercury
[V. mocking, dice. *grin*]
Penny Mercury
"How long until they disappear?" Pen asks, and she is not smiling; she is only looking and as she looks she is considering and as she is considering she is (absolutely not paying any attention at all to Time or its passage or the Present) not smiling. Only looking. A glance can unseat a heart; it can also be an indicator of a heart, unseated; and anyway, a moment that is given all due attention (solemn [sharp]) is a moment it is easier to revisit later in word or in charcoal and: wait, fuck. "Devil wound," she whispers, intent: "Damn. I mean, ah: it is taking me as long as my stride." Her nose crinkles again: caught-out. She turns her head to the side, so that she might regard him sidelong rather than directly; it is still direct. The little rueful curl of her shoulders is direct: ly annoyed at herself.
Dice: 3 d10 TN8 (2, 4, 5) ( fail )
crow
Pen is not paying attention, and he can tell; he can tell but he is not Lysander, not any of the Hermetics who might have first taught her lessons years ago. He is only Nicholas, and his heart could be unseated by her glance, and it is; it thumps along in his chest ignorant of decorum or the fact that he is supposed to be focusing on her and her learning at just this moment. Pen's nose crinkles and of course he cannot help but smile. "And how long does your stride take?"
Penny Mercury
"As long as my legs can make it," Pen says, precisely. She cocks an eyebrow, and it is arch rather than rakish; it is arch with a suggestion or rakishness, and the curve of her mouth is serene. Dissolves: "Give me another thing to measure."
crow
Has she reached him, now, striding as long as her legs can make it? Nicholas is there waiting, and his hand finds her arm and given the frost of morning the dry heat of his palm is probably a welcome one, settling in there like a warm stone. "Measure the wind. Measure how long it takes the breeze to move a falling branch to the river, and how long it takes the river to carry it downstream. Measure how long it takes a fallen tree to break down into soil, or the soil to become dust."
Penny Mercury
The wind - pleased to be invoked by name, if not by Name (and she had to learn the Names of all the winds, didn't she, when she chose to no longer be Disparate, to be part of Something Greater Than Herself) - rakes through Nicholas's curls and whispers around Pen's ears, dragging the unbridled tresses away from their neat-tucked-behind-her-ear position; Pen exhales when Nick tells her to measure the time it takes the breeze to move a falling branch to the river and then: "Poetry," she says, and both of her eyebrows are lofted now; she is solemn. "Can you make me a paper swan?"
crow
"If I have the paper," Nick says, and he shifts from foot to foot because the pins and needles have indeed begun in earnest. His feet are not silent here; the water whispers too when he moves them, echoing the wind, and Nick slides his fingers through hers and clasps her hand in against his ribs. There is a sidelong glance to her now, because Pen can summon these things, can't she, make them appear?
Penny Mercury
Pen can make all manner of things appear. That sidelong glance of his: Pen, an unconscious echo of another Flambeau, another time and another city another context, crooks a smile and says, "What do I look like, a magician?"
His hand slides: it scores her, that warmth, a shield against the wind and water; his fingers find her fingers and he holds her hand against his ribs. She could be distracted if she allowed herself to be distracted by a desire to explore his ribs; she does not choose to allow herself distraction and she is not distracted, though she presses her hand against the spare flesh and bone.
Her other hand she reaches into a pocket of her gray be-laced many-pocketed pants and pulls out a small notebook and rips out a small piece of paper - with her teeth, casually and before Nick can think to unclasp her hand - then catches the loose paper between her fore finger and middle finger, and holds it out to Nicholas. The paper is not square; it is rectangular.
crow
[Uhh...paper swan? Dex + my nonexistent Crafts? I'm trying here.]
Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (1, 10) ( success x 2 ) [WP]
crow
Pen quips, and Nicholas laughs, quick and ringing and unbidden. When she pulls a notebook out of his pants his face registers surprise, as though it would not have occurred to him that she could possibly manage to carry a notebook on her person, even with so many pockets. He reaches out to take the paper from her, mirrors her posture and seizes it between his own fore and middle fingers.
Thus commences construction of a paper swan, and though the paper is not square he folds it at one end to make it so. He's not especially good at crafting with his hands, Nick; it's not something he's spent much time on, any sort of visual art. She knows this about him. Nevertheless, the paper swan he constructs is entirely serviceable, swan-shaped and without too much asymmatry. It is not a thing of beauty, but it will float down a river.
He extends the swan to Pen. Its little paper wings flutter in the breeze.
Penny Mercury
[All right. Perception. Notice the passage of time. We are totally going to measure time this time. WP. NO MORE FAILING. YOU ARE HERMETIC.]
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 5) ( success x 1 ) [WP]
Penny Mercury
[SUCK IT, BOTCH.]
Penny Mercury
One of the possibilities here is that Pen takes the paper swan and, through carelessness, drowns it immediately; attempts to save it and dry it out, but mid-Word shakes the sodden thing from her fingers and onto Nicholas's chest splat flat as toilet paper then laughs and laughs and slips into the river and that's another attempt at measuring time shot.
That possibility is decimated, is nonexistent, only because Penelope Mercury Mars is a willful creature: ardent, even zealous -
and she does not want to fail at something because it is being taught by someone she is attracted to (you're true North, Nicky) or is sensitive about such things being said even if only by the Greek chorus in her mind and she puts the little swan gently down on the river and watches at it is whisked away. Her breathing is quiet; so is she, and her eyes are very sharp: she can likely see it beyond the moment when it passes out of Nicholas's sight.
She tries to be aware of the passage of time; she tries to place herself in the moment, be immanent.
crow
He had relinquished his hold on her hand when he had crafted the swan, and now the river licks hungrily at their feet and around their ankles as she sets the thing down it is swiftly carried away by the current. Nick's hands are at his sides, and he does not reach for her hand again if only because he can sense that she is: aware, or trying to be, and is indeed measuring. Counting, maybe, if that is how she does it; Nick's sense of time is much more intuitive than that.
The wind swirls around him and the sparse lines of his ribs, the skin drawn across them tight like a drum, as they both watch the swan make its maiden (only) voyage downriver. He does not interrupt her; he allows her her silence, her concentration, inasmuch as she can find it with the Greek chorus in her mind. Nick cannot tell, when it disappears from his sight, whether it is because of distance or because all things go, all things end, and the paper swan will eventually drown among the river rocks.
Penny Mercury
But counting would be cheating, wouldn't it? Pen pays attention to her heart beat; she pays attention to the lap of the waves against the shore, uneven as it is, those glassy rills; she pays attention, a tithe of her forcefulness, to Time; and when the swan is gone she shifts her weight from one leg to the other and reaches out herself for Nicholas's hand. But only so she can glide up, follow the line of his arm and draw him near (but can't I be true North, Crow?), and solemnly set her elbow on his shoulder, cup the nape of his neck and study his expression in that distant way she has some times. Absorbent. Absorbing. She hooks an index finger at the waistband of his trousers and pay attention: Pen is going to, from the moment her elbow touches Nicholas's shoulder and her finger finds his waistband and she tugs him nearer to the moment she touches his nose with her nose and then his cheek and and then her mouth against his a very slow flirtation with the possibility of the idea of kissing to less a flirtation - well it is more or less exactly how long it took that swan to go away.
"There. That long," she says, to mark the end of it. Her feet are ice but who needs the body anyway.
crow
It is more or less exactly how long, and he can tell, can't he? He is teaching her this Art, and he can tell that she's grasped its measure. It was one of the first ones he learned, and so marking it comes as second nature at this point as breathing (which, nonetheless, he forgets to do for a few seconds, death in microcosm [the only peace is] because the body has an annoying habit of forgetting to preserve itself sometimes when the mind is over-engaged).
His feet too are ice, and at some point he curved an arm around her waist. He is shivering: she can probably tell. His smile is playful, touched with rakishness. "Are you sure it didn't take longer than that?"
Penny Mercury
[TRICKERY TIME.]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (6, 6, 8, 10) ( success x 4 )
crow
[No! No trickery!]
Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 6, 6, 6, 6, 7, 8) ( success x 6 ) [Doubling Tens]
Penny Mercury
Pen is not shivering, although she should be. She has paled; the sodden folds of her trousers, which she did not roll up, are like a cut from a knife against her shins; where the wavelets rise, but don't stay risen; where the air sweeps in, and her skin thrills toward numbness. He is shivering and she tries to measure that too, lets his playful smile spark the flash of hers; and her eyes are still (ardent) solemn.
"I'm sure you should leave the river, my love," and if she sounds as though she is saying: come to the river, my love; well. Forgive her, the mythology of beguilement. "Or I will have to stop it from moving around your ankles and heat it for you as well as for myself." Such guilelessness: and she has been heating the river this entire time, just for herself; it is as comfortable as a sauna. No she hasn't: but she has a very, very, very good poker face. It is only for how astute Nicholas is that he sees through her.
Pen pulls him nearer or leans into him hard for a half-second (measure that, too), and then puts her hand on his chest and gives him a little push: go.
crow
Such guilelessness, and though he sees through it he knows that she could do it if she wanted to. "You are tempting me," he says, and because this is honest well, maybe she thinks she has him fooled. Dhe does have a very, very, very good poker face today.
As she gives him a little push he takes a half-step forward, toward the riverbank, and see here how sometimes the mind exerts its own push and pull. He leans forward toward her even as he is taking a step away and as she looks toward him he catches her mouth with his own, and it is too brief, the span of an inhale exhale, because he really is cold.
He shuffles toward the banks, beelines for his shirt and his boots.
Penny Mercury
[This will decide me. Stamina: river or no?]
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (3, 5, 8) ( success x 1 )
Penny Mercury
Pen pushes herself hard.
Now is not an example of how she allows herself to take it easy. Pen is not a perfectionist, precisely, but there is so much to learn; there is so much to do; there is so much to feel. Nicholas shuffles toward the banks and his shirt and his boots and Pen: Pen takes a step backwards into the river, gaze on his shoulder blades for a moment, though it then casts off down the river: against the current. She is considering.
Cups her hands around her mouth and, lifting her voice so it carries, clear and brightened now, burnished, silvered up and shining, "Give me something else to measure."
Another step back; she means to submerge, clothing and all; and she will.
And perhaps this is how it will go for a while: attention tithed to the present, and her mind unruly, and her body cold and cold again, until she can no longer stay or be steadfast or perhaps until Nicholas lures her out of the river (where she holds something like a vigil) with his handsome mouth and his dark eyes, and then it will be Pen: shivering, shuddering, wracked:
The river takes from poets, always.
This is a truth.
