It has been quite some time since Nick encountered Sera entirely out of context in REI. Perhaps she was high when she made the offer: to go bouldering someday. Like real climbing except without the need for all that gear, since there is only so far you can fall. Maybe he imagined the invitation would come: soon or not at all. Maybe he didn't think of it again.
Not days or weeks but: yes, months, later. Nearly or perhaps more-than two of them he is invited, via text, to go climbing. Logistics must be handled. Today or tomorrow or three days later. Texts one exchanges with Serafine come heavily ornamented with emojis. Something they arrive onlyas emojis. Regardless: a time, a date. Either a request or a direction that he pick her up. She has a Jeep that is good in the mountains, but even if they take her car, he has to drive.
Sera's home is in Capitol Hill, not far from downtown, not far from that Trader Joe's where they met for the first time. Three stores, an old blond-brick four-square with a wide front porch and a somewhat overgrown garden. Porch swing on one corner of the porch, a hammock on the other. Recycling bins and ashtrays on the porch, an assortment of shoes on the floorboards. A unicycle upended behind the recycling. Another bike tethered to a pillar. Edison bulbs swagged across the ceiling, a fern and a spider plant hanging from hooks and that's just the front porch. Doesn't have much time to take in the devor either because she appears before he has much chance to start searching for the doorbell (there isn't one; strangers knock. friends walk right in), keys in one hand, a small daypack in the other. Already tossing them to him before she understands how they're getting there.
That's how it starts..
Nick Hyde
He's considered texting her once or twice about bouldering. He hasn't seen much of the other magi of Denver since he and his wife brought Andrés to Kiara's doorstep during an episode of Quiet; truth be told he hasn't even really heard from Andrés. So he'd wondered if he ought to reach out to someone outside his cabal, and thought of Sera and how they were going to go climbing without all the gear, and the thought had occurred to him once twice thrice maybe while he was at work and was forgotten soon thereafter.
So he accepts once he hears from her, and they work out logistics. Sera's texts make him reminisce once more about his friend Thane: Thane is who he would've gone climbing with out here in Denver, too.
Nicholas arrives on her doorstep and no sooner has he begun to hunt for a doorbell than she's striding out onto the porch, tossing a pack and her keys at him. Nick catches the pack somewhat clumsily, clapping the pack between his side and arm and letting it hit his whole body as a means of impeding its course through the air. The keys he has to pick up off the floorboards.
"I'm driving?" He glances out toward the cars, towards Sera's Jeep and his little black Honda Civic. "Are you sure you want me to drive your car?"
Serafíne
This is what Sera wears to go bouldering: the same thing she wears to get coffee or - what the fuck ever. Perhaps slightly more rugged: a t-shirt, thin and white with graphic black on the front, silhuoettes that look like some 1980s post-punk group. No band name visible, but the piece is worn and faded enough that it may well be actually vintage, not faux-vintage. Denim cut-offs, fishnets. Combat boots.
Maybe there's something more appropriate in that pack.
Quick flash of her smile as he asks whether she really wants him to drive her car. She gives a neat little shrug and a mildly wide-eyed look. "Uh - yeah?" Doesn't understand his concern, about driving her car. Seems perhaps a bit surprised by it, though not in a way that feels material. The Jeep is pretty old: late 90s, with Colorado plates. Isn't usually parked on the street but with Plans, Sera or one of her housemates pulled it around front. "I'll like. Fucking pilot or whatever." A beat, then: "Navigate."
She seems pleased to've found the word. Like she discovered it laying around unused on her tongue: just so.
Nick Hyde
Nick is dressed more appropriately: he's wearing a light grey shirt of some loose knit athletic material, khaki cargo shorts and a pair of boots. Just about what one would expect from a person who is about to go hiking or climbing or to do something in the Great Outdoors. If he is a little taken aback by Sera's dress he does not say, and there is nothing to indicate such in the once-over he gives her.
He's been Awakened long enough that he doesn't question little idiosyncrasies from his fellow magi.
"All right," he says, hefting the keys in his hand. "I need to grab my bag from my car though." Denver has been hot lately, surprisingly so given the fact that there was a late spring snow on the ground at the very beginning of last month, and so the inside of his car (and the water he brought along) is probably already baking. He is trying not to think about it.
"Do you live here by yourself?" he asks, with a glance around the porch as he turns and tromps back down the steps, hefting her pack over his shoulder. He unlocks his car with a fob and reaches into the passenger seat for his own bag, a small day pack with a large water pack attached.
Serafíne
She comes down the steps easily after him: a stompingish clatter of her combat boots. Hands tucked into the front pockets of her cut-offs, this loose, perhaps surprisingly athletic body language about her. A kind of lissomeness that one imagines one forgets in her, at other hours on other days. Or that is perhaps nearly universally devoted to being as unimpaired as possible when she wanders around in six-inch heels.
"Naw." A glance back at the house when he asks. That physical tic is natural, too. She tips her head back, looking:up up up. "Dan and Dee and Rick live here too," only one of those names is likely to register immediately for Nick, and listen - Sera catches that. Something about her dark eyes on his profile. Clarification: "Dee's our bassist, Rick's the drummer. It was actually Dee's great-aunt's place and her great-aunt left it to her so we kinda followed her here from Raleigh. I mean, that was a fucking while ago. Dan bought it from Dee, though. Got a fucking mortgage and everything."
The Jeep, of course, is unlocked. Sera: does not offer to help Nick with either of the bags. It's just not something she thinks about. But also: she doesn't wait for him to open the door for her. She just swings herself into the passenger's seat.
Nick Hyde
Nick hauls himself into the Jeep, twisting around so that he can deposit both of the bags in the backseat. He doesn't ask Sera to help him with either of the bags; it's not something he thinks about, and they aren't terribly heavy anyways. He settles into the seat and there is the momentary patting around that many people do when in an unfamiliar vehicle for the first time; he casts about him to either side, his fingertips wander over knobs and levers and buttons.
Key in the ignition, and he turns it and ensures the air conditioning is working before he buckles his seat belt. He doesn't crank it; Nick is a son of the desert and he is used to the heat.
"What were you all doing in Raleigh before you moved out here?" It's a natural sort of curiosity, a natural line of questioning. Nick simply takes the nomadic lifestyle of Sera's band in stride.
He leans around to carefully assess the street and vehicles parked nearby before he wheels the Jeep out and onto the road, and then: they are off, headed toward the distant mountains. "Are the other two sort of in the know, like Dan is?"
Serafíne
"Mmm." Sera makes an equivocal noise, when Nick asks whether or not her other band mates are in the know. It isn't entirely negative. Not entirely positive. "Kinda. Dee more so than Rick- but. I mean: kinda to them both?"
Hard to live with her and not start understanding: something. Sera rubs her thumb thoughtless over the band of one of her rings. "We met in Raleigh. Well, Dan and I met Dee and Rick there. They were going to college. Dan and I had this drummer before that that we played out with, and then he graduated and decided to go to some fake fucking medical school in the Caribbean, so then we were figuring shit out for ourselves, and kinda hooked up with Dee and Rick."
Sera's watching the neighborhood roll by. Seat belt buckled only kinda after Nick has buckled his, and perhaps therefore reminded her. Might need to be reminded that he requires directions. Which she supplies initially as: go like you're going to the Chantry but - , with further directions to be supplied, well: closer to the mountains.
Quiet for a moment longer. Then, this lift of her chin. An arrest of inquiry, lilting.
"Where'd you and Pen meet?"
Nick Hyde
Go like you're going to the Chantry, she says, and so he does. He has not been there very often, but often enough to recall in a general sense how to get there. Highways, and visible signs for how to get to the nearest one: they are a traveler's blessing.
He is keeping his eyes on the road and so he does not look at her very often while she speaks, but occasionally there is a sidelong glance at certain words or a certain inflection. Maybe Nick himself isn't always aware of what specific thing draws his eyes versus not, or if he's simply spacing things out, looking over at a certain time. "Do you think you'll ever tell them?"
Sweat has dampened his curls and he sweeps them back away from his forehead, letting the cool air blast over his skin. He drives the speed limit. He keeps both hands on the wheel, except for that gesture. He is Chakravanti and he gives weight to dangerous things.
Her question does draw his eyes momentarily before they settle back on the road ahead. "I met her and the members of our old cabal at the same time. It was during one of those crises that pop up every once in a while and I was tracking down information Crow had sent me after. We all ran into each other and I started working with the cabal for a little while since I knew more about working with spirits than any of them, and I ended up sticking around long term. She and I...I won't say we were ever just friends or just cabalmates, but that's all it was for the first couple of months."
Serafíne
Nick asks if Sera will ever tell her band-and-housemates about: whatever. Magick. The world in which they live. The strange and surreal and terrible things she can do to change the world because she wills it so. Becasue she wants it so. Because: she wants.
Another neat little shrug by way of answer. She isn't thinking that he's not likely to notice the response, because she isn't: remembering that drivers have to drive. Maybe she is simply used to having all eyes on her. To be: understood, or attended to, somehow. Still, it might seem like she ignored the question. And that shrug isn't careless, and it isn't a dismissal. It is something else: both a maybe and an I'll let them make that decision. Pretty shitty thing to force onto someone, who isn't ready. So: she won't. Not unless it is necessary for their safety or their sanity.
--
And: she asks a question about how he met his wife. Nick answers. Something about Nick's answer pulls Sera's rather keen attention back to him. Perhaps he can feel it, or see her cheated profile in his periphery.
"What do you mean," her voice is quiet, perhaps: pensive. " - when you say 'that's all' it was? And what changed?"
Nick Hyde
Sera shrugs, and perhaps Nick does think she dodged the question: he cannot read her body language, though he can see the movement of her shoulders out of his periphery. It draws his eyes over to her when seconds go by and she makes no answer, though he does not press her here and now: he is used to letting subjects fall by the wayside more often than not when the other person seems to have little desire to want to speak of them.
He asks too many questions, and too often, but silence is its own answer really. Perhaps he is only curious; Nick has not had to consider such a question with many people in his life. His sisters are Awakened, and Anna told their mother before he could ever consider whether it was an unfair burden to lay at her feet.
Sera's question provokes a thoughtful drum or two of his hands on the wheel, and another look to the side, a half-lashed thing that maybe doesn't miss her line of questioning or the words she has chosen to focus on. "We weren't romantically involved early on, was what I meant. It was different from what it became."
Serafíne
And: quiet for a little while after that, from the other half of the car. The baking city rolls by. The flat, sun-scrawled sprawl, the sunlight slashed in lines through the passenger's windows. Jeeps are noisy, especially old ones like this one. Sera, nimble creature, pulls her legs up so that her heels rest on the edge of the seat. Wraps her arms around her legs and rests her chin on her right knee, looking out the window. Watching the city move past.
And she's frowning and he cannot see that: the divot between her flat blond brows, the thoughtful moue of her mouth. She's frowning, but it is a considering sort of frown, could be the illustration next to the dictionary definition of mulling over. Or even: pensive.
Which isn't a word most people associated with Sera.
A mile or two or three or ten later, she asks him. "How did you know that it was changing?"
Nick Hyde
Quiet does not bother Nicholas. It settles over the two of them like the snow will fall in midwinter, the way candles in a darkened room throw light: quiet, the hush of hallowed spaces, is a part of him and he is part of it. He has sat for nearly an hour with clients with neither of them speaking a word, and if Sleep and Death are cousins perhaps this is some distant relation to them both.
He drives, and the sun slants through the driver's side window into his hair, washing out the light brown of his skin and eyes, filtering through the dark bar of his eyelashes. Pensive is a word many people associate with Nick; who knows what he is thinking about.
A mile or two or three or ten later, her question gives him pause but only because he likes to give questions asked of him their due. "I don't think I did, at first," he says. "We just started to spend more time together individually, away from the cabal. Pen is very direct when she wants something, so I think the obvious answer would be that we started sleeping together," and he's more blunt than many people would expect of him perhaps, and shows no sign of self consciousness, "but that wasn't really it. I slept with a lot of people before and it was casual. I started...I don't know. I started wanting to share things I don't normally share just because I wanted her to know them. That was different, for me."
His eyes flick up to the rear view mirror, to the side mirrors, this casual sweep of their surroundings but somehow it ends back with Sera. "Why do you ask?"
Serafíne
Sera is used to having eyes on her, isn't she. Friends, strangers, lovers. Folks who are sliding between those definitions, refusing them, perhaps. Becoming one or none or all-at-once. She has a sort of centripetal force about her: arresting, compelling, the belongs to with and by motion, that begins in her body, that is rooted in her whip-lean frame just as much as it transcends it. This countrapuntal weight to Nick's hallowed silences
And he asks her: why she asks. And Sera, well: she gives another neat little shrug. Narrow shoulders, a thoughtless whatever. Like, you know, maybe she's just curious. That's what her body says, at least.
"Did you stop sleeping with other people, then? When you started thinking about things you wanted her to know? Or was that later? Or - " a pause, a hitch. Not precisely a hitch but: she realizes that she doesn't really know Nick well enough to make that assumption. Maybe he still sleeps with other people? Some do.
Sera does. Doesn't shy away from asking him about this, either, intimate and personal though it is. "Did you talk about it?"
Nick Hyde
Maybe she's just curious: that's what her body says. Nick's intuition and training tell him that most people don't ask these kinds of questions out of simple curiosity; most people are centered in the self, they frame the world in terms of themselves. Still, he doesn't ask again, instead tilting his head as he considers her questions.
He doesn't shy away from answering her, intimate and personal though her questions are: he asks intimate and personal questions of other people all day, and even with the tables turned this is the sort of conversation he is comfortable navigating. "I wasn't really sleeping with other people at that point to begin with," he says. "I got that out of my system when I was younger. But I don't think I would have, if someone had shown an interest. I've always been relatively monogamous. And it got to be a comfort to have someone know me so well." A beat. "Not that that's the path everyone takes. It's just what it was like for me."
They've passed outside the city now, and the road cuts a path through a hill or two, rock jutting up on either side of them. It is not the shale he is used to, and yet: some familiarity.
He is not used to having eyes on him, though, even if the subject matter itself is not uneasy. He is searching for a question to ask in return even as he answers (he does not find it.) "We did talk about it eventually. She told me how she felt. I told her how I felt. A lot of it was new for me, though. I think it would have been a lot more difficult if she hadn't taken the lead."
Serafíne
The countryside changes. Sera's body language changes, too. Minutely, mind. There is a certain point in their discussion, in his answer, where she tilts her head, cheats her profile towards him. Catches and holds that glance, with a strange and supple attentiveness. From a creature as instinctive, as visceral as Sera: this attentiveness feels whole, feels animal, feels physical.
--
But the countryside is changing. Here, she'll say. Gives direction sometimes. At the last minute. When something triggers her to do so. The route diverges from that to the chantry; some other feeder road, some other exit. Some other valley, some other range. Scrub pines against rock. Sera still finds the countryside so barren, though it reminds her of the Connemara, in its way.
Was a time when nothing reminded her of anything. When her past was: opaque.
"What about her? Was she sleeping with other people? Or was that something you talked about, when you talked about what you were both feeling?"
Nick Hyde
The road forks and one direction lies the chantry and the other lies the long road they are headed down on their way to the mountains; Nick guides the Jeep toward the latter, in spite of reflex which almost carries them in the other direction. Hence anything they come across will be unfamiliar to him, and his eyes sweep over new country. He too finds it barren outside of Denver, and it reminds him of the few times he was ever able to venture outside Phoenix in his youth.
His hands are still on the wheel, settled low, relaxed in their grip. The roads are straight and there aren't many cars.
"She wasn't. We did talk about it, but I'm not sure a lot of people would have. I knew some non-monogamous people so I didn't want to make any assumptions. It wasn't a long conversation." Another glance up into the rearview mirror, at the city they left behind or at least where it would be if it hadn't already vanished behind the horizon line. "I think people who still wanted to sleep with other people would probably handle it differently. That conversation, at least."
Note his tone: it's not precisely leading. But the comment is offered almost as an afterthought, without the finality of his statements about himself. It's speculation, or a nod to other ways of life perhaps and it's also an opening. "It was all pretty clumsy, on my part. I'd never been serious with anyone before."
Serafíne
Sometimes certain valleys, canyons, what-have-you have denser growth. Some slope or some spring. And as they drive the necessity for the Jeep becomes more apparent. There is a turnoff onto a rutted gravel road that winds away and starts to climb. There are more trees. Enough to even be called a forest, though they still have that sere, scrub look to them. Something hardy. Pin oaks and what-have you. Prairie grasses.
The road hasn't been graveled in a while, though it isn't abandoned either. Here or there: driveways or secondary roads branch off, disappear into the scruff. They keep going.
"I think it's funny, you know. The way we use the word serious. I mean I get what you're saying. What eeryone means, it's just, so much of it feels serious to me. Not like put on a school uniform and study your ass off serious, but, you know. Real.
"Immediate. I don't know. I guess it was good that you both wanted the same thing, huh? Like, lucky. Was there anything that you had to give up?"
Nick Hyde
"Control," Nick says, and this is said so quietly that it cannot have been said without weight, and it is said so reflexively that it cannot help but be true. "You give someone else the power to hurt you. It was lucky that we both felt the same way." Perhaps it should not be surprising that he had such a ready answer, that he has thought deeply about this; he is a counselor, and there are certain themes that come up again and again (and Nick would say they all lead back to one thing.) In another life and time he might have been an advisor to kings, a village wise man, and it requires a certain understanding of doubts and fears that are nearly universal.
The road is uneven, and though the Jeep sways it does not rattle and bump along as Nick's little Civic might have. He is grateful for that. His body sways with the road, the way one might in a saddle, and how appropriate to their surroundings.
"I think it can be real without being serious," he says. "But I never felt connected to anyone I'd been with before that. I suppose if I had, it would have made what I felt for her more confusing."
His gaze tracks down a side trail as they pass; he has slowed the car's pace on the gravel road, and his eyes occasionally sweep from side to side for errant animals. It would be a rare thing to find a Chakravanti who is cavalier with death.
Serafíne
Sera makes a quiet noise, almost a harrumph. Maybe it is subvocal laughter. This kiss of a half-smile graces her mouth.
"I never find anything I feel confusing." That laughter still in her voice, and an unerring confidence inherent in the declaration. Then: sobering, and sobriety always wears strangely on Sera. "It's everything fucking else. Turn here."
--
A short driveway leads to a small cabin. Quiet. Still. The building is framed by a wrap around deck. Behind, on the shoulder of the hill: a dusty ring of stones, like a firepit. The suggestion of a trail or two leading off through the pines.
Nick Hyde
Turn here, she says: and so he does. Surprise sketches itself across his face as they draw up on the cabin, and Nick's face is an expressive thing when it is not reserved and on the rare occasion that he acts without forethought. His dark brows draw up, their pitch and slope sharp as the bend of a wing, and he slows as they near it until he has ascertained that it is where the road ends. Then he pulls up next to it.
A click of his seatbelt coming unlatched. "Everything you don't feel is confusing, you mean?"
He reaches around into the backseat for both packs just after he cracks the door to the vehicle, grabs Sera's first and holds it out to her as he leans to take hold of his own and haul it forward. The scenery he'll take in after they leave the Jeep behind.
Serafíne
This is indeed: where the road ends. Not the road, the driveway. Sera accepts her pack from Nick with this odd little slice of surprised equanimity. Which is to say: she had forgotten about it, or is perhaps just so used to having Other People take care of ordinary things for her that she assumed that the pack would end up wherever she did? But also: she doesn't seem to mind that it has ended up in her hands again.
"Naw," she's replies, with a neat shake of her golden head. "It's more: the shit that you can't solve by asking yourself how you feel and how to fix it or make it right. Where you feel everything, both sides of it, and you've gotta think and shit. I'm not really saying it right." Pensive, for a moment, after.
Only a moment. Because then she's sliding out of the truck, pack in hand.
Slings it over one shoulder, the straps swinging around her thighs. Later she'll secure it a bit more properly. Now she holds on to it as she circles the Jeep, gravel crunching under her feet, to stomp up the steps to the deck of the cabin. A bit of a sleight of hand around the frame and lo she has the key in hand. Drops her pack on the deck as she disappears inside, returning with a pair of worn hiking boots and a clean pair of good socks.
"Do you have climbing shoes? We have a few extra pair. I don't know what size you are but you could try them." She doesn't mean the hiking boots she's changing out the Doc Marten's for. She means: climbing shoes. Maybe he bought some that day at REI.
Nick Hyde
Nicholas, who is slim but not tall necessarily (an inch taller than his admittedly tall wife) also has to swing himself to the ground. His feet touch the gravel and are soundless; his pack he swings up around his shoulders, the strap crossing down over his chest, and secures there with a snap buckle. He follows Sera toward the cabin, though he stops short of the threshold at the bottom of the steps.
"I bought some," he says, of climbing shoes. Those, he figured he would need even if she denied needing the rest of the equipment that was sold there.
Better than having his feet pinched or sliding around inside a pair of shoes, anyway.
He's a quiet sort of observer, Nick, and even in casual situations one could get the impression that he is taking in details. See here, the swing of Sera's hair as she bends down, how it ripples golden in the sunlight and how she'd been pensive when she spoke just before leaving the car. As she pulls on her boots he says, "What is it that you're feeling both sides of? What are the sides?"
Serafíne
More details for Nick to take in: this rustic cabin, not larger enough to have more than one bedroom. Isolated and out of the loop, not even a hot tub on the back deck to recommend it as a weekend couples' getaway. And Sera's familiarity with it. The hidden key; her boots inside. The claiming of space, natural as anything else. It has this neglected air about it. Not quite abandoned but: shuttered. It is only an occasional retreat.
She ties her hiking boots tight. Pulls hard on the laces, wriggling her foot around inside. The leather is a bit stiff. It has been a little while since she came out here.
And she looks up when he asks that question: a note of chasing surprise that widens her eyes. Modestly, but hey. She's used to been seen, yeah, but not seen.
"Well." she tells him. "Here's one thing. I had a visit from this Chorister who has this apprentice ssleeping on her couch who needs a place to go that isn't her couch. She thinks: maybe he got in over his head, or he was half-innocent, or he didn't do the actual bad stuff and he needs another chance. I usually think that about everyone. Then I hear what this kid was involved in and I - " a sharp arrest, a cessation, " - and I can't, you know? I don't know that I could ever talk to him without letting it show. I've been meaning to talk to you and Kiara about him.
"That's not - what's really on my mind though."
Nick Hyde
Actual bad stuff. He needs another chance. What was this kid involved in?
Nicholas's eyelashes flutter, just a little. Maybe Sera misses it.
There are certain respects in which the two of them are a bit similar, and their belief in the parity of souls isn't the sole thing. He's not used to being seen either; maybe on some level he recognizes something in that wide eyed look she gives him, maybe something in it finds where it's rooted in him. He slides a thumb under the strap on his pack and leaves it there, partially shifting some of the weight away from his collarbone.
"Let's come back to that," he says, because he cannot leave that alone; he would not be expected to leave it alone. Sera does not expect him to: it is probably at least in part why she brought it up. "What is it that's really on your mind?"
Serafíne
Does she miss the eyelash flutter? Per + Empathy.
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 9) ( success x 5 )
Serafíne
Sera's boots are tied, by then. Does she see eyelash flutter?
Yes, oh yes. Isn't precisely extending herself in that moment, but she was made to feel, and to be, and to notice. And so: she does. The brief precision of her attention: clear-eyed without any further expectation. And then: down. Away.
The susserant pines.
She rises. Grabs the pack, lifts it over her shoulders. Ties the belt around her narrow waist. Starts off, heading toward the leftmost path, through a scrubby, open, grassy area with the remnants of a fire pit. Nick has asked what it is that's really on her mind. She waits until they are in motion again, to ask,
"Do you know Hawksley?"
Nick Hyde
It does not take him long to start after her, though he lets her move a few paces ahead of him. These are her woods, and she clearly knows them; it is plain by the casual ownership she took of the cabin, of the boots she laid claim to, of how they easily fit her feet even with the leather stiff and unused as it was. Nick is a guest here, and he is a courteous enough guest to know that he is a guest. That's important, when one works with things that are Other, and no less so with human beings.
Sera asks whether he knows Hawksley and Nick shakes his head. Recalling then that she cannot hear him, he says, "No, I don't. Though the name sounds familiar for some reason. Maybe I heard someone mention it once."
Grace, perhaps, or Sera herself; maybe it was Alex. Nick cannot think of anyone else who has been around Denver as long as the three of them seem to have been.
Is everyone in Denver so new, or are these simply the magi he has met?
"Tell me about him."
Serafíne
"He's a Hermetic," Sera tells Nick. Her back is to him. The woods are not silent, but there is still an absence of human sound so far out from the city. She is clearly confident enough, too, of their isolation to use terms like that freely.
Though: Sera is never especially paranoid about what she says; and where; and to whom. The most staid of sleepers now get a sense of something: Other, about her. Torn out from the ordinary by its roots.
"He likes books, and Egyptian shit. And working out." Well, that's quite an introduction, isn't it, Sera? "And when he swims he looks like he's hunting something. He looks like he should be the kinda asshole I really can't stand, you know? Good looking. Old money. Boarding school.
"First time I met him me and Jim were at Red Rocks for this concert, and we were down near the stage and I was so stonedand I felt him up - you know? Higher in the amphitheater, which is where he feels like he oughta be. 'Cos he feels like his name. And we all got high together and I think he danced someone on Dee's roller derby team. Em or Daria, maybe? Not like, I wanna fuck you dancing, but real dancing.
"Third time I met him he started reciting Baudelaire to me. You know: Be drunk - on wine, poetry, or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk. That was a while ago."
Nick Hyde
Pen had recited poetry to him early in their meeting: perhaps not the third time, but it was not long after they began to keep company with each other outside of the cabal. It is a fond memory for him, and maybe she can tell by the soft cast to his features, how if a painter had painted him it would have been with diffuse light, with pastels beneath his browns and blacks and grays.
"Hermetics can be charming when they want to be," he says, and if his tone is a little wry it is also knowing. He is married to one and in a cabal with two and there was a third, for several years. It is wry because: want to be is an operative term here.
Nick listens to the rest of what she says. Maybe Sera isn't used to being seen but Nick has a way of making people feel that way, when he listens to them with his eyes attentive. There is always some tenderness there held in reserve; he likes other people.
"That was a while ago," he repeats, and maybe it is an acknowledgement of what she heard or maybe it is a simple reflection. The same thing can sound different when one hears it again: see recordings of one's voice. "So has something changed since then?"
Serafíne
Something about that repetition, or perhaps the painted cast of light through the pine-wrapped canopy, has her stopping, so-briefly. Casting him a dampened, slanting glance. The edge of his profile. The trees beyond. And he can hear another sound through the silence, water over stone. Soon enough, the narrow trail opens up to a glimpse of a small, rock-strewn creek ahead. The water is low, but still pools and tumbles and ripples and catches the light. Their hike will take them across it, later, at a place where - when the water is as low as it is now - they can pick their way from stone to stone without getting their feet wet.
A moment only. Then she goes on.
And he asks whether something has changed since then? And Sera gives one of her expressive, deflective little shrugs. Though this afternoon it is a placeholder, a kind of marking time.
While she thinks. About how to reveal herself. Neither of which she likes to do.
"It was intense. Really fast. We were really close," she tells Nick. "For a long time. It wasn't all the time, you know? We had our own things, too. But when I wanted him, or when I needed him, he was near. Or at least, whereever the fuck he was, he'd respond, you know? I could see him in my head, and even if it was just a fucking text it made me happy to think of him being somewhere else in the same world.
"Then it changed, right. And I didn't entirely notice at first, because we always had our own space and our own shit and I had my own shit and I wasn't -
"He moved away, a few months later. Shut up Hogwarts, had it all packed up and shrouded and whatnot. I saw him once, before he left-left. He had this really intense, and stressful family shit going on. And on, and on. That was demanding, and draining, and sad. Had to move back East and spend a lot more time on the mundane than the magickal. So."
Nick Hyde
It's a sad story, the one she tells him. Maybe he wasn't expecting it, but it's hard to tell; he is watching her as he treads along after her, his expression solemn, questant. Nick's footfalls are always the footfalls of someone walking in church, or amongst the fallen or in an untouched grove; they are silent, as though the forest floor has soaked up all the sound.
His eyes are for the little creek then as they approach it, and he draws in a breath that is heavy with the water droplets that are hanging suspended in the air surrounding it, too small to see. It smells of stone, and of moss and beneath that rotting vegetable matter.
"So he left," Nick says, and his voice is quiet enough for her to pick up on threads of sympathy beneath the words. They aren't bright things, they don't call out to be noticed, but they are there nonetheless. Maybe he can't help it; maybe it is only second nature for him at this point.
Nick takes another few steps along beside her, his thumb still hooked beneath the strap of his pack. "What has you thinking about him now?"
Serafíne
"I always think about him," says Sera, and there is something thoroughly unselfconscious as she says it. Maybe a little bit wry. Standing there creekside, she glances up at him again. Wiggles her right index finger: where she wears an old ring, beaten bronze. Which has been consecrated by another mage, and bears that other resonance. So yes: she always thinks about him. Even when it hurts her, which it sometimes does. "Went to see him, a few times, back east.
"He moved back to Denver a couple months ago. I was at his place the night he came home, but I haven't -- " neat little frown, sketched between her blond brows. Then she starts across the creek: sure-footed as a doe. "He came over a few nights ago, though. I was really fucking stoned.
"We watched the sunrise together. He told me he was in love with me. It's weird to say it out loud."
Nick Hyde
The ring is a little detail but of course it's one Nick remembers; these are the sorts of things he readily recalls about people. This was perhaps where he'd heard Hawksley's name the first (only?) time, was Sera telling him who had given her the ring.
There are rocks leading across the river, and Nick steps onto them with care. He is not as sure footed as Sera: fewer natural gifts. He spends most of his days behind a desk, or at best tugging dandelions up by their very long roots and planting marigolds in their place, or biking; and so he is careful. He does not want to end up doused in the creek, not yet and not today.
A quiet is there after Sera tells him more about Hawksley, about the Hermetic's return. For a few seconds he says nothing. And then, "Are you in love with him?"
Serafíne
There is a bit of a scramble up the other side, which may require a hand or two. A certain care with where to place one's feet while balancing the pack. Sera spends most of her days sleeping and most of her nights swaggering around in six inch heels as if they were combat boots. Or sometimes: combat boots as if they were combat boots. Regardless: she turns, and offers him a hand to get to the top. If he wants it.
And he asks what he asks, and she gives him another contained little shrug. Easy-peasy, right.
"Sure." So she says, quite simply, though in that simplicity there is a living kind of awareness: of her body, somehow. All the articulations of her spine. "I told him a long time ago. Though, to be fair, I'm always a little bit in love with everything."
Nick Hyde
He accepts her hand with gratitude as he glances down toward his feet to figure out where to place them. He has some experience with rock climbing, mainly with his Verbena friend who is now on the other side of the country, but he is not so sure of himself yet.
While he is seeking out hand and footholds he does not answer her, not until he has hauled himself up to the top of the far bank, bracing his hand on the top of his thigh to push himself upward as he takes the final step. He straightens his spine as he reaches the top, and there's a series of faint pops as his vertebrae settle: they are just getting used to the activity.
Now that he is there next to her, Nick wipes a smudge of dirt on his palm off on his pants. "So if you've known for so long, what is it that feels strange to you? The fact that he feels that way in return?"
Serafíne
There is a slight, modest shake of her head. That little scramble was just a precursor of the boulders to come, and before she offers more than that little shake, she is off again. It won't be long now, though.
"It wasn't like a - " Stop. Restart. Sera takes a deep breath. The hitch-curl of her shoulders, the spare wings of her scapulae against the frame of her pack. Her hands all hooked through the straps. "I wanted to have sex. He said: he didn't think we should. I didn't - understand, you know? So I asked him if he wanted to. And he told me - what I told you. And said that he hadn't told me before because when he's in love with someone, he wants to be monogamous with them.
"He never told me because he didn't want to ask me to give up my freedom. Something so close to my magick, you know? That he still didn't want to ask me that. So. I've been thinking if I want to ask that of myself.
"How it would be. And how it would feel. And I don't know. It's not the same for me."
Nick Hyde
It's a precursor of the boulders to come, and maybe Sera is getting a clear idea of the day's portents now: Nick is not as athletic as she is, and he might struggle at points to keep up. He seems to warm to the activity the longer they move, though; perhaps his long days mainly at a desk mean it takes a little longer for his muscles to awaken themselves.
He listens to her, and his eyes are unfocused as his thoughts turn inward. "I think we always sacrifice something in order to have something else," he says. Isn't that what she had asked him earlier? What he had to give up?
"I think the other thing I gave up to be with Pen was possibility. Once we choose to do something, the other things we could have done are closed to us, at least in what we perceive. I gave up all the other could-bes. I think that's a difficult choice even for people who prefer monogamy, acting with that sort of intent." A beat. "Maybe it feels weird to you because it feels like you're imposing a limit on yourself. Do you think that's true?"
Serafíne
Sera listens, and something about the erectness of her posture, the careful way that she holds her head - still, for a moment, as if it were somehow as necessary for her to filter his question through her skin, the frame of her body, as to listen, think, respond.
"Yes." Careful as she nods: a supple tip of her head. "I don't like limits. I've never been with just one person. I don't know how it works. And I don't know that I know how to be me around people without being - " she pauses. Frowns again, thoughtful. " - closer than you should be if you're. You know. Monogamous."
Nick Hyde
"It feels like we're having a pretty honest conversation where you're you," Nick says, with a glance to the side toward her. His posture is relaxed now as they move past the stream, as he settles into the conversation. He is not in his chair; nevertheless, this is the sort of conversation which to him is second nature, another skin.
"The time that I've been with Pen I've found less that I was limited, but that the limits I was perceiving changed and adjusted. I think most life changes or most paths we consciously choose end up that way. My frame of reference shifted."
A beat. "But I never thought...I mean, I was never not monogamous before, but I never thought I would have what I have with Pen. I never believed that was possible for me, or something I would want. And now I have it and the things that I want have changed along with it."
Serafíne
The trail rises from the rocky muddle of the little creek in a slope that will seem steeper when they return. For now the elevation gain is marked more by the tightness in their calves. The slight breathlessness of the exertion. Eventually it levels out; cuts through another copse of pine and pin oak before opening up once more. And from here Nick can see their likely goal: a cluster of bolders at the mouth of another valley. Perhaps spat there by some long-retreated glacier.
"How have the things you wanted changed?"
Nick Hyde
Nick has done a lot of hiking since he arrived in Denver. On his weekends, when he hasn't been working the garden in the hope of the summer growth that is flourishing there now, he has often been out walking river paths and seeking out places where the Veil grows thin. He has done this often enough, at least, that the thinning air out here in the mountains troubles him less than it otherwise would.
Here he hesitates; it is not easy for Nick to articulate what he wants. It never has been. "Well, a lot of the things I wanted before, like exploring this world and the next and...and helping alleviate suffering, I still want to do those things but I want to do them with her now. She brings me new ideas, so sometimes how those things look when I do them changes shape. I want to be better because she challenges herself so often, and I want her to have an equal. Those things."
Serafíne
Something in there makes Sera grin. The expression is equal parts quick and sublime, and slides pretty easily into a self-aware little smirk. "I'm not really quite that forward thinking. Goals and shit, you know?" The curve of her mouth takes on another pensive little twist. She gives him a glance, upslanting once more as they close in on the rock field.
"Thank you, though. You know, for talking about all that personals shit. Do you ever worry that you're going to hurt her? That you're gonna do something - and - "
Nick Hyde
She will find him looking on ahead as she glances up at him, his eyes half-hooded, lashes casting a long shadow over his cheekbones. "Maybe you could be. I never was, before," and here Nick shrugs. "Especially before I joined a Tradition." Which, in truth, could be as much instrumental in lending him structure and direction as Pen has been.
When Sera asks her next question he draws in a sharp breath, a clearly audible one. It is not done with any sort of particular intent; perhaps he is not aware. "I think I worry less about hurting her and more that one day she'll leave. She'll want something different. But I think we...it's normal, to have fears like that. It's the human condition to fear endings and impermanence."
Serafíne
Is that one of her fears, too? It must be: impermanence. He has already left her once. And there is some irony that Nick counsels her about the natural human fear: of endings, of impermanence, adept, as she is, in the art of time. Sera doesn't really catch the irony. She is wired only for certain cuts of it, and then her awareness can be either emboldened or undercut by her near-static refusal to intellectualize.
Anything.
Something there, though, makes her eyes damp. And her chest seize, oh, briefly.
--
She doesn't say anything else, for a little while after.
There's work to be done, anyway. The packs unslung. Hiking boots exchanged for climbing shoes. Then there's the air mattress to be inflated: a kind of make-shift crash pad to be slung beneath their target when near-full.
Nick Hyde
Does Nicholas realize the irony? Perhaps. He too has some skill with Time, though nothing to match Sera's; he knows that kingdoms rise and fall, that eventually all becomes dust, that eventually things emerge from the dust once more. He knows that the only thing all life has in common (save life itself) is death.
He, too, says nothing for a time. Maybe he saw the gleam in her eyes, limning her eyelids and lashes.
Nick pulls his pack off and changes into the climbing shoes he brought along, and then he stops to watch as she inflates the air mattress. There is curiosity there, at what they are about to do: he has not been bouldering before. He helps, when possible, offers her this or that.
"Do you usually come out here with other people?"
Serafíne
Here is the other irony: if she wanted to do nothing more than to will herself into some sort of eternal present. Some gloaming past, she could very well someday Will it so. They Know very different things, but they do Know them, skin and sinew. Mind, and will. Blood, and bone.
And here they are. There's not much to do to prep except for the air mattress, layering it with a another sleeping pad for extra cushion. Sera does explain it, though her explanation is imperfect and he must splice together the concepts. But: real crash pads are bulky and awkward, especially for someone her size. So: the air mattress and a few bolsters. What's the crash pad for? Well: you're gonna fall off, man. Again and again and again. Free climbing's the only way to learn, she thinks. Gotta fail, to figure out how to get it right.
Irony there too, perhaps.
--
Does she usually come out here with other people?
A shake of her head. She's pulled her hair back into a ponytail so it won't get (too much) in the way, and the ponytail swings and swings and she likes the way it swings so she shakes her head again. Mostly sober, but maybe she's a little bit high.
"Just Dan. There's nothing special out here, but I think of this place as sort of for mages. It was a kind of safe house out here. We brought Leah here after we found her. Protected her here while the Fallen hunted her. And we hunted them. So I just had Dan keep up the rent, after. I like to come out here, sometimes. Rock climb or hike or get stoned around a fire or trip in the woods. It's like, mine, yeah?"
Nick Hyde
I just had Dan keep up the rent, after, Sera says, and it strikes Nick not for the first time just how helpful Dan is, how he has told himself more than once that he ought to voice that verbal appreciation for the man and the contributions Nick has heard him make.
"Leah. Is she the girl that you said you tried to rescue? The one with the priest?" And it was months ago but sometimes it's only months later that people realize that Nick really does pay attention, that when he appears to be gazing off into the beyond or drawn into himself he is still paying attention. Keen attention, too. "Thanks for bringing me here," he adds, because: it's hers.
Serafíne
Pick a nice easy boulder for Nick? Per + Athletics
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 6, 7, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )
Serafíne
And climb? Dex + Athletics
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 6, 7, 7, 10) ( success x 4 )
Serafíne
"I don't know if rescue's the right word, you know? Makes her seem kinda passive in all'a that shit. Which she wasn't. We gave her space to choose her path. She had to do a lot of fucking hard work to find it and stay on it. Rescue sounds all maiden and tower-y."
Shrug.
"I fucking hate maidens and I fucking hate towers."
Throughout this patter: our Sera is looking for the likeliest starting point. Something easy: plenty of handholds, a few routes up. Something he can fail at probably sure, but also something he can conquer. She's not an expert, though she has had training and that's another story but: that training serves her pretty damn well.
With Nick's help, she drags the air mattress over to the base of one of the larger specimens in the group and positions it beneath the rounded face.
"It's just like the fucking rockwall at REI except no one's paint where you gotta put your hand. So you feel and look and look and feel. Three points of contact at all times. Watch me first and then - try to follow?"
--
Half-way up the rock, hanging there catching her breath, nothing anchoring her body in space except her own goddamned hands and feet (but it's not that far down, and isn't that the point of this: freedom balanced against risk.)
"I never finished telling you about that kid, did I?"
Nick Hyde
[Follow follow! Dex + Athletics.]
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 7, 8) ( success x 2 )
Nick Hyde
"Nothing wrong with maidens. We all are at some point," Nick says, though his voice is wry-touched as he watches her select a starting point on the boulder, once they have positioned the mattress beneath it. He too is surveying the rock face, selecting likely hand and footholds.
For all the good it'll do him once he's actually trying to cling to the rock and find a way up.
Which he is, moments later. Nick is not wholly unskilled; he has a rudimentary knowledge of how to do this, how to position his feet and feel around through crags and juts and crevasses for a handhold. He tries not to look down, even though the ground is not so very far below them.
"No," he says, as his foot goes questing for a likely ledge he could position it against to push himself up to the next spot. His shoe scrapes rock, sends a small scattering of dust below; it's too small so he adjusts himself and looks about for a different foothold to use instead. "Just about the priest."
Serafíne
There's no real physical strength in Sera. She's slight, though, so: she doesn't need strength, except here and there in her fingertips, to power through. And those are calloused to hell and back from tuitar strings so: it all works out for her, as so very many things seemed to. And she is not very responsible. She doesn't avoid looking down. Neither the distance nor the potential fall really scare her and hell, sometimes she likes the mildly dizzying thrill of skewed perspectives, the exhilaration of possible danger.
"Right so." A bit breathless, because this is real work. The clinging-to, the hanging-on. "I was at the chantry a few days ago, and this cop came up. She was looking for Annie, the Verbena who owns the land out there. Said that she was from Colorado Springs, and she and her partner were hosting this apprentice on her couch that she was concerned about. She also said that apprentices up there were disappearing. The point is: she was looking for Annie because she needed someone to take in her houseguest.
"Somehow, this cop - who is a Chorister - and her partner rescued this kid or something from these people he was working with. He was like - the computer person who helped them put some pretty gross stuff out on computers. Stupid to let him go to the chantry if the Techs - or whoever - is hunting him. So I figured he could come here."
She has gained the tiny little plateau at the top of the boulder. Yay!
"But I'm not sure I could help him. Maybe they're right that he's remorseful and fine and a victim and needs help, you know? I mean, I think everyone deserves the chance to make a choice, or a new choice, a better choice, about their path, right? I'm just not sure I could do it for him, the way I did it with Leah."
Nick Hyde
It is more work than Nick had rightfully anticipated, really: more difficult, perhaps, than rock climbing in and of itself. At least when using a harness he has the option of leaning into the harness when he grows tired, of taking a moment to rest before finding the next foot or handhold. Not so with bouldering; here he has to hold on despite a hand cramp or a wearying leg.
Sweat beads on his forehead, trails down his neck to wet his collar. Still, even with as much as he is concentrating he can still spare an ear to listen to Sera. He's a practiced listener, see.
He is a few handholds behind her in gaining the top of the boulder, and at first he does not reply. She could take it for breathlessness, but if she did she'd find him gazing intently at the rock, pulling air deeply into his lungs but not gasping for it like a doomed fish. Then finally, "When we're saying 'pretty gross,' how gross are we talking about?"
Serafíne
"I only know what the Chorister told me. Right? I don't have any independent knowledge."
In the interim, while Nick was silent - thinking, or breathing, or considering, or re-oxygenating or meditating - Sera was swinging her feet in the small void in front of her. That motions slows though. Stops. It is quiet out here. A baking afternoon, sunlight lancing through the deep shadows cast by the pines, by the shoulder of the mountain that rises above them. Well above them, in the blue sky, a raptor circles lazy on a thermal.
"But, she told that he was the webmaster for a place that made snuff films. Learned all he knows about magick from the internet and the people he was working for."
Nick Hyde
It is quiet out here, something Nick notices as he finally hauls himself to the top of the boulder. He skinned his knuckles at some point and did not notice; when they leave a small smear of blood behind on the rock he is startled, flips his hand over to glance at it and is just as quick to disregard it and let it dry as it will.
His face had remained still when Sera told him what the kid had been doing: not impassive precisely, but reflective, the way a slow-moving river is not easily disturbed and the way there are hidden currents and eddies (and sudden drops, treacherous, those too). He does not sit beside Sera yet but instead pulls his water bottle from his pack, taking a long swallow from it.
"That is one of the more terrible things I could have imagined you saying. What makes this kid different from Leah?"
Serafíne
"I don't know him." Sera returns, low-voiced. "But that chorister told me that the apprentice in question is - 'one or two questionable calls from either returning to the great cosmic cycle or becoming a supervillain.'
"Which doesn't sound to me like a endorsement of remorse or regret or shame. Or contrition. Hell, nothing in the story sounds like he was trying to: resist, or stop it, or get out, or ever gave a fuck about what was happening to anyone except himself.
"Maybe I'm reading too much into the words the cop used. She told me that he didn't participate in any of that shit. That he was a good kid, he just wasn't raised right. But if everything she says is true: hedid participate in it by filming it and putting it on the goddamned internet and letting these sick fucks make a living on it and letting other sick fucks get off on repeated acts of rape and murder.
"I have such a visceral reaction to the story she told me, see? I figure he deserves more of a chance than I find myself capable of giving him."
Nick Hyde
Nicholas bites the inside of his cheek, here. Because: he has sent people back to the great cosmic cycle, as the cop put it. He has done this to people who were far more innocent than this apprentice: see, Death comes for the just and the unjust alike. This is a thing the Chakravanti accept.
"Have you spoken to the boy directly?" A beat. "I think it's wise of you to have the insight to know that you can't give him a chance. To be honest, I'm not sure I can either, but I'm willing to try."
Serafíne
There is a quick, quiet shake of her golden head. A kind of sobering stillness that settles over her.
"I haven't spoken to him. Only to that cop. I told him I'd take him off her hands, though. She seemed pretty desperate, like she didn't know where to turn."
Nick Hyde
There is another long pull from his water bottle before Nick finally lowers it, caps it, and stows it back in his backpack. As he moves over to Sera, his footfalls are silent; he seats himself beside her, letting his legs swing out over the edge of the boulder. The hair on them is sparse, like his arms, and both have been dusted with bits of dirt and grit.
He leans back on his hands. There is a stitch there between his brows, shadowed by a dark corkscrew of hair, as Sera tells him: the cop was desperate. The Chorister was desperate. "I wonder if there's something she's not saying. It wouldn't be in our depth any more than hers, since it doesn't sound like she's an apprentice herself."
Or, perhaps, any more in Nick's; he is at the cusp of disciplehood and beginning to establish himself as a Willworker in his own right, and yet. "Where is he now?"
Serafíne
"He's in Colorado Springs. That chick's couch."
Sera returns. Quiet, her mouth seamed, her own dark eyes focused on some middle distance. "I have a phone number. I told her someone would give her a call. She was talking about some other stuff going down up there. Said she was concerned that someone would blame him, or use him as a scapegoat.
"Dan and I will go pick him up. Bring him back to the cabin. I can ward it, too. Beyond that, I'm not sure how much help I could be to him. Given the way I react every time I think about what she told me."
Nick Hyde
"I think it's wise of you to be aware of how you're reacting to him." His ankles cross and hang, suspended, over the open air below the two of them. They tap back against the boulder, lightly; the stitch is still there between his brows. "People will do a lot of things if someone else tells them to do them. Kids especially. That doesn't excuse him, but it's not necessarily damning either, you know?"
Perhaps his use of those words is intentional: it is difficult to imagine Nicholas doing anything without intention, without careful forethought. Indeed, that is one of the areas in which his wife has grown frustrated with him.
"I can come and talk to him," Nick says. "Get an idea of whether or not he truly is feeling remorse or not. I suppose it depends, for me, on what he says and what he believed he was doing."
And unspoken between them: perhaps the knowledge that it is his role to return people to the great cosmic cycle, if necessary.
Serafíne
Sera accepts that: a quick nod. A glancing lilt of her dark eyes, no more.
"Cool," she says, "thanks."
Both the spoken and the unspoken encompassed, all together. Doesn't need to talk about it anymore, either.
So she doesn't. Leans back, resting - or perhaps basking - in the dappled shadows and slanting sun for another five minutes or so.
Then she sits up, a kind of resolution wreathing her spare frame. "So, here's something I didn't tell you when we were on the ground. Down's harder than up."
So it is.
But she'll show him the way.
