It is late evening and Nicholas is just arriving home from work. He had texted to let her know that he would be late: he will be taking the next few days off, he had said, and so he is finishing up administrative work and his notes in preparation.
It is late evening, the dusking hour, the sky grown rosy at the edges and soft and shadowed up above. It's cloudy tonight: there are no stars that can be seen winking in the heavens.
Nick is arriving home and the friendly beep of the car horn to assure them that it has locked heralds him before the door opens. It was a long day; he woke with the dawn, with Pen who always brings it to him giving his shoulder a shake when he is slow to react to his alarm clock. His tie is hanging loosely around his neck when he passes the threshold and into their home.
He leaves his messenger bag and shoes in a pile near the door, haphazard as though they'd been knocked right off of him. He does not call for her right away; he listens for her in the home first. It has become more a habit since she surprised him a few weeks ago.
Nick
[Perception + Alertness? Are you there, Pen?]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 5, 5, 7, 9) ( success x 2 )
Penelope
Their house is quiet right now, but it is not the empty quiet of absence or the careful quiet of a skulk. It is not even the blank quiet of someone who has desired silence, and so re-woven the air to be more accommodating of this. It is only quiet because Pen isn't down in the foyer, or on the stairs, or in the living room, or in the dining-library room, and where ever she is, she isn't listening or music or doing anything that might accompany her with voices. A table in the foyer, right when you walk in through the door, has a ceramic dishes for keys and matchbooks from bars and business cards and interesting stones or seeds whatever other things accumulate in pockets and must be set down immediately.
Look: a piece of paper, card stock, heavy cream, a notecard propped up beside the dish and the hall lamp with Nicholas's name on it in Pen's handwriting, glinting gold because the ink is gold metallic threads of metal melted down or could've been in some dream-world, and a gentle breeze wafts through the house.
The note is brief: a cheese plate in the refrigerator [truffle and honey cheese being the best, apricot stilton and pomegranate-rum preserves, some of those good seed crackers, pancetta wrapped around mozzarella and home-made feta (success, Nicholas! and a smiley face)], and some probably eloquent observation about why Nick is so f'ing lovable to her specifically. An arrow: look at the back of the card.
Coda: she will be finishing off the scotch like a villain.
Pen is outside, writing in a journal. The journal is a dim red: a coal-glow red. Interesting papers, woven together, and it looks handmade and clumsily so because it is and it is. Pen is an artist, but not one with great skill, and everything about this journal was chosen with care.
So: she is writing, outside. In a hammock which is tied from their back porch (such as it is) to a willing tree, and it is higher than is easy to get into without a stepping stool. There is a crystal bottle of scotch on the nearby table, but she is cradling a tumbler of it against her collar with one hand while she uses the other to write. The journal is balanced against her hipbone and her thighs. Tea-lights on the table, beeswax, unlit. Metal lantern, glass-cased, interesting shapes: also unlit. There is a gentle wind: it combs through obsidian-glass wind chimes, playing the glass like a stringed instrument.
Nick
Of course he finds the note, unfolds the notecard with a soft snap of the cardstock against the ball of his thumb, and casts an eye over Pen's golden script. In this house, gold things stay: there is a private smile as he folds it again and then tucks it into the back pocket of the grey corduroys he is wearing.
When he makes his way out to the back porch, he is carrying a plate with good seed crackers and cheeses and pancetta, with an almost artful smear of preserves, bloody dark on the plate and with the cheese knife the culprit held there beneath his thumb. Under his arm he too has a journal (and this one is not handmade, simply bound in light brown leather and well thumbed) and in his other hand an empty tumbler. He's coming for your scotch, Pen.
The cheese and crackers are plentiful: more than Nick himself can eat.
He reaches the table first where he sets everything down. A matchbook (one of the ones from the dish out in the hall, in fact) and a whiff of sulfur later and the tealights glow one by one, like a gathering of fireflies. Like a circle of faerie light.
His feet carry him next to the hammock, around behind her head like the haunt he is. His presence there is palpable as he leans down and kisses the top of her head. The placement of his lips is gentle, will not cause any rocking motion of the hammock which might disturb either her handwriting or the scotch in her hand or Pen herself. "Mind if I join you?"
Penelope
Penelope's eyebrows lift before her head does as Nick comes out into the yard. The words on the page keep her visual attention and the care of her hand, but only until she reaches the end of a phrase and punctuates it. Lifts her pen so the ink will not bleed, and sweeps her gaze over Nick's profile and back as he lights the candles: a lingering look, and wondering, and any who saw it would know, and think perhaps of the color in Fairyland's twilight which is always twilight which is always a certain gray.
Then her eyes drop back to the journal, and she tries to finish her thought (though it isn't fair to call it a 'thought' when it is observation. This is a journal of observations: I tried this, and this happened; the ritual might be cleaner, if). She is not so absorbed by her work that she doesn't react when Nick comes around behind her and presses his lips to the top of her head; she looks up, lets her pen rest on her abdomen/against the journal, and reaches up for him with that hand.
"Caa, caa," she trills, happily, and then the spark of a very rakish smile.
The journal is open, but it is not written in any one language.
"I do mind if you join me. I mind it very much," as if 'mind' only meant 'like,' her tone of voice, and Nicholas must mean he is going to attempt to assay the hammock (a pretty thing, trailing crochet, and generously wide), so Pen tries to prepare herself by putting journal aside and both making herself smaller so he has room to clamber on and, holding the tumbler still balanced in one hand, stretches her arms out and distributes her weight to give it as much stability as possible.
Nick
There is this wry little lift to his brows and the corners of his mouth as Pen spreads her arms to prepare to allow him into the hammock alongside her. If she were looking up to see it, it might suggest that he had meant only to join her in journaling: nevertheless, she makes room for him and so Nick wiggles his feet out of his dress shoes, tugs his thin socks off his feet and leaves them discarded near the shoes like shed skins.
Then he carefully moves into the hammock beside her, though carefully in this case means that it is given to sway a bit less than it might otherwise have. Pen's arms stabilize it, though the tumbler comes dangerously close to splashing over on one side and onto Nick's shirt or down Pen's arm.
But soon he has settled, and they fit as snugly together as a pair of seeds in the same seedpod, suspended over tufts of grass and bare earth.
Nick tucks his head in against her shoulder and drapes an arm around her middle, a leg over hers. His eyes have not directed themselves towards her journal; in this he affords her some privacy. "How far did you run today?"
Penelope
Pen is prepared to go spilling onto the ground. There have been, back in New England, in the same hammock, Instances of Note regarding gravity and sharing and hammocks like to swing and twist and it takes a certain knack or grace to manage them sometimes. The hammock swings and swings and Pen readjusts and readjusts to be comfortable and give Nicholas some more room and the hammock is really flirting with the idea of being an uncomfortable disaster or at very least twisting a tiny bit and then: settled; settling. Pen takes a long drink of her scotch.
"Four miles; not very far at all. Only to the Tuesday farmer's market and back. Would you like to tell me about your day?"
Nick
"Dying people, and the notes I was putting off at the end of last week and yesterday," Nick says, and there is a little smile there: take other peoples' stories out of his day and one sounds much like any other. He spends his day listening to other people talk, more often than not.
Now that Pen has settled, there is a bit of additional settling for Nick: his head nestles even closer, his curls brush the bottom of her chin and along her throat. He reaches something he is content with, evidenced by a little hum. "I took the next few days off."
A beat. "I'm planning to go up into the mountains tomorrow morning."
Penelope
It is a trick: take the details from any story and it could be any story. Penelope hums too, a contemplative sound, resonant: kept behind the harp of her breast bone. Penelope lifts her chin and - this is the curse of hammocks - there is another minute adjustment: so that she can take another sip of scotch, let the heat of it spread through her head like branches made of smoke, of fire, of ruby-bright molten some thing, and so her thoughts cant; she settles back and she traces his brow with her middle finger.
"Tomorrow morning," she echoes, and her voice is an artist's at work: absorbed by some vision in her head. "The mountains."
"What time do you want me to wake you?"
Nick
"At four," he says, "when you get up to go and run." Maybe she's tried to wake him up at that time before: usually he sleeps until she returns, rising after that to go to work. Take the details out of any day and it could be any day.
His eyes are shut as her finger lights on his brow, his forehead smooth and unburdened tonight. "I'm just taking up some water and my phone. I think I'll be gone for most of the day."
It's going to take that long, to reach the top of the mountain. Perhaps longer, if he finds what he's looking for at the summit.
Penelope
"Only one?" Pen says, tracing the slope of his nose, though she uses her index finger instead. Perhaps there is some sort of symbolic significance in the change.
"It is a rite you're going for, isn't it?"
He could be going Seeking; that is even what Pen would guess. But he could also be going to do some other shamanic thing: some death-magick best performed where the earth has buckled and risen and it is young, young, young.
"What do you hope for in the mountains?"
Nick
"I'm going to go Seeking," he says, if only to confirm Pen's suspicions. His eyes have opened again, though he is not looking at her: off into the trees, off into the sky where it draws down into darkness. "Though I suppose if I don't succeed I might as well turn it into a rite."
He does not like to think about that. Perhaps she can see it, however subtly, in the flutter of his eyelashes. "I suppose it could go for multiple days. I want...understanding. Connection. I suppose it's a lot to expect all of that within a day."
Penelope
His gaze is off and away but hers has dropped its anchor on Nick's face. See: she looks at him with such an air of awareness, such just-contained devotion: it would shame someone contemplating disloyalty did they see how she looks at Nicholas right now. While he says he wants understanding, she decides to trace the shape of his lower lip with her ring finger and tries to be careful enough that he doesn't stop talking to her. Then she traces his chin with her thumb when he says 'connection,' and takes another sip of scotch and thinks how best to share it with Nicholas without dislodging him from a position he finds comfortable. She thinks other things, too, and has gone contemplative.
"I don't think it's a lot to expect. It might come all at once, and in a flash; you might be gone for three nights, because that is how long it takes for the horizon to open. Understanding and connection aren't - " a pause. " - subjects of time. I like it when you want things, Crow; can understanding resist the magnetic pull of your attention?"
"Is there any way I can help you prepare?"
Nick
If there is a way she could share her scotch with him, it does not appear to be at the forefront of his thoughts; he tilts his head as she traces his lip, though it does not keep him from talking. Pen touches him often enough and in this way that it does not startle him any longer; it might quicken his heart but that sweetness is no longer half a throb.
He does not answer her right away. There are flippant answers he could give, ways he could tease her and there are also ways he could acknowledge what she has already done for him. He does not answer right away because he knows the question is sincere.
"Tonight is an ending, if I find what I'm looking for tomorrow," he says. "I want...I would like you to hold a vigil with me. That's all."
Penelope
"Tonight or tomorrow while you're in the mountains?" Pen asks, and then: it comes on sudden, and fierce - this physical expression of the longing she feels: wraps her arms around Nick's shoulders and she squeezes. Shifts, so, and then she slips her arm beneath his arm and: squeezes, tight. The corner of her journal finds her back and presses a warning against it. All this ferocity: it is in her bones, blood, muscle. Not her voice; her voice is ardent, yes, but clear as polished silver, the kind of mirror which transforms the world into enchantment: softens it; makes it lovely.
Nick
Nick draws in a breath before he answers: this is a natural reaction, to being held so tightly. It is a way in which the lungs respond, to steady the body when the heart is running away with itself, impulsive thing. He draws in a breath and then his arms, too, tighten around her. His is not ferocity, though joy and fear and desire can commingle and look that way, sometimes.
"Tomorrow," he says. "It will make me feel more connected to think of you, holding vigil here while," and he stops: while he goes out into the unknown. "Tonight I'd like to prepare to fast tomorrow."
Penelope
"All right," she says, slowly, and after a moment's thought. "I'll hold vigil for you. Prepare to fast... By feasting?" Pen says, a note of plaintive apology in her voice. The hammock swings; she has, alas, spilled just the tiniest bit of scotch on Nicholas' shoulders; maybe in his hair. "I can go pick something up - anything you'd like. If you want, I'll go sneak your favourite meal from your mom's and bring it back to you, or I'll make the fancy cheeses into a grilled cheese - we have some Italian bread. By - " and what follows is, of course, a suggestion far too filthy and graphic for the censors.
Nick
There is a laugh there contained between his ribs, in the swell of them, which escapes once the scotch splashes into his hair and is immediately drunk up in his ringlets. A blush might tinge his cheeks, though in the twilight who can tell. "You could go to my mother's, couldn't you," he muses, though without any real commitment to the idea. His fingers walk their way up her spine to her shoulderblades and down.
"I'm hungry now for the cheeses as they are. But I'd like to finish off that scotch with you, and stay up later than we should at a fire. Maybe you could tell me a story." Which, well, is likely to result in some reciprocity, some story in kind: it's only fair, isn't it? "I'd like to - " And his suggestion, expounding upon hers, would make a censor blush.
Tomorrow will come early, and no matter what it will be too soon.
Pen
[Hmm. Dirty talk. Wits + Exp.]
Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 9) ( success x 3 ) [Doubling Tens]
Pen
[Again!]
Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 3, 6, 7, 10, 10) ( success x 6 ) [Doubling Tens]
Pen
[Again!]
Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 5, 7, 7, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 6 ) [Doubling Tens]
Pen
[Pen's priest is so proud. Evens for Not Cabal Yet Scene. Hello, dice, what do you want?]
Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (1) ( botch x 1 )
Pen
"A story." Because Nicholas' ear is against Pen's breastbone he can hear the resonant echo of her musing (amused) voice. "I can tell you a story."
He can also hear the breath catch: the breath snag, the delighted laughter with something to it of smoke -- a thread of wanton longing: stay up later than we should at a fire? The Flambeau rests her cheek against Nick's crow black hair and takes a moment's thought -- arrogantly takes it, see, because she does not feel any hurry, because (and she has yet to master Time, but one wouldn't know it) she is quite sure she is due that moment and the next and the one after -- before she gives him a reply.
One suggestion must be met with another. And then another, see, and another: and Pen is as eloquent as a sinful priest, as a Romantic poet, as any enchantress ever between the lines of those poems written by men who dare not speak of anything except looks and hands and
well, Pen is daring; she has an eloquent tongue.
--
Let it pass. The evening grows darker. The tea lights are long in their pools of wax. Some cheese and crackers are gone, the crumbs scattered in a way some oracles or shaman might be able to read. Daily life has its calligraphies, its messages for those who look: or at least, so think some.
--
Let it pass.
"Nickolai. Won't you tell me a story first? A story of the kind you want to hear before you go to Seek understanding."
Nick
The evening passes, and the sun and moon pass each other during ascent and descent: perhaps they say hello across a stretch of space that human minds still have difficulty comprehending. The tea lights are floating in miniature lakes, and it's a wonder the flames still flicker at the end of their wicks.
The neighbors can't see into the backyard, framed as it is by hedge and tree. Perhaps that's a fortunate thing: Pen's eloquent, see, and Nick has never been able to withstand that eloquence for long. It brings him sharply into being, defines his blurred edges and lends him shape as though it were some invocation of a god of old.
Let it pass.
They abandoned the hammock for the bonfire, and so: here they are.
Nick's eyes flick over and meet hers at the sound of his name, or the name close to his that only ever appears on her lips. And he laughs, once. "A story of the kind I want to hear from you? I'm not nearly as good a storyteller."
Pen
"What does good mean? We're talking the story, not the telling of it. Tell me a story, won't you?'
Nick
Nick laughs once again: a clear sound, clear as the fire nearest the logs where the flames burn hottest, and settles his cheek in against her hair though his eyes remain fixated somewhere above them. "Um...well, I...you'll have to give me a moment to think."
A story of the kind Nick wants to hear. And Pen likes it when Nick wants things, doesn't she? She likes it because he is so often unsure of just what he wants: he would have been quite happy with whatever she had chosen to tell him, and that would have been the type of story he wanted. "I um...well. The last time I went Seeking, it was after I'd gone through the shallowing and past the Veil. Did I ever tell you that story?"
He cannot remember whether he has, or whether it has been only in pieces: as one grows older, stories become like this. One's past becomes a story, told often in passing or brief allusion.
"Or would you rather a different kind of story, not about me?"
Pen
Pen makes a neutral sound, one open to interpretation, for she wants Nicholas to choose. She wants him to choose, not because he was coerced, but of his own free will. She wants him to choose! But the neutral sound is accompanied by a sidelong look, clear-eyed and expectant, her mouth a moody curve and a slender bruise new mark on her collar. It is difficult to give someone a sidelong look when they are resting their cheek against one's hair, but not impossible when one has a certain degree of poise; of self-assurance and self-possession.
Nick
There are times when it is difficult to give a sidelong look, and times when it is difficult to receive one: but Nick is glancing down at her from time to time, at what he can see of her face: the arched bone of her jawline and her nose, the soft glow of flesh in the firelight like carved marble polished by human hands and time. He knows her well enough to sense when she is looking at him.
"Well, you remember how a long time ago I told you I went into that shallowing? I found it when I was out biking, trying to...I wasn't in a good place. It looked like this glade, this overhang, and I could tell there was something strange about it. Something just kind of...eerie, but..."
Words escape him because they often do. Nick's sort of eloquence is not Pen's sort.
"Anyway, I went through and I couldn't find my way back. You hear that sometimes in old stories, about someone wandering through into another world and moments pass for them but years pass on the other side. I was afraid of that happening to me, but I still couldn't find my way back. I went through that glade and into another, where the branches were made of bone and the shadows knew I wasn't one of them.
"I hadn't really come prepared to stay, so after a day or two I had to drink, and I found the cleanest looking river I could. The water didn't taste strange, so I drank it and I fell asleep. Have you heard of places like that?"
Pen
"Yes I have. Oh, Crow. Careless, but daring, what happened next?"
Nick
Careless, but daring, and perhaps from Pen he hears this as a compliment: her daring is a thing that he admires. "After that I...well, I've heard things from other people and I've read things that suggest that a lot of people lose themselves in places like that. They lose the tie that they have to their mortal bodies, even if their bodies are there. They fade around the edges. And for some reason that never happened to me, but I was worried at the time that it would."
There is a little furrow there in Nick's brow as he recalls.
"When I woke everything had...shifted. It was different from where I was when I went to sleep, so I woke up and I walked. And around me there was only a long field of dead flowers. It didn't matter how far I walked, or where, and it remained that half-dark that you see at twilight. Eventually, I walked out of it and into a wood with bare trees and fallen leaves.
Nick's hand wanders up over her shoulders and comes to rest on the side of her brow near her temple, where he absently strokes the fine hairs there. "I didn't see another person or thing during that time, until I started to see things. I would sometimes see what I thought were other people, but they were these half-formed shapes or shadows and they didn't answer me when I spoke to them. I started to tell myself stories about who I was and things that had happened to me just so I didn't forget."
Pen
"Is this a nesting story, other smaller stories hiding inside it like a matryoshka doll or the heart of Koschei the Deathless?" Pen says, and though the question is a hooked one, playful as a nip of the lip, see, not yours, another's, it's quiet too, and thoughtful.
Nick
"I think all stories are like that," Nick says, and although her question is hook and snare he smiles and adds, "But you asked for only one story."
And unlike a matryoshka doll, the stories that can be within another story can be almost infinite.
"Anyway, eventually I finally did start to see something that was defined and not...winding around a tree there or something I saw out of the corner of my eye. I saw a raven first, leading me off in a different direction. When it landed, it was on a huge tree - one that I knew was the oldest one there in the grove. The branches had grown so large that the tree couldn't support them any longer. They were on the ground, and the weight of them was pulling it to the side. It was splitting there in the middle.
"At first I didn't do anything, because I was afraid of hurting the tree more. But I didn't know where else to go and I couldn't find my way out. And the branches kept - they kept pulling it farther and farther down, and I knew it would die if I didn't act. I spoke with a raven who told me that was the way of things, and an old woman who came to collect acorns and told me she and her lover had carved their names on it when they were young, and she showed me where.
A beat.
"I tried a lot of things then. I looked for an axe or some sort of tool I could use to save it, but I couldn't find anything. I tried to prop up some of the branches so that they wouldn't weigh it down. I touched it, and I saw...everything that it had seen, from the woman and her lover down to when it was just a sapling. And then eventually I heard it crack and it split down the center. And so I left."
Pen
Pen is quiet; then she shifts, so that she might look at Nick's expression. She is better at reading what she can see.
There is a very natural guilelessness about her expression; it is open without being revelatory, only caught up in the story, only plaintive because she is curious about what happened next.
"And then you were back in this world?" Her thumb finds the notch at the base of Nick's throat and then the ridge of his collarbone. She abandons both so that she might reach for a glass of water; the Scotch still has her on the pleasant and dreaming edge of tipsy for how much she drank.
Nick
Nick, too, has found himself on the pleasant end of tipsy; he has not yet reached for any water. His body angles toward her as her thumb traces the outline of his collarbone, a subtle thing.
She will find his expression to be thoughtful, pensive even, with his brow furrowed just a little and his eyes on the leaves above them. Here and there are patches of starlight woven in and amongst them: the hour is late, now.
"I wasn't back in this world yet, but I did get out of the grove. It was a while longer before I found my way back, and more strange places that I went to. I...you remember how I told you about that Old Road that I found? That was one of the things. I was there for a long time. A few weeks, I think."
Pen
Does she remember about that Old Road? Nod.
"But you're not certain." Rake of fondness, sudden. Then: "And this was your last Seeking?" Pen asks - as if she wants to make certain.
Her voice is ash and clouds; she sets the glass down and swallows, then presses her lips to Nick's collar. She has one earring in one ear; she started out with two. The earring is a smokey blue; some dangling nouveau bit of fancy, moon-shadow and lake-light.
Nick
"I'm not certain how long I was there, no," Nick says, and his hand finds hers in the half-light, not that it has to look very long. He threads his fingers in between hers, curls their hands in against his hip. "I only know it was more than a few days and less than a few months. Other people said they'd noticed my absence when I got back, but it hadn't been long enough for them to really start worrying."
He rises on his elbows so that he can continue to look at her while she takes a swallow from her water glass, and slides back earthward as her lips find his collarbone. "It was my last Seeking. The entire time I was there wasn't a Seeking, just that part."
Nick folds an arm beneath his head, and his curls are matted and tangled from sweat and grass and her fingers. He sweeps them back away from his forehead, so that they tumble backward in freefall.
Pen
Pen would be happy to stay at Nick's collar and his throat, which is where she presses her lips next, for quite some time (forever). He is sweet and salt and when he speaks she can almost swallow his voice. Pen would be happy to squeeze his hand once he has enlaced their fingers, then stroke her thumb across his palm and the inside of his wrist. And she does these things: stay, and taste, and hold, and stroke. But she also says, "If I ever learn the Art of Spirituus, it will be to find you. I know it is true. I feel it like a prophecy," she says. "You want that kind of story from me?"
Nick
His hand leaves the earth behind his head and finds her instead at the small of her back, at the back of her hip, and she fits neatly into the curve of his arm. "I hope that you never have occasion to learn the Ars Spirituus then," he says, and the light has not found his eyes and so they are dark and that darkness makes them somber.
"I want that kind of story," he agrees, and ducks his head only so he can kiss the hinge of her jaw, where it is just squared off where it is distinct and lends her features their strength. "Will you tell me?"
Pen
"When you win this contest," Pen says, while he is at her jaw; there's a laugh in it, the way moisture will hang in the air before a storm comes; the leading edge. She curls her thumb under Nick's chin and lifts it (agony!), and gazes (ardor; love) into his eyes.
The contest: a stare down. The rules: none.
Nick
"I don't recall a contest being part of the terms," Nick says, but good-humored, but with a laugh in his voice too and eyes that are crinkled at the corners, the beginnings of crow's feet. He holds her gaze, even if it's the kind that makes his heart sore in his chest, and - there are no rules, are there?
He turns, drops an elbow to the other side of her, not-quite-pins her in place. "If you're not going to tell me a story, you should tell me about the stars," he says. "Where each constellation is."
Nick
[Willpower?]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 5, 6, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )
Pen
[Iiiiii wanna win.]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 5, 6, 8, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 5 )
Pen
"We didn't name the terms," Penelope says, though there's a jolt of her voice comes when Nick not-quite-pins her; the drum-in-her-chest echo of the surprise. "I will tell you a story," Pen, she runs her finger up along Nick's ribs, "when you win this contest. It can be about the stars, if you'd like, or the constellations: there's an interesting star right now just behind your left ear." Gaze, love, etc.
[Char-ees-ma. And Empathy! Specialty.]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8) ( success x 2 ) [Doubling Tens]
Nick
[Psh. WP.]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 3, 4, 8, 8) ( success x 2 )
Nick
It's normal, to look away when someone else tries to draw your attention to something. Nick is curious and he is also agreeable and he loves Pen and wants to look where she suggests he look; and so all of these things together mean that he has to remind himself that they are in a contest. And so he laughs and he says, "I'm not going to fall for that one."
His hand threads carefully through the hair at the top of her head, and: there's humor here, mingled with affection. "How long do you think you can go without blinking? Don't blink."
[Manipulation + Empathy!]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (4, 5, 7, 7, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 5 )
Pen
[That's... pft, psh, meh, I'm not, nuh uh.]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 6, 8, 9, 9, 9) ( success x 5 )
Pen
"I won't," she says, with a slow smile. "I like what I see. Won't you kiss me, Crow, right here?" She touches her smile but draws her finger down her sternum to where her rib cage parts and there stops and draws a little circle. "Or here?" She touches her knee - difficult to see if one's eyes stay on someone else's eyes. Difficult to keep gazing if the request is granted, too.
[Again, again. Char + Emp.]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 6, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 5 ) [Doubling Tens]
Nick
[Nooo.]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 5, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )
Nick
Difficult to see if one's eyes stay on someone else's eyes, though Nick tries: he does. But as her hand reaches his eyes inevitably waver, are dragged down along with them -
after which he rolls them upward and shuts them and laughs. "All right, you win that one." And he does grant the request, shifting his weight just so that he can let a kiss linger on her breastbone. "All right, another contest. If I win, you'll tell me your story. Can you think of a thing that belongs to you, but others use it more often than you do?"
Pen
[Ack, answer. Wits and Enigmas.]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 7, 8, 10, 10) ( success x 4 )
Nick
[Riddle, again! I chose this contest poorly.]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 5, 7, 7) ( success x 2 )
Pen
[It's this thing, yo.]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 5, 6, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 4 )
Nick
[Question about something about me I haven't told you about? Totally passes as a riddle, yo. Manip + Empathy for winning smile.]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 6, 7, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 5 )
Pen
[Ack.]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )
Nick
Nicholas is nowhere near as skilled at riddling as Pen and so perhaps he chose this contest poorly. He knows it, too: she can see this little furrow appear at his brow when she gives him her second answer in the same breath as he has finished asking the question. Perhaps she can see her victory there: no storytelling for Penelope Mars tonight, and isn't that a rare day.
The only way for Nick to win is to either hope he gets lucky (and he's running out of riddles he knows that he thinks Pen might not know, at two) or through base trickery. We have established that Nick is not above this.
So he thinks, and he thinks very hard. And then he says, "How long would it take to walk the length of the world, if you were to use only Old Roads?" And, well. That could very well be a question that has no answer, or has an answer but it is a Mystery lost to time, or it could be a question that could be answered only with the Arts of Time and Spirit themselves.
Pen
Pen's mouth curves: wide, generous; both dimples in evidence, and the expression in her eyes a caressing one: and a little smug, too; and then just unlaced by the winning smile that Nick accompanies the question with. The question which sounds like any question and an answerable one at that.
Penelope's smile diminishes, she bites the inside of her mouth, what's left of the smile goes lopsided; sparks up again, then fades into solemnity; breaks again, a glimmer.
"Never?"
Nick
"A question that you would need the Arts of Spirit and Time and Space to provide an answer to, Ms. Mars," Nick says, and the smile that is still in place has some warmth in it, there, for how she is solemn and thoughtful and then hopeful again. "Even were you to find them all."
He leans forward then and kisses her cheek, just at the dimple, and there's a hint of mischief in his smile now. "So what story are you going to tell me?"
Pen
[Eloquent Expression? Char + Exp. No words, yo.]
Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 5 )
Pen
Nick says what he says. Pen's expression is eloquent. She does not think much of it. There's the brief pause; the slender, precarious moment of weighing out the answer; her gaze gets very still; so does the curve of her mouth; her breath. Then her eyebrows perk: like that, and her mouth twists: like so, and there's a precarious cant of her head: a shift of her eyes, sidelong. No; she does not think much of it at all; she is reserved.
"I would only need somebody who knew the answer, thou Ravenkind, or knew it once," Pen says, and then: hmmms; she is clearly guaging whether or not to let that pass.
Her expression softens on the hmmmmmm....
She's going to give in; he wants a story.
Nick
Pen is reserved, and Nick: he holds his smile in place, and maybe she's going to give in. Perhaps she doesn't think much of it, but Hermetics will be Hermetics. So she answers him, and he does not argue, and his eyebrows only lift expectant.
Eventually she chooses to indulge him, and when her expression softens he settles back down against the grass, the straight blades cutting through the thicket of his curls.
Sometimes it's nice to be indulged.
Pen
He settles back down; she pushes herself up, resting her weight not on her elbow as she was before he laid her down and she won the contest of staring regardless, but on her hand. The earring which is not lost falls against her jaw; it is as dim as a moth, even with the fire. One of the tea lights burns out; the smell of candle just snuffed wafts over in their direction, circles Pen like the premonition of a crown: that pale thread of smoke; and then another, and then the breeze changes its mind and washes everything away.
"A story of Elaine the Disparate or a story of Penelope Mars the Flambeau?"
Nick
Nicholas had asked her to wake him when she wakes before the dawn to go running: tomorrow he will be climbing up the side of a mountain with only water to sustain him, and if this night keeps going as it is, precious little sleep. He'll be in a sort of fugue state by the time he reaches the summit tomorrow: but none of this kindles in him the desire to go back inside to their bed.
He folds his arm back behind his head as it had been before she began their staring contest, and he watches as the smoke curls around her, halos the red of her curls: war and flame.
"Elaine the Disparate. I haven't heard about her in a little while," he says, and perhaps too because he had just told her a story of Nicholas Hyde the Disparate: symmetry is pleasing. His free hand drifts up and smooths a path across her flank, just beneath her ribs.
Pen
"After I'd established myself as an individualist, by which I mean I was not interested in joining with the Traditions of those I knew and it was mostly known, I had an occasion when I met with a Devil and very nearly lost my mind and I held somebody else's curse in my hands. Almost it became my own."
"Every Spring, there is an art festival of river boats and boat houses outside Boston. The boats fill the waterway and many of them are shops; you can buy whatever you want from them, if you have the money; some of them are food trucks. The seafood is good, but Joe's Seaside Burger boat always had the longest lines. The most dazzled eyes. The most longing wake. Some of the boats drift, some of the boats are moored, and there are bridges and walkways built everywhere."
"I felt her before I saw her. She felt like humidity, like the dark underside of a cloud limned in silver, like something stuck on your tongue - like black licorice. She was a tall woman in a [technical name of boat because New Englanders are strange and know these things] with a little wooden house on its back and a great deal of half-melted candles along the edge."
"When she saw me, she opened a box - it looked like a salesman's box, one of those wooden things silvermen would take around to offer their wares. Held it out, like she expected me to buy something, but I couldn't see what was in the box."
"What do you think was, my greedy love?"
Nick
Nick's expression is solemn, as he listens to her. They both spent enough time as Disparates to know that it was a time of wonder and self-discovery, and danger too: there is no one to protect a Disparate. No Tradition includes them in their codes and writ.
He is smiling when she mentions the art festival, and "Somehow I never went there," he says, thoughtful, though Boston was still a ways away. And listens.
"The fingerbone of some poor unfortunate," he says. "Or a pen that could enchant whoever read its words. Or a flute that could command the winds. Any of those?"
Pen
"You guessed it, I guess the story's done," Pen says, full of wickedness, and pleased with herself. See: she lofts her chin; casts her eyes up in innocence, then sneaks a glance down at Nick to see how he's taking it. She's serious. Really. She is so very obviously serious! (She cannot lie, Pen.)
Nick
When she looks down at him, she finds Nick suppressing a smile: see the thin little line of his lips, the gleam in his eyes that he can't quite hide. Pen cannot lie, but maybe if she hadn't sneaked that little glance down at him he might have had enough time to choose to let her get away with it. Instead he says, "Which of them was it? And what happened next?"
Pen
Pen rakes her hand through her hair, down to her shoulder, down her ribs, down and down until she finds Nick's hand, which she gathers up with her own and brings to her mouth: she separates one of his fingers from the rest, and is going to swallow it -
but says, "Why do you think the one who lost their finger bone must be unfortunate? Wouldn't you sacrifice this finger for the chance to meet me and be glad? Wouldn't you be glad if you got away from a certain kind of deal with only the loss of a finger bone instead of your life?"
Swift change: from (beguiler) gentle and solemn arrogance, to laughter: against his side. She eases back down,
"It was none," she says. He can feel the shape of the words on her mouth; she shakes her head, no, nope, no. "It was tass."
Nick
For this moment as she lifts his finger as though to swallow it his eyes are wide, drawn into the story or just wondering what she will do next. Her swift change brings about one in him too, though his amusement is quieter as he says, "I suppose. But ideally I'd still rather have my finger and have met you, anyway."
She eases back down and he reaches for her again, gathering her against him and folding his arms around her waist. "Tass? What shape did the tass take?"
Pen
"Many different things," Pen says. "Something that was a darkness so dark it couldn't have been darkness; then a fork with a dented tine; a green glass bottle; a pen."
"But I said I couldn't see what was in the box. How do you suppose I found out?"
Nick
"Did you take the box home with you?" It's difficult to catch her eyes or watch her face from the position he's in, but he tries: he can imagine, perhaps, a young Elaine doing this. (Nick, remember, recalls countless duels; he recalls how brash Pen could be when they first met.) "Or did you go and steal it later?"
Pen
"Define 'steal.'"
Nick
"Pen," he says, and he sounds scandalized. "You know, like...using magick to bring the box to you."
Pen
Pen laughs the way a spring'll let water bubble up from some place deep below. It isn't a waterfall and it isn't a flood, but a continual renewal and renewing, beguiling brightness and suggesting light; here, see, this: unconstrained flash of her dimples and her teeth and she shakes her head once twice thrice very dramatically most dramatically the third time and must prop herself a little up to do this so the dramaticism of the headshake is fully appreciated. Her most-messy-this-eve hair, with the grass and the dirt and Nick's attention, goes: no movement, a little movement, tumble-tumble.
"So in this scenario, Nicholai, it would only be stealing," pause; she bites the inside of her lip, then leans in conspiratorial and/or wondering - some alchemy of both: eyes wide, "if magick were involved in the transportation of the box."
Nick
It takes Nicholas considerably more alcohol than they just had (or a different sort of starting mood, perhaps) to arrive at the stage of giddiness that Pen embodies at the moment. He is only: pleasantly relaxed, floating, more open (less guarded.) As Pen goes to push herself up his arms loosen to allow her to do so, and his gentle amusement is evident in the not-quite-a-smile he is watching her with.
"You and your Hermetic word-traps," he says. "So if you didn't steal it, what did you do?"
Pen
"Well might you ask," Pen says, archly, and she looks into Nick's eyes with purpose, as if she'd like to hypnotize him, mesmeric, intent, and she bridges an infinitesimal scrap of space to bring her eyes closer to his, and then: winks. And eases back down again.
Pen is not drunk, but she is tipsy; she had more Scotch than Nicholas, and her inhibitions and the boundaries she sets herself are often fed upon by a passionate nature. When she sets a kiss on Nick's shoulder, it is celebratory and revelatory.
When she says, "I stole onto the boat," it is with a poet's pleasure at a simple turn of phrase. "I waited until she left the boat and I watched her go to Joe's and I thought that, if she were a danger to me, it was an obvious trap; and I thought that, if she weren't a danger to me, but might be threatened by such scant daring as I had, why? The door was unlocked."
"But you know that sense, Nicholas, of feeling everything around you turning inside out and without end. That sense where there is no horizon at all - and sky and water are the same; that sort of liminal, breath-snatching - that sense? Breathlessness."
"I felt it when my hand came close, so I paused and decided to really Look at the boat."
Dramatic pause.
Nick
Pen settles back down and Nick carefully combs his fingers through her hair: grass and a few fine copper strands come free with them. He will not find all of the grass and dirt in his until tomorrow morning, when he washes it free in the shower. "What did you see, when you Looked at the boat in that way?"
Pen
"It was old," Pen says, soberly. "It was older than the water in the river, and parts of it which looked to be canvas and wood and lacquer were nothing I knew to name."
Nick
Nick's eyes widen and the words come as though she'd pulled them from his mouth on a string: "Did you find a ghost ship, Pen?" And moments later, he looks abashed at the outburst, because he never has them: it passes.
Pen
Pen does not answer.
And her longing sharpens suddenly, but she controls and contains it, as the setting of Mars or Venus might suddenly catch in a wizard's glass and amplify; fling a spear of light into unwary eyes, dazzle-them.
Traces, with a hallowing care, some word across Nicholas's skin, and there's the presentiment of a laugh in the hollow of her chest; an echo of a sound that isn't because: she doesn't laugh just like she doesn't answer.
She says, "I didn't open the door and go inside, but I waited for the woman to return. When she did, I didn't hear her come. I didn't see her, either. I looked at the water for one second, and I looked up, and she was standing in the open door of the house on the boat.
"I said I'd never seen a boat like hers and asked her about this mark on the wood, a bullet hole, and another mark, which I think was a saber cut, and we chatted."
"I thought she was going to kill me at first, but for whatever reason she didn't. Still, there were stormclouds in her eyes; they didn't fully abate while we were just ... talking."
"She wanted to know what my allegiance was. That was her exact question. 'What is your allegiance, Rose?' I had told her my name was Rose. Which it is, a little. In Penrose, you know."
Nick
"Ghosts aren't always easy to understand," Nick says, and this is thoughtful: it is the way of all things human and yet not. Does he count the two of them in amongst those things? "She wanted to know your allegiance to what? Different warring pirate nations?"
Pen
The sound Pen makes at this point is the sound, thoughtful and courteous, that many New Englanders make when tourists think they understand history, and she nestles against him so.
"No."
"She wasn't a ghost. She was eating a burger, and the juice was on her fingers. Which she wiped very fastidiously on a handkerchief. She wanted to know my paradigmatic allegiance, who my masters were, what hand held the whip - as she put it."
"I told her my allegiance was to getting away with it."
"She said, Is it really?"
"I said, No."
"Then she invited me into the house on the house boat and I accepted her invitation and she opened the door and I followed her inside. She asked me to shut the door behind us, and I did."
"Do you think I am too trusting, Nicholai?" Solemn. "Would you have?"
Nick
"I think once, I would have," Nick says, and there is a little smile here: he too was once more reckless than he is now, more devil-may-care, less concerned about whatever outcome his actions could have on his well being. (Look close and you could see an edge to that smile: it was because he did not care.) "So she was another Disparate, then? Where did she find a ship like that?"
Pen
"She was ... two people. And she was nothing, Nicholas. She was a mask for something else," Pen says. "I told you this was a story of a Devil, didn't I?"
This is quiet, quieting. "The ship was the curse. But nooooo," and this is, indeed, long and drawn out; she tucks her face away. "I am not telling it in proper order. Do you want the questing part of the story or the answers, Nyktipolos?"
Nick
Pen tucks her face away and he places a kiss on the top of her head. "I want...both? Can I have both?"
Pen
"I'd give you the moon," she says, earnestly. "I'd give you the last three years of my life, my first memory," and she is tracing his collar again, gentle repetition, gentle drawing out and drawing on. "But you only asked for one story."
He said that to her not long ago, didn't he? She can't keep up the pretense that she'll deny him for more than a second: lifts her head so she can look down at him, and her eyes are as dark as his, indecipherable except for how much she is sustained, see, seems to be sustained by this drinking-in sort of look. A half-a-second, and then she covers her mouth to smother the laugh: to hide the flash of her swashbuckler's smile.
"I went inside the houseboat and she wanted something from me. It was clearly a contest, though for what I wasn't sure, and I wanted to know. She talked about the Traditions, and wanted my opinion on them, on all Mages. She had some tools for carving on the table, a low bed, and a chest full of skulls. The wall behind the chest was painted with a forest scene - silvery, interesting, out of place."
"She told me that she'd been Verbena once, and she'd tried the Euthanatos, and she'd abandoned them in order to try the Cult of Ecstasy, and when that didn't work she'd tried the Order of Hermes, and she said that she thought it might be nice to be a Hollow One."
"I asked her how it was she'd had the time to try all of those Traditions, and she smiled. And her eyes sparked with fire, and I asked her if she was human, and she said she was not, and that if I wanted to buy something from her before I was lost on her boat I'd better do it quick. We discussed the nature of deals, and then: something changed. In her face. There was no reason for it that I noticed but she went ... away."
"I saw her go for the knife, so I took out my own."
"There was a fight, and all the time she seemed to be out of her mind. I could not say; there was more fire in her eyes, and I thought..."
"I thought her under a spell, and our discussion of deals made me think that a deal would undo it."
Pen
"But we were fighting. Don't think of it as - it wasn't some flashy movie knife fight; just both of us had knives, and she was going to strike at me again, and I was going to strike at her if she did, so the air was full of intent. I told her I'd buy something."
"She said that it would cost me a piece of my avatar."
"I wanted to know how that could even be done."
"She said she couldn't do it herself, but she had something which could, and she brought out this spindle - a hand-spindle, you know? And it had thread on it."
"My eyes were still sharper than usual and it was nothing the Sphere of Matter could touch twined in that thread."
"Too steep, I said. I'd buy something lesser, and I'd pay with a question or an answer, and I pointed to the box. I said: You showed that to me. Why?"
"She told me it was because it had my heart's desire in it, and it was policy to offer a heart's desire when drawing somebody onto her boat - somebody like us."
"Back and forth and back and forth we argued and debated until she opened the box to show me the wares. Which is how I knew what was in the box."
Nick
After she has covered the smile that sprang to her lips and started speaking again Nick is attentive, and solemn. There are occasionally a few deep breaths, and one of his hands stirs over her back, her shoulders, as she tells him about how a Devil offered her her heart's desire for the low low price of a piece of her Avatar.
And he wonders, because it is human nature to wonder: what she saw in the box. What he would see, in the box.
"You knew your heart's desire before she opened it? You were wise, that young," he says, and a smile quirks the corner of his mouth as he spools a few threads of her hair around his finger. "Were you tempted, when she showed you?"
Pen
"It wasn't a real heart's desire," Pen says, after a very long pause.
"It was only an idea of it. An idea I might have had, perhaps, but you can't buy an idea; you can only have them."
Nick
"Did you know that, at the time?" Nick gently lets the thread of hair unspool on his finger, drawing it to its full length before letting it fall across her back.
Pen
"I don't trust the gifts of magical people on boats who want a piece of your soul," Pen says. "As general policy."
Pen's hair is growing long, again. She'll probably cut it soon. Possibly tomorrow, while Nick is gone, after she sees the shower floor and all the detritus from their backyard caught by red curls and black and liberally bestowed twigs and clover.
"It was a tempting ... thought, but it wasn't tempting to buy it from her. Does that make sense?"
Nick
"It does," Nick says, and his arms settle again around her, though not tightly. He is still too tipsy for that. "So what did you do? Did you fight her or did you run away?"
Pen
Up from his collar to his throat. Up from his throat to his jaw. Up from his jaw to his ear. Up from his ear to his temple. Up from his temple to his hair, down from his hair to his eyebrows, down from his eyebrows to his cheekbones, down from his cheekbones to his mouth.
"I did run. But I fought her first. The knives were out, yes? But we were -- it was wits, Crow," her voice goes to ash, goes like a piece of copper flattened to a dusk strip suddenly leaping to fire; has a throb t it. "I bought a piano key she had on display, and I paid for it with a poem, and then when I went to open the door she started crying -- but look no this still is no good, this storytelling. I said she was two people, and nothing, and something wearing her like a mask, right? This was one of the people, who wanted help."
"I touched the door and found I couldn't move; and then I found that the world wasn't as I thought it was. Because outside the door: the river was there, and all the other boats, and all the people too, but the river was full of skulls; I knew this because she opened the door, and though I couldn't move, I was moved, and she mentioned what a lot of work it took, seeing everything from every different perspective."
"Another argument with her - she wanted me to agree to come back. It was hard, forcing myself to move. And I didn't think the skulls were really there, but I wasn't sure why I was seeing them exactly: as soon as I did manage to take a step, the skulls disappeared. Almost all of them, except one."
"I fell into the river, trying to move and thinking that I might want the skull - I don't know why I might want the skull. The piano key was in my pocket; my clothes were ruined."
Nick
This was one of the people, who wanted help.
He is still, except - Nick, he swallows hard, and it would go unnoticed if her fingers were not tracing his throat, if she could not feel the muscles beneath her fingers like the earth itself shifting, like the way the canyons and mountains themselves are scars upon its surface.
It passes.
"So after you fell in the river, did you get away? Did she follow you?"
Pen
"Nicholas?"
The name is a question when he swallows hard; she doesn't stir, but her regard is different; she'd been watching her hand, or the fire, or the night sky.
"I did get away."
Nick
"Hm?" The name is a question and as his head rolls over in the grass to regard her they are only curious, only wondering: whatever struck him, it was there and gone. Sometimes a thought is like that, deeply affecting and yet too ephemeral to grasp and hold.
"What happened to the woman?"
Pen
"I was concerned so I reached out to some Traditionalists I knew, different ones. At first I tried to ask them about what she might be, what impressions I had might be true, without giving too much away. It wasn't very productive."
Pen sighs, deeply.
Nick
"So the boat is still out there?"
Pen
"Hm? No, I meant - being oblique wasn't very productive. It's only, I was trying not to - it just seemed to me that it was easy to find people who had their fingers on the trigger of a loaded gun, and would use that gun to blow off the hinges of a door before just picking the lock, and since she seemed both villain and victim, I was hoping... I just wanted a perspective which wasn't, um, skewed. The boat is still out there. The woman isn't. She - well, when wiser heads went to check it out, I went along too, she sloughed out of her skin, or what was in her did, and she died. We think she died."
Nick
"I understand," Nick says then, and his head rolls back to where it had been, resting in the little hollow its impression has made in the grass. And for a moment as he lifts his hand back to her hair, weaves his fingers through it, he is quiet.
"At least she's at peace, now, if it was only wearing her skin."
Pen
Speaking of hollows, Pen's fingers walk from Nick's chin back down his throat to the hollow there and she turns her head so she can open-mouthed inhale the smell of his skin and fire and the earth.
"At least no more Avatars will be gathered on a spool," Pen says. "I cannot imagine giving away a piece of myself like that, like that," quiet fervence.
Nick
"To trade for a thing you wanted?" Nick lets his cheek come to rest against the top of her head, and his own is angled now: he can see the sky, or what of it he can through the treetops. It's darker, out here at the edge of the city. "Me either."
Pen
"What was it like for you, after my last Seeking? Did you think differently of me?"
Nick
In answering her, Nicholas does not hesitate. "I loved that you had become more yourself. You were...you were just somehow more." A beat. "I...I suppose the only thing I thought of differently was that I hoped you wouldn't...that it wouldn't change anything that I wasn't there yet. But you're already there, so if I succeed it won't be like that for you."
Pen
First she makes a sound that is not quite a hmf. Just a very inward-pointing hmm, and it might strike him as doubtful, though it isn't doubtful precisely.
He has a hand tangled in her hair, and the other loose around her waist; she wants one of them, and the hand at her waist is less fraught a thing to tangle with. She draws his hand up to her mouth and shapes some words, before she licks the life line.
"I love you, Nicholas," Pen says (and it's rare that she says them).
Nick
It's rare that she says them, and here his eyes leave the stars to find hers, arrested a moment. There's a certain gleam there, a certain tender awareness. He lets her hold his hand: then lets it drift, runs his thumb along her jawline. "I love you," he says.
Those seconds of careful consideration perhaps seem longer than they are - Time is this way - before he lifts himself on an elbow so he can kiss her. And another tealight gutters out in its puddle of wax, the smoke carried away in the wind, with the rest not long to follow and the fire dwindling. And the night is dark.
They may still awaken bleary-eyed and cursing the dawn.
