Getting Higher

Serafi­ne
Christmas and New Year's always turn themselves right back around and into January.  It is some sort of terrible alchemy - all the aftermath of all that celebration.  The days grow brighter at both ends but winter settles in, unrelenting.  People stop drinking so much, start working out more.  Resolve themselves that they will try to pay off their credit cards, and the stores are bare, or just filled with the leftovers that no one purchased in the first place, and the restaurants are less busy, and the bars are rather more quiet, and on and on.
Most of the homeowners up and down Corona Street have taken down their Christmas decorations.  Not 719.  The blonde-brick three story house is still wrapped in many colored lights.  The trees, the shrubbery, the porchposts and the railing.  The upstairs windows and on and on.
There is a fresh-cut tree discarded in the yard awaiting recycling, so some of the interior decorations must be down.
Even from a block or two or three away, it feels like Sera.  She is sunk into the bones of the place.

Grace
Grace got a call a few days ago, and since then, has not been back to the Chantry except to sleep. Let us say, she has been having fun, in Grace's definition of the term (which is a lot more solitary, a lot more focused and requires less chemicals than Sera's definition). But eventually, even playing with her new servers gets old.
Wait a minute, no, it does not get old. It will never get old. But her servers are busy with a long process that will take a few hours, and Grace decided that watching them do their thing was about as exciting as watching grass grow, and sent Sera a text.
'Wanna hang out?'
It's probable. I mean, we are talking about Sera. It would take something fairly serious to make Sera not want to hang out. There's more to it than Grace put in the text, but that'll have to wait.

Serafi­ne
What Grace receives back from Sera is a very clear and very simple and very concise,
sure.  come over?
a few seconds or minutes or hours after she sends the inquiry.  And not long after that first text, a second,
my place i mean.
Just in case, you know.  When Sera gets started texting, watch out world.

Grace
[Oh yeah, I forget. Nightmares?]
Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (4, 5, 6, 6, 9, 10) ( success x 2 )

Grace
[Also, Awareness!]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 5, 8, 10) ( success x 2 )

Grace
It's not hard to feel that sense of Sera as she drives up to the house, bringing her own abrupt shift with her. She parks, and gets out of her old Toyota wearing a grey turtleneck jacket and jeans and tennis shoes, her very own uniform. Seems like she always has this same getup anymore, now that winter's struck. Sometimes there's a heavier coat on top of that, but it doesn't seem to change.
And of course, she's wearing her laptop bag. Can't go without that for more than a few minutes.
She also knocks at the door, and maybe she doesn't have to exactly, but still.

Serafi­ne
Awareness!
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8) ( success x 3 )

Serafi­ne
No one really knocks at the door.  Or rather, the variegated parade of people who feel like they belong here or want to belong here or need to belong here or dream about belonging here do not knock.  Some others do.
People like Grace who wear the same thing every day and carry laptop bags and dream about the pleasures of exploring their brand new servers.
No one's really listening for the door but of course someone answers it.  Eventually.  It may be that our Sera sensed Grace at some remove and when that sense of Grace's movement-through-space became static rather than dynamic, nudged one of her housemates to answer the door.
So, yes.  The door opens.   Dee answers, dressed in her derby gear, a duffel bag and a pair of roller-skates slung across either shoulder.  The quick flash of a perfectly crimson smile, "Grace, hey.  I was just on my way out.  Sera's upstairs, pretending like she's not smoking in the house.  You know where her room is, right?"
And if Grace does not know where Sera's room is, well.  Dee tells her.  Up the stairs, the second door on the right.  Can't miss it.

Grace
"Hi Dee! I must say. Ninjabread. Awesome," Grace says, and gives her a thumbs up and a smile. She's better at this, the one-on-one, than than the one-on-fifty like at the Christmas party. It's highly likely that Dee was there and got totally ignored by Grace in her way of dealing with crowds (which is to try very hard to imagine that there aren't actually people there).
In any case, she nods a farewell to the roller-derbyist and heads inside, up the stairs, and when she gets to Sera's room (note, she did not know where Sera's room was, this is a first) she knocks. Again.
And again, she probably doesn't have to.

Serafi­ne
Grace did not even make it up the stairs before.  So now she climbs past the black and white photographs of Amelia Earhart and the spider plant in its macrame holder onto the upstairs landing, and knocks on a particular door.  There is a sweet, somewhat skunky odor evident when Grace gets there, though the smokiness is not deep and beneath it the sharp bite of winter air from an open window.  Music a low and background rumble, which does not stop when there is a brief and quiet scramble from someone inside, who gets up to answer.
Once again, Sera sends someone else to open the door.  This time it is Dan, who towers over Grace.  The scent of pot is wrapped all around his skin and his eyes are bloodshot and there's a keen sort of languor to him as he steps back to let Grace in.  All,
"Grace, hey.  You didn't have to knock."
Though given that this is Sera and this is Sera's bedroom and one never knows whom she might be entertaining, or how,
" - but it was probably wise."  This quick, bemused grin.  "I'm gonna run downstairs for a sec.  You want something to drink?"
Sera is just evident behind him, sitting on the arm of a huge old armchair parked beneath a bank of windows framing the winter garden.  One of the windows is open at least a quarter of the way, and Sera is exhaling a lungful of smoke into the bright cold air.  Otherwise, Grace just has a moment to take in the surroundings - the chaos of them.  Art and clothes and clothes and art and jewelry and many, many stranger things are scattered everywhere.  Some on the wall, others on the floor.  There is a covered with stuff and a huge, unmade bed in the middle of the room.  A mismatched group of thrift-shop finds and antiques, all of it thoroughly Sera.

Grace
"Oh hey, Dan," she starts, but her eyes skip around the room, from thing to thing to thing. "No, I'm fine, really. But um... You have Sera's phone perchance?"
'Cause, Dan is the keeper of technological things. So, he might be the one to ask.
And Sera's old phone, the one with Ginger, is dead and gone.
Whatever his response, she finds Sera in all that stuff (not hard, Sera is unmistakable, unmissed) and quirks up a little smile. "Hey Sera."

Serafine
"I want the Jacobite," Sera calls after Dan, as he's greeting Grace and Grace refuses the offer of drink and Dan's greeting Grace but is also trying to remember whether or not he has Sera's phone, and is starting to reply that he thinks Sera has it,
except, Sera answers for herself.  Giving Grace a lazy wave from where she perches on the arm of that big armchair, breathing out one last lungful of smoke all wrapped up in a green chenille blanket as ward against the necessary cold.  Covering the bowl of her bong with the body of a Zippo lighter to deny the remaining embers oxygen and until the spark inside dies.
"I have my phone.  Graaaaaaace."
She might be stoned, Sera.  She holds up the device for approval and/or inspection.
"See?  Come sit."
There are three places to sit in the room, other than the floor.  The bed.  The armchair, of which Sera is presently taking up about a quarter, all of that on the arm, and the bench for the vanity, which is quite close to the door and all the way across the room from Sera's perch.

Grace
Sera might be stoned, like the sun might be hot, or the ocean might be wet, Grace decides. It's probably the way Sera says her name. Anyway, she gives a grin and plops her laptop bag down on the bed, followed by her self. She sits on the side of the bed closest to that window, mind you, so she's not too far away. Somewhere in the middle.
"I thought maybe you'd like to chat up Ginger again sometime, you know? Also just thought I'd stop by. Say hi. So, hi."

Serafine
The bed as mentioned is huge and - a King or perhaps even a California King or maybe an Emperor - unmade. White or perhaps ivory sheets with an obscenely high thread-count that feels like silk, and a fluffy white/ivory duvet and loose top sheets more or less twisted into the sort of fluffed up nest that hamsters or other small, adorable rodents might make to burrow themselves into. Grace sits on the side closest to the window and while she picks her way through the chaos of shoes and spangly bras and teeny t-shirts and leather jackets and carved wooden frogs and folk-art sculptures and mixed media collages and flyers for this show or that opening, the embers in the bowl are finally extinguished.  Sera sets the no-longer-smoking bong aside in the windowsill and puts down her phone on the seat of the armchair long enough to reach over and mostly-shut that half-open window.  The garden beyond: stark and spare.  Bare limbs and an interrupted view of the downtown skyline, there, between that apartment building and that home behind them.
"I've been doing pretty well without Ginger, lately."  Sera tells Grace, then.  Confesses, really.  She's still holding herself, and holding herself a little bit apart, even as all the other pieces of her life are slowly fitting themsleves together.  The edge of a moderately ironic half-smile as her dark eyes drop from Grace to the phone, then lift again.  "But I suppose I could find a way to do just as well with her.
"Hi Grace.  How are you?"

Grace
Grace bites her lower lip and smiles at the question. "Kalen... do you know Kalen? Anyway, he bought us a computer lab. Just like, up and bought all this equipment, like its a Christmas present or something."
She sits up stock-straight, but wobbly, and all grins. "And he says he wants to learn the language of computers. I have a wee little nerd on my hands, to bring up as my very own!"
"Hey, you get that from Connor?" she nods toward the bong. "He had some great free samples at the Chantry."

Serafi­ne
"Hermetic, right?" The briefest pause for confirmation of the information, before Sera gives Grace a little curl of her shoulders.  "I met him.  We got high together.  Talked about the way people used to navigate the sea, with just stars."Learning the language of computers sounds boring-as-fuck," she continues, Sera, all wry, her eyes dark and affixed on Grace, taking in the smile and then the grin, the excitement evident on her face and in her voice.  " - but I'm glad you're happy.
"Don't know Connor.  I don't think we've met.  As for this, I've got sources."  Then a pause, and perhaps a double-take.
"Wait.  You said great free samples.  Grace did you get stoned?"

Grace
Grace's eyes glitter with fake-menace as Sera insults her very being as 'boring-as-fuck'. Two can play this game. "Well, I find parties boring as fuck, so there.
"But it was nice to see you happy at Christmas."
"Oh, that's a shame. You should really meet him. He's new, like really new. And he sells pot," she says. Sera and Connor would get along like peas and carrots, one would think. But then, Sera and Grace get along, and you wouldn't think the same of them.
"And... yeah? I had some of his free samples," she says, and scans the ceiling's borders. It's less cluttered up there. "Helps me relax. And eat. And you know... relax."

Serafi­ne
"I had a good night that night," Sera tells Grace, with a quiet sort of smile that lingers in the gleaming intention of her eyes and settles a quiet, steady curve on her quick-moving mouth.  Which is true, absolutely and objectively true.  " - but I'm still not," a brief, apparent pause.  "I don't always have the energy for strangers, right now.  I think I still mostly need it for me.  It's hard to say why.  That's just how it feels."
There is a particular inflection to the word strangers, there.  Easy enough to read it as strangers, period, though in truth Sera means it much more specifically: strangers, who know magic.
"Maybe you'd like parties more if you go stoned first.  I'm taking it that was an endorsement of the product, yeah?"  The vaguest sort of grin.  Then, a gesture toward the now-exinguished bong.  "You want to try some of this?"

Grace
Sera says she doesn't have the energy for strangers, but if that were true, why the party? Why did she look so beatific surrounded by strangers? It puts a quizzical expression on Grace's face as she tries to puzzle this one out. But then Sera makes with a bit of innuendo. "Yes, Sera, the product, not Connor," she sniffs, and coughs. "I think he's more interested in Shoshannah anyway. Or she is with him. Or whatever."
But then, like it usually happens (when pot dealers aren't leaving notes behind saying 'please, take some of my stuff!' that is) a friend offers her a hit. Sera might have been surprised at Grace getting high, and truthfully it's not a common thing. Mostly that's just because Grace doesn't like the idea of spending all that money on something as 'unnecessary' as weed. But when offered...
"Sure, I'll bite."

Serafine
Grace is going to bite.  And Sera, who does not have the energy for stranges - and she means, implicitly though Grace does not understand that she means this implicitly - awakened strangers, magic and all its many consequences.  All the expectations and disasters, all the - whatever it is that strangers bring with them.
All the need.All the love.
All the light.
She has no room for them in her heart now; just her own strangers, fallible, lovely humanity, crowding itself into her home again and again and again.
And she wasn't even meaning to make with the innuendo but Grace hears it and gives Sera a brief glimpse into the love life of Connor the stranger and Shoshannah and Sera gives her a wry, rather indulgent little grin, then picks up the bong and the lighter and nudges open the window a bit more and carries the former over to Grace.
Sera is wearing boxers and a t-shirt which is her I am lounging at home for a while attire and she parks herself beside Grace, offering her both the bong and the lighter.  "I don't usually smoke inside but it's too fucking cold.  You ever use a bong before?  Breathe in through the opening while you hold the lighter lit over the bowl, see."

Grace
Ok, so Grace has yet to use a bong. Most of her partaking has been in the form of a shared joint, but she likes the idea. It's economical, they say.
So, she gets handed the proper equipment, gets instruction, and sets to it -- holding bong in one hand, lighter heating up the bowl's contents in the other. It catches, and then a breath held deep. There's always a bit of a challenge to keep from coughing at this point, but she takes it, blowing the spent air out the window as much she can from her Sera's-bed perch.
And then, she coughs. Destroying that whole 'yeah, I'm so cool' moment.

Serafi­ne
Sera, who has tucked herself quite neatly beside Grace in these moments, is absolutely ready.  Ready to take the bong from Grace's hand and take her own easy hit, rather smoother than Grace's but no one is watching them and Sera is not measuring cool points.  She's just breathing in the smoke from that long ceramic column and holding it in not desperately but savoringly, as if she were a dirigible just loosened from its mooring, already starting to drift  into the sky. Her exhale is a deep and abiding sigh that opens up her body through the vertebrae of her spine, and she's ready to hand the bong back to Grace when Grace starts coughing.
So, instead, Sera leans forward and half rises to set the device on the windowsill where the embers can continue to burn without consequence for the many things scattered on the floor, and reaches over to rub Grace thoughtfully between the shoulderblades as she coughs out those lungsful of smoke, so deeply held that perhaps tears from the force of the coughing fit.
"If you want I could see if there are any leftovers of Dee's brownies, instead."

Grace
Grace flaps her hands at Sera like she's waving her off, "Oh, I'm fine. It's just the first hit, you know... always a bit hard for me."
Oh, to be smooth! To not be so red-in-the-face! She disguises it with a quirked-up smile, and the tiniest of thin coughs. Well, it's a good thing that pleasantness is starting to kick in, yeah? It relaxes the social anxiety right out of one...
"Oh you're kidding me. She makes those kind of brownies too? You won the roommate lottery, Sera."

Serafi­ne
So it's just the first hit, and that's always hard on Grace, and Sera hardly notices the red-in-the-face or the social anxiety or the awkwardness or the longing for something other-than-awkwardness or any of the rest of it.  Or perhaps Sera does notice it; she cannot help but notice it, she breathes such things in the way strangers at the beach take in that first lungful of salt-sea air, with a present sort of mindfulness, an awareness of the strangeness and beauty in everything they inhale.
But Sera does not acknowledge it.  Just gives Grace a skimming and sidelong glance, which is shaded by the dark smear of her own inky lashes and graced by the curve of a quite darling sort of half-smile and keeps rubbing Grace's spine, the knuckles of her left hand smooth over the knobby jointures of Grace's vertebrae.
"'course she does and 'course I did," Sera returns, full of affection for Dee and all the rest.   "Dan and I met Dee and Rick back in North Carolina.  Raleigh-Durham.  Dee's got this brightness to her.  And this physical, earthy fragility I can't fucking resist.  I love the way she blushes.  All-fucking-over."

Grace
"I love her gingerbread," Grace says, thinking with her stomach. "My roommates, when I tried that experiment out... not so nice. I had one draw a line down the dorm room and forbid me to step a toe over it. Made getting inside rather difficult. Sometimes I hung on to the door and swung over to my side, like her side was lava, but mostly that was to show her how dumb the idea was. But I like your roommates."
Grace talks, and as she talks, tries to ignore the fact that Sera is doing something weird with her spinal column. Sera just is this touchy feely person, and Grace supposes if spines are her thing, okay. Sure. That works. Odd, but you know, it's Sera. Whatever. So there's not much leaning in to the touch, or signs of her enjoyment, other than the general laziness of sitting on Sera's bed during a break from 'work'.

Serafi­ne
"People are fucked up, Grace."  Grace's coughing fit has finally passed, and Grace has moved from thinking about coughing to thinking about spines and whether or not spines are Sera's thing, and spines, assuredly, are one of Sera's many things.  Think of all those nerves tunneling through all that bone.  Think of all of those electric currents.  Think of all those sparks.
With the coughing fit over Sera gives Grace one last quiet, affectionate caress, the solid weight of her warm hand between Grace's scapulae, then pulls herself up onto the bedspread, cross-legged in her t-shirt and boxers, the chenille blanket still draped over her shoulders like a cape.  The lick of chill from the half-open window bright against the heavy muskiness of the smoke in the air.
The bong is within Grace's reach.  She can go for another hit or leave it be, just as she chooses.  Sera is pleasantly high, enough that her body feels undulant even when it is still, which is really a rather lovely feeling, edged with golden.
" - really fucked up," Sera is going on.  Giving Grace a lazy and philosophical look.  And maybe Sera's talking about Grace's roommate or Dee or thinking of something else entirely, " - which doesn't really free us from the responsibility to try and love them anyway, you know?  Even if it's only for a little bit.  At some particular intersection of place and time.  During one particular breath."

Grace
"Yeah, maybe. One particular time, one particular place, for some. But you let the ones who bake you kickass ninjabread people live with you," Grace says, defiantly non-philosophical.
She retrieves the bong from the sill. Better to not let it go to waste, yes? All those smokey embers are busy getting the air high, which helps no one. And she takes another hit, breathing in... blowing out.
Not too long ago, those miraculous lungs were bleeding inside, and she wasn't coughing smoke up, but rather pieces of herself. This time, however, being so aware of her own breath comes comfort-wrapped.
She gives Sera a sidelong glance. She knows what Sera's really talking about, or thinks she does. Who else in their experience has been 'really fucked up'? Only Sera found a time and place to love them all. Somehow.

Serafi­ne
Defiantly non-philosophical Grace takes another lungful of marijuana and holds it in and coughs this time if she needs to cough and otherwise holds the smoke inside her body and there's magic happening as her blood pumps through her lungs, picking up oxygen and intoxication, both.  Sera had a head start and is leaning back to settle herself on her elbows to watch Grace smoke and watch Grace's defiance of any and all philosophy and watch Grace's sidelong glances, as Grace thinks she knows what Sera is talking about Sera, for her part, thinks she is just fucking talking -
and then there is a moment which bends itself like a tattoo at the back of her throat.  The sudden hammering of her heart there, higher than she remembered it, clotting up her esophagus and the drifting coil of something she cannot quiet remember and will never precisely forget rolling toward her rather than away.  Coalescing, not dissipating.
Sera is breathless in those moments, not really paying attention to Grace, not really capable of paying attention to Grace, no and no.  Her dark eyes are fixed before her and her mouth is open and there is an air of startlement, of wonder, evident in the easy arch of rather flat brows over her close set eyes.  In the way her mouth is parted, as if she were about to receive communion.
And maybe she is.
--
It lasts a moment.  Sera is affixed and then it passes and she's breathing in and drawing herself upright through the shoulders as she does so and giving Grace a startled, startling sort of glance with a strangely guilty edge to it before they are interrupted by Dan, knocking softly at the door to the bedroom, returning with beer.

Grace
Grace blinks a few times at Sera, and then, "Are you okay?"
Because Sera looks like she's just gotten a surprise. Whether it's a good one or a bad one isn't all that clear. The first thing that comes to Grace's mind is that perhaps a certain demonic entity has managed to attack from afar again. But she would feel that, right? She hopes she would feel that.
Sera doesn't respond. Maybe she never heard the first time, but then when her eyes come unfixed, Grace offers again. "Are you alright?"
And then, there is Dan, and the moment seems broken. And everything seems okay again.

Serafine
"Course I am," Sera murmurs to Grace, pulled back into herself by something.  The retreat of the smoke, the assertion of her consor's presence at the door or then, crawling over the bed, behind her as he presents Sera with her bottle of Jacobite and Grace with a bottle of locally brewed ginger beer.  The non-alcoholic sort made with actual ginger and raw sugar and fresh water from some spring in the Rockies, even though Grace turned down a drink, just because.
And Sera's course I am feels solid and full and correct because of course she is alright, here in the room where she locked herself in to die.  Of course, she's just fine.
Sera gives Grace a rather lazy, lingering smile and settles back into Dan's arms so he is obliged to stay and lounge on the bed with her and tells Grace, quietly.  "I'm glad you came."

End of Semester Victory Party

Kalen

Kalen does not invite Grace out for a victory celebration, but to the warehouse.  He hasn't decorated it much, but he has put a little stars and streamers thing on the table and hung a ridiculous flamingo pinata.  Because look, nothing says congratulations like a fucking ridiculous flamingo pinata.

There is food, but since Kalen doesn't cook that Grace has ever seen, it is sitting on the table in boxes.  Bakery boxes.  Nothing that looks like an actual takeout box.  And there is, of course, coffee waiting in a French press and all the crazy things Kalen puts out with coffee for Grace to play with.

And, nevermind that Christmas is in like five minutes, there is a little stack of wrapped up congratulations presents.

This is what happens when Kalen tries to be supportive.  Pinatas and presents and coffee.


Grace

When it was suggested that they celebrate the literal surviving of Grace's first Awakened semester, she was expecting... Well, she wasn't expecting this. Coffee was expected, but that's because this is Kalen we're talking about here. But presents? And cake? And, "Holy shit, Kalen, you have a lawn ornament hanging from your ceiling."

She smiles as her eyes track to one thing and the next and back again, barely hovering over each thing in turn, even Kalen himself. It's like Christmas, only one that doesn't reek. If Christmas involved the massacre of pink papier-mâché creatures hung from the ceiling, it might be worth celebrating.

The warehouse, this crazy old formerly-a-business building, now houses cozy matching upholstered chairs and other such handsome furniture and accessories, and stars and streamers and ridiculousness. You can read Kalen in this mélange of stuff, you know. The old barn-like warehouse, made comfortable with expensive furniture and random elements. A juxtaposition of oddity. Kind of like the guy who wanted to turn a pile of his money into a networked emergency GTFO fund for everybody, because why have money other than to give it away, right? And buy pink flamingo piñatas.

"It's perfect," she says, her eyes finally landing on Kalen again as she walks into the room toward one of the couches, and then plants herself in it. Shoes come off, and she's already starting on the coffee.

It's easy to forget a tangled-up life in this place. Easier still when the weight of school is off one's back, for the time being at least. The weight of everything else still pulls, but it's a start


Kalen

"It is," Kalen says with the kind of gravity she's never seen him use without being ironic, "A piñata."

He settles onto the couch, watching her. It is a minute before he starts making coffee, less because he's waiting for Grace and more because it's Kalen. He's undoubtedly had coffee already.

"I must confess that I've never thrown a congratulatory party. I determined that flamingo piñatas were the most congratulatory of piñatas. Hopefully it is true that they are more congratulatory than penguins." He grins. "Also, penguins are so cute. I don't really want to hit them."


Grace

"Ooooh, a piñata," she says, mimicking his ironic gravitas. "You know, I always did love piñatas as a kid. I think it's something about children, really, how they love to beat the shit out of things."

Grace plays with her coffee, throwing in heavy cream and caramel, and topping it off with one of those ridiculous rock candy coffee stirrers. "And you know, after all this stress lately, I can see the allure of beating the crap out of something inanimate and pink. It's perfect, really."

She blows on her coffee, and looks up at him over the steam, a little sad smile on her face. "Thanks. For this. for all of it really, I mean, all the food and prodding and getting me out and stuff too. You've been such a help."


Kalen

"I have never...." He waves at the piñata. "I wanted to. I remember other children talking about them, at birthday parties I think. But I didn't have birthday parties or go to birthday parties. Parties at all.

"Kharisma drug me out to raves eventually, but those aren't exactly the same. I enjoyed them, but they aren't full of people celebrating one thing." He does not sound particularly sad about the lack of birthday parties in his life. As he once told Grace he had solitary underground adventures and rooftop adventures and aside from a few isolated incidents, as far as he is concerned his childhood was brilliant.

Kalen adapts. Kalen survives. And, if he must, he reframes narratives until they tell a story he doesn't mind telling. Grace has seen him spin silver linings out of the ether before. He may even remember his childhood as happy, but some of it seems unlikely to have seemed happy at the time. It seems unlikely that he was always so indifferent about parties and piñatas.

Why else would he have brought one to Grace?

"Did you think I did all that for you?" Kalen asks Grace with a laugh.  "I was bored and you're one of the only Magi in Denver who doesn't run from me. Eating takeout alone all the time was just getting depressing. Less pitying looks when you order for two."

Oh, yes. And Kalen deflects thanks and affection with a reflexive ease that speaks of years and years spent alone.  He doesn't always do it, and in this moment it is less a deflection and more teasing because his smile and his eyes are both warm, but it is still his first instinct.


Grace

Grace stays silent for a while, braving the hot coffee concoction in little sips while Kalen goes and talks about his childhood. But eventually she just comes back with "Well, I guess I'll have to let you have the first swing then. Sometimes it only takes one good whack, wouldn't want to deprive you of the pleasure."

She curls her legs up on the couch, "Speaking of which, do you have a stick?" Apparently, she is all about violently disemcandying a flamingo. Perhaps handing a stick to a recently stressed-out student reeling from finals hopped up on sugar and caffeine isn't the best of ideas ever, but Grace sure thinks it is.

"Oh please. I know you're not that desperate for company. You have Garrett, and you said Sid doesn't hate you anymore. And there's Pan," she says, trying to remind Kalen that he isn't as anti-social as he really thinks. "But, even though you had such evil ulterior motives as 'I want to be friendly', thanks anyway."


Kalen

"Did you just ask a Flambeau to confirm that there were objects with which to beat other objects and/or monsters available?" Kalen asks with a raised eyebrow. "Of course there are. I can even teach you very basic staff work. Or you can just use it like a big stick. It's your party."

"I may have never hit a piñata, but I assure you I have hit enough things and broken them not to feel deprived. Admittedly, vampire hunting would be soooooooooo much more amazing if they were actually filled with candy."

"I know. If I settle in one place and am not careful enough, soon I have friends. I am not completely incapable of that. I just...there are people who want to kill me. Perhaps for secrets I may or may not know. And they have killed people I cared about before. I don't hate having friends, Kit. I just hate what becomes of them sometimes.

"Wait? Am I friends with Pan? I'm not really sure what...I mean...Pan reminds of some people I knew. I think one of them was my friend. The other...it was too formal for that."


Grace

"You realize, right, that half of the fun of piñataing is watching people be woefully inept at staff work. You're supposed to get blindfolded and dizzy first. Smashing objects other than the piñata is expected. Bonus points if you hit someone else or yourself with the stick," she laughs, and then laughs some more about candy vampires. Granted, Kalen is probably talking about actual vampires, but Grace's mind's eye goes straight to Buffy the Candyman Slayer and stays there. She just doesn't have it in her right now to get worked up over yet another monstrous thing.

This is supposed to be a victory party anyway.

"I know. I worry about my friends too. Well, I don't know. Maybe you're not 'friends' with Pan, but he's not running away from you. I kind of get the impression that he wouldn't run away from anything, so maybe that's not the best metric, but you know."

She swirls her coffee around with an almost solid sugar stirrer, and stares at it, instead of Kalen. It's just easier. "You know, when we first met, you said something like if I wanted to be safe, I should stay away from you. We were all in public, and I thought you were joking, but now I know better. Even still, I'm not running away from you, am I? You're just going to have to somehow come to terms with the fact that there are some people who like you. Difficult, I know."


Kalen

"It isn't difficult to come to terms with the fact that you like me. I spent a long time deliberately having no one close to me, but I learned people were okay. I like having friends, Kit. And I am not always terrible at it.

"It's harder to come to terms with the thought of this chantry being destroyed too. But there seem to be enough ways to be in danger in Denver that I think perhaps I should worry less about that."

He sighs then laughs softly. "Pan probably wouldn't run from anything.

"He sat with me once, when I was exhausted and miserable. He read for awhile and I pretended that I was looking at maps for awhile. It's not like we could never be friends. I'm not sure that he really wants to be friends. Most of the priests I have known don't. The only notable exception was...very different from Pan.

"But that might have been a function of how we met. Or that he was closer to my age and had comparable degrees of experience as far as magic went. I don't really know. There's a lot going on with Pan.

"Like...Garrett and I aren't friends. He's like my adopted father, and we are really close, but that's different from friends."


Grace

Garrett. Now that's a twisty ball of emotions to stuff inside, now isn't it? It's hard to talk about the man with Kalen, because they are so close, and it's impossible for her to talk about him with anyone else because she feels that it's the height of meanness to speak ill of people behind their back. Unless one of her friends were seriously planning on going to him for psychiatric help, there is nothing to say. And even then, there would be much left out.

Information has worth, but so does privacy. They're like sides of a coin that is itself a thing of value.

But honestly, if she were to say something about Garrett right now? Maybe that's why he's so lonely. He doesn't want friends. He doesn't want to be equals. He wants to be everybody's fucking father. Damn if that coffee isn't getting stared at real hard.

"Yeah. Denver's interesting. I will give it that. But there's also a reason why that's a curse," she sighs. "So far, we haven't heard of your hunters yet, but likely they'd just be another straw for the camel's back." So what, don't worry about them, worry about... all the other stuff too. Right. Not exactly brilliant help here, Grace. But being all positive and uplifting about the future just isn't her thing right now. She has his same fears. Telling him to be rid of them would be hypocritical.

"And yeah, that's uh... different from friends. I don't know. I just have a hard time treating other people like they're my father, you know? Even Pan, and he's, like, a father. I don't know if I could be close to someone who's not a friend."


Kalen

"Yeah. He kind of freaked out a little when you came by. I forget he isn't...he doesn't care as much about protocol with me anymore and I didn't think to explain to you who he was and the kinds of things he did because...that's just never who he was to me.

"I was still new in the chantry and not yet a member of the Order when I met him. That's why sometimes when he isn't thinking about it he calls me Eli. He used to come up and see what I was reading in the library. Sometimes he would bring me books.

"I know he must have seemed horrible to you. But he was so patient with me. And gentle. And then he started bringing me to see Jake and sometimes I would go visit them and suddenly I had somewhere I could be on holidays and....

"I should have known better. Especially after Terrance and Pippa. I should have expected he wasn't going to do anything like what he did with me again. I'm sorry. All that did was hurt both of you."


Grace

Grace just listens, drinks long sips from her coffee, and peers at Kalen through the steam as he talks, and talks, and talks. It's like he needs to get this off his chest, and is just monologueing his way through it all. And she tries to be as blank as possible.

"You've said you're sorry for that before, you know. And I don't even slightly blame you for wanting to help me, so you can stop, okay? It's all cool," she says, then studies the boundaries of the room, eyes grazing over the form of that pink flamingo and mouth curling up ever so slightly in the process. "I don't even really blame Garrett either. I know I hurt him back."

Exactly how she managed to hurt him, she couldn't say. And that's the truly scary part. It would be one thing if she could point to some behavior, some reason why her presence made him dredge up all that pain. If she had an answer to that question, she could stop it from happening again.

"You said you had a stick?" she asks, deliberately trying to steer the conversation elsewhere. Somewhere more... festive. Or perhaps, violent. Either way.


Kalen

Kalen, who has to think in completely different ways to talk about people and how they make him feel, blinks when Grace brings up the stick. Why does she want a stick?

Piñata!

"Yes. I will go get you a stick." He sets his coffee down, rises carefully, and then walks toward where the firing range is. He returns with a staff and a silk scarf, both of which he holds out to Grace.


Grace

It's a relief to have that dark spot of a conversation ended, and Grace's eyes light up when she sees Kalen return with a stick (which is actually a quite substantial-looking staff) and scarf combination.

Because this is fun. Better than having to talk or think about things. Hello not giving a shit, where have you been?

She hops up and does this unbalanced dance with her coffee cup, trying to drink and stand and not spill all at once. The coffee gets placed on the table, and she grabs at the scarf first, tying it around her head while walking over to where the poor flamingo is suspended from the ceiling. "Okay, now... stick!" she says, and gropes around in the air until she finds it.

Once found, she spins around with the staff in hand, to get the other prerequisite of 'dizzy' satisfied. When she makes the first trial 'where is the piñata' swooshes of the staff, though... she must be cheating. Peeking, maybe. It finds its mark, wobbly though she is. The pink thing makes a little hollow clunk. "Hey-y, gotcha!"

And then, it's time for a real swing. She winds up, and does this overhead slam that she's sure is going to strike... well, something. As she said, it's the point of piñataing to watch people be woefully inadequate at staff work.


Kalen

There is a muffled choking noise, followed by, "...Kit. I am not sure what is customary, but is it permissible to laugh while people are flailing at a piñata with your staff like a drunken four-year-old?"


Grace

"It."

The staff strikes air, making a whooshing noise (because she is trying, and isn't actually peeking).

"Totally."

The piñata veers in spinning circles and pendulous swings as Grace wings a foot of the thing, making further hits somewhat less likely.

"Is."

She winds up like the staff is a baseball bat, and does a very awkward 'to the side and up' combo, which actually manages a solid smack, as the piñata swings forward, and the staff meets it in the air.

"Haha! Got it! Okay, your turn. Now you get to look like a drunken four-year-old!" she exclaims, and sets the staff's end to the floor, looking quite proud at the successful flamingo hunt, as it makes chaotic motions overhead, dangling from its string.


Kalen

Kalen does laugh, because Grace looks ridiculous and because he'll look ridiculous and because eventually candy will come spilling out of a slain piñata and there is just nothing else to do.

He takes the scarf and staff and moves to the piñata. He studies it for a few seconds as it swings more and more slowly. Then he puts on the scarf like a blindfold and spins in a few circles. It it unlikely he is terribly dizzy, but it also unlikely he can spin that fast.

He does not peek. He knows the height of the thing. It's probable distance from him. And so locating the proper direction is a matter of a few easy arcs of the staff. Once he taps it he whirls the staff in one hand, strikes and misses, then strikes and hits. There is a solid sound of impact and a light cracking, but the piñata does not yet give way.

He slips the blindfold off and grins at Grace like this is the best thing ever.

"We need to get more of these. It will be great!"

And he holds out the scarf and staff to her again.


Grace

Sometimes, Kalen displays some of what must have been some elegant physical prowess, before a building fell on him that is. Even blindfolded and limping, he whirls a staff like he knows very well how. Even if he hits air.

Now it's Grace's turn to laugh (and stay a good distance away, because blindfolded staff-swinging people, no matter how good they are, can be dangerous). "Just imagine it's really a vampire flamingo!"

Then, he gets his good solid crack in, and good for him. Now he has the full piñata experience. Grace puts on a fake-unamused face, and gives him a haughty golf-clap. "Good show, sir, good show."

She walks up again, takes the blindfold back, and the staff. She twirls around, grinning, staff held aloft. This time, she makes sure to get really, really dizzy.  Who knows how many times that staff has been used in battle, perhaps? But now it has another purpose. She tries giving it a one-handed whirl like Kalen did, and it slips out of her hand and clatters to the floor.

So now, she's blinded, giggling on the floor, feeling around for the staff again, and wobbling a bit on unsteady feet.


Kalen

Kalen has faced no few enemies. He has not done so with a staff, but there may yet come a day. The whirling and striking looks impressive enough, but Kalen prefers guns. Grace has not seen him handle a gun yet.

Her advice about considering it a vampire flamingo gets a laugh. As does the golf-clap and the faux-formal congratulations. And the ensuing craziness with the attempt to twirl the staff.

"If it makes you feel any better, Kit, my first attempt to do that was about that terrible and I wasn't dizzy and had instruction."


Grace

Upon finding the staff, she stands back up, and points the staff at the general direction of Kalen's voice. "Now you stop laughing," she says, with fake gruffness. "This is serious business."

She stumbles a bit trying to find the piñata again, and is pointed in the entirely wrong direction when she starts prodding at the air with the staff. Is it here? No. Here? No.

But then, this is the point of the thing -- to look ridiculous and make fun, because there is nothing better to make.

Eventually, she finds it, by then somewhat recovered from the dizzy spin. And this time, when she gives it a good solid whack, it splits open. In its death throes, it flings its mixed candy on Grace's head, and all over Kalen's warehouse. Chances are, he'll be finding candy under the couch or under a rug or in the corners for a while.

At the first drops of candy rain, Grace lets loose a whoop of success. "It's okay Kalen. I slew the beast. You can relax now," she says, and while her face is bright, it does bring certain things to mind -- that there are beasts out there that need slaying, that no one can truly relax until it is done.

It's not like 'Thakky' is going to spew candy when they're victorious over the thing either. Probably. For all she knows, demons are made of Jolly Ranchers. But probably not.


Kalen

Kalen laughs at Grace searching and whoops when Grace smashes the piñata. It is not quite the kind of sound one would generally expect, all joyous and spontaneous and not at all quiet. Piñatas, he has already decided, are going up in the chantry. They can have a delightful time knocking them down.

He doesn't seem concerned about the amount of candy on his floor. And it's Kalen, so this is expensive oddly-flavored gourmet candy. No boring things like cherry or grape - persimmon and mango and pomegranate and blackberry and pear. Single handmade truffles in tiny boxes.

Kalen settles back onto the couch and fixes more coffee, watching Grace. He doesn't seem interested in scrambling for candy, but he does seem interested in Grace's reaction to candy everywhere. There are still neatly wrapped presents, the top one sporting an elaborate ribbon bow, but he doesn't call her attention back. He is in no rush.


Grace

The scarf she pulls off her head is silk, and the staff she lays on the table is no broom handle. It shouldn't be a surprise then, that the pink flamingo was full of gourmet candies. "Oh wow, Kalen, you do not do anything halfway, do you?" she asks, picking up one of the little boxes. It's blackberry and dark chocolate and sinful, you know. Grace has never been one for decadence really, or things without purpose.

She has to be careful not to step on any of the truffles as she makes her way back to the chairs. A few of them, where it's easy to do so, she picks up and takes with her. Perhaps when they're done here, she'll gather them all up to save Kalen having to do it with his broken body. Not that she thinks he can't, just... it's a courtesy. But for right now, she flops herself into a chair, spills her haul out on the table, unwraps that blackberry chocolate and pops it in her mouth.

It tastes like joy feels -- something she hasn't let herself touch in so long.

"S'good stuff," she mumbles, with her mouth full.


Kalen

Kalen laughs at her, and the warm relaxed sound carries into hugs spoken tone, rendering it practically a purr. "We don't live forever, any of us, and my House especially. Why do anything halfway under such conditions, Kit?"

He may not do things without purpose, but he had that early training with an Ecstatic and a Euthanatos before the joined the Order. The lines between what he learned from all of them blur into something fuzzier. Fluid.  Whole.  Joy is a purpose. Pleasure is a purpose. Life is a sacred gift. Protecting it is a sacred duty. Even when you kill to do it. Especially when you kill to do it. Blackberries are fucking amazing. None of this is complicated or contradictory to him. He knows nothing of how light acts as both a particle and a wave, but he already understands how one's existence can comprise such seemingly different things as part of a unified whole.

"You never did answer my question about the mangoes," he says, like taking an abrupt sidetracking back to the first conversation they ever had is totally something everyone does at random.


Grace

"Mangoes? Well, they're like peaches and cherries and blackberries and black pepper and almonds," she says, with a smirk, remembering this conversation well. "They're drupes. Mangoes have got a stone in the middle." She doesn't even have to check that one on Wikipedia. Maybe in her random musings, she's been memorizing fruit types. It wouldn't be the strangest of things locked up in her memory.

She takes up another box, another dark and sinful-looking thing. "This one's pomegranate. Persephone's bane," she says while unpacking the box. "One of your kittens is called Pomegranate, right?"

So far we have biology nomenclature, mythology, and kittens if you're keeping count.


Kalen

"Shoshannah's kitten, yes. I do believe she is named for that very legend. Mine is Persimmon. Which is, I think, a different classification of fruit entirely. They both stay at the house." Kalen curls up a little with his coffee. "I thought mangoes were drupes."


Grace

Grace munches on the pomegranate truffle, and gulps down her carameled coffee, her eyes tracing the room again, until they land on the present with the big bow. "Well, you were right," she says, absently. "You know, Kalen, you're going to make me feel bad buying me all this stuff. I can't exactly... reciprocate, you know?"

But then, she thinks about how that might sound. You bought me a present, and I hate you for it, grr! Not exactly.

"What's the big one?" she asks, flicking her gaze over to him with a smile.


Kalen

"It gives me something to do. I used to train, but...." He leaves his coffee beside him on the couch for a few seconds and spreads his hands, then picks it back up and takes a sip. "And buying things for me wouldn't make any sense. I don't know who I am in Denver yet. Maybe who I am first in Denver. Not sure how long I'm staying yet.

"The big one is...definitely not a puppy. It would have chewed through the box by now. Open it and see."

[But what's in the box? Assorted boxes contain: an antique pen and pencil set in a case, a frighteningly comprehensive assortment of fountain pen ink, some graph paper notebooks with thick ridiculously touchable paper, a large leatherbound book (like the size of an encyclopedia) and a smaller one (like a journal size). You know, exactly what someone would get for Grace.]


Grace

"You don't know who you are in Denver yet?" she asks, giving him the side-eye. "You are who you are, I thought. You may have different identities perhaps, but they're not who you are."

She walks up to the packages and hefts the big one up. It's heavier than expected, and she looks a bit confused. Maybe she was thinking stuffed animals? In any case, she sits down with it, and carefully unwraps the paper and then gets into the box, and pulls out the huge book. At first, she's thinking he got her a tome to study or something, but opening it just reveals thick, blank, eggshell-white paper. She's meant to fill this with her own words.

Sometime during the unwrapping of all those boxes, she gives Kalen a sheepish look. "You know, my handwriting is atrocious. I'm too used to doing all my writing on the computer." She says that, but she also happily runs everything through her fingers, flips through the books, and oohs and ahs over the antique pen and pencil. Next semester, if there is to be a next semester, she will be taking notes and drawing diagrams in luxurious style. Perhaps that huge leather encyclopedia will one day boast graph and tree diagrams, visualizations of algorithms, and graphical interface sketches. Or maybe barely-legible stories. Or both.

"None of these are puppies," she says and grins at him. "Thanks."

Grace has an idea of who Kalen is. Who he really is. Even if he hasn't figured that one out on his own yet. It's just so hard to be him because it hurts too much. She understands. Today is the first day she's allowed herself to feel truly happy again, just because having happiness ripped away from you hurts. You don't want to experience that again, so you deny joy's return. Like having people ripped away from you time and time again, making you avoid becoming close again. Which makes her wonder... why her? Why is he so truthful when it comes to her? There's questions in her eyes as she packs away the wrapping paper into compact folds, this tied with ribbon. Easy to toss. Or save for more present-wrapping. Never let it be said that Grace is wasteful.


Kalen

"The Order...we take Names, which you have no doubt surmised. But we also have Words. Most of my House have Words like Blazing and Conflagration and Overwhelming and Triumph. I know-I know, you're already bored now. But you should know that for the context here.

"Mine is Metamorphosis. My Avatar is a thing constantly shedding masks and with no real face ever visible." He smiles, his expression caught somewhere between excitement and reassurance. "I do sort of become different people, Kit. There are common threads but I'm not...I don't keep identities or personalities or much of anything at all for very long."


Grace

"My Name's Chimeric One," she says, while flipping through a blank book as though she were reading its pages. "Sometimes Una. Or L. Marshall. Or Kit," she says, with a smirk. "Someone else came up with that last one. I don't know what my Word is."

She seems a bit distant, reading her blank pages. "Gadfly told me about Avatars somewhat, but he didn't have much to say. He'd never seen his. Neither have I. I wouldn't have the first clue. Do you really think you don't have a face under your masks? Do you think you are your Avatar?"


Kalen

"We are our Avatars and aren't our Avatars. It's...I don't know, like the Holy Trinity? You have a God and Jesus and the Holy Ghost and they are three different things and one thing at the same time.

"I think...I don't know what I think. There are things about me that don't change, but I've always found it so easy to slip into being other people. For a few minutes or a few hours or a few years. I learn different things because I see things differently. I have to, to respond as someone else would without hesitation.

"I believe only the Order mandates that tradition, but if you would like to take a Word I see no reason you could not. I know you keep computers, but I think there is something to having paper and pens and colors to chose from. There are books full of notes and accounts in most Hermetic libraries. You can read so much of who we are in how we approach magic and reality. I thought it might help you to have something to keep your notes in that was more...tangible."


Grace

She laughs at that last one, really laughs, as though Kalen is in on the joke even. "Silly. You think this is tangible? That it isn't really just as made of ones and zeros as the files on my computer?" she says, lifting the heavy book.

"Just takes a wee bit of translation from this to straight data. Although, in its present state, I could compress this quite a lot..." Again, she laughs, to her own little joke.

"You know, when I have time, I was going to go the other direction. I think I told you about that idea, to take the Chantry library and digitize it? Tangible to digital, digital to tangible, when things are so transcribable, they may as well be the same thing. Like spatial dimensions."

She goes off into tangents of her own personal reality and her approach to it. It's easier than talking about Avatars that she has never seen, or who Kalen truly is. Changeable, without a face underneath the façade. Or so he thinks. Or doesn't know what to think. He hints that someday he will change into someone else and leave. All Grace could say to that is that she will miss him when the wind changes. All they have is right now, but that's the case anyway. It all blows away in the end.


Kalen

Kalen laughs too, because he does follow that. Hell, sometimes he argues that. "All that aside, it seems more tangible. Don't tell me perception isn't everything sometimes."

"You want to transcribe all the books in the library?" He raises a curious eyebrow. "How?" He assumes she is not going to say by typing them all up in a database. Or letterpress. Which is a shame because letterpress is as gorgeous as it is laborious. Still, he isn't sure they know anyone who could make proper woodcuts for illustrations.


Grace

"Perception is in the eye of the perceiver," she snarks back. More chocolate. Must have another of those joyous sinful things. It's the kind of thing Grace would never buy for herself -- she'd probably take one look at the price tag and declare it anathema. One could buy a small computer for that, etc. etc. But she's not in charge of buying it, and it's easy to forget the source of candy for now. It just exploded out of a flamingo.

So, she's chewing on a pear truffle when she answers him next. "There's these setups you can build, with open-source blueprints. Get a couple cameras, a frame to hold the books, it's pretty neat. Still rather manual. Someone's going to have to turn pages and push the button until they're sick of it. But then, once the pages are in digital form, I can do so much with it. Strip the text out of the images, you know, do all kinds of fun things. I can make data dance for me."

She may have a lot of confidence in her skills, but it's not overconfidence. Kalen knows. He's seen how she is with a computer.

"Anyway, the real benefit to such a thing would be that people would be able to say, upload their personal notes, their personal libraries, and still take the books home with them at the end of the day. We could expand the library, share all our knowledge. You know, make it networked."

She starts laughing, again, this time at herself, at how grandiose she's getting. She stands up, and raises a fist in the air, with fake dramatics. "I want the library to transcend its earthly form, to shed the weary chains of the material, and be... free!"

It's a kind of 'ha ha, only serious' moment.


Kalen

"I imagine," Kalen says slowly, suppressed laughter turning his voice into something rich and warm, "Little winged books flying about the library and pressing themselves wistfully against the glass when you say things like that. Perhaps with those little whining noises puppies make." One day, Grace will get to see him kill, and then the distance between this moment and his eyes cold instead of just distant is going to strike her. But so far, all she sees are little indications of his training.

"I have time. I can help you scan books. And build things, if you think someone with all the mechanical knowledge of a five-year-old can help you with that. It sounds like a brilliant idea. Would you set up something like Ginger, but for chantries? So that we could share books that way? I mean...you would only want some magical knowledge to be so free, yes?"


Grace

There are times when Kalen says things that are so damn awesome. Even though he claims the computer knowledge of a womp rat, he has a tendency to think in 'those' ways, which makes Grace feel there is hope for the Hermetic yet. Yeah, something like Ginger but for Chantries. Hell yes. Let's do that.

"Well, I have enough mechanical knowledge to follow a blueprint, and you can just hammer where I say to hammer or something. It'll be great! And if anybody asks what we're doing, we can say we're making winged book-puppies!

"I do like the way you're thinking with the Ginger-for-Chantries thing. But why would you only want some magical knowledge to be free? I suppose everybody can decide for themselves what they want to share, but I opt for as open as possible."


Kalen

Kalen sighs and stays quiet for a few seconds before he answers Grace. Interested in open cooperation or not, Kalen still comes from an Order that sees fit to limit access to knowledge and shuns transparency to the point that they have their own internal branch dedicated to justice.

"Some knowledge is dangerous. There are things that can become of us, terrible things." His lips press together. "You remember when Garrett was talking about having had to kill his wife? When we Fall, it is often those who most loved us who hunt us down. If we haven't destroyed them already.

"To anyone without proper training and understanding, curiosity can be dangerous. Even those with some comprehension of the dangers in the study of some particular types of magic still Fall. Having those rites at your fingertips is...you have to understand how difficult it is not to use them, just once, with good reason. But from there, very often, there is no turning back.

"And while I would share most information freely with chantries, there is the matter of Sleepers to consider. Trying to sneak a little more magic into the world is one thing, but there are things it is much safer not to share.

"Trust me, I wish that we could just share ourselves with the world. For now though, I think we should limit our sharing to other chantries. And, if we can find them, independent Magi. There are some out there."


Grace

She sits back down, and curls up a bit when Kalen goes on the latest track of conversation. It's not as happy. When he talks about Garrett having to kill his wife, she looks away.

"Well, okay, I get why you wouldn't want to have a copy of L'Ultimo Giorno on the Magical Netflix or something, but do they really keep shit like that around... just... Wait yes, of course they do," she says, and facepalms. "It was in a vault at a Chantry, wasn't it? And then when it got stolen and carted halfway across the world, they proceeded to be extremely tight-lipped about what all went down because... reasons.

"There's times when people could learn to be more free with their information, I guess is my point. Also times when they could be more careful to whom they hand the keys to the vault. I do understand that. Also, we have to hide from the Technocracy and shit, so we can't be too open. There's no sleepers who know about Ginger, I'm not that naive. As open as possible. Within reason."


Kalen

Kalen nods. "As open as possible within reason is exactly what I was hoping for. I know you feel really strongly about...putting restrictions on people. I don't want to go through some horrible vetting process or censor things or anything like that. I just want us to be careful."


Grace

"Oh, the application form will have to be suitably onerous. Must be filled out in pen, in triplicate. Preferably with one of these things," she points at one of the expensive-looking fountain pen boxes, "using gold ink, of course. You know, I had a pen once that wrote in gold ink. Really crappy for taking notes with because you can't see it. Anyway, yeah. And you only get text, no pictures, because sometimes the pictures are dirty," she says, and makes the face of a scandalized church lady.

"I suppose if we're going that route, we'll need a few things. Share the blueprints for making a book scanner, then leave it up to everyone else what they want to donate. With the caveat of please no books which house viral meme demons or something. How would you stop that, anyway? I'm all for making a safe system if we can manage it. Trouble is, I feel kind of like a new kid setting up a service that has 'please hack me' written all over it because I don't know what the heck I'm doing." Grace sighs, looks up at the ceiling in her way of gazing into the distance. "If I actually knew any others of the technomantic persuasion, I would open-source this idea and then we could really make it secure. But I don't."

"Maybe we beta test it locally. I think I can trust everybody here not to be malicious assclowns."


Kalen

"I have never had to do such a thing," Kalen says, eyes scanning over the flood of candies as he thinks for a moment. "Knowledge and words have considerable power. In Egypt they used mutilate or draw snakes in hieroglyphs as already dead to neutralize the threat they could pose. Removing all instances of the name of the dead would prevent them from reading funerary rites. So...assuming you could erase the Name of a thing, you could Unmake it. Or you could mutilate all the words about its power, perhaps.

"Oh...were you even seriously asking that question?" He smiles a little, not exactly apologetic or self-conscious, because he doesn't think that would merit an apology regardless and he isn't really self-conscious at all around Grace.

"Most books can be safely copied, and sharing them between chantries should pose no issue. I assume you can set up something similar to Ginger so only the people who should have access have access." His eyes light up, and then he looks right at her with huge dramatic puppy eyes. "Can-you-make-us-a-self-aware-virtual-librarian?"


Grace

Grace practically cackles in glee at Kalen's dramatic puppy act. "I can make us a virtual librarian. It'll have to learn its own self-awareness though. I'm not that good. Maybe... a guy this time. A companion piece to Ginger? Sexy robot voice is not optional, of course. Also, I can't believe you just said that! You're really excited about this virtual librarian thing, you... want to help?"

The Hermetic and the nascent Virutal Adept bleed into each other sometimes, it seems. Grace shares her love of things with robot voices, and Kalen shares his optimism and wish to save the world. And expensive pen and ink sets. He may be of an Order whose members she has abysmally low rate of success with, but then he goes and posits library networks with virtual librarians, and Grace can't help but get along with this Hermetic. He's too damn fun.

"But like, you don't have to tell me, the writer, that knowledge and words have power. It's just, sometimes, a picture of a snake is just a picture of a snake. Other times, yeah, a picture of a snake contains a virus that will bite you. The solution is not to destroy all pictures of snakes, the solution is to sanitize your inputs."

Grace looks over at Kalen with a sheepish grin. He probably doesn't know what sanitization of input means. "Which, is a thing where you basically treat all input, in our case books, as though it could be trying to hack your system, and never ever give it the opportunity to run code.

"Only problem? I know what I have to do, but not how. Haven't quite figured out the magical equivalent of netsec," her eyes flit around. "Yet."

"Sharing them between chantries should pose no issue, but it kind of does if I can't make it secure. I mean, look at what happened in Vienna. I'm not saying I don't trust people, but... Well okay, I am kind of saying that, aren't I..."


Kalen

"Right." Kalen sighs. "Let's figure out the local version first, I guess. We can work on the rest of it as we go. I suppose our worst case scenario could be creating a place to access information that isn't actually uploaded anywhere like Ginger. As a worst case scenario, it isn't terrible. Hell, we could use the office building at the warehouse if we needed more space. Or the warehouse. Whatever."

He finishes his coffee and sets the mug down. "What would we need to start? At a minimum?"


Grace

"Are you saying, you want to take this place," she says, and waves arms around at the warehouse, "and make it into a data center?" Honestly, you couldn't wipe the smile off of Grace's face if you tried. Well, okay, you could, but how horrible a crime that would be!

And then, he asks her what they'd need to start. So, he's planning on buying toys. Oh dear.

"We'd need a trip to the hardware store, and a couple of cameras for the book digitizer-o-matic. For storage and data access, we'll need a server and a decent high-speed connection. And, you know... build for expansion. In the future, we can branch out to other chantries, and really share knowledge... Oh, I'm so excited! This is going to work!" And she'll get new toys!

"Oh yeah, and a voice model for the librarian."


Kalen

"Well, there are entire rooms we could use. And it would be nice to do something with that other building. We probably shouldn't do anything serious there as far as scanning until I set up more serious security measures, but for building and archiving non-security risk books there isn't any reason we can't use it now.

"Mmmmmmm...I think it would be way too weird if the voice sounded like me. But...how much of a vocal sample do you need? I bet we could find someone.

"If you make me a list of supplies, I will pick them up and bring them here. Servers...you can write down model numbers or part numbers, yes?" He laughs. "Are we going to have to climate control a computer room like we are growing orchids or storing wine?"


Grace

"I was going to scan the things at the chantry. Easier to cart data than it is to cart books to here and scan them. Plus, the chantry has security measures already. But yeah... hmm. It depends on how extreme a setup you're thinking of, how climate-controlled we have to get. You did say, you know, 'at minimum'. At minimum, we'll need one server. At minimum, it could run fine in a room that stays cool-ish, so maybe air conditioning for the summer? It might be nice to have a backup, though. So, okay, two.

At the other end of the scale, we've got multiple servers, in blade configurations set up in racks, they're up off the ground for flood protection, they're in a sealed room with filtered air, and air conditioning for cooling and humidity control, with a monitor to keep either measure from fluctuating too much... It can get pretty extreme.

Truthfully, though, we don't need that if all we're doing is scanning books. I could fit our entire library on one hard drive without a sweat. Pictures and all."

She leans her head on the side of her arm, quirks up a smile. "Why am I being so honest with you? I could probably tell you that we definitely, at minimum, need a pit full of colorful plastic balls, and you'd probably get us one."

"Hmm.. Maybe Hawksley would like to be the voice of a library. I'll ask."


Kalen

"I have yet to meet Hawksley," Kalen murmurs, though he sounds amused more than anything. "He seems entertaining enough, at least."

"Let's plan to have complicated things eventually, so we'll get the number of computers we need but set up a room that could get more interesting. That way, we won't have to move anything later if we need all the insane climate control settings."  He regards her in a way that suggests he is trying not to smile (and not even really trying because Grace has seen Kalen not expressing emotion enough times to know his expression is rarely not exactly what he intends it to be).

"Do you think we should install the ballpit in the conference room? Because we could also use part of the garage...."


Grace

"We definitely need a ball pit it in the conference room. That way, when we have a conference, everybody's nice and comfy. And if the person speaking is bad, we can throw plastic balls at them," Grace says, and she's not disguising her own smile.

"I love the way you're thinking. Plan for expansion. And ball pits. And winged book puppies."

Ahh yes, she is stuck on the thought of books as whining flying things. She leans back in her seat, throwing her arms behind her head and smiling in no particular direction. "I'll get you a list."

And then, she lets loose an extended little noise. It sounds like someone holding down the 'e' key on their keyboard in an expression of barely-contained excitement.

They're going to build a computer lab. With AI librarians and ball pits (although that last one is probably a joke). And it will be awesome. The Awesome Lab, that's what they can call it. And and and...

It's almost enough to wipe away the vileness she's faced, and what she'll have to continue facing, this. She's trying, though, to look to the good things.


Kalen

Kalen watches Grace with growing amusement until she makes that gleeful eeeeee noise. And then he laughs, low and quiet and entirely unstaged. "Good. I like lists. At least when I have no idea what I'm buying.

"What color would you like your awesome mad scientist lab to be?" He might have been joking about the ball pit, but he is not so much joking now.


Grace

"Color?" Well, now that's a question. Grace doesn't usually think in terms of picking out color schemes. Kalen has seen her apartment, with its non-painted walls and mismatched everything. And maybe that's why he's asking, to see if she does actually have some sort of fashion that she has yet to express.

"Um... Does it matter? I don't know... Blue?"


Kalen

"Blue." Kalen says once, as if to confirm. And then his eyes flash for a second and he smiles a little. "I can do blue."

He grins. "Okay. Write me a list and we'll get started."

Christmas at Sera's

Serafi­ne
The hosted at 719 Corona Street in Capitol Hill has been going on for the better part of three days and people have come and people have gone and alcohol has been consumed and replenished.  Some people have been here and home three nights in a row and a few stalwarts have merely been here, crashing in odd atriums and guest rooms, oversized reading chairs and one might imagine that an endless party would begin to tail off, to shift and change and go strange and wrong but one that begins at Christmas and ends sometime after New Year's with interval flares of Boxing Day and Someone Brought Us Mead day and Who Is that Person in My Bed Day He's Pretty Cute But I Don't Remember Him is materially different from the desperate-to-hold-on-to-the-weekend bullshit that happens at frat houses Sundays after a three-day binge when hey, everything starts to fall apart and you remember you have to go back to the real world.
This is Sera's real world.
So it is hard to say what day it is or night it is or how much booze and pot and molly and yes even cocaine have been consumed on premises in the last ever-how-long but still somehow the house looks great, festooned in Christmas lights strung along its solid bones, wound through its shrubbery, evergreens on the iron gates.   The front door is unlocked and there's always someone coming in and going out, a warm blast of sound that varies with the day and hour but includes the peculiarly lovely din of a half-dozen conversations carried out in various stages of inebriation.  Sera has essentially hired a cabbie to be on-call for exiting guests so there won't be any driving to go along with the drinking which also means it is hard to get a parking place anywhere close, what with all the vehicles people will have to retrieve once their hangovers let up.
There are fires in every hearth and lights in every room and a changing buffet of goodies set up in the dining room and kitchen and a changing array of drinks at the bar and a changing array of art: on the walls and stacked against the floorboards, stuffed haphazardly on the elegant old shelves, tucked into every niche and nook and cranny.  Pictures of Amelia Earhart framed in black and white on the landing leading upstairs and a spiderplant tumbling a solid dozen baby spiderplants down toward the runner on the stairs.
Sera's resonance is everywhere in this place.  It belongs to her as thoroughly and wholly as the rectory once belonged to plan.  Dee's place but Dee is Sera's, don't you know?  Strongest in the kitchen, though.  That's where he guests will find her just now if they go looking.  Though they may want to avail themselves of the many pleasures of the house first.  Pick out one of the wrapped gifts from beneath the Christmas tree in the living room.  Argue with three hipster dudes about which Arcade Fire album was the best, and whether they've sold out.  Kiss the drunk boy lingering beneath the mistletoe, waiting for magic to strike a seventeenth time.  The usual.

Grace
[Nightmares!]
Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (2, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

Grace
The word 'Christmas' strikes up a ton of negative connotations in Grace's brain. It's less like people are celebrating a holy day, and more like they are worshiping at the altar of Wal-Mart. Hell, with the tramplings that happen every year, there's even human sacrifice to go along with. A regular feast-day of Mamon.
So maybe that's why the holly and the Christmas lights and yes, even the tree and mistletoe (though they were borrowed from older traditions long enough ago that nobody minds) grate against her.
The word 'Party' strikes up a few negative connotations as well. All those people, a crowd of them? Likely, when we're talking Sera. The woman seems to thrive on people, where Grace does not.
But that would be why she's here, right? To not shy away from people, and learn to be in public again without looking around constantly wondering where the next threat's going to be. Also, because it's Sera's party. And that makes everything cool.
Even Christmas.
So, she's at the door, ringing the bell as though she has to (chances are that this is not the case, but you know...) dressed in jeans and the ubiquitous grey turtleneck that's become her winter attire... nearly every day. On top of that is a black peacoat, but it's open to the chill air.

Pan
On any other day this wouldn't be the priest's scene but when Sera came by their shooting lesson several days ago he'd promised he would at least make an appearance. Grace might have said the same thing. They take his truck from the Chantry up to the city. He doesn't drive like someone who isn't comfortable driving in cities but he also has faith in something other than fate.
They would have gotten here half an hour ago but someone ended up waiting for the other person and the other person thought she was waiting for someone and it was just a big misunderstanding. Misunderstandings are usually pretty entertaining in hindsight.
But they make it. It's a Christmas miracle.
Pan has a good-sized rectangular box wrapped in plain brown paper tucked football-like in the crook of his arm when they come in the front door. It jingles. Glass. He comes up the sidewalk behind her and just opens it before anyone can come answer the doorbell.
In they go. The party can start now.

Serafi­ne
Someone is coming to answer the door but it's not Sera and it's not any of her housemates.  It's the boy who has been hanging out beneath the mistletoe.  He has a handmade mug of something in hand and neither Grace nor Pan are likely to get close enough to catch even a whiff of the contents but it is probably alcohol.  Of some sort.
Inside, warmth everywhere.  Coats piled on coats in the foyer, so Grace and Pan can shed their winter coats or keep them tucked over their respective arms, if they prefer.  Grace has been here before and Pan as at least seen the front porch, Sera stumbling up the steps in the arms of her housemates and consor and it is rather as Grace remembers it, an old family home full of solid furnishings and a handful of genuine antiques, with the lives of a handful of artsy twenty-something layered over that history like a layer of tulle over a repurposed party dress.  Books and knicks and knacks and treasures and taunts in every corner.  Downstairs a living room and a front parlor and a formal dining room with a fire layed in each and some sort of Christmas, New Year's, or Yule decoration scheme that varies between "straight out of that twee boutique in Cherry Cheek" and pretty near authentic midcentury modern, authentic enough that you can almost hear the Vince Guaraldi soundtrack to Charlie Brown's Christmas.
Wait, you can hear that from the front parlor, though deeper in the house the vibe is a little less holidy and a little more indie and the music permeates the air, interspaced with the sparkling sounds of conversation. Grace knows to follow the hallway straight through to the kitchen, which is white and bright and big and modern, redone sometime in the past ten years, with wide windows overlooking the winterquiet backyard.
Fewer people here and really fewer people than they might've found at three a.m. last night anywhere but Pan and Grace aren't exactly three a.m. people, are they?
--
They find Sera in the kitchen, sitting up on the granite breakfast bar, legs swinging a cup of something in hand, and it must be warm from the way she holds it, and the scent in the air is cinnamon and ginger, vanilla and figs, is marijuana and rumchata and the spike of cloves.  Is the close, humid scent of strangers' bodies and on and on and on.
She's smiling for them, Sera, before they have turned the corner into the kitchen and her eyes are on the door and her hands are cupped around her mug and she's dressed in the most ridiculous get-up imaginable.  A skintight green velvet dress belted by a wide black patent leather belt.  The bodice is laced all the way down to the navel and would show the most delicious cleavage if Sera were especially well-endowed.  As it is she has paired it with a black-leather push-up bra so they are still treated to a view of the most delicious cleavage, the spikes and rivets of the bra counterpoint to the velvet dress - whose cuffs and collars are trimmed in a heavenly soft white rabbit fur.
Oh, smiling Sera opens up her arms (and, honestly, her legs) when she spots them, Pan looming above Grace.
She wants a hug.
Of course she does.

Grace
[Perception + Awareness!]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 7, 7, 9) ( success x 3 )

Grace
Grace slides her way in, sliding around that guy with the mug who looks a bit leery and more than a bit drunken. But still, she's got this smile plastered on her face at... well, at everybody. "She's really done up the place, huh?" Grace says to Pan. In all likelyhood, Sera had little to do with it, and the decorations just happened. But, you know, it's Sera's place.
She leads the priest into the kitchen, where the press of Sera's raw resonance is strongest. Along the way, she smiles at those she passes, though it's an empty thing. She smiles only because smiling is expected at a party, you see, and she knows none of these people.
But when she enters the kitchen, that smile becomes genuine, it finally manages to reach her eyes. It's not in appreciation for what she's wearing, but for who Sera is. And, because it is Sera, Grace marches up, and steps into her arms, giving her that same, stiff, awkward hug she got the last time, complete with robotic pats on the back. Hugs aren't Grace's thing, but she does at least try.

Pan
At least one of them is smiling. The priest stands nearly a foot taller than the woman leading them through the house and the only time he seems anything other than simply present is when Grace comments on the state of the place.
"Yeah," he says in the dubious tone of one who isn't quite sure what he's walked into.
It's just a little light fornication and mild overindulgence. Nothing he hasn't been exposed to before. Wasn't like he came out the womb a priest. Priests start out human and most of them die that way. Humans being flesh and all.
The kitchen is the most logical place to go if one is looking for the party's host. Irony of ironies in his life is that light doesn't do his complexion any favors. Pan looks drawn in fluorescence or caught in the sun's rays. He doesn't look tired or sick. He just looks like he's wearing all the years of his life in his skin.
Pan glances around and gives perfunctory greetings to those who are gathered around Sera. Gets that out of the way while the women hug. He doesn't go to her right away. Just stands there with his coat still on leaning against the archway.
"What'd you do?" he asks. "Lose a fight? Where's the rest of your dress?"

Serafi­ne
Sera wraps her arms around Grace and doesn't seem to notice the robotic awkwardness of the Apprentice's hug.  Slides her nose through the short riot of Grace's hair and inhales, just feeling the way the world shifts and slides beneath her as Grace comes close.  Grace receives a kiss on the temple, and Sera's breath smells like smoke and red wine and cinnamon, while Sera looks over Grace's shoulder at Pan, still in his coat, leaning against the frame of a door.
Mouth still in Grace's hair, Sera smiles and holds Pan's eyes.  There's a sort-of-sorrow threaded through the welcome, which is then eclipsed by the edge of a quiet, rather self-aware little smirk.
"The rest of my dress?" Sera tosses back, lifting her mouth at last from Grace's temple, a few locks of Grace's hair clinging to her red lipstick.  Letting Grace go.  "You're kidding, right?  It has been scientifically determined that this dress covers 78% more Sera than any of my usual outfits.  Which makes it, when you think about it, quiet nearly modest."
"You guys want a drink?  We have Italian sodas for the designated drivers."

Grace
A drink might just make the rest of this party easier to deal with. Besides, Pan's driving. "Sure," she says, stands up straighter, pulls her errant hair away from her face.
"She makes a good point, Pan. I mean, it's got sleeves," she says, smiling up at him, like 'no you are not going to win this argument'. The two women will band together, even though nearly every bit of Grace's skin is covered. You might expect her to be on Pan's side, but...
"I think it looks great."
More like, Sera here in her element looks fantastic. Not skeletal. Not nearly as sad and lonely. More like Sera. The fact that she can dress like a sexy elf and throw a party again? Superb.

Hawksley
Hawksley has not been at Sera's party for three days, five days, however long it's been.  Hawksley has been in Denver at nightclubs and libraries and one jaunt out under the stars, then Connecticut and New York and was going to spend the night in Paris but in the middle of the night he was overcome with an ennui one doesn't usually associate with the City of Lights in the middle of a festival of light.  He went somewhere warm where people don't really think or care much about Christmas, because it falls in a season where you don't really need to be reminded that the cold and the dark will end because it's never really cold even when it's very dark.  He felt better then, because it takes a special talent to feel miserable when lounging on a beach drinking something that tastes of coconut and has an umbrella in it.  Hawksley does not have that rare and special talent.  He snuck a girl away from the rest of the girls she was having a girls' vacation with and when that was over he thought that he would either leave the resort or stay for a few months, and decided on the former.
He went to London.  He is not popular in London.  He was less popular at a particular witch's doorstep, but she didn't stick him with a knife or anything, so it went better than it could have.
Hawksley is at Sera's party now, though.  He is in the United States, in Denver, and he doesn't know what day it is and isn't interested in finding out.  He shows up driven there by a tall, lean man with a neatly trimmed beard.  They are not in the 911 but a low, long, car in British racing green.  Go get Dee; this is the Jag, even if she wouldn't recognize the 1961 XK-140 as one.  Before her time.  The rearview mirrors are closer to the headlights than the windshield, the convertible top is in place instead of stored in the trunk, and more wind gets through this top but as Hawksley put it, the green is more festive.  So they drive the Jaguar.
Since it's not his usual, no one at the doorway or porch instantly recognizes the Porsche that came and went regularly, often, during Serafine's recovery.  Sera will recognize the sense of the man inside as soon as that car takes its sharklike turn into their block.  Grace and Pan might, but they aren't as familiar with that soaring, sun-drenched soul.  They have never peeled away the mortal layers of his appearance and seen something else entirely.  But that feeling of power that looks down on the world rather than inhabiting it, that invincible summer in the midst of winter -- that brings to mind the man, and the man's face looking at you like an eagle might examine... well.  Anything at all.
The car slides to a stop, and Hawksley gets out.  He is wearing white.  White jeans, white belt, white shoes.  Accents of gold here and there, sharp contrasts of cloudy grey at the edges of the belt and the stitching of his clothes.  He wears a v-necked shirt, and that is white, too.  Tailored, of course.  He gets out, coatless, and walks to the door as Collins drives elsewhere, parks somewhere, starts unloading the parcels from the trunk.
Of course when Hawksley gets to the door he just walks in.  Who wouldn't want him there, after all?

Pan
No. He is not going to win this argument. Not if the argument is that more surface area is covered than usual and she looks great. Pan smiles a more genuine smile than the one he gave Sera's friends on the way in here and then he moves in behind Grace to properly greet the Cultist.
He hasn't checked for rogue mistletoe sprigs hung up overhead but he doesn't need to look up. The perks of being tall.
Before he joins her at the counter Pan places the jangling package down on the counter. It is above freezing but he isn't wearing a hat or gloves or anything other than a black peacoat to keep out the cold. Tromping a distance through the cold gave him some color in his cheeks at least.
He hesitates while pondering the logistics of hugging a young woman whose skirt ends less than an inch past her ass. The logistics involve inwardly shrugging before embracing her.
"Happy Christmas," he tells her. "I don't know what Italian soda is but I'll take one."

Serafi­ne
This is the first party Serafíne has thrown in months.  Two and a half months.  Grace and Pan do not know this and Hawksley does though he does not know what day it is and therefore cannot take the measure of time down to the decimal point.  Most of the other people in the house - all of whom are strangers to Grace and Pan except for a handful who are Sera's housemates or more regular hangers-on - know this in varying ways, with varying levels of precision and intelligence and it is by now rather well known among a certain subset of the hipster/indie/intelligentsia of Sera's particular part of Denver that she probably went away to recover from an accidental overdose.  Or a bad trip.  Or something to do with drugs.
Now she is fine; more than fine, it seems.  Wrapped in green velvet and white rabbit fur, welcoming a constant parade of strangers to her well-decorated home and getting them drunk and stoned and beautifully fucked in really every way imaginable.
Grace is replaced by Pan and Sera hugs him too.  Firmly, her arms wrapping around his solid shoulders, her brow tipping forward to meet his.  She does not kiss him.  Not his temple, not just cheek.  Just this brief and solid communion as he the exterior chill dissipates from his skin, against hers, which is flushed and warm with drink.
"I'm glad you came." Sera murmurs to the priest when they are still close.  Her voice is quiet and a bit rough with smoke and alcohol and she's been awake for maybe two hours, presentable for less than half that, and her expression goes rather far away and her head cants as if she were listening to a signal being broadcast from the other side of the horizon, which is slowly resolving itself into something more immediate, intelligible.
"Hawksley's here."  Sera tells both Grace and Pan with a hum and a private smile as she slips down from the counter at last, landing carelessly on her high-heeled patent leather boots and saunters further into the kitchen to make them drinks.  Though she is glancing over her shoulder for the first glimpse she might have of Hawksley.  Sunlight drenching the horizon.
"Italian soda's club soda with flavored syrup.  Blood orange.  Hazelnut.  Almond fucking roca," Sera's explaining to Pan and as she gets ahead of them pair of them it is clear that her dress does not come an inch past her ass.  It does not even really quite cover her ass.  Sera does not care.
"There's gingerbread and egg-nog syrup, too - " a complete fucking stranger interjects, helpfully. Because of course there is.
"Grace, we have mulled wine, cider, mead, beer, red wine, champagne, white wine, punch. Grog.  Glog, which is like Grog except someone fucked it up and no one wants to drink it.  Any kind of mixed drink you want.  Oh, or you could do a Christmas bomb.  Celebration ale with a shot of rumchata.  Have to drink it quick though 'cos the rumchata gets all clotted and gross if you don't.
"It's delicious, though.  Fucking genius.  You gotta try it."

Grace
Delicious, fucking genius, she's gotta try it... Sounds like the choice has been made, and Grace isn't going to argue. "I'll have the Christmas bomb then. Sounds festive." Heh. Christmas bomb. Blowing up Christmas. Festive, indeed.
And she says Hawksley is here. And that must be the warm brightness filtering in. Like Pan, only... not like Pan at all. The only thing they share is the light.
She sheds her peacoat, draping it on the back of a chair at the kitchen table, which she then slips into -- it's a claiming of space. This here's mine, so shoo.

Hawksley
They know him here.  The housemates, and plenty of the hangers-on, the hipsters and hippies alike, the people who know Sera often know of Hawksley or know him.  Many, many of them know him as Davie.  He has a good word preceding him.  The first person he finds inside past the entryway is Dan, and since he isn't sure now if Dan is still with Jer and since he most likely does not care either way, he flicks his eyes at some mistletoe, winks at the lanky musician, and tells someone near the door that Collins is coming in with gifts, open the door for him like this person should know who Collins is and should be obliged to help this Collins person bring in presents.
They will be.  Hawksley is rather charming.  Also: presents.
He makes his way toward the kitchen after putting thoughts in Dan's head, reaches through a cloud of 3 people to pinch Dee, and finds the knot of Awakened energy both intimately known, briefly known, and sort of familiar.  He is smiling when Sera glances back and sees him, and when he sees her, and she's an elf and he's an angel even though neither of them are in church for this, one of the holiest of holy days.  If it's Christmas.  He is pretty sure they're past Christmas by now.
No matter.  She's an elf and he's an angel.
He comes up to her, to them, like he was invited.  Never the sort to hang on the fringes and wait to be told they have permission to exist, Hawksley.  No: he gets behind Sera and wraps his arms around her waist and very nearly lifts her up an inch or two when he squeezes her, inhaling her scent from scalp to throat, which is rather intimate and rather sensual and an odd thing to do to someone in front of other someones, but this is Sera's place and such things are permitted.  Welcomed.  Encouraged.  He looks at Pan and Grace from across a tiny shoulder clad in bright green.
"Happy Christmas," he tells Grace first, since he's met her more times.  He looks at Pan, too, smiling, because last he knew this guy was like half-dead or something and he knows the man is powerful and he knows that he matters to Sera.  "Happy Christmas."  One for each.  None for Sera.  Poor Sera.
"I want one," he says to Sera, when Grace says she wants a Christmas bomb.  He missed the description.  No matter.

Pan
For someone who was half-dead or something a few months ago Pan looks alright. At least like he's recovering if he isn't all the way there. He's quite a bit slimmer than he was over the summer but like all of them who went through the hassle of losing so much of it he's packing it back on. Helps that every time he walks into the Chantry kitchen someone shoves a spoon or a plate at him and tells him to try this try that eat Padre eat.
He leaves whatever he brought into the house with him on the counter and turns to watch as Hawksley comes in and swoops up Sera.
"Happy Christmas," he says.
Christmas bombs. The kids want Christmas bombs.
Pan draws the same silent Okay Fuck It conclusion about taking off his jacket as he did about hugging Sera the Elf. Underneath the peacoat he's wearing a suit. The entire thing is black which makes it hard to tell if he's just wearing his usual outfit with a suit jacket on top of it. That's kind of the point. His stupid tie is black too. He doesn't usually wear ties.
He finds a place to stash his coat that someone won't throw up on it and puts his hands into his pockets.

Serafi­ne
Grace is claiming space in the kitchen, her peacoat over the back of the chair, and consents to a Christmas bomb.  Which makes Sera smile a Sera-smile in profile over the curve of her shoulder as she continues on.  Her eyes are dark, perhaps darker, in the brightness of the white kitchen, with its sleek white cabinets and gray granite and double-oven and chef's stainless steel gas range.  While this is going on, Rick is peeling himself away from where he was lounging, shoulder against the edge of the pantry, immersed in one of those complex and very specific discussions about reverb and wax and other hipster things to come over and help Sera navigate the complex specifics of the kitchen.  Of course one of the housemates is close by,  a more genuine host than Sera.  Someone who knows where the extra paper towels and shot glasses can be found, and how to fill the dishwasher and how to make the oven work and while Sera reaching for one of the cabinets to find not glasses but triscuits and spices, Rick is opening another, pulling down the pint glasses, getting the glassware ready for the drinks.
"Pint glasses are up here," Rick is telling Sera, low-voiced, with a huff of bemusement beneath his breath because they've lived here how long and she drinks like a fish with a drinking problem and she still does not know where to find the barware except of course she doesn't know.  Someone is always there when she needs them, aren't they?
And he's there now, searching out pint-and-shot glasses for Grace's Christmas bomb and a highball for Pan's Italian soda and he doesn't ask Sera if she wants more mulled wine, just refills it from the heavy pot on the back burner of the gas stove.
Then Hawksley, behind her, wrapping his arms around her and lifting her up from the ground.  She leans back into his embrace, her shoulderblades sharp points against his chest.  Leans back into that inhale and her arms fold over his at her waist and she just - savors him.    Allows the radiant heat of his presence to soak into her elfen bones for a long moment.  Breathes him in and says nothing to him at all until he tells her that he wants one, a Christmas bomb.  "Then you'll have one."
She has to break away though.  There are drinks to be made and a bit of a bustle and cross-talk as she ascertains what sort of syrup Pan wants in his soda, and whether he wants cream, and would he prefer cider, and Rick heads off to the keg to draw three pints of the Celebration while Sera fills the shot glasses with rumchata and sets one down for Grace and one for Hawklsey and one for herself and Pan has his soda before Rick returns with the beers and they are a lovely amber, rich and deep and fragrant, and Sera is giving Grace the instruction more than Hawksley because even though he missed the description, she is one hundred and eleven percent sure that he will know what to do.
Which is: take the shot of rumchata.
Drop it glass and all into the pint of Celebration ale.
Down it all like a bastard, quick as you can.
Oh hey!  Like a good hostess, laughing, Sera will demonstrate.
The rumchata hits the beer and immediately starts fizzing and curdling and clotting but drink it fast and it smells like Christmas and is insanely, ridiculously delicious.  Leaves behind maybe a milk-like rumchata mustache, at least for someone as enthusiastic as Sera.
When she comes up for air she's swaying pleasantly into Hawksley and beaming at Pan over Grace's head and ready to swoop in if necessary to assist Grace however she can but her eyes are on Pan.  At his neck.
She's noticed something.
"Are you wearing a tie?  Is it black!  Like fucking Johnny Cash."

Hawksley
"Rick, you gentleman," Hawksley tells the housemate who does not want to fuck him, grinning.
In the front room, the door is opening and Collins is coming in, carrying parcels wrapped in white and silver with gold bows and everything is metallic and shiny and light-catching and people are very curious who all those gifts are for but they're for everyone, aren't they?  And Collins is a black-clad, expressionless, skinny Santa.  Surely there's a tree somewhere, and he goes to it, unloading gifts that really, truly are for whoever wants to open them and find the cashmere, the leather, the silver, the gold, the party favors of the privileged.  It's terribly gauche and greedy and it makes Hawksley happy.
Hawksley is happy anyway, at least right now.  He's giving a quiet noise, something like a snarl, when Sera starts to peel away from him, but it's all play: he lets go of her as easily as he lets go of most things, most people, or at least he pretends to.  He wants; he shall have.  God help the two of them, for if they really put their minds to it, they could be the most codependent, enabling people on earth.  Good thing they each have plenty of other people falling over themselves to be depended on, to enable.
He lifts his shot of rumchata to Grace, taps the glasses together, drops it into his ale, and chugs like a fucking dudebro.  Sera's faith is not misplaced.
The pint glass gets thumped down on the counter, rolls of moisture dripping down the side, and Sera sways into him and he smiles, to solid to be swayed but warm enough to sway into yes that's nice all right hello.  He sniffs Sera's hair again while she notices Pan's tie. He looks at Pan's tie too.  His eyes get wide, excited, ridiculous.
"Do you play the guitar?"

Grace
"Woo, Sera, that looks interesting," she says as Sera slides the Christmas bomb in front of her. "Thanks!"
Okay, so this thing is some deep chemistry. Grace is thinking about how it must be the acidity of the ale that makes the cream liqueur clot like that, and she just kind of wants to watch it work its way through its reactions because... Well, it's fun. But Sera downs hers fast, and says it'll turn gross if she doesn't, so...
She lifts her shot of rumchata to Hawksley in return, a little jagged smile there too, and follows their lead. The rumchata goes for a swim, and the ale turns into a chaotic mess of fizz and fuss, which she tries to drink fast.
It tastes like Christmas. Which, in this case, isn't too bad.
It's hard for her to finish the whole thing, cause Grace isn't much of the 'CHUG CHUG CHUG' kind of college student. But she manages.
"Dude," is all she says after it's gone, when the glass drops back down to the table.

Pan
Is he wearing a tie? Is it black!
Pan looks down without changing his expression like he's only just realized. Would you look at that. He did put on a tie this morning. When he looks back up at her he takes hold of the tie in his unadorned left hand and flaps it. Yes. Good. It's still there.
And then she says it's like fucking Johnny Cash and he laughs that unguarded laugh of his and lifts his eyebrows with the same careless quickness with which he'd lifted the tie.
As to whether he plays the guitar:
"Not often. When I do, people cover their ears and beg me to stop."

Serafi­ne
There is indeed a tree and beneath the tree are a handful of wrapped presents, nothing like the gleaming ones Collins brings in, full of cashmere, leather, gold.  The tree is covered in a mixture of handmade artisan ornaments and handmade family ornaments with pictures of five year olds circa 1971 framed in the belly of origami Santas and it is wrapped in a garland made of brightly colored balls of felted, organic, hand-spun, hand-dyed yarn, strung on undyed fair trade cotton, of course it is, and beneath it go the bright silver and gold boxes ferried by Collins who looks more like Charon than Santa but never-you-mind.  Once people begin to figure it out, they will begin opening.  There will be a frenzy.  It will be lovely.
Rick, called gentleman, gives Hawksley a lofted brow and an ironic smirk and another beer.  Everyone who had the Christmas bombs is so treated: to another, clean pint of the Celebration ale, which is local and draught and delicious, too.  He does it without show, slides it into their periphery and then kind of retreats, because like most mortals, perhaps more than most mortals, he can sense with a brief inhale just how little he belongs here.
Sera licks away the remnants of her rumchata mustache and takes up her mulled wine again and leans into/against Hawksley and watches Grace go.  Beams, this solid, gleaming smile as Grace downs that drink and the smile deepens and Sera leans forward, drapes both hands over Grace's shoulders and bends down to give the crown of Grace's head a solid little kiss, like a saint's blessing.  Pulls back and tells Grace, quietly - "You're so gorgeous.  That was awesome."
Then lofts her gaze up over the crown of Grace's head, back to Pan.  Pan, laughing in front of her.  Hawksley solid against her spine.
"I'll teach you," says the sexy elf to the priest.  "If you let me do it with something more interesting than Kumbaya."

Hawksley
Hawksley did reasonably well at college before he was cordially asked not to return.  He does very well at parties, though.  He has no spouse, no significant other, no parents, no children, no pets, no plants to worry about.  Whatever he has, Collins takes care of.  If he misses an appointment early one morning it is rescheduled for him.  If he runs out of food, more is purchased.  He does not get arrested and he does not fret his pretty head about the things that obsess the daily lives of people who are less privileged.  He could not be able to comprehend a vow of poverty.  He does not really grasp the sort of life that many of Pan's former-current flock have to face.
He wants.  So he shall have.  That is what he knows, and that is the reality that in part defines his use of the power to adjust the universe.  Many magi fret themselves away from hubris.  Hawksley is not one.  He does not ask himself if he dares disturb the universe.  He just disturbs it.
And chugs his goddamn beer like pro in celebration of himself.
--
His little face just lights up.  Those sky-colored eyes, sharp and piercing and predatory at their darkest, ethereal and alien at their prettiest.  Pan looks like a Latino Johnny Cash and plays the guitar.  He is very excited.
"You have to play," he says instantly, even as Pan is saying that people cover their ears.  He is reaching for the glass of beer like he knows it's going to be there, and it is, cold and sliding into his hand without his eyes ever going to Rick.  Rick probably thinks to himself sometimes that Hawksley is an asshole.  Rick probably also feels the same way so many people do around him: that they are lucky to serve, lucky to be near, lucky to be allowed in the corona of his billion-year burning, the eons that he is enthroned in the heavens.
Or if not, at least this is how Hawksley thinks, in part, of people like Rick.
He takes a drink while Sera wipes her mouth, his palm sliding over her belly as she leans away from him, towards Grace.  He flicks his eyes at them, the blessing kiss, then back to Pan, pretty illuminating powerful shiny Pan who plays the guitar, and there's a bit of that predatory gleam in his eyes.  But that's usually there.
"You seriously have to play.  You can even do carols.  Sera will sing."  Because if he wants it, he shall have it,
isn't that right?

Grace
Sera is Sera. And she touches and kisses and tells people that they're gorgeous. Grace is used to none of that, and it's always a little uncomfortable when it happens to her. But every time it does, she gets a little more used to it. This is just who Sera is. "I'm gorgeous? For downing ale. Okay," she shrugs, like whatever.
Grace laughs at Pan's little joke at his expense. He plays guitar, and Grace isn't surprised. He looks the type to have at least picked up an instrument at one time or another, and maybe there's a story beyond how he got bored one day behind that. But whatever. He says he doesn't play well.
"Hawksley, honestly, don't make him if he doesn't want to," she says, but it's with a smile, not an admonishment. "You might end up having to beg him to stop."

Pan
Sera is willing and offering to teach him to play the guitar in a manner that will not cause people to wonder if he's testing out a new means of torturing his audience into paying attention. This is no shock to anyone. Of course she would come up with a reason to spend more time with him. Of course she lays it down with a condition.
"I don't know what is Kumbaya," he says.
This could be one of his old-man jokes but his truths have more weight to them than his jokes. That air of his finding himself amusing isn't there.
But he has to play. Hawksley is all excited and not used to people telling him no and Pan doesn't know him well enough to know if he ought to tell him no or not. It's a party. People are supposed to have fun at parties.
He laughs a more subdued laugh when Grace tells Hawksley not to make Pan play if he doesn't want to. Like anybody can make Pan do anything he doesn't want to do. The man intimidates people for a reason and it isn't just because he looks like a Latino Johnny Cash.
"You find a guitar," he says to Hawksley, "I'll play the thing."
Find a guitar. In this house it's more like try to walk into the next room without tripping over a guitar.

Hawksley
"Pff," Hawksley scoffs at Grace.  "I wouldn't beg.  I'd just set the guitar on fire."
He has this in common with Pan, though -- just like the light they both seem to emit without trying -- it's different in tone, in flavor: it's a bit difficult to tell if he's kidding or not.  He drinks his beer and the priest tells him to find a guitar, and Hawksley
points to one that is currently sitting in a chair at the dining table.  It even has a place setting and a glass of mulled wine (long since cooled) in front of it, and someone put sunglasses on the neck and draped a Christmas scarf around its curves.

Serafi­ne
"Everyone is."  Sera is telling Grace, rather quietly but with a sort of alcohol-glossed seriousness to her voice.  She has settled back against the Hermetic and is twisting reaching for the wine she set down on the counter with one hand, but the second is still sort of trailing all affection in the short, twisting fringe of hair framing the back of Grace's neck.  "Absolutely everyone."
And Sera, who is legitimately, traffic-stoppingly, shows-her-everything without concern or consequence gorgeous means that as entirely as she means anything.  She would probably bend over to kiss Grace again in seal of that pronouncement except she has her wine in hand.  It is lovely and rich and warm and also cool enough that it won't burn her mouth and the Christmas bomb and Hawksley and also whatever she's had already are warming her bones and making the moments come a but undone before they slipslide together and she loves these moments, when the buzz is first really starting to hit her and the world is all haloed and golden and fine.
This is where she was meant to live, and she hasn't been here for so long.
It feels like coming home.
Sera does not get a chance to educate Pan about Kumbaya because he's agreeing to play if Hawksley finds a guitar.  And Sera's tipping her head backwards against his chest and is about to tell Hawksley that there are two in her bedroom when it turns out that there's one at the table.
"Can you play God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen?"  Sera's asking Pan, since hey, she's supposed to sing isn't she?  "Or the one with all the flalalalalalaing.  I like that one too."

Grace
Grace laughs at Hawksley then, whether he's joking or not. It doesn't matter. The ale and rumchata hit her like she doesn't actually have that high of an alcohol tolerance, and everything's cool even if it isn't.
"I can see that. Pan playing a flaming guitar. Scowling at you 'cause you made him play and then set it on fire." She's grinning, like she actually wants to see that too.
So, she gets up, and takes Mr. Guitar with the glasses and scarf, and hands it over to Pan, trying to keep the accouterments on because it's more fun that way.

Pan
Why go into the bedroom when you can just get the guitar up from the table?
Well that makes things a lot easier. Pan sticks out his lower lip like to say Oh alright and then rights his expression and lets his gaze wander over to the table. Takes in the guitar with its sunglasses and its scarf like it's a shame to have to disrobe it just so he can prove to everyone in the room he can't play worth a damn.
Grace brings it over with everything still clinging on and he snorts.
Can he play God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.
Pan holds the guitar in one inexpert hand while he removes the sunglasses and scarf from its neck. Puts the scarf around his shoulders and figures fuck it, he's not going to impress nobody anyway. Sunglasses go over his eyes.
Try to contain yourselves.
"How you feel about Los Peces en el Río?" he asks as he slings the strap across his shoulders and acts like he's tuning the thing.
[liz talked me into this.
entropy 2 - BEGINNER'S LUCK YO. base diff 5, -1 because he's got all this quintessence he's not using, spending WP because we ain't got time for botches today.]
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (4, 9, 10) ( success x 4 ) [WP]

Hawksley
Everyone is gorgeous.  On this, Hawksley mostly agrees with Sera.  Grace is beautiful when she is brand new in a bookstore on Broadway and beautiful in the chantry library and beautiful chugging a Christmas Bomb.  He thinks her eyes are spectacular, that they look like far-off galaxies and the bits of light that reflect in them must be distant stars supporting life unimaginable to him and the rest of the poor and earth-bound.
Pan is beautiful and dark and intense and like looking into a light that has no source, no heat, not burning core but simply is: the metaphor for that moment of euphoria when one discovers, when one knows what was not known before, when one sees and realizes only then that they were once blind.  Pan's presence is reminiscent of the Platonic ideal of an Awakening, and even if he has not thought this through completely himself yet, Hawksley senses it and adores it.
Sera is beautiful.  Sera is Beauty.  He has other thoughts about that, and he doesn't think to speak of them any more than he thinks to tell Grace what he has always thought of her eyes or Pan what being around him feels like, reminds him of.  It might bring them comfort and joy, and Hawksley is great at spending money to give gifts but Hawksley forgets to think of what would actually bring such tidings to these certain poor shepherds.
So he's sort of a shitty angel, whatever his costume.
--
"Deck the Halls," he fills in for Sera, tipping his head down and kissing her cheek and it would be chaste except it's the two of them and it's so obvious that neither of them are chaste about anything.
Grace is imagining Pan playing a flaming guitar.  "That would be the most badass thing he could do," he says.  He smiles.  He doesn't know that he just barely missed a chance to 'go get a guitar' from Sera's bedroom.  With Sera.  It might have taken a while.  He doesn't know so he doesn't mind: Pan is going to play them carols, and Sera is going to sing.
"Come on," he says to Grace, after the guitar has changed hands and after he has let go of Sera to sing.  He grabs his beer in one hand and the gorgeous half-drunk computer nerd in the other and drags her over somewhere to sit down
AS PAN PUTS ON THE SCARF AND SUNGLASSES AND MAKES HAWKSLEY'S YEAR.
He looks so happy.

Serafi­ne
"Are you really going to make me sing Los Peces en el Río?" Sera is asking Pan as he starts pretending that he knows how to tune a fucking guitar.  And something is happening out there in the living room, the ripple of a rumor is spreading out and opening out, and it has a life of its own, because Pan dresses like Johnny Cash and has disturbed the totemic wine-drinking guitar of the evening and is now wearing all black plus sunglasses and a Christmas scarf, with reindeer including one that is very clearly Rudolph, woven into the pattern.
And Sera is asking Pan that with a bit of petulance and she is asking Pan that is a Spanish that feels, well, quite nearly native, just as natural asPan's choice of carol-that-none-of-the-others in the room are likely to know, so perhaps just Sera and Pan understand what Sera is saying, except Sera's player does not speak Spanish is is too lazy to try Google translate at just this moment.
"It's a kid's song!"  And maybe they hear ninos, right?  Most people know what ninos are.  Sera tips her head upward as Hawksley kisses her cheek and half closes her eyes and half-nuzzles him in response and then they are rearranging themselves, Hawksley and Grace to take the prime seats andSera, shoving the kitchen chairs out of the way so she can perch on the table right in front of Pan, gleaming all-bright up at him and seeing herself reflected in the lenses of his sunglasses and dropping her pleasantly-tipsy gaze to his hands on the frets to get a sense for the tuning and the key and the opening chords and there's no planning, really, is there.
Pan's going to play something.
Sera smiles up at him, and tells him.  STILL IN SPANISH, all liquid and redolent, "I'll sing whatever you play."

Grace
Hawksley grabs Grace and tries to drag her off somewhere, and suddenly she turns a bit chilly. Sera might be able to do something like that, but she doesn't extend that right to Hawksley, and so, tries to worm out of his grasp. Politely. At least, politely for Grace, which may or may not end up being insulting.
"I ah... I have a chair over there," she gestures to her coat-laden, claimed spot. It's like she's planted her flag, right?
But she still follows Hawksley, trying to figure out what to do. Maybe there's a reason he tried to drag her off? And when he sits, she sits beside him. Not touching. Just, there.

Pan
[i think he still has to roll the skill he doesn't have even if he got 4 auto successes with the rote.
dex + perf, untz untz untz]
Dice: 2 d10 TN7 (4, 8) ( success x 1 )

Pan
So Sera and Pan start bickering at each other in Spanish. Technically she started it but if you really want to split hairs he's the one who countered her suggestion that they knock out a well-known carol with one that only she appears to know.
Es una canción de niños.
He answers her in Spanish. Grace grew up in Arizona. Maybe she recognizes some of the words. Pero. Everybody knows pero. That's dog, right?
"Right, but it's a kid's song I know how to play."
He says, as he's strumming the thing like he has any idea what he's doing. They don't know he can't even carry a tune half the time. All anybody really knows is the room gets a little brighter. It feels a little more intense than it did a minute ago. But the young folks have been doing fucking Christmas bombs and they goaded the old man into playing the guitar.
She'll sing whatever you play.
"Claro," he says, "yo sé."
So he starts playing God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen. And it sounds pretty god damn good. Total beginner's luck.

Hawksley
Hawksley does not know Spanish.  As a result, he just rolls his eyes when they bicker in Spanish, barely even taking notice when Grace wiggles her hand from his grasp and says she has a chair already.  She has a chair and he ignores that as well because he's going to go sit in the lower chairs where they can lean back a bit and watch the show.  The show that is in another language that he doesn't know, and is annoying to him for reasons not immediately obvious even if the flicker of annoyance is definitely obvious and most likely misconstrued.
They sit.  Pan plays.  And Grace is being all squirrely all of a sudden so he just leaves that where it is and sits like a kid at storytime for the music.

Serafi­ne
And Serafíne the sexy elf in her green velvet rabbit-fur trimmed dress with the lacing down to her navel and the fucking black patent leather belt following the spare curve of her hips (we confess she does not quite fill out it as well as the model in the picture) perches her barely-covered ass on the kitchen table and swings her patent-leather-clad boots beneath her and bickers with Pan in familiar, liquid Spanish and is a bit absorbed in that so does not quite comprehend the frission of tension between Grace and Hawksley as Hawksley drags Grace to spectate and Grace does not want to be dragged and  and and -
She tips her head back, canted, listening as he begins.  The first chords of this carol are minor that why she's loves it.  The bright and sprightly dissonance that soars but is underscored with the inevitable darkness of human existance.  The way the notes acknowledge and underscore sorrow, not merely joy.
Sera lets Pan go through verse and chorus once entirely unaccompanied.  She's still listening, and as she is her gaze flickers out to touch on Grace and Hawksley and the strange vibe from Grace and the flicker of annoyance from Hawksley which she just - inhales.  And then, Sera takes another sip of her wine, and as Pan - who cannot play, beginner's luck - comes around to the verse again, Sera takes up the song.  Sings it all, right through the going astray and Satan's power to the tidings of comfort and joy and back again.
Sera feels her heart beating in her chest.
She does not know why.
Really, she never does.

Serafi­ne
Charisma + Performance since Pan was rolling dice.  PLUS WP cos the dude with two dice is probably going to outplay her.
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 6, 7, 7, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 7 ) Re-rolls: 1 [WP]

Grace
Grace sighs when Hawksley is obviously annoyed. She thinks it's her. Of course she would. But okay, if Hawksley is going to consider her annoying when she doesn't like being dragged around like she's his or something...
But then, Pan brightens even more, and even the people who she's spent a good deal of effort in ignoring notice how the Christmas lights glow, or the room just grows bright, even though there's no warmth in this light. She knows what must be going on.
In her seat next to Hawksley, down where she landed of her own free will, mind you, she says, "So, you gonna set the guitar on fire then?" and smiles at him. If he's annoyed at her, she doesn't care much -- will cover it up with humor.
Pan's not going to run anyone off or have his guitar spontaneously combust at this rate. And Sera...
The only other time Grace has heard Sera sing, it was beautiful, sad, and lovely and magic, driving nightmares away. And now Grace realizes that every time she hears Sera sing, it will bring back that memory. "She's so... perfect..."

Pan
For the sake of not drawing too much attention to himself Pan takes the sunglasses off his face between the verse and the chorus. It makes the instrument squawk but even with the scratching of his fingers off the strings it doesn't sound terrible.
So maybe he was actually just joking earlier. Working on his comedic timing or something.
The sunglasses click down onto the table behind him and he stutters his way into the chorus but it doesn't do much of anything to cover his tracks. Grace has been living at the Chantry. She knows his resonance as well as she knows anyone else's by now. It's there all the time. It thrums in the wards and it beats back the darkness that would come in after whatever it is that happened last month that so riled Callisto.
With Sera standing there all euphoric and centripetal it's easier to ignore the fact that he's Working. That he prayed or communed with the guitar or whatever it is he does that lets him do the things he does. If anyone asks he'll just say he'd learned the chords once. That a girl he was sweet on in high school used to play the thing and that was almost thirty years ago but some things stick with you.
He can't remember where he put his keys half the time. He'll spend a good minute or two trying to remember whether he left his jacket slung over a chair or hung it up in the closet before he goes outside to smoke in a few minutes. But oh yeah sure. He remembers the chords now.
Even when he takes his eyes off the strings because his eyes are drawn to the Cultist he doesn't squawk the strings again though. Nothing wanton in his gaze. She's getting to be like a daughter to him.
Like all things do the song ends. Scattered applause or whooping from anyone who was wandering by and thought those in the room needed to hear their opinion. Pan lets the silence rest a few moments before banging out the first several bars of Los Peces en el Río. He's just screwing around. Whether Sera protests or not he slings the strap off his shoulders again and winds the scarf back around its neck and puts it back down in its chair.
Then he pats his pockets like he can't remember where he put his cigarettes.

Hawksley
No one really notices the tension between Hawksley and Grace, including Hawksley.  Asked about it later, and he might be, he will have no comprehension of what the hell is being talked about.  Hawksley cannot hide that flash of irritation any more than he can tell that Grace instantly assumes IT'S ALL HER FAULT and spins out from there into other conclusions.  He is leaning back in his seat, cavorting easily from excitement and anticipation to a lightning strike of annoyance to a sort of starting-to-get-buzzed pleasant warmth spreading from the ale into his chest.  There is also the undercurrent of attraction and arousal that comes both with simply being in this house as with that warm beginning of a buzz and isn't so much related to the scandalously short green velvet as something else which would be written all over his face if he understood it.
Only the things that Hawksley does not know he knows are things he can conceal.
He rests his elbow on the dining table to his side, closing his eyes slowly and opening them even slower as Pan plays alone, and then as Sera begins to sing.  He hears Grace beside him ask if he's going to set the guitar on fire and he just huffs a small laugh through his nostrils, half-smiling.  "Nah," is all he says, so as not to interrupt.
she's so perfect.
That gets an answer, too.  Just a small shake of her head, a moment where his attention is more on Sera than on Pan-and-Sera.  He looks at her for a while, breathing in and exhaling, and his fair eyebrows tug slightly together, the briefest expression of an ache that is as uncommon to his features as consideration for others.  "No she's not," he murmurs, quiet enough that it's like he isn't really talking to Grace at all.
His gaze on Sera is different from Pan's.  But it would be.
--
By the time the song winds to its ending, to those last chords, people have gathered.  People still carrying half-opened silver-white-gold presents, people with cocktails and just coming in for mulled wine or a snack.  One couple that leans in a doorway, and no one is humming because there is something special in the room between and all around the musician-magicians.  Some heads are bobbing when they find the beat, and Sera of all people will feel the increase in that magic, the power in captivating the Sleepers, the strength in the dreams that they can't seem to acces on their own.
Pan probably knows that sensation, too.
At the end, there is clapping.  There are requests, instantly, for more, for this or that or something else.  Hawksley is clapping, too, his mouth a lazy grin, his second beer empty.  He calls: "DAN.  Hey.  Rick.  Somebody play something," while Pan is patting his pockets, obviously done performing for these louts.  For his part, Hawksley bumps Grace lightly with the outside of his elbow.  "I'm switching to wine.  You want some?" And if she does he'll tell someone she wants some, because it doesn't occur to him to go get it for her himself, even if he's perfectly fine with ladeling a glass of his own.

Serafi­ne
Sera can feel Pan's resonance, assuredly.  Sera feels everything, keenly.  Sometimes it seems like she is nothing more than a singular, really rather raw, nerve.  Tonight though she's lovely, bright and absorbed and shining and  a little bit mournful because the song is a little bit mournful and a little bit golden because the song is a little bit golden and she gets rather lost in it even though the myth embedded in the bones of the song is not her myth and the frame around that myth is one that she rejects, wholly and entirely, except when she doesn't.
She tips her head back when she feels the priest's eyes on her rather than the strings, and her blond curls swing freely down the back of her little velvet dress with the motion and she catches the edge of that look, the paternal affection framed in his body and gaze.
Pan does not remember where he put his cigarettes but Sera always remembers where she put hers.  Or well: Sera actually often forgets that but her body remembers it, or perhaps her housemates or at least her consor just sort of secrete packs of cloves cigarettes in likely places near the entrances and exits of the house since mostly Sera and her crew do not allow themselves to smoke inside.  That might make it a habit rather than an indulgence, an addiction rather than a vice.
Also: it ruins the art and makes your clothes smell.
--
Their part in the performance is done for the nonce but Hawksley knows the names to summon and Dan is among those who has gathered in the hallway and crowded into the kitchen, and he knows Sera's voice as well as and better than any of them and the magic in her body and blood and bones as much as her voice.  Can't compete with that but he's a different sort of genius and Hawksley's shouting for someone to play something and this is after all a house of musicians.  They haven't played out much recently and it feels good, doesn't it, the possiblity that it opens up.  They all need an audience.
--
Sera slips from the table neatly, slides up behind Hawksley as he goes for the mulled wine and nuzzles his shoulder as she reaches for her pack of Djarums-and-lighter kept in a cannister on the granite countertop and asks him, quietly, if he's spending the night.  And also, asks him quietly to spend the night, with the same words and the same breath, before she flashes cigarettes-and-lighter to Pan and a smile to Hawksley and Grace and tells all of them that she and Pan are going out back to smoke.
There's a fire in the chiminea.  It won't be as cold as you imagine.
--
Dan is starting to re-tune the decorated guitar, going for a drop-d, capoed up and as a sort of antidote to the caroling he's probably going to play the Clash.   Merry fucking Christmas.  Happy New Year.
Someone hands Sera a half-opened silver-wrapped present and she takes it with her as she heads out back.  Someone else drapes a chenille throw around her shoulders.  Someone else opens the back door.  That's how things work for people like her, in places like this.
That's just how they move.

Hawksley
Hawksley is standing at the stove and Dan is looping a different guitar over his shoulder and he drinks one full glass of mulled wine where he stands, ladle still in hand before he pours more.  He is going to get drunk and possibly stoned while he's here, among other things.  He feels Sera coming up to him before he feels her arms around him, and his spine straightens a bit and he glances back over his shoulder at Pan, at Grace, then Dan and then Sera again.
He smiles at her, low and lazy and surprisingly soft for someone whose features are sharp and hungry and inhuman.
And he kisses her temple, and nods her away, and she goes to smoke with Pan.
He looks at Grace.  "I'm gonna go get unbelievably fucked up and watch people open presents," he tells her, grinning.  It's as much of an invitation to join him as she's going to get, but by golly, it sure promises to be fun.

Serafi­ne
There are cigarettes secreted in a few places around the house and sometimes on shockingly cold nights Sera cracks a window and leans against the frosted glass and lights a cigarette, watching as the smoke drifts out the window, but these nights are not shockingly cold and the house is full of guests and even though everyone in the house gets stoned with some regularity, the guests know that they are expected to slip onto the front porch or into the back yard or at least onto the bridge between house and garage apartment to smoke.
Sera does not wait for Pan to locate the cigarettes he's patting down his body for and he does not really even need to mention that he wants a cigarette.  She gives him a look that drifts down his black-clad frame and sidles up to Hawksley at the stove and murmurs something to the Hermetic and unearths a pack of clove cigarettes and a lighter from a cannister on the kitchen countertop that looks like it should contain sugar but actually contains marijuana and cigarettes and assorted paraphanalia, then leads the priest outside.
The kitchen is open to a sort of sunroom / breakfast nook, which in turn opens onto a winter-wrapped garden through sliding glass doors.  The garden has an errant, overgrown charm - someone loved it once, but likely not the house's current inhabitants - and a flagstone patio in the shadow of a large oak tree quite nearly in the center.   An assortment of patio furniture, nice looking but rather mismatched, as well as a cabana bed (of course Sera has a bed in her backyard) and a chiminea and a firepit.  The backyard is as  brightly decorated as the front.  There's an arbor someone hung with Edison bulbs and lights wrapped around the trunk of the oak and fires burning in both the chiminea and the firepit and ashtrays and the like scattered around.  Sera is wearing basically no clothes but someone gives her a blanket and there is the fire to which they can flee, so that's where she leads him, blanket wrapped around her shoulders like a refugee until they are close enough to the fire that she can feel the bloom of its warmth on her bare skin.
Sera smiles at Pan as he reaches the ring around the fire with her and bumps him and taps out a pair of cigarettes and slides them both into her mouth and lights them both and inhales the smoke from both until the embers crackle and snap sharply with the fragrant scent of the spiced cigarettes.  Then hands one over to Pan, the stain of her lipstick visible even on the dark blue paper.
"I'm glad you came," she tells him, rather quietly, the din of the party a hubub behind them.  Strangers, warm and bright, visible in almost every window.

Pan
The day being warm as it was means nothing for the evening. Nightfall brings with it a plummet and a pernicious chill and Pan has to find his peacoat even if he can't find his cigarettes before they go outside. Big as he is he's whittled down since his hospitalization.
He's putting back the weight he'd lost. It's slow going though. He hasn't been this thin since he was in prison. He was younger then. Doomed.
Out the backdoor they go and they form a two-body contingency around the fire pit. Someone had the foresight to give Sera a blanket and she has it wrapped around her as she coaxes two clove cigarettes awake. Every time she shares one with him Pan forgets that they are kreteks. The spice of the tobacco startles him. Pan never inhales deep into his lungs though. Doesn't startle himself into coughing.
She's glad he came.
Like always the priest makes nothing of the quiet in her tone.
"Hey, thanks for inviting us." Us. Him and Grace. He squints against the harshness of the smoke as he exhales and examines the paper before taking another drag. "You having a good time?"

Serafi­ne
Sera has the blanket ranged around her shoulders and down her back and her arms like a cape, open to the heat of the fire to catch every gleaming tidbit of warmth.  Stands close enough that soon there will be a flush beneath her skin, like a fever, close enough that if she shivers, it is not from the cold.
"How could I not?" The question is rhetorical, hummed over a stream of smoke Sera is exhaling through her nostrils, like a fucking dragon.  "Two of my favorite people.  Did you get a load of Grace chugging that beer like a boss?"
Then, and just then, Sera looks up.  Tips her head back and finds the priest's eyes, if he is looking down at her, or his profile, if he is not.  Finds the priest's eyes and then looks up and past him, past the silver threaded through his black hair, which stands out, glistening in the firelight, to the arms of the oak tree above them.  There are balls of light hung from the limbs, scattered haphazardly high above, gleaming LEDs like a bruise against the darkness, that cool-brilliant light that feels saturated with color but shadowed rather than incandescent.
Is she having fun?
"'Course I am." Sera assures him, that same quiet in her tone.  And it is true: she is having fun.  She is half-drunk and there is a party happening in her house.  The way she was cannoodling with the Hermetic, well, the priest can easily imagine how she will be entertaining herself in the wee small hours of the morning.  "I always have fun.  You know that."
Then she indicates the hanging lights in the tree with a lilt of her chin and a little press of her elbow into his side.  "See that?"
There's one right above their heads.

Pan
She does always have fun. Except for when she isn't having any fun at all. Except for when she's upset or scared or angry. But this is a party. This is not an emergency.
Half-drunk is better than having a bad trip.
Sera knows as well as anyone else that Pan is not diligent about keeping his hair under control. As of late he has taken care to cut it himself so it does not touch his collar. That does nothing to keep the moonlight color the black has turned out of prominence. Only the darkness does anything to conceal it and they are not stood in darkness this night. They are by a fire and underneath bright LED lights.
Up goes her chin. Her elbows hits his side. The taller man takes another drag off of the kretek and lifts his eyes.
"Mmhmm," he says around the filter. Yep. He sees it. It doesn't register though. All he does is blow the sullied breath out the side of his mouth and over her head and wait for the punchline.

Serafi­ne
She always has fun except when she doesn't, which is regularly and often.  When the world has started tearing itself to pieces around her and has left her behind to struggle through the aftermath.  The last two months have been remarkably quiet for Sera and her closest friends, but only because she has retreated so thoroughly from the world-at-large.
This is her first party in months.
She hasn't been sleeping around.
And, by all the gods, she was made to sleep around.
So he asks and there is something quietly poignant about her response, which he knows to be both true and false in equal measure, and that poignancy draws out a particular light in her dark eyes, which dance with reflected firelight.
"Mistletoe in each one of them."
Her eyes are on him, now.  Her smile is spare and healing and whole and holy, too.  The way some of the darkest things are holy.  Then the smile dissipates from the edges of her mouth, and all that is left in the quiet at the center. "Though I should warn you.  In case someone tries to catch you beneath one."

Pan
Must be they don't have mistletoe in Puerto Rico.
For all the quiet and the thought gone into her words they go over the priest's head same as the joke about singing Kumbaya had gone over his head. It isn't often that they find themselves butted up against language or cultural barriers. He will tell people with an ease that he didn't move to Colorado until he was fourteen years old. That he moved to Pueblo and then he went to Englewood and English wasn't his first language to begin with but it just got worse spending his twenties in prison.
It's funny sometimes. The fact that he doesn't have a cell phone or a computer. That he doesn't understand references to things that happened in the late 1980s or most of the 1990s. Just amplifies the image of chastity that Catholic priests have attempted to cultivate over the centuries.
"Catch me?" he asks. His attention sharpens now and he points up at the lights with the hand holding the cigarette. "Under a mistletoe?" He takes another quick drag. "I don't know nothing about mistletoe, mija. What happens if I get caught under it?"

Grace
As if on schedule, to rescue Pan from finding out what traditionally happens under mistletoe, Grace appears on the back porch, creaking open the door, which lets party noises outside and the chill inside, until she shuts it again.
She grabbed the coat off of 'her' chair first, obviously, because it's on her now, no longer claiming territory. Or maybe it is, delineating this space of hers for Grace.
Anyway, she's outside. Why? Maybe it was the crowd getting to her, or maybe Hawksley who wanted to get drunk and watch people devour each other over the presents he bought. Maybe she just feels more anchored around Pan and Sera, and needs a break.
She won't find a break from Christmas out back, not with the lights, not with Sera still looking like Santa's Little Trollop Helper, but perhaps out in the open, it'll be less oppressive.
She walks up to them, and just joins in the conversation like she'd always been there.
"Traditionally, if two people are caught standing under mistletoe, they have to kiss, Pan," Grace explains. "Something to do with Baldr."
Like Pan would know who Baldr refers to, or why it has anything to do with kissing at all. It's one of the more pagan, ancient Christmas traditions that has nothing at all to do with Christ.

Serafi­ne
The creature's dark eyes flick upward; past his profile against the spare winter sky to his hand point at the spheres, the cherry of the cigarette lambent against the darkness, bright in a way those glowing frames of light are not.  Then flick back to his face, a narrow line of suspicion briefly cutting between her brows as Sera tries to determine whether or not Pan is having her on.
The line disappears as quickly as it was etched between her brows.  Sera huffs out a laugh then, her mouth curves all quiet irony as her gaze falls from Pan's eyes and Pan's cigarette, down over her shoulder, back to the house, where the lights from the glass sliders leading into the kitchen spills over the flagstone and people move in indistinct smears of color and laughter against the slightly fogged glass.
And then she smiles, a far-away, rather daring little smile, her eyes flicking back up to the priest's as she rises up to her tiptoes and then some and Sera's mouth is a little bit parted and Sera is .00009 seconds away from kissing Pan when the glass sliders open up and Grace steps out onto the patio, starts across the muddied garden toward the pair of them.  Supplying Pan with a verbal rather than a non-verbal explanation.
Sera's eyes drop from Pan's eyes to Grace over his shoulder, then slide back to the priest's mouth.  Then she glances away from both of them and there's nothing guilty about the look, but there is a sort of living awareness about her, isn't there.
Instead of kissing Pan, then, Sera looks away from him and takes a drag of her clove cigarette, dark eyes searching the familiar shadows of the garden, and the way they go strange in the sprawl of the fire, beneath the illumination of all those Christmas lights.
If the priest requires confirmation of the myth from Sera, she gives it to him.  Nonverbally, with an eloquent shrug of her green-velvet shoulders beneath the shelter of her blanket.  But she doesn't look back at him.
Not now.
Not quite yet.

Pan
The Catholics who make up Father Echeverría's church don't give as many shits about Jesus as they do about his mother. Women are the foundation of the Hispanic Catholic community. There wouldn't be a Jesus if there wasn't a Virgin Mary. The mythology of the religion is not terribly complicated.
But Grace's assumption is correct. The name Baldr doesn't mean anything to him. Neither does the presence of mistletoe or the threat of a kiss beneath it. Sera rising up on her toes to try and kiss him now that the groundwork has been laid. He couldn't push her away if she'd warned him that was what was supposed to happen.
They are not related by blood or adoption or communion and Pan is not a virgin. Worse: he holds his beliefs to be incontrovertible in their truth and he adheres to a standard of conduct help up by temperance and prudence and courage and justice.
Even if Grace had not come outside he could have handled himself.
But Grace tells him. Sera looks away. He laughs an uncertain laugh.
"Or did they start hanging up mistletoe so when they got caught kissing they could say--" He points up with the cigarette hand. His accent slips. Like he's imitating the teenagers in his congregation. Teenagers throughout history. "'Ay, no, we weren't doing nothing we weren't supposed to be doing! It's how you're supposed to do!'"
His eyes rest on Sera's profile a moment and that quiet takes him. But only for a moment. He looks back to Grace after it passes.
"You ready to go, or you just out here for the fresh air?"
Asks the priest smoking a cigarette.

Grace
Grace laughs at Pan's little joke, not nearly as uncertain. She interrupted something, perhaps, but she doesn't really care about that much, until she notices Sera's quietness, the shrug, the way she stares away.
"Mmm, yeah, because the air is so fresh out here," she smirks, but her eyes flit back to Sera again. "Nah, just had to get away for a bit. People."
Just, people. Too many, too pressing, too grabby and drunk or half-drunk, which is quite hypocritical considering she's had a beer and a shot herself.

Serafi­ne
Sera is smiling quietly at Pan's joke, not-quite-looking at him, taking another drag from her cigarette, until she feels at last the weight of his eyes on her profile, which is sharp against the shadows, and pale if only in comparison to the way that night wreathes the edges of the yard.  Her eyes spike upwards to find his, then drop to find Grace and Sera's mouth curves for Pan in one of her small, patented, I'm alright, I'm alright, I'm alright smiles.
Which he already knows to be both true and false in equal measure.
The back doors sweep open again.  Party guests framed in the open doors are summoning Sera.  Three girls with Dee at the center, drunk and high, laughing, their sentient shrieks a bit piercing in the echoing chill.  Good thing it's still early and everyone on the block is likely to show up to the party anyway.
Sera takes a last, sharp drag on her cigarette and then stabs it out in a convenient ashtray and takes up her blanket with both hands for the dash from the warmth of the fire to the warmth of the house and hands over cigarettes and lighter to Pan in case he wants another and admonishes him with a sardonic grin, " - I'm giving custody to you but be careful I think there's a joint hidden in there."
Smelling of sugar and cloves.
Then she's on her tip-toes again, kissing the priest oh-so-chastely on the temple and wiggling fingers at Grace and admonishing them both not to leave without saying goodbye and dashing off, quick as you can, back toward the warmth of the house.