That Went Fucking Well

Serafi­ne
The Tap House would be a hole in the wall were it dignified with anything so grand for an entrance.  Tucked away on the farthest storefront of an old warehouse surrounded by pulled up narrow-gauge railroad tracks once used for God-knows-what, the quaint little shopping center is populated by a mishmash of thrift stores and fair trade boutiques, tax prep businesses (one employs someone to dance around in a statue of Liberty costume out on the street) and small restaurants.  And: the Tap House.  Tiny, but two stories if you count the loft, with a rotating assortment of microbrews and the promise of at least one new keg on tap every goddamned night.
--
Grace got a text or some sort of invitation.  Maybe she was just accidentally dialed at first, but still - she was invited.  By the time Grace arrives, Sera and her entourage are already arrayed around the bar.  The first people Grace sees are Dan and Dee, hanging out by the bar, talking to the tender while he draws them little 2 ounce samples of all the beers currently on draught.  Dan, taller, in a button-down flannel shirt fitted to his whip-lean frame, the cuffs rolled up to reveal forearms covered in tattoos, a silver ring around his left thumb.  Dan, with an arm loose around Dee's shoulders, friendly and familiar though not intimate, flirting with the bartender.  Dee, milk-pale skin flushed from the alcohol she has already imbided, a certain muss to her rather precise 1950s inspired updo.
If Dan sees Grace, catches the feel of her resonance in the back of his throat, shifting beneath his feet, he looks up at back at her.  Flashes her a little grin and hooks his thumb upstairs.  There, Grace can see Sera, leaning hipslung against the railing where the balcony overlooks the bar, a beer in hand, chatting with someone who keeps leaning close to say something to the shell of her ear.

Grace
[Nightmares!]
Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10) ( success x 2 )

Grace
Sera's invitations are so numerous -- at least they are to Grace, the girl who most everyone thought was pretty damn strange before she found her calling with a group of people even stranger. Also, they're usually a bit tinged with fear that said invitation will be a party where she'll have to behave herself.
And by that, we mean not be herself. Parties are not a Grace thing, let's just say. At parties, one does not pull out a laptop and go on a long monologue about black hole firewalls using creative illustrations, because there's certain other behavior expected.
But Sera wants to meet at The Tap House. At first, Grace furrowed her brow at that -- why there? Isn't that where Sera got infected? But there might be reasons behind that. A big middle finger to fate -- 'you don't own me!' etc.
There are a few people in the world, and a few reasons in the world that would get even Grace to stop being a homebody for a while, and one of those people and one of those reasons is tied up in Sera. So, she responds, of course, that she'll be there.
Grace catches the eye of Dan when she walks in, grins back at him, and waves at Dee (oh she of the amazing gingerbread). Sera is never too hard to spot, and at the jerked thumb, Grace finds who she's looking for -- follows that feeling of amazement to its source.
"Hey, Sera."

Serafi­ne
Sera is dressed tonight as Seras often are: in something remarkably short and remarkably tight, showing rather remarkable amounts of skin.  A leather skirt covered with a baker's dozen buckles of varying sizes and shapes, which has the grace to cover her ass, but just barely.  Her top is a long-sleeved black lace thing with a neckline that - for a girl like Sera - is really rather modest.  On close inspection, though, the black is absolutely see-through and entirely unlined, and therefore wholly immodest.  Sera has not seen fit to pair it with a bra, and the lace fits her torso as if it were molded into place.  Perhaps it was.
A dozen necklaces or so, of varying sizes, made of varying substances, are wrapped around her neck and spilling in varying lengths down her frame.  One of these is a long length of tiny black pearls, which Sera is twining around and around her free hand, even as she holds her beer with her other, and watches Grace climb the steps from the downstairs bar to the upstairs lounge.
"Grace - " a smile for the other woman, warm and rather drunk, as Sera lifts her beer in a brief and gleaming toast.  "You want a drink?"

Grace
Grace, in utter contrast, is wearing jeans and her grey turtleneck jacket, zipped to the top. As if she could wear anything else? Potentially. But it's not summer, and therefore not t-shirt weather.
Either way you slice it, Sera and Grace make an odd-looking couple.
"One maybe, I have to drive back," she responds, leaning her back to the balcony railing. "How you doing?"

Serafi­ne
"Have two." Sera induces, favoring Grace with this slow-burn of a smile.  Sera illustrates the concept of two by holding up her thumb and middle finger, all two though there's a bit of confusion and her hand seems to float a little bit detatched from her mind and her thumb is up for a solid half-second of that illustration but
two
two
two, Sera means, "and I'll get you a cab home."  Sera has had more than two; or perhaps she has had fewer than two but started the night with the ingestion of some other substance that has this effect on her.  "I'm good," she's saying then, picking up the beer to have another swig.  Watching Grace with eyes are are too dark, pupils that are too large.  "I'm aaalllways good.  You?"

Grace
Grace grins and looks at the floor for a second. Sera's a trip when she's tripping... "Heee. Kalen bought himself a computer lab. I may have been involved. I may have created a guy who worries that his servers are lonely and won't have anyone to talk to if he isn't there."
She looks back up at Sera with that bright grin plastered on her face still. "In short, I'm pretty good too."

Serafi­ne
"Grace, darling.  Cariño, - "  Sera has slung herself back on the railing again; she is not much taller than Grace herself, but something about the way she is put together makes her seem taller; makes her limbs look long and spare and lean.  Perhaps it is just the illusion that is enhanced by the ridiculous heels she with which she has shod herself: tonight they are thigh-high boots built over what appear to be iron cages, filled with tiny skeletons and black roses and they add at least four and a half to five inches to Sera's height.
" - I have no idea what the fuck you're talking about it."
Arresting.  She is so arresting; strangers watch them, openly or surreptitiously.  They cannot help it and some part of Sera absolutely revels in their attention.  Some of them study her body and some watch her mouth, catch the way she smiles at Grace, the clear way she is ready and willing and prepared to be charmed by the other woman and then glance back to their companions.  Perhaps even pulling some piece of that warmth with them.
"But I love it when you smile like that."
Sera's eyes, dark in this light, dark with her dilated pupils, drop from Grace's eyes to her mouth, that bright grin plastered there.
"Guess whom I saw last week."

Grace
"I figured you might not know. Think of it like... a guy who buys a bunch of plants and talks to them, and honestly worries they'll miss him when he's gone. I told him they would talk to each other. I don't think he believes me," she says. "Whom did you see?" Grace asks, mimicking the 'whom'.
The people around them -- their eyes are drawn to Sera in much the way Grace's are. Arresting, she is. Grace doesn't so often trace the boundaries of the room she's in, or flit from one shiny object to the next when Sera's around. It just doesn't feel right. Sera's the only thing worth looking at.
It also makes it easy to ignore everyone else in the place. To pretend that she's not somewhere unsafe. With people. So maybe Grace is behaving a bit more human, a bit less paranoid. The skittishness is still there, somewhere, underneath.

Serafi­ne
Sera makes this noise in the back of her throat; it is quiet and low and dismissive, though not cruelly dismissive.  Simply: dismissive.  "Fuck."  This noise, this quiet breath of laughter that does not fill her throat but does vibrate her soft palate, curve her mouth, found a certain light in her eyes.  Tosses her head back so the that her curls dance away from the carefully maintained sidecut, then lifts her freehand to slide a few fingers through the tangled curls.
"He does know he's not tending a freshly planted field of newborn fucking babies, right?"  The creature's eyes cut back to Grace then.  Intent now, in a way that cannot really be dismissed or ignored.  "I mean, he gets that people are the only things that matter.  Right?"
--
"I saw Lena.  That went fucking well."

Grace
"Lena?" Grace asks, and... maybe there's something about the way Sera says how that went -- all sarcasm-laden. "So how is she? I haven't seen much of her lately."
She says that like she's talking about a friend who's simply not been around, like it's nothing. But honestly, if they weren't at a bar, Grace would have a bit more to say. Like, haven't seen much of her since we rescued her from an exploding lab-prison. And why?
"But you know, I've seen her a couple times, and she was really doing good from what I can tell. What do you mean it went 'fucking well'?"

Serafi­ne
Sera's sarcasm is mild rather than deep; self-deprecating instead of scathing.  There is a certain wry note in the inflection of her voice, and a rue beneath it.  Sera is glancing away from grace in that moment, her darkly made-up eyes hooded by a sweep of sooty lashes, her profile sharp against the bevy of loose, golden shadows where the lights from the bar below are diffused across the lofty architecture of old beams and rafters visible from their perch in the balcony.
Her first answer is a supple and rather helpless shrug.  If Grace looks closely, she can perhaps see the lights of the bar glittering across the surgery of Sera's eyes.  Though perhaps not; perhaps Grace is not the sort to look closely; perhaps Grace does not know how to read the language of Sera's sudden unshed tears.
"Lena's been avoiding the chantry.  She had some spiel about how busy she is with ordinary things and I don't doubt that, but - "
Inhale.  Sera inhales through her nostrils, shoulders rising in a coil as she favors Grace with this peripheral sort of look, which skims Grace's profile, as if she were looking for or at the light shed by her skin, all immanant.  " - it's also bullshit.
"Then she said she didn't want people to look at her and pity her.  That people - that some of us - look at her like that, and it makes her angry.
"Which I think is a different kind of bullshit.  It's mostly okay, you know?  I mean: you need time and you take time, and all that shit, but you let it fester and it starts to all become real and you start walling yourself away -
"Anyway, she didn't like me talking to her about it, either.  She got made and told me that I don't know anything about her, because I never cared enough to ask.  And no one in the city knows anything about her, because no one cares to ask."
A deep, sighing breath out; Sera turns to look at Grace again, really look at her, all direct and drunk and stoned, always in her skin but not merely in her skin.  Sort of bleeding out the way light does, shining.  A deep and lambent glow.
"That was the saddest thing I'd heard in a really long time."  Quiet, then.  Even really rather solemn.  "Made me cry."

Grace
"Oh... Well, fuck," Grace says, her joy now well and completely gone. "I knew she... I know she had to have had some problems dealing. We all did. Do. Whatever. But any time I've seen her since, she's seemed... not so bad."
But then, there was the time, in a clinic, when she raged. When she was certain that she hadn't actually escaped her prison. When Lena's mind was warped and raw and... how can you easily recover from that?
"I... I don't know. I don't like being all pushy about people's past and such. I mean, if she wanted to, I would listen, but I'd never just ask. Should I have?"
Grace, by the way, looks beyond worried. Crushed, really. Concerned that in her typical way of dealing with other people (which is to assume that they want the same treatment she does) she has managed to fuck it up again.

Serafi­ne
"Grace.  Grace."  Sera is saying, with that intensity that is her birthright; the weave of her voice, the dark, damp certainty of her eyes.  Opening her arms in a way that suggests that she would very much light to wrap all of Grace - all of Grace's light and all of Grace's darkness and all of Grace's everything - right up inside them.
"There's no should.  You're not a mind reader, and people fuck things up all the time. We're not - we're not algorhythms, you know? We're blood and bone and startled hearts and half-remembered wants and waking dreams and everything in between.  How are you supposed to know?
"How is anyone?
"I think that she's got - all these fears tangled up in all these desires.  If you think that people are going to pity you, because of who you are or what you've suffered - what the fuck are you going to share with them?
"She thinks you pity her.  And just telling you that makes me almost pity her, because it's such a narrow way to live, all wrapped up in your own skin, seeing your fears written into everyone else's eyes.   I don't know.  I don't have an answer for you.
But if you wanna call her up, call her up.  See where it goes."

Grace
"Oh, oh my no... I would just mess everything up," Grace says, her eyes going crazy in their back-and-forthness. "What would I say? If I say, 'oh Lena, I don't pity you' she'll just be mad at you for telling me."
Grace takes a breath, to steady herself. And then, "But you know... there's all kinds of things wound up in that word, pity. It can mean just having compassion for someone else, grieving for them. I did grieve for us, Sera. Not just for her, but myself too. All of us, you know. I can't really control that."
"But, pity her, as in... like... putting myself above her, like I think she's pitiful? No."

Serafi­ne
"I don't care if you tell her, Grace."  Sera returns, ardent.  Still watching Grace with that rather mesmeric intensity, the sort that seems hungry.  Wanton.  Wanting.  Wanting.  "I don't care if she gets mad at me."
Sera's voice is a dark and immediate tattoo, just then.  Arresting in its vigor.  When she says that she does not care she does not mean that she is indifferent.  She means, and there is passion in the meaning, that she is willing to bear that anger, to open herself up to its lash, to feel its blast, if it meant somehow, someone getting through to Lena.  Perhaps someone else, Sera having tried, and having failed.
"We can blunder through or we can wander 'round.  Those are pretty much the only choices.  One's easier.  Less explosive.  More predictable.  The other - "
A sharp breath out; Sera turns away from Grace, half closing her eyes until the lights start to smear like running yolks.  Which makes her feel both dizzy and bright, like she has been spiked through with narrow little tunnels that lead to the stars and back.
"You need to tell her those things, Grace.  Not me.  Because she doesn't fucking believe me.  Maybe if she hears it from you; if she understands that you mean it, she'll see that she was wrong, and ask herself why.
"I do think you should call her.  But if you don't want to, I understand.  I won't reproach you for it."

Grace
"I'm just... I'm scared I'll hurt her," Grace says, after a long while staring at the floor. "But then, I'm scared now, if I don't reach out to her, then that will hurt her."
Grace's hands turn into fists, not out of violence, but out of a need to do something with them. They call this a double-bind. A Catch-22. Must, but cannot. Cannot, but must.
"Maybe... maybe I will. I just... You said something about me getting a drink?" the barest hint of a wry smile then, and eyes that slide up to Sera's from the ground. Yes, because that's a great idea: drunk dial Lena.

Serafine
"That's my Grace," Sera murmurs, turning back to the Virtual Adept then.  Leaning in for that hug, enfolding Grace in her arms, pressing her mouth so briefly, so reverently, to Grace's temple.  Eyes closed, following the shifting-thing-that-doesn't-love-a-wall sensation of Grace's resonance with the distracted aura of a hungry, pollen-drunk bee.  Staying too close, for too long, nose in Grace's hair because she enjoys the sensation.
"Remember that.  Remember both those things.  And you'll be fine.
"Now come on," peeling away at last, untangling most-of-herself only to grab Grace's hand, so that they will tangle only-fingers.  Drafting Grace to follow behind her, back down the stairs to the bar.  "Let me get you that drink."
Or twelve.