911 [Attn: All y'all.]

[mnemosyne]

What light there is in the room comes in from behind them. Through the windows, which have curtains perhaps, or blinds that are rarely drawn. The windows are old enough that they make the pale and uncertain ambient light all the more watery where it cuts into the room. But mostly: it is night, and it is dark, and the shadows are deep and quiet.

Sera's eyes are closed and her breathing is steady enough when the quiet knock comes on the door to her bedroom. They are holding hands and his arm is across her ribs and she's tucked against him, just so. Silence follows her telling-of-what-happened because what else there is to say he says quite wordlessly. With hand against her hand and his breath in her hair, its steady rhythm. With his face against the back of her skull and the way his hold on her tightens when she shivers.

Sera must have heard Sid on the stairs - several of which creak as one might expect in old houses - or even, felt her earlier, downstairs, on the porch, on the street, but it felt removed the way everything outside of the immediate bubble of her senses feels removed and she thought she should stir, slip down the stairs to greet her late-night-guest but could not quite summon the will to rise and forgot one and the other between the porch and the knock on the door.

Hawksley whispers, Sid and does not stir. It rouses Sera, who is not asleep but is drifting and while Getting Up From Sera is not an option for Hawksley Sera - roused by the knock, brought back to the here-and-now by his whisper, lifts their joined hands and plants a kiss on the back of his knuckles and then crawls out from beneath his arm and out of the bed, slipping across the intervening on bare feet to answer the door.

Which swings open to show Sid Sera and a rather large, moonlit bedroom beyond. Sera, her face in shadow, wearing a white tee and dark boxers and feeling, yes - worn out but still. Sera opens her arms to Sid, hugs her with a quiet hey that is tired and quiet and maybe a bit wry and more than a bit sad and but - so very welcoming. And perhaps Sera starts crying again, just a bit, when she wraps her arms around Sid.

You would think, by now, that there were no tears left in her to be cried.

You would think that, and you would be wrong.

Beyond her then, a impression of the room. Wide windows overlooking the garden. The bed against the wall, beneath the windows, is large and was unmade before she crawled into it and is still unmade and is now inhabited. A chair-shaped-armchair that has not yet been retaken by the mound of clean clothes Hawksley dislodged from it, though is perhaps under siege. A dark closet, with an open door and shoes-and-things spilling out at its base like a lake of leather and stilettos and littered with strange little bits of gleam.

There is a vanity with a three-way mirror littered with Stuff and there may be a guitar or three and there is art on the walls here too but it is too dark for any of it to be more than a dark shadow against the wall and even the neon sculpture is turned off.