back to the city [pan solo]

[mnemosyne]

Father Francisco Echeverría has a few days to settle into the routine of bachelor religious life. Which must feel both familiar and strange, like slipping one's arm's into a favorite sweater rediscovered, years later, on the closet floor.

Oh, yes. I remember you.

The morning light and the spare streets and their emptiness. The service workers who stop by for the earliest mass before heading off to man the coffee shops and bakeries, the convenience stores and muffler shops, the lunch counters and the parking garages. The toddlers still scrubbing sleep from their eyes being handed off to the day care workers scrubbing sleep from their own. The earliest bus and the early bus and the still fucking early bus, hydraulics sighing as they kneel at the corner, to expel or accept a new congregant. The prostitutes and the dealers and the homeless vets who might stumble by on their way to wherever it is they go when the sun threatens to show up in the sky.

--

Morning. It is morning. No candles are yet lit and the sky is dark but lightening somewhere, on of those strange corners of it, out to the east, the long flat expanse of the high fucking plains, and the streets are quiet and sanctuary proper has that echoing, empty sense that must make it feel haunted to strangers who do not believe in his god. Incense, candle wax, Murphy's English Soap: all familiar, all sunk into the plaster and the lathe, the beams and the nave.

Another scent too. Less common though not unknown here, lingering in her hair and on her skin.

She's sitting in the fifth or sixth pew, close to the center aisle, legs tucked up beneath her body, elbow resting on the spine of the bench, temple cradled in the heel of her palm, slouched bonelessly aslant, the rise and fall of her shoulders so slow and steady that he might assume that she fell asleep like that, waiting for him because why else would she be here at 4:49 a.m. on a Saturday morning, not far from that statue of the Virgin Mary, crowned with a slow-drying circlet of roses by the League this Thursday last. Perhaps in honor of his return.

Not asleep, though.

Because she stirs, quiet and lazy as he approaches. Lifts her head from her hand and gives him a half-smile over her shoulder and something about the way she moves, the indolent pleasure she takes in that movement, tells him with certainty that she is a long way from sober.

--

Maybe he stops in the middle of the central aisle, hand on the back of her pew, a solid and strangely bright presence at her back, in a way that makes her wonder at the cold fire of the each breath she pulls into her lungs. The way the shadows were banished to all but the farthers corners the moment he walked through the door.

Makes her wonder at the immediacy of the moment. At the immediacy of every moment.

She's already standing up, Sera. And god she's wearing the most ridiculous pair of Nina Ricci's, but he hardly has time to glance down and take them in because she's tumbling out of the pew and reaching for him and putting her arms around his neck and laying her head against his shoulder for a long, solid moment, intimate as you please.

Lifts her head a moment later, pulls back far enough that she can find his eyes in the shadows of the sanctuary and meet them and find herself reflected therein, and favor him with a dreaming sort of smile.

"I like your statue of Mary," Sera tells him, mouth curving around the words. She does not tell him that they have been talking, Mary and Sera, but the way she smiles, oh, like she's met a new crush. An old friend. A soon-to-be-lover.

Her arms are still around his shoulders, her fingers laced behind his neck, and rather like Don Quihoxte tilting at windmills, she leans in closer then, inhales through her nose. Settles her mouth at his ear. And says, "I just hope she didn't actually die a Virgin.

"Welcome home, Pan."

She lets him go, then. And saunters out the door.