Picnic By the River Styx [Attn: Kalen, Sera, Gwen, Alex]

[mnemosyne]

Sera understands invitations, both spoken and unspoken, and Kalen waits for her and stands close to her and when she has slipped out of her shoes and picked them up again, she does not reach to clasp his hand, but she does slip her arm, quite neatly, through the crook of his elbow, and together they walk over the new-grown grass, back up the slope to where Alexander and Gwendolyn await them.

She knows. Glances at Kalen's profile and then - soft-eyed, somehow within that cocoon of numbness that keeps her quite entirely together, thank you - Alexander, and if she were more herself she might simultaneously encourage Alexander and roll her eyes at him. This is the wonder you've been looking for? But she is not, and there is that smooth surface like fondant icing, and this sense of space inside her where she can hear her heart beating and otherwise nothing at all.

Her smiles are tight. They are framed, you see. And really, Sera says nothing else whatsoever until they are back in the park, or wherever it is that the sending sees fit to return them.

And when they are back in the park she looses her arm from Kalen's and gives him a quiet kiss on the temple and asks Alexander to watch out for Kalen, please, tonight, because she does know, and if there was anything inside of her right now from which to construct a spell other than a degree of dark disturbance from which she has yet to lift the lid or this delicious numbness she would try to construct a spell to spare him the dreams she knows will come to him, after this.

But - there is nothing else inside of her, right now.

Nothing at all.

So she will: say her farewells and take her leave, alone, with reassurances for Alexander and Kalen and even Gwendolyn that are true and false in equal measure. She manages to make it completely out of sight and perhaps even out of mind before she throws up - kneeling on a park bench, bending over its spine, heaving again and again until -