Motel 6+6

[mnemosyne]

Take the third right and then on 'til morning.

That's next, after. The ash coating their shoes and boots, the legs and cuffs of their jeans, accumulated like falling snow in the diamonds of a certain someone's fishnets is literal. Still there as they pile into the van, that moment of dissonance as they work out the logistics for meeting up again, since Mara drove herself.

They agree on a meeting point in an hour or two, someplace Else. Some anonymous exit in an outer ring of the city's suburbs, a cluster of strip malls and big box stores, fast food restaurants and brilliantly lit gas stations, the running lights of a constant waterfall of taillights and brights against the darkness. Dan drives through the darkened cityscape, taking turns whenever they present themselves, giving himself over to the maze of the city, the air in the truck humid and close and acrid with the scent of vomit. The rough, glottal sound of Jim puking re-awakens the dry heaves Sera fought down earlier. This time, she does not fight them. She bends over in the front seat, her head between her knees, and pukes up that stomachful of vodka into an airsick bag stolen from a long-ago flight. There's a stack of them in the glove compartment, because of course there is, and the paper is thick and waxed and heavy, but not really enough to block the scent, which permeates the air around them now. Her heaving is less deliberate, less ritual purging, more what-the-fuck-I-just-saw, and the first spasm relieves the worst of the pressure. Unlike Jim, when someone (Sid or Dan) thrusts a bottle of water in her direction, she takes it.

Dan slips a hand into her hair while she's throwing up. Just cups the back curve of her head, an acknowledgment of presence and awareness. Some insistence of comfort. Moves his thumb back and forth across the thick sweep of her French braid, and hums a bit to her, quietly while he drives.

Maybe half an hour into the drive, forty-five minutes, Serafíne digs her way through her pockets and the pockets in her little backpack, finds what she's looking for, and slips a little piece of perforated paper beneath her tongue. Jim's going to be working later; she'll help him if she can and it's best that they're on the same wavelength. He's been tripping balls all night, and so soon is she.

--

Their phones are all off, at Sid's insistence. So when they pick Mara up at that BP in I-Have-No-Idea-Where, Sera runs into the convenience store, fills up a reuseable shopping bag with supplies - bottles of water, gatorade and OJ that she knows she'll need later, snacks and snack and snacks: the sort that appeal to someone who's just getting hit by the speed buzz of LSD, with only the faintest hint of visual hallucinations smearing in around the edges of her peripheral vision. She also picks up two of the cheapest prepaid phones available in the place, pays cash and makes a brief call to the church on one of them.

Then hands that phone over to Sid, as Sera is unsure whether to throw it away or smash it or what. Let someone responsible figure that out. Someone for whom the wash of neon outside the windows of the van is not soon to begin merging into a malevolent smear of hothouse flowers that crack and crust and turn gray white and begin to dissolve into flakes that peel away and drift like snow in the air around them, but taste like ash in the back of her throat.

--

Mara collected, the van gassed up, they hit the road again. Sera always has cash - for cabs, for drinks, for drugs - but the van has a huge gas tank and the fill-up guzzles most of her ready cash and leaves her searching for the wallet of emergency funds tucked beneath the driver's seat to pay for their cheap hotel room that night.

Sometimes, the memories of the vision she shared with her fellow Seer shoulder their way through her hallucinating mind, swallow everything else - but Dan usually pulls her back here. Now: van and people and smoke and the curl of bile hanging in the air, the collapsed exhaustion of Jake's grief, where he's curled up in one of the bench seats.

He does it by singing, to/with her. Quiet, gravel-voiced but precise. When he hums it, the rising falling melody is all Beethoven. The Ode to Joy is so universal that the others might recognize it from the Ninth Symphony if they listen (and listen closely, his voice is quiet, his hum more suggestion than thing-itself). Sometimes, though, they take up the words, together in rough harmony. This is an old habit between them, they sing the song very, very quietly, like they are taking up some old conversation they've been having with the universe all this time, precise and sweet and raw. Except for the odd line here and there, where melody and language merge into such a note of raw expression that she feels the fucking vibration of it like a note struck so solidly that it both knots her in place and ties her into the womb of the world all around them, and there's her resonance: visceral and bright, ragged, fear and hope and sorrow and joy all scored together, and her Self laid open, raw to the all the pain and beauty of the fucking world.

I'm wide awake, it's mornin'.

--

[OOC: the song they are back-and-forthing is Road to Joy by Bright Eyes, which: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37r9aqTxhBQ - is here and the lyrics are awesome and so Ecstatic-appropriate. Heh.]

[errin]

They agree upon a meeting place with an approximate time. Sid, quietly clinging to the strap of her bag, the furrow of her brow deeper than usual, manages to keep her head enough to tell them all to turn off their cell phones. Take out the batteries if they must. She doesn't know yet what the Ecstatics discovered in their vision, doesn't yet know just how deeply fucked they all will be if they're tracked and found, but she can tell it's bad.

Mara gets into her car and takes off and the others climb into the van, Dan behind the wheel, Sera beside him. Sid takes the first seat available after Jim, ends up sitting right beside him. Jake is the only one alone, but that's probably for the best right now, with his grief still so fresh and raw and terrible. It's one thing to expect the worst, to prepare for it, to assume that Shelby was never coming back. But without the certainty for knowing there's room for a little seed of hope to grow, a tiny little niggling thing that helps to keep a person afloat. Tonight that seed was crushed for the Consor. He needs a moment to attempt to come to terms with reality.

The van has hardly started when the sounds of retching fill the small enclosed space. Beside her, Jim buries his face in the closest thing he can find. Sid startles at the sound, leans her upper body a little away from him, eyes darting up down up down, from what she can see of his face to the liquid sag of the bag he's found fill with the contents of his stomach. Drawing in a deep breath, closing her eyes and steeling herself against the smell of bile, she lifts her left hand. It hovers above the curve of Jim's spine a moment before slowly, cautiously lowering down. She can feel the bumps of vertebrae against her palm, can feel the spasms of his back with each retch. Jim can feel the warmth of Sid's hand through the fabric of his shirt, the heat of it seeping deep into his skin, relaxing the muscles. Slowly, Sid slides her hand up his back, then down, the movements awkward, then slowly smoothing out to something more natural. Leaning forward herself, she rests her elbow on her knee and her chin in her hand, her face turned away to watch out the window as they drive and drive and drive.

===

Later, at the meeting place on the fringes, Sid collects the bags of waste, taking them from hands or picking them up from the floor. Without word or explanation, she goes into the convenience store along with Sera, but once inside beelines for the restrooms, backing up against the door and pushing her way inside. When she emerges a few minutes later her hands are empty (and freshly washed), the former contents of Sera's and Jim's stomachs fed to the city's sewage system.

Sera hands her a prepaid phone, and for a moment Sid merely blinks at her, confused, before accepting it. She has two calls of her own to make, the first to her housemate, letting him know she lost her phone but won't be home tonight and no, she doesn't really want to talk about it right now. Later, maybe. The second call is to her work, letting them know that she feels terrible and she doesn't think she'll be feeling any better by morning, so someone will need to take her shift. When she's finished she holds the phone out to the others, offering it in case someone else needs to make similar calls before dismantling the device and throwing a couple pieces into the nearby trash bin. She keeps the battery, because you just never know.

Back in the van Sid is quiet as ever. Her hands stay on the bag she has tucked in her lap, one wrapped over the other, which is clutching a fold of cloth. Her spine is curved forward, the slope of her shoulders is relaxed as she watches the lights streak past the darkened windows.

[Joey]

The magi in his vicinity – maybe even the consors – can feel the weaving that is happening in the backseat as the van turns down the highways and byways of Denver. The sound of his stomach grumbling in protest seems to solidify, the urge of his being to be filled and sustained radiating outwards as they drive. Jim? Jim is silent. He focuses on an unforeseen destination. He focuses on his own want. Maybe a part of him focuses on the heat from Sid's hand, stirring deeper passions. And then he transcends outward to the wake of urges this creates, a moving ward that reaches out to play with the minds of those that might follow them.

Drawing law enforcement to stop, take a moment, and grab a cliche donut or some fast food. Maybe pull over and take a nap in one of the speed traps until their radios come alive. The hounds that would be hot on their trail, he hopes, will be drawn to instead indulge their baser instincts. Gluttony. Sloth. Maybe even lust, if there is a nearby girl or boyfriend to spend an unscheduled 'cigarette break.' And not bring their wrath down upon the magi he has surrounded himself with.

That same awareness that allows those who sit about him in the car to feel his weaving into the Tapestry, the echoes of his avatar laden with an addled resonance, might also sense an emotion on his face when it finally rises. That contortion, the shamed turn of his shoulders coupled with it, is that of guilt. He is not so much fearful for himself, but for those that surround him. The ones he shares a ride with, the one that had come to offer her own protection – Mara. The one who pats his back – Sid. The consors that were dragged into this.

Despite his apparent discomfort, again curling up as pangs and cramps grip his inside – his face is reddened with pinpoints of blood beneath its surface from engorged pores and his eyes shot red with the stuff – it's not until the hotel that Jim eats. Drinks. Whatever snacks are there he devours. The effects of the drugs have faded. But not for long.

Another dose spreading across his tongue. Another drop from the iodine-brown vial he pulls from his pocket. This one, this indulgence of vie, not hidden in the bathroom like before they'd headed out to the warehouse. He draws the motel curtains. He turns up the sputtering little air conditioning unit built into the lower wall, and sits across from it on the ground as he pulls his knees to his chest.

He shuts his eyes. Turns on. Tunes in. Drops away from his surroundings.

And begins another weaving as the earlier one fades away. One with a new purpose. One with new and – when he is finished – impressive strength.

When he is finished, every corner of the place is saturated with his resonance. His stoicism lends the cracked walls and fading paint the reassuring heft of a fortress. To the undisciplined? His addled and erratic attentions – well, it's hard to not cycle through the channels on the television, and maybe forget what task you're in the middle of beginning. And the psychedelic nature of his unhinged psyche will no doubt make for interesting daydreams and tinged REM sleep.

When Jim is finished his head is bobbing with fatigue. And beneath the simple lack of rest is a deeper tiredness. He'd given more than a bit of himself over the course of the night. The willwork had been a great feat, the crafting palpable in its strength to all within the ward, but it had also been a great labor.

He is finished in more ways than one. He pulls himself onto one of the beds. He pulls a pillow under his head, sweat-soaked fabric of his shirt clinging to him. He manages to give Jake a final glance, a final appraisal, before looking to Serafine.

"Can you? Can... Can you tell them what we saw." Again his words nearly disjointed. His eyes visibly heavy before they close. Whether or not he has drifted off to sleep is anyone's guess. His breathing is deep and steady.

[mnemosyne]

Dan rents the hotel room, pays cash, brings back the keys. Yes, actual keys on plastic diamonds inserted into locks to admit the patrons into the room. An old-fashioned motel that long-since lost its franchise for failing to live up to the lax standards of some low-end chain targeting itself to strapped tourists and unexpected travelers, and is now instead directly marketed toward truckers and prostitutes of every variety.

While they’re exiting the van, Dan hits the glovebox firmly and watches it open. Takes in a breath, glances over his shoulder at the others there, then pulls out two handguns, checking the clips and assuring himself that the safeties are on. They make him nervous, he can't hide that, but he knows the basics. His voice is drawn, quiet.

“Hey,” to Sid as she’s going inside. “ – do you know how to use one of these?” Offering it to her as casually as he can. She does not; he nods. Dan makes asks the same question of Mara – can she use one of these? If she says yes, he offers her one. Sid and Mara are the only ones he queries. Sera is fucked up. Jim is Working. Jake is -

- well, he should not have a weapon close to hand.

--

Inside the hotel room, Sera sinks down against the wall between the a/c and the door, her spine straight and upright, legs bent at the knees, elbows resting on her thighs. She looks thoroughly disconnected from the world and these levels of reality, but the truth is she’s following the weaving Jim performs on some altered level, feeling the cage he builds around them with his resonance, breathing in the shifting patterns as he warps them to form the powerful wards he builds. No: not just breathing them in. She sees them pulled like taffy from the raw stuff of the universe, weaving them into braids, braiding them into weaves, patterning them into the walls and the ceiling, changing and charged and dark and raw. She has not seen work like this in -

- well. Quite literally, she could not say.

--

This is the second time Serafíne has told this story tonight. The first time, she muttered it in five addled and virtually inchoate sentences into a cheap prepaid phone in the brilliantly lit parking lot of a BP filling station. The coronal flare of headlights in her peripheral vision like the birth of galaxies, her awareness all smeary-bright, her heartbeat in time with the steady pulse of the universe. Just so - exquisite - all the cross-sections of awareness and the way they converge, the cage and mobile ward Jim was building around that van with the raw stuff of his own desires, every fucking level of them.

--

Now it is later. Now always becomes later, except when you play with Time. Then now can become both later and yesterday, without discrimination. Sera is still on the floor; the beds are left for others. The reflected resonance of the Disciple's wards is creeping into her spine, beneath her skin. That's why she's sitting up so straight, her head canted aslant, forehead against the doorjam, listening to the work of the walls. Which are living with Jim's energy. The desire for a cigarette, if only for the familiar movement of her hands, the crackle of the tobacco in her lungs, is like a lozenge in her throat. But - oh, stoic (hah), infected by that sensation, lingering in it like a strange dream, wallowing in it the way she might revel in the space she has in a cool, clear, empty porcelain bathtub, she resists. Takes a sort of pleasure in that resistance and does so half-a-dozen times without realizing she has done it before.

So, see. Jim asks her to tell the others what they saw, and she is summoned back to now-or-later, and looks at him, this brief and focused survey that drops away to her guitarist. Dan is seated on the edge of the bed, watching over Jake. Watching over Sera, for that matter. Though from a bit more of a distance. He has put the weapons he retrieved from the car away, tucked them into the bedside table with the Gideon Bible and the 1987 Greater Denver Area Yellow Pages, careful to assure himself that the safeties were thumbed on. As Sera starts to speak, he retrieves Sera's leather-bound folio, opens it to the next blank page, which is the first one after her dream as she's written nothing all week, and takes notes. The names, particularly.

"We saw nothing of whomever worked the illusion," Serafíne's voice is always low, more rough and raw tonight than it often is, but it still has a certain power to it. With Jim's wards, the pulse of his resonance surrounding them, it might seem somehow disconnected from the creature seated beside the door, who is now, while she speaks, slowly pulling the piecework of her French braid down, alive to the feel of her hair between her fingers. Perhaps to some of them the sound of her voice floats in a susurrant stream, like mist drifting through some half-deserted forest, the broad, protective trunks of massive trees the stoic walls caging them in, while strange, unruly night-sounds, that undeniable sense of disorientation and dissociation woven into Jim's working, too play havoc with their senses.

" - though there was a piece of memory sliced out of the timestream. Erased, or warded from our seeing." A thought arises and she turns her head, finds and focuses, vaguely, on Jim's shadow on the far bed. "If the illusion was the Work of the mirrorshades, why would they have bothered to erase themselves from the moment?"

Her question is not rhetorical, and has just occurred to her, but it is a question for later and now is now and also then, and she is telling the story of when. So she returns to it.

"We saw the girl from my dream. The one who asked for my help."

Something of the girl's reflected, remembered confusion and fear insinuates itself into Sera's voice. It is not merely empathy. Closer to a spasm of the sympathetic nervous system. No matter. It passes. Slips back into the stream of consciousness.

"Her name is Leah Walker and she is sixteen years old."

"Shelby and a man named Will rescued Leah from," a flexion of her neck, a movement of her jaw, "the mirrorshades. She was unconscious when they brought her back to the warehouse and they warded themselves in, and let her sleep. They spent a day watching over her by themselves."

"That night, the rest of their cabal found Shelby and Will. Shelby let them in, and they crowded into the warehouse arguing about the rescue and Leah Walker's fate. A man named Jai had instructed Shelby to leave Leah to the technocrats, but Shelby refused. And so, this split between them. This dissension.

"Shelby said, she could not leave Leah. The mirrorshades were going to dissect the girl, splay her open, study her and needle her and break her down into her constituent parts, and use her as bait to catch," a soft, sharp breath. Withheld and raw, " - the others."

"Jai wanted to kill Leah. He said," Something of the Euthanatos' remembered passion, his fury, his righteous power, infects the remembered words. "She is Widderslainte. She is Tamas gone mad."

"No." This is Shelby, in response. An abrupt, calm cessation. Steady certainty. The other half of the echoed argument cool as a hand on a fevered brow. "She is a child. Her name is Leah Walker and she is sixteen and she is terrified and she is a child, and fate can be changed.

"So they argued."

--

"That's when the Technocrats arrived." Sera is far away now, her heart beating faster. The fight vivid in her mind and body; her spine though, against the walls and those stoic wards holds her upright even as her throat constricts around the words, makes them rougher, ragged with violent sensory overload from the memories. "The other six, who make twelve.

"Leah was asleep as the fight exploded around her, but she lurched away when she was wounded. She was crying, mad with pain and fear."

Quiet.

The tale returns to, "Shelby was pinned beneath one of the Technocrats, in desperate straits. But she Worked a healing on Leah from across the room, before the woman attacking her sunk a knife into her heart. And her blood - "

Sera's hands are tucked beneath her legs. She looks so relaxed, so tuned in, so dropped out, but beneath her knees her hands are fists, nails digging into the palms, the punctuate clarity of pain leashing her focus to the immediate and physical, to the spare-bones facts she seeks to relate. When the nails are not enough, her grip shifts. Fingers pushing deeply through maze of flexor tendons in the inner wrist, into the distal radial-ulnar joint.

"A man leveled a gun at Leah. He had and took a clear shot, but in that moment, something in Leah Awakened. Virulent and dark and powerful - quiescent before and quiescent after - but so, so strong in that moment.

"The bullet froze, mid-air, and crumbled to ash.

"And then the gun. And then the man who fired it. And then the rest.

"Flesh and blood and bone. Bricks and mortar and stone."

When they walked through the warehouse, they were walking through a crematorium.

--

"And just as abruptly, whatever awoke in Leah Walker went quiet. Disappeared. Evaporated. Burrowed its fucking," sudden, unleashed vehemence. Venom. " - way back inside her, and left her standing in the ruins.

"And she was a sixteen year old girl, again. And she screamed.

"And she ran, away."

[Shayla]

Mara had expected many things this evening, had been prepared for violence, for pain, perhaps even death [or so she believed] fear, though not something unexpected was also not fully prepared for. Not her own fear, but the fear that spilled from the others, the intense need to leave, to flee, to go to ground. She had fled with them, taking her car and doing as she was told, driving in a nearly endless loop which gave her all the time in the world to think, but no time at all to calm, to reflect.

She had been at the rendezvous when the others arrived, her neck craning to the side to ensure that it was them and not someone else, one might wonder how long she had been waiting there leaning against her little old accent in the darkness of the night, her form illuminated only by the headlights of the van and the distant and stark light of the street lamps which seemed to watch them, an expectant gaze that seemed to imply that there were eyes everywhere, and that there was nowhere to hide.

Her posture as she stepped to the van and listened to the plan was one of calm, an almost aloofness that should not have been possible given the reaction the others were having. But in her face all her fears were visible, the tight lines of muscle and sinew drawn taught with worry and fear, lips tugging this way and that in apprehension, eyes wide and scanning the darkness like a small creature praying and hoping that they have managed to outrun or outsmart a predator who's only desire was to end them.

She followed them of course, there was safety in numbers as the old saying said and Mara was not going to turn away from them in this moment. She followed in her car, refusing to leave it behind, and when they reached the motel she parked it on the other side of the lot well away from the other vehicle, perhaps it would not matter, or perhaps it would be their ace in the hole should they need to flee.

It is here as she stepped quickly towards the room, her arms wrapped around her, her head lower then any had seen previous that Dan approaches her, discreetly offering her the cold heavy weight of iron. She looked at it like it was something venomous and insidious and she simply shook her head. "I don't know the first thing about guns." She said as she turned away and strode into the room, her jacket dumped on a bed as she paced the room, nervous energy rolling off her like a tide.

This behaviour continued as Jim began his weaving and casting forming a safety net about them. It continued as Sid entered, as Serafine slid to the floor and played with her hair, and as the cultist began to tell the tale gleaned from the strands of time itself Mara continued her inexorable circuit, seeking clarity through motion...or perhaps simply a last ditch effort to avoid the full brunt of her thoughts.

It is only upon the completion of the story that Mara's feet still her movements, the woman looking around the room at her fellow magi and consor's. She bit her lip nervously, the muscles in her face twitching as her eyes seemed to water. She turned then and strode towards the washroom.

"I'll be in the shower."

[errin]

[apologies if you all were waiting on something else to go in here, but i thought it about time to kind of move this part of the SL along.]

The first night in the motel room was one of the hardest for Sid. She'd curled up in the room's only "comfortable" living chair, an ugly thing of sturdy orange and yellow cloth that was anything but comfortable, and tried and failed to sleep. Some time in the night she rose, wanting to get some air, but was stopped at the door. The quiet conversation with one and then both of the awakened Ecstatics lasted into the small hours of the morning, when Sera rose to make a bed of the tub and Jim rolled over for more sleep. Sid curled back up in her chair, and her rest was a little better, but still terrible.

The next day was long. Six people stuck in a room together with nothing but snack foods and whatever entertainment could be found on basic cable. Or whatever Jim or Sera had at their disposal. Sid sat on the floor by the door again; somehow the nearness alleviated the claustrophobia that rose and fell in waves, with each crest rising a little lower than the one before. She spent most of the day writing in a notebook she kept in her bag. Every inch of the pages, in, around, and above the blue college-rule lines, was covered in her neat handwriting. Some pages have drawings, tidy little diagrams or detailed profiles of her room-mates done in miniature. Sometimes exhaustion overwhelms her and she dozes, pen falling one way, notebook dropping in her lap as her arms go slack.

Friday night, desperate for an hour, maybe two (if she's lucky) of uninterrupted sleep, Sid caves to Jim's simple, "There's room," something she might not have done if he hadn't pulled the covers aside a little, making room. She collapses into it, her long red hair fanning out over too-thin pillow, still wearing her jeans and t-shirt from the day before. Curling onto her side, she scoots as close to the edge as possible, so close that if she rolls even a little in that direction she'll tumble right off. It's there that she hopes she'll stay through the next few hours, but she doesn't. At some point she wakes to the warm closeness of another body, her arm draped over their torso, her head nestled in the crook of a shoulder. It's Jim, of course, his chest rising and falling beneath her elbow with each breath. Sid pushes herself up onto her elbow, squints down into a face that may or may not be awake.

Saturday night it's back to the chair.

Which brings us to Sunday, a day when some of them may be on their last nerve with each other. Too many days in close quarters with strong personalities. Not to mention by now their food stores are either empty or close to it. Sid has to make another phone call to her work. They all heard it, hear her tell them again that she can't come in, and they hear her stammered side of the conversation that consists mostly of Ahs, Uhs, and Buts, and ends with her setting the motel phone handset quietly back on its base.

For a moment she just sits there on the edge of one of the beds, chewing on her thumbnail. When her hand drops down, she looks up. At Sera, at Mara, at Jake and Dan, and finally at Jim. "I want to go. I want to leave," she repeats, her brow furrowing, her voice low yet firm. "I can't help you find Leah from here. So...so I'm going," she says, rising. She has to get her socks and shoes on, gather up her belongings, which is exactly what she sets about doing.

[mnemosyne]

[The bulk of the mood post brought to you mostly courtesy of the fact that the universe decides it wants to rain when I decide I want to plant my damn flowers.

Also - it's all good, Niko! Thanks for pushing us forward. Heh, I do wanna grab Shayla and Joey for a couple of brief scenes that we back-date to motel-hideout time and I'll try to get w/y'all for those.]

They're there a few days. In that cheap motel room in Nowheresville. Six people in a single motel room with one shower and two beds and one chair and one television (which Serafíne turns off, compulsively, whenever it is left one with no one watching it. She refuses to subject herself to the white noise of it; does not even think about it, makes no mention of the habit, and would not herself understand why. But listen: institutional memory, this) and one microfridge. Fridge and microwave bolted together.

They are not the only group of six in one motel room, especially not in a place as cheap and rundown as this, which advertises weekly rates and offers space not just to truckers and prostitutes and low-end salespeople on the road, but to migrants of all sorts. They do not go outside, but sometimes, at a certain hour of the day, they can hear children outside. A few of the rooms are flanked by cheap children's toys. Second-hand bigwheels and faded Lil Tykes slides, the plastic cracked and weathered by the sun.

Dan and Sera have been on the road before. In that fucking convenience store, they picked up cheap, calorie dense food that can sustain them. Starving artist stuff. Ramen and bread and peanut butter, booze and chips and hot pockets. Microwave popcorn, and some fruit. A sack of apples and a basket of strawberries. For the strawberries, Sera is grateful beyond words. But this stuff won't last long. Not with six mouths to feed, and by the time Sid is finished hiding out, their larder is getting attenuated.

The first night Sera sleeps, when she finally sleeps, in the fucking bathtub. It is still damp from Mara's shower, but she doesn't care. Wake me if someone wants a shower, she said, but if they try she sleeps like a stone. It requires work to wake her up, and if they're tentative, if it is Sid, for god's sake, who's trying, Dan will give her a hand, shake Sera physically awake. Sera swims to consciousness like a deep sea diver returning too fast from pressurized depths.

And she sleeps like the dead.

She's fine, Dan'll say, if asked. She's always been like this.

---

The only instrument in the van was an old acoustic guitar. So, Sera and Dan share that out between them when people are awake and in need of distraction. Sera's fine with the guitar, but Dan - he's really good. He sits propped up against the wall, eyes closed in concentration, feeling the music as it emerges from the vibrating strings. They play songs by Bob Dylan, Will Oldham, Joni Mitchell, PJ Harvey, The Pogues, and they sing them together in rough and easy harmony. They play Cool as Kim Deal by the Dandy Warhols, and that gets Sera on the subject of Kim and Kelley Deal and then she spends like an hour in this recursive loop, fixated on the bass line from the Breeders' Cannonball, trying to figure out why the fuck that thing is so awesome.

There's nothing to do but talk. Or sleep, or get fucked up. So Sera does all three.

She asks Mara where she's from and what she does, and my god if Sera finds out that Mara is a contortionist she wants to see that, right fucking now. She will be astonished and delighted and demand that Mara show her how to do that and then falls on her ass eleventy million times attempting to follow the Akashic's instructions and laughs it off every time.

She asks Jim what was his first trip and when and where and was it before? he opened his eyes. Needles him for more Ghandi quotes and Hunter S. Thompson quotes and any other quotes he wants to quote at her. She takes requests, for music, and claims to know everything everyone asks for but is not always correct, ends up humming mistaken lyrics into being.

She tells them that she and Dan came here by way of Raleigh-Durham and Brooklyn before that. She talks about North Carolina quite a bit, Brooklyn very little, and whatever came before Brooklyn not-at-all. Tells them stories about parties and festivals and bars and happenings she's been to and the people she's met there. About some amazing fucking guy who carves these fucking - animal totem statues out of wood logs with chainsaw. Just tell him what animal you want and he goes town. He sells them on the side of this random road way back in the hills.

Serafíne makes a spectacle of herself whenever distraction is necessary, but not of Sid. Never of Sid. The shy redhead is given space, to be or breathe or participate in the conversation when and where she will. She is not put on display. And someone always has an eye on Jake. Sera or Dan or Jim. The handoffs are natural and thoughtless. When Sera's there, she sits physically close to the kid, and is mostly quiet. Which is astonishing considering how much she can talk when she wants to talk.

About this show one night - or this chick who or - that fucking art professor - or that redneck bar or the time she was tripping and it was sunset and it was June and they were in western North Carolina sitting on this ridgetop and the hills were wreathed with mist and the sky was on fire, but fading, and then, and then - the fireflies started to come out, one by one by one, and it was like watching stars mating and galaxies being born and comets searing through the darkness, searching for home.

--

When Sid announces that she's ready to go, Sera glances toward Jim, her blue eyes flickering over his features. Gauging whether he thinks the coast is clear. Whether they've shielded themselves long enough. Truth is, she's ready to go, too. But Sera, she awaits Jim's word.

[errin]

[Yeah, I tried to leave it overall vague so if anyone wants to they can go back and fill in spaces. I also would like to get a room scene with Shayla at least, but I also think we need an endpoint, especially since Howl wants to take both Sid and Mara out for a spin. Solo. To do terrible things to them (probably). Also also chantry! That they can't get to.

PS: I want to live inside your music collection ]

[Joey]

The press of a body that comes that Friday night stirs only Jim's unconscious. Though the word, only, belies just how much of Jim that entails.

When Sid is looking down at his face his eyes stay shut, his breathing remains subdued by the steady tidal lapping of good (necessary) sleep. And though his body doesn't move much it does seem like... Well, maybe it does the same thing that had gotten her on the bed and left her eventually clinging to him. His muscles and bones and being seems drawn to her. To another living being that is the same in important ways and (just as importantly) different in ways that intrigue him.

Maybe it's how two Cheerios feel in a bowl of milk. Sticking together when a spoon is coming to eat them.

Jim tries and mostly manages to keep this barely-voluntary bonding experience as bearable as possible. The guitar helps. The junk food helps. The smell doesn't. The door and walls don't for some of them. For Jim it's the children outside playing, that sound is what both does and doesn't make it easy. When they do Jim sometimes claws his way to the window, glancing at them through the thin slits of curtains. Watches them with an awe and a curiosity and like it's the best television show he's ever seen – the TV stays off, so his basis for comparison may be limited, but his basis for comparison is also real life outside a digital fishbowl, so there's that.

The questions help the most. And the stories. Sleepaway camp for wayward willworkers and deviants. Jim's first time was on a train to a museum. He never got off the train. He grew up in...

Wait for it...

Cherry Hills Village. He went to school at the University of Denver. Has a degree.

What did he study?

Botany. Biochemistry. Cognitive neuroscience. He rattles them off like he shouldn't stop at one, just like he did the day he skipped from the first to the next.

“What is this a job interview?”

A day passes. A second. He is able to withstand the time with all these social and mental and observational exercises. His spirits build.

Sometimes he's meditating. Sometimes he's writing in his own little book with little words and ideas of varying size and impact. Sometimes he transitions fluidly between one and the other.

But when Sid says she wants to leave, he nods, and almost looks uncomfortable with Sera looking at him for an answer. "Watch your back. I'll be watching it too."

And with that, though the spell remains, the curse of it is lifted by Sid's gumption and Jim's word. He still doesn't seem thrilled with that last part. Heap responsibility on an Ecstatic... Well, he's the one who had done that. But tell him what it is. Make him aware of it. And see how he reacts.

Jim reacts by getting up to take a piss.

[errin]

Perhaps encouraged by the storytelling of the others, Sid opened up a bit about her own past. She'd tell them a little about Chicago, which doesn't sound much different from what they've seen of her Denver experience, except that in Chicago there was a man. When that went south she went west until she couldn't go west anymore, ending up here. Before that? She doesn't remember, she says.

The time spent in the room isn't all bad. Sid even almost laughs a little when Sera tries and fails to contort her body like Mara. Though clearly interested in Jim's schooling, his courses of study, she doesn't pry. Prying leads to reciprocal questions, and Sid is still reluctant to open up about some areas of her life.

When Sunday rolls around and events occur that tell the orphan enough is enough, that's all it is. Sera looks to Jim after Sid's quiet outburst, but Sid doesn't wait. When he speaks, though, she stops in the middle of tying on her scuffed-to-hell sneakers, her eyes seeking him out across the room before dropping with a small nod.

Maybe others are moving now, gathering up their belongings in preparation of their own departure. Maybe they don't. Sid doesn't immediately beeline for the door once she's got her shoes and socks on, her bag slung over her shoulder. Digging through her bag for something, she stops in front of Jake, holding out her hand. Nestled in her upward facing palm is one of her test tubes, small and plastic and filled with grey ash from the warehouse. She doesn't need it, probably doesn't need any of them. It's unlikely she'll find out anything the Ecstatics didn't already discover in their shared vision, but she'll keep the other two just in case. If nothing else, they'll help her with her understanding of non-living matter. But this one...this one she can part with.

"So you can say goodbye. On your terms."

If he looks up at her, meets her dark eyes behind the lenses of her glasses, Sid meets it for a few seconds before her gaze shifts to his nose and then drops entirely. In those seconds, though, the consor would see understanding and empathy. The quiet, timid redhead knows a thing or two about closure. If he accepts it, she hands it over carefully, reverently. If not, she sets it down on top of the microwave/fridge combo, just in case he changes his mind.

And so ends Sid Rhodes' time in the stasis of the motel room.


[thanks for this series of events, guys! i know Sid got some good growth out of it. and like i said, i'm happy to do some retro scenes. my week's a little busy, what with life and STing a little over in WtA, but i can still be around in the evenings. just, not Tuesday or Friday and maybe one other night i haven't decided on yet.]