Searching [Alex mood]

[vesta]

You've got to start looking, though.
 
It’s mid-afternoon, but the light streaming in through the balcony door makes it seem later.  Rather than the bright, clear light of day, this is the warmer, tired light that flows over the mountains as the sun makes its slow descent towards the horizon.  The air outside is cold – so cold – but fresh and clear.  Good mountain air.  The air inside is cool, but much warmer than outside.  Warm enough for Alexander to be perched on the sofa in shorts and a tshirt.   
 
Perhaps it was time to start looking at certain things in a different way.  His Awakening had just kinda happened.  He hadn’t come up with any reason for why it happened when and where it had.  He’d returned to the same stretch of road – the smashed mirror and the black rubber streak from the truck tyres were fairly reliable landmarks at the time – and hadn’t seen, or felt, anything different to the rest of the highway.  The voices he’s heard had never returned.  His dreams had never returned to that snowy version of Pike Place.  It had just been one of those things.  Maybe his Avatar – or the part of him that was his Avatar – had decided that it was just the right time, the right place.
 
He’d ask, but that particular entity had been rather… absent ever since. 
 
Alexander had assumed that maybe the changes that he’d seen in the others – the Seekings – had just happened too.  And so he had waited.  And waited.  And become more frustrated and constrained by his limitations.  He could have done more if he had just been… Better?  Stronger?  Only he hadn’t been.  He hadn’t been able to look back at the campsite, or at the murder scene.  He hadn’t been able to hold onto the spirit of Kozlowski, hadn’t been able to do more than see him fade across the barrier between their worlds – the physical and the spirit.  Hadn’t been able to get an answer to who did this to you?
 
So maybe it was time to actually Seek.  Whatever the hell that meant to him.  Sera had given some ideas and it was probably time – well past time – to try.  And this is what bring him here, now. 
 
The only real sound in the apartment is music coming from Alex’s phone.  It’s been running through a playlist of dance music.  The music has all been without lyrics, but it has all had a noticeable beat thumping through it.  It’s the kind of music that he loses himself in during those nights out, when the music and the crowd take over and his conscious mind takes a back seat and just lets him be. 
 
He’d started out in something approximating the lotus position, one leg cross over the top of the other.  That had become uncomfortable.  So he’d shifted a little, perching on the edge of the couch with crossed legs.  And he’d tried.  He’d tried to meditate.  He’d tried to lose himself in the music.  He’d tried and tried and tried and… Nothing had happened.  No epiphany, no moment of inspiration.  Nothing that felt anything other than the couch under his ass and the cool air on his skin and the sound in his ears. 
 
So he slumps back on the couch, kicking his legs out and resting them on the coffee table.  The music plays on, but now he’s staring out of the window at the mountains. 
 
This isn’t working.


 
 

[vesta]

[Retro, before Stuff Happened]

The time?  Is somewhere between 2 and 5am, any more than that doesn’t really matter.  Hell, even that doesn’t really matter. 
 
The place?  Downtown.  Where the main clubs turn the lights up and close the doors at 2am, other after-hours clubs step in to take over.  Omega is just such a club.  Three floors, three different DJs running at once, three completely different moods.  Want something modern?  Something from the 80’s?  Something less tied by time as the sound and the beat that runs through it?  Well, this is your lucky night.
 
The place?  Somewhere in the middle of the dancefloor, where the dance DJ is doing a pretty good job of riding the crowd.  It’s crowded, but then would it really be anything else as a Friday night slides into a Saturday morning?  It’s crowded, so there isn’t much space between people.  For the more academically-inclined, this could be a study in Brownian motion.  Body meets body, each has its movement reflected and deflected.  There’s no dancing around handbags.  The house lights are dark, but coloured lights and lasers and diffuse smoke are enough to see by.
 
Somewhere in that crowd is Alex.  Somewhere in that crowd is a man with black combats (red stripes scattered over the legs), with a t-shirt tucked into the back and a bottle of water sticking out of a pocket.  He dances, arms overhead with glow sticks, bare torso slicked with perspiration.  The room is warm, with the body heat of so many bodies being so active, so close together.  Warm enough for the odour of fresh sweat to mingle with deodorant and alcohol and dry ice and cigarette-smoke pulled in on other clothes and cleaning products and countless other scents. 
 
The music track changes, but it’s pretty seamless.  There’s no dead air, no jarring transition from one track to another.  A cheer goes up, but is quickly drowned out by the rising volume and tempo from the music. 
 
Alex notices, but it’s more of a subliminal thing than a conscious change that alters the flow of his movement.  The DJ may be riding the crowd tonight, but Alex is riding the music.  The music, the beat, the movement.  Maybe Sera was right and this is his ritual.  His way of finding the part of himself that has proven so elusive over the past years.  Maybe this is something he will consider later.
 
For now, though, all there is is the music and the dance, the crowd and the combination of sensations that settles his conscious, considering, questioning mind.  For now, it’s just him and the part of the universe that this opens up to him.
 
For now, there is still no sign of anything changing inside him.  

But, for now, that doesn’t matter.