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The next-to-last day [Attn: Sid + Jim]
#1
Sid's driving the Jeep back to Denver proper from downtown Littleton. The meeting was late afternoon and now it is evening-becoming-night and the air is cool and there is a bright, metallic note sharp in the air. Snow or the promise of snow or something. It's cold. Sera's wearing that little cocktail dress and fishnets and the most absurd sort of high-heeled boots, with open toes to show off her toenails, which are painted red-as-pooled-blood. So even with the sherpa-lined leather jacket, she's cold when they get outside, and can be forgiven for shivering. That must be why she shivers when Sid tries to hug her, because Sera does not ever shy from physical contact, does she? So no she endures it. Smiles one of her slivered and bracing smiles for the Orphan, though her dark eyes are on Jim in that moment, over Sid's shoulder. Whatever came-through-her to stain him, he managed to fight off. Found his center in the midst of the storm and split his skin and pulled in something bright and undying and opening and that too she can feel -

- and it eases the knot of strange, unbidden guilt that clots her chest.

Her head tips back. She takes in the ordinary bureaucratic bulk of the building against the darkening sky and shivers again as a cold breeze skirls around them, then darts into the back seat of the Jeep. Leaving shotgun to Jim and driving to Sid.

Sera is sitting behind Sid as they pull away, her left temple against the cool glass, view both obscured and revealed by the tangled fall of her hair against the window. She's looking down, watching the running white lines of the downtown streets give way to the running white lines of the interstate, letting movement blur together into an unformed and liquid pallette of gray and stone and pavement.

There isn't much conversation at first. Just the quiet background drone of music from the speakers. It's not the radio. The floors of the Jeep - old enough to have a cassette deck rather than a CD along with the radio - rattle with old cassettes and right now there's an old Jesus and Mary Chain cassette shoved in there. Driving beat and melodic guitar layered through reverb and atmospherics.

Things straighten up. Right themselves a little. Jim is Jim again and that facade melts from him as they drive. Sera tells them more clearly about the vision she had. The taste of Jhor on the roof of her mouth and how she found herself standing in the hallway, where Keller walked: of Keller-who-was-not-Keller; of the something beneath his skin, alien and other. The nictating eyes that looked right at her. And blinked; inhuman, impossibly alien. The shivering sense of a liquified corpse being poured down her spine. That's where it came from: the dark resonance she first tasted when they walked into the building. Through her without quite touching her, not precisely, then flooding on- and in- to Jim.

When she thinks about it, Sera puts her tongue to the roof of her mouth, pushes up the sleeves of her leather jacket, rubs her hand over her inner wrist, as if assuring herself of her own warmth.

Tells them about it quietly and solidly: Keller definitely had the film in hand then, and wasn't precisely Keller anymore. Was carrying something solid and heavy and dragging with him, maybe just the weight of that resonance and that film and the chain-of-it, and if he is in his cabin-in-the-woods, well. They should be able to trace him there and tasted him there with that resonance none of them are likely to forget, even from a distance.

Whatever was inside him is not likely to give up the film easily.

Sera tells them, too, about the other, older Workings she sensed. The first powerful, insidious, old enough that it had faded to no more than a scrim of sensation rather than the twisted nest of stinging nettles it must have been when the Work was done. And, a bit more recent, the bright chaotic burst like a firework. She imagines that whoever put the film in Keller's hand may have been the author of the earlier work. Playing on and expanding his obsession with the old film. Opening him up and turning his enthusiasm into a damn-it-all obsession. If it seems important, they can come back later. Peel back the skin of time and follow the threads to see who else was here, and when, and why.

--

Sid and Jim drop Sera off at her house in Capital Hill on Corona Street. The Jeep too, parked in the garage accessible from the alley, behind the house. Sera clomps up the stairs to the music room over the garage, connected to the house proper by that fucking awesome bridge that overhangs the overgrown garden and hey, they'll figure out the next step tomorrow. Maybe a pow-wow at the chantry in case others want to get involved? Maybe they just give that fucking address to those fucking film-hunters and have done with it. Still, someone beneath her skin Sera's wondering if Keller can be saved. Can be peeled away from whatever is inside him; can be given another chance, can be made whole.

Now, though. They drop her off. They are all a little bit wrung out. Sera waves goodbye from the bridge as Sid and Jim walk through the now-dark-garden to the street where Sid left her truck. There is nothing in that moment to suggest that Sera is going to out that night and get so fucked up she can't precisely remembers where she lives or what her name is or that she has a name, and drink until she's puking behind a dumpster in an alley somewhere. Maybe end up sleeping it off in a pew in the back of a certain - well, god knows really where she'll end up.

But yeah, that's going to happen.
But my heart is wild and my bones are steel
And I could kill you with my bare hands if I was free.

- Phosphorescent, Song for Zula
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