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After
#1
There is blood on her hands and soaked into the cuffs of her men's suit coat and smeared on her thighs and dripping from the tips of her blond curls, as if they had been dip-dyed, and Serafíne looks not so much like a victim of violence from a distance - more like someone coming home from a masquerade party. Up close though, no one would mistake the real thing for corn syrup.

So they stick to the shadows and the alleys. Skirt the crowds gathered around the front doors and open patios of the bars where the smokers are exiled, where people spill outside for a breath of somewhat cooler air and even the Sleepers tend to react to Sera's resonance now, subtly you understand, as if some small, small piece of their DNA had been rearranged in the space between two breaths, as if their hearts had seized, but only for a moment. The sensation - expectant, wrenching, compelling - that one is a hallway, and one door is closing behind, and another is opening ahead, and anything, anything, is possible.

Brighter tonight, the glistening remnants of her Work lambent in the air around her. Even Sera feels it, and it makes her feel - somehow all at once, intense, hungry, and lighter-than-air the farther they walk. Every corner is a new, strange threshold. The world is dark, every half-lit window beneath which they pass is a mystery. She is seventeen places at once, her mouth full of blood, her body wretched and whole, tired and a little bit drunk, wanting more and understanding too that maybe that is not the world's best idea.

When they get to Elijah's place Sera takes off the altered suitcoat and digs all manner of things out of the pockets: a clutch the size of her palm containing her cash for the night, three cigarettes, lipstick, three condoms, two hits of acid, one lighter and a very well-rolled joint. Her phone, from the other pocket, which she hands off to Elijah as she heads toward the bathroom. Tells him to call Dan and tell Dan to stop drinking and come pick her up in about thirty minutes or so. Then she disappears into the bathroom though about thirty seconds later she pops her head out, asks Elijah if he has a t-shirt or some fucking thing she can borrow.

The dress and the jacket might be salvageable, but just now they are stiff with dried blood, wrapped up in that particular, peculiar scent of which Serafíne has had a lifetime's fill. Whatever little buzz she had going is -

- well, cooled, or maybe warmed by the beating rhythm of the shower, by fucking familiar ritual of trying to sort through a near-strangers toiletries. Flattened out, perhaps. Worn smooth.

Sera takes a long-ass time in the shower if the hot water does not run out, and emerges looking like a strange amalgam of street urchin and can-can girl. She has salvaged her fishnets and scrubbed the stranger's blood from every inch of her skin, washed it the fuck out of her hair and fingercombed the wild tangle of her golden locks into something that approaches order, but the heels are a loss, right? Her feet were soaked in blood when she stepped back into them and now they are sticky and wreched, and the heels and the dress and the jacket are all stuffed into a plastic bag from Target and all she's wearing is a borrowed t-shirt, dark lingerie beneath it visible like a shadow when she's close to the light.

The t-shirt's longer than her fucking dress though, so ironically the clothes to modesty ratio is working in reverse tonight, and when she settles on Elijah's couch she pulls the t-shirt over her knees, all curled up, waiting for Dan to arrive.

If Elijah offers her a beer she sure as fuck takes one. If he offers her a whiskey she wants a double. But beneath that visceral immediacy - well, she's tired. Worn in a way that Elijah, at least, has not seen her before and there's nothing particularly troubling about it and except for the odd quiet moment here and there - for which the younger mage has no genuine context - she feels really quite strange and quite solid and quiet and quietly sure.

And Elijah wanted to know how she did that, so, chin on her knee, looking really rather small and a little bit damp and ridiculously fucking hot in his t-shirt and her fishnets-and-garters and not at all like she has the power to heal someone from the edge of death to more-or-less like new in her blood and in her lungs, in her hands and in her will, Sera explains to Elijah that she has: just that. How she does it. How she feels the world around her, sometimes blindly, sometimes acutely, how it all moves in her skin. How she uses the physical to focus the metaphysical, the pieces she pulled together, patterns and Patterns, to make him whole.

She'll show him later, if he wants to see. Maybe she'll try to teach him, but fuck, she tells him, she's pretty sure she'd be the world's worst fucking teacher.

--

Of course Dan shows up. It's not even midnight. He's a bit later than he meant to be but he had to take a cab home because he had planned to drink tonight and then pick up the Jeep and Sera wonders if he can get the blood out of her jacket, she likes that jacket, and Dan just wants to make sure they're okay, and Sera's all, We're fine. We're fine. It's all someone else's, she just doesn't wanna go out anymore. She wants to go home. She wants to be with him, she wants to get high.

She tells Elijah that he should come with and Dan echoes her so maybe Elijah does. It's just that Sera thinks that that was all freaky enough that Elijah shouldn't be alone tonight. Something about being alone in a boxy little apartment with the promise of one's nightmares to come after an almost-nightmare sounds just wrong.

--

So they go home. Sera tells Dan quietly what happened in the car, and he wonders if she wants to go see Pan, and maybe she does, so maybe Elijah gets introduced, or maybe the priest is off at something official: some wake, some wedding anniversary, some birth, some death.

But they go home. Sera doesn't want to go out again. She texts Hawksley (nothing urgent, just: I wanna see you. Come over tonight?) while Dan makes drinks and then Sera cleans the pollen off her favorite bong and settles on the cabana bed in her back yard to get high and watch the brightest starts come out. One by one by one.
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