morning sunshine.

[mnemosyne]

"I want you to read this."

It is morning and Serafíne is just waking up and there is something delicious about the lingering sleepiness, the aching echo of the night before, the way it lingers in her bones, and they are both at the table in Dee's lovely white kitchen, the window over the sink full of little pots of herbs, the view to the garden bright in the slanting afternoon light (you see: Sera's definition of 'morning' is whenever she wakes up) and the house is empty. It is a Tuesday. She sits with her legs curled beneath her body wearing a men's button-down and black lace panties and probably nothing else.

Fingertips abraded from her expedition this weekend, a deep bruise in her side that probably represents a few cracked ribs. And she could probably heal herself of these minor injuries and she probably will, but for the moment they are a different sort of prayer to her and she sits with her mug of tea and the mind that she would like to teach to be everywhere all at once, which is a harder thought experiment than you might imagine, and each little place where she is a little bit broken, you see, she presses, the way one presses on a bruise. Savors the way it makes her catch her breath.

The way it makes her - open.

--

And she sits there some mornings feeling newborn. Feeling new-born, aware in a way that she does not understand to be mindful but very well may be of the sunlight and the shadow and the cooling mug of her Darjeeling and the tick of the gas range as Dan turns it all the way to light, and she is thinking about telling Dan that she is going to go to London soon, and what she means to do there, and it scares her, it must, but somehow she also knows that she can swallow all the sorrow in the world, that she can be harrowed, and come out whole.

This is a different kind of seeking.

--

And she wants to tell Dan but she doesn't know how that it won't be tomorrow but it will be soon and she wants to tell him that he won't be going with her. It feels both right and wrong, and she is settling around both the right-ness of it and the wrong-ness of it and he is clattering around the kitchen and he is making her French toast and while the butter melts in the pan he has picked up her phone and pulled something up and put it in front of her.

Oh! Ginger.

"Here," Dan leaning over her back, scrolling, pulling something up, sliding something down. Sera turns her golden head aslant and kisses his bicep and the gesture is sweet and tender just as you'd expect and just as you'd expect it pulls Dan briefly out of his ever-so-efficient you-need-to-read-this reverie and draws his focus directly onto her. He inhales, and exhales and he watches her hair stir with his breath. The discrete little details - the soft, dark fuzz of her shorn fringe, which is getting a bit long, the empty little holes in the cartilage of her ear, the warm beat of her pulse in her throat. The way she lifts her brows, all inquiry, before tipping her head back and looking up at him because reading stuff on phones is boring and good morning, Dan, Serafíne is right fucking here.

"Read this one. Okay? Then the replies. Then this one."

So Sera reads while Dan makes her pain perdu with yesterday's leftover brioche. Sautees a few slices of banana in the pan with a little bit of turbinado sugar and just a touch of whiskey to top it with. Yum.

--

Sera has finished reading by the time her breakfast is ready. She sits with her chin on the frame of her chair looking up at Dan as he sets down the plates and hands her a fork and she asks him if he is going to tuck in her napkin too, please, and Dan kinda smirks and tells her no, but they both know that he would do it if she asked him to. They both know that he would do anything if she asked him to.

"I talked to Elijah after he posted the first manifesto," Dan tells Sera quietly. "Gave him a bit of background. Asked him to please think seventeen times before he asked - or demanded - that everyone in Denver pitch in to rescue a time master from the clutches of the technocrats - "

"Alicia's dad."

" - yeah. Before he talked to you, before you saw that."

"You thought I'd be all gung-ho."

"I did."

"I bet those places are worse than rehab."

"I bet they are."

Sera has drawn her legs up, heels on the edge of the seat, chin resting on her bent knees, arms wrapped around her thighs and calves. And, to be honest, she is quiet for quite some time.

Then,

"That's why Pan showed up at the museum, to tell Elijah about the Ascension War."

"It is."

"Huh."

It is the huh Sera employs when it turns out that something she thought was some admixture of real, dream, wish and hallucination turns out to have been a real thing. Watching her, Dan smirks again, quietly. He likes that word in her mouth. The way she nudges her chin against her kneecap as she absorbs. Digests. Considers.

"And after all that he still thought it was a good idea to go talk about it all to a stranger on the internet."

"Yep."

"To talk about technocrats and <i>Nephandi</i>," there is a shudder in her voice as she says the word, " - to a stranger on the internet."

"Yep."

"Huh."

This time, her mouth against her skin. Nose compressed a bit against the bony prominence of her knee. The huh sounds quite the same, though. Sera is thinking so hard she can <i>feel</i> herself thinking all soberly and it is such a strange sensation that she just keeps kind of doing it.

"Alexander's too scared of magic to do anything with it and Elijah's - " A lacuna, her pupils contract.

"All over the place."

"That's not what I was gonna say."

"What were you going to say?"

Sera shrugs, quiet, moving her mouth and humming against the back of her throat. "I'm not sure. Why didn't he ask somebody?"

"You'd have to ask him that."

"Do you think they're recruiting him? Or that it's even them? Or that he's - "

"I don't know. I don't think there's a way to know."

This brief, quicksilver smile. "I still have that number. I could ask them."

"Maybe let's not."

"I wouldn't. It's not fair to anyone."

"That's kind of the point."

"Huh." replies Sera, and she is very quiet, and she is very thoughtful, and she spends the rest of her breakfast half-stabbing her sauteed banana, chasing it around the plate with a fork. When Dan comes to clear away the half-touched plate, she looks up and asks him whether he told everybody about 'the hungry guy' on Ginger. And Dan says no, and so, Sera asks him to do so.

Later, she makes a few calls.