It is a Tuesday or a Wednesday. Some middle-of-the-week night, the ordinary sort that feels vaguely undefined it you aren't the sort that holds down an ordinary, nine to five job.
No one in the house in Cap Hill is the sort to hold down an ordinary, nine to five job.
--
So, a Tuesday or a Wednesday some other -day that isn't quite specific, Elijah receives an invitation by text from Sera's consor. It is loose, really -
Having some people over. Why don't you drop by?
Dan's texts are sometime (tonight) quite precise. No text-speak. He spells out all the goddamned words and he spells them correctly. Dan was a fucking English major.
He did a Senior Thesis on Keats, thank-you-very-much.
--
There are almost always "people over" at Sera's house, particularly when Sera is around, because Sera attracts people the way the moon attracts luna moths. But even when Sera is not around, there are "people over," friends and acquaintances and customers and hangers-on of the rest of the housemates. Dee's roller derby team or fellow musicians, hipsters and record store clerks, the lawyer couple down the street still sort of holding on to their young-and-wild days because fuck it, shouldn't you hold on to your young and wild days for all the rest of your goddamned life?
Tonight's a low-key thing. There's music somewhere, someone playing an acoustic guitar inside. A pitcher of some sort of gin cocktail with blueberries and stems of rosemary on ice in the large white kitchen. Snacks, because such things accumulate, because Dee works in a bakery and loves to cook, because people who like to get stoned often like to eat while they are stoned.
Elijah will find Dan, eventually, out in the backyard, sprawled back in a pink plastic Adirondack chair with a bottle of beer in his right hand, looking at the stars. He's a tall guy, Dan, a bit sprawling, but not big. Not ripped. More sinew than muscle. Left hand scratching his beard a bit as he watches smoke from the chiminea spiral up toward the night sky.
Elijah
The English major texts the French major, though Elijah was so far away from having written a senior thesis that it just seems like a pipe dream. Whatever his thesis may be on, though, it probably wouldn't be Keats. When Elijah replies, it is in English. Sometimes, he doesn't reply to text messages in English, at least not at first, and then one can tell when he hasn't because it takes twice as long for the reply to come back.
Elijah responded in English, just as lacking in precision.
Sure! I'll swing by, see you in a bit
--
Elijah was content to come over, excited to see the other man and chill. Content to see the roller derby girls and Dee- Dee who blushes and it turns her a lovely shade of pink all over. Dee who was in the process of acquiring a cheerleader (Sorry, still looking for the flyaway skirt, he told her apologetically. Sincerely, like he'd meant it. He laughed anyway, because why not?) He came to the back, finally coming across Dan.
The young man was distinctly more dressed. Tee shirt, vest, ripped up jeans- not the kind you buy, but the kind that you abuse all to Hell because you love them and refuse to buy another pair and give up the ghost. Elijah plopped down next to him, not in a chair, though, adjacent to the chair.
"The fact that you can see the stars like this kinda makes me wish I didn't live in the city proper."
Dan
"This is the city proper," the older man returns, hand still on his beard but not hovering over his mouth a bit, the index finger, as he turns his head to glance down at Elijah in a manner that assuredly makes him appear - knowing maybe. Nearly sly.
There is a smirk beneath the skim of his hand, neatly hidden by his beard, and laughter rumbling below the edge of his voice. Not precisely hidden but: swallowed up. Contained, see? Embedded.
"It's just what happens when you have a back yard." He goes on, " - a few square feet of darkness lets you remember the sky and look the fuck up."
Breathes in, he does. Breathes out.
And looks the fuck up.
"Sera told me you were new enough you needed watching out for. She never told me how new, though."
Elijah
[Smoke and sky and wow- spirit 1. diff. 3+1 (sphere)=4]
Dice: 1 d10 TN4 (4) ( success x 2 ) [WP]
Elijah
He grins like the world is amazing. That grin is his constant companion, and it is the last look he gives Dan that is direct because there is the sound of summer in the air and he can smell smoke and his green eyes travel there instead. Wood and earth and something that burns on his senses. Something that makes him smile bright and for a second he almost seems serene before he seems delighted and the lung man closed his eyes, inhaling deep and exhaling some centering breath.
The air feels anything but calm. The beginnings of a disaster. There is movement, there is elation, there is that feeling before revolution and chaos, people associate the way Elijah feels with storms but it's more than that. Something intangible. He is the storm that brews in the hearts of men as much as anything else. He's young though. He's young and green and when he opens his eyes the stars are alive and bright.
The smile on his face almost seems innocent. Like he's seeing the first fireflies of the year.
but, there is a question to answer, and it doers bring his mind closer to reality. How new at this was he?
"It's kinda complicated," he said, "I… uh… ignored that Voice for over two years. I didn't… well, I thought I was crazy, because that makes sense, right? you hear voices, then you're crazy. I just recently met people who were… y'know… like Sera."
Dan
"Was it better being crazy?" Still lounging, the guitarist, loosejointed hand wrapped around the neck of the bottle of beer he's nursing, his voice quiet, and not particularly distinctive. Direct in its way,
but here, with the question, he casts a glance quite directly at Elijah, where the young mage sits on the damp and trampled grass, deep in the long shadows bathing the back garden, looking up at the sky. And there is a kind of sagacity to that look, though perhaps Elijah cannot see it, watching the night sky as he is, in the darkness. Seeing things that no one else can see.
"Or better being magic?"
Elijah
"I figured out I can be magic and crazy at the same time," Elijah admits, "but I prefer the magic... because god damn if this isn't beautiful."
He gestures to the sky and the backyard, but there is something in his tone, the way he gestures and seems to avoid something that isn't quite there that makes it clear that either Elijah is crazy or he really is seeing things that aren't there for everyone else.
Dan
"A lot of folks like you get labeled crazy. Defy consensual reality," a quiet rumble, not precisely an edge but the guy also knows what the fuck he's talking about. " - thoughtlessly because it doesn't work for you or deliberately because you've figured it all out and the jig is up too long and too hard and you or someone else is bound to notice.
"Sera doesn't talk about it, but she spend a lot of time in and hour of institutions when she was a teenager. Mostly rehab but - " A brief, surrendering sort of shrug, as he glances at Elijah's face, then looks back toward the sky,
where all he sees are stars,
wistful, maybe.
"Have you just fallen into a pattern of running into people?" Dan asks, tapping his index finger against the neck of the beer bottle thoughtfully. " - or has someone given you the whole spiel about the Traditions?"
Elijah
He has to come back to reality. He has to. he has to stop looking and splitting his attention between the worlds because he needs to focus on Dan but he just wants to keep looking. There are things he can feel in tone and he listens to Dan. The fact that he hadn't been looking at him made Elijah more aware of the finer details. He liked the sound of Dan's voice; that was centering. Centering like Jenn was centering. Centering like touching Alicia. Centering like Kalen- though who would have ever described Kalen Holliday as centering (more than you would think, actually.)
Dan is the voice of practical wisdom; Sera spent some time institutionalized and that was what snapped him back. That's what made him finally let go of that beautiful moment and come back to reality. It reminded him that the grass was damp and cool and when he looked at Dan, he was all somewhere between shadows and softness.
"I don't blame her," he said, "it… it fucking sucks. I hated it."
With such aching familiarity.
Had someone given him the Traditional spiel? He nodded, "yeah, Kalen's been teaching me some stuff… for awhile I was just running into the same people, but… it's more than coincidence, it's like magic is magnetic, all these people kind of just… pull in."
Dan
"Or fate. Or like seeks like. Or water seeks its own level, or something - "
because Dan, assuredly, had experience with that running in to the same people thing even if he does not really count as the same people to many (most) Awakened folks. His fingers lace lightly over the neck of the bottle again and he lifts it up to his mouth, tosses back a mouthful, and then another.
"I don't know Kalen very well. He's a Hermetic, right? You know what tradition we are?" Not Sera is, but we are.
Elijah
He nods an affirmative. yes, Kalen is a Hermetic. And then yes, again, he determined what Tradition they were, but not without a little bit of guess work. Elijah reached up and ran a hand through his hair. There are times that Elijah very much does not seem his age, but now is not one of those times. He was new at this, and he has to think. Sera said she was a seer, so...
"You're both Ecstatics?" because he doesn't refer to them as cultists.
Dan
"We are."
Dan rumbles, low. Casts Elijah a low-slung glance that seems to both take-him-in and take in everything-around-him. An equanimity to it, that lingers after in the shadow of a half-smile beneath his beard.
"What has Kalen told you about the Cult of Ecstasy?"
Elijah
Damned if he didn't have a voice that was enough to make Elijah's breath catch in his throat and he could listen to Dan talk for hours if the need be, and he almost wanted to see if he would because there was a manner about him that Elijah couldn't stop himself from wanting to take in and absorb the entirety of. Dan had a voice that could make the phone book sound like the most important thing one could say.
"That you guys deal with time- and that there's a huge emphasis on transcending boundaries," he said with a nod, "the rest I'm kinda drawing a blank on, sorry. He seems to think pretty highly of you, though."
Dan
Dan listens, and he listens in a way that few people listen: in a way that feels whole and entire, that is both present and absent, immediate but without imposition. And he leans back a bit, stretches out his knees, a rough hand on either one, eyes on the sky. Elijah may have the sense of his halved smile, the way it skims in the darkness, rises and then - not precisely sets, but goes still again, to be subsumed beneath the architecture of his skin-and-bones.
So there's a kind of quiet around which Elijah's laughter wraps itself and a kind of quiet when Elijah pauses and a kind of quiet after, too, when Elijah remarks that he doesn't know if that sounds weird or not,
which makes Dan smile, rather kindly, all told, and flash another look down at Elijah.
"There's not one right answer, you know that, right?" That smile lingers, though it is slowly edging toward a grin. "There are seventeen million right answers, or maybe seven million, or however many people there are who believe in both the answers and the question. That's the point; but beneath that, it's up to you to find something, and someone, with answers that are pretty goddamned close to your own.
"That's the first step in figuring out all this shit.
"Or maybe, figuring out that there's no one else like you and your beliefs are strong enough that you are a-okay going it alone. That's the beauty of it, you know?
"The sheer fucking multiplicity.
"And of course that sounds weird. And at the same goddamned time, it doesn't sound weird at all. We're talking about people who shape and reshape the world with their fuckingthoughts. With their Will.
"You're just figuring out the name for what it is you do and you can still do more with it than I can dream of."
Elijah
"I dunno, man, people can dream pretty damn big," he tells Dan.
Dan, the lucid dreaming man, the man who knows what it is for all of this to make sense. A man with answers, but without the ability to reach out and grab it. He was doing things with his will; Elijah was doing magic because he wanted to do magic. Because he wanted it. Because he wanted, more than anything, for something more than the mundane to be there. When it came down to it all, the smoke the movement the touch, the trappings, it was all because magic was going to happen because Elijah wanted it to happen. Focusing made it easier, giving something else, giving power to an action made it easier, but it wasn't strictly necessary.
"So.. what if you find more than one person who makes sense… It's okay that more than one person might make sense because… everyone's been really gung ho about explaining how personal all of this is," Elijah said.
He sighed, but the sound was joyful. The sound was pleased. The sound was one of contentment, "so how did you… like… how did you figure all of this stuff out? I don't think I've met people like you before… well… y'know to be honest up until a month or so ago I hadn't met anyone like Sera."
Dan
"It's not just whether or not more than one person makes sense. What matters is more than that: it's belief; it's the framework of your belief in the fucking world, you know. Religion's the easiest analogy. I know some people hate it but - a priest might be able to see the logic and the beauty and the faith behind the structure of another religion. A Catholic might understand and appreciate and respect the teaching of the Koran or the Talmud: but her god, the god she prays to, the god that moves her heart is neither.
"When I said: makes sense, I don't mean it in anything close to a casual way. I mean: makes sense in a fucking profound way. In a way that moves the world, and moves you to move the world around you."
And he breathes out, at that, laughing a bit at himself, mouth opening but only just. Picks up his beer and takes a swig and gives Elijah a look that is at once spare and direct.
"The guy I was seeing in college was an Ecstatic. We were together for a while, and Ecstatics tend to be a little more - open than most. We had friends and friends of friends. It didn't work out, but some things you can't really unlearn. And fuck it. I'm a musician and I'm a goddamned songwriter. I double-majored in philosophy and literature.
"I believed in this shit before I even knew about it. Unlimited human potential. The ever-expanding universe. The ongoing argument with the world, the constant interrogation of the nature of being. There are all different kinds of ways to open your eyes."
Elijah
[Can I invade your personal space? Awarepathy]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 5, 6, 6, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 5 )
Dan
Dan is pretty open to touch. He does, after all, live with Serafíne, so he isn't exactly the standoffish sort. Right now, he's perhaps a bit charmed by Elijah but in a fairly neutral way. There's no real, uh, I'm interested in more than smoking a joint and waxing philosophic sense about him, he is assuredly not flirting with Elijah. He's just - in the moment and enjoying the moment he's in. So: no sense that Dan is interested in contact / invasion of personal space, but no sense that he's opposed, either.
Elijah
"So you'll know when it makes sense, when your world views line up and stuff because it is literally we see the world in the same light and not, oh cool, we both read the same books.And it's okay if what you see, the world around you and how you interface with it, isn't like anyone else… you don't have to try to fit?"
And why would you want to try to fit? It's your reality, your world, the way that everything see,s and feels. Elijah listens, takes in the story and the details. He doesn't bat an eye at the fact that Dan has dated men before because, well, so had Elijah. Frankly, Elijah had been contemplating whether or not he could invade Dan's personal space or if he would let him touch his beard- because damn he really, really wanted to because it looked soft and it was an act of self control that didn't have him
"The religion thing makes sense, though."
Dan
"Or you'll find something that fits, for a while, that makes sense to you, the way it shapes you and guides you, and then it won't make any sense, and you'll find something else. I don't know anyone, Sleeping or Awake, who stops evolving, whatever path their on."
A brief, supple grin.
"Change is the only constant and all that rot. You also need to think about power, and how you understand it, and how it understands you, and how you hold it and wield it and feel it so differently from all the rest of us, while remembering your goddamned kinship with the people you're leaving behind.
"It's a helluva lot to work through. That's another way religious analogies make sense. The disparity between the doctrine and the actions of the instituion. All the wars that get fought In Nomine Patris, so to speak.
"Fuck it. That's probably overkill. How old are you, anyway?"
Dan
Witness a roll!
Sera: freeing the nymph. Mind 3 / Prime 2. Vulgar Without Witnesses: Dif 7. -1 for focus.
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (8, 9, 10) ( success x 4 ) [WP]
Dan
Extending! +1 difficulty, -1 for spending quint. So: 6 again.
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 8) ( success x 2 ) [WP]
Elijah
"I'll be twenty in August," because that makes all the difference, you see, Elijah is young. Elijah is damnably young, unashamed of how young he is, but sometimes very much seems to be every bit as young as his years make him. Being committed in his teenaged years wasn't so far away because he was still technically a teenager. His memories are still fresh, which begs the question- how on earth did this young man find time to have the experiences he's had? Packed them all into a scant few years, remembered them so vividly and preciously because they were his experiences. Because they were part of his world and some of the few precious things that shape him.
"Why do you have to leave people behind, though? Just because they don't see things like… couldn't everyone, in theory, wake up to all of this? I mean, isn't there in some way a possibility that every person is capable? Why not take them with you?" a longing, perhaps, for a world he can't show people. A longing, perhaps, to seem sane when he talks about how beautiful to moon is or a place where no one bats an eye at how he can tell time without even opening that ubiquitous pocket watch.
A beat.
"You're not gonna get pissed that I'm shithoused, like, eighty percent of the time you see me, are you? Because I don't really intend on stopping."
Elijah
Witnessed
Dan
Now: Time 3. Dif: 7. +1 for time. -1 for focus. + WP.
Dice: 3 d10 TN7 (4, 8, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
Dan
And, extending! +1 to extend, -1 for quint spent. + WP.
Dice: 3 d10 TN7 (1, 1, 4) ( success x 1 ) [WP]
Dan
One more time. One more quint (her last) and one more WP. Because.
Dice: 3 d10 TN7 (4, 8, 8) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
Elijah
[I witness everything!]
Dan
"You're talking," Dan tells Elijah, rather patiently, "about people who can change the world on a whim, with their will. You don't have to leave anyone behind. I don't actually think you fucking should. But look at the way the world works, the way power changes people. The way humans make tribes, and defend their goddamned tribes to the bitterest of final solutions.
"You're nineteen. You've got time to work on all this shit. We've all got time to work on all this shit, but you've got more power than most nineteen year olds will ever know or understand. Part of what you have to figure out is not just: how it works, but: how you use it, and - "
Here he actually laughs, a low thread of laughter that hums through his body and has him opening his mouth and tipping back his head and - and - breathing out.
"Have you actually met Sera? Somehow I think if you had, you wouldn't even be asking that question."
Elijah
"Sera is this ageless, eternal creature in my head to which the rules of damned near everything do not apply, be that societal or otherwise," he replied, and with that Elijah stood up and carefully- if permitted- took the beer bottle form Dan's hand and took a drink. He returned the beer to the other man and restated himself to where he wasn't necessarily facing Dan but he was making contact with him. Elijah took a perch between his legs, not suggestively, but there so that he could put his arms on his legs and enjoy the fact that there was human contact. Something to ground himself with.
Elijah thrived on contact, craved it, and having seen that this was a person who wasn't going to painc should he make contact with him at all, Elijah seemed more than content to do so.
"And good," Elijah replied with a cheeky grin on his face, "because I don't intend on stopping." Dan
The older man smirks - mildly, but smirks - at Elijah's characterization of Sera, but that smirk recedes into a rather different sort of expression, one that exists in the middle distance. His eyes are a muddled sort of blue that goes to smoke and shadow in the darkness and they flick down at his hand, and Elijah's, as Dan reliquishes the beer bottle without comment or complaint.
Accepts it back without comment or complaint, as well.
Dan is equally unpertubed when Elijah takes up a seat between his legs, on the grass, cool in the night air, not precisely damp but one has that sense doesn't one, that dew should be forming as the temperature drops and the day's heat dissipates.
--
So it goes. Quiet really. Dan doesn't have a comeback to Elijah's cheeky grin or declared intent not to stop drinking, just another smirk, smaller this time, that settles itself into the shadow of his beard.
The night goes on. People come out, or they go in. Dan to grab another beer. Someone starts a fire in the chiminea and someone else starts a drinking game. There's a joint and then another to be passed about. And more than that, if one wants more. Dan's ex, Jeremy - everyone calls him Jer - comes by later. A hipster and a professor at DU (ADJUNCT) and a jazz musician and a solid few years older than even Dan, and their body language is close, flirtatious, even intimate, but Jer does not spend the night.
As parties at this house on Corona Street go, this one is subdued. There's a relaxed vibe, none of the rooms are crowded. People are mellow, more likely to lounge than dance, more likely to dance than fight. Food appears, disappears, people come and go.
No one tells anyone that they've had too many, but the housemates do confiscate keys once, pack a few people into taxis, find rides for others. Offer up couches, blankets, spare rooms when necessary.
Elijah is never precisely invited to spend the night in that house, but it is clear, wordlessly clear, that he's welcome.
ElijahHe liked the smirk almost as much as he enjoyed they contact. He looked out at the sky again and was content to just observe the world. It was hard to tell what he was looking at, or when he was thinking about. He doesn't know what a mess he is going to get himself into later. Doesn't know what he was about to ream about or what terrors would await him in the morning. No, right now he had to live. Live because tomorrow he would die and the cycle would begin anew. It would all come back as it is, as it always has been.
There is a sense of finality in that, and so Elijah was content to stare at the sky and not say anything to Dan beyond that. He was content to make conversation with people- because he liked people. Elijah thrived on those around him. He needed human contact about as badly as he needed oxygen, and depriving him of either would make the young man wither and die. Would be a true and steady death sentence.
Elijah is content to hand over his keys because he knows when he's had too much. AS far as parties go, this one was more subdued. He had moments of insight, moments of delight, moments where he found himself speaking French excitedly to some other francophile who had the unfortunateness of having read Le Petit Prince- Elijah could quote it lovingly, gingerly. He loved that book with all his heart.
And he was surprisingly well-versed in matters relating to paper and children's literature. Who would have guessed?
He passes out on the couch when his body finally gives way, and Elijah can't strain to keep himself awake any longer. There is a quiet dread, like a toddler resisting his nap or a condemned man going to the gallows or somewhere in between. Elijah knew what was coming, but he hung on to light, onto conversation, onto sensation just a little more.
For tomorrow, he would die. And the cycle would begin anew.
DanThere's a green velvet couch in the living room - a bit worn - and a shaggy orange one in the music room, which is elsewhere in the house, up the stairs and across the strange little bridge that connects the house old three-story-plus-attic brick building with the second storey of the old detached garage out back that was maybe once a carriage house. Back when people had carriages.
--
Regardless: green velvet couch or shaggy orange couch in the music room on the hammock in the garden or whatever. After hours (and it does not run all night into the early hours of the morning. It's a Tuesday or a fucking Wednesday. Ordinary goddamned people have ordinary goddamned jobs), someone came skimming through, a preliminary clean-up. Glasses and cans into a bin to be rinsed and recycled. The big bottles too. Ashtrays (they confine the smoking usually to the back garden) emptied and stacked on a table outside but near to the glass sliders leading into the kitchen to be cleaned later. Left overs wrapped up and put away or scraped into the disposal or whatever. Just a few things that can be done while drunk or half-drunk or stoned or whatever, to make clean up in the morning that much more palatable.
--
Someone drapes a chenille blanket over him. The house is cool, air conditioned. Night slides on into morning.
ElijahWhat does Elijah dream about?
What does he dream when no one is looking and his mind is left to its own devices?
It is no prophecy, no potential herald of what was to come like Kalen saw, but perhaps in the future, it was. Perhaps, this was the future, something wrapped up in nothingness that would birth the world again as it had time and time again and would until finally everything faded into the void and black nothingness from which all creation was destined to fade into. He does not dream of nothingness, of a blackness where creation is potential. No, Elijah dreams of the Void. The place where the darkest parts of ourselves live, a place like the abyss that was dark and eternal and all consuming.
It wanted.
Oh, how it wanted.
---
Elijah Poirot slept for nine and a half hours.
He didn't know at what point he started crying, started pleading, started begging for anything- good, bad-anything- to come back so long as it was something.
He then learned that he would regret this, and something brushed his shoulder across his collarbone, a caress of something ancient and withered and icy cold. Something that was unlike anything he had ever felt and his heart wanted to stop and he wanted to start screaming but the sound was gone. There was nothing.
---
When he opened his eyes, Elijah wouldn't get off the couch, instead he curled up under the chenille blanket and didn't say a word. Tear streaked and silent.
DanHousemates.
Plural.
--
Elijah's night terrors wake Dee, who wakes Dan, who tells her to go back to sleep. She's up again in a few hours anyway. The bakery opens early, after all. Rick leaves the house a few hours later, headed off to his liberal-arts-degree job in an upscale toystore out by Cherry Creek. If anyone else crashed last night, they're gone too by 8 or 9 a.m.
--
When Elijah wakes, Dan is in the room. Drowsing in a deep seated reading chair covered in a plush, patterned faux-velvet, an antique afghan half tossed over his body, wearing boxers and a Pixies t-shirt.
He hasn't slept much, Dan. Didn't know whether or not to wake Elijah, so he defaulted to no. But he sat there, or slept there, drowsing when he could. Skinny as he is, Dan is a tall guy, long-limbed so he folds rather awkwardly into that armchair, which Sera can curl herself into without a second thought.
Dan stirs, senses movement even in his sleep, and his sleep is light, anyway. Fitful. He wakes a moment later, with a deep inhale and rises, rubbing a spare hand over his face and beard, stretching, yawning, scratching lightly at his stomach. All the things one does when one wakes up.
In that moment, he glances at Elijah - a spare look, which is knit together with a subdued compassion - then heads into the kitchen.
He returns a few minutes later with a tray. A French press full of really fucking good coffee, the aroma sharp and savory in the room. Pours himself a mug, then pours Elijah one, and the first thing he says is,
"Cream or sugar?"
ElijahCream or sugar?
It's the cue that he has to sit up. It's the cue that he has to sit up and make his body work and make his head stop swimming and his hands stop shaking and he can only do one of those things so Elijah chooses to sit up. To fake composure. His hair is sticking up, a mess of blond strands and tangles. When he looks at Dan, he smiles, but his gaze is miles away. Not like he is present in this world or the net, but rather trying to forget that he can exist in all of them.
"Cream please, no sugar," which was a sign something was wrong because Elijah lived off of sugar, "it smells too good to doctor up too much."
There are times he seems his age, and this is one of those times. Hands on the edge of the couch, gripped like the fabric may fly away from him if he let go. There's an odd silence.
"… I didn't freak anyone out, did I?"
DanSo, somehow Dan is seated on the coffee table. It is a solid wood piece, nothing particle board, nothing plastic. That's the thing about this house, which feels both new and vibrant and lived in. Half the furniture has this vintage-I-got-it-at-a-spendy-thrift store. The rest is just: old, solid, well-made, antique or at least: from a time when people bought furniture for a lifetime from stores that sold things made in America.
Seated on the coffee table beside the coffee tray. Dan adds cream to Elijah's coffee and hands over the mug.
Listen, when things go wrong, sometimes you just need the motions to remind you that you are human, that the worst night of your life turns into the worst day of your life turns into another night that may not be as bad as the last one, and so on until you can remember to be normal again.
Reserved compassion, that is what lingers in the older man's eyes as he watches Elijah. It is not especially demonstrative but: he's right there.
And he shrugs in answer to Elijah's question, picking up his own mug. "I don't know. You might've, but people who live here've been through some weird shit, so they won't hold it against you.
"You wanna talk? Or just, decompress."
ElijahSeated on the coffee table beside the coffee tray. Dan adds cream to Elijah's coffee and hands over the mug.
He takes the mug into his hands and holds it. He doesn't drink it, but he holds it, because it feels good o have something sitting there and he wants to think about the sensation of it in his palms. His smile turns gentle and, for a second, those trembling fingertips are put to use and he brings the mug to his lips.
Takes a drink, but only finds French press and note he waters of lethe. He would rather not forget, though. No matter how horrible something may be, Elijah wanted to remember.
Does he wanna talk?
"Yeah," yeah I kinda… I wanna talk." he said with a nod. "Do you ever think about Nothing- like, a complete absence of everything."
There is a capital in his voice, something beyond just simple nothing and going into something primal and large. Something vast and dark and over reaching. The mention of it makes Elijah hold his coffee cup a little tighter.
Dan"Not," the older man replies - quietly. There's a modicum of a sort of gallows humor in his voice. This quick slip of his mouth that rises and then passes just easily. "on what you'd call a routine basis. Which I say because I figure you aren't talking about existensialism or Hegel or John the Scot or Aristotle."
He takes a sip of his own coffee.
"Is that what you dream about?"
ElijahThey weren't talking about existentialism, though thoughts and dreams of John the Scot or Aristotle seem enough to make Elijah laugh. It's a small sound, but he always laughed easily, even if he didn't quite feel like doing much else.
Elijah traced the top of the coffee mug. His thoughts wander.
Is that what you dream about?
"When it's bad," he says, "sometimes it's what happened, what could have happened, but it always leaves and it's all replaced with Nothing. A-and if I were more poetic or maybe a little more fucked up I would think it was beautiful, but there's nothing beautiful about it. I just remember wanting something to come back- some sight, some sound, some sensation instead of that.
"Tonight, something did come back… or… or maybe it was always there, but whatever it-" he falters here "-I don't want to know what it was. I've never not wanted to know something more in my entire life. I screamed, I cried, I begged but the only sensation that existed was knowing that I was alone with something that chose that place. A-and I'm afraid to blink, I'm afraid to rest, I'm-" he laughed, though the sound was closer to hysterics "-it'll all go away again. It all goes away."
DanDan gives Elijah a degree of privacy when the younger man confesses his dreams. His nightmares. His fears. He's looking away, mug in hand, blue eyes cutting to the fireplace, but for all that it is clear - still - that he is listening, closely. When Elijah falters Dan glances back, gaze shifting over Elijah's features as if he is sifting for clues about how bad this particular stumble is.
"What do you mean what happened, or what could have happened?" A request for clarification, or perhaps he is like a physician in that moment, lancing the boil to get the poison out. Then, a moment later, "You have nightmares like that every night?"
ElijahHe was afforded some privacy until he faltered, but once he did Elijah had to stumble to come back. For a moment, he was there, he was off wherever it was his mind insisted he be in that dream, and there were things he desperately, desperately didn't want to say lest they happen again. Lest he tempt whatever being he'd dreamt of the night before
"Like… sometimes, it starts off with when I awakened… like, what if I had grabbed my friend's hand? What if I pulled her in while I was drowning? Sometimes, i-it's about the hospital and staying," the mention of the hospital makes him wary, makes him nervous, makes him feel small and lost because his mind hadn't been his own there. He is afforded some privacy. "And yeah… it's… some nights aren't like this, though, it's not always so bad-" he tries to insist, tries to assure Dan, but it doesn't reach his eyes.
It is always that bad, just some nights he can deal.
Danan sighs. The sound is quiet but not disappointed and not reassured and certainly: not defeated. It's just a sigh, empathy and a kind of weariness that is not directed at Elijah or related to him. He isn't reassured, no, but he doesn't really need reassurance. People in the world he inhabits have been through shit. They can move mountains with their goddamned minds and they live through pain and he lives through it with them.
They still live. Right?
Right.
"Times like this," Dan says, with a crooked sort of something shaping his mouth. "I wish I had magic. Calm you down sometimes, help you sleep. You might feel weird about asking, but you shouldn't, and I'm probably going to tell her anyway, you should know. So if you need a solid, restful night - just talk to her. She'll give you a hand.
"Maybe there are others who could. I know Jim probably could.
"But I don't have that. I can't take it out of you and I'm sorry about that, but I figure sitting here is probably the worst thing in the world for you, right now. When you're still, all you are is a mind. When you're moving, well. You've got a shot at being just in your body, don't you?
"Wanna go for a hike?"
ElijahDoes he want to go for a hike? there is a thought, a thought that goes neither here nor there, but Elijah wonders for a moment- would he like to go on a hike. Truthfully, Elijah hadn't hiked in-
"Yeah, I'd like that. Don't I need, like, special clothes and stuff?"
- Ever, actually. Elijah has never been on a hike in the history of ever. He can count on one hand the number of times he's been camping, the number of times he's been out into the splendor of nature. Elijah and nature, truth be told, didn't always mix. Not for a lack of desire, but rather, because Elijah was never entirely certain as to what sounds he was hearing in the middle of the night. His imagination was active, though if they were moving Dan had a point. Maybe... maybe he could just be a body.
Dan"Hiking is like walking, except you do it out in nature and generally uphill," Dan returns, with a quiet sort of smirk. "I won't take you rock climbing, I promise. If you don't have hiking boots, sneakers will absolutely work.
"We can go as far as you like. Denver's a pretty good place for a helluva lot of outdoors type stuff.
"We could go to any number of state parks. Or, if you're concerned about being around too many strangers after a night like that, I have another thought, too."
Elijah"I've never done outdoorsy stuff," he admits with absolutely zero shame. It was something that he could focus on, and his thoughts traveled somewhere that was less off settling and more natural. More organic. Elijah, for his part, had his attention on Dan.
There could be a healthy distraction at that juncture, and when the man mentions another option his brows raise and his posture straightens and, like a puppy, he cocks his head ever so slightly to he side. "Whatcha thinking?"
Dan"Sera's rented this cabin for the summer, up in the mountains. It's a place with a bit of history, but nothing you'd need to worry about. There's hiking up there, too - and it's not open to the public so you're less likely to run into gaggles of tourists the way you would out at Roxborough or someplace like that.
"Or," a supple shrug, offered thoughtlessly, mug still in his had but a bit forgotten for the nonce. "There's the chantry. Have you been there?"
Elijah"The chantry?" he asks for confirmation, and Elijah nods as if this was the most normal of things, "Kalen took me there, I crashed out a couple times over on their couch... okay, more than a couple."
He doesn't mention if he woke up crying or if he screamed or if he wast hinking about how the walls seemed smaller and the outside seemed darker and the room was starting to feel quiet, oh god, oh heaven, please and-
Exhale.
It isn't real.
Inhale.
This is real.
Elijah closes his eyes tightly, and he mulls over his options before, "what kind of history? It's not, like, triple homicide might he... ya know, even if it is haunted, that could be cool. Can we go there?"
Dan"Like most places with history," Dan remarks, eyes steady on Elijah, crinkled at the edges as they search the younger man's countenance, take in the momentary ticks, the flotsam and jetsam that surface. The history that is not mentioned: all the many ways in which he wakes from the dreams that will not leave him.
The breathing, the exhortation Elijah gives himself to breathe, the steady familiarity of that exhortation. Exhale, inhale.
The goddamned rhythm of it. The fucking ritual.
Yeah, Dan can readh that in him too.
" - it's good and it's bad, and it doesn't really matter to you right now. You get to write your own story of the place. C'mon."
And so saying, Dan heaves himself up, a faint popping of joints from sitting too long on a too hard surface. He rubs a hand over his beard, then picks up the coffee cup and heads into the kitchen.
--
Elijah is given more coffee in a stainless steel travel mug with the name of a bar in Pocatello, Idaho on it. Breakfast to take with in the car: homemade English muffin sandwiched around local sausage with a gently cooked and folded egg and a local farmer's cheese if he eats meat. Sprouted seven-grain bread and vegemite if he does not.
--
A bit of a delay in there, too. Dan makes some calls, out of Elijah's hearing. Rearranges his schedule. Begs off from some commitment and makes new arrangements for some other meet-up and checks in with the housemates, too. Still, it doesn't take that long to get ready, and unless Elijah is depserate for a shower and a pedicure, they're on the road within twenty minutes.
It takes longer than that to get out of town, but at least they are driving against the flow of morning traffic, watching late morning commuters stream in the opposite way. Eventually, they leave the four-lane highways behind, and start climbing through the front range of the Rocky Mountains. An isolated road turns off onto and even-more isolated road, and so on until they pull up a gravel driveway.
The cabin is... rustic, to put it politely. It looks like something thrown up by the park service in the 1970s: cannot have more than one bedroom, and nothing about it seems contemporary or fucking modern. Firewood stacked outside, well away from the stairs leading up to the deck, and a ring of seond and third-hand lawn furniture beneath the hanging branches of scrubby pines surround a stone-circled firepit. And on and on.
Dan kills the engine and exhales and shoots Elijah a glance and says, "Here we are," as the engine of the old jeep he drove up here ticks quietly beneath its hood. "C'mon." He goes on, climbing out of the car.
ElijahHe gets to write his own history of the place. He gets to think of it as somewhere not where something horrible happened, but where he went when he needed somewhere else to go. When he needed somewhere that he could breathe deep and steady and sure of himself and force the world back into his lungs and the taste of coffee could follow him along.
Elijah followed Dan into the kitchen.
---
Elijah Poirot does, in fact, eat meat. And is more than happy to have breakfast in the car
--
Elijah spends his time on the couch. He starts in a sitting position, waiting and occasionally checking his phone- he calls out sick to work on account of being crazy. His work understands, if only because he is a student worker with a History and they're forgiving of the fact that they don't want to potentially get sued for firing the schizophrenic guy for taking off on account of having an episode. If Elijah ever mentions anything about the medication he doesn't take or the things he's heard the young man's manager is quick to let him do whatever necessary just to shut him up.
Other than the fact that he was batshit insane Elijah Poirot was a good worker and a personable employee.
He gets in the car with little fanfare, and on more than one occasion Elijah's grip goes white and his breathing hitches and he tries, desperately tries, to rem ind himself of where he is. To his credit, he didn't ask Dan to pull over once, though he did spend most of the drive with his eyes closed. A shame, really, because ELijah suspected the view was beautiful, and if he could convince himself that the world would still be there and that the cold on his skin was just the air conditioner then he would certainly be fine.
He would be fine.
Everything would be fine. There was a world out there, more beautiful and terrible than Elijah could imagine and he was given a life to experience all of it. How much more wonderful could things get.
---
The first thing Elijah does when he gets out of the car was gasp. He inhales sharp and took in the air. When he turned back to Dan, his eyes were alight and alive and bright. Something delighted by the sheer beauty of it all. This was nature, this was what he had been missing. The younger man wandered out, hand grazing some nearby tree and brushing over the bark.
"Ohhh, is this what summer camp is like?"
DanHard to credit those swings in mood. Or see them or live right alongside them: the terror, the live-wire tension in the car, the nightmares-made-real that make Elijah's skin all white and something about his gaze edge toward the sickly and then,
out here,
this sudden joy. The delight.
Dan's rather stoic in the face of all of that. He lives with an ecstatic, after all. He fucking knows this shit like the back of his hand, like the branching veins in his body, the way they spread out from some central point when you are too high to fucking move and the earth is starting to take root in you. And he's sliding out of the driver's door and shouldering a small day pack he packed earlier and glancing around and listening to the silence and he doesn't look especially outdoorsy, in his skinny jeans and tattooes and Pixies t-shirt and - well, he does have hiking boots on - but whatever.
He seems comfortable here.
He's all familiar with the measure of silence.
"Summer camp has more panty raids and shittier food. So I'm told. I went to jazz camp on the campus of Carlisle College in Dickinson, Pennsylvania, not color war camp, so what the fuck do I know."
A quick survey of their surroundings, inhaling the pineneedle scent.
"Bathroom's inside if you need it. If not, I figure we can start with up.
"It's harder than down."
That, my friends, was a joke.
Elijah"Oh thank God," and immediately inside with him for the restroom.
Elijah returns a good five minutes later.
"O-kay, let's go commune with nature, into the fray!" because nature, you see, was very clearly the fray today, "what do you play? I mean, I've heard you play before, but what else do you play?"
Dan"Guitar. Bass. Mandolin. Banjo - " a smirk, here. Quick and sure. Elijah wants to commune with nature so Dan sets off, fairly sure-footed, confident enough to be familiar with the area, at a pace that is quick enough to get one's heart rate up, to require less thought and more action and this is also deliberate, see. It is the only magic he knows. "Pretty much anything with strings. A few things without. Piano. The odd woodwind, from the jazz camp days."
The first obstacle they reach is a bounder-strewn stream, swift-running and dark with tannins from the piney woods all around. Lower than it might be earlier in the spring - but Dan's familiar with this too. Knows just where to find stepping stones across its widest (and, therefore shallowest) point and leads them across, into the woods on the otherside, dappled sunlight drifting through the pine branches.
"What about you? Play anything?"
Elijah"Eh, piano has strings, but I don't know what family that goes it… I think it's technically a percussive instrument? Because of the hammers and shit," he said, because apparently Elijah knew something about the piano. Something, yes, because-
Does he play anything?
"Piano," he replied nonchalantly. There wasn't terribly much pride there, or shame, but he does continue on, eyes playing across the little patches of light and dark and the shapes they made on the trees. He makes his way across the stream, lingering for a second in the middle with a smile on his face. The whole place smelled like pine and he couldn't help himself. couldn't keep from smiling that smile that came too easily, but continued on when he realized he couldn't stand in the stream on the stones forever.
No, just long enough, precisely as he had intended.
"When I was in fourth grade, my mom was looking for something that would even me out? So I played piano. I'm not, like, any good but I can work my way around a keyboard. And a harp, but seriously, it never comes up."
Dan"We'll play together sometime,' Dan remarks, tossing another smirk over his shoulder. They're over the stream by now and - yes - climbing. "I'm curious to see how you'll work a harp solo into a cover of I wanna be sedated."
--
Dan is as good as his word. They climb. The scenery changes, the further they get from the stream. The piney woods becomes more sparse, opens up into meadowlands, studded here and there with ribs of rock over which they have to scramble. Here and there are poorly maintained trails marked by the odd blue or yellow blaze. As they climb, the sun rises. They encounter no one else, although at one point they cross a blacktopped road with no shoulder, curving around the slope they are climbing. Like everything else, it is deserted.
The sun and the exertion conspire to make small talk less appealing, less needful, less necessary. They hike until Dan's t-shirt clings to his spine, damp with his sweat, until - perhaps - Elijah remembers that the world is real, because it is only measured by his heartbeat and he can feel his heart pounding in his chest. His heartbeat and the beating of the sun down on everything. By mid-afternoon they have gained a ridge high enough over the treeline to give them a view. Not a soaring view, the world made small, but a view nonetheless. They eat up there - simple food. Protein bars and a bag of fresh cherries. Sandwiches Dan threw together back at the house. A bag of chili-cheese fritos and some slightly-melted GORP.
Down is easier than up, but still has plenty to occupy the body so that the body occupies the mind, and Dan keeps the conversation light, when there is conversation, or listens - quietly, thoughtfully - if Elijah wants or needs something else out of any interaction. It is a long goddamned day and at the end of it Dan grills some steaks he left thawing in the fridge while they went higher, slices up some day-old baguette to mark garlic toasts. Digs out some chocolate chip oatmeal cookies and a bottle of whiskey for Elijah, which they can eat around a small fire Dan cultivates in the fire ring.
They do not spend the night.
But by the time Dan drops Elijah off at the younger man's apartment, he has probably had enough sun and exercise, food and whiskey, that his body will want to sleep, insist that he sleep, drag him down into sleep the minute his head hits the pillow, no matter what his mind says.
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