Sleeping Beauty

Elijah
[Nightmares]
Dice: 4 d10 TN7 (5, 5, 7, 7) ( success x 2 )

Elijah
[how many drinks in are we?]
Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (4) ( fail )

Sid
[percept (paranoid) + awareness]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 3, 3, 3, 6, 7, 10, 10) ( success x 4 ) Re-rolls: 2

Elijah
[per+aware]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 3, 6, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 4 )

Elijah
There was a house (in New Orleans) they call the Rising Sun.

They call it that because the paint job is atrocious, but nobody in the neighborhood has the decency to tell the couple who owns the litle two bedroom shack that they have managed to make their house look like a New Age crystal shop. Maybe that's what the couple does. They were older, which read that they weren't twenty anymore, but happened to have a lot of artist friends and an abundance of tattoos.
Jenn got Elijah into this little house party, mostly because she did work for these people. There's a phoenix on the woman's back that Jenn had been working on for the better part of a week, somehow manage to work that cobalt color she loved so much into it because sometimes a flame burns so hot it's blue at its core. Jenn had an eye for these kinds of things, and the owner of said house was more than pleased with the results.

They had been at the party for an hour and a half, and Elijah was alread four drinks in. It wasn't his fault this time, really, because this time Elijah had been being good and the next thing he knew someone handed him a shot of something, and then he did a shot of tequila and then he had some kind of iced tea and then there was a PBR, which he was nursing right now. There may or may not be a shot of tequila in it.

He didn't really believe in slowing down, but he was still articulate. Still remembered his name and his address and where he had been and who he had come with. Occasionally forgot to speak English, though, which seemed to get him far with the brown haired gentleman he was chatting up. He worked in an office somewhere, Elijah missed that part.

Attire was comfortable. Vest. button up shirt. Jeans. Pocketwatch, because pocketwatch. He even had a tie tonight, too, but it was loose and more like a little noose around his neck. He would no doubt lose it by the end of the night, or tie something to something else with it like a lasso.

That's what neckties are for, right?

Of course right

Sid
Sid is not inside the house.  Not yet, maybe not ever.  It isn't very large and it is very full of people and Sid hasn't been fond of small and crowded places for some time.
No, Sid is on the street, on her way from one place to another.  The place: a coworker's home for an early July 4th slash after-work barbecue that she couldn't comfortably beg off completely.  The other: the place down the block where she parked her truck.  Ordinarily the walk would be nothing to her.  She is not yet thirty and she is athletic.  But she - or rather her body - spent the bulk of June prone and unmoving in a hospital bed.  She's past the point where she needs to magic strength into her muscles, but she's still weak.

Her heart hammering in her chest, her breathing is already becoming shallow when she walks past a two-story house with a poorly-planned paint job.  There are people all inside of it, so many that they've spilled onto a small square of yard that is midsummer brown infused with green.  Sid, dressed in jeans and sneakers and a short-sleeved shirt, ducks her chin as she passes a group of young men leaning against one of the many cars parked in the narrow driveway.

"Hey, gorgeous, you here for the party?"

Sid wraps her arms around her torso and continues.

"Don't be like that," one of the others adds, pushing off from the car.  The third among them puts his hand on the second's arm to arrest his motion, stopping him from doing whatever it was he'd had a mind to do.

Somewhere Sid senses a thread of tumult, a breath of unrest and chaos.  It's coming from the house.  Hunching her shoulders, she keeps walking.

Elijah
There's a feeling. There's a feeling that is familiar and he begs off because curiosity gets the better of him. It always gets the better of him, because he feels desperation. desperation and euphoria and he knows both of these feelings so well. His attentions travel to outside of the house and with a kiss on the cheek and a bright smile, the blond man made his way outside.

There was a stag, something strong and powerful with shoulders hunched making her way down the street.

There were hunters; Elijah didn't care much for man. Men, yes, because dear god they were fun, but mankind as a species tended to be a little less than favorable. All the same, Elijah preferred humanity to mankind. There was some distinction to be made there. desperation. Euphoria. Empowerment... but her shoulders were pulled in and the tall woman seemed smaller.

No, no this wouldn't do at all, Elijah concludes.

He looked onward, a little too drunk and not quite knowing what's going on here, missing the context.

"Sid?"

Sid
Her name being shouted out across the neighborhood has her stopping suddenly.  There is something slow and graceful about the way she turns her head, as though it is burdened by the weight of vastly branching antlers.  And the way she looks at the young man who's come outside the house.  Even in the fading light of day he can see the weariness, and the wariness followed by a momentary confusion.  It shadows her brow and tightens her mouth.

But she doesn't flee.  She does not turn and bound away.  And perhaps because she doesn't she remembers where she saw the young man last.  In Kalen's office, the last time in this world that Sid talked to the Hermetic.  Right.

"Sid, huh?  That short for Sidney?" one of the prime examples of Mankind asks, not yet ready to back off like his friend.

"That's it, you guys are cut off."  Humanity steps in in the form of the third, pushing off from the car to collect his two more inebriated buddies.  He doesn't take them away, though, but guides them back inside.  He doesn't look back at Sid to offer her an apology via expression on behalf of the others, which is just as well.  Sid's attention is focused on Elijah.  She would have missed the look, but she doesn't miss that they are leaving, and that now most of the revel spillover is centered around the house.  Her shoulders relax and her spine straightens, but Sid does not relax.

Elijah
He's very green. That's a good way to put Elijah, he's green in so many senses of the word. His eyes are green, he is young, he is vibrant, he isn't golden like the poem insisted- earth's first green is gold. He doesn't know better. Doesn't know that things went from awkward to worse with Kalen and Sid. What he does know, though, is that she is walking around and she is there and he can't help but want to bridge the gap.

They aren't friends. They aren't even familiar with one another save for that pang of familiar resonance. Elijah smiles all the same, bright and wide-eyed with wonder. When he speaks, the south creeps into his voice- unashamed of its own presence.

"I'm glad you're awake," he said once there was enough distance to do so. Said with the sincerity like he actually meant it. Odd, because he doesn't seem like he should be a creature capable of guile.

Looks are deceiving.

Sid
Sid knows better than most that looks are deceiving.  The people who should have protected her didn't.  The people she trusted shouldn't have been trusted.  The people she loves most have all made their ways away from her and out of her life forever.

She knew boys like Elijah once, back when she was young and full of the vibrancy of life.  Back before those boys taught her that wary countenance.  Before new people came along and renewed the lesson.

That's why, when he approaches and says that he's glad that she's awake, Sid turns her body so that she's facing him directly.  It's why she watches him while remaining aware of her surroundings, the people lingering near the cars or up by the house.  And Elijah.

"Me, too," she says eventually.  Her hair is down, spilling over her shoulders in curling waves of dark red.  Her t-shirt is yellow with some sort of image, but that image is distorted and mostly hidden by her arms, which have yet to lower.

"I don't remember your name."

Elijah
He stands like he's come as close as he can to a wild animal, like she will bolt or he'll get gored, because he knows better than to anger anything so ancient. It is instinct; he knows better than to ignore instinct, lest he be reminded of those lessons. Elijah puts his hands up for a second, surrender for a moment before letting  them fall where she can see them.

No sudden movements. No running jumping springing restlessness, but it is still with him. under the surface, barely restrained. He is perpetually in motion until he finally, finally falls to rest and spring to life again the next day.

But let it be said for him that Elijah? Isn't running from her. He isn't retreating.

"I'm Elijah," he offered again, "it's been awhile."

He inhaled sharply, "I guess you are not here for a party."

Sid
The bried raising and lowering of his hands gets a slight if temporary frown.  It takes more than that for the older woman to trust a stranger, but that he does it, that he stops advancing, that he seems willing (for the moment at least) to respect her space goes a small way.

He offers up his name again and Sid nods once.  She won't forget again.

As for the party, she shakes her head slightly before saying, "No.  I just left one."  Not that it was anything like the one going on inside the small house.  This close it's easier to see the dark smudges beneath her eyes, stark against her pale complexion.  For a few moments her skin was flushed with exertion, giving her an almost healthy appearance, but that's fading now.

She frowns again.  "Did you need something from me?"  Like that's the only reason other mages approach her anymore.  When they need to be healed usually.

Elijah
"Do you wanna go get waffles?"

Sid
Sid's frown deepens and she looks away, down the street in the direction that she was going.  Maybe she can see her truck from where she's standing or maybe it's hidden behind the row of cars.  Something about this - or maybe it's just something about him - makes her stomach tighten.
Face still turned mostly away, her eyes shift back to him, considering him and his offer and also his condition.  The flush of his cheeks, the look and light of his green eyes, if he's swaying.  She is gauging just how drunk he may or may not be.  People who are drunk are prone to unexpected actions, but sometimes they are also easily overpowered.

Does she want to get waffles?  With him?  No, not really.  But she is tired and she would like some coffee, and places that sell breakfast food at all hours tend to serve coffee at all hours, too.

"There's a breakfast place on Santa Fe.  I think they have waffles."  It's a breakfast place, why wouldn't they?

Elijah
[what did I do? Awarepathy!]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )

Sid
Sid isn't hiding her wariness.  Stomach-twisting is because of his resonance.  Mostly, though, he's a stranger and he's drunk and she's paranoid.

Elijah
"Can I walk there?"

There was a note that he wasn't asking her for a ride, but certainly he was not good to drive. He drove a motorcycle, Beyond that, he hadn't actually driven that night. If he took the keys, Jenn would never forgive him. which was saying something, because Jenn- darling sweet Jenn- forgave Elijah for any number of things that he did not actually need to be forgiven for.

He shouldn't have been driving in the first place. His cheeks were flushed, but his eyes weren't quite glass. He didn't quite sway, but he did have the fluidness of motion that indicated he would be a couple shots away from swaying. he has a smile that comes easily, though, and that was the worst. He smiled like he meant it.

"If I can't, do you want to have a rain check on waffles? Like, on Tuesday?"

Sid
"It depends how you feel about walking, I guess."

Talking to Sid when she's like this, when she's in an unfamiliar neighborhood talking to unfamiliar people moments after other strangers tried to harass her.  When she's tired, and when her fear and wariness are riding high.  It is rather like talking to a wild animal.  One wrong move and she'll bolt.  One wrong look and she'll tip her head down and shred someone to pieces.

Elijah, even a little drunk as he is, has an instinct that tells him to give her space.  He asks her if she wants waffles and then offers a rain check.  He offers to meet her again in a planned place at a planned time.  Finally, Sid relaxes.  Doesn't lower her arms, no, but she does hold herself a little less tightly.

"It's a couple blocks that way," she says, tipping her head to the west, away from the neighborhood with its small and artful or rundown (or artfully rundown) homes and toward the strip of galleries.

Elijah
Sid doesn't seem like she does surprises; Elijah feels like surprise somewhat regularly. Ironically, he felt like expecting the unexpected.

"Cool, uh... I'll see you there in about twenty minutes? Or we could walk together," he offers. He's drunk, but he offers anyway.

Sid
"Are...are you sure you can find it?" she asks.

Elijah
"Yes?"

No, no he was not sure.

Sid
[hmmmmmmmm let's go WP to resist helping the puppy find his way]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 3, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )

Elijah
[passive awareness]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (4, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 4 )

Sid
His mouth says yes but all the rest of him says Uhhhhhhhhhhh?

Sid frowns, but then Sid is always frowning.  Few get to see the laugh and smile lines at the corners of her mouth and eyes, evidence of a life that was once full of love and laughter and joy.  The lines of her frown are finally starting to set in to her skin, and to overtake these other signs of the life she's lived.
Looking away, she pulls the messenger bag resting against her hip forward.  Reaching in, she pulls out a simple white-tubed Bic ballpoint pen.  Then she looks at Elijah, or more to the point, she looks at his hands.  Hesitantly, she reaches for one of them, her palm up to show that he should place his atop it, glancing up at his face and nodding very slightly to say without words It's okay.  Even though she's the one who is nervous, not him.  But it's important for her to let him know, even silently as she does, that she isn't going to hurt him, either.  Not physically, anyway.

If he lets her take his hand she steps a little closer, pulling his arm to her and adjusting where she stands so that she can write on the inside of his wrist.  Her hands are gentle and warm.  They are good, strong, comfortable hands.  He can see that on the inside of her own there is a tattoo.  Two concentric circles around a dot, with two dots on the inner-circle and four on the outer.  Beneath it, and at an angle that it's upside down to him, are the words WE ARE MADE OF STARSTUFF.

With just a few strokes of her pen, Sid draws out a small map on the inside of his wrist.  One line for the street they're on, one for a cross street, one for Santa Fe, with small arrows to indicate directions and the names of the streets in tiny, precise handwriting.  It's as she draws a tiny circle to indicate his destination that he'll start to notice it.  The air around them tints toward something green.  The breeze when it washes over Sid brings with it a hint of something fresh and new and growing.

"It's called Swifts Breakfast House."  Releasing him, she tucks the pen behind her ear and steps back.  "I'll keep an eye on you."
[Life 1/Corr 1: Bio Tracking, coincidental and practiced]
Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (2, 5, 10) ( success x 2 )

Elijah
[don't touch her tattoo!]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 7, 10) ( success x 2 )

Elijah
Elijah craves contact. He is a very, very physical person. He is a strange dove, but a dove none the less. He isn't as solidly built; he wasn't going to be running an marathons or winning any boxing matches. If he told someone he once broke an orderly's nose, someone would probably laugh and not believe him. He's more prone to caged desperation than any actual harm.

It's a good sign that he craves touch. he's not nervous, though, has no problems offering skin.
His pulse is bright and live and vital. A steady, slow drum beat. His eyes fall to her tattoo, and there is a strange fondness that crosses his features reserved. His fingers twitch just once once the pen drags across his wrist. Something warm stays on his senses. Elijah closes his eyes and lets it all wash over him- it felt like home was supposed to feel.

"Swift's breakfast house," he repeats, and he takes a step back along with. His eyes are bright and he looks down at his wrist and the little map there. "I'll see you in twenty?"

Wrong, but he doesn't know that yet. He doesn't know that it'll take him a solid hour to figure out precisely where he was or that he would get distracted by shiny things. Bu, he should expect it at this point.

Sid
It may come as a surprise to many, particularly to those who don't get to know her very well, but Sid also craves physical contact.  Every human being - nearly every living thing on the planet needs it.  It creates a connection that Sid bolsters with her magic, tagging Elijah's Pattern as it were so that she can do as she says and keep an eye on him.

She touches him but even though she doesn't hold his arm gingerly or limit the contact as much as she can, she doesn't hesitate to move away when she's finished her map.  A map that will soon prove completely useless, but neither of them know that yet.  When Sid moves away from him there is a sense that it is not simply to get away from him, but to get herself away from him, give him distance.  Sid craves contact but what she's learned over the last several months is that these people, the ones that she's met and cared for and loved, these people have been hurt because she's come in contact with them.

So she puts a space between herself and Elijah, almost more for his sake than for her own.  And he repeats the name of the restaurant dubiously, which makes Sid dubious in turn.  Her mouth firms into a line and she looks at him uncertainly.  But her magic is wrapped all around him.  She can feel the pulse of his heart thrumming in her own veins, can feel the way that their very atoms seem to be connected in this moment.  If he should get lost, she will know where to find him.
Which is good, because in five minutes she's driving up Santa Fe toward Swifts and, rather than pulling up to the curb to park, she passes it with a sigh.  She guides her truck around the block so that when Elijah reaches a cross street she's already there waiting for him.  Rolling down her window, Sid leans her head out to call, "Elijah!"

Elijah
He hasn't had a chance to sober up yet. Nope, on the contrary, he finished his beer and very politely deposited the can in someone's recycle bin, because if he is going to be drunk in public he is going to do it while being environmentally conscious. Elijah continued along the way, blithely unaware that he was going in the wrong direction and had read his arm upside down until someone was calling his name.

Someone was calling his name.

It made him jump, pull his arms up and look around for the source. Sid can feel his heart rate spike, his adrenaline course, dopamine flow and god damn he should be a lot more drunk than he is, because she knows precisely how much he's had and how much he can take. Always pushing the limit, this one, or unaware of what that limit was.

It hit him that it was Sid yelling at him, and he stagger/sauntered down her way.

Sid
Sid is aware of the effect the exertion of walking what was supposed to be only a block and a half but which has turned out to be slightly longer is having on Elijah.  She is aware of his elevated heart rate and the moment when his BAC spikes.  He is a young and healthy male, however, and so she knows he's not at a level that is dangerous.  At least, not dangerous enough that he shouldn't have been trusted to walk that block and a half without issue.

That was Sid's problem.  She still hopes and has trust in people's sense, reason, and ability.
He stagger-saunters over to her and when he's close enough that she needn't raise her quiet voice too much, she asks, "Do you still want waffles?"  She doesn't know.  Maybe he changed his mind and that's the reason he's wandered off course.

Elijah
"Have you seen the new Avengers movie?"

Sid
Confused, off guard, and immediately wary, "You mean the one that came out two years ago?"

Elijah
"Yeah, that one," he replied. He paused, "Has it seriously been two years?"

Sid
Sid doesn't answer that question.  In fact, she doesn't immediately speak again.  She looks at Elijah and then she turns away, looking down the street ahead of her, considering.  After a moment she turns back.
"C'mon," she says, "get in.  You need food."

Elijah
He is a force of nature, or at the very least forces those around him to exercise their better nature. He was... an interesting young man. He continued along, because she w`as right Elijah did need food. His stomach growled in agreement and he followed along in line by her like a confused duckling who hadn't figured out that he needed to be behind people instead of caddy corner to them. "Anyway, I'm always in the mood for waffles."

Elijah
(on a one or a ten he falls asleep in her truck)
Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (9) ( success x 1 )
Sid
[do you seem sleepy?  alertness?]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 5, 5, 10, 10) ( success x 2 )

Sid
[Life 3 coincidental: You seem tired and I don't know that you have nightmares and also I'll probably feel better driving around with a strange drunk boy if he's asleep, let's help you take a nap, threshold of 2 (1 to target, one to snooze briefly)]
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (4, 8, 10) ( success x 2 )

Sid
It's a good thing that Sid has her hazards on, letting the cars behind her know to go around her while she talks to a young man.  Traffic forms a steady stream of cars along one side of her truck while she climbs out the other to head him off and get him inside.  Which she does, noticing the weariness of him.  It's something that is separate from the drunkenness, but is in no way helped by it, surely.  Taking his hand as she helps him up into the cab, she focuses a moment on the drawing she made on him.
Climbing up onto the step, Sid slides the seatbelt across him and carefully locks it into place.  Stepping down, she closes the door gently before returning to the driver's side.  Within seconds Elijah will feel a deep weariness bear down on him.  Not enough to knock him out should he choose to fight it, but it will be a hard fight if he does.

Sid climbs up into the driver's seat, closes the door, turns off her hazards, and drives.  Not to Swifts, it'll be busy tonight.  Most places will be busy tonight.  She goes instead down Santa Fe, past the I-25 overpass to Breakfast King.  They are better used to dealing with crowds.

In the parking lot, Sid parks the truck somewhere toward the back.  As she kills the engine, she undoes the Working that she put over the apprentice and waits.  Either his weariness wins out, and he keeps sleeping, or he wakes.

Elijah
[am I tone deaf?]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 7, 7, 9) ( success x 3 )

Elijah
He takes her hand and climbs into the cab of the truck. He marvels at how her hand feels, how she is warm and the feeling of empowerment fills the air. He doesn't quite know that something might be going on, because he doesn't know something has sot[[ed happening. He still believes her first effect was in effect, and Elijah looked at her with those green eyes of his and he smiled.
He starts to nod off, but tries to snap himself back to reality, to fight it off with some kind of sound. Like a small child, he sings-
"À la claire fontaine, m'en allant promener- J'ai trouvé l'eau si belle que je m'y suis baigné," hé wasn't bad by any means, but there wasn't the sustaining poet in his tone. He was most assuredly  tenor, maybe a baritone at best but that was neither here nor there. The sound was achingly sweet, a song for pining, "Il y a longtemps que je t'aime- Jamais je ne t'oublierai"
They get two minutes into driving before he can fight no longer and finally succumbs to sleep. By the time she is undoing her working, Elijah is… still surprisingly deep in sleep. Hr makes a little sound, something almost concerned, but he doesn't wake up.



At about this time, the young man's cell phone starts going insane.

Sid
If Sid spoke or even remotely understood French the song might have more meaning for her.  As it is, Elijah could start singing Frère Jacques and it would still threaten to make her chest hurt.  Within minutes, though, his voice trails and his head lolls and then he's out, leaving Sid in relative silence.  She glances at him once and then turns her attention to the road.

In the parking lot, when she lifts the effect and finds Elijah still asleep, at first she assumes that he was tired.  He was drunk and needed to sleep it off.  He just needed the sleep.  Which is good.  For one shining second Sid starts to think that maybe she is capable of doing good after all.  The only downside is that now she's stuck with a sleeping young man.

It's while she's pondering this dilemma that his phone goes off.  At first, Sid ignores it.  The ringtone goes and goes and stops.  Then goes and goes and stops again.  And again, and again.

Finally, frowning deeply, the corner of her bottom lip disappearing between her teeth, Sid undoes her seatbelt and slides across the bench seat, the better to locate the source of the ringtone.  When she has it, she looks at the face of his phone, at the name on the caller ID, the picture if Elijah's put pictures with his contacts.  Swiping her thumb across it to take the call, Sid sings her hair away from her ear, holds the phone up and says,

"Hello?  Ah.  Elijah's phone."  Her quiet voice seems almost an ordinary volume in the relative silence of the cab.

Elijah
"Elijah Renee Poirot if you are going to hook up with people, you need to tell me-" a tiny woman snapped on the other line, which was about when she realized that there was a voice she did not recognizing answering Elijah's phone and-

"Ohmygod, I am so, so sorry, is Elijah there? Did he lose his phone?"

There was a moment of silence, some stammering and- "oh, uh, if you have his phone and not him, Elijah's the blond guy in most of the pictures, I can come get his phone if you need. Is he with you? He isn't with you, I don't hear talking."

There is a picture of a brown haired woman of questionable ethnic origin licking his face on the caller ID. The name next to it said - ICE Jenn

Sid
At first Sid holds the phone away from her ear, letting the snap of the voice on the other end sail harmlessly past her ear canal.  Then,

"No, he's here.  He's," she pauses, looking at him slumped into the corner of her truck, the seatbelt all that's keeping him sitting upright and not sliding to the floor.  "He's asleep.

"Actually.  Are you."  Jenn can't see the way that Sid frowns as she tries to put together the words to express what she wants.  "Is...is there somewhere I can take him?  So he can sleep not in my truck."

Elijah
"Oh god, he didn't crawl into your truck bed and go to sleep, did he? He's done that before," she said with no small amount of worry.

Jenn, patient Jenn, does let her worry stew and she waits. The little bleeding heart waits patiently, tries to come up with something to say, "I could get him if you want? He could sleep in my car, I mean... you could try and take him home, he should have his house key in with his pocketwatch. Left pocket."
Wow, he does have a pocketwatch in his left pocket.
Jenn's good.

Sid
"No," says Sid.  In another life, the question of whether Elijah crawled into her truck of his own volition to pass out without her knowledge would have been met with an understanding laugh.  Sid was like that, too.  Once upon a lifetime ago.  Now, though.  Now her voice is quiet and steady and nearly void of inflection.  Elijah didn't crawl into her cab and she's neither concerned about it nor upset.  But the fact of the matter is, there is a boy sleeping in her truck and she would like him not to be, because she is tired herself and would like to go home and lay down.  But she's not going to take Elijah home with her, and she's not going to leave him in his truck or somewhere laid out in the grass to wake whenever he wakes.

"No," she says again, to the idea of Jenn coming out to her to pick him up.  She isn't much for caregiving, but it seems to her that Elijah would be better off sleeping on a couch or a bed or some other soft, comfortable thing that isn't her truck's bench.

"I can take him home.  If...I mean."  Sid frowns again.  The trouble with being untrusting of others is the knowledge that others who don't know her won't be trusting of her, either.  Not until she proves that she's trustworthy.  Only how do you prove your trustworthiness over the phone to a stranger?

"If you give me his address.  I can take him home, and...and I promise I'll just drop him off and go."

Elijah
She promises.

She promises that nothing will happen, that she'll just drop Elijah off and leave, nothing weird. Nothing terrible. Jenn nods absently, unaware that the woman on the other line can not see her nodding. Can not see her trying to think through what may happen and puzzling through worst case scenarios. She realizes, at that juncture, that they have nothing worth stealing. Nothing worth taking save for the sleeping cargo with her.

"I-I'll text you the address, I'll meet you there if you want, but like I said his house key is in his pocket, please be careful with him," she all but pleads. Whoever this young man is to the woman on the phone, he means the world to her.

Soon enough, there is a bing on his phone with an address.

Richard
There is a rap on the window.  A very tall, very blonde man is standing outside, his forearm braced along the top of the truck, his shoulders hunched to peer in.  He's wearing a faint, quizzical smile, and when Sid looks at him he waves with three fingers.

Rest of his fingers are holding a doggie bag from Breakfast King.

Sid

"Okay."

That's all Sid says at first.  She cannot see Jenn on the other side of the phone call, but she knows how she would be if their roles were reversed.  If she called looking for- for Frank, and some other voice answered in his place.  She would be frantic.  She would be affecting a demeanor of calm, but she would be frantic.  Desperate.  And she would be so happy to find him safe and unharmed she wouldn't care if she came home to find their house cleared out completely.

"I'll put your number in my phone.  Ah.  I'm Sid, by the way."

She is, for those just joining us, sitting behind the wheel of her old blue-and-cream-and-rusted truck, in a parking space toward the back of the Breakfast King parking lot.  There is a young blond man quietly snoozing in the passenger seat, head lolled toward the window.

Sid
[don't freak out: WP]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 4, 4, 8, 10) ( success x 2 )

Sid
There is a rap on the window and Sid, distracted from the presence of patterned and oceanic resonance by her own dilemma, starts.  Body freezes, shoulders tighten, and her eyes narrow beneath a tense brow.

When she turns and sees Richard outside of her window some of that tension eases, but not all.  One hand still holding someone else's phone to her ear, she uses the other to roll down her window.  Yes, it is a manual-crank window.  Sid's truck is closer to Richard's age than to the boy in the passenger seat.
When the window is half down, just enough for her to speak without having to stretch her chin upward, Sid says quietly, "Hi."

Richard
"Hi."

Long, lanky Richard with his lazy, easy grin: he looks in at Sid, and then at Elijah, and then back at Sid.

"You didn't roofie my friend there, did you?"  It's a joke. Mostly.

Sid
"No."  What she doesn't say is not exactly.  There was nothing slipped into the last drink that Elijah had about a mile north of the Breakfast King, not by Sid and not by anyone else.  She would know.  Until about ten minutes ago Sid was aware of every process running in the boy.

There is the kind of silence coming from the phone that lets Sid know that it's ended, so she lowers it.
"He was drunk and tired and restless so I helped him fall asleep.  I thought he'd wake up when we got here, but..."  The phone in her hand lets out an alert - a tone or a buzz, something that sounds different than the calls Jenn made to it only a few minutes ago.  Sid looks at the screen, catches the message as it flashes across the top, and lets out a small sigh.  Leaning in against the side of her car, Richard can see that Elijah isn't the only one.  Beneath the lights of the parking lot Sid is a sickly kind of pale.  There are dark shadows beneath her eyes and, should Richard open up his senses, he'll detect recent workings.

"I'm taking him home now."

Elijah
The knock is faint, and not enough to actually wake Elijah up. The little blond man, who wasn't little by any means he was thin but he was six feet tall so he wasn't a petite creature by any means, was a heavy sleeper. The young man was probably just being he'd up by the seatbelt and the good graces of the powers that be. He did, however, look like he was sleeping, which was a familiar look for Richard because he's seen how this kid passes out and it looks just about like that.

Richard
"Hm.  Okay."  Richard eyes Elijah for another moment.  Then those remarkable eyes, ocean blue, come back to Sid.  "Did you two run into trouble or something?"

Elijah
[Did I sleep okay?]
Dice: 4 d10 TN7 (1, 2, 3, 7) ( success x 1 )

Sid
"Not today," comes the reply, and for a moment Sid wonders if they shouldn't make signs.
It has been ___ days since Denver's last crisis.  Or
Denver's crisis level is- with a wheel of colors and a needle pointing out a color spectrum.  But where would it go?

Sid's reddish brows tighten and she looks at Richard, her expression thoughtful.  The look in her eyes is somehow older than she is.  Like something ancient moves just beneath the pale surface of her skin.  Something animal and wild that seems at odds to her quiet demeanor.

"If you're worried you can come with us."

Elijah
Car alarms are obnoxious.
Car alarms, as a rule, are always obnoxious. There is never a point when they are not because they are supposed to be obnoxious so they will get attention. Most people drown them out, but the sound, coupled with the rather loud cursing of the owner of the car nearby whose panic alarm wouldn't shut up, happened to be enough to rouse the young man from his slumber.

Not as well rested as he could be. He inhaled and he smelled something sickly sweet. Something that smelled faintly of decay and he had no idea no one else could smell it, that it was his imagination carrying things over.

He groaned, and suddenly was aware of precisely how much tequila he'd had in a short amount of time.

"… sonofabitch.."

Richard
On cue, Elijah stirs.  Richard straightens up a little, his forearm atop the car lifting off; now just a hand on the frame.

"Nah, it's all right."  He quirks a grin.  "Looks like Sleeping Beauty woke up, anyway."

Sid
A car alarm starts blaring from the car beside them and Sid tenses again, eyes shifting to that side, watchful of the stranger cursing.  That watchfulness subsides when Elijah shifts.  The sigh Sid breathes is one of relief.  An awake Elijah should be able to get himself from the truck into a building of some kind.  Or at least he won't be dead weight for her to attempt to carry.
She starts the engine again.  For as old as the vehicle is, and for as ill-kept as the exterior is, the engine sounds alright.  Like it's been cared for to the best of the ability of one who can't afford for it to break down.

"Okay," she says.  "Take care."

The Kick Always Comes

Elijah
The apartment was decent enough, in that it had potential and Sid didn't have to actually drag him up the stars. He started up, a slow and purposeful gait and he had himself wondering how on earth he had fallen asleep so quickly, blithely unaware of the fact that Alicia had been calling him or she sheer amount of trouble he was going to be getting himself into. The fact that Jenn hadn't made it home to give him the business was probably testament to Jenn's inability to find her own car keys in any given situation.

We digress. There were a number of reasons Jenn wasn't there yet.

He didn't think to think of Alicia, or how she must be upset. He wasn't thinking of the aftermath of his little stunt. no, Elijah was thinking about his phone and how irritated he was that it didn't have better battery life.

Sid
It's good that Sid doesn't have to try and carry Elijah.  Her body is still recovering, and she has already worked so much magic today.  Not that she wouldn't do it, but she was glad when Elijah started to rouse in her truck.  It meant he was okay after all.  It meant she wouldn't have to try and brave a drive with two men she barely knows in her car, or have to be there when Richard caught them up.

Still.

When they reach Elijah's neighborhood and she parks her truck, despite her weakened state and her own paranoia, Sid offers to support him to his building and through the door.  On his way up the stairs she stays behind him.  If nothing else she might be able to break his fall should he topple backwards into her.

Their ascent is silent, and continues to be so - at least from Sid's quarter - until they reach his door.

"Will you be alright on your own?" she asks, because she has to.  There are the things that Sid thinks about herself and there is the truth of what she is, which isn't the same.  Truth is, she's a healer.  Truth is, she can't in good conscience walk away from here without knowing that he'll be okay.

Elijah
"I'm not that drunk," he tells her. He lies, doesn't know he is lying because he is pretty tipsy. Nothing a good night's sleep wouldn't cure, though. No, it is his pride, and it is his sense of… what? Decency? Compassion? Once he figures out how badly he scared Alicia, he's no doubt going to feel like an asshole. Beyond words, like an asshole.

Not at all like right now, when he just felt lightheaded. He couldn't help himself, his thoughts kept drifting to places he knew they probably shouldn't. It's passed the time he said he may fall in love, played off hopefully as a joke because if… no, nothing had changed between them. things were still kosher, and for that he was thankful. A perceptive creature, but terribly obtuse when he needed to be.
He lingered at the door, but didn't retrieve his key just yet.

"Are you okay?"

Sid
She could, if she wanted, check him herself.  She doesn't, though.  Not because she doesn't believe him, but because she's already read his Pattern.  There is nothing wrong with him, no defects or illnesses or wounds.  Nothing has changed in the last hour except that he slept and slept hard for a good thirty minutes.  And also because it's not imperative.  She doesn't need him in perfect shape to get them through the next obstacle course fate throws at Denver.  Not right now.  Probably not ever.

"That's not what I asked," she says quietly, because she is almost always quiet.

Elijah
"Are you going to leave if I tell you I can make it on my own?" he asked, almost cautiously.

Sid
Without a word, Sid merely inclines her head slightly in a small nod.

Elijah
"Are you okay?" he asked again.

Sid
"I've been worse," she says and, taking his response to be answer enough, she steps back, preparing to go.  "You should sleep some more.  And drink a lot of water.  The altitude and the arid climate, they'll make your hangover at least ten times worse."

Elijah
"You feel like empowerment and joy and something beyond joy, but…"

He knows he shouldn't say this. he knows he shouldn't call people on their physicality and he knows that he shouldn't say anything about how people carry themselves because he has no idea what happened. He has no idea what is going on or how things work. He has no idea how or when or why things went so southerly with Kalen, but what Elijah does know is this:

Sid isn't okay.

Not right now, even if she has been worse before.

"When you walk, you keep your head down and your shoulders in, like you're expecting a kick in the ribs that never shows up but you know it's coming. I don't believe that you're okay, even if you have been worse, you could be a lot better."

Sid
Sid is quiet because Sid seems to have always been quiet.  There was a time before the quiet that no one would believe existed, not after seeing her how she is now, how she's been the last several years.
Sid is quiet, but the silence that follows Elijah's observation is palpable.  It becomes an invisible wall, a dividing line that stands between them.

For a moment Sid considers telling him something.  He's not drunk enough to forget, though, and she's already done enough to him today.  For a moment she considers showing him, but that would be cruel.  And she has been unknowingly and selfishly cruel too much and to too devastating an effect these last few years to do it on purpose.

Instead, she says, "You've seen me once."  Then she turns and starts away, but she stops.  At the end of the hall or the top of the stairs, or both.  She turns her head, looking back at him over her shoulder.

"And the kick always comes."

Elijah
"I'm not going to be okay if you leave," he replies hastily.

Sid
[oh yeah?  percept (paranoid!  whaddayou want!) + awarepathy]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8) ( success x 2 )

Elijah
What does he want?

There is a feeling, a concern, an imperative that he can't help. Elijah looks at her, and even if he is drunk, he is concerned. She's a stranger, but he seems to care about what happens. Looks are deceiving, perhaps he wants something else, because people always want something.
But it's hard to find out what it is that ulterior motive is.

What it comes down to is simple enough- he really is just concerned. He doesn't seem to want in her pants or to convert her to becoming a Mormon or anything. He just... doesn't want her to leave because she's hurting.

Sid
He just cares.  There is a part of her that is moved.  Not enough to stay, though.  For it, it comes down to trust.  And the fact of the matter is that she doesn't.  Doesn't trust him, doesn't trust herself.  Doesn't trust anyone.  She thought for a while that maybe she could trust people, but that was a terrible mistake.  One that she will be paying for for the rest of her life.  One that she isn't likely to make again.

"Then I suggest you call a friend."

Elijah
[Should I push this? Awarepathy]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 3, 6, 6, 8, 10) ( success x 4 )

Elijah
He has to push.

He has to, because she's already shut down, and maybe she'll get it if he keeps trying. Maybe she'll stay if she keeps trying, and he knows he shouldn't, but there he is. Elijah inhaled, a little drunk but there is a certain clarity to him, a moment of understanding and self-awareness that came with knowing his limitations and knowing how to read others.

"It's not… It's you, I don't care if I've seen you once, I know how this whole being awake thing works, it's a reflection of who you are- you're a contradiction, you're stuck."

He inhaled sharply, "if you walk down those stairs, I don't know what will happen."

Sid
One step down Sid pauses.  One foot is lowered, ready to accept her weight and carry her down down down and away, and it stays that way for just a little longer.  Hand reaching for the railing, Sid looks back, and when she looks back her expression is solemn, but determined.  Despite her weariness and her wariness she is steady.

"No," she replies, a calm counterpoint to that sharp inhale of hiss.  "You don't.  It's not your job to know, and it's not your job to fix me, either."  Turning away, she takes that steps down, and another more quickly than the last, eager to be away.

Elijah
"Goodnight, Sid," he replies. Sounds wounded... perhaps he is?

No, surely he couldn't be. This stranger, this person who has met her once. This person whose heart bleeds so easily, who first met her while she was having a fight with Kalen. This person who felt like an outsider so often, who ached and burned and hurt so clear and true that it was almost palpable. Je took a step back, this child, and another. Soon enough Elijah exhaled, and started to let himself in the apartment. He fumbled with his key, but he waited to hear if she left before going inside.

The Importance of Hiking

Dan
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.

Elijah

He 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.

Dan

There'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.

Elijah

What 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.

Dan

Housemates.

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?"

Elijah

Cream 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?"

Dan

So, 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."

Elijah

Seated 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?"

Elijah

They 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."

Dan

Dan 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?"

Elijah

He 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.

Dan

an 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?"

Elijah

Does 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.

Elijah

He 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?"

Dan

Hard 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.