Independence Day Eve tradition dictated that there was a celebration in Civic Center Park.
Something about free admission and patriotic concerts followed by light shows and fireworks. Denver citizens invited to bring their own picnics and blankets and sense of pride - Kiara Woolfe was no great follower of tradition. She didn't adhere to the notion of wearing colors for the long weekend or waving sparklers around as dusk settled but there was something almost comforting to the normalcy in sitting with her back against a tree as evening settled and watching families sprawling across the lawn; children running free and wild in the lead up to the light show.
The grass a sea of beach chairs and picnic baskets and red, white and blue.
The Verbena had no picnic to speak of but she did have a blanket thrown down beneath her; shoes removed and tucked up beside her body; a pair of sunglasses still perched atop her head. Hers was not the embodiment of celebration but the quiet contemplation of a witness. Kiara's fingers curled around her knee; one drawn up in lazy respite. She'd been sitting there long enough for activity to build around her, couples arriving and taking up ownership near by but there was still modest space between the brunette and the nearest.
In the sea of bodies out as a warm evening settled in on the city, the brunette was just another figure lost to the banking afternoon light.
SerafíneAwareness.
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 4, 6, 8, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 6 ) Re-rolls: 1
SerafíneThere are kids with sparklers and dad with beers and mothers with visors and beach chair set up on the lawn. Food trucks and strangers on stilts and a whole arena of patriotic bouncy houses. The peppered brightness, the jostling murmurs as people fill in the lawn and compete for space on the fringes. Spreading out, distributing snacks and drinks and responsibilities ("you watch your sister, Amy! I mean it!"). Vendors sell everything: balloons and cheap flashlights topped with fiberoptic cables, red white and blue stuffed dogs and monkeys and sharks, t-shirts and trucker hats and blankets and bikinis. People are playing frisbee and bocce ball but the games get getting more and more crabbed and stunted as more folks fill in the greenspace all around.
Among but not of them: a stranger cutting through the dark. She doesn't have a blanket and doesn't have a crowd and doesn't have a beer-in-hand, though she has acquired an unlit sparkler that she taps against her thigh as she picks her way through the park.
Barefoot because her heels were sinking into the trampled ground.
Beeline for Kiara. Could feel her from a mile away, in her throat and behind her eyes, beneath her ribs and in the most primitive ganglia of her brainstem: everywhere, everything.
This sharp silohuette against the wider darkness, hair a shadowed tangled, the bulk of a leather jacket belying the thin frame beneath. Thumbs hooked through the loops of her denim cut-offs, heels dangling against the meat of her bare thighs, shadow falling across Kiara: just so.
"I'm surprised." A glance up at the still empty sky: darkness still wrapped around with light from the setting sun. "Doesn't really seem like your thing, you know?"
Kiara Woolfe[Oh, we should do this too. Awareness.]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8) ( success x 3 )
Kiara WoolfeShe feels Serafine coming, it's the barely there but building sense of something with her. This captivating sensation; like pinpricks across her skin; the slightest shift under it. It's a drawcard - she - was a drawcard and it's a wonder at times, like tonight, with the illumination framing her and the buzz and activity that seems to fall away and become muted as it flows around her - it's a wonder to Kiara that they all don't just stop and stare at this creature as she threads a way through them.
Like some barefoot wonder of compelling chaos.
She feels her coming and tilts her head back when she's there, her shadow falling across Kiara's throat; her features; that red-coated mouth. She's dressed in a worn denim jacket over a pale sundress, the pagan. There's a tangle of necklaces around her neck, the flicker and gleam of others around one wrist; rings on her fingers.
"It's really not." This easy, warm greeting. Kiara's cherry painted mouth curling in a smile; her eyes shift over Serafine, bare toes to crown of her head and then return to her face. "I felt a compelling need to be around a whole lot of people and just - " She casts her attention out beyond them to the scope and shape of the celebration; the raucous noise of it all; humanity at its finest (and perhaps, worst) in the height of jubilation.
"- disappear for a few hours. Plus, I don't entirely mind the fireworks." There's a beat, then: "Sometimes it's nice to just watch people."
Serafíne"That's what I do at a great show, you know? Down in the pit. Not the people-watching, mind. The dissolving, yeah, or something close to it. I mean, I guess people do that at nightclubs, too, with DJs and shit, but I can't really handle the canned music.
"Or, well, I'd rather have bleeding fingers and broken guitar strings than a sound-board and a dude in headphones plotting all that shit out."
Sera does this neat, brimming little survey of the crowd, turning in place balanced on the ball of her right foot, takes in the organic movement of the host all around them, the drift of smoke over the park from one of the food trucks offering barbecue, the quiet sense of - well - wholeness that sometimes comes over strangers gathered in one place, for one purpose.
Finishes the survey with a lashed glance at Kiara, a closer survey, then pads around the blanket and takes a seat beside her.
"You seem different," Sera tells her, quiet now. Dropping her shoes to the ground beside her.
Kiara WoolfeShe does feel different. The brunette's presence has lost that edge of devouring, destructive certainty. There's a subtle pulse to Kiara, now. A drumbeat that keeps in time to that rejuvenating signature of hers. She's changed and it's there in the smile she throws Sera's way as she settles beside her, a tinge of something aware and bittersweet and yet - not wholly without the same sharp humor Kiara has always carried with her like armor.
The Verbena with her dark eyes and red lipstick and brief, sharp-edged smiles.
"It happened on Beltane. I was out near Morrison for a party and - " She lifts a shoulder; settles back then, opening her body to conversation; turning her profile toward the other female. " - I woke up the next morning in a field." She absently plays with the edges of the frayed blanket she'd brought with her; its checkered in navy and red, a fine thread of white running through it; Kiara's thumb plays over the vein of it. The line where the colors bleed together.
"I saw Annie the other day at the Chantry. She took me out to Roxborough State Park. Have you ever been out there?" Kiara's eyes move to Sera's face, there's a subtle play of pleasure that slips into her voice; her dark gaze. "It's beautiful. The trees grow so heavy and close in places it's hard to even push through. She took me on a hike."
Kiara's smile dims, her chin dips low. Nearby, someone has lit a sparkler and it hisses as its waved around; the light reflecting in the Verbena's sunglasses. The distant peal of excited laughter.
"Did you know there was another Node out there once?" She shifts a little; her face turning to look out over the crowd. "There were a lot more of us here."
Serafíne"Did you go looking?" Dark eyes touch Kiara's profile, then drop to her mouth, her hands, the blanket, then away. "Or did it just find you?"
Then,
"Mmm." That noise is a quiet negative, mostly throat-caught, captured and pinioned in the body. Reflective. Sera is leaning back now, bare feet planted on the blanket, arms back, hands behind her hips, supporting the curve of her spine. "Haven't. Usually when I go hiking I go to this cabin I have. Not far from there, but - "
A supple shrug.
"I didn't know that. Doesn't surprise me, though. Alot of things have been lost. Was it the War?
"Or before?"
Kiara Woolfe"I think I knew it was coming. I could feel something. I just had no idea what it was until I saw her standing beside a bonfire." There's a shaping of her lips into a smile not entirely without humor but the softening doesn't quite reach her eyes. The little breath she expels. "You just know in the moment. It was like looking at my reflection."
She's quiet a minute or two, then: "The War. It was. Is. They came and slaughtered everyone. Couldn't take the Node, though." There's a noise of mingled defiant pride and disgust. The fire in that look she shoots Serafine is purely primitively glad for it. "Too fucking wild and alive for their machines and God forsaken static reality. So they killed it, too. There's a grove where everything is dead out there. They sucked the life right out of everything. I looked across and it was just - empty."
She frowns down at her hands.
"I think that's why I'm out here tonight. It's easier than remembering that." She looks over at Sera, then. Her eyes roving over her face, the curve of her cheek, the framing of her body there against the blanket. "It's good to see you, though.
How's Dan? Not out feeling the patriotism with you?"
Serafine
Kiara says that she knew it was coming and Sera makes a quiet noise, beneath her breath. Not precisely recognition, this, so much as awareness, acknowledgment, something else: wry, hmmm? Glances at Kiara's profile, the reflections of sparklers in her eyes.
"Mine doesn't look like me. Part of me, yeah, but she has never been my reflection. The last time I had no idea it was coming, I stumbled into it, or maybe she pulled me in. Next time - "
This quick, supple shrug, expressive and wholly unguarded.
"I'm ready now."
--
Then, another shrug in response to Kiara's question about Dan. "He's around. Somewhere. We'll meet up later - probably have people over later if you wanna come."
Sera's mouth closes, thoughtful, then she glances back at Kiara, returns to the topic of the broken node. "Why do you think Annie took you out there?"
Kiara
I'm ready now.
They'll have people over if she wants to come. It's been a while since she's seen Corona Street and she makes a faint, affirmative noise. "I'd love to," confirming softly, easily.
The Node, again. She's looking at Kiara and there's a minute after she asks where the Verbena doesn't speak. She's looking out, away and her brow is drawn, expression unreadable in the settling dark. "They were a coven. The ones that died. Verbena. I think - "
Kiara's eyes narrow for a beat where she stares off into the distance; into the crowds; her mouth twisting and offering up some spasm of remembered grief for a moment past, for women she'd never known who died a long time ago. Her eyes tick back to Serafine's face and she makes no bid to conceal that lingering emotion, the residue of it clinging to her voice, her dark eyes, the downturn of her mouth. " - she wanted someone else to know. To remember their names."
Serafine
Then she'll find you.
(She might say something to that, Sera. It is there in her: in her spine and in her skin, in her bones, in the texture of her being, in the work and in the Work that has brought her here: that something about here, and something about now, and something about where she is and where she is going depends not on Her finding Sera, but on Sera striving: and finding, Her. There is meaning in that thought, that desire, that ideal, that Work to Sera - more meaning than perhaps even the creature herself can fathom, but she feels it, feels it as a physical thing and - also - a change in her.
Could consume the certainty of it and find herself on the other side of it.
But the moment has changed; shifted. She says nothing. Feels that thought like a flame inside her, incandescent.
Burns with it. Knows.)
--
No. A flicker in her dark eyes. Awareness, yes. Empathy - soft and bruising and intense, of course.
"How much witness do you wish to bear?" The briefest of pauses, a twinge of her mouth. "I'm a Seer. I can See." The past, she means: oracle, of course. "And share. And show."
Kiara
She'd known other Verbena that could See. That could scatter runes on a table in her Mentor's home outside New York's city limits and glimpse beyond; into; the eternal moment. Could foster the precise moment to act; when it was ideal to move. They could unsow the seeds and return to witness the grandeur of the towering Oak; could stand at the ashes of all things and know.
"There aren't any spirits left there, you know. That emptiness when I looked across - I've never seen that. That even nature's been torn away and doesn't hold a reflection anymore. It's - " Kiara's voice is gentle, she seems pained, an earth witch stripped of her power must feel so, one imagines. Must feel acutely the strangulation of her source of comfort and kinship. The wellspring of so much of her magic.
"What I looked at hurt but it's not the same as seeing. The way you do."
Her mouth flits slightly; softens into some trace of admiration. "I could find it again. The clearing. If you want to see it too." A pause. "Maybe want is the wrong word, but - " There's a little breath as she looks down between them; rubs her thumb across her palm as if she could still see the cut she'd sliced into it with the other Verbena, could still feel the blood she'd offered to that withered, dying stump. An offering. A mark of respect.
"I could show you."
Serafine
An awareness in the air around her; more measured than bright, but see: her profile against the dark, sharp, the strange, thoroughly immoderate, thoroughly appropriate celebrations of others all around them make the moment somehow both more intimate and more universal. The spectacular tableau that casts the private moment into sharp relief.
What she is aware of is not so much the shock of that absence (she knows, after all, little or nothing about the spirit world, Our Sera, does not count that knowledge among her varied skills. Does not care to, precisely, either), but the grief that absence engenders in Kiara.
Dark eyes flick over Kiara's countenance, the curve of her mouth, then drop as if in tandem after Kiara's to her palm.
"Show me."
--
Simple, yes?
"But not now."
--
Quite as simple, too.
Because the twilight around them has softened and has deepened and now the raucous noise of the crowd and settled into more of a lively, organic hum as couples and friends and families gather on their blankets and in their camp chairs in the buzzing darkness. There's a stage somewhere, right? And music of the sort one expects to find on a day light this, full of trucks and warriors and waving flags and mommas and sacrifices. Death because death is life is everything, in the life of a man or a woman, in the life of the mind and of the spirit, and even the life of a country.
The music's stopping though, the last strains of an old drinking song fading as the stage lights are cut with a final blazon of phosphorescence against the sky, and then the fireworks begin.
Her mouth flits slightly; softens into some trace of admiration. "I could find it again. The clearing. If you want to see it too." A pause. "Maybe want is the wrong word, but - " There's a little breath as she looks down between them; rubs her thumb across her palm as if she could still see the cut she'd sliced into it with the other Verbena, could still feel the blood she'd offered to that withered, dying stump. An offering. A mark of respect.
"I could show you."
Serafine
An awareness in the air around her; more measured than bright, but see: her profile against the dark, sharp, the strange, thoroughly immoderate, thoroughly appropriate celebrations of others all around them make the moment somehow both more intimate and more universal. The spectacular tableau that casts the private moment into sharp relief.
What she is aware of is not so much the shock of that absence (she knows, after all, little or nothing about the spirit world, Our Sera, does not count that knowledge among her varied skills. Does not care to, precisely, either), but the grief that absence engenders in Kiara.
Dark eyes flick over Kiara's countenance, the curve of her mouth, then drop as if in tandem after Kiara's to her palm.
"Show me."
--
Simple, yes?
"But not now."
--
Quite as simple, too.
Because the twilight around them has softened and has deepened and now the raucous noise of the crowd and settled into more of a lively, organic hum as couples and friends and families gather on their blankets and in their camp chairs in the buzzing darkness. There's a stage somewhere, right? And music of the sort one expects to find on a day light this, full of trucks and warriors and waving flags and mommas and sacrifices. Death because death is life is everything, in the life of a man or a woman, in the life of the mind and of the spirit, and even the life of a country.
The music's stopping though, the last strains of an old drinking song fading as the stage lights are cut with a final blazon of phosphorescence against the sky, and then the fireworks begin.
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