glad you're back. [kalen]

Kalen
Kalen has largely ignored the Chantry for the better part of the year.  He's largely ignored a lot for much of the year.  Now, though, it is Christmas.  Kalen would probably buy his nemesis Christmas presents.  He can certainly come back to the Chantry for Christmas.

And he has.  There is a tree, as promised.  It is a much smaller affair than last year.  And alive.  It is blue spruce rather than some greener, longer needled pine, wreathed only in white lights and white ribbon.  There are stockings for everyone he has reason to believe might be in Denver, and, oddly enough, stockings for people who were in Denver for prior Christmases even if he knows they won't be here this year.  Near where he has hung the stockings there are two heavy canvas bags that smell like citrus and clove.

At the moment Kalen is distributing candles onto practically every available surface.  Candles on windowsills.  Candles on tables.  Candles on countertops.  So many candles.  Some are red, some green, some white, some gold, some silver.  They are being decorated with ribbons in similar colors.  There is an open bottle of wine and a half empty glass vying for space on the dining room table where he is tying three white candles together with a wide gold ribbon.

Kiara[Awareness!]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 4, 7, 9) ( success x 2 )

KiaraThe Verbena that pulls up to the Chantry house on the other hand is a semi-regular visitor to this place. Regular enough that her hatchback bears dust marks all along the doors and back windows from the uneven gravel it traverses over en route.

A door opens and slams, there's footsteps and then a polite one-two rap before the ranch door is nudged open and a figure slips inside in a whirl of crisp evening air that flutters no few amount of Kalen's candles. The flames flickering and dancing before they settle and a floorboard creaks under foot as Kiara Woolfe appears in the foyer, a basket of offerings under one of her arms.

She's halted as much by the scene of festivity as she is the sight of the man decking the Chantry with Christmas decorations.

"Kalen." His name is also the greeting she gives and when he turns to sight her, it's to witness the pagan leaning against the doorframe, her eyes traveling over his efforts. "This is ... something." There's a curl of the Verbena's mouth upwards, her arms loosely folded over her chest, basket set by her feet. Even dressed as casually as she was, the pagan's eyes were painted with dark, dramatic liner, her mouth a familiar bold slash of red lipstick.

Ever the embodiment of nature's whims, the female, it seemed.

"When did you get back into town?"

Kalen[How distracted by Resonance are we?]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 3, 3, 5, 6, 9) ( success x 2 )

KalenKalen finishes tying up the candles into a bundle before he looks up at her.  "This is nothing compared to what Shoshannah used to do."  There is a flicker of a smile.  "Last year I made cookies and threw a tree decorating party."  He is reacquainting himself with speaking English.  With being in a place where he has any reason or desire to be guarded.  His cadence is different.  There is no sign he is looking for a trap or some reason to fight.

"And, as mentioned on Ginger, pinatas."  He settles the trio of candles on the hearth.  "Apparently not everyone loves pinatas like Grace.  Although I did convince Alyssa to come stake vampire pinatas in their gummy hearts.  But she's gone now."  He is focused on lighting the candles, or at least that is where his face is angled, when he says, "Sometimes you remind me of her."

"Anyway," he continues.  "This morning.  Should I get you a glass?"

KiaraIt's not the first time she's been told she reminds people of those who had come and gone - it's become enough of a regularity in fact, that when he expresses this, the response is a slight lift of her eyebrows and a little lingering smile as she scoops up her basket and carries it over to the table, setting it absently in one corner. The contents looked to be offerings of the season - of a fashion.

There were bundles of herbs tied together within it with various small bottles and what appeared to be a small golden statue of a blazing sun.

Winter solstice essentials perhaps, from the pagan to the Cabal in residence at the Chantry.

"Absolutely. I want to hear about your trip." She drags one of the chairs out and settles into it, drawing a knee up and curling around it, her fingers gently teasing at the edges of one of the candles he's already finished setting out. The flame draws her eyes for a long moment before they tick up to study his face.

"I'm guessing you've already caught up with Grace." Softer, that. This edge of something vaguely somber there. She's dressed in an oversized sweater, the brunette. Her dark hair left to spill in unconstrained waves over her thin shoulders, it casts her into a younger aspect somehow; spills the suggestion of vulnerability into the planes of her face. The draw down of her mouth, the fine shape of her dark eyes.

There's a pair of necklaces around her neck, the fine chains of both comprised of silver, a stone set at the end of each; one a darker, round gem and the other a longer cut of crystal suited for scrying. "There's been a lot going on while you were away."

KalenKalen vanishes into the kitchen long enough to pick a wine glass for Kiara.  He runs the first two fingers of one hand over the label.  Pours her a glass of wine and holds it out to her.  It's a malbec.  Chilean.  Dark fruit and smoke.  Kalen tastes other things in that wine, but those tings are more memories.  "I'm always away from somewhere.  And there is, always, so much going on.  I'm sorry I couldn't be here, though I don't know that it would have changed anything...at least...not for the better."

He picks up his wine and takes a sip of it.  "My trip was...have I ever told you about why I go to Santiago?"  He sets down his wine.  Starts wrapping a red pillar candle with slender white and red ribbons, working out a pattern as he circles the candle and twists the ribbons.  Kalen's eyes stay on what he is doing, but the act itself seems more like muscle memory than concentration.

KiaraHe doesn't think that his presence would have changed anything and there's this tight little flex at the edge of Kiara's mouth. Unspoken agreement, perhaps. She accepts the wine and holds it carefully as she adjusts her weight where she sits; dropping her knee in favor of leaning back a little, her tongue tracing over sharp little teeth.

"Maybe not, but - it doesn't mean you weren't missed." Kiara's expression dances on a knife's edge there, lingering tremors of whatever it is that's happened around her (to her) ghosting into her eyes, drawing a tiny line of consternation between her brows. "It was - a lot. Grace was amazing, though. Not that it would surprise you to hear it, but - I think you'd have been proud of the way she handled herself." It's noticeable perhaps, that the Verbena doesn't mention her own role in anything that had (or was) ongoing in the city.

Vague accounts and retellings on Ginger notwithstanding and Kalen could, no doubt, piece enough together even without her version of things.

She pauses to take a sip from the glass, then. Smooths her fingertips over the tabletop as he resumes wrapping up a candle, watching the easy dexterity to his motions. There's this consideration to it, the way Kiara observes this that suggests the routine of it reminds her of something.

Or someone. Her eyes shift, traveling over his form to his face, his eyes bent to the task. She watches him for a long moment, then. "No, you haven't. But I got the impression it was something you felt like you had to do."

Kalen"I'm always proud of her," Kalen says quietly.  "I can't imagine that changing."  He ties off the ribbons, sets this candle down on the mantle but does not light it.

"I may have been missed.  But, honestly, almost no one here agrees with the way I tend to want to handle things.  This may have been an exception, but my being in the middle of something here very rarely seems to make it go more smoothly."  There is a quick, grim smile.  "And I'll stir everything up again soon enough I'm sure."

He turns to face her, his eyes suddenly on hers.  "How are you?"

Kiara[Manip + Subterfuge, tiny pool for trying to act cool about traumatic events activate!]

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (3, 6, 10) ( success x 2 )

Kalen[Perception + Empathy because I see this roll coming....]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 4, 5, 7, 10, 10) ( success x 3 )

dronehttp://www.sadtrombone.com

KiaraThe quick, grim smile is answered with a crooked variation from Kiara, one that struggles to hold structure there when he asks how she is. She holds his eyes long enough to respond: "I'm fine. It's - you know, whatever, right? Things are always going on in this town." She drops her eyes away as she scrapes the chair back against the floorboards and reclaims her basket, busying herself with unpacking some of the contents out onto the table.

The Verbena's dark hair falls over her shoulder, partially shielding her expression from the Hermetic as she works, her dark brows knitted together.

-

Fronting, of course. And it's no difficult task to see she is, the female. It's right there buried in those dark eyes and the way something like remorse and guilt and who knew what else sparked in them before she quite pulled them away. Distraction is the name of the game and there are so many tells, with trauma.

The tiny way it slivered into day to day life. The slightest tremble in the Verbena's hands every now and then when stress built. The way she stared off into the distance, counted dark corners in a room while out as if were necessary. In the here and now, it unpacks itself in the structure and deliberation of her actions.

In the fact she's baldly lying to him to avoid pressing her fingertips against that fresh, painful wound. He could leave it, if he wanted to. Allow the brunette to skirt around it, allow the conversation to steer on.

But it lays there, like a root exposed.

-

"I'm not sure any of us ever really know the right way to handle things." That she does offer, while she sets herself a task.

KalenIt is, for so many of the Flambeau, in their nature to press an attack.  If Kiara expects that, she would not be the first.  He had to know when he asked her what he was asking.  There was that sudden intensity and he did, at least for a second, press forward.

And now, Kalen lets Kiara pull away.  Refills his wine glass.  Gives her a moment to unpack the bag she brought with her, eyes tracing the motions of her hands.  Cataloguing her offerings.  He's fascinated by the ways in which they all do magic.  Their tools and their understandings and the way those come into harmony.

And those things are, in a way, why he's decorating this year without anything overtly Christian.  It is, for him, about Christmas.  And yet...absent that knowledge he could almost as easily have been decorated for Yule.  Trace back far enough and it is the same thing, traditions stolen or traditions hidden.

He takes a green candle and a length of red velvet ribbon and offers them out to Kiara.  "Last one," he says quietly.  And it is not the last candle but it is apparently the end of the decorating.  He's running out of places to put the candles anyway.

KiaraHe's not the first to press her to speak of it, in his way. He likely won't be the last to notice the way the Verbena's eyes adopt a vaguely far away, haunted tinge. It is, in part, a sad counterbalance to their lives. It is what weighed up their days and their loves and losses, the changing of the seasons marred with happenings and traumas that slowly tipped the scales.

That had no choice but to, you see. They defied reality and where did all that pressure have to go but to feed back into their lives, their psyches. Things bruised and scarred and scratch at the surface of her but a little and the Verbena standing across from him with downturned eyes and a supple, expressive mouth that was just now compressed into a line of stubborn distraction was not without her own set of blemishes.

A man divorced from reality in her apartment, his blood on her hands only a night ago. Another in the same apartment, in the same room, who'd been possessed by the spirit of something dark and twisted. She's no cowering damsel, Ms Woolfe, to fear death, not this creature of cycles and renewal, who paid homage to the Goddess and understood that there had to be a price - that balance mattered, in the cosmic, greater scheme - there would always have to be a price exacted.

Saplings sprouting in the decaying ruin of felled trees, ecosystems fed by the fox that perished in the wild.

Still - he doesn't force her hand and in some way, perhaps, she's grateful for it. There's this tiny hesitation that speaks of that: the tick up of her eyes as he holds out the candle and ribbon, the surprise that wars with gratitude in her expression. The way she ducks her face and tucks hair behind a lobe in a spontaneously, sweet little moment of unguarded pleasure.

"Thanks. I thought I'd do something for Annie and the girls. They've put up with all of us stomping around their place enough." She picks up her wine glass, then, Kiara and with a thoughtful little swallows, offers: "I saw the picture you got for Ian. The one in his apartment. It's beautiful."

Kalen"Mmmmmmmm...." Kalen says.  "I always assumed that he lived in the poshest of posh trees."  There is some amusement there and perhaps a little surprise.  He never saw Ian's apartment.  Does not even really know where Ian lives beyond that he can walk to that champagne bar.  There is a second where it seems that perhaps he will say something else, but then instead he pushes away from the table, picks up the box of matches open on the table and offers it to Kiara.

"Come."  It is, on the very surface, a command.  But the tone turns it into more of an offer than anything.

Kalen heads for where all the stockings are hanging by the living room fireplace or leaning against the edges of the hearth.  There are so many things he could say to her.  Perhaps they would be the things she wanted to hear.  If he was even luckier, they would be the things she needed to hear.

Except they don't work that way, words.  They have their own power.  Their own magick.  But only in the moments when they align with the moment in all the right ways.  He expects he could say the perfect words and leave Kiara unmoved.  For a second he tastes the memory of a dream of fire slowly being overwhelmed by sunlight and moss.

He smiles, warm and calm and not entirely for Kiara as he reads over the names traced in glitter on the stockings.

Kiara[Perception + Empathy: What were you thinking of saying, Kalen? Does Kiara notice?]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 8, 9) ( success x 2 )

KalenIt is hard to tell what, precisely, he might have said.  Not because his expressions are closed off to her but because there were no words quite close enough to the surface to clearly catch the final shape of them.  There is empathy and memory and a kind of impulse to reach out that she hasn't often seen quite so readily visible with Kalen.  Probably it has something to do with something that happened to him, but Kiara isn't familiar enough with his history to easily guess what it might be.  But whatever it was, it probably was not about Ian.  That surprised him, but his attention didn't really catch there.

KiaraShe watches him for a moment, Kiara, much the way she'd looked at the painting hung in Ian's apartment the first time she'd seen it.

There's interest banked there and the same settling sort of awareness that her expression had possessed then, too. This quiet sort of focus that reads her study of every tiny nuance and cadence in his voice. As if she were absorbing the details the way she had the strokes of the brush on the canvas.

It had been the sort of picture she'd have chosen herself, for the Orphan. She'd said about as much to Ian at the time. There's a little curl of the Verbena's lip up when he adds he supposed that Ian had always lived in a treehouse. "Not quite but ... it is meticulous. In a very Ian sort of way." Kiara's fingers have strayed to toy with one of the necklaces around her neck, she curbs the habit after a beat, dropping her fingers away and curling them up against her thigh as if burned.

Come, he offers and Kiara watches the retreat of his back for a moment before she does. Collects her glass of wine and navigates around the length of the table to follow after him, her movements betraying an easy sort of grace that transfers itself into the manner she deposits herself into the arm of one of the scattered sofas; folds her legs up and cards fingers into that dark mane of hair to prop her head up, elbow on the rest.

She's watching the fire as much as the decorations. "You really do like all this, don't you?" She asks, with no small amount of humor. "I always used to hate this time of year growing up. My parents would throw these ridiculously large parties and the house would be full of strangers who came just to say they did." There's a flare of bitterness there, underplaying the humor.

"Even now, I don't really do much when the winter solstice comes. Old habits die hard, I suppose." She leans over to set the glass down carefully.

KalenKalen kneels beside the bags he brought, pulling out one small clove studded orange and a single gold coin.  He stays there for a second, very still.  "When I was young, Christmas was me and my sister Melody and my mother.  Melody...if she had lived I think that she would have been a lot like Grace.  But she died when she was nine and I was six.

"We both did, fell through the ice a frozen lake.  Only my heart started again."  There is a slight pause.  "I was alone after that.  My mother...she went into a kind of shock I guess, and then...then a lot of alcohol and a lot of drugs.  She doesn't even know who my father is.  We didn't have Christmas after that.  I didn't again until I joined the Order.

"My mentor and I did.  He was like a father to me, after I got over being sixteen and a total jerk.  It was great, really.  We'd do this whole thing with the Chantry and it was...ridiculously ostentatious but gorgeous."  His voice shakes a little, in ways it did not when he talked about his mother and his sister.

"It's gone now.  Destroyed.  As far as I know, only Jenna and I got out of there."

He sighs.  "Last year...it was the first year I ever baked Christmas cookies and picked out a tree and invited people out to decorate it.  I hid Easter eggs one year here and it was the first time.

"Of course I love this.  Denver may not understand me, and most of the people who first made it my home are gone.  And maybe it isn't anymore.  Maybe I don't belong here anymore, or with the Order anymore.  I don't know.

"But this.  I can still have this.  At least one more year.  That's enough.

"So yes.  I love this."

Kalen looks up and meets Kiara's eyes.  Holds up his hands with a coin on one palm and an orange on the other and drops them into the stocking with Kiara's name on it.  Then he nudges a bag of oranges a few inches toward her and picks up the bag of coins.  Pulls one out and waits, ready to drop it into another stocking to see if Kiara wants to come and join him instead of watching from the sofa.

KiaraKiara spent a large portion of her time in a professional capacity doing exactly this. Listening, to people's stories, deducing from what they reveal to her the ways she can attempt to heal what ailed them; to set her hands on their bodies and sink in deep with her energies - soothe jangled nerves and tender muscles. Glean a thousand tiny tells from the way they responded where the root of their issues were situated.

Healing was no exact science, she could no more explain the way she connected to another individual's lifeforce than she could the reasoning behind why some souls lingered on, after they'd left their physical bodies behind. Some things simply were. She's an attuned audience, when Kalen begins to recount his experiences with Christmas.

As he leaves imprints on her memory of his sister and his mother - of a frozen lake splintering apart, ice cracking like a whip beneath young children. Of his mentor and another Chantry - her eyes lift from the floor when his voice betrays him a little and there's a quiet sort of empathy shining out of them that warms her features; slips into the edges of her mouth. It gives over to it, a wistful little smile that rises and then settles in.

The fire cracking in the hearth; a log snapping as it was gradually reduced to nothing but ashes.

She gives Kalen's offerings this respectful little beat of silence; her form still huddled there, curled in around the arm of the sofa. Her fingers have returned to one of the necklaces she's wearing, she's idly stroking her fingers down over the length of it. "My mentor gave me this. She's buried in this little backyard outside of New York. I put it in a box full of her things for a long time. I could just never bear to look at it.

Then, a few months ago I was cleaning things out and I found it. Or, well - it found me. It fell out of the closet. I don't know what changed but from that point, I've rarely taken it off." There's a beat, where Kiara sits forward, clasps her hands together in her lap. "It was the only weapon I had when a Nephandus known as the Artist took control of someone I was trying to help in my apartment.

I used it to drive him off." She breathes out carefully, as if testing her capacity to stay calm in the face of it: remembering the moment. The blood on her floor. The sting of an open cut on her palm. "Cast a spirit back." She slides to her feet, then. Pads around to him and stands nearby, studying his face. "Part of wants to cling to the idea that was Aisling. Somehow."

She collects up an orange, shapes it in her hands. "Even if you don't belong with them anymore, the Order. You've got friends here." This little cant of Kiara's head, her eyes search his for a beat. "Maybe that's reason enough to stay."

She deposits the orange into a stocking.

Kiara[Ahem, 'part of me'. Darn typos.]

Kalen"We have a way of finding the things that we need," Kalen says quietly.  Releases the coin in his hand and moves to the next stocking in the row.

He takes a careful breath.  "They're hard to be around.  Nephandi.  The last time I was...it was in an Umbral realm the thing had warped into...I don't think they're ever easy to remember."  There is a slight pause.  "I'm sorry.  Whatever it did, whatever it was.  I'm sorry you had to see it."

"And yeah.  I know.  I don't plan to leave Denver.  At least not in a permanent fashion."

KiaraShe makes this sound, Kiara. This little noise that speaks of agreement and disbelief and anger, and - there's so much wrapped into it and so much of it feels snared and tangled together. The way her shoulders grow a little stiffer; the way she cuts him this brief, sudden little glance that feels like its all sharp edges and raw, unprocessed feelings on the subject, because -

"I'm sorry I did, too. But it's dead now. So I guess that means we won."

- she really doesn't sound so sure on the matter, though.

She drops another orange into a stocking and, with a spare touch to his arm, moves back to reclaim her glass of wine, tipping back the remains of it in a single, deep swallow. There's something vaguely unsettling to it. The easy way she imbibes the alcohol; the way she carefully slides her fingertips over her lips to check if she's spilled a drop (she hadn't).

"I'm going to stop by and say hello to Callisto. She gets a little disgruntled when she knows I'm nearby and don't come talk to her." There's a beat, Kiara standing by the sofa, empty glass in hand, her red lips a little smudged where her fingers have touched them. It somehow only adds to that element of the unbridled primitive in her, beneath the tousled hair and dark eyes.

"I'm glad you're not planning to leave." Another beat. Kiara's mouth bending in a subtle smile. "And I'm glad you're back in one piece. For whatever that's worth."