They parted on such awkward, grateful terms. Hope, he said, and she just smiled. They held hands, of all things. She stayed with him right up until he climbed back into that Audi and drove off, and the loneliness took awhile to hit, but by then he had regular coping mechanisms back in place.
As for Eileen... well, Christ only knows what she was thinking of when she asked him -- twice -- if he wanted to stay. Christ only knows if she really was offering to let him climb up to that soft, cozy bed of hers and be with her, inside of her, til his physical systems shut down and told him to sleep there
in her goddamn lithe little arms.
Hope, he said, and left. Gratitude and wariness twined together when he walked out the door of her weird little building, and she just went back upstairs and made herself come, made herself moan, got past her overwhelming sexual tension until she fell asleep from relief. Eileen, who his tradition's representative and her tradition's representative think he should continue to work with because something in him is lacking what she can provide and something in her needs what he is in order to be useful. Eileen, the once-Consor. Eileen, Awake for far too long to be so little advanced. Eileen, inexplicable.
They call him in awhile later. A few days, a week or two, whatever -- like Time is a real thing -- to please go handle This Thing, The Other, what-have-you. Not someone who needs to be taken care of, they're watching Thomas Dane and working him up to that, but
a tradition-mate who refuses to come into the fold, who won't speak with the Council, who stays in his study with his books and his Circles to the Demonic Realm and scratches at itches he imagines on his own scalp. He has strength. He has power. He has, perhaps most importantly, a library to rival that of the entire chantry's. He won't listen, he won't teach, he won't come out of his house. So send Dane. See what Dane does.
Send Eileen with him.
She's waiting for him outside, when he leaves the Chantry proper. She's in the driver's seat of his car, settled behind the steering wheel, heart-shaped sunglasses on her face. "Get in, loser, we're going shopping," she says,
and grins,
because it's her, and that is what she does.
DaneGod knows what she really wanted when she asked him if he wanted to stay. In the weeks after Dane - thoughtful, brooding, sometimes grumpy Dane - has gone over the night in his head so many times and arrived at every conclusion from "absolutely nothing" to "backbreaking torrid sex". Eventually he resigned himself to not knowing, and moved on - but not so far that he didn't feel a frisson of awkwardness and anticipation both when he was called into the council office and informed that he would be paired with Eileen again. Another mission. Another piece of armor and arms for the forces of Good. Or Righteousness. Or Freedom. Or maybe just: Them.
On the way out of the chantry, Dane descends the broad steps at a brisk trot. He doesn't look very imposing at all in the bright April sunlight. The light makes his hair merely brown rather than some more mysterious dark hue, and he's rather pale. No jacket today; just a buttondown shirt, which makes him look neat and clean and a little on the thin side.
Intense, though, as he comes down those steps. Dark, fiery eyes that frown when he sees his car driven over by someone else. No, wait; by Eileen. In spite of himself, Thomas smiles. Just a little.
"I'm not Lindsay Lohan," he informs her, getting in, "and I hate going shopping. Do you have the address?"
miss cottonThe question is: how did she get into his car, much less get it started? How is she driving his car, locked and alarmed and the keys with him, when he left his car in the parking lot of the chantry, where personal property is generally respected unless the Janissaries or the Deacon or the Albireo -- heaven fucking forbid the Albireo -- have a reason to inspect one's personal property? That's the question. The answer, as usual, is that Eileen knows someone. Or knows someone who knows someone.
The more important question is why she'd break such a rule, when it seems so unlike her to disrespect boundaries like that. She didn't press him, when he said no. She walked him out, helped him to the door, eased the transition for him from No to Gone. She didn't run down the hall and leap onto him, kissing him, drawing him back by sheer power of sexual tension to her bedroom, her bed, where
god knows what she would have done.
But now she's in his car, ignoring that rather tacit boundary, her thick hair up in a thick ponytail and a sweater knotted around her shoulders as though she's imitating every stereotype she's ever heard of for WASPs. Her tank top is even nautical, white with thin navy stripes. Horizontal, of course. She gives him a cheeky grin, the tip of her tongue between her teeth for just a moment, as he walks around to the passenger side and climbs in. He doesn't say a word about her driving his car, or ask how she got in, or got it started, or what the hell she thinks she's doing. When he gets in, he can see she's wearing short white shorts and deck shoes, a bracelet from Tiffany's around her wrist. She's like a different person, if one goes by appearances.
Mages shouldn't. But often, they're no better than Sleepers in this.
"You're so literal and linear," she tells him, and grasps the gear shift in her right palm. "What if we are all Lindsay Lohan?" she asks, and wheels around the circular drive and down the path towards the gate, then the narrow road towards the real road. "What if there is only one soul between all living creatures, and that is Brahman?" The words and that is Brahman sound more ritual than musing, like a statement of fact more than a question. But who knows with her?
"What if," Eileen says, ignoring his question about the address and just swerving out onto the road and kicking their speed up a notch to drive southward, "what we like and dislike is based only on what we have and have not learned from previous lives? I dislike asparagus, and for all I know I was an asparagus farmer in a past life and I really don't need to ever taste asparagus again in order to understand it, to know it, to have come to terms with it."
She turns her head to him, smiling. "Of course that's silly. Think of how few people on earth are really disinterested in sex versus the number of people who are really really really into it, even if they don't do anything about it. The whole concept," she goes on, watching the road again, "that our interests or dislikes and likes are based on things we did or didn't experience to the full in previous lives is pretty inherently flawed. But so is the idea that all our interests and likes and dislikes need an explanation. Maybe you just hate going shopping."
Eileen reaches over and squeezes his knee. "And that's okay, Thomas. I don't want you to feel judged for that."
She does not slide her hand up and squeeze his thigh. She wants to. It's almost tangible in the air that she wants to, that she thinks about it, imagines it, almost makes it real through her will -- simple decisions, she might say, are the first magics anyone might attempt -- but doesn't. Restraint, she might say, is a wholly different sort of sorcery. Her hand flies simply and easily back to the wheel.
"But you still might have more in common with Lindsay Lohan than you think. For example, the English language only has 5 and a half vowels." She thinks a moment. "In fact, you've only got three letters that your two names don't share, which are I, L, and Y, which is an initialism for I Love You. Isn't that neat?"
He has a chance, there, to actually respond. They are rare things, those chances.
DaneDane has discovered by now that the best way of communicating with Eileen is to allow the torrent of words to stop before attempting response - to one or two pieces at best.. That's what he does: he waits, listens, picks his battles. Or his poisons. Or his pleasures, depending on how one looks at it.
"Even if there's only one soul amongst all living creatures, I am not Lindsay Lohan. She must be the fragment of that soul that I am most not." He thinks a moment. "There's also an E in my name that is not in Lindsay Lohan. And a T, if you count first and last names. I L Y E T sounds like I Love You, Extra-Terrestrial to me, which I think tells you all you need to know about Ms. Lohan's true origins."
This is a truly absurd conversation, Dane thinks, and isn't sure why he's having it at all. He glances at Eileen, then obliquely at his speedometer.
"So, why are you driving my car, again?"
miss cottonTo Eileen's surprise and, of course, delight, Dane actually grabs part of the conversation that was interesting and responds to it, argues with it, then he spins it out into the letters Eileen missed -- proving how visual she actually is -- and what they might actually spell out. Eileen could bounce in those fine leather seats, but she doesn't. That desire, however, is as palpable in the air around her as any other.
One should be grateful her skill in mind magic isn't so great as to broadcast emotions and thoughts, the way some initiates do. Her thoughts and feelings are already far too tangible. So he can tell, right as his grumpiness starts to settle back in, that she is absolutely thrilled at the fact that he's being absurd.
They aren't going too fast. Over the speed limit, but the road is clear and it's within the range that police generally are willing to forgive or ignore. Eileen just smiles at him. "Because we have a job to do," she tells him, "and if we end up coming back with books or a person they aren't going to fit in the basket on my bicycle. Obviously, Dane. Use your head a little."
DaneDane just shakes his head a little. "Not what I meant," he says, but she knows that, he's quite sure, so he gives up on ferreting out the real answer and settles in for the ride. There are a few moments of silence - if Eileen can suffer them to live, that is - and then he looks at her again.
"It's good to see you again," he says carefully.
miss cottonPerhaps the surprising thing is that she seems perfectly comfortable with silence. She likes talking. She doesn't dislike being quiet. Dane tells her that isn't what he meant, but he doesn't ask what she meant, so: they just drive along wordlessly for awhile. It's going to be awhile. This Hermetic is old-school. Lives up on the north shore in some vast estate he's inherited many times over.
Eileen hasn't turned on the radio. She isn't sure yet if she wants to find out what kind of music Dane listens to, or news programs, or XM, or whathaveyou. What if he's really really into Jefferson Starship?
He says, after awhile, that it's good to see her again. She glances at him and smiles. "You, too," she answers, and like so much else: means it. Of course she means it.
DaneThere's a moment where one of those rare little smiles courses over Dane's mouth. Then he turns forward again, severe-mouthed and proud-nosed and Very Very Hermetic.
Not old school, though. Far from it. The true Hermetic Old Guard likely wonders what happened there - what happened to Thomas Dane, how they went so wrong with him. Once upon a time he was regarded as one of the rising young stars of the Order. Such promise, but oh, such shortsightedness, such inability to see beyond the here and now, the tangible and explicable, the things he could see and feel and bend. And then, then, he just started sliding entirely out of control. This man they're sending him to rein in today? In some ways, this man is a good deal better than Dane. Sure, he's uncooperative and a hermit, but at least he doesn't run around with risk and paradox and the fire and brimstone trailing in his wake. At least he's relatively harmless.
Dane seems somewhat harmless right now, too, though. He's sitting rather docilely in the passenger seat of his own car. Maybe he's trying to figure out how Eileen got her hands on it. He does, after all, tend to circle around again to old topics. Maybe he's trying to figure out who she might have talked to, persuaded; or maybe she just used magic. Is she strong enough? He was under the impression she was still in the Perceiving era of things. Maybe she just used her hands. Maybe she knows how to hotwire a car. He should check under the dash later, repair what damage she might have caused. Maybe
she put her on his knee earlier because she still wants him.
Dane frowns at himself rather suddenly. He shifts, and then he redirects. "So how would you like to handle today's task?" He takes that smartphone she briefly saw her high school yearbook picture on last time, when he was looking for her. A few swipes and he has notes up. "Do you want to talk to him first again, or should I simply inform him that one way or another he and his books are coming with us?"
miss cottonEileen just laughs at his question. He's so firm, so brusque, so ready-to-work. She looks like she's going to go sailing this afternoon on some friend's boat. Not a yacht, of course, nothing that big. She's going to drink flashy frozen neon drinks from curvy goblets through two tiny straws and she's going to end up making out with some friend of a friend's friend who rows crew and can lift her up over his head with in arm. And he's going to run his hand up her soft smooth legs and up under, into her shorts and squeeze while she giggles, her mouth tasting faintly of pineapple juice.
She does not look like she's going to spend the afternoon stuck in some musty old Hermetic library trying to convince anyone to do anything they don't already, secretly in their heart-of-hearts want to do.
"Well, what they told me was that if we can, we want him helping us. Fighting, probably not, he's pretty unstable, but he knows a ton. So if he wants to keep his library in his stupid house and just become a member of the chantry to take on apprentices, then that's optimum. And if we have to pander to him to get it, we can, we just can't promise him much, and he'll probably ask for a lot."
She wiggles her ass a bit in his driver's seat. "I'm horny," she says aloud, like someone might say they need to sneeze or they're hungry or slept funny last night and they have a crick in their neck now.
Then, moving right along: "We can take his books if we have to. That's why they want you to go, I think, because he has a lot of good stuff in there I hear. But then we have an enemy. And that's never really good."
DaneDane hates pandering. He doesn't even particularly like talking, reasoning, cajoling some stuffy old Hermetic to please please please come out of his cave. His distaste is written all over his face, and he listens to Eileen while he skims the dossier on his smartphone. Adeptus so-and-so, of the line of so-and-so-and-so, proud upholder of the Order for so-and-so-and-so-and-so many generations. North Shore. One of those sprawling lakeside mansion-houses, likely. He casts a sidelong glance at Eileen's inexplicable attire again and nods to himself. Now it makes sense, he thinks. They're sending her along to do the persuasive work again, he supposes, and she would be that much more successful if she appeals to the fellow's memories of his youth. Or maybe just his crusty old sex drive. No; that's uncharitable, reducing Eileen to a mere sex object. He opens his mouth to say that he doesn't intend to promise this fellow a damned thing, when
she says what she does.
And then prattles on while Dane frowns. "Thanks for the information, as unsolicited as some of it was," he says dryly. "For the record, I don't intend on offering him anything. I suppose we can negotiate if we need to, and I'll try to keep the rampant destruction to a minimum. But I'm not about to bend over and kiss his posterior simply because he's taken his ball and gone home. If I can drag myself to the Chantry everyday For The Greater Good Of The People, so can he."
He glances at navigation. And, unable to resist: "Wouldn't it be faster to take Green Bay instead of Sheridan?"
miss cottonShe casts him a sidelong look at that dry comment of his, her brows quirked and one raised over the bumping rims of her heart-shaped shades. It's not one of her more delighted glances, infinitely amused by everything simply because it exists and is therefore worth celebrating.
Dane's been looking up William Wentworth, III on his phone, a man of about forty-five who looks more like he's thirty on the picture attached to the dossier. A library worthy of envy, rumored to include texts that contain secrets both esoteric and concrete. A man of great panache and known to be an Adept of the Order. He and his father and his father's father have all been magi of House Bonisagus, all taking a similar craft name. They have been a quiet lot, though, studying magical theory for generations now. It isn't his power they're after, not really. It's his knowledge.
When he looks up, though, Eileen is giving him that weird look and asking him, point-blank and yet in a tone more taken aback than anything else, a little bewildered: "What's got up your ass?" she asks him, as though he's grumpier than usual.
DaneThat startles Dane. Perhaps he isn't asked so bluntly very often. The truth is Dane leads a somewhat lonely existence. Other Traditions rarely like the Order: so uptight, so arrogant, so full of themselves. And the Order doesn't particularly like him, or the other way around. Sometimes he sees younger magi avoiding him in the halls. Sometimes - most times - he's certain he's more feared than beloved, and while that's neither good nor bad, the truth is
it is a little lonely.
So: not many people would ask him that, straight up. And it makes him blink, glancing at her for a single disarmed moment. Then he frowns.
"I wasn't aware I was comporting myself with anything above and beyond my usual level of cynicism," he replies. "What did I say?"
miss cotton"You are," she tells him, as far as how he's comporting himself goes. "You're going out there as an ambassador of the chantry as much as anything else," Eileen goes on, driving. "Whatever we offer him," and the difference between 'I' and 'we' is notable, "is what the council has agreed it's willing to offer him. You can't just cross your arms over your chest and snit that you're not going to give him a damn thing because you don't like the principle of it. And frankly,"
she goes on, taking a corner a little too hard, her control of the wheel a little loose for anyone's comfort,
"I think it's interesting that this is the one time you've chosen to comment on 'unsolicited' information when Jiminy Cricket knows how much I do that. So does me being horny bug you, or does knowing it bug you, or does me saying it bug you, or what? What's so far up your butt that you're gonna be grumpy no matter what?"
She looks at him. "It's a gorgeous day, and we're taking the scenic route, and as god is my witness you will look at the sun shining on the lake and enjoy it, damn you."
Eileen huffs. Hard to tell how affected it is and how real it is. She presses her foot harder on the pedal, drives faster.
Dane"This is my car," Dane argues, ineffectually, uncertain himself of why this might be valid reason for why he doesn't have to enjoy the ride or the day or, for that matter, the conversation about her sex drive. "And I dislike diplomacy. Intensely. It has its uses, I will admit that, and you are rather good at it. And I'm even happy about how our last mission was resolved. But a battered man who was a prisoner of war, who was subjected to terrible things, and who subsequently retreated from normalcy and even sanity is quite different from a hale and healthy W.A.S.P. who's simply decided to retreat to his grand estate and ignore the wider world and its needs. Forgive me if I don't shed a tear. Forgive me if I almost hope diplomacy will fail and we simply seize and impound his library."
"As for your libido, you are of course free to be as 'horny' as you like." A beat. "However I feel a pre-mission briefing is hardly the time or place to mention it. It's very unprofessional," he adds.
His hand fidgets a little on his thigh, the thumb swiping quickly to and fro across the side of the index. "And," he adds, quieter, "the truth is the ... latter part of our last meeting still weighs somewhat on my mind. It doesn't help to be reminded of your, ah, inclinations at the moment."
miss cotton"Of course it's your car," Eileen says agreeably, as though this is both obvious fact and also quite pointless, which in the grand scheme of things, really is the case. Dane should know. Dane the destroyer. Dane the ender of worlds. She lets him finish, though. He dislikes -- intensely -- diplomacy and all that bother, which she knew, but maybe he just needs to say it. He uses the word 'happy' even though she knows that doesn't come anywhere near being an appropriate descriptor of his actual feelings on Their Last Mission. Poor Charlie, she thinks, remembering last week when she visited him and he was so eager to show her something he'd planted that was growing, except
he was overcome, he was tortured inside, he started saying things that scared her and so she tried to help him calm down, and then she couldn't sleep for two days because he was just so upset.
Her brows tug together a little, though she really is trying to listen to Dane. It's just that her mind wanders, too. The way he talks about William Wentworth III is not far off from one of her own darker opinions, but she doesn't let on to tell Dane that. It isn't fair, she knows, for someone to refuse to help another. But she resists the urge to judge, to demand, because
you never know.
He, quite uppityly, if that is a word and she's rather sure it wasn't til just now, tells her that it's very unprofessional and this isn't the time and place and rehrehrehrehreh. Eileen presses her lips together in an attempt not to laugh and sits up straighter, giving a little hum. Dane fidgets. He admits what he does, confesses with all the shame one associates with confessions, and it makes her sad that he refers to her inclinations.
Eileen, driving along Sheridan, becomes quiet.
DaneEileen becomes quiet. This is so unusual, even in the short time that Dane has known her, that he can't help but cast her a curious glance. Then, a little later, a concerned one.
A couple blocks later he asks: "Did I say something hurtful?"
miss cotton"Yes," she says quietly, and she doesn't sound like she's on the verge of tears, but there's sadness there. Something else, too, a cousin to sadness and grief but harder to define. She isn't driving wildly at all, though they're keeping the car going Quite the Clip.
Dane[PERCEP + INTUITION LAWL]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 4, 5, 5) ( botch x 1 )
Dane[ :[[[[[[[[[[ ]
Dane[errm. percep + awareness!]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 3, 6, 6, 7) ( success x 3 )
Dane[WUN MOAR ROLL. percep + nonexistent empafee.]
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 5) ( fail )
DaneDane has the luxury to look at Eileen as much as he likes without needing to fear for their lives when the car careens off the road. He doesn't really take advantage of that luxury, truth be told: he spends most of his time looking through the windshield or out the window. Right now, however, he does look, furrowbrowed and quizzical, and for a long time. He sees almost nothing. He gives up, frowning through the windshield again for a moment before simply electing to ask - as gently as he can -
"What did I say?"
miss cotton[So essentially: he has no idea what is wrong, he knows for certain that she's not using any kind of magic right now, and he is going to handle this situation in an incredibly inappropriate fashion.]
miss cottonShe looks uncomfortable now, just as a moment ago she looked sort of sad in an indeterminate way. Eileen exhales and glances at him, a quick glance like they all have to be, then reaches over and gives him a squeeze on the knee. "I'm sorry," she says, that hand going back to the wheel. "I'm not trying to be passive aggressive or whatever. It just made me feel... lonely... when you sorta sideways-ish talked about my 'inclinations' like it's just... a fact of what I am or something."
The tip of her tongue flicks out and moistens her lips. "I felt stereotyped. Like... oh look, hey, she's a Cultist, she has inclinations. And I'm not even sure you meant it like that, it just hit a nerve and maybe I'm being oversensitive? So I'm sorry."
Her brow wrinkles. There's a long pause. "I'm not indiscriminate. And some people are, Cultists or not, and I think that's fine. I think people who can only ever have sex when Virgo is ruling and with a ginger who has a certain glyph painted on their genitals is fine, too. I'm somewhere in the middle, because... that's me. Not because I'm a Cultist." A deeper frown. "Except I think everything about me is sort of affected and changed by the fact that I chose the Cult. It's a part of me but it's not who I am and it doesn't determine where or when or who or why."
Eileen's brow smooths. "As for calling me unprofessional, that was just... annoying. You want to treat this like a job or whatever, fine, but I told you before that the way you seem to want to work on this stuff is not how I work, and if you want a partner like that, it won't be me. So don't try and shove me into that box. I'm professional when I'm at my profession. And this isn't that. This is something else entirely."
DaneIt's those airquotes around inclinations, which Dane can all but hear, that makes him look at her almost in alarm. "Wait," he's saying, even as she's saying she felt stereotyped, and when she says I'm not sure you even meant it that way he breaks in altogether:
"I didn't. Eileen," he can't remember, oddly, the last time he said her name, "I didn't mean it like that. I wasn't making an offhand assumption of what your Traditions says about your morals or standards, or anything of the sort.
"Eileen, I just misspoke. All I meant was that I was still trying to work out what was going on - between us, I mean - that night you invited me up for a cup of coffee. I'm still confused about that, and about what you may or may not actually want from me, and so it's ... difficult for me to hear that you're -- that your libido is running high. It's makes me wonder if you're trying to send me a signal, or if I'm completely misreading you, or if I've completely misread you from the start, or what. But that's all.
"It was not my intention to insult your Tradition or, god forbid, your person. And if I inadvertently have done just that, then I humbly beg your pardon."
miss cotton[DL2Ps!]
miss cottonShe looks uncomfortable now, just as a moment ago she looked sort of sad in an indeterminate way. Eileen exhales and glances at him, a quick glance like they all have to be, then reaches over and gives him a squeeze on the knee. "I'm sorry," she says, that hand going back to the wheel. "I'm not trying to be passive aggressive or whatever. It just made me feel... lonely... when you sorta sideways-ish talked about my 'inclinations' like it's just... a fact of what I am or something."
The tip of her tongue flicks out and moistens her lips. "I felt stereotyped. Like... oh look, hey, she's a Cultist, she has inclinations. And I'm not even sure you meant it like that, it just hit a nerve and maybe I'm being oversensitive? So I'm sorry."
DaneIt's those airquotes around inclinations, which Dane can all but hear, that makes him look at her almost in alarm. "Wait," he's saying, even as she's saying she felt stereotyped, and when she says I'm not sure you even meant it that way he breaks in altogether:
"I didn't. Eileen," he can't remember, oddly, the last time he said her name, "I didn't mean it like that."
miss cottonHer name. She glances at him, and there's a faint ache to the line between her brows. She holds up her hand to him, gently, pressing back: "I'm not mad. It's okay. Just... let me finish, okay?"
DaneSo Dane falls silent, mouth closing, lips compressing faintly as he frowns. And nods.
miss cottonHer brow wrinkles a little in response, frown for frown. There's a small pause. "I'm not indiscriminate," she says quietly. "Though I do think it's okay to be indiscriminate, and it's okay if you can only have sex when Virgo is ruling and with a ginger who has a certain glyph painted on their genitals. That's okay, too. I'm somewhere in the middle, but not because I'm a Cultist."
A deeper frown, a derailing for a moment: "Though I guess everything I do is connected to the fact that I chose the Cult. It's part of me, but it doesn't determine...where or when or who or why."
She looks at him, then. She doesn't have the luxury he has: looking. So she takes her eyes off of him and carefully, with the right flicks and switches and lights and everything, pulls over to the shoulder. Looks at him then, all she wants.
DaneDane is quiet as Eileen pulls over. He understands instinctively that she wants to talk about this, and she wants to talk when she's not driving, when she doesn't have to watch the road, when she can look at him as much as he looks at her. Or more.
When the car is safely parked, Dane says it again, "I didn't mean it like that." He sounds a little sad; he wouldn't have meant it like that, he means. "I wasn't making an offhand assumption that what your Traditions is determines your morals or standards, or anything of the sort.
"Eileen, I just misspoke. All I meant was that I was still trying to work out what was going on - between us, I mean - that night you invited me up for a cup of coffee. I'm still confused about that, and about what you may or may not actually want from me, and so it's ... difficult for me to hear that you're -- that your libido is running high. It's makes me wonder if you're trying to send me a signal, or if I'm completely misreading you, or if I've completely misread you from the start, or what. But that's all.
"It was not my intention to insult your Tradition or, god forbid, your person. And if I inadvertently have done just that, then -- I humbly beg your pardon."
He isn't looking at her by the end. He's looking at some neutral point in the middle distance, facing forward, frowning and sort of tense and, really, abjectly apologetic about it all.
miss cottonIt seems to surprise her, a little, when he brings up the other night. The last time he saw her, which was either a few days ago or a few weeks ago and she knows it might seem really weird to ask him how long it's been right now, so she doesn't. Not like it really matters, not in the Grand Scheme of Things. She looks bewildered, maybe even sad, when he talks about working out what was going on, or being confused, or what she may or may not actually want from him, like it's something to take, drain from him, like she's a vampire. Difficult, he says, as his mind circles possibilities.
A smile tugs at the corner of her mouth when he swerves around the word 'horny', like he daren't say it. The longer he goes on and the more akward he gets, the more formal his words become. It's completely weird and a little endearing, in the same hemisphere as the bizarre anachronisms of many of his Tradition mates but not the same, not really.
And it's so odd, so strange to her, that he's confused and turned in circles about what she might want, or might not want, or signals, or misreading her, all of that, because she tries to be so clear without being too pushy. Such as: right now, what she wants is to lean over and kiss him.
So she leans over, and puts three fingertips on the right side of his jaw, not quite turning his head towards her, and gives him a small, soft kiss on his left cheek. Her lips don't linger, and something about that is heartbreaking. She doesn't draw completely away afterward, but her hand's already light touch begins to fade and she moves at least as far as it takes to see his face.
"Was that unprofessional?" she asks him, quiet, almost whispered, but
cheeky.
DaneDane's eyes, gleaming-dark as they are, close when Eileen leans in. He doesn't resist. He doesn't pull away. He stays very still, but when her lips touch his skin he leans into it -- just a little bit. It's been so long. She draws away then; she teases him a little. He exhales slowly.
And he doesn't answer. Not with words, anyway. He turns his face and he leans over those few sparse inches; he kisses her this time, on the mouth this time, but gently - close-lipped, close-eyed. Just contact.
miss cottonOne could almost hear the rush of blood in her body if they listened close enough. If they touched the right spot, or, alternately, had skills that are so far beyond Dane that he scarcely believes they exist. She hasn't the faintest idea of how long it's been, or how he feels when she kisses him or if it's any different from when she teases him. His car is still running, idling on the shoulder when they're supposed to be on their way to a mission -- a mission, like they're the A-Team -- and instead are pulled over,
kissing.
Despite his verbalized confusion with what she wanted from him that night at her place, despite his insistence that she was being unprofessional, he's not just letting her kiss his cheek and then gruffly, stiffly moving on. Eileen wouldn't have faulted him for that. It would have been sort of endearing and amusing in its own way, too. But no. He's exhaling, turning to her and closing the already small distance between them to kiss her mouth. Half of her soul falls through her body and dissolves somewhere around her elbows and lowermost ribs. She feels momentarily... transcendant.
That kiss doesn't last very much longer than the first one to his cheek. When it ends, when Dane's eyes open again, he finds hers still closed for a second afterward, her lips parting to breathe. Those eyes, startlingly colorless for such a colorful girl, open too slowly, and in them he can read every inch of her for a moment, dazed as they are. She's lost track of the world. It is -- perhaps -- a little alarming how quickly and how totally she gives herself over to moments, to sensations, how strong her reaction is, but it is also
fascinating.
disarming.
enviable.
"Don't stop," she whispers to him, in the middle of the day, in the middle of pre-mission briefing. The words are more an encouragement, a granting of permission, than a plea. Even so, they're not nearly as clear as her hand touching his face, moving back to his hair, as she leans toward him again.
He has her permission to not stop. And that is an intoxicating, tempting thing, much as her eyes are -- the absoluteness and fearlessness of her reaction. She moves closer again, offers access, offers herself, puts her hand on his face and then back into his hair. Which is short, unsurprisingly. Soft too, surprisingly.
And his eyes, which opened as that kiss parted, close again. He leans into her as though drawn by a lodestone. His lips part this time, and his hand comes to her cheek, warm and large, with prominent bones and little spare. He touches her rather unhesitatingly, heavily almost, rubbing her cheek under his thumb, sweeping his palm back across her face. But,
he stops, he exhales and he doesn't kiss her again after all. "I have to," he whispers, and he draws back, he opens his eyes again and puts his back against the seat, puts his head against the headrest for a moment.
"We should go on," he says - aloud now.
miss cottonEvery time they draw a little bit further away from each other it feels like stretching out taffy, pulling something whole and malleable apart until it snaps. No wonder the thought of it makes her ache. It isn't just lust, though there's enough of that to change the air in the car completely. If it weren't so warm outside, sunny and midday, Eileen would not be surprised to find windows already steaming. They aren't yet. She's marveling suddenly that she can even remember they're in a car and that windows are a thing that exists.
She would not mind, or care, if a little time passed and a highway patrol officer rolled up behind them and asked to see her ID to make sure that the obviously older man with his hand in her shorts is not breaking yet another law. Her thigh is against the center console, her body seconds way from crossing completely and settling onto his lap instead. Seconds that he spends doing something other than kissing her.
It takes effort, and so much of it, for her to not let out a whimper when his head falls back and he says he has to... stop, that is. Eileen breathes instead, steadying the part of her that wants to just ignore what he says completely and convince him that he's making very poor life choices right now. She tips her head to the side, resting it against her own seat, and takes a couple of moments to just breathe, as though
they went much, much farther than they really did just now.
"Mmm," she says, when he announces that they should go on. "Probably. Do you mind driving the rest of the way?"
DanePart of him must be a little disappointed that she actually gives up. Not that he's surprised. He's never felt pressured, never felt pushed. Just felt -- wanted. The other night, though he wasn't sure. Today: absolutely, with certainty.
Dane lifts his head off the headrest, glances at Eileen. "Of course not."
So they switch seats. He moves the driver's back to make room for his longer legs. She settles into the passenger's, which still holds some warmth from him. They drive. He doesn't know the way, but he's familiar with his navigation; familiar enough, too, with the streets and roads up here. He goes inland, of course, leading scenic Sheridan for the more straightforward Green Bay.
Eventually they pull up to the address Dane got from the dossier. The silver Audi, nice as it is, is a little outclassed here, and a little standoutish. Mercedes and BMWs dominate the streets. No one parks at the curb; everyone parks in their multi-car garages or on those long, long drives up to their big, big houses. Dane double-checks the address one more time, and then he gets out of the car, coming around to Eileen's side as she, too, steps out.
All business: "Ready?"
miss cottonWould he have been more disappointed, one wonders, if she'd crawled on top of him and told him again, this time begging: Don't stop. Please don't stop. or would all thought and morality simply abandoned him then? Consciousness matters, Eileen knows that. When to say yes. How much saying yes matters. Right now he says no. Even if it makes her want to moan and fight him, he says no.
So: she settles back, and she gives the faintest smile, a little delirious still, as she asks him to take over driving, as though suddenly she's too drunk to do it safely. He looks at her. They walk around the car and get into new seats and she curls up in the passenger side like a cat. At some point her legs stretch out -- she doesn't bother moving the seat forward -- and she crosses them at the ankle, resting her white canvas shoes against the dash. Like it's just a pleasant summer drive, any old afternoon.
She throws a pout at him, back in her sunglasses again -- which she removed when they pulled over, of course -- when he leaves scenic Sheridan. "You're awful," she says, and this is one of those times, rare as they are, when she doesn't mean it at all.
Time comes that they get to the address they were given. It's late afternoon now, well past the lunch hour but well before dinnertime. The neighborhood is quite nice without being too ostentatious -- a politician or two have their mansions around here -- and it's in a good school district. Dane and Eileen stop at a crosswalk and watch a kindergarten class being ushered across, wearing their flat little backpacks that have more stains on them than homework in them. Clean, fresh-faced children bursting with energy at the end of the day, mostly white, all of them a little too wealthy.
They keep driving and come to a house that has a gate out front, tall and wrought iron, a rose worked into the metal. Past the gate is one of those long drives, but it winds and weaves, and there are so many trees that one can't see anything of the actual house but a few glints of brick here and there. "Wait," Eileen murmurs, when Dane begins to pull the car over to get out. She waves at the gate, the intercom on a little pole-stand outside. "Let's just... see if he lets us drive in. You never know."
She digs around in her bag while Dane drives, coming up with a bottle of water and a little pill case inscribed with a bright yellow symbol that Dane probably doesn't recognize, but one never knows, just as she says. Eileen quite contentedly rustles in a bit of tissue paper inside and pops a white pill with a tiny blue flower on it in her mouth, downing it with water. She puts her things away and crawls over Dane to the window as soon as he's pulled alongside the intercom, reaching through to press the faded red button by the speaker.
Her body is stretched out across his lap, her back arched with the angle she's leaning at. That part isn't intentional, it's just a side effect. The fact that she knows how close they are again, the fact that her mind is swimming with the what ifs and maybe laters, the fact that she can't help but wonder what goes through Dane's mind, well
she uses that. And that is intentional. Eileen folds her arms across the window of the driver's side door, waiting for a response to her buzz. "Wave at the camera, Dane," she says quietly, as magic starts to gather around her.
"Name?" comes the voice through the speaker. It's a male voice, sounding impossibly old. Creaky. Eileeen pops backward, changing her mind at the last second, smiling at Dane. Waggles her eyebrows at the speaker, at him.
"He's your Tradition," she says. Whispers.
DaneIf Eileen thinks she catches Dane holding his breath when she leans across him -- well, she's right. He does hold his breath. He looks past her, over the slope of her back; he becomes very very interested indeed in the boxwoods that line the drive. But then that strange sense of the world tilting on its axis is gathering, and he remembers it, recognizes it from his last outing with this girl. This time he doesn't even think to ask what she's doing. He just braces for vertigo, except
whatever she thought to do, she doesn't. She's back in her seat in an eyeblink. He quirks his eyebrow at her, clearly wondering what she's up to. She explains, sort of. He shrugs and turns toward the intercom, from which emits that old, old voice.
"Thought he was in his 40s," Dane mutters under his breath. "Who is this? A butler?" Then, loud enough to be heard across the intercom: "Thomas Dane, Adeptus Majoris of House Ignis. Here to see Mr. Wentworth."
miss cotton"Something like that," Eileen whispers back concerning WWIII's age, the colors and the tactile sensations in the car becoming a little too much to bear, a little too much for his senses to cope with. He braces, and it washes over and around and through him, like being caught on a merry-go-round that has gone out of control.
Dane announces his name, and Eileen peers through the windshield at the camera that rotates on its perch toward them. She beams, smiling and waving like it's going to take her picture on Splash Mountain, the lens zooming in on her for a moment before rotating away again, doing the same to Dane.
The intercom is silent for a moment. It buzzes again. "It is requested that your ...companion... cease the activities she is currently engaging in. When you have complied, the gates will open."
Eileen wrinkles her nose, looking at Dane as the connection goes silent. She heaves a great sigh and lets the magics she was raising drop so abruptly that, well, it's a bit like being thrown off that merry-go-round. "I did sense a lot of wards," she tells him. "He probably knew your name and that we're Awake before you finished saying it. Or whoever has the wards up did, I mean."
The gate in front of them is swinging open, inward, the wrought iron scraping and rustling across the gravel.
"There's weird stuff in there," she tells him, with a small shake of her head. "I couldn't feel much, but... lots of minds, lots of non-Sleeping minds. But I couldn't get far."
DaneDane most decidedly does not smile and wave at the camera. When it turns to him, focusing with a tiny whirr, Dane stares straight back. Frowning. The image is probably a little distorted through the small lens; likely the impression is prominent nose, dark eyes. The camera zooms back out, then, and then there is a polite 'request'.
With which Eileen complies -- even as Dane is opening his mouth to say I hardly think a mage of your stature needs to be concerned about the 'activities' of one little initiate. He doesn't get that far, though, or even around to opening his mouth, when the magic is abruptly gone. It's sudden enough to make him exhale a little, a controlled little gasp-pant. And then the gates are opening. Dane gives a quick shake of his head. He takes his foot off the brake and lets the Audi roll through.
Eileen tells him what she's discovered. Yet another place where they complement each other, that. Dane could literally pinpoint electrons with his mind, Uncertainty Principle notwithstanding, but there could be a metaphorical jumbo jet of wards in front of him and he wouldn't have a single clue.
"Great," he says, sounding gloomy. "He's started a cult in there." That's where his mind goes. Now we all know Dane is the glass-half-empty type. Then again, Eileen probably knew that from the start. "Be careful."
Dane[APPRENTICE.]
miss cotton"Well," which is suddenly a terrifying word, terrifying sound, to come out of Eileen's mouth, because it's followed cheerfully and thoughtfully by: "not all things that are Awake are human."
She doesn't promise him that she'll be careful, either. She does reach over and pat his knee as though to say oh, you, but this time there's not quite as much seething sexual tension in it as there was before. Other forms of tension, though they're mostly in Dane for now.
Dane rolls forward and after they've gone several feet, the gates just as slowly and deliberately close again. The drive is long and winding, the gravel well-packed, and the sun filters happily through the trees that form canopies above the road. In the distance they can see the corner of gardens that are reminiscent of royal Paris, cultivated and controlled in a way that few Verbena would be happy with. They pass by rows of hedges that, yes, have been formed into geometric topiary. Eileen reaches out and runs her hand across a bush or two that are covered in small, star-shaped white flowers. "These are poison," she says tenderly, smiling at them as her fingers brush the petals.
When they turn the final corner, a long curve, they find themselves upon the mansion. Three stories, mostly yellow brick and white molding, the windows tall and narrow and framed in black iron. There is a circular drive around a fountain whose pool is in the shape of a six-pointed star. The sculpture in the middle is not a god but a tall, slender young man with wings flared behind him and a single scrap of cloth blown around him with imaginary wind as clothing. He holds up a great spiraling horn, pointed to heaven, from which the water pours out in a curtain all around him. The sound of water falling into water filters into the interior of the car.
Eileen smiles. "My god, Hermetics and their symbolism," she says, as pleased and endeared as she is genuinely amused. She hops out of the car as soon as it stops.
On the lintel of the door are symbols, too. Dane would recognize them: the names of angels, each one with some inscription beneath it that means nothing to him. Personal language, personal magic, most likely, specific solely to this place and this willworker. Strong stuff. Eileen doesn't notice, or seem to. She is touching the bushes in great stone urns on either side of the stairs, then looking at him. "And I heard that these, mixed with a bit of a virgin's saliva --"
The front door opens and a butler in a tuxedo wheezes out. He looks to be about eighty, fighting with the great walnut door, every breath the harbinger of a wracking cough. His hair is stringy and cut in a monk's tonsure, stark white and stiff. One eye is milky. He waves a brittle hand to Dane, gesturing him in as he tries not to collapse on the spot.
Dane"Don't do that," Dane says testily as Eileen sticks her hand out the window. And that's before she informs him that those tiny little flowers she's caressing are poison. After, he just shoots her a glance, "Why on earth would you touch them, then?"
Truthfully, much of the symbolism is lost on Dane. He sees a very nice house, and a rather pretty fountain. Symbolism 101 was not, to say the least, his favorite subject. He remembers other apprentices, way back in the day, who were so eager to inscribe their favorite foci with runes and glyphs and Words in whatever made-up language they'd invented. Always did annoy them, those. He suspects, really, William Wentworth III is going to annoy him too. Actually, strike that: he's already annoyed.
The car parks. He kills the engine and gets out, starting up the steps to the grand entrance. "Don't touch those either," Dane says without even looking, because yes, he heard her feet heading toward those urns, and he knows she's probably petting flowers again. "Especially not if they're poisonous."
The doors open before Dane can reach for the ornate brass knocker. The oldest butler he has ever seen comes out. Dane looks alarmed; he starts to help with the door, but then the old man gets it open. Dane draws himself upright for the introduction, but it doesn't appear to be necessary. They are waved in. Dane ushers Eileen ahead of himself, saying,
"This is Miss Eileen Cotton, an Apprentice of the Cult of Ecstasy, and my partner."
He wills her not to add, in crime!
miss cottonShe ignores him when he tells her not to stick her hand out the window, just smiling. Then: "They're only poisonous if you eat them, you dork," Eileen tells him, smiling just as much as before.
And so it's no surprise that she ignores him telling her, again, not to touch things. She smells them, smiling. She's still downstairs when Dane starts storming up the steps, and Dane is still storming up the steps when the door opens and the old man begins gesturing. So Eileen bounds up the enormous stone steps, her cheeks flushed, and veritably skips ahead of him. "Thank you so much," she tells the butler, and truth be told, the in crime never occurs to her. She just heads inward, where it's far darker and cooler than it is outside.
The door shuts very quietly behind them, for being so large. The hall they walk into is made for grand entrances, and is overlooked by a great mezzanine from which two grand staircases descend, flanking the foyer. A chandelier hangs overhead, unlit for now. Eileen's pristine white deck shoes pad silently across a thick Oriental rug that spans from the doorway to the long hallway beyond. She looks up and around, she drinks in their surroundings. More symbolism everywhere: engraved into lintels and frames, buried in the oil paintings in the gallery, obscured by the wearing of time on marble busts here and there. Eileen is lifting her sunglasses up onto her forehead, carrying a little red patent purse dangled from her shoulder.
The butler is passing them now, wordless, too worn through to speak, gesturing for them to follow him to hallway that extends toward the right. Eileen follows, her footsteps light, her eyes curious and touching everything. For some reason she wants to hold Dane's hand. For some reason she has a feeling he'd shake it off right now.
They come to a set of double doors made of cherry, the handles worked to resemble a single brass rose joined in the middle. The butler gives a double rap of his knuckles on the wood before opening both of those doors, which open inward, just like the gate. He opens his mouth to speak and only a gasp and another retching cough comes out, a shaking fist going to cover his mouth. They are thus announced. Eileen steps inward, fearless as ever, going from polished wood floors to yet another expansive Oriental rug.
The room is surprisingly bright and cheerful. Most of the wood is cherry, like the doors. There are bookshelves, but even from a glance it's not hard to tell that this isn't the library. Tall windows let in a great deal of sunlight, but there are thick curtains that can be closed against it. A large walnut desk stands at an angle in a corner; the sleek computer monitor atop it is at odds with the anachronisms of the rest of the place. The small crystal pyramid beside it, however, is not. There is a 'perpetual' motion toy there as well, a multitude of circles shifting back and forth and around each other. Two chairs in U-shapes, upholstered in black velvet, sit in front of the desk. There is a tea service cart beside the desk with, of course, a kettle of tea and a pitcher of iced lemonade sprinkled with a few mint leaves. There is a tiered tray of petit fours and hors d'oeuvres arranged there as well.
"Ooh!" Eileen says, of course as delighted as one could be. She nearly claps her hands together. "Fancy snacks!"
The man standing in the middle of the room, hands clasped behind his back, smiles at her. He doesn't look forty. He looks Dane's age, though the beard he wears adds a few years. He is trim and fit, straight-backed though lean of shoulder. His hair is auburn, his eyes black. His suit, which includes a tidy vest and a pocketwatch as well as a white silk pocket square, is gray. His tie is black. He gives a nod to the butler. "Thank you, Donald, that will be all," which he says with what sounds like true gratitude and even kindness.
The butler, excusing himself, closes the door on the three of them, and William Wentworth the Third turns his attention to his two guests, waving a hand to the chairs. "You must excuse Donald. He insisted on greeting you himself. We do not often receive visitors, but..." a helpless shrug, "he's been with my family for generations and it would be cruel to ask him to retire. Won't you sit?"
DaneThere are mages like this in the Order. The Old Guard, in a sense: those whose magic runs in their veins, back generations and generations; those whose power has gained them wealth, status, land, aged butlers. Nobility amongst magi, or so they consider themselves.
Dane never liked them. Never liked their tailored coats and their goddamn casting robes, because some of them actually had such things. Never liked their symbolism, their dusty old books, their subtle arrogance and subtler condescension, the entitlement implicit in their every word, their every gesture, their very existence. Dane is not one of them, either. Certain he's done well enough for himself - the car is nice; the clothes, though plain, are far from shabby; the condo is very nice indeed, though a little austere and a little
(lonely)
solitary. However, that je ne sais quoi that sets William Wentworth III apart from other men and magi is missing from Dane. For that, he dislikes Wentworth on sight; for that, he also - perhaps, just a little bit - envies him; resents him.
Eileen exclaims. Dane flicks the 'fancy snacks' a glance. Then the rest of the room. Almost instinctively, he notes the moving things: that perpetual motion device, the swinging pendulum of a grandfather clock. Kinetic energy - by far the easiest to access, bend, multiply. Just waiting to be tapped. His eyes come back to William Wentworth III, and he gives a small shake of his head.
"We won't disrupt you long," he says. "We're here on business, representing the interests of the Chantry and its allied magi. We understand you keep an extensive library of rare and powerful texts. We want access," oh, and Eileen can almost see him grind his teeth, "and we would like to negotiate terms."
miss cottonEileen, not one to be deterred by Dane's refusal -- in most cases, at least -- does not take a seat but goes over to the tray and pours herself a minted lemonade into a small cut crystal teacup with a curving handle. She looks like she's about to die from how adorable and fancy it all is.
Wentworth's head does tip. The room is heavy with his resonance, which feels...a bit like the opposite of Eileen's, in a way. Hers is this wildness, every sense overloaded by noise and heat and cold and sensation and movement. William Wentworth the Third feels like the motion that comes from erosion, the vast shifting going on constantly in the depths of the earth, the intense pressure that, at a certain point, will crush a person's body. Erosion. A firm hand on a pressure point, making the edges of one's vision go black.
"This is delicious," Eileen says, sincerely appreciative.
Wentworth gives her a patient smile, a little nod, and a small wink. He gives Dane his attention once more. "Ah, yes. Well, you are scarcely the first to approach me about this. And so you are not the first to be turned away, Mr. Dane." He crosses over to his desk, seating himself and leaning back a bit. Eileen is already sitting in one of the black velvet chairs, letting the Grown Ups have their little talk. "My family has worked for close to a hundred years on gathering the materials we lay claim to. If there are apprentices of our Order and my house who wish to seek instruction, they may come to me and make the appropriate oaths and exchanges if they would like to receive the benefit of my family's sacrifices. Others, of course, have as much right to search for and earn the sort of texts I have at my disposal, and then pass them on to their own students and offspring. You understand," he says, casual as ever. "Simply Awakening does not entitle one to reap the rewards of others' labor."
Eileen is quiet. She nibbles on a petit four swathed in pink fondant.
DaneDane is the only one standing before long. He stays where he is, though, clasping his hands before him. He listens, wearing the sort of neutral frown one imagines to be his best poker face. When Wentworth is finished with his long, polite, intricate no, Dane thinks a moment. Then:
"Freely reap," he says. "You mean, simply Awakening does not entitle one to freely reap the rewards of others' labor. You seem willing enough to trade access for oaths and exchanges, albeit only for Apprentices of your own house. We can work with that. What would you deem a fair price for universal access by all magi of the local Chantry?"
miss cottonThey are, if Wentworth's dossier is up to date, equals -- he and Dane, that is. Eileen is over there with her broad knowledge of little depth and a surprising amount of power behind her swing, eating a Fancy Snack, keeping mum and keeping her magic in her pants like a good houseguest.
Wentworth gives a small shake of his head to Dane and spreads his hands, fingers outstretched, wearing a few small rings. There is a hint of a tattoo on the inside of his wrist, where his cuff tugs downward for a second. "I'm afraid I assumed you understanding, Adeptus: not all of what I have at my disposal is meant for magi of other traditions. They wouldn't... understand."
He gestures to Eileen, glancing at her. "I mean no insult, darling. Simply: the Cult and the Order do things so differently."
Eileen's eyebrows are up. She chews her cake slowly.
Wentworth's eyes, dark and bottomless, turn back to Dane. "The level of fealty I require from an apprentice I take on is a price too high even for others in the Order, Adeptus. I doubt any others would be willing to submit to it, particularly those who are already trained in other schools. My answer has not changed. The chantry has no claim to my library or my instruction, and I would have them stop sending envoys to my door.
"Now, if you would like, I always enjoy taking tea with other Awakened, hearing a bit of gossip, all that." He smiles, leaning over and lifting up the teapot. "I'll pour."
Dane"Well, that's the thing, Mr. Wentworth." Dane, unsurprisingly, ignores the offering of chitchat and tea. "I'm not sure I'm really an envoy at all.
"You see, before I came out here, I read a dossier on you. On the whole it was quite complimentary, really, regarding your ability and accomplishments and so forth. But just below the surface there was a growing crescendo of suspicion, gradually accrued across all those previous visits by all those previous envoys of the Chantry. Whatever is Mr. Wentworth doing up, holed up in his grand house with his library of secrets? Whatever could that library contain, that he won't share it with the Traditions, or the Order, or even any of the House Bonisagus that won't swear personal fealty to him?
"Whatever could he be up to?
"Now, I'm sure you've read your fair share about me, too. I'm sure you know far more about me than I do about you. So you must know my strengths and weaknesses. You must know that persuasion and diplomacy are not counted amongst my strengths. You must know that I'm considered rather reckless, prone to overstepping the bounds and boundaries a more ... docile mage would observe. I'm not a diplomat. I'm not an ambassador. I'm commonly regarded as a weapon, and a rather indiscriminate one at that. It's widespread knowledge that I have rather little regard of the collateral damage I cause to myself or to others.
"So that brings me back to the point. On the surface, my mission here is to persuade you to allow us access to your marvelous collection. But why send me as an envoy, particularly when far better men have tried and failed? Why? Unless, of course, they haven't really sent me as an envoy."
A small pause: Dane's dark eyes fixed on Wentworth now, his head tilted at a slight, avian angle.
"Here's what I think," he continues, softly. "I think the Council is at the end of its patience with you. I think the Council wants your information, but more than that, it wants to make sure you're not a threat. Wheels are turning. Lines are being drawn. There's a war on the horizon, and if you won't help us, then by god you better not harm us. So maybe, just maybe, they've sent me because they know I have no patience for diplomacy. They've sent me because they know if you turn me down - which you have - and if you make me suspicious - which you have - I won't simply walk away like every other little diplomat on your doorstep.
"And here's the beauty of it. The Council has given me no formal orders. So whatever I do here is my own business. When it's done, and when the dust has settled, the Council can take what it wants from the wreckage, shrug at the rest, and chalk it up to Thomas Dane going too far again. Whoops."
DaneDice: 6 d10 TN7 (1, 4, 6, 7, 10, 10) ( success x 2 )
miss cottonDane doesn't sit, and Dane doesn't accept tea, but Wentworth pours, all the same. He lifts a single cube of sugar from its bowl with a pair of silver tongs and sets it in the bottom of his glass with a rolling, angular clinking sound. He pours the tea over it, then sets it down on the doily. Not a drop is spilled, of course; he does all this the way that people open their eyes, the movement of muscles almost autonomous. And, cupping his tea, he leans back and listens to Dane.
The pressure in the room increases. There's no doubt that he has multiple spells up and active: the wards in place around the estate, various sorts and strengths. He takes a small silver spoon and stirs his tea, dissolving the sugar within the steaming, amber-colored liquid.
Dane says here's the beauty around the time that the sense of erosive pressure, forming the roots of the world, begins to amplify. No gestures, no waving of a wand -- and there's no doubt that Wentworth has one, somewhere -- and certainly no words. He merely thinks, tugs strings of his own thought, and re-weaves the world according to his will. The magic changes. It's hard to tell at first what it is; Dane doesn't know this magic. But then, Dane only knows a tiny bit of magic.
What he recognizes, a little too late, right as he's saying he has little regard for collateral damage, is that some of the movement in the room has stopped. The clock still ticks, the tea still stirs, the perpetual motion machine spins, but
Eileen has stopped. She is motionless, frozen where she sits, and she seems somehow less dimensional than she did before. The look in her eyes -- she is caught, see, in a half-glance sidelong at Dane -- is serene but thoughtful, and when it isn't shifting, moving around, Dane can see an appreciation for the deep orders of chaos in the universe somewhere in her. She is holding a half-eaten petit four. She simply isn't moving.
Wentworth stirs his tea, watching Dane. "You are mistaken, Adeptus. Until you announced yourself at my gate I knew not a thing about you." He smiles. "As I said: you and your 'partner' are hardly the first to come to my door... from any chantry."
He sips. "Do what you will," he says, unconcerned. "But remember: there is one thing those herb-witches got right. What you sow, you will reap three times over."
DaneThere was a time when Dane would have hesitated. There was a time when Dane wouldn't have even gone this far; when he would have hedged, when he would have tried to persuade, when, finally, he would have slunk back to the Chantry, made his report, and waited for further instruction.
That time is past now. Whatever scorched him clean of nearly all human attachment took his sense of moderation and caution as well. What remains is aggression and reaction, and - when his head snaps around to note that the unfortunate initiate paired with him on this encounter has simply been removed from the flow of time - something rather like vengeance.
"I'll remember that," Dane says, and
his own resonance cracks out as abruptly as lightning: a pounding in the temples, a hard adrenaline rush in the blood. There is a sudden blazing quality to every edge, every line, every object. Every molecule in the room seems refulgent with its own unlocked potential, gathering to the still, dark, brooding singularity that is Dane: Dane the destroyer, Dane the ender of worlds.
Really, it starts so small. Just that hot cup of tea in Wentworth's hand abruptly freezing solid. So cold it burns. So cold the humidity in the air around it immediately sublimes to a mist of ice. Every last iota of heat drawn. Converted. Redirected.
miss cotton[APPRENTICE.]
Dane[APPRENTICE.]
DaneDice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9) ( success x 2 )
miss cottonHe'll remember that.
Magic bursts from Dane, gilding the edges of everything until the eyes burn. God only knows what Eileen sees, if she sees any of this right now. The tea goes cold, and Wentworth's eyes flick downward. He gives a small smile, lifting his eyes again. As Dane gathers his power, as he fits the pieces of his universe together only to blow them apart, the mage across from him leans forward, sets the tea and saucer down on the table, then leans back, lacing his fingers across his middle.
Kinetic energy builds, potential mounting upon potential until it's unleashed, and
slams William Wentworth, III backwards, his chair crashing against the corner of a bookcase. He gives a grunt, a small cough, but little more. And it wasn't light, he wasn't gently nudged backward. There is power behind Dane, strength directed in force. It's just that, even when Wentworth's head snaps back for a moment, he doesn't seem much affected by it. His eyes don't even swim. Of course, Dane might not notice.
His own power doesn't come back to hit him, three times three. That ward has what's known as an alarm. Not a bell ringing in the back of Wentworth's mind, not a chime to let him or others know that the ward is being assaulted. In fact, it isn't even the assault on Wentworth himself that does it. The ward itself is weak, merely a... trigger. If, then.
If: Ars Essentiae, then: Ars Mentis.
The onslaught is sudden and overwhelming. The ability to sense the shifts in resonance in the room is gone. The ability to see is gone. Eileen is gone, the room is gone, sorrow and duty are gone, everything is gone. He has no body any longer. There is only pain, shredding through his mind like a cat sharpening its claws, and he has no defense against it, he does not even have Eileen's rudimentary defense against such a thing. At his best, this could put him on his knees. No one is teaching him a lesson. No one is giving him instruction. There is torture, and then
there is this.
Time loses all meaning. Everything, for awhile, loses all meaning.
miss cotton[The ward Dane just activated was simply a trigger against the use of Forces by anyone other than Wentworth, and it sets off a Mind effect that simply causes utterly overwhelming pain. It causes no physical harm, but it is temporarily debilitating. If Dane had botched that WP roll, he might have gone into a coma or started taking actual damage. A failure would have resulted, likely, in going into shock or passing out instantly. With a couple of successes he might be able to stop himself from screaming or curling up in a ball on the ground, but he's not able to overcome it/recognize that it's not really hurting him. For all he knows, Wentworth just teleported a scorpion into the center of his head.]
DaneSo: not what he expected, then. He has enough time to register that, the distinct lack of a rebound that he could use, could amplify, could redirect over and over and over until he had enough energy to blow a crater in the world. Not that.
This.
And it is totally unexpected: this sort of backlash, this sort of destruction visited back on him. He has no defenses against this sort of onslaught; does not even understand it. He does not know what his body is doing, does not know that he has crumpled instantly, his fingers pulling at the ground. He knows only pain. The world is pain.
(On a better day, Dane, wry and weary Dane, would smirk at that. That's how it always is, he'd quip, only he's pretty bad at jokes, so it wouldn't really be a joke.)
This is not a better day. This is a very bad day indeed, and somewhere in the midst of that white-hot torrent of agony Dane, pressed back against the very last vestiges of his will, forced back to the very last core of self that even now threatens to be utterly obliterated by what the world has become -- somewhere in the midst of that, Dane reacts in the same blind, instinctive way Charlie had.
Only, not the same at all. Charlie was broken. Charlie just wanted safety, peace, someplace he could go and not be hurt anymore. Dane is damaged, but Dane is not broken. Dane is utterly full of wrath. Full of destruction. When he's hurt, well and truly hurt, hurt on so deep a level he has no conscious defense against it,
he retaliates.
Dane doesn't sense it - he never senses his own Resonance - but Wentworth does. Everything is searing light, pure and hyperreal, collapsing inward to some almost-invisible core of obliteration. Dane opens his mouth to scream. His lungs compress, his vocal cords vibrate. It is primal and raw, agony and wrath, but no sound comes out at all. That sound, those forces: they too are altered at their most basic level, ripped away the instant he creates them, rewrought and redirected and lashed out in every direction.
Stone cracks. Wood splinters. Molecules come undone at the basest level; searing, insubstantial sickles of blazing energy whip through thin air, cleaving anything and everything in their way. Reality itself begins to groan under the assault: too much, too unchecked, far too vulgar.
miss cotton"No."
This time, there is a word, and that only seems to give Wentworth more power. Dane can hear it through the pain, the pain he is using as focus not only for his magic but for everything, all the agony he had even before that backlash. The word is like a crackle of lightning, like the silence after the hammer of a god falls to earth. The walls are shaking, and the crystal and the teapot and the lemonade pitcher have already shattered. The weakest things in the room are already disintegrating, breaking against Dane's wrath. Pages of books have burst into flame on the shelves and that fire licks upward, slavering against the wood.
The little petit-four in Eileen's hand has crumbled to dust, the plastic of her shades cracking, and she hasn't moved a centimeter from where the wood of Wentworth's desk splinters. Her chair is shaking, trying to come apart at the joints.
No, says Wentworth, unfolding his hands, opening them wide, and then -- with a complicated placing of how his fingers are arched, bent to be as gnarled as his butler's -- flips his palms down. It stops.
Nothing freezes, like Eileen is frozen, but the fire douses instantly. The room stops shaking. Except where Dane claws at the carpet. Within a 3-foot radius around him, the world is still trying to blow itself apart, blasted down to molecules. Part of the rug under his hands has simply ceased to exist. He has no mirror to see how the blood vessels in his eyes have burst, his sclera turning blood-red. He is caught in a hurricane of his own making, restrained down to a dome of reality while Wentworth's will asserts itself everywhere else. It seems to take something out of him, though:
Eileen stirs. The pain in Dane's mind has stopped, as though within the dome Wentworth has created he is left to his own devices. He can see her clearly, startled, but she doesn't look confused. She is staring at Wentworth suddenly, pale as a sheet, and breathing again but
not daring to move.
Wentworth strides forward to the boundary of the space he's created around Dane, the walls to keep Dane in, only harming himself if he harms anything at all. He looks down at him. He speaks, but his lips don't move. Dane hears him in his mind.
You are no weapon, he says, to be wielded, bloodied, cleaned and sheathed again. You are a stick of dynamite. There will be nothing left of you after you burn. His head tips slowly, inspecting Dane thoughtfully but not -- surprisingly -- without respect. They must be desperate, to have sent you.
He lowers himself into a crouch, the edges of his suit jacket brushed aside, leaving him eye to eye with Dane. Still his voice pulsates in Dane's mind. One lifetime is not enough, Matthew. Don't throw any of your lives away over one little war. It isn't even yours, is it? His eyebrows flick upward. The tone of his 'voice', the look in his voidlike eyes, is nearly gentle. He rises again, standing, and walks over to Eileen, reaching out to touch her cheek. She flinches away, horrified by him for some reason.
He says something to her. Dane can't hear it. And he walks out of the study, gently closing the door behind him.
The ward -- the boundary -- around Dane drops.
DaneThe pain stops. With its departure, control reasserts itself. Consciousness. The unchecked, undirected flood of destruction ceases; those last, light-fast whips of raw force hurl themselves against the barrier and are absorbed. Left in his own little bubble of reality, Dane is panting harshly, bowed to the ground. The rug is gone. The wood is faded, as though scorched by a thousand summers. The air smells like ozone: molecules torn apart and recombining oddly, imperfectly.
He doesn't stay on the ground for long. He sees Wentworth approaching and he pushes himself up, shaking with rage or remembered pain or both. He steps right to the edge of his little prison, stopping only when he feels his toes hitting immovable resistance. Stands there, nostrils flaring, eyes blazing, stares at Wentworth with such. utter. hatred that it's a wonder the air doesn't catch alight all over again.
Matthew, Wentworth calls Dane. There's a flash in Dane's eyes, a quick animalistic quiver to his lip. Don't throw any of your lives away, he counsels, which makes no sense at all to Dane. Not that Dane cares very much about sense at the moment. Because Dane, knowing he can't touch Wentworth, knowing how utterly outmatched he is, knowing all this and not caring:
gathers heat from the air itself. Gathers white-hot fire in his palm, that first and most familiar of the Forces. Gathers it, directs it, smashes it at Wentworth's face.
His palm hits the barrier. Flame explodes briefly, blindingly around his fingers, crisping the hairs off his hand, searing his skin. Then it fades. Dane is still trapped, and Wentworth, that smug bastard, is simply turning away. Dane's breath frosts in the sudden chill in his bubble-world. His hand stings. He watches Wentworth go to Eileen; he smashes the side of his fist against the wards as Wentworth speaks to her, but
Wentworth doesn't do anything to her. He just talks. It's insult to injury. He knows - he saw in Dane's eyes - that Dane would gladly kill him if he could. He has them both at his mercy, and yet: he does not retaliate. He does not eliminate the threat. It's as though they pose no threat at all - beneath his notice, beneath anything he need be concerned about.
William Wentworth III leaves his study. He closes the door gently. Dane's barrier's fall. In the next instant the temperature drops again, precipitously, as a sheet of raw flame chars the door,
and dies to nothing.
Dane's resonance is still pulsing around him, an almost-visible corona of impotent wrath, when he goes to Eileen. It's hard for him not to be preoccupied by his own fury; he wants to look at that door, he wants to tear it apart and chase Wentworth down. He knows it will accomplish nothing. Not here, not now. So he helps his partner up. He touches her broken sunglasses with something a little like regret; then her chin.
"Are you all right?" This, from the man with the blistered palm, the blood-red eyes, the skin still sallow from whatever it is he went through in his mind. "What did he say to you?"
miss cottonWhen the barrier between Dane and Dane's power and the rest of the world falls away, he doesn't tear out of the room and go chasing Wentworth down. Eileen doesn't know why. Eileen is staring at the still-ticking grandfather clock against the wall, her skin ashen. She's not really the sort of person one expects to look so shellshocked, so overcome by fear. And yet: fear is as much a passion as joy. It is just as potent and meaningful as grief, or lust, or envy.
The room is a wreck. Crystal has shattered everywhere. Lemonade drips off the edge of the serving cart onto the floor. There is a hole in that expensive rug and a charred floor beneath it. There are scorch marks across everything, the smell of smoke and burnt paper. The clock still ticks, though, and the little motion device keeps on shifting. Dane knows, from a little bit of lore and a lot of experience, that the Paradox is coming. There's little comfort in the knowledge that it will come for Wentworth, too. He lashed out again and again at the man, sent fire at his face, energy through the air, flames up the door. The Paradox is coming, and hangs now like a sword of Damocles over his head, ready to fall at any moment.
Eileen lifts her head and looks up at him as Dane comes over. She doesn't seem to know quite what to do with his offered hand at first, then blinks slowly and sets her own hand in it, standing up like she isn't feeling her legs. He touches her sunglasses, her chin, and right about then she sees the burnt skin on his palm and lets out a little cry. Sorrow turns her cheeks pink, both her hands suddenly cradling the back of his hand, holding it open. "Thomas," she says, somewhere between anguished and apologetic.
She's pale. He looks like he's been through the ringer. Eileen is blowing gently on his hand, as though she can't not. "He said..." she doesn't want to say this, considered just telling Dane she wants to forget it because she didn't like it, but: "He said 'you would think he'd be more careful'," she finally gets out, and looks up at Dane again finally. "I'm afraid to use any magic in here. Can we go? Can we just go?"
DaneOf course Dane knows the Paradox is coming. But then - that line in his dossier, the part about collateral damage and his lack of concern for it. The fact that he just keeps doing these things, these terribly foolish things that rend what is believable, that bends the very laws of physics. Never mind if it's him or those around him caught in reality's crossfire later.
There's a little of that, even, in the way he glances at his palm. Eileen looks stricken. Dane looks - puzzled, then a little annoyed, as though it's such a terrible inconvenience that his own flesh and blood can't stand up to the heat. "Don't worry about it," he says. "It's just a scald."
Eileen wanted to hold his hand when they walked in here. She thought he would shake her off, though. And in a way she's right: he shakes her off now, extricating his hand from her concerned grasp, grimacing a little. He's still so angry. He's still so humiliated - particularly when Eileen tells him what it was Wentworth said to her. She can see the anger flash right back into his face.
"That son of a bitch," he bites out. Turns toward that door, looks for a moment like he wants to storm through it after all, but -- no. Turns back. Looks at her, brow knit and eyes snapping. Focuses on her a moment later. When he exhales, some of that fire seems to go out of him. "Yeah." He glances at his palm again, then tucks that hand into his pocket. "The Council should hear about this too. Goddamn outdated records."
He starts out the way he came. And, curious: halfway to the door, and without making a single remark, he reaches out and takes Eileen's hand.
miss cottonSoon enough a burn on his hand will be the least of Dane's worries. The pain won't be as bad as what Wentworth's ward did to him, nowhere that bad, and he's a tough chap -- he can likely take the brunt of it. It's the quirks that will mark him for hours, or days, depending. It's the fact that even when it is bad, the few healers the magi can claim on their side are even fewer when you take away those who are unwilling to work such magic on wounds given by paradox. Superstitious, some might say. The law of three, say more than a few of those healers.
Eileen hasn't let go of his hand yet though. She looks at him as he says it's just a scald, and her hands drop away as he pulls back. There's sadness in her eyes along with the fear, but neither one is shattering her. She does not look sad or angry due to his anger, either. Her eyes follow his to the door and when his snap back to hers, she says:
"Go, if you want to. But I wish you wouldn't."
He doesn't. Some of the fire goes out but the room still smells like it. His eyes still flash with anger. She winces as he tucks his hand away and reaches up, tucking her cracked sunglasses down over her eyes. Eileen starts to follow him, tiptoeing around broken and burnt things, afraid to even look through the books because of the last time they did anything. She's stepping over the handle of the lemonade pitcher that flew across the room at one point, its ends severed cleanly by one of Dane's arcs of laser-hot light, when Dane takes her hand.
She doesn't remark on it, either. She does look across her shoulder at him, though, for a moment.
The door isn't hot. It could have caught fire but he let the fire die instead. Dane could have engulfed this room in flames: melted the glass, turned the books and wood to ash, cremated Eileen alive. But when they get to the rose-shaped handles and pull it open, it's cool to the touch.
Wentworth's butler is waiting for them in the hall. He gives them a bow. He gestures to the door.
It's salt in the wound. It is as much an expression of power as anything else that Wentworth has done. It nails down neatly: he didn't have to run away. This is his home. He just had better things to do than keep fighting with them. With him. Eileen wasn't a fight at all.
She, however, is the one who gives Dane's hand a squeeze when they see Donald ready to usher them out. Back into daylight. Past the trumpeting angel, the poisonous flowers, the magical herbs, the symbol-carved lintels.
Stepping down the stone stairway, Eileen says:
"We do need to tell the chantry," which is quiet, before she looks over and up at him, "but can we take a break first?"
DaneIt seems absurd that the day should still be so bright outside. After what they've been through, it seems only fair that the sky be red and the earth afire. Or at least: a cloudier day, perhaps. A distortion in reality, something to make it real. Some sign that what happened really happened. But there's nothing. There's only sunshine, the sparkle of water, the gleam of Dane's Audi waiting for them.
Dane is walking a little ways ahead. Aside from his hand holding Eileen's, and aside from the way he'd gone to her, touched those cracked sunglasses, touched her chin as though to acknowledge, no matter how tacitly, that what he did - what he did when he had absolutely no control of himself - could have injured her. Or killed her.
-- aside from that, he barely seems to know she exists right now. He's distracted by his own anger; preoccupied with who was that bastard and what the hell does he want. He needs to get back to the Chantry. For once, Dane wants to be amongst his own kind, surrounded by mages and their knowledge, their abilities in all the areas he lacks. He wants to know:
what. the fucking. fuck. happened in there.
So when Eileen speaks up, so quietly, he startles a little. He looks at her. They're passing the fountain, those flowers she was so happy to stroke earlier. And abruptly some realization knifes him through the heart: god knows what she went through when she was frozen like that. God knows what it was like for her to be so utterly taken out of the equation, and not because of anything she'd done. Dane; well, at least Dane had some initiative. At least he, in a sense, brought it down on himself. Eileen just came here for some Fancy Snacks and ended up frozen, nearly sliced in half and, for a terrifying instant, utterly alone with a creature whose power made Dane's look like child's play.
Dane draws up short. His hand is still in hers. He comes back to her, frowning; looks at her for a moment. Then he wraps his free arm around her, pulling her against his chest. The hug is brief, but tight.
"Yeah. My place isn't too far from here, in Lincoln Park. Do you want to go there? Or should I take you home?"
miss cottonStepping out into the sunlight, holding the hand of a friend, seems to bring color back to Eileen's face. She breathes in deep and the green, beautiful things that Wentworth surrounds himself with fill her lungs with oxygen. She smells flowers and water instead of smoke, which isn't a bad smell, it's just nice to have something different. She skips down the last two steps and lands beside Dane, who is turning to her, his eyes flickering a bit with
acknowledgement, and she's not sure of what. She smiles at him. God only knows where that smile comes from, how she can smile right now, but she seems so much more at peace than before. The fear isn't gone. Dane doesn't even need to ask anymore if Eileen knows what happened in there. She's an apprentice, to be sure, but she's not like other apprentices. She's nothing like the neophyte apprentices of the Order, allowed to learn about the faith and the forms but no magic at all. He keeps forgetting, in fact, that she's not an initiate.
She's asked to take a break, she looks hale and healthy again, and he pulls her across the neatly-packed white gravel and hugs her in one arm, firm and fierce against his chest. It lasts only a matter of seconds: for the first, she's startled, regaining her feet. For the second, she's relaxing against him, her cheek to his shirt, her hand flexing softly in his. For the third, she's exhaling, and for that single second he has a sense of how much she has on her shoulders, in her past, in her mind: and it is greater than he ever imagined.
But he does let her go, and she doesn't mention the hug, she just smiles gently up at him. "Gillson Beach," she says. "Just give me... fifteen minutes up there with you, okay? Then we'll call the chantry and I'll get you home safe and... all that. But c'mon. I'll drive." She has his hand. She uses it, tugging him away towards the Audi.
DaneDane doesn't understand how she can smile right now. Then again, Dane hardly understands how anyone can smile at all. But she does. And she always smiles. And even without anything else, even without the strange gentle-fierce attraction he feels to her, even without how well she complements him on their little missions, that alone is enough to make him appreciate her, and what she does.
She smiles. And he, wanly and almost in spite of himself, smiles back.
"A beach," he echoes quietly. "Right now. Really?" But he doesn't argue. He takes his keys out and hands it to her: he and his ghastly eyes, his burnt hand.
They get in his car. He gets a look at himself and hisses through his teeth. "Why didn't you tell me I had Boris Karloff eyes?" he wants to know, and he's digging around his glove compartment for eyedrops, as if that would help. She starts the engine and he doesn't find eyedrops, but he does find one of those little roadside emergency kits, which has burn gel and bandages inside. So he bandages his hand up, and then he lets down his window a little bit so the fresh air can get in. He smells a little like ozone, a little like frost, a lot like smoke, but all that begins to lift away. He closes his eyes for a little part of the drive.
Then he opens them again.
"What was it like for you," he asks quietly, "when he ... took you out of time like that?"
miss cotton"Gillson beach," she insists, as though the name matters. "Right now. Really." Smiling still, through all that pain and fear, as though it can't quite touch the oxygen and the flowers and the sunlight, just as what Wentworth did and is cannot touch the beauty of his fountain, his gardens, the ferocity and glory of his power which -- yes -- Eileen sees and appreciates as much as the flowers,
though they are poison if eaten.
They get to his car and she scoots into the driver's seat. She's using keys this time. He makes a noise and a fuss about his eyes and her brow wrinkles. "I didn't think it mattered," she says, quite honestly. She's starting it up and driving away, as though they aren't leaving the mansion of a wicked wizard, tossing her sunglasses -- broken as they are -- into Dane's back seat while he smooths burn gel onto his hand. The windows roll down. She drives them out the drive and down to the gate, which is open, waiting for them to leave, swinging slowly closed as they pull out onto the street.
All the little kids are home now. Eating their after-school snacks. Doing their homework. Itching to get outside and enjoy the remaining hours of daylight. Eileen just drives, currently northwest a bit, towards Gillson Park and its beach. She looks excited to be doing so. The beach. On a warm, summery day in the middle of spring.
Her smile hitches a bit when Dane asks her about what Wentworth did. Her eyebrows tug together. She thinks for awhile, then shakes her head. "He didn't...take me out of it. He stopped time. My time."
She glances at him. She honestly has no idea if he knows things like this: "We don't do that," she says, very quietly. "The Cult," which is, truthfully, where most masters of Time reside and why so many Cultists who achieve that level simply disappear and no one knows if they took too many drugs or fell off the face of the earth or
simpy became masters of the fourth dimension, the most well-known of human constructs, the lie that we all pretend is concrete.
Eileen is watching the road again, both hands relaxed on the wheel. "Mostly. That sort of thing is... really dangerous. And the ones who can do it usually say they can also tell what the repercussions backward and forward will be, but... even confining it to just my timeline is scary. It's really really scary to me."
She's pale again, pressing her lips together to stop talking, visibly reining herself in, calming herself down, before she spins out into that terror. She shakes her head. "I don't remember anything. As far as I was concerned, I may as well have blacked out. But I could... taste it, when he let me go. I could feel in the air what he'd just done. I could feel it on me."
Her throat moves. "What it was like for me," she says, her voice a bit clearer, summing up, "was not fun, and I highly recommend never going through it yourself."
DaneWhen Eileen pales, when she visibly has to reassert control over herself to keep herself from freaking out, Dane reaches out to her. It is unexpected. He's so stiff and formal sometimes; so grumpy and gruff other times, and even when he's not being any of these things he's simply not the type to comfort, to touch. That single fierce hug outside the Evil Wizard's Castle was about as far as he's ever gone,
excepting that achingly gentle kiss on the way there.
Here's another example, though. He reaches out to Eileen. He puts his hand over hers, closes his fingers over hers. He covers her hand for a moment, wordless. Just there. Just ... supportive, as much as he can be. He's still looking at her even though she has to look at the road. And when she sums it up, his mouth moves a little, a bittersweet little smile.
"I'm sorry you had to go through that," he says quietly. "And I'm very sorry I wasn't more careful. Not knowing what he was capable of, I shouldn't have provoked him. Certainly not in his own home, with all his wards up and active."
miss cottonLike she did earlier, more than once, Dane crosses the center console with his hand and touches her. She has both hands on the wheel, and she notices, glancing at him. All he does is touch her hand, and it's the sort of wordless, tender comfort that one usually associates with 'empathy', with 'kindness', with 'humanity', which are not words one usually associates with Thomas Dane, Adeptus Majoris of the Order of Hermes, House Ignis. She wants to look at him longer, but she has to look away. She does see the smile, though. Barely. Out of the corner of her eye.
She shakes her head to him. "Oh, Thomas," she says, gentle and patient. "I think he did it to see how you'd react. Which means he would've done it anyway. You can't take responsibility for other people's dick moves. You can burn a house down with your brain, but his actions are on his own head. The Wheel will turn."
For a moment, she sounds like a Euthanatos.
Eileen breathes in deep and exhales. "We have paradox coming for you, a chantry to correct the books with, and I need new sunglasses. This is a very full plate. So we will need rest and sustenance. What is your favorite flavor of ice cream?" she rattles off briskly, pulling the car to a rather sudden turn into the parking lot -- and then, drivethrough -- of an ice cream place called Bobtail. She beams at him. "They have a dutch cocoa flavor here with Jack in it. It's --" her eyes roll upward on the first syllable and then down to him on the others: "uhmazing."
DaneThey're taking a detour. To an ice cream parlor, of all things, and Dane - who one would not imagine to be even remotely self-conscious, not when he apparently doesn't even really care if Paradox causes stigmata to randomly appear on his body or, for that matter, assigns him a little fire-imp for the day - digs around his glove compartment again until he finds sunglasses. Nice ones, with a lightweight titanium frame and stylish, classic lenses. Very Order of Hermes, that.
He slips them on as they're approaching the drivethrough window, looking past Eileen to examine the menu. "I like coffee ice cream," he says. "Or just plain chocolate is fine too. I guess I could try to dutch cocoa."
And, a little later, as they're pulling from one window to the next: "How do you do it? I mean, how do you bounce right back to being happy? How do you not get dragged down by all the crap?"
miss cottonThey shouldn't be going to 'take a break' at all, if you want to be perfectly businesslike and professional. They need to go back to the chantry. They need to find a safe place for Dane to endure his backlash. They should at very least report that they didn't get any further with William Wentworth, III than any other ambassador. But Eileen asked, so gently, if she could take fifteen minutes on a beach with Dane before dealing with all that. And maybe he needs a break too, or maybe he doesn't see any bother in allowing it, but: okay, he essentially said, and handed her his keys.
Now there's ice cream on top of the beach outing. She has no sunglasses, and is squinting while she orders two scoops -- for Dane. Coffee on bottom, the 'Lakeview Barhopper' on the top. A waffle cone. She gets herself a tinier sugar cone with a scoop of the Lakeview Barhopper flavor and digs around in her little red purse for her wallet, which is yellow pleather with a little hedgehog on it, a pink heart next to his tiny face. Her cash is wrinkled and confused, and at first she hands the person a twenty instead of a ten and they hand it back, because she's just so nice that they don't want to rip her off.
"Aw, thank you," she says, beaming at them, handing Dane his double-scoop and taking her own. She drives rather well one-handed as they pull aside, heading back into the road. She must be hungry; she goes at that ice cream like she's starved.
She basically ignores Dane's question, at least until they're back on the road heading toward the beach. Then, abruptly, suddenly, chocolate on her lips, she answers him. "Happiness," she says, quite philosophically, "as we understand it, is a relatively new concept. It's certainly not a given aspect of the human condition. The Russians think that someone who smiles a lot is either a fool or an American. The Protestants of the 17th century encouraged people to be melancholy and austere so that god could encourage and lift you up, not mortal pleasures."
Eileen laps at her ice cream. Takes a turn, wide and slow and lazy.
"But then the Enlightenment, which if I recall your Tradition actually was way into, and suddenly people began to look at happiness as the point of life, the meaning of life, the aim of life. Suddenly, when bad things happened, people began to insist that those who suffered 'cheer up', where before they never would have thought about it." She pauses a moment, glancing over at him. "But I don't think you were really asking about happiness, which is... happenstance." She smiles at her play on words.
Eileen shrugs, driving on and looking forward again. "I thought," she says more slowly, "that William's house, and his fountain, and his carvings, and his garden, and his paintings, were all beautiful. I loved his little... thingy on his desk. I liked being there. I thought he was handsome, too. Those are all things that, on their own and apart from any moral judgement or other emotion, are utterly worthy of enjoyment. The hard thing in life is that there are other emotions at play. There's other stuff that isn't enjoyable. It's painful or scary or disgusting. All of these things, all these passions, all these feelings and sensations... they're going to happen whether we like them or not. You're going to walk outside after a movie matinee and it's still going to be daylight and it's going to feel weird. People are going to hurt and violate you. People are going to make your heart pound. The world itself is going to do those things, too."
She shivers, a little caught up in it all, and shakes it off, shakes it through her shoulders and her limbs. "With all that information... all those feelings, conflicting and rebounding around inside and outside and everywhere, we all end up making a decision which ones we're going to focus our attention on in a given moment, or even for a lifetime. It's hard," she says, perhaps surprisingly. "The Russians didn't get that idea from nowhere: someone who never, ever focuses on pain or fear or grief is someone who is trying to blind themselves to those things. And people think the Cult tries that. We run away from hurtful or sad things with booze or sex or whatever because we can't handle it or something." She shakes her head, her frown momentarily sad.
"We're Seers. It is hard to try and find freedom in balance, or balance in freedom. It's hard to ask yourself: am I choosing to take joy in the sun and the air and my friend's company right now because I can't deal with what just happened, or am I choosing that because I think it's important? Is asking the question at all just overthinking it?"
She smiles at him. "I try not to overthink too much. It doesn't mean I don't think at all. But once I'm asking myself if I'm overthinking it, I probably am." She licks her ice cream and takes their exit toward the park, toward the lake, the beach. "The short answer to 'how' is: practice, magic, discipline, and self-liberation. The short answer to how I bounce back is: I'm not bouncing back, really. Everything that happened in that room is still with me, right now. But so are you, and so is the sunshine, and this ice cream. If I had to pick which one would trump the other, it would be my friend and the sun and the ice cream, not some prick with hubris and a grandfather clock."
They can see the trees, the gate, the people who are already out here, enjoying this place. She smiles, pleased to have arrived. Pleased to have had the drive to talk. "And the answer to how I don't get dragged down is..."
Eileen looks at him. Her eyes are colored like the veins in marble. They're gentle, and patient, and fond. They're a little sad. "None of it is crap, Thomas. Nothing is insignificant. And nothing is so great that it can become my whole reality." She looks very much like she'd like to touch him right now, but she can't. She's still driving. She can't even watch him for very long. "The good and beautiful matters as much as the terrifying and painful. Maybe even more."
DaneListening, Thomas is mostly quiet. Not because he's not paying attention, or because he finds her boring, dull, any of that. Simply and uncomplicatedly: because he's listening. He's quiet, and listening, and once in a while he looks at her as though the very look on her face could tell him more.
When she's finished, he's quiet a little longer. Then he smiles at her, that wry half-sad little smile of his, his eyes shaded by the sunglasses, but that makes him feel impersonal so he takes those sunglasses off. Nevermind that he has, as he put it, Boris Karloff eyes right now. Nevermind any of that.
"See the good and the bad for what it is, and experience both to its fullest. Something like that? It's so different from what I do that I can hardly imagine it."
He eats his ice cream, though. And she's right. It's good. Experimentally, cautiously, he lets himself enjoy this much at least. Nevermind what happened earlier, too. Nevermind how utterly they were - he was - outmatched; nevermind how easily Wentworth could have snuffed both of them out. Eileen is right that it doesn't change this much: the ice cream is still cold, and sweet, and good. And the day is still beautiful. And they're parking at the beach now, and he's looking out across the surprisingly pristine sands at the surprisingly oceanic lake, slipping his sunglasses back on.
Knowing he should get back to the Chantry and report as soon as possible, Dane says, "Do you want to go for a walk?"
miss cottonWhat Dane says is true, and shows that he 'gets it', as Eileen would put it: experience both to the fullest. She wouldn't say good and bad, she wouldn't put it quite like that, but she knows why people would. She knows why she used to. She struggles, all the time, with not saying that joy is good and sorrow is bad, when neither are either. But Dane does get it: what happened earlier, awful as it is and as consequence-filled as the future is now,
does not change the fact that ice cream tastes good, or that the day is beautiful.
She just smiles at him, when he says it's so different from what he does. "Oh, I think you can," she says. "I have faith in your imagination." But then, it seems like it doesn't take much for Eileen to have a little faith.
Eileen parks his car in the lot and for a moment they just sit, eating their ice cream, looking out at the -- waves, of all things, though it's only Lake Michigan. There are people walking. There's a dog beach further down the waterline where a yellow lab is playing frisbee with her human. A young man with a tan and a hemp necklace is building a sandcastle with a boy of about six while a toddler girl sleeps on a towel in the shade of an umbrella, sucking on her pacifier. The man -- brother? nanny? doesn't really matter. -- seems equally invested in the sandcastle as the six year old.
Dane asks Eileen if she wants to go for a walk. She smiles at him. "Let's go lay on the sand with our shoes off. I don't want you to fall or anything when the Paradox hits."
That doesn't damper her enthusiasm, either, it seems. In this moment, good as it is, she doesn't have to deny what did happen...or what will. She pulls the door handle and gets out, putting her cracked sunglasses back on, munching on the melted-ice-cream-filled point of her sugar cone.
Dane laughs a little as she speaks again, and so casually, of the impending backlash. The good and the bad, he thinks, neither outshining the other. Both just there because, well, that's life.
He gets out of the car. He considers the beach for a moment, and then wordlessly, but with something that almost borders on a mischievous smile at Eileen, he pulls his shoes off. And his socks. He leaves them in the car, tossing them into the back, and with bare feet he walks off the asphalt, onto the sand, where he rolls his pant-legs up to the knee and puts his hands in his pocket.
He lets her lead. He lets her figure out a good spot to hang out. As they walk out there he says, "Don't be too worried. Paradox and I are well-acquainted with each other. So far it seems content to limit itself to torment, not doom." He thinks a while. "Once it put me away in an alternate microreality entirely composed of water. It was polite enough to confer on me the ability to breathe underwater, though. I was there for some time; long enough that I wasn't sure I'd ever get out. Learned all sorts of things about water, though; its properties, its reactions, its moods. I even learned to build things. The architecture of water is quite remarkable. It doesn't obey the same rules as concrete and stone. It's not static. You can build ... beautiful, alien things there. You would liked it, I think.
"And then one day I woke up and I was back." Dane shrugs a little. "I tried to make a record of all the things I'd seen and done, but ... it was like trying to hold on to a dream. It slipped away even as I recalled it, and in the end all I can remember is that it happened. That's Paradox for you, I suppose."
They've found a spot. Dane sits, and then Dane lays back, wriggling his toes into the sand, looking at the sky. There are magi that are terrified of Paradox. Won't cast anything vulgar at all for fear of it. There are magi who pretend not to fear Paradox; who brag about their experiences with it as though to prove to the world they aren't fettered by reality's backlash. Dane falls into neither category. Knowing it's coming, not knowing when or how it will strike, Dane's reaction to Paradox is almost ... familiar. There's a strange sense of peace around him that's never otherwise there - like resignation. No; not quite. Like acceptance. He smiles a little. Another memory:
"Then there was the time Paradox sent a little fire imp to follow me around. Set everything I touched on fire. Cackled. Sang while I tried to sleep. Terrible singer. Came back a few times since just to bother me. I'm sorry if he shows up today."
Dane[too many 'though's in his dialogue! take out the second one!]
miss cottonSome magi are, indeed, so wary of Paradox they scarcely do magic at all, as though the universe is looking over their shoulder even on the most coincidental of magics. Eileen, one imagines, is like most apprentices whose magic only extends to perception: she's hardly ever felt Paradox in her Awakened life. Even when she was a consor, no one could claim to see things as she saw them unless they literally deposited themselves into her brain and rode sidecar to her thoughts. It does not bother the universe if she sees and feels things that others might not, that others might think impossible.
You can see energy and you can measure waves of it in midair, Eileen might argue; she just doesn't need to use high-powered microlaserscopes anything like that.
He takes off his shoes and she grins, but keeps hers on -- they're just canvas slip-ons, anyway. They circle the car and she waits for him while he rolls up his sleeves, and then -- perhaps not so unexpectedly by now -- takes his hand before he puts it in his pocket. Not the burnt one. She's still upset about that, and for all her talk of not running away from things, she's glad he doesn't let her see it.
"Oh, I'm not," she says, when he tells her not to be too worried. It's so breezy, so simple, because clearly he thinks she's worried and he should probably know that she isn't, particularly if he doesn't want her to be. She isn't. She just doesn't want him to fall. He might skin his knees or something. Or pass out. And while she knows a neat trick to roll someone way way bigger than her on his side when they've turned to dead weight, she still couldn't drag him around and until she knows what form his backlash is going to take, she doesn't want to call 9-1-1 to come pick him up.
Eileen is, despite being so excited by Fancy Snacks, quite practical.
He tells her about the forms of Paradox he's ...well. Endured would be the usual word. He almost sounds like he enjoys it. Eileen looks at him, head tipped, carrying her deck shoes now in her other hand. "I think it's interesting that when you were in that water realm, you started building things." No further commentary on that. Just interesting. Just neat. She doesn't even agree or disagree, doesn't tell him if she'd like it or think she'd hate it.
They come to a stop about three-quarters of the way down the beach, far enough from the waterline that the sand all around them is perfectly dry and sunbacked to soaking warmth. Dane sits, and he leans back, and he looks upward. Eileen dances around him for a moment or two, bounding lightly on the sand, doing her best not to kick it up. Her toenails are red. She hums lightly, finds herself on his left side, and then drops down beside him and, quite unselfconsciously, lays out against his side. Lays her head on him -- his shoulder or his arm, whatever's available. She buries her feet under mounds of sand.
Listens. She looks at the sky for a moment, then simply closes her eyes. "You can keep talking," she says mildly. "I'm not going to sleep."
Dane"Is it?" Dane is a little disarmed when Eileen says what he did was interesting. He thinks a moment, and in that moment they're getting comfortable on the sand. She lays against him. He remembers her laying like this against Charlie, and though he tenses for a moment, he allows it. He doesn't draw away. He is not wasted and emaciated as Charlie was. He's no bodybuilder, but the body beneath those clothes is trim and lean, though on the thin side of athletic.
"I suppose," he says a little later, "there didn't seem to be anything else to do. It kept me occupied. It made the time pass faster."
He falls silent. He thinks about Paradox. He thinks about reality, and its boundaries, and how curiously unreal it is about enforcing those boundaries. To most Hermetics, reality is faceless, impersonal, a brute beast to be conquered by sheer will - or dodged the best one can when it enrages. Dane, one might say, is not terribly good at dodging. He's been run over by Paradox so many times that it's become familiar, expected, a point of surprising dependability in his very unpredictable world. And even when everything else in his life burned away - friends and attachments and good sense and all the rest of it - Paradox endured. As unfathomable as it is, Dane can always count on Paradox to come calling.
"I don't have much else to say," he replies. He thinks a little more. He thinks a lot, really. "Thank you for calling me your friend," he adds. "Earlier, I mean, when we were getting ice cream."
miss cottonEileen hesitates at that tension. She hangs back a moment, their bodies having a wordless conversation:
wait --
what's wrong?
...nothing. it's okay.
you sure?
yeah.
okay.
before she settles again. It would be a lie to say she doesn't notice the contours of his body. His shirt is thin and light; he's more solid, the physical reality of him dark and heavy. She has her eyes closed and she can feel how warm everything is, from sun to sand to human being. She doesn't go so far as to drape an arm or a leg over him, though she might have if she hadn't felt that moment of tension in him. She might still. She just isn't right now.
"It's interesting," she murmurs, a smile in her voice, "that nothing else occurred to you."
He falls silent. She stops disarming him with the little things she says, non-jdugemental as they are. She lays out in the sunlight, ice cream in her belly, listening to the water on the shoreline, the dog and her human, the little boy and his buddy playing in the sand. She listens, sidelong, to Dane's heartbeat. It doesn't startled her when, some time later, he thanks her for calling him her friend. She smiles, eyes still closed.
"You're welcome," she says. "I like that you're my friend."
Which is simple enough: no arguing that of course she 'called' him her friend, because he is. No questions about whether he thinks of her as a friend. No questions as to why he'd think to thank her for that. No questions at all. Just graciousness, and gratitude of her own. Eileen doesn't seem to have much else to say. The wet sand beneath dry sand is cold on her toes and the warm sand everywhere else is somehow making her happy. She doesn't imagine anything. She doesn't wonder what anything means or what will happen. This is how she recovers from Wentworth stopping her in time. This is what she needed:
for Time to unfurl, slowing down, soaking behind her and ahead of her around her, diffuse and open. She could be here alone, experience this alone, and the joy would be not at all diminished. Still, all the same: she is happy he's here.
Maybe Dane is happy, too. Or maybe it just feels good. Eileen isn't asking him how he feels about this. But slowly, the longer he lays there, the warmer his skin gets. Everywhere he's exposed, in fact, begins to get warmer, and warmer, til it feels almost feverish: so hot on the outside that he feels cool on the inside. Not just hot on the outside: burning.
Lazily, Eileen opens her eyes where she lays by him, looking at him, and lets out a tiny noise of surprise. She darts up, as though afraid it's under his clothes, too. She looks sunward, then squints away, looking down at Dane. "Dane, your skin --"
is covered in a brutal, lobster-colored sunburn.
miss cotton[SHE CALLED HIM THOMAS. NOT DANE.]
Dane"Hm?" Dane opens his eyes. He looks at himself, frowns, and sits up. "Well, that's just lovely. I should probably get out of the sun." He pulls his sleeve back a little, hisses as his shirt brushes the fresh sunburns. "I suppose we should return to the Chantry, at any rate."
Mini-vacation over. Dane gets up, ginger with his feet now. He thinks he might have actually preferred the imp. At least it told jokes. Bad ones, mostly at his expense, but still.
"It might be a good idea," he says as they're heading back, "for you to keep your distance from me for the next few days. Sometimes Paradox seems to have a large radius of effect. I wouldn't want you to be caught in the backlash."
miss cotton"It won't be that bad," Eileen says, smartly, as she climbs to her feet and shakes sand out of her rather copious amount of hair. "It takes way worse stuff than you did to start messing with other people. Like, it really makes me wonder what you did for that imp to follow you around."
She sounds like she's been there before: caught in the backlash of someone else's mistake. Someone else's hubris. Someone else's power. Or maybe she just reads a lot.
Eileen doesn't complain that the mini-vacation is cut short. She just gets up and gets to it. Life goes on. Good with the bad. Also, they need to tell the chantry that William Wentworth is about as much an Adept as she is. She looks at him, her expression aching even behind her now-cracked sunglasses. She doesn't say anything. It just pains her, evidently and obviously, to see it. "And I'm not going to keep my distance from you for fear that something might hurt. I may as well sit in a room for the rest of my life drinking tepid, weak tea if I want to avoid stuff hurting."
She glances at him as they walk back toward the Audi, carrying her shoes still. "I'll keep my distance if you just...y'know. Don't want me around. But I'll know if you're lying," she says, and points her finger warningly at him.
They get into the car. She turns the key in the ignition. The car starts up, rumbling and purring, and
abruptly dies. At the same instant, Dane's head is filled with Mozart's Marriage of Figaro for exactly four seconds. Then that, too, dies away. Eileen is looking in confusion at the steering wheel, as though it holds the answers to why the car died. She doesn't seem to have heard the music.
Dane"Don't worry about me," Dane says softly, seeing the way she looks at him. Him and his burnt skin, burnt hand. At least one of those, and maybe arguably both, are the direct result of things he did to himself. "I've been through worse."
Like the imp. Like the water-realm. Like the other times, the ones that he won't tell her about because he knows it'll upset her. It's not that he thinks she can't take it. It's just that
he doesn't want to hurt her.
"I generally want you around," he adds as they're getting into the car. "It's just that sometimes I ... need to be alone. I might have to again, before this is over. Don't be insulted by it. Or hurt. I wouldn't want that."
She starts the car. And then the car dies. There's music in his head; not even a piece he particularly likes. Eileen is looking at the car as though wondering what happened. Dane looks -- level, really. Accepting. He reaches over all the same, though, because this is who he is: the sort of man who will try to burn the face off an enemy through a barrier he knows he can't pierce just because he wants to. The sort of man that will resist Paradox not because he doesn't think he deserves it or even because he considers Paradox much of an enemy at all,
but just because he will.
Quite deliberately, Dane turns the key to off. And then to ignition again.
miss cottonEileen's brow is wrinkled when he says that. She just shakes her head while they're walking. "It isn't worry," she tells him, and wants to squeeze his hand, but she's not holding it right now. And she seems to know that he's holding back. Then again, it doesn't take much for her to know that he's holding back: he does it again and again, until
the moments when he doesn't, and things begin to burn.
She laughs when he says he generally wants her around, soft and almost soundless, but there. She can smile through anything, it seems. It fades though. She looks more sympathetic when he tells her not to be insulted, and shakes her head. "I like being around you. I'm sure there are times when I certainly won't like being around you. I might be sad, I might be disappointed, I might be relieved... but --"
that's when the car dies, and she starts staring at the steering wheel.
He reaches over and she looks at his burnt hand, wondering if he's going to touch her, looks at his face, and he turns the key again. Off. Then on. It starts up, just like before.
DaneFor something so large, so faceless, so impersonal as the Consensual Reality itself, Paradox certainly has a sense of creativity. Humor, even, albeit a bit of a cruel humor. And for someone so bound to rational thought, to logical explanations for some of the very, very illogical things he can do, Dane is curiously willing to see Paradox as something wholly outside the logical scheme. It would be easy enough, really, for him to rationalize even Paradox away. Perhaps as an extension of his subconscious, awoken by casting, refusing to go back to sleep. Perhaps as an echo of his own power, lingering to haunt him when he overuses it.
He doesn't think of Paradox like that, though. He speaks of it like an entity, an intelligent thing. A ... friend, of sorts, annoying and sometimes outright destructive. But reliable.
This time the car starts. Dane watches it a moment. A series of unconnected circumstances, for now, but: the first seeds of connection are forming in his mind. Maybe...? he thinks, but there are no words yet; nothing to really encapsulate what might be going on. After a while, he takes his hand off the key, sits back.
"I think we should be okay for now," he says. "But take Sheridan down, and drive slowly. Just in case something unexpected happens."
miss cottonEileen looks at him sidelong. She has no idea. She thinks, quite frankly, that he's being paranoid. He's not a mind reader though; he can't tell. So shh.
She exhales and shrugs. "Okaaay," she says, the inflection lifting rather than descending on the second syllable. She begins to pull out of the parking lot, looking over at Dane a couple more times. She smiles. "Why do you want me to take Sheridan instead of Green Bay?"
Dane"You'll be disappointed at the answer," he says, and if she wants to know anyway: "Because there's less traffic on Sheridan, and the speed limit is lower. So if the engine cuts out again, or anything ... weird like that, we're less likely to end up in a major accident."
miss cottonHer brow wrinkles again. "Why would that disappoint me?" she asks. Then smiles. "That's just practical."
Dane"Well, I thought maybe you thought I wanted to enjoy the view," he replies.
They pull out onto the street. Sheridan is gently winding, lined by huge houses. There aren't a lot of stop lights, and the day is bright. Which is good, because as they approach their first traffic light, the little red bulb flickers and goes dead. Confused drivers start to inch forward. Dane, quietly sitting in the passenger's seat, finds himself inexplicably holding
a handful of ice cubes.
"Oh, come on," he says to no one in particular, "that doesn't even make sense." And he rolls down the window and tosses the ice cubes out.
miss cottonEileen laughs. "Oh, Thomas," she says, and it's hard to tell what she means by that. She drives, and they do go south on Sheridan. Eileen enjoys the view, now that it's on her side. She smiles at the sun on the lake, the distant slices of white on blue where boats speed across the water, the fluttering sails in the distance. It's still a good day. She smooths to a stop at the first light, and then blinks and startles as the red light goes dead. Her head turns to see the ice in Dane's palm.
She laughs again, then cuts it short. "Oh, Thomas, I'm sorry. It's just --"
Someone honks at her. She rather embarrassedly waves at them and pulls forward. "Is it wrong that I sorta hope the various spells people have up at the chantry interact with this in weird ways?" she asks. "Not that I want you to run up against some Etherite's science project and suddenly grow fur or anything."
Dane"Oh, no," Dane mock-accuses, "you just want me to wander around causing havoc."
Which, to be honest, is sort of what happens all the way down to the Chantry. That red light isn't the only one that goes dead. Another one blows out in a shower of sparks as they approach. A third simply blinks out, while Dane abruptly feels his hairs standing on end. With an air of - yes - resignation he reaches out and touches the metal chassis of the car. An enormous spark of static electricity, enough to flare brilliantly even in broad daylight, discharges from the tip of his finger. Ow, he says, matter of factly, as they drive on.
Eventually they make it to the Chantry. Eventually they park, and they get out, and they walk back up the steps where they met up not so very long ago to go on this ill-conceived little mission. As they walk into the Chantry, sounds are curiously muted in Dane's presence. Their footsteps are silent, even on hard floors. A potted plant stops stirring in the breeze as he passes. When he puts his hand on the doorknob of the Council chambers, the metal goes freezingly cold; so cold that his skin sticks to it. When he pulls loose, he finds a tiny plant has grown on his palm, its roots tangling into the bandage he's wrapped around his burned hand. Dane has to work it loose gently, and hands it to Eileen.
"Maybe we can give that to Charlie later," he says - and pushes the door open. Every light in the room goes dark. The temperature drops ten degrees. Out of absolutely nowhere a cascade of water comes crashing down on Dane's head, leaving him soaked, shivering, and rather thoroughly unamused.
"We're back from visiting Adeptus Wentworth," he says, "and incidentally, he's not an Adept."
miss cottonThe most interesting thing to happen to Dane, as far as Eileen is concerned, is the plant growing out of his hand. It's so tiny, so alien, with miniscule roots that were stuck to the grooves in his palm. She is a little bit horrified and a little bit in awe and a little bit overcome with how adorable it is. All of that, though, is nothing to how she feels when Dane, seeming to know that this would interest her more than sparks of electricity or a lack of wind or sudden sound (or lack thereof), works it carefully off of his skin and hands it to her. She cups her hands around it and looks at him, briefly overcome.
He says they should give it to Charlie and her heart breaks a little. And soars.
They burst into the office the council uses, and because no one was meeting right now or waiting on them, the one On Shift happens to be the Virtual Adept Councilmember who, at the moment, is in 3 places at once thanks to a very intriguing Wonder that looks more like a Bluetooth headset than a magical device. It doesn't seem to react much to Dane at first, its tiny green light still glowing in the darkness, but then it goes out -- either she turned it off or something else is about to hit Dane.
In the dim light, lit by windows alone now, Elise Durnau blinks at them. She is, as usual, dressed in a simple, well-tailored suit of a silvery grey. Her legs cross. Eileen, next to Dane and now a bit damp, sees a cup of water and darts across the room to drop the little plant in. Doctor Durnau looks annoyed; she was drinking that. Eileen looks pleased as punch, and brings the glass back to Dane to show him, smiling.
Durnau flicks her eyes back to the Adept before her. "I see," she says, determined to be unruffled. "Did he...'curse' you?" she asks, the word obviously meant for poor Dane and Eileen's brains. Anachronists and primitives, that's what the Hermetics and the Cult are.
DaneOh, she's annoyed. She's not the one that just got an invisible bucket of water emptied over her perfectly coiffed head. Dane just quirks an eyebrow at her. Then Eileen shows Dane what she did with the plant. Dane looks at it, pleased, but he shakes his head when she holds it out:
"I think I better not touch anything I don't have to touch right now."
He wipes his face off. His bright-red, sunburnt face. And he takes his sunglasses off, and now he looks like a demon raccoon. Overall, actually, Dane looks awful: bandaged, burnt, sopping wet, red-eyed. He comes up to Elise's desk, dripping.
"No," he says, measured, "Dr. Durnau, this is not a 'curse'. This is Paradox. I'm sure you'll be relieved and happy for my sake when I tell you so far the effects have been more annoying than lethal, and they've been limited to a radius of about ten or twenty feet." Which is a radius, Dr. Durnau might note, Dane has graciously included her in. Well. Sort of. She's in three different places at once most times. Dane doesn't quite grasp that; he thinks of it as splitting. Maybe even quantum splitting.
"However," he goes on, "they are rather unpredictable." And he starts to reach for some fancy little gadget on her desk.
miss cotton"Oh, I don't want you to touch it," Eileen says back, clutching the glass of water to her chest. "Don't you dare." She reaches into the glass and strokes a leaf on the little plant. "Don't worry, Kermit, I won't let the grouchy man turn you into concert tickets."
Dane and Elise, for what it's worth, ignore her. Once more, Eileen fades a bit into the background. She knows her place: she is an Apprentice, and the grown-ups are talking. Dane is angry, where not so long ago he was lying on a beach with her. Eileen watches him as he stalks over to Durnau's desk and, quite essentially, lays into her.
The councilwoman flicks her eyebrows up at him. "Are you trying to use your Paradox to be threatening?" she asks, her voice quite calm. "Or are you just angry? Mr. ...Dane, was it?" she says as she leans forward and folds her hands together, her eyes on him. "At the moment, I know very little of what happened to you this afternoon. I am here to help you in any way that I can, but I need you to give me more information than 'he's not an Adept' and 'at least my backlash isn't lethal'."
Her hands spread open. She seems utterly unconcerned with her gadgetry. "Would you like to have a mutually beneficial conversation? Because that's very much what I'd like, right now."
Dane"What I'd like," Dane replies, picking up the gadgetry regardless, examining it, and setting it back down possibly turned into concert tickets, "is to cut the political bullshit-ese for a moment. I don't expect very much from a Tradition Council anymore, but I do expect that a Master of Correspondence who spends her days living in three cities at once - not to mention all the illustrious persons of the Council combined - would be able to discern the difference between a glorified librarian and a grade-A Master of Time, Forces, and god only knows what else living on their own doorstep."
Dane pulls a chair out and has a seat. Eileen is fading into the background, or attempting to, but he nods her over and pulls out the seat next to his for hers. His initial outburst done, Dane sits back in his chair. Compresses his lips a moment. Speaks again, more level now.
"I'll admit my current state is as much my own fault as anyone's. Perhaps mostly my own fault. But if Eileen and I are to act as agents of the Council, I need to be able to trust the Council's information and intelligence. Today, the mission briefing left us woefully unprepared for what we faced.
"As I understand it, the Council apparently has an interest in some rare texts and tomes currently in the possession of one William Wentworth III, so-called Adeptus Majoris of House Bonisagus. We were dispatched to negotiate terms of access. Upon arrival we found his estate heavily fortified by magic and peopled by Awakened minds - Eileen can tell you more, though she was requested to stop scanning almost as soon as she started. We were allowed in, even welcomed, but Wentworth made it quite clear his texts were only for himself and those of his House willing to apprentice themselves to him.
"I ... may have instigated a confrontation at that point. Wentworth promptly escalated by stopping Eileen's personal timestream, either as a provocation or a show of power or simply to remove her from the equation. At that point I misjudged the nature of his wards and cast a minor effect, which I intended to multiply in order to incapacitate him. I hoped to explore the grounds more thoroughly, both to find the texts and to discover who and where those Awakened minds were.
"Unfortunately the wards were some sort of ... pain spell, which totally incapacitated me. I must have cast reflexively at that point - nothing focal or directed; simply an overwhelming backlash of destructive Forces that, frankly, should have leveled a city block. To some degree I suppose I should be thankful that Wentworth promptly shut me behind a ward, since it kept me from reaping ten times the Paradox I did. It still doesn't change the fact, though, that I was trying to level a city block with my mind and he just put me in the figurative corner like a misbehaving child.
"At that point he had some words for me, something about not wasting any of my lives and this war not even being mine. He said something to Eileen too. Then he just left us. His butler showed us out, actually. Very polite and all. We limped back here."
miss cottonRight when it would be appropriate and perhaps asked for, Paradox smirks and leaves Elise Durnau's gadget exactly as it is. The lights are starting to fade back on, though Dane's cellphone does begin blasting David Hasslehoff's voice saying Don't hassle the Hoff! Don't hassle the Hoff! on repeat until he finds it and turns it off.
Eileen's ears perk at what she thinks is a very silly ringtone, but she's seating herself in the second chair around the conference room table, holding Elise's water glass and Dane's Paradox-plant.
As for Elise Durnau, she is leaning back in her own chair, a few pieces of her work apparatus spread out around her on the table. She props her elbow on the arm, fingers along her cheek: one to her temple, one curving across her cheekbone and lips. She watches Dane with eyes that hold no ill will but a great deal of patience and a touch of exasperation. When the council first discussed adding Dane officially to the list of 'operatives', they all got a copy of his dossier. They all flicked through it. They all asked why a man who -- it says right here -- 'is not recommended for diplomatic work' was being given, for his first mission, a trip to see a prisoner of war to try and talk him into returning to the fold. Harrington had good reasons. Cynthia was quiet, thoughtful as always, and approved it. So off he went, with his little Ecstatic in tow.
Elise Durnau, who until this moment has never met the man before her, is not so much surprised by his behavior as she is reminded of why the Order of Hermes never appealed to her. He seems to know a thing or two about her as well, but it's nothing most magi in the chantry don't know. He settles down as he goes on, and her hand slowly moves from her face to cup the end of the armrest of her chair.
When he finishes, she exhales long and slow. She does not speak for a number of moments. Her eyes go faraway for a few of those, then return. The magic in the room is wholly her own, has been since they set foot in here, which means she's been working in the conference room for at least part of the day. It is, like most masters, a complex resonance that draws from her very Awakening to the moment she's in right now, the flavor of her magic, the scent of her very soul. It's reminiscent of the seashore they were just at. It brings to mind the quiet intensity before a storm. A fluttering of wings. A drumming in the back of the mind.
"I understand your anger," is the first thing she says, level and calm, "though I recommend you rein it in a little during reports to other councilmembers; Lien-Jun in particular places a premium on respect."
Lien-Jun would. The sixty-four year old master of Mind can create sentience. She can take it away.
"Aside from that, however, I assure you that you were not 'tricked' into that situation. No one withheld information from you -- and if anyone on this council were guilty of such negligence that any of your lives were put in danger as a result -- there would be an inquiry. As contrary to your 'expectations' as it may be, however, we did not know." She glances at Eileen, who looks content, then back to Dane. "On the other hand, you say yourself that you instigated the confrontation after his refusal. Why did you do that, instead of returning?"
Interesting, despite the mild condescension in her tone when she throws his 'expectations' back at him, her question is curious. It is not... displeased.
DaneAs Dane's phone begins blasting the most embarrassing ringtone in the world, Dane grabs at it through his pants pocket, fishes it out and, with a look of utmost irritation, silences it.
"I didn't think you'd withheld information," he clarifies. "I realized you and the rest of the Council were unaware. I'm giving constructive criticism: the Chantry's informants and intelligence officers could do a better job.
"As for the confrontation: I was sent there to complete a job. I don't like to leave things half-finished. Furthermore, I thought that was the reason I was sent. Rather than one of your more tactful negotiators, that is. I assumed the Council knew what it was getting in me and sent me for a reason. I assumed you wanted me to get the materials irregardless of method or cost. Was I wrong?"
miss cotton"Your constructive criticism will be noted," she tells him, her voice so level and calm as before that it's hard to tell this time if she's being condescending or sincere or a weird mixture of both.
She listens, though, and gives a small shrug. "If that was the secret hope of any other councilmembers, I can't say, but if I remember correctly --"
bullshit, she's got his files pulled up on one of her gadgets right now and is having it dictated to her through a miniscule, near-invisible earpiece in a tone so quiet it's almost white noise,
"-- your instructions were did not specify a course of action if you met Wentworth's refusal. If you'd like, I could recommend that your instructions be more detailed in the future, but we do generally prefer to show our chantry members more faith than that. And as we do not have a charred hole on the North Shore, an apprentice unstuck in time, or an adept in a body bag, and we have more information now than we did before -- however unsettling that information may be -- I'd say this ended up more on the side of success than failure." She shrugs. "Others may not see it that way, but that's the beauty of liberty." This last part is rather dry.
She sits up, giving Eileen another glance, then returning her attention to Dane. "I'll have to go over this more with the council. We may be calling you. And of course, there will definitely be an inquiry into how a Master of Wentworth's caliber went under our notice, and -- if we can -- find out why he chose to reveal the truth of his abilities when he did."
She doesn't say it, but she means: to a loose cannon adept who only really knows two spheres and an apprentice who is infatuated with a Paradox plant in a water glass. Over a matter of books.
Elise Durnau is watching Dane intently. "Would you like to be involved in that inquiry, Mr. Dane?"
Dane"I don't know," Dane replies levelly. He's still annoyed, to be certain. It's hard not to be a little cranky - or crankier than usual - when one's skin is blistering, when one is never certain what interesting effect might happen next. Still, the first heedless rush of his anger is past, and now Dane is keeping his anger in check the way he keeps every emotion in check: with a lot of stiff words. "Would you clarify what you mean by an 'inquiry' and, for that matter, what you envision my part in it to be?"
miss cotton"At this point I can't be certain," Elise tells him, with a slight edge of annoyance of her own, "as I only just found out the man is a Master two minutes ago, and a Master who apparently is capable of pulling the wool over the eyes of nine masters. What sort of inquiry?" She shakes her head. "My first one is going to be asking Harrington the same questions of how he did that which you had when you first stormed in here, only I believe my language will be a stitch more colorful.
"However, I thought I would offer you the chance to be involved, if the need for your skills arose, in however we end up handling the Wentworth situation. The man did assault you with mind magic, lock you in a bubble, and stop time for your partner. He 'put you in the corner', to use your words, and if I were you,"
Elise gives a small shrug,
"I would want to see the same happen to him."
She leans back, her shrug more pronounced this time. "I can't make any promises. Just thought I'd put the idea out there."
DaneElise doesn't even get around to not making any promises. She says, I would want to see the same happen to him, and while she's leaning back and gathering her shoulders into that shrug Dane replies:
"Absolutely. So long as my involvement is on the action end. I'll answer questions if I must, but I prefer to be left out of the policy debates in which I'll have little sway regardless. If and when the Council decides on a course of action on this matter, I want to be involved in its execution."
A pause, and a glance toward Eileen. "Apprentice Cotton as well, perhaps."
miss cottonElise gives a slow smile that is, truth be told, more of a smirk. A pleased one, however. "I'll be in touch, then, Mr. Dane," she tells him. He mentions Eileen, calls her Apprentice Cotton as though he still has some vestiges of the traditional Hermetic. Eileen looks at Dane when he says her last name, then at Durnau, and just gives the redhaired woman a smile. "We'll see," Elise says, and nods at the door. "Thank you for coming in. If you don't mind, I have a phone call to make."
DaneDane's mouth makes this grim little twist, like an answering smirk that never quite gets out of the gates. "Have a good afternoon, Councillor," he replies.
On the way out, Dane lets Eileen go ahead of him; shuts the door quietly behind them.
miss cottonShe is already directing her attention elsewhere, turning her chair a bit and sliding her finger along that gadget in a quick pattern. It's not a smartphone; it doesn't wake up like a smartphone. It calls Harrington. As Dane and Eileen gather up and start to head out, they overhear the sweetest, southern-tinged voice from Elise:
"Yes, Joyce? It's Elise. I'm fine, darlin', how are you? ...Oh, that's good to hear. Listen, I need to talk to Malcolm real real bad, could you let him know I called?"
The door closes quietly behind Eileen and Dane. They take two steps and Eileen is opening her mouth when they hear behind them, Elise's voice. The sweetness is gone. Her natural southern accent is gone. She speaks in a roar:
"WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK, HARRINGTON."
Eileen's eyebrows hop up. She blinks, grabs Dane's hand -- the non-blistery one -- and starts jogging down the hall. "Oh, I'm glad I'm not a Master," she says, with utter sincerity.
DaneDane allows himself to be pulled about ten or fifteen down the hall before he slows back to a walk. "You'll spill the plant," he cautions. It's likely an excuse: he just doesn't want to run helter-skelter like he's scared or hyper or both. "And I don't think," wryly, "you have to worry about becoming a master anytime soon."
They descend stairs; go down more halls. And then more stairs. Somewhere here there's a garden, tucked away and secret, and they're both heading toward it. They have a plant to give to a very disturbed -- though recovering -- Verbena, after all.
"I am curious, actually," Dane adds, "as to why you're still an apprentice. It's not lack of raw aptitude that holds you back. I can't help but wonder if it's almost intentional - like you just want to observe and ... experience, as you put it, without actually perturbing anything."
miss cotton"It was born out of the flailing of the universe to try and cope with defiance to consensual reality," Eileen tosses back, still trying to bound along. Yes, she's sloshed water. No, she doesn't care. "It'll be a survivor, I can tell."
But Dane is bigger than she is, and she can't drag him along after her. Nor does she want to let go of his hand. So there's the choice, and she does make it accordingly. She slows down, smiling at him and what he says about her not becoming a master anytime soon. It is the truth; he's far closer than she is, and even for Dane it's a long way off. They go down the long hallways and down a circular staircase and then down a wider staircase. The Fourth Presbyterian Church has fallen to some disrepair in areas. Magi who know how work occasionally to fix it up, but some places are still dusty, broken, falling to decay. The sanctuary is in the best shape, but that's a whole other building. Gargoyles and carvings adorn the exteriors, though some are missing bits of their faces.
In the middle of the church's buildings is the courtyard. A large central spread of green encircled by a pathway. There is a fountain in the center, once known as the Children's Fountain. Some of the trees still retain blue ribbons -- though tattered and stained -- that once represented cases of child abuse and neglect in Illinois. They pulse gently, to magi, with their own sad, frightening, aching resonance. The fountain has a sense of healing. There are statues here and there, worn by time and weather now, but they look down on visitors with gentle stone eyes. It is reminiscent of cloisters, walled on all sides, hidden from the outside world, the various waterworks just enough to hide the worst of the noise from the street. Through the pathways one can reach other corners, even more hidden away. There is the vegetable and root garden, taking up quite a bit of real estate, that Cynthia started.
Eileen is, though for while she was helter-skelter, letting Dane lead. She doesn't realize where they're going until they come out of the doors and into the sunlight, entering the garden. They're not alone here. There's a young man with auburn hair working in the vegetable garden; he's an apprentice, too, and working the land is part of his exchange with older Verbena for the instruction and protection they give him. Such is the way with most of the apprentices here, even the ones without a formal mentor. They give a little; they get a lot.
She's smiling. She waves at a woman in her early thirties who is sitting on the grass, back leaning on the fountain, a blanket cast over her front and shoulder because she's nursing. The woman gives Eileen a small smile and a nod of hello; she's both the disciple and partner of the Thanatoic councilmember. Her name is Veronica. Dane might not know that any more than he knows that the apprentice harvesting strawberries is named Edwin and wildly gay and horribly shy. Eileen knows, though. That much wouldn't surprise him, probably.
The smile turns to Dane as he -- doesn't so much ask, but -- comments on the fact that she's nowhere, nowhere near becoming a master. He frames it as an I-can't-help-but-wonder without asking her to remove that wonder. She thinks that's sort of cute and interesting, but doesn't tell him this for once. She thinks of just letting him wonder, letting him stay curious, but he's had a rough day. She walks toward one of the paths with him, since now she has an idea where they're going. He really meant it: they can give the plant to Charlie.
She's a little bit in love with him for that, right now.
"Don't get me wrong," she says, her voice softer than up in the hallways, because the sense of this place really is so serene. "I do want to Ascend. I don't see the higher levels of magic as necessarily... perturbing. I think... we need to dare to disturb the universe," she says, the words slightly firmer on the almost-not-quite recitation of poetry. "I think," she says, a little ruffled up, though not with offense and not quite with pride, "that I absolutely perturb a great many things, just by experiencing them the way I do. Seeing things differently."
Eileen smiles, taking a step off the path and onto the grass, slipping out of her little canvas shoes. There's still some sand on her feet. She uses the grass to dust them off. "I just don't see what the rush is. I won't be happier if I can stop time or heal with a touch. The things we can do..."
Her smooth brow wrinkles a bit as she looks at the grass, speckled with sand. Sand doesn't belong here, and yet it's okay, it's all right. Her eyes turn to Dane then. "Even the most static, traditional mage is constantly changing. When you change what's around you, you're changing yourself, too. Everything is in constant flux. Why do you think Cultists look so dazed all the time? I know some of them get high just to try and numb how aware they are all the time of the billions of worlds that spin out from every single moment. The amount of possibility is staggering. Every single moment, there is something new."
She's rambling again; knows it. Shrugs to him. "I have to choose, with great care, what I become. Every new thing I learn or experience matters. It's a part of that. I'm just... not in such a rush. I know sometimes I seem reckless. But I think there's time enough for me to evolve, and grow, and change, and ascend. As long as I don't sink myself into some sort of mire or narrow my field of vision into one little slice of possibility, change will happen when it is Time. I have never chased down the knowledge I have; I've simply lived the way I do, and learned as I go along. It's... slower, than other methods. But it works for me."
Eileen exhales, still looking at him. "You look so ridiculous right now. Does it hurt?"
Dane"What?" He was listening to her. Intently, in fact - so much so that he's startled, a little distracted, by her question. "No. Well. Yes, but I've had worse."
Then something he's more interested in - "Is that what you think happened to me?"
There are other magi here. A sense of peace, a sense of healing underlain with the old, aching sorrow that is still in the process of being healed. Dane stops near the fountain, pausing for conversation before going to give the little plant to Charlie. Because of course he meant it. Dane is straightforward, a mind that runs on rails but rarely corners at all. He wouldn't say it if he didn't mean it.
"Narrowed my field of vision, that is. Pursued only one little slice of possibility."
miss cottonNo but yes, he tells her, and that makes her smile a little for some reason. It aches for her to see wounds. It does. It isn't easy to look at Dane and see him even so much as sunburned -- but she does look, even though it will haunt her later. She hasn't quite grasped that the moment when he really snapped with Wentworth today was when he froze her. She was, after all, blacked out of time for a few moments. Stopped, then started again. Dane hasn't come out and said, to anyone, that his actions were connected to her. So she doesn't assume that.
Veronica is on the other side of the fountain from them, but she's dozing, feeding her child and mostly ignoring them. People have conversations here. She's not really the eavesdropping type.
Eileen walks with him, and tips her head as he pauses by the fountain. "I hadn't assumed something happened to you," she says quietly. "People choose different paths, sometimes don't think they choose it, whether things happen to them or not." She shrugs. "You're not me."
Dane"No," his smile is faint but real, "I'm really not."
They start walking again. Dane leads; Eileen doesn't so much follow as she keeps him company. They walk slowly, taking their time. Dane isn't sure Charlie is here, but he wouldn't be surprised.
"I've had people ask me why I specialized so deeply in Matter and Forces without even broaching the other seven spheres. The truth is they just don't make much sense to me. Time and Correspondence, yes. Entropy, a little. The rest - I can't ... grasp it. It's like an equation too advanced for me to solve. Or maybe just written wrong.
"And at any rate, they don't interest me. They don't speak to me the way Matter and Forces do. When I stand here, I can - if I wanted to - feel every exquisite detail of the physical world around me. I can feel atoms vibrating. I can feel light, grasp its wavelength with my mind, alter its intrinsic properties. I love it. I can't imagine why anyone would want anything more than that."
That smile returns, a little wry.
"But then, I'm not you. Or anyone else. And I'm not ... defending myself or why I chose the path I did. I just wanted to explain."
miss cotton"I know that feeling," she says gently, when he speaks of sensing the vibration of atoms, the light, everything. "Exquisite is a good word for it."
Which is all she says about it. About Dane's path, his choice, his inability or lack of desire to see the rest. She likes the way he describes them as equations that are maybe just written wrong. She disagrees -- oh, most certainly, this little apprentice who has dabbled in literally every sphere known to the Awakened -- but that doesn't matter to her. Dane isn't her. She would be disappointed if he were.
Charlie isn't in the vegetable garden or out by the fountain. They walk to one of the quieter areas where there's an apple tree, though it hasn't borne fruit in awhile. Charlie isn't there either.
"He likes being here," Eileen says, and doesn't mention who, but Dane can figure it out easily enough. "I think Cynthia talked to him about helping make the tree healthy again so it could give fruit. She's big into metaphors."
Eileen goes over to the tree, letting Dane's hand slip from hers, and kneels down at its roots. It isn't very tall or large, but if it were healthier it would have a magnificent spread. It gives more shade than it does leaning space. Even Eileen couldn't stand up straight beneath its boughs. It's alive, but it's obviously not doing so great. It would be great for climbing. She looks over at Dane.
"I'll give it to Edwin later. He can make sure Charlie gets it. Charlie still has to rest a lot, even during the day. He was malnourished." Her eyes are pained when she says that, and she looks aside, down at the little plant, which looks almost artichoke-like, though softer and with petals of a reddish orange that verges right on the edge of pink.
"I know you want me to stay away from you for awhile until your Paradox rides itself out," she says quietly, though clearly. She looks at him again, past her shoulder. "But I want you."
She hasn't said that. He knows it now. In her hallway when he dropped her off, he somehow wasn't sure what she was saying when she asked him if he wanted to stay. Maybe he didn't want to project onto her the thoughts he had when he saw that silly little mole on her shoulder where her sweater sat askance on her body. Maybe he just doesn't like to make assumptions, period. He knows because in the car she let him kiss her, and she let him know he didn't have to stop, he had her permission to do it again, and again, harder this time, deeper. Warmer. It was Dane who, in his words, needed to stop.
Eileen is looking at him, lobster-red and blistered and already peeling in places as though Paradox is willing to heal him faster just to make him as uncomfortable as possible in the amount of time it has him in its clutches. And doing something she rarely does:
"Why did you stop?"
Dane"He's getting better, though," Dane replies quietly. "I saw him working in the garden the day before yesterday. I think he's still wary around me. But he was more cogent. And more coherent."
Then - she says what she says. And Dane looks away, a little uncomfortable, a little strained. She asks a question. He grimaces a little; after a moment, he sits amongst the gnarled roots, exhaling like a sigh.
"It's complicated," he says. "It's not that I don't want you. But I think you know that."
And that's it for a while. A silence, as Dane leans against the tree, looks across the courtyard. Chicago in spring is beautiful. The sun is bright. The breeze sifts down, stirs the trees. Stirs the hairs on his arm; vibrates the very molecules in the air. He could sense that, all of that, if he tried.
What he senses instead: the warmth of her, close to him. Not so close as to be unbearable. But close enough that she is there, she is close enough to touch.
"I just ... don't know what it would mean to you, if we slept together. And I don't know how I would react. I don't think I'd want a casual relationship. But at the same time, I ... can't be in a serious, committed relationship either. I'm not in a place right now, emotionally, where I can deal with either of those things.
"So it's easier for me just to stop myself. Just to not start anything at all."
miss cottonIf Eileen knew that the pain in her eyes showed, that Dane maybe even saw it, she might wonder if he tells her what he does about Charlie in an attempt to comfort her. She doesn't know, though, doesn't entirely realize that it showed so much. She wouldn't want to assume such a thing about him, either. It's too much of her trying to fill up another person's glass with herself. That never works. You have to pour it all out and start over.
"I don't see why he'd be wary around you," she says, which may explain a lot of Eileen's interactions with Dane, because she means it. Or maybe it just explains a lot about Eileen -- or raises a half-dozen whole new questions.
The truth is, it makes her a little sad and upset that now she's made him uncomfortable, strained, grimacing, sighing. She withdraws a little, setting the glass with the plant down on the grass, balanced carefully. She draws her knees up and wraps her arms over them, leaning her head down on those knees and watching him. She is close. Close enough to touch, but they don't. She doesn't, right now -- it usually is her, reaching out first. Not always, though.
She listens. And absorbs. She doesn't ask why again, doesn't pry into, pick apart, dissect what has put him in an emotional place where he can't cope with casually, freely fucking a Cultist -- and frankly, it's fair that he doesn't know what it would mean to her, whether she were an Ecstatic or not -- much less being in a relationship with one, when he doesn't know what she wants. What she might want. What he wants. How he might feel. The truth is: all of that is fair. And true. And not something she has a right to question.
Eileen doesn't touch him. The desire to -- and more than that -- is so heavy in her that it makes her head spin. There are the times when they're speaking to a master or working on a mission or disagreeing and just talking that she doesn't think of it at all. And then there are moments like this very one, where she can barely breathe for how powerful her own lust is. Lust; may as well call it hunger. It isn't longing, it isn't just desire. She wants the closeness there, too, and til now she hadn't formed that into words even in her own mind. She does know this, now: that no, she doesn't know how she'd react, either, when even now she wants to find herself inside of him by letting him inside of her.
So she doesn't touch him. And the restraint is agonizing.
What she does say, though it isn't so much an argument as a statement of fact, is this: "It kind of already is. Started."
But she doesn't leave that alone for him to reply to, to answer to. It's just the truth. Eileen licks her lips and gives a small shrug. "That's okay, Thomas." And it is. Or at least: she does mean it sincerely, even if she's writhing inside. "I understand." Her lips form a small, soft smile. "I'll leave you be unless you show me you want something else. Okay?"
DaneDane is silent when Eileen says it's already started. She's right, of course, but he's afraid saying as much - agreeing - would be something akin to the naming it. Bringing it fully, focally into existence. That's something his Tradition always believed fiercely in; the power of names, of words, of speaking things aloud.
But then she ... forgives him, in a way. Allows him to leave things unspoken and unformed. And he looks at her in sudden and aching gratitude. Nevermind his burnt hand. Nevermind his peeling red skin, his hemorrhagic-red sclera. He reaches out with his good hand, quite on impulse, and he cups his palm through her hair, around the back of her head and neck.
"Thank you," he says quietly. "Believe me, if there could be anyone for me right now, it would be you."
His hand falls away, then. He puts it on the earth instead, pushing himself up.
"I should probably go home," he adds, holding his hand out again to help her up. "I think I know what's going on with my Paradox, but it doesn't hurt to be careful. Would you mind giving me a ride? You can keep my car until this," a vague gesture at himself, burns and all, "is over with."
miss cottonShe does want him. And it's not that he doesn't want her. They both know those things now -- have, in this way, named it. Eileen knows the steps to achieve ecstasy. She knows Dane can't even take the first one. At least not right now. Not in this. Forgiving him for that takes no effort at all, no strain on her mind or heart. Forgiveness, in general, does not hurt Eileen. It takes nothing from her that she cannot get back.
Then he looks at her like that, and he reaches over and touches her like that. Her eyes close, her head tipping back a little, leaning into his palm like a cat being stroked. The expression on her face is quiet, is serene, but also: indulgent, unabashedly letting that pleasure and that ache flow through her. When she finishes caressing herself against his hand, her chin dips and her eyes open, and they glitter a little. Seem to.
What he says isn't fair. It hurts, more than anything else. She doesn't tell him that. She knows that isn't his intention. Some part of her, too, isn't hurt but gratified to hear it. Confused by it, too. Skittish. Burdened. Delighted and fluttering. Wary. Wanting.
His hand falls away, then. She watches him stand, and offer her his hand, and she takes it. What else is she going to do? The urge to do anything else right now doesn't come to her, and she has learned as much from allowing herself to be led sometimes as she has from striking out on her own. Eileen levers herself to her feet and brushes dirt off the seat of her white shorts, then leans over and picks up the glass with its little plant inside. For Charlie. He's going to be so interested when he finds out where it came from, she thinks. She wonders if it'll really live. She wonders if the fact that it came from Dane will mean anything. She decides not to tell Edwin where it came from. She'll tell Charlie herself, later. Just to be safe.
The urge to touch the plant, caress it with Prime, and see if it does, in fact, hold any of Dane's own resonance, is strong for a moment. She quells it.
Dane is talking. Eileen startles, looks up at him. "Oh. Yeah. And -- ooh. Everyone at work will be all jelly."
They start to walk, back along the path. The rumors really are going to start up eventually. If they walk around holding hands. If they sneak off to beaches or hidden corners of the gardens. If they keep working together. If she's driving his car. It's one thing when Eileen does any of these things with another Cultist, or a Verbena even, but with a Hermetic -- nevermind a Hermetic with Dane's attitude and reputation -- it's another thing entirely. The rumors will really be more about him. An Adept should know better than to get his head up his ass over someone that much younger than he is, will say those with more limited minds. An Adept should know better than to get his head up his ass over someone in the Cult, will say the ones who have reason to be bitter.
Eileen, though. Something about her makes rumors slide right off. She's Teflon. Even the people saying things behind her back can't always finish, because the words end up feeling false in their own mouths. They find themselves embarrassed. She's just... so nice.
She smiles at him as they get to the courtyard proper and she excuses herself to run the glass of water over to Edwin. He looks excited, seems to have a dozen questions, but Eileen doesn't stay long to answer them. She skips back to Dane, grabbing his 'good' hand again. "C'mon. I'll drop you off. Where do you live, anyway?"
DaneDane knows he shouldn't put his hands on her like this when they're in the middle of the Chantry. A nice, secluded, peaceful area of the Chantry with none of the blabbermouths around, but still: the middle of the Chantry. For all that he's almost glad of the potential eavesdroppers and spies all around. They keep him reined in. They keep him from
leaning forward when she leans into his touch like that. Putting his mouth on her neck, or the line of her jaw, or lower on her shoulder where he knows that coy little mole hides. The image in his mind is embarrassingly strong. He wonders if she can sense it even without trying. See it in his eyes the way men and women have seen desire in one another's eyes for millennia, eons. The most primal of magics, that sixth sense. Perhaps the Ecstatics are on to something after all, channeling sensation, channeling raw emotion.
The moment passes. They draw apart and get up and Dane knows it's also perhaps not the best idea, reputation-wise, to skip around hand-in-hand with Eileen. He doesn't seem to mind, though, when she grabs his hand again. He allows himself to be tugged along a bit, and they wind out of the courtyard, into the darker recesses of the old church. Then out again in the spring sunshine, where the noise and urban-ness of the Gold Coast stands in sharp constant to the quieter resonances in the Chantry.
"Lincoln Park," he answers her, slipping his sunglasses on again, "about a mile and a half from here. Just take Clark all the way up."
And as they're getting into his car - a little apologetic, as though aware of how rude it is to ask for a ride without inviting her up, and a little shyly almost, as though worried of what she might think, how she might read this, whether or not she might even accept - "Perhaps next time we go on assignment together, you could come by afterward. For coffee. Provided I haven't incurred another massive Paradox balance."
miss cottonHe wonders if she can read in his eyes what he is decidedly not doing right now, that embarrassingly strong mental picture. No, she doesn't have the skill in mind magic to see it as clearly as he does, to feel it on the air as though it is already happening. She hasn't stopped to ask herself, any of the times it has occurred to her, if Dane might somehow pick up on the images she's had in her mind. One in particular keeps running through her mind, every moment of it shot through with lust more primal than he probably would see coming, but
that is why she hasn't wondered if he can see it, too. Read it in her eyes.
It isn't for the other magi or for any external reason that he doesn't lean into her, though. It's internal. It's in himself. The fact that they're in the courtyard gardens of the chantry does help, though. And it isn't through any wariness on her part that she doesn't keep on encouraging him, luring him, eroding his will until he 'gives in' or what-have-you. Ugly business, that. She recoils at the thought of things like that. The will is what keeps magi from going mad or turning into monsters. The will is what allows them to reach out and touch the face of glory, wear the face of glory, become glory. She would never tarnish that. She would never be so arrogant as to think she could.
For his reasons, he stands up and walks out with her, gives thanks to the place they're in. For her own reasons, Eileen just gives thanks that he's walking out with her, holding her hand, staying nearby. She's smiling all the while, no longer holding the little plant that she gave into Edwin's care for now, and they walk through the church and down to the sidewalk and towards his car, talking about where she's taking him.
She remembers, suddenly, that when she asked to take a break and they went to the beach, he'd mentioned going back to his place. Her heart trips and stumbles a little, not really for any reason, it's just distracted. The doors close and the interior of the car isn't as cool as it was when they arrived, but as soon as it starts up again the A/C starts up again, too. Eileen is getting quite familiar with his Audi, very quickly.
Her eyebrows perk up at his offer, her head turning to him. She should ask him what the hell he's trying to do. Point out that his signals are more than a little mixed. She doesn't. She smiles after a moment. "If you do, and the Paradox is that every liquid you touch turns to gourmet coffee, then it'll work out perfectly." There's a hitch in her body where she almost leans over and then stops herself, but she doesn't look embarrassed or awkward about it. She's just smiling a little softer as she pulls out into the flow of traffic. "I'd sorta like to see where you live sometime," she goes on. "Not today, because you're all afraid you're going to short something out and I'll get electrocuted or whatever,"
or whatever being, in this case, the gentlest thing she could say, because it is absolutely not saying that if she comes up he might come to his senses, lose his senses, indulge his senses, and fuck her until he can't think anymore, but she's not saying that because it would be sorta like breaking her promise to him under the apple tree,
"but yeah. Next time, maybe."
DaneDane's smile is the one it so often is - small, a little wry, touched with something a little like ache or sadness.
"Yeah," he says softly. "Next time."
The drive isn't long. It's, as he said, only a mile or so from the north end of the Gold Coast, where the Chantry is. Along the way the landscape changes a little - away from the sleek glamour of Chicago's wealthy downtown, toward a slightly more mellow area where the average age is a little older. There are young families here, along with the yuppie crowd. And scattered retirees looking for a more active lifestyle than some sunbaked villa in florida.
Here, Clark dives inland at an angle. The park lies to their right; the zoo within, the lake beyond. On the left are a series of mid- and highrise condos, along with some brownstones and brick rowhouses. Dane is not in the tallest building, but neither is he in the lowest. From his apartment, he can probably see the lake, the park, the city in the distance.
She stops at the curb. He has nothing to gather, so he simply undoes his seatbelt and looks at her. "Thanks for the ride," he says. A small pause. Room for something else, perhaps. A change of mind. An invitation. Coffee. More.
It passes. He smiles. "Don't drive too crazy, okay?"
miss cottonIt's not a long drive. Not even as long as the one from the chantry to her place down in the Loop. They don't talk much, now, and the silence is... oddly, poignantly comfortable. Comforting. Eileen settles into it, appreciating it for what it is rather than driving herself batty thinking of all the things it isn't or might be or could have been. She likes Dane. She settles into that, too. It changes things a little for her, though not really. Not by much. A nudge in one direction rather than another. She wants to stop the car and lean over and just rest her head on his shoulder and fall asleep. She is pretty sure he would like that, if he could let himself. It might hurt him. And so: she doesn't really want it anymore.
Dane directs her up Clark. She perks when she sees how close he is to the zoo and the conservatory. She leans over and peers out the window to look up at his building, smiling. He undoes his seatbelt and she turns to look at him, hands still on the wheel. At his words, she grins. Salutes him. "I never drive crazy. I occasionally drive according to rules outside of strict reality, but that's totally different. I won't wrap it around a telephone pole and I'll bring it back all filled up and everything."
Another smile. He exits, because after telling each other they'll see each other soon and after telling him that he can call her if he wants to and after telling him to take care, there really isn't anything left to say. She just smiles at him as he heads toward the door, and she stays until he's inside, like she's watching out for him. Which, truth be told, is exactly what she's doing. She drives off some time after that, and she doesn't drive crazy. She doesn't even drive fast. Rolls all the windows down, finds out where he leaves his radio, and enjoys the trip home.
