I don't know anything about zombies.

[Emily] The lock on the downstairs door has not been mended. It does not bar anyone's entry; it keeps out nothing but the wind. With a twist of the knob and a little pressure, it gives way. Welcomes.

The morning sunlight streams into apartment 2F, throws long shadows across the floor whenever it means the immovable solid of furniture, casts thinner hazes in the wake of the sheer panels she hung as curtains.

Emily is sitting at her dining table, with her laptop open and a notebook beside it. She's chewing on the end of her pen (a horrible habit) while she puzzles through one academic matter or another. Now and again, she writes something down on the open page. Every so often, she glances at her cellphone -- which does not ring, will not ring, cannot be arsed to ring no matter how soundly she wills it to -- or picks up the now tepid mug of tea to sip at.

In the bedroom, Riley is sleeping on Emily's futon. There is no couch to crash on, no spare bedroom to occupy, so the Orphan Apprentice has not slept. Would not sleep until either Chuck or Owen was aware of what had happened, or until Riley roused and demanded safe passage back to Cabrini Green (or wherever it was that she had left her car).

There is a plastic carrier bag filled with Riley's (ruined) filthy clothes sitting just inside the bedroom door. The sounds of shallow, gentled breathing reach the living room if Emily holds still, holds her breath, listens closely enough.

It is calm, now. She is waiting. There is nothing to do but wait.

[Owen Page] He'd given her what you might deem a grace period.

She'd rung him while he was sleeping, though the slumber had been light enough that the repeating trill of the phone had roused Owen enough to roll over onto his back, absently listening and rubbing his eyes to clear them. At first he hadn't deciphered the words, only heard the distinctive lilt of Emily Littleton's voice speaking into his answering machine. It was later, when he was standing beside the machine with its flashing light, listening with his arms crossed over the bare expanse of a chest that comprehension settled into the Initiate's expression and deepened the frown lines around his mouth, drew his eyebrows together.

He gave the Orphan an hour's breathing space, let himself shower and prepare himself for whatever it was that had occurred to Riley to land the Virtual Adept in the Hospital [couldn't you leave anyone in the city alone for two seconds?] and was out the door by half past seven. Now, tromping up the stairwell toward Apartment 2F, Owen began to wonder if he shouldn't have stopped for back-up -- coffee, perhaps, or Chuck Carmichael. If it were a case of life and death at stake, he wasn't certain he was the one to make decisions regarding another of the other Initiate's tradition.

Still, hands tucked into jacket pockets, Owen reached Emily's door and rapped three times.

[bap-bap-bap]

Owen's knock, it was becoming familiar.

[Emily] It had been a nice enough message. (She'd called him "lovely.") Emily had tried to not overcomplicate it, or have it sound too terribly excitable. She hadn't the energy for excitable, any how. Aside from the inopportune hour, it shouldn't have been too worrisome.

The door is solid, heavy enough to hide the sound of her footsteps approaching. Not so heavy as to muffle his knocking. There's a pause, long enough for Owen to wonder if perhaps his Apprentice had wandered into the land of Nod. Then the lock turns, tumblers shifting to grant access, and there's the little scrape of the door chain being freed.

Her apartment is tidy in an almost unlived-in sense. There are still wide, vacant tracts of floor (no couch, no television, no area rugs) unsettled and ready for colonization by the proper immobiles. His rocking chair -- his gift -- has a blanket curled into its seat, a book atop that, and a string of small stone beads beside it. It is the most lived-in part of her living room, after the walls.

And that's a difference he'll likely notice as soon as the door swings open, the walls. What were bare and austere the last time he visited were now outfitted with an impressive array of small, black rimmed frames. They stretched all the way across one wall, breaking only for a pair of bookshelves, marching across at roughly eye-height to his apprentice. The line turned the corner and continued more than halfway down the adjoining wall.

She'd said something about frames, that night at his place. When she'd been Seeking.

Each frame holds a picture, some (at the beginning of the line) are old enough to have rounded corners, to be biased toward sepia tones due to age. Each frame's matting has a handwritten annotation (City, Country). No description. No date. Most are of places; some depict people; fewer are hold carefully handwritten phrases; most infrequently, there are captures of Emily herself. The most recent frame holds only broken glass, pieced together with cellotape. No photograph at all. It sits beside a small print of the Chicago skyline.

Emily is wearing a wide-necked sweater. It settles comfortably, while baring (nay, more just hinting at) the hollows and shapes of her shoulders. And jeans; more often than not Owen sees her in jeans. Her hair is pulled back in a low ponytail, but the curls have broadened and begun to fall into loose waves.

"Hey, Owen," she says, offering him a small (tired) smile. "Please, come in." She steps away from the doorway to let him enter. Emily rubs absently at her arm; it's a nothing gesture, idle, no meaning.

"Riley's still out. May be for awhile." Her voice is low, even and warm enough. "Would you like me to put the kettle on? I can make coffee..."

Never one to be idle when distressing things are afoot, Emily's already heading back toward the table. To put away her schoolwork. To make room. To make coffee. (To do something measurable, useful, meaningful.)

[Owen Page] Truth be told, the fact that she'd preceded her message by calling him a pet-name had worried him all the more. She'd sounded tired -- nay -- exhausted over the phone, Owen was good at hearing hinted at nuances in speech, even speech that was distorted by time and phone-lines [makes you wonder why the Initiate had yet to begin his education of the Correspondence Sphere, sometimes] and he'd known there was more to the story than what her tone would have him believe.

It was partly the reason he'd made haste to arrive and why, though his dark hair was spiked, it still glinted with moisture from the shower. He was dressed as he almost always was (did he own anything other than jeans, work boots, that leather jacket and endless supplies of plain shirts?) excepting that this collared shirt he wore matched his jacket; it was black as pitch and the only hint of color came from the wife-beater, peaking from beneath it.

She invites him in, and he steps inside, eyes instinctively tracing to the walls; the new pictures [he'll examine each in turn at some point, see if he doesn't] and finishing, before returning to her face, on the rocking chair, complete with book, blanket and beads. It makes him smile faintly, some trace of pleasure at discovering that she liked his gift, that it had become a welcomed addition to her home.

He turns to her, and nods at hearing Riley was still sleeping, Emily was already moving on, asking if he wanted coffee, clearing her school things away. Owen turns with her momentum, but doesn't follow. His clothing rustles as he crosses his arms over his chest in an unconscious mirror of the stance he'd adopted whilst listening to her message.

Ah, Owen's business face, then.

"Coffee, sure." A beat, barely room for a heartbeat, the tick of a clock. "What happened, Emily?" He never calls her Em, or any other sort of pet-name, between them it seems they are only ever to be Owen and Emily.

[Emily] She had sounded tired on his answerphone. In some ways, more tired than she sounded now. She'd had more time to get used to the exhaustion now, a handful of hours more to let it seep in, become a natural second skin. It blunted her expressions, her movements, yes, as if everything she touched or put out into the common space was constrained by a webbing of fatigue. She had not slept since she left him that message, had not slept since some hour before this one on the previous morning, but she was still functioning.

Emily filled the kettle at the sink, set it atop one of the burners, lit the flame. There is an amber prescription bottle on the counter, beside a small sheaf of printed papers. With them is a small notebook and pen. Here Emily has written down what Riley is taking, how much she has taken, when it was given -- this is a practiced thing, as if she is used to keeping track of medicine cycles. It does not strike Emily as an odd thing, though it might raise flags with the Chorister.

She does not own a coffee maker, but Emily pulls a french press down from the top of one of her cabinets. She has recently ground coffee in the freezer, this is measured out more by eye than by spoonful. Even cold, it smells rich and inviting. (No instant coffee here. [No tasteless, bland, lifeless caffeinated dregs.])

Owen is wearing his business face, so Emily is not looking him in the eye even as she speaks to him softly. Lets her voice interweave with the idle patterns of culinary things-seen-to.

"She called around two-thirty, needing a ride and sounding unwell." If Emily were standing still, this is when her shoulders would pull back slightly. Her hands would find each, clapsed just before her navel. He's seen this in her before, seen her take the stance at Chantry meetings. As she stills to wait on the water to boil, Emily begins to adopt it now -- see? It's even in the cant of her jaw, the line of her lips. Engrained.

"I picked her up from the El Station and she was pretty badly banged up. I loaned her some clothes, took her to hospital, brought her back here -- she was adamant that she didn't want to go home tonight.

"The doctor said it's just bruised ribs and she'll be fine. They put her on..." Emily struggles to remember, to wrap her tongue around the medical name (it amounts to Vicodin). "Riley hasn't said much yet, but she was talking about zombies for a little while."

There's a pause here. Emily's mouth purses and she looks down at the counter, unclasps her hands so she can rest her fingers against the tile.

"Given what's happened lately, I thought one of you might want to check on her. I can life scan her, but I don't know anything about zombies." The Orphan drew a little breath, and inwardly chided herself for what was quite likely the most ridiculous thing she'd said aloud in weeks (are we seriously talking about Zombies here? [Clearly I need more sleep]), however appropriate it seemed in the moment.

[Owen Page] There's silence for a few minutes.

Emily might well be tempted to peep upward and check to make sure that Owen was still there, so still and silent had he become when she'd said the word zombie aloud. It hung there now in the room like the unspoken elephant, expectant and awaiting its trial for lucidity, for actualization, because --

"Zombies."

--there's incredulity in the Singer's voice, but its textured by some kind of passive acknowledgment that speaks of his reluctance to believe such things could exist, but his acceptance that they must, if another Awakened has just been beaten to hell and back by something fitting that descriptor. Owen's hand goes to the back of his neck, scratches through the soft hairs at the nape and then drops back to his side.

"Right," there's no panic to him, it's perhaps one of his best attributes, Owen Page. Not much ruffles that demeanor of stoic tranquility unless its really hitting close to home. Discussion of Zombies, however, doesn't appear to do more than make him wonder how long the coffee will take, and when, precisely, he'll be able to check on Riley. "I can check and see if her pattern shows any signs of decay, any weaknesses that weren't there before. If we couple that with your life scan, it should rule out the chances that she's been," he hesitates, uncertain with his wording.

He spreads his hands, palms shaping the word as if reduced to saying it, despite his better judgment.

"Infected."

[Emily] Oh, no. Emily is far, far too tired to be so easily goaded into looking up to search Owen's expression just because he was being quiet. The deeply pragmatic part of her personality argues that Owen is nigh-always quiet, and assuming that his quiet means anything but Owen is being Owen would be a serious act of folly.

It all made so much sense, in her head, just now.

Y'know, in that same bit of brainspace where checking to make sure Riley wasn't infected with Zombie-ism made sense.

Right.

The Apprentice shook her head a little, but didn't speak up. She turned back to test the kettle. First, by touching the side of its belly with her fingertips -- bad plan -- which were quickly drawn away, shaken out a little, observed. (Do I have all my fingerprints? [Yes] Is the thing sitting on top of the fire hot? [Yes] Laws of physics intact? [Yes] Good. I meant to do that.) And then by holding the back of her hand over the spout to feel for steam.

She'd removed the whistle. Riley was sleeping, after all.

Deeming it warm enough, Emily snapped off the burner. She poured the steaming water over the grounds and watched them swirl for a moment.

"Do you want to check on her while this steeps?" she asks. "I doubt we'll wake her."

[Owen Page] [I'm just gonna, you know, try and do something over here and hopefully not botch horribly and devolve into a toad.
Entropy 1, -Foci, -Rote]
Dice Rolled:[ 2 d10 ] 8, 10 (Success x 3 at target 3) [WP]

[Emily] ((Life 1, base dif4 +1 because I'm tired, -1 rote, extending to share with Owen. +WP.))
Dice Rolled:[ 2 d10 ] 10, 10 (Success x 3 at target 4) [WP]

[Owen Page] Do you want to check on her while this steeps?

He nods, and makes an odd request of her however, before they head into the bedroom to check on the recovering Virtual Adept. "Can I borrow a knife? The sharper the better." Once it's [one hopes] granted, the Initiate leads the way with quiet, respectful footsteps into Emily's bedroom. He's painfully aware that this is the Apprentice's private sanctum, different again to the general space of her apartment's living area and kitchen. This was her place of rest, it somehow made him more cautious, more focused on the task at hand as he carefully lowered himself to sit beside Riley on the bed and opened up his palm.

Then the sensation started.

That creeping, crawling, corrosive quality thickened the air in the bedroom, captured it and made it stifle; never enough, at the Initiate's level, to send people running, but enough to be unsettling, to make someone twitch, or fidget. It's threaded through with the intensity that the Singer brought as he lowered the knife to his palm and drew the tip of the blade across it.

"Blood spent," he murmured with his eyes closed, his breathing even, and calm. Blood began to well in the cut across his palm, it was not deep, but it was enough for what he sought. Riley's pattern, the sense of it, the vitality. His senses probed it gently, as if invisible fingers, sure and precise felt around the entirety of its coiling form for some sign of erosion; of decay and sickness, of the time to end, to end to renew to --

"Blood given," the Chorister's palm closed over the wound and he made a fist. "The One blesses and removes, takes and gives anew," a pause, and Owen's eyes slowly opened. He turned dark eyes on Emily, feeling the stoke of her own magics working into the air. "She's alright. There's nothing but the bruising afflicting her that I can sense."

[Emily] ((Extending... dif 4, any extra suxx go to duration))
Dice Rolled:[ 2 d10 ] 5, 8 (Success x 2 at target 4)

[Emily] This place is not her sanctum, not yet, not now, possibly not ever. It is the hollowed out, empty place where she lays her head down to sleep. The futon lies directly on the floor, without a frame or any ornamentation. When it is not in use, it folds to thirds and lives in a corner of her room. There is a low bookshelf with sparse, purposeful clutter. There are shelves in her closet. There was little, even here, to give her away. Fewer intimacies nailed to her walls than in the living room.

Bare.

Riley was stretched out on the futon, covered with a light blanket. As Owen worked, Emily's fingertips found the pulse point at her wrist. Slowly, the building thrum of Reverence mingled with the corrosive taste of the Chorister's magic. Slowly, because she is taking her time: see, this is careful work, this is gentle work, this is something passed down to her not just something she Awoke innately possessed of.

When Owen is finished, she takes the knife from him. She lays it aside, on the floorboards several planks away from where she stands. There is no chanting, no spilled blood (hers), nothing vulgar or crass or overtly sensual to the craft she has learned from the Verbena.

When she is ready, there is no outward sign of it beyond her hand find his uninjured one. The light press of her fingers intertwining with his. And then the growing awareness that slips in beside his other senses.

He is aware, now, of the very different cadences to their breathing. His, Emily's, Riley's. It takes a moment to sort them all out, the rhymthms and patterns that intertwine. Emily's pulse at her wrist, so close to his own pulse point. Mirroring. (Call [Response]).

She is directing, still, shaping what comes through that shared sense until he has fully taken over his end of it. Riley's pattern has a stable foundation, she is healthy, hale but for the injuries she has sustained in the last night. Together, they trace over the jagged pieces of the Adept's pattern, places that are only just beginning to mend. Bruises, cracked ribs. He can feel the sluggishness, the numbing effect of the pharmaceuticals in her system, warring with the drive of her naturally quick metabolism.

He knows things, now, about the Adept he hadn't before. Each broken bone now mended, scars, the stories that a body tells about its host. The lies it cannot tell, truths it cannot hide.

She is not a zombie. (Truth.) Not from what this scan can show.

Emily does not pull the sense back immediately, but lets it linger. In case there is something more than Owen wants to see. She does not knowingly turn its scrutiny toward him, but there are some things that cannot be hidden from one another here. It is an intimacy, like most magics, that must be accepted and overcome.

This is what her first mentor had taught her, and this she gives him openly in the early morning moment.

[Owen Page] It is only the second occasion Owen has had to feel Life being worked. He can feel the reverent thrum of Emily's own resonance sliding into being with his own in her [sparse, spartan] bedroom, can sense the distant sting where he had cut his palm open for his own will-working, can feel her warmth infusing his hand where their fingers are interlocked. And then --

new sensations to track.
new patterns, new heartbeats resounding in his head.

Owen gently explores the connection that the effect gives them, the gift of experiencing something entirely new to him, to his development as a Singer and he relishes the moment. However, like a fused point the flow goes both ways, it is give and it is take and just as Owen can sense Emily's life-force in that moment, she can feel his; she can read a lifetime's worth of scars and broken bones [a dislocated shoulder from football, another healed collarbone, a once broken wrist] there is a smattering of life's bruises writ into Owen Page's very marrow and for a few moments, when she doesn't mean for it to happen she gets a sketch of the rougher times in the young man's adolescence.

[His nose was broken once, what was the story behind it?]

Eventually, he squeezes her hand, his focus now on her, maybe there's gratitude in his expression, maybe some quiet awe at the display of a new sphere; a new facet to draw him closer to the One.

[Emily] They all have stories, some kinder than others. The stories scored marrow-deep into her bones, though, are not as gentle and Owen might have expected. But first, the simple things.

She is exhausted. Emily's pattern is worn-down by over twenty-six hours of wakefulness. There is no adrenaline surge bolstering it, not even much in the way of caffeine to substitute for natural alertness. It is a deep fatigue, perhaps garnered over many nights of insufficient sleeping.

There is no doubt, either, that she is thinner than needs be. That the strength in her form is ill-defined. The muscles are bent toward agility, not endurance or potency. She shows no bias--left-handed, right-handed--which makes her pattern an oddity among the three of them. Most people favor a dominant side, but Emily shows no evidence of this in her pattern.

Deeper then? She walks on the balls of her feet out of nature, not nuture. She turned her ankle a year or so ago, bad enough to leave scar tissue. There are no currently bruises, cuts, but her pattern has seen plenty of them; contusions heavy enough to leave impressions on the underlying bone. There are imperfect mendings on several of her ribs; not merely cracked, as Riley's were now, Emily's had been broken.

These are years old. Mended, faded, but not forgotten.

She must have known, when she lent her sense to him, that Owen would have turned his attention this way. That the watchfulness that extended to his empathy, his attention; it would not have left well enough alone. There are questions here (When? Why? How?), questions they both might ask of one another.

When he is ready, or when Emily can hold the rote no longer, it lifts. It falls away from them like smoke rising from a just-snuffed candle flame. He's left, in the last moments, with the awareness of their heartbeats, of the shudder to her breathing as the sight finally falls away and the Orphan (for now's eyes blink open.

Her fingers squeeze his, and then Emily withdraws her hand. She rubs her palms on the fabric of her jeans as she crouches to retrieve her kitchen knife from the floorboards.

It's heady, this sharing: the innate knowledge of how your presence affects another person, be that in tension or in comfort.

Her voice is muddled, somewhat strangely shy when it breaks the silence: "How do you take your coffee?" she asks. Offers him a self-conscious smile. Moves back to the kitchen, away from the sleeping Adept.

[Owen Page] It was a temptation, you see.

When someone opened up the way for you to pry into their mind, or into the very substance that made up their life-force to keep delving deeper and deeper and not to stop until you had traversed all that made them as a human being and an awakened individual. It was especially tempting for a first (or second) time user of the force in question. It was so easy, so effortless for him to look into Emily's life-force and read out all the signposts, the important moments impacted into her body. A hundred little things that time should have allowed him to notice in the normal fashion but which this sphere, this working, had cheated him out of.

Had passed onto him.

He is thankful, in the end, because the overwhelming reality was he did not have the strength at that moment to stop gawking into another's personal realm, when the life sight sharing dwindles, then extinguishes itself, abruptly dousing them both with the shyness of the after. The broken reverie, the shattered silence that came with a communion of sorts.

How do you take your coffee?

It's such a mundane, ordinary question, yet it takes Owen a moment to compose his brain, to rewire it into reaction; he gets to his feet, folding his cut palm in on itself, fingers drawn in. "Black," he says quietly. Because of course Owen Page took his coffee black, and bitter, without sweetening.

Somehow, that just made sense.

"When she's awake, I'll ask her about the --," it's still hard to say it out loud, honestly. "Zombies. Was she alone when she called you, or were others involved?"

[Emily] "Mmmm," Emily rolls the thoughtful sound across her tongue, brow furrowed, thoughtful. Owen is doomed, now, to notice how she walks on the pads of her feet; resigned to the subtle reminders from his natural sight of what he's seen with her borrowed one.

"I don't recall her mentioning anyone else. It was just Riley when I got there." The girl's hands are busy, again. She's pushed the plunger down on the press. She's washing the knife and setting it beside the sink to dry. Emily finds straight sided ceramic mug for Owen's coffee (it is an Asian style, delicately textured but without a handle) and sets it out for him beside the press.

There is a rich aroma, indulgent, that comes from whatever passes for coffee at Emily's house. Black, without sweetner, without cream, it is more than enough. Milder. Robust. She's not partaking, so Owen can have the whole pot if he likes.

"I'll get the kit for your hand," she says. The apartment is small, not much larger than his, so it doesn't take Emily long to rescue the first aid supplies from under her bathroom sink. Amusingly (perhaps), her first aid kit lives in an old Manchester United theme lunch-box. Emily says nothing about it when she brings it back to the kitchen. Perhaps Owen will say nothing about it, too.

"There's the papers, here, from hospital if you want to go over them. After that, I think you know everything I know." She takes a careful breath, lets it go slowly. Pensive. "I didn't know what to ask," Emily explains, where perhaps she doesn't need to. "Chuck didn't pick up his phone, and I didn't want to bother you before we got back from hospital, so I didn't really learn much else. By the time we got here, she was pretty out of it."

There's concern in Emily's features. Open affection for the other apprentice, and worry after her well-being. It's harder to mask with how tired she is, harder yet to mask from Owen at any time, so she doesn't put much effort into hiding it.

"Would you like me to help with your hand?" she asks. Emily does not tell him she will be seeing to it. There's hesitation there, because some boundaries are (understandably) fuzzy at just this moment.

[Owen Page] Oftentimes, what Owen thinks or feels is uncertain. He is not the most vocal man on the planet, is prone to long periods of silence and tends, more often than not, to skulk around instead of joining in gatherings. He does not like big social occasions, he finds it hard to communication effectively with women, and, not infrequently, with other Mages, too. He gets angry with surprisingly ferocity when he gets angry at all, and his fists speak for his mouth far too often for his own sense of comfort.

He's twenty-three, and with his birthday approaching he does not feel much closer to understanding half the things he's done in his life, or the choices.

When Emily gives him the coffee, he sips it and listens to her with his trademark silence, when she gets the 'kit' for his hand he's surprised by it, that much does register on his face. He sets the coffee down on the counter, and calls after her as she's fetching it from the bathroom. "It's not necessary, really, it's a small cut." He does not note that he'd prefer it to heal naturally, without any aid because it had been an exchange between Entropy and himself; the gift of something in return for information, for transformation and revelation.

He's not sure why, precisely, he's not telling her that.

Instead, she asks if she can help, and Owen, lip twitching at one corner, holds out his palm for her to take care of; it's a strange parallel to the time he'd done the same thing for her in his own apartment. "I was a little surprised," he admits it, though his voice is cautious on the matter, "not to find Chuck here already." A beat. "At this hour," he qualifies.

[Emily] If Owen had explained, then Emily could have considered letting it go. It would have hastened the quiet, motionless time that was coming. The waiting. And with Owen here, now, it would be a quiet waiting. In which Emily would have to actively struggle to keep herself awake.

She pays no mind to the twitching of his mouth -- oh she'd noticed, but it was not safe just now to comment. To inquire. She is careful with him, moreso than she needs to be, and her fingers (even in this sleeplessness) are nimble and adept.

"I do not think Chuck believes in mornings," Emily says, with amusement and frustration in equal measure. The Initiate had not returned her call, had not returned Riley's. But he would be tasked, later, with covering for the injured Apprentice at work. He would be made to be useful.

"And I was studying," she explained, reaching to the cabinet below the kitchen sink to discard whatever trash had come from seeing to Owen's palm. "When Riley called, that is. So it's not like he was here."

Besides. Where would Emily put a second adult-sized person in her apartment? She had nowhere to sleep, now, that Riley was staying over. It wasn't likely that Chuck ever stayed here, or lingered overlong. That Riley was sleeping on Emily's futon was a (seeming) great act of self-sacrifice. Owen knew, after the way she'd looked after the boy, that Emily was capable of compassion and self-sacrifice. It simply did not come naturally.