Happy New Year

[Emily Littleton] [Awareness: Anyone in here I know?]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 4, 7, 8, 9, 10 (Success x 4 at target 6)

[Emily Littleton] Every time she's gathered into one of these community events (let's be politely euphamistic tonight), Emily is aware of that fleeting, floating, untethered feeling that comes with realizing this could reasonably be her last night on Earth. If something went awry, if Paradox reached out a little more soundly than expected, if their hubris at bending the world this way and that -- If any of a hundred little ifs, then she might not wake up Monday morning after all.

It's sobering. That's a distinct problem. She's phoned home, spoken to her brother, put her mind to ease that her obligations are in order, and now there's nothing left to do but prepare and wait. And wait.

The Singer unwinds a pale scarf from her neck as she enters the Hung, Drawn and Quartered. Her awareness is spread wide, cast like a net across the dark interior, trawling for familiar presences. She crosses the room in a few crisp steps, her bootheels clicking quietly on the hard floors. She's dressed almost professionally today, slacks and a nice blouse, and carries herself a little straighter, with a bit more confidence. If it's feigned, few would know.

"Newcastle, please," she tells the barkeep when he turns her way. "And Happy New Year." There's a warmth in her tone that wasn't there before. It is just enough to seem friendly without inviting anything beyond polite conversation.

[Nico Brady] [Awareness: BE AWARE OF YOUR SURROUNDINGS DAMMIT. +1 diff (distracted).]
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 1, 2, 5, 5, 8, 9 (Success x 1 at target 7)

[Nico Brady] He has become one of those rising white-collar professionals that the rest of the rising white-collar professionals mock while simultaneously aspiring to emulate someday: the one who cannot put away his connection to his profession long enough to enjoy what's going on around him, the one who makes so little time for anything outside of his profession that he ends up sitting at a table in the middle of a Saturday night bar crowd with a plate of food and a beer not at all in the center of his attention. A plate containing a picked-at Cobb salad is pushed off to the side of the table, a barely-touched pint of stout sits at his left elbow, and a small cache of books lay spine-down and splayed across the polished tabletop.

Physically, he has changed since his return to the city. There isn't much about him that has survived the summer, truth be told, let alone his lengthy hospitalization and the events that transpired once he was released. Sitting alone, the clock on his Android supposedly keeping him aware of the time, Nico bears little resemblance to the boy next door who strikes the rest of the Awakened populace as being nice. To look at him now one doesn't necessarily get the impression that he has become callous or cruel, but he's harder now. What baby fat he'd had has been whittled away, and his curls have been shorn off, leaving his hair cropped close to his scalp. The plaid flannel shirt he wears has had its sleeves rolled up to his elbows, revealing sinewy arms that bear no lasting reminders of the tubes and equipment that kept him alive before Israel Cohen could intervene.

It's entirely possible Emily doesn't recognize him until she feels that burst of resonance swirling around him, that familiar flashiness that hasn't grown or altered any to explain the physical transformation. Nico doesn't look up from what he's doing when Emily walks in, doesn't lift his eyes from the text; his left hand wanders out to reclaim his beer, and that's when he feels her.

His eyes go to the door before they go to the bar.

[Emily Littleton] Emily's resonance is the same as when they'd last met. She hasn't gone lurking forward along the path to Enlightenment, or struggled with anything that's brought its particular taint into the press (Unrelenting) and elevation (Reverence) around her. If he can hear her order from where he's sitting, he'll hear the renewed and honed clip of consonants, an accent that is decidedly less muddled than it had been in the previous year. She's wearing the vestigial trappings of home in her speech, and in her carriage, and the way she does not dress, tonight, as much like the graduate student he knows but as the Diplomat's Daughter she has been for most of the past month.

She feels him, but Emily does not turn to look his way just yet. He'll have time to find her, at the bar, still standing, waiting for her beer and to pay her tab before drifting toward a table or claiming a barstool. With her back to him, she's a still tableau, bleeding off an active sort of patience, an accute sense of waiting, pervasive.

He's changed. She's slipped back behind the social distance she used to maintain as easily as breathing.

"Cheers," she tells the bartender, handing him a little more than what's necessary to cover her pint. "No, I don't need change. Thanks."

Emily picks up her pint with one hand, snags her scarf with the other, and turns around to find the source of a familiar tinge. She knows that it's Nico even before she can visually confirm it. His studies are spread out across the table, so when she crosses to it she does not presume to sit.

"Hey," she says. Smiles a little. It's warm enough to echo back the reminder of a once-potential friendship. "Happy New Year."

[Nico Brady] Without bags under his eyes, lines on his face, gray or white staining his hair, citing stress or the passage of time as the reason for Nico's maturation seems hasty. Knowing what they know about him, there are few in this city who would be surprised to hear that Nico has become more subdued. Even in June, when he arrived in the city fresh out of graduate school, he was not nearly as outgoing or boisterous as his resonance would suggest him to be, yet he smiled easily and looked completely harmless. He looks no more powerful or dangerous than he ever has; he simply looks like a man now, an Initiate preparing himself for deepening his understanding of the universe instead of a student and a recently Sought.

He also looks weary, like a man full of doubt. There are few things more terrifying to a person whose very reality is comprised of what he wants it to be than the notion of losing belief. Even faltering, to their kind, is a sign that something is amiss, and Nico is so reluctant to discuss what is going on inside of his head that there is no one around to assure him No, Brady, you are not losing touch with reality.

Reality is subjective anyway, and when it becomes malleable in the hands of one of the Awakened it easily eliminates the possibility of insanity.

Emily walks into his line of sight, and when he smiles it is not forced or exhausted, yet it lacks the brilliance, the light that used to shine when he saw someone of whom he was fond.

"Hey," he replies, and reaches out to move his phone and his salad. "How was your holiday?"

[Emily Littleton] "Good," she says, with a smile that broadens noticeably and warmth that touches her eyes as well. "And, more importantly, not here," she adds, with a knowing and wry tilt to that expression. She's lost track of what Nico knows about her, but she imagines he'll mark her accent as not-for-show and the collection of pictures that used to line her wall as a further indication that she did not usually accept a stationary and tethered lifestyle for long.

He moves his phone and his salad in an implicit invitation, but she still gestures to the vacant seat and lifts her eyebrows in a query: May I...? She waits for some assent before sliding into a seat across from him.

"How about yours?" she asks, expertly setting her pint down without having spilled it. "Restful, I hope," she adds.

"You're looking really good," Emily tells him, sounding pleased by this. He seems healthy, if diminished. Hale, if changed. It's a drastic difference than their last meeting, and she has worried about him from afar since then. She hasn't know how to bridge the silence or the space. Emily left Chicago in December in a very uncertain, unsettled place. That's fled her, for now, leaving a quiet surety in its wake.

[Nico Brady] "Please," he says, to the raised eyebrows and silent question. His books are quickly yet not violently closed, three of them stacked atop each other, and he hauls a leather messenger bag off the back of the chair to begin loading them back from whence they came. It's a Saturday, for crying out loud, and he's not dressed for work. No rational reason exists for him to be concerning himself with work tonight, and yet he is.

Emily asks how his holiday was, says she hopes it was restful, and the Orphan smiles, this one more wan than the one before it.

"Quiet," he says, and slings his messenger bag over the back of the chair again.

He's looking really good.

"Having diabetes comes with a silver lining," Nico says, dry humor staining his response: "I have to take care of myself."

[Emily Littleton] Emily will not judge him for studying, whether for school or his avocation, at any hour of the week. It would be highly hypocritical of her to do so. Instead she assumes that Nico's working on a specialized credential, or is going above and beyond to help one of his patients, or simply takes some measure of personal interest and satisfaction from his work. She's an idealist, at times, about self-education.

"To silver linings then," she says, before lifting her pint in a small toast and pulling from it. (Upon pain of death from across the fourth wall, Emily does not introduce another topic here!)

There are no dark circles under Emily's eyes, no strange and sad overtones to her presence. She seems more solid than she has for awhile, but as inscrutable as ever. She turns her pint glass from its base with her fingertips, slicks the condensation down the sides an onto the little coaster beneath it. These are idle things: she has never been very good at sitting still.

[Nico Brady] Very few people can claim to have grown close to Nico in the time he has been in town, and through no fault of their own: he's a busy young man considering the fact that he does as much as he can to keep himself as uninvolved as he can, that he never asks anyone other than Ashley what is going on with the Chantry and only then because he really wants to know how Ashley is doing and not because he's remotely interested in politics or happenings within the community. When called upon for aid, he answers, yet he is so rarely called upon anymore. Nico speaks to so few people, and yet it seems difficult to find a person who has been here any length of time and hasn't heard his name mentioned in relation to some difficulty or another.

Emily toasts to silver linings, and he gives a lopsided smile before lifting his own glass in mirrored salute, extending his arm to clink glasses before the Chorister draws another drink.

"To silver linings," he says. A drink of his own, and he hauls his salad in front of him, picking up his fork with a ringless left hand and fishing around for non-lettuce ingredients. "I, ah... when would be a good time to stop by your place? I've got something I want to give you."

[Emily Littleton] A month or two ago, Emily would have been able to give Nico a few very specific windows in which she might be home. Between Chantry rounds, and meetings, and study sessions with her Praecept, and school obligations, she kept very busy. Tonight, though, she has to think about for a moment, make some verbal stall (Ah...) and run her fingertips along the rim of her pint glass.

"Actually," she says, with a measure of surprise at this assessment, "My schedule's pretty flexible these days. Evenings are good. If you let me know when you're coming, I'll even lock the terror-kitten in my room."

She's curious about what he might be bringing by, but aside of a querying look Emily doesn't ask. She is capable of patience and as silly as it might sound, having a benign mystery to look forward to gave her something to come home to when the Asylum trials were over.

She pulls her pint and it's little coaster closer, rests it close enough that she can keep her hand on it. Even sitting with someone she trusts, Emily's fingertips do not leave her glass for long. It is an old habit.

"Pretty much the only night I'm busy is Sunday," she tells him, without any sort of self-consciousness about her unencumbered schedule.

[Nico Brady] A look of amused confusion crosses over Nico's face when she refers to her pet as a terror-kitten, the reaction bringing about muted laughter and a sense of relaxation in the Orphan. He busies himself eating as Emily speaks, and though he hardly gives off the sense that he was raised eating with a full set of cutlery off of china plates, his table manners are impeccable.

Without a book in front of him, his attention thoroughly buried by whatever it was that he was studying before she came over, Nico is able to put a more substantial dent in his plate of vegetable matter as Emily speaks. Bobbing his head in a nod, he clears his mouth of detritus with a swig of beer before speaking again.

"Sunday," he says. Anyone else might have made a joke at her Tradition's expense, might have said something like Of course or asked if she had choir practice then, but Nico was never one for making jokes, period, unless they were so dry they could be mistaken for him being utterly serious. That's not what he says; if anything, this sounds novel. "I'll remember that."

[Emily Littleton] She nods a bit, in acknowledgment.

In all fairness, Emily's kitten is rather mellow. She limits her usual tyrannical reign of destruction to whatever textiles land themselves in the rocking chair she's claimed. Once that was Owen's rocking chair, and now it is An's. But Emily was away for a few weeks, and the terror-kitten has not finished expressing her displeasure at being uprooted and forced to share space with Molly's ferrets who are both bigger than she is.

The Singer lets the quiet hang between them for a moment, sips from her beer and lets him work on his salad a little bit. There's a lull, but it doesn't stretch like taffy toward some breaking point. It's not that purposeful.

"Mmm," she says, lifts the index finger of the hand grasping her pint, all as if something's just jogged her memory. "Hey, I don't know if you've heard, but Chuck and I aren't working together anymore. So, if you need anything from the House, it's better to go through Ashley."

[Nico Brady] There isn't a Chicago Chantry newsletter that people can subscribe to, but even so, the circle of influence in this place is so small that everyone almost always knows what is going on with everyone else before the person in question is aware that dissemination of information has occurred. Were he newly Awakened, perhaps, or if he had spent the entirety of his tenure beyond the bounds of their society, he wouldn't be quite so comfortable with how much everyone knew.

This is the Internet Age, but so few of them trust modern technology enough for that to explain the nuances of their method of keeping each other informed. It isn't gossip; these are things they need to know to survive. The veterans, the ones who lived through the War, are afraid peace won't last long. Given that they lost two Disciples last year, one to Madness and the other to miscalculation, given that Nico himself was nearly killed by a creature that so far as anyone can tell still lurks the streets, knowing what everyone is doing is a necessary part of their existence.

"I heard," he says, without clarifying from whom. "You, ah... you seem like you're holding up well."

That's something of a slip. That would imply that Chuck isn't, or wasn't, or was suspected to not have been holding up well.

[Emily Littleton] "Thanks."

The word trails off a little, falls to something hushed by its end. There's a flicker of something -- sympathy, sadness -- as she looks down momentarily, shifts her weight a little and picks up her pint to cover. Emily's innate inclination to evade uncomfortable topics extends to her body language, to the incidental (seeming) movements she makes in the course of a conversation. Those skills and instincts have only gotten stronger over the past year.

"I've kept busy," she tells him, with a little shrug. It could explain away her absence, or how distant she seems now, how that disconnection is clearer even across a table in a familiar pub. There's a more distinct line between Emily and Other these days and it's more tightly held, even among friends. "You know how it goes."

[Emily Littleton] [ Pause/Fade for you silly mages, there's werewolf dice afoot ]