Καλησπέρα and I miss you

[Emily Littleton] It is late on Emily's side of the world, and the moon hangs high and lambent over head, shining. It's darker her, on the north side of the island, and the village and town lights only reach so far into the sky. They cannot dim the moon or the stars. It's beautiful. There is a warm and lazy breeze, the sound of people gathered further down the cobble-stone street, of a club that spins mostly 80s music and some of that in translation, of karaoke, of late night conversations. They're muted when they reach her balcony, even moreso when they become the subtle backdrop to her call.

It's six-thirty in Chicago's afternoon, nearing seven. Two-thirty in the morning for Emily. It has been a very long time since she called. But she's calling now. From a far away place, so her cell phone number shows up as a +1-and-then-some-digits, regardless of how he'd had it programmed.

[Jarod Nightingale] If Emily had called any earlier in the day, Jarod would have still been in Boston. Or, rather, he might have been on a plane coming home from Boston. Or in an airport dealing with any number of tedious and stressful issues that were associated with travel. Especially traveling with a child and a canine. Had Emily called yesterday, he'd have been at his sister's wedding.

But she didn't call yesterday, and she didn't call earlier today. She called... literally moments after he'd returned home to the house in Madison. The smartphone buzzed faintly from the back pocket of his jeans, where he'd stuck it temporarily while he was dealing with their luggage, and he pulled it out and glanced at the screen. A few seconds passed before he answered.

"And what fabulous and exotic location might you be calling me from tonight?"

[Jarod Nightingale] [Int+Linguistics - That's greek to me, but I'm pretty good at this language thing. +2 diff for unstudied language]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 10 (Success x 3 at target 8)

[Emily Littleton] "Κρήτη," she answers, and the R rolls delicately on her tongue. Emily does not sound like a native Greek speaker, but enough time on the island and enough exposure to locals has taught her to pronounce some words with authenticity.

"Καλησπέρα, Jarod," she says, and his name is shaped in that subtly canted accent of hers, tinged lightly with the colors of the language she'd just been speaking, wreathed through with her own Manchester roots. It might sound familiar, or welcome, or even wanted. Most remarkably, it sounds warm, bereft of some of her natural coolness, less stifled by her innate evasiveness.

There's a little pause, and the sounds of the village surrounding her seep in. They help breach the silences, the odd pauses international lines put on phone calls.

"I called to see how you're doing," she says, like it's a thing that friends-like-they-are might do. Like it wasn't so damned personal and un-closeted, and not self-protective, and out of character. She doesn't exactly ask him how are you doing?, instead she states an intent and sees if he might follow up, walk into it willingly. This is their dance, different from all her others. Jarod is a singular entity in her life, as Emily might be in his. With an ocean and a sea between them, she can afford to be a little less guarded, almost, maybe, warm.

[Jarod Nightingale] She'd called to see how he was doing. Out of the blue, and after a rather lengthy absence of such calls from either side. There were any number of ways in which he might have reacted to that, but what he landed on was...

"Tired." But there was a lightness to his voice that prevented the word from sounding broody, because he didn't mean tired in the emotional sense, and for people like he and Emily... that made all the difference. "I just got back from Boston with Ilana." (And the puppy, and Gale. He didn't mention either of them.)

The words that Emily used were in a language that he wasn't familiar with, but the sound of them was fairly easy to pinpoint, especially for someone like him who'd traveled a lot and spent a great deal of time learning and studying languages. As for their meaning... that wasn't so terribly hard to guess at, given the context. "Greece must be lovely this time of year. I should go back some day. Maybe I can pawn the kid off on some poor, unsuspecting babysitter for awhile."

He was teasing, of course. Ilana meant the world to him. He'd never leave her with someone for any prolonged length of time. (Or so he told himself for now, anyway. One had to imagine that sooner or later he'd be forced to break that rule.)

He hadn't really answered Emily's question, but he sounded well, at least. "How are you doing?"

[Emily Littleton] "Boston sounds ..." There is a pause. Emily considers her adjectives carefully. Someone does the street is singing along with a Grease medley (oh the homonym-ic irony), and it undercuts any idea she might have had of making commentary on his family members, or Ashley's acquaintances. "... muggy," she settles for this. A truth. Simple, but honest: East Coast summers sound muggy to her, like land-locked Augusts often do, too.

"It is lovely," she tells him, with a note of appreciation in her tone. For the island, or maybe for the attempt at honesty that they're sharing. Something too fragile and nascent to name, just now. "You should visit. Crete is so different from Athens," she appends.

Her words are languid, slowed by something other than alcohol. Slowed but not muddied. It takes a moment for the nuance to slip in: she's relaxed, long-limbed and draped over a patio chair on the terrace that overlooks the dark, slumbering sea. Her voice almost carries with it the hint of moonlight in her hair.

"I think you'd like it here. I'm staying in a very small village, where people are actually friendly, and I have to sit on the rooftop to really get mobile service, and the music seems stuck about a decade or three in the past. It's like time travel, without any of the ethical complications," she teases. The words cant a little toward her usual wry wit, but are softened by something warmer instead. A fondness that she isn't outright hiding.

He hadn't really answered her question, and she hadn't really answered his, but they'd given each other something honest to start from. Intimations and hints, clues to follow up on. It was more than they might have a couple months before.

"I miss you," she tells him, but the words are somehow not all that weighty. "Talking with you. Before everything in Chicago came tumbling down -- I do not miss that city," she says, as if it were a place she could unmake by ignoring it. "But I miss the people. Well... certain people."

[Jarod Nightingale] "I've been." You could hear the smile in his voice when she mentioned Crete. It had been awhile, true, but Jarod had a strong memory for places. And people. Experiences, really. Those were the kinds of things that stayed with him. "And yes, I do like it there."

Truthfully, he liked many places. Even Chicago, for all its flaws. (One would imagine that he wouldn't live there otherwise.) But a place was always nicer when one could experience it in... doses. Where the best parts of it could be relished in, and the worst parts ignored. Madison he liked too, but the more time he spent here, the more he began to feel a bit bored with its night-time entertainment options. (Not that it mattered really. That was why he had two homes.)

I miss you, she said. In a warm, light voice. The kind that you'd expect a person to use to tell a friend that their conversation was missed. It didn't feel like it meant anything, in particular, but neither did it feel like it didn't mean anything. It was, yes, honest. Still, her admission was met with a bout of silence on his end of the line. Not too long. No more than a few beats. But it was there.

"We have fractured a bit, lately," he conceded. "That happens." Friendships, to him, were often cyclical things. They could be for many people, but for him especially. One would imagine that this was probably the only way that someone like Jarod could really stay friends with anyone, given how problematic prolonged exposure to him could become. And then, after another pause...

"I miss you too."

It sounded a bit more weighty than hers had. But not much. Perhaps there was some calculation to the way he followed this up with, "Ilana got a puppy. And I got an... apprentice." Beat. "It feels fucking bizarre, saying that."

[Emily Littleton] "I think Ilana got the better end of that deal," she tells him, and Jarod can almost see the way her mouth shifts to a lop-sided smile as she teases them, and the time they've been apart contracts a little more, and this feels a bit more like the beginning, with her standing in his flat and him goading her about her newfound status: Awake. But it isn't as tense as that, this isn't (not necessarily) verbal foreplay. There's a measure of it, lurking, but it will always be between them, one imagines.

His was weightier, and brokered an answering quiet in her. It lingers, and it colors her next words but only so much.

"They must be something," she leaves the specifics up to innuendo. "If you're willing to claim them outright like that." Emily had been, but hadn't been, his Apprentice. They'd stood on muddied and uncertain ground. She wouldn't have had it any other way. It left their relationship, even now, in a place that defied words and categorization. Maybe that's why its effect was measured in the length of her silences, or his.

"You were a good teacher," she tells him, to reassure as much as to remember. "I'm more worried about you and a puppy than you and an apprentice. How did Ilana ever get that past you?"

There's nostalgia, now, wrapped around her words. A thing remembered, a kinship and a warmth, that was trying to come forward enough to rekindle that communication between them. It doesn't grasp and it doesn't over-reach, but for the first time in a long time he could imagine that she was open again. More the girl who stood, rain soaked and wondrous, barefoot in his flat that one night and less the broken young woman who'd cried against him in Madison at Halloween.

[Jarod Nightingale] Jarod laughed, and the sound contained some knowing bemusement. One could only imagine how someone like him might be coping with the combined stress of having to deal with a new puppy (they were needy things, puppies... they needed training, they needed food, they needed attention...) and a twenty year old apprentice at the same time. One could imagine that Jarod was hard-pressed to tell the difference between them, at times.

"Ilana definitely got the better end of that deal."

But then Emily said, they must be something, and his amusement sobered. There was a bout of silence on his end of the line, neither a confirmation nor a dismissal. When she told him that he'd been a good teacher a small, hesitant smile touched his lips, but again... he didn't say anything. This was one of the reasons why phone conversations could be so frustratingly inadequate. There was too much communication lost by lack of sight.

How did Ilana ever get that past you?

"Months and months of persistence," he replied with what sounded like a tired sigh. "And a few hunger strikes. I wasn't going to. You know how I am about dogs. But then Nick moved to DC and... " he trailed off a moment. "I don't know. I just wanted to cheer her up." Unspoken, but obvious: I can't bear it when she's sad.

"He's not so bad, I guess. I just hate the fucking fur. I need to learn how to cast some kind of... anti-static rote, or something." (Not that he could. He didn't have the right spheres for that. Yet.)

A beat.

"The kid... he's..." he didn't seem to know how to articulate what he wanted to say here. Or maybe he just couldn't. "He'd be a good Verbena, I think. Probably better than I am. And he doesn't really have anyone, so... he kindof latched on to me. But he's alright."

Emily was returning to a version of herself that seemed more... her, somehow. Pure in her curiosity and reverence. Jarod, perhaps, was in more of a state of flux. But he was still Jarod. He probably always would be, no matter the alterations to his life. "I took him to Boston with us, to take care of the dog." (Wealthy people had such luxuries.) "Damn near gave my step-mother a fucking heart attack. It was worth it, just for that."

[Emily Littleton] Her laugh ripples across the line, hushed and gentle but calling up warmer notes still. Emily's smile is crooked, canted to one side, lazily wry to match the snark in his tone. Had he been able to meet them, he'd find her eyes steady and just touched with that darker mirth. Very much herself, indeed. Perhaps more herself than Jarod had ever seen her.

"I take it your family is, well, still your family..." There's a balance to the cadence of her words, one that threads the tiny pauses between them into a sort of double-entendre (your family is well [... and still your family]).

Emily breathes out, it delineates a little break between levity and something less pointedly playful. "You're good to her," she says, of Ilana, of who Jarod has become with Ilana in his life. "I'm glad you found each other."

There's talk here, of Boston. And Boston necessarily leads to Ashley. Emily knows that Kage is with Ashley, likely in Boston. That the three of them are all tied up in co-localization, than the three of them (a different subset now) will be tied up in the same soon. She knows, but she doesn't touch on that. Jarod doesn't offer. He knows that she knows, and she knows that he knows, and it stays just that: awareness. Not an elephant in the room, but neither a needy thing delved into and explored.

"I want to meet this apprentice of yours," she says, rather directly, baldly, just like that, which makes it a different matter entirely, because this is Emily. And because her voice is canted just so, making this a playful thrust in a verbal joust and nothing so plain as a demand or request. "You describe him a little like a well-meaning lamprey," she teases.

He kind of latched on to me. Jarod didn't allow anything to cling to him unless he wanted it there. Some part of this was on the Disciple's terms, however much he denied it. It amused Emily to hear this, and she was curious, and the Apprentice sounded a bit like a plaything or a puppy. Emily had a kitten, now on its way to feline adolescence; she'd learned to play with (stalk) her toys, too.

[Jarod Nightingale] "My family is well. And still my family." His response was somewhat cold and lacking in inflection. This was how it was, when he talked about them as a singular unit. Only when separating out his sisters might he have flashes of warmth. "And now my sister is married to some guy who's old enough to be her father. Fucking yay for her, I guess."

Jarod had never been happy or approving of this. Emily knew that from the way he'd stared icily at Violet's engagement ring at Ilana's birthday dinner, and the brief argument the two of them had shared in the hallway in hushed, angry tones. One could point out to him the hypocrisy in this, considering the ages of some of his own past sex-partners. Violet, in fact, had done exactly that.

It hadn't had terribly good results.

But they'd made up for it later.

You're good to her. I'm glad you found each other.

"So am I." And that was all he said about that. But that was all he needed to say.

He did not mention Ashley.

When Emily mentioned a desire to meet Gale, he laughed. In truth, Gale was anything but a pet or a plaything. And he hadn't so much latched on to Jarod as he had correctly identified that the two of them were uniquely compatible, paradigmatically speaking. Certain people might choose to believe that the two of them had met for a very good reason, but of course... Jarod didn't think that way. He'd met many apprentices in his lifetime. Emily, of course, being one of the notable ones. (More than notable - important. Meaningful.) That eventually he might happen to find one with a similar instinct and outlook to his own... wasn't so terribly surprising. What was surprising, as Emily well understood, was that Jarod had allowed it to happen. It had been an incremental thing, much the same way it had been with Emily herself. But yes, there was... a sense of this being official, now. Loathe though the man could be to admit these things.

There was a reason, yes. And he'd only given a small sense of it so far, but they had more than just a natural affinity for Life magic in common. (Why was it that Jarod had taken such an uncharacteristic interest in Emily, all those months ago? Many of the answers here were the same. [Though Emily and Gale were most assuredly not the same person.])

"He is, a bit. I'm... not sure how the two of you would get along, but I'm sure that can be arranged some day."

[Emily Littleton] The Nightingales. Emily well remembered, however close to breast she kept her opinions of them. She still hadn't told Jarod how uncomfortable she'd felt, cornered by the brother whose mobile seemed surgically attached to his head. Emily was, after all (and before most things), a diplomat's daughter. But she was not a debutante. She was not meant to mingle with such lofted company. The felt apart from him, not a part of him.

The night air and moonlight in her curls suited her better. The Singer girl runs her fingertips along the line of her forearm, not quite following it up past her wrist, to where one hand presses the smartphone neatly to her ear.

"Mmmm," she says. The sound rides a line between calming and disapproving, straddles it well. It splits the difference between thoughts of Nightingales and intimations of apprentices.

"You hesitate," she points out, focusing instead on his quiet misgivings. "I'll have you know I can be social," she attests, drawing any censure toward herself, gallantly sparing this unnamed and fledgling Verbena.

Someone in the avenue below says something sharply in Greek. It rises in lost syllables, unshaped sound, between the thickly stuccoed walls. Emily pauses, peeks over the edge of the terrace and down, and then shrugs a little. Closing time: the bars were closing up. She ached for a cigarette, a habit that had never really been hers to claim. Her fingers formed the absent shape, wanting, unsated.

[Jarod Nightingale] "I know you can." He smiled, a thing of remembrance - though it was not this that he was remembering.

It seemed a very long time ago that they'd met. That they'd walked through the wintered landscape together. That he'd taught her to feel living patterns in a garden atrium. It seemed a long time, even, since they'd played soccer (football) with Ashley in the park. That was an odd juxtaposition in his head, now. The two of them. And him.

He'd been standing until now, resting a hand on the smooth countertop of the island in his kitchen. Not the kitchen that Emily knew and remembered from his place in Chicago. This one belonged to a house in Madison. It belonged to the woods and the lake and summer. And Gale. And a puppy.

It was a house that someone a little less cold might live in.

Moving now, he walked over to the sofa and stretched out on it. There was the sound of rustling, and that of a long, quiet exhale.

"How are you? I mean... how are you, really?"

Because it had been a long time. Because he knew - about Solomon, about Gabriel, about Owen. Because he cared.

[Emily Littleton] It was lifetimes ago than they'd met. She'd swear to it. Back when all of this was shiny and new. Before she had a Tradition, before she had any Rank. Before she'd saved anyone's life. Before she'd taken any one's life. Before she could see the patterns in many things. She'd been a college kid, volunteering at the food bank, because it was the sort of thing she did when she had too much time on her hands.

Barely Awake. Hopeful.

A year and a half, give or take a few months. If she thought to count them out, it would surprise her how few moons had really slipped through her fingers, sand through a sieve, time marked as weightier than its true measure. Emily breathes out instead of answering, and though she moves the phone a little ways from her head, though she tries to gentle that sound away from his ears, the quiet lingers.

"έτσι κι έτσι," comes the reply. It has the same sing-song merits that its translation, in almost any language, holds. So-so. Solala. Comme ci comme ça. It's the linguistic equivalent of a shrug, and her attention is pinned somewhere out to the darkling sea, where the moonlight does not so much as ripple on the swells.

"I'm better, don't get me wrong. Getting out of Chicago for awhile was probably the only thing I've done right this year. I've traveled with my father, gotten out from under Solomon's thumb. I feel like a person again, not just this vessel that works miracles when she has the proper clearance." There's a burr of annoyance to that, but it softens quickly. It doesn't have the strength to stay.

"I feel like me, if that makes any sense. I'm happy -- and maybe it's because I'm ignoring everything that happened," and isn't that a polite way to sum up her first Awakened year, "But maybe I'm okay with that, too. I don't know. It's so... unbalanced there. Frenetic. Dangerous. It feels good to be out, for awhile."

She doesn't say: No one's died. That's a distinct upside to diplomatic envoys; they rarely involve combat or lethality. She doesn't say: I feel like can fucking breathe again.

"It's beautiful here. Things like that can touch me again. It's warm at midnight, and I'm not too numb to notice anymore, so I'd say I'm better," she assures him. The corner of her mouth lifts, echoes a sincere and somewhat guarded smile. "A little bored with mundane life," she chuckles, rolls the sound between them like a secret, like a conspiracy building. "But better."
[Jarod Nightingale] She was better. Maybe not luminously happy, but relaxed and free of the weighty thoughts that had plagued her for so many months last winter. And despite the complicated feelings that inevitably surfaced whenever he thought about that time, he felt some relief at that - knowing that she was alright. He hadn't been worried. He had, in fact, not been thinking of her much at all.

So I let her go.

He could be frighteningly good at compartmentalizing his life. But that didn't erase their past, and it didn't change who they were - maybe always would be - to each other. It didn't mean that he didn't still care. (Clearly, he did.) When Ashley had mentioned that Emily was being mentored by Solomon; told him what had occurred between the two of them, he'd more than a little angry.

They'd never discussed Solomon before, he and Emily. This was, in fact, the first time that Jarod could remember her talking about anything related to her Tradition with him at all. And it was barely a passing mention. Perhaps she understood, intrinsically, that someone like Jarod would never be able to talk about the Chorus without at least some small twinge of bitterness. And so this subject had been a void between them.

But he didn't exhibit any surprise when she mentioned it now. He had heard, of course. Other people had told him. And if he had any judgment, he reserved it for himself.

"I wouldn't say you're ignoring it. You're moving past it. That's healthy." He breathed out quietly, reaching up to run his fingers through his hair. Strands of it fell whisper-soft against his forehead. And while there were many, many bluntly vicious things that he could say about Emily's erstwhile teacher (a man who he had never met, and now had absolutely no desire to,) what he ultimately voiced was: "He didn't deserve you."

So much an understatement it was almost laughable.

Then, a sly smirk. "Mundane life isn't so boring. Clearly you aren't doing it right."

[Jarod Nightingale] [Edit: "he'd been more than a little angry."]

[Emily Littleton] She laughs a little, taken enough by surprised that the sound catches in her throat, comes up a bit as a huff, then a chuckle, then a rueful trailing sound. He could imagine the shape her mouth or the glint in her eyes in that moment; he's seen it before. Emily looks back over her shoulder toward the glass door between the apartment and the terrace, notices the faint light echoing there, realizes that Niko is awake and possibly near enough to listen in.

There's a struggle there, between the life she had (has) and the one she's living. It's bittersweet and languid, not the sort of thing she expects to settle out in one phone call, or on one island, or maybe even in one lifetime. There is no glint of silver around her neck tonight, instead a thin leather cord. No locket, instead a small circlet of dark green jade. Her skin is bronzed; her frame a bit more generous, less starved. There's a softness to the hollows of her cheeks. It's summer here; it's Winter on the other end of the phone.

"Mmmmmm," the sound teases, taunts a little, seems oh-so-self-assured. "I rather think I'm doing alright at it." The smirk would be answered by a shrug of her shoulder, some little gesture to help convey her lack of worry, something easy and physical and undisguised. But he's not here, so he'll have to imagine it, and this Emily is not entirely the one he'd known before. She's lighter; she might be halfway to healthy; God forbid, she may actually yet learn to thrive.

"Though if you would like to come on over and show me how it's done," she offers, all very faux-prim and utterly polite. [i}Gracious[/i], Emily. Accommodating, Emily. "You are most welcome to." It's such a leading tone, but there's no press behind it. It's playful, without laying out any expectations.

[Jarod Nightingale] "I think I've already shown you plenty," he replied in a dryly matter-of-fact tone. Not quite taking the bait, but not quite not taking it either. "You're more than alright at it." Here the corner of his mouth turned up and the inflection took on a hint of wry humor. "...When you give yourself permission."

The house was very quiet. Exhausted from the trip, Ilana had fallen asleep on top of the covers of her bed with a book in her hand and a ginger puppy curled up by her feet (where he wasn't allowed to be.) In a few minutes Jarod would probably get up and check on them.

"I should go," he said with a quiet sigh. "I was meaning to take a run tonight."

He'd been running a lot lately. The change in surroundings seemed to have reminded him that activity could be enjoyable for its own merits, rather than simply a means to an end. Here it was a freeing thing - running. It was the earth and the sky and blood pumping through his veins.

[Emily Littleton] I should go, he says, and Emily makes no argument. She doesn't try to hold the line longer, this is not some sort of needful call. It's a whim, calling him in the first place, and they are not in a place to cling or cleave to each other right now.

"It was good to talk to you," she tells him. The words are plain, unencumbered by other meanings or regrets. "Enjoy your run."

Somehow that's better, in her mind, than saying Goodbye. There's less certainty to it, less implied anything. Her life is far more diffuse, now, and Emily is finding that there's a sort of simplicity in that. Niko's shadow darkens the door, and she offers him a smile and a little wave. She tips her phone just enough for the touch screen to light up. They do not intrude on each other's separate places. They are the children of diplomats. They understand complicated lives that cannot or should not intertwine.

"Oh, and, Jarod?" This is lighter, unvarnished teasing. It is not meant to be prickly in anyway. "Good luck with the puppy." And the curl of the word suggests she also means his new-found Apprentice. There's a note of fondness but that, that is the first thing she tucks away even slightly tonight. It is restrained, jealously withheld.

[Emily Littleton] [... and wrap! ...]

May: Seattle, Act I

[Lisa Carraway] Hello, Seattle.

It's more temperate than Chicago in May, and it's certainly wetter. It was raining when Emily got off of the plane, when Lisa Carraway greeted her at the airport and offered to take her luggage. The other Chorister has changed very little since last fall: still tall and boyishly slender, an impression that is only contributed to by the black pinstripe pants and white collared shirt she is wearing, sleeves neatly rolled to the elbows. Lisa likes black and white. It's the color of choices, and it's the color of notes on a page. Her hair is tied back in a loose bun and her eyes are the same pale gray.

Emily was greeted with a genuine grin and a hug and Lisa held an umbrella over her to protect against the ever-falling drizzle while they walked to her car, a blue Prius that is clearly not new. The first thing Lisa did was point out Mt. Rainier. The second thing she did was ask Emily if she wanted any coffee or anything to eat. Familiar with travel and jetlag, Lisa is. So there's no immediate conversation about the Chorus or about Chicago or about that clear desire to escape for a little while. That can wait.

Lisa lives in a townhouse off the Union Bay, close to the University of Washington. To Emily the city must seem almost an island; it seems like no matter where they go there's a dock or a fish market or a bay or a marina. Water is always in sight, choppy and gray. So are the mountains.

Inside, she allows Emily some time to get settled. There's a guest room, presumably here for occasions such as these, and as a disciple of the Chorus it isn't too far fetched to imagine that she has people crashing here on a semi-regular basis. Emily might feel, at first, as though she has to tiptoe around the house. The place is immaculate, and the furniture too is in black and white, quite modern with clean lines and a simple design. There's a lot of metal and glass. It might feel a little spartan and cold to some people, even if there's a brightness to it; something like winter sunlight, perhaps. The bathroom smells, very faintly, of cleaning chemicals. A large concert piano, black, takes up quite a bit of the free space in the main room and that living space has clearly been arranged around it.

After bringing Emily to the house, Lisa left her some time to herself to get settled or take a nap, telling her that she'd be in her study whenever she was comfortable. The "study," in fact, didn't appear to be much of a study at all when Emily walked past the open door earlier: rather than books, there's a very neat desk in a corner with a laptop, and other than that it is full of instruments. A drum set. A synthesizer. A beat machine. Two guitars, plus amps. An electronic keyboard. There's even a french horn. The sole disorganization in the entire house is the walls of the study: they've been scribbled all over with a pencil, crowding out the white. Notes.

Given the general attitude of most of Chicago's magi, it's likely Emily's first time being around someone who has had episodes of Clarity. In its own way perhaps it's just as unnerving. Still, since arriving here she's only been treated with warmth, and she's been given her space.

[Emily Littleton] Hello, indeed.

The flight from Beijing to Seattle is a little less than eleven hours. Moderate. Almost short by international travel standards. No layovers. Only one trip through immigration control and customs. Being the daughter of a U.S. diplomat eases some of that queueing up and interminable waiting. Emily's passport is a deep maroon, but the identification she carries with her allows her to whisk through the shortest lines of all. It means that the nicely uniformed man with serious eyes smiles warmly to her, calls her Ms. Littleton and welcomes her home.

Home.

Seattle never has been home for Emily, the sentiment calls up a smile that just touches her eyes, softens them away from their slate-grey hues. This young woman, who has a certain press about her, a sense of motion or momentum, tied to something lofty, idealistic, no, Reverent. This young woman seems so like a still frame to the man with serious eyes, caught up in a stillness that is almost unnatural. Calm. Poised. Clear. There is a bit of jade at her throat, carved into the shape of a flat disk. It is silent: it does not speak of home, or of belonging. Her voice is clear, shaped with a British tinge, and yet when he welcomes her home, she tells him thank you.

The people who come through his lane next seem pale, bland in the wake of the Diplomat's Daughter, though she is not someone of singular importance, and she is not beautiful to behold, and she is no longer standing there. He will chalk it up to the oddity: a foreign accent and diplomatic status, a passport so full of visa stamps that extra pages have been sewn in when she is merely twenty-three. He will be unable to shake that small feeling, the wonder that maybe he had brushed hands with something Other.

That's what they are. Other. Remote. Removed. Sharing immanence but no longer identity with the Sleepers around them. Some of the hardness has slipped from her shoulders. Some of the grace has called forward into her small. She is different than when Lisa saw her last; she stands a little taller; she walks a bit more proudly; she smiles as if it comes from somewhere lasting and real. Emily endures. More than this. She is beginning to live.

The clasp hands, like brothers in arms do, like sisters in arms might. The Knight and the Novice. Claps hands, hug, and Emily kisses both of her cheeks, one, then the other, then the first again. They exchange greetings like It's good to see you again and then they most definitely get coffee. Good coffee. Seattle has excellent coffee, if the rumors have any truth to them, and Emily will not pass this up just to cater to her personal preference for tea.

It is a lot like coming home, but the Initiate does not say so aloud. She doesn't need to. As close to breast as Emily keeps everything (everything), the tells are in the way her language does not close Lisa out, in the lack of a Mind shield wreathing her thoughts, in the ease of her gestures, the readiness of her smile -- often something wicked and sharp, teasing, testing, intelligent and wry and amused all at once. She does not seem worse for the traveling, or likely to succumb to sleep at any moment. Emily stepped off the plane and into the Pacific Northwest as if she'd only been coming from San Francisco, not over the great expanse of the sea.

Lisa will find that her houseguest is undemanding, gracious, that she keeps a small footprint but not out of any sense of un-welcome or dis-comfort. She has only a carry on and a small case, and these are tucked into the closet of the room, or a corner. The only disorderly imposition, at first, is the neatly collected bundle of wires -- her laptop charger, her phone charger. That phone is kept on silent, so that it does not encroach onto Lisa's aural space.

The neatness of her home, this clarity, the precision of the space. Some find it cold or off putting. For Emily it is relaxing. It leaves her room to breathe. There is rain and dampness and wet outside, but she cracks a window to let the smell come in. The cleanness.

At first, all Lisa will hear of Emily's presence are the quiet sounds of footsteps in the guest room. The hush-snick-zip of a suitcase enclosure opening, then closing. The rush-whisper of water at the bathroom sink. Then quiet sounds from the kitchen. The rise of water starting to boil, but never the scream of a kettle. When the Singer girl finds her way to the study, she is carrying two mugs of steaming tea, that give off a slightly sweet and gently floral scent. Her hair is unbound, and tumbles in soft waves to her shoulders. Her clothes are comfortable, and not quite as crisply pressed as the ones she'd flown in.

"I hope you don't mind that I made tea," she says, her voice breaking the stillness of the house at last. It is pulled strongly toward the something foreign side. "Lychee," she adds, passing one mug to Lisa. "I've had a fondness for it, since I was young; it seemed a nice way to settle in."

[Lisa Carraway] That Emily is a quiet, unobtrusive houseguest goes quietly appreciated. Emily might not have musical friends - no friends who are and can hear it anymore, at least - but there are a lot of people out there who don't have an idea of how much idle noise disturbs them at times. How distracting they find it. Lisa can hear the quiet noises as Emily moves through the house and makes note of them, but they aren't jarring enough to shake her concentration.

When Emily comes into the study, Lisa is bent over a sheaf of paper. "Words" she has notated from the wall, probably, and has made her edits to. She's already looking toward the door even before Emily walks in, and she grins out of one side of her mouth and holds out a hand to receive the tea. "I thought that's what it smelled like," she says, when Emily tells her it's lychee. "I don't mind. My dad's a British expat, I get the tea-lust."

She uncrosses both legs at the ankles and stands up, nudging the chair back into place with one foot. "We can move to the living room if you want," she says, carefully blowing on the tea before she takes a sip. "So how are you?"

[Emily Littleton] "Mum's British," Emily says, stopping just short of identifying herself this way as well. If pressed, Emily sides with her Manchesterian roots over her American ones, but it always feels like an incomplete answer to her. Like it stops so far from the truth that it would best be described as a lie of convenience, if not outright deception. "My early years were in China, so I suppose I'm doubly-doomed," she adds, with a twist of her smile that echoes Lisa's, expounds upon it in a delightfully wry way.

It isn't that the instruments and the writing on the way fails to capture Emily's interest, not at all, just that the Singer girl doesn't give much away, naturally, by letting her attention linger too long in any one place. That evasiveness she has honed comes from a place so engrained, so innate, that it may as well be Nature not Nurture that raised her to it. Each instrument is studied, quickly, by sharp eyes, taken in or accounted for if not fully seen for its truth. There would be time for that later. For now, Emily has taken their measure if not their merit. She is informed, and later will come to understand.

The segue to the living room comes naturally. Emily falls in step with Lisa. They do not hurry but do not dawdle. If someone like this Knight had been part of Chicago's awakened community, Emily might not have struggled or suffered quite so keenly over the past year and a half. That's one possibility. Or she may have rebelled even harder to see such a strange and canted, but honest, reflection of her own mannerisms and modalities amongst the magi.

"Better," she says, as if the word could speak volumes on its own. It is weighty, carefully considered, measured and meted. This is no blase answer, but a precise one, exactly what she means to say, pointed, clear. "I feel like I can breathe deeply again; it's like remembering what I hadn't known I'd lost."

Truth. Naked and unveiled, if necessarily imprecise and unhoned. They are lighter words, voiced in a slightly higher register, things relaxed and threaded through with honest lilts and cadence. They are unsuspicious Words, which feel very out of character, coming from this girl, this young woman, this journeywoman Singer who does not sing.

Emily sips from her tea as they settle into the living room. She cuts a clean and natural figure in the modern setting, but does not sit just so on the furniture. She finds a way to rest that is comfortable, makes her seem very much a part (without being apart) from the black and white, metal and glass. Her mug will not leave a ring, as she keeps it to her lap, steadies it with just the fingertips of her free hand, moves it like a natural and thoughtless extension of her body. Physical self-awareness has never been a thing Emily struggled with; it reads as self-possession, control, poise as she grows older.

"How have things been with you?" she asks, and the question seems honest. Genuine. There is warmth to it.

[Lisa Carraway] Lisa remembers Emily's struggles well, and truth be told it has always troubled her that there was little she could do about them. When they first spoke Emily had been struggling with a death, then with Faith, with Waiting. Lisa doesn't have to ask her to see that she might have waited in vain. She doesn't really have to ask her to see that she's felt alone in the past year, that she's suffered. Lisa imagines that in a place like Chicago, a place of transience, ruled for a short time by Hunger and a city built by Conviction and Sorrow, she would have too.

She sits across from Emily. For as contained as her moods might be, physically she doesn't make a neat package of her limbs: they sprawl out, as though her legs are a little too long for her to know precisely where to put them. She's rangy, but she's not clumsy. This is simply the one aspect of her where her precision seems to slacken a little.

There's a smile when Emily says she's better, and once more she lifts the mug. "Good," she says. Then, with genuine interest, "What changed?"

She doesn't seem uneasy when Emily asks after her too. After three years away from the Technocracy, Lisa has finally settled into herself and her life as a Mage. Into her role as a disciple. "Good," she says in response. "The school I'm running got a pretty hefty donation from a benefactor this summer, to be used next fall. And I went out to assist another of the Knights of St. George in Phoenix. There was a little nest of Nephandi out in the desert. Nobody died."

[Emily Littleton] Nobody died. Emily nods at this, and the cant of her jaw and the shape of her eyes and the seriousness to the set of her mouth all speak to one thought: That's good. It's the sort of thing that doesn't need to be voiced, but it very much spoken and resonant between them. It is the pause of conversation, the rock-solid stillness in the swift movement of ideas and exchanged words. Silence, for a moment. Gratitude and a measure of relief.

The war rages on, quietly and also in fits of guerrilla carnage. Emily cannot understand why anyone seems to think that it is over; they are still besieged; they are still fighting. It has shifted away from a war with the Technocracy, maybe, maybe -- she remains unconvinced that that, too, is over in any way -- but they struggle still, they suffer, still. Maybe it is how they are all built, bent toward the uphill climb, salmon swimming upstream, innovators and idealists and idolaters all of them. She doesn't really believe this, not yet. As much as she plays at it, Emily is not a cynical being at the core. She is idealistic, hopeful, not yet fossilized and immoveable, downright progressive by the Chorus's standards.

"Solomon and I had a row," she says, but even now, months later, it colors the overtones of her expression. For a moment, her mouth is tight. Her eyes are distant. She breathes in, and it is a constricted thing, and out like breathing alone could push the tension from her shoulders, expel it forcefully from her lungs. These are subtle things, but easily read. Lisa has known her enough to see them, to note them, if not to take their merit along with their measure.

"I said some things that I oughtn't've, but that I firmly believe and utterly meant: He is not a leader of men. He does not know how to inspire, only to dominate. That his way is not the only way, his Truth not the only verity. I didn't take something to him, because I knew I would be over-run and that people would suffer for the firmness of his hand in things. He took it as insubordination, and told me I would never find a place in a Guardian Order. That he would bar me from it."

Her mouth purses a little, pinches in but doesn't completely pucker. These are sour thoughts, but distant ones.

"I didn't stay long after that. I tried to, but there wasn't any hope in it. My department was struggling with grant writing and funding for the next year anyhow. I took a leave of absence and went to work with my father for awhile -- unofficially of course. It's amazing how accommodating technical programmes are to remote studies."

She realizes, near the end of the explanation, that she hasn't told Lisa outright what changed. That was too simple, and taken out of context that answer was meaningless. If Emily said merely I broke. I yielded., if that's all she'd had to answer, it wouldn't have been an answer. So she explains, instead, and stops short of saying these words aloud. She doesn't tell Lisa that everything was unraveling -- Ashley's home had been burned and she was halfway out of the city already, Emily's relationship with Jarod was nearly unmendable, the remaining Awakened had all the self-determined will of a bag of day-old spaghetti. How she was drowning in it, and it had suddenly, painfully become untenable.

She left. There's very little about it that she regrets. Chicago was never meant to be a lodestone around her neck and it had become a heavy thing. A trap. Unacceptable. Utterly unacceptable. The distance and time had lessened this heaviness, its gravity; she felt lighter, stronger, safer for it.

[Lisa Carraway] Lisa doesn't know Solomon, not really. She hasn't spoken with the man at length; they nodded to each other when she was admitted to the Order, when they introduced themselves, and they both recognized the others' zealotry, the others' inflexibility and stubbornness. They are both martial people, in their way. They come from places of discipline and order, where there is a clear hierarchy.

Still, she laughs when Emily tells her that Solomon threatened to bar her from the Guardian Order. It's a sharp sound, because Emily isn't the only one here who plays at cynicism even if neither of them have let it permeate their core. "He can't bar you. That isn't his decision. It's mine." She takes a swallow from her cup, giving a shake of her head. "They only just let him in last year, anyway. He's getting a little far ahead of himself."

There's a little pause, and once it's done her eyebrows arch thoughtfully. Then she adds, "Which doesn't mean that there isn't something to be said for listening to your superiors when the situation calls. But a good leader, I think, tries to accommodate different viewpoints. If you run a chantry like a war machine you won't get anyone's respect. Might've been his mistake. I don't know." Her pale eyes raise to Emily again. "Regardless, he isn't the one who's going to decide whether you're fit."

Lisa doesn't seem to mind the explanation; she responds to it easily, accepts it for what it is. Had Emily not offered it she might have teased it out of her. She was once a spy and informant, even if she's taken up the mantle of Knight these days. There's a little beat and she says, "I'm sorry, Em. It's a hard lesson." And she doesn't explain what she means.

[Emily Littleton] Emily is hardened and inflexible in her own ways, too. She is martial, but from a very different side of the war. People like Solomon may believe that there is very little room for Diplomacy, but Emily has lived her life wrapped up in its importance, its vitality, its truth. They all come to the table with very different expectations, different experiences, and it is this variety and complexity -- Emily believes -- that strengthens the fabric they weave together; brings something beautiful and resonant to their combined Song.

Lisa's eyebrow arches; the corner of Emily's mouth slides back, just so, in answer. A little nod. He isn't the one who's going to decide whether you're fit. But this isn't pride, and it's most certainly not relief. Acceptance, maybe. Something deeper and more settled than even that: surety.

"The right and wrong of it doesn't matter to me, now. I think it was a revelation, epiphany, one of those shiningly crystallized moments for me. I don't need Solomon's validation, but I would have hoped we could work together. I would have liked to learn from him, to offer up something in return, but I also do not want to become him. I think he honestly believes that his life is the only life Knighthood leads to, and if that were true, if it is true, than I am okay without it."

She shrugs a little at that. It is okay, by Emily's standards, to want a thing, to run toward it, to work toward it, and to find it wanting at some moment and need to reconsider.

"I can respect authority, and I can work with hierarchies, and I can yield to wiser, stronger, more experienced voices. But I will not mortgage my truth or my song for their approval." The root of this is not what Solomon heard: insubordination. It is not brazen rebellion. There is something sad and steadfast and Unrelenting to it. Emily, more than many people her age, knows some of the truth about what and who she is. And she will not give that over for anything as simple as identity with a group of dissimilar people. She won't be bullied.

No wonder things had gone up in flames between her and the hide-bound Templar. At the root of it, they were likely far more similar than either would admit.

Lisa apologizes, but Emily shakes her head a little, sips from her tea. She can't know what the Disciple is thinking -- maybe Lisa is writing this down in the list of all the reasons why Emily shouldn't call herself a Singer; maybe Lisa, too, feels it was wrong to bring her into the Chorus. She can't know, and she doesn't imagine the worst (or the best) into the moment.

[Lisa Carraway] There's talk of how she won't give up her own songs, her own truth, for the approval of others. For the approval of those who would hear humanity sing in one voice. There's more sympathy for that than Emily can possibly understand or know right now; perhaps one day she will. Perhaps one day Lisa will tell Emily about her own decision, her own bid for freedom. The only thing that is clear is that she understands the sadness and the regret.

"There are always going to be people who can only see differences," Lisa says. "You'd expect it to be different in the Traditions, but it's not. I think you made the right decision. Hopefully you'll be able to keep it in mind when you're tempted to do the same to others." Because Lisa is tempted, because she can't imagine that someday Emily won't be. There's just this: let this be a cautionary tale. Hold this to your heart and remember that it is a Chorus, not a singularity.

"Do you think you're going to stay in Chicago then?" she asks, because she knows Emily has bonds there but she isn't sure of how strong those bonds are. Because sometimes people just need to move on. There's a smirk that pulls at a corner of her mouth. "I mean, not to put pressure on you since it sounds like the people there could use a guiding hand. But I thought I'd ask."

[Emily Littleton] A choir sings with one voice, like one multi-stringed instrument, raising up a song all its own. But it isn't most beautiful and most powerful when it sings in unison alone. In moments, yes, that clarity has an impact like no other. But if there weren't multivariate moments, if harmony was striken utterly from their repretoire, then unison would be nothing resonant and marvelous. Emily thinks of the Chorus more like a symphony, like a classical thing come together with intricacies and dissonance and resolving, leading tones. She thinks of it like a tapestry, or the webwork of a thousand tiny lines. At its heart is the truth that no energy is created or destroyed, that in being a closed system they are, integrally, all part of one another.

She thinks of it like a physicist might, or a weaver might, or a musician might. Like a physician who can seem all the systems of the body come together into a whole, but doesn't discount the importance and self-sufficiency of any single cell. (As above so below.) It is a complicated belief, not suited to the (apparent) simplistic contrasts of war: Good and Evil, Us and Them, Right and Wrong. But even War is not simple, and it is not immune to the shadings of grey and uncertainties.

"Hopefully," she echoes. Draws that thought down deep to her core, into a place where secrets and honest things are kept. There is hope, there, too, that if she ever forgets herself there will be someone to pull her back, not just to put her down. Solomon had given her that assurance: if she ever went too far, they would put her down. She'd been unable to find certainty, even in her fledgling cabal or among the Emissaries, that anyone would be there to pull her back from the precipice.

"I don't know," she says, to thoughts of Chicago. Emily wraps long fingers around her mug of tea, smooths the rim of it with the pads of her thumbs. She is thoughtful, collected, reposed. "I don't feel done with it, somehow, as much as I would like to be. But it isn't a healthy place, if that makes sense alone. I don't think it can be my only home without falling in, again, to the sadness and singular struggle there. Maybe I'm just one for settling in or putting down roots," she says, and the corner of her mouth cants back, wryly, a smirk, a bit of a smile.

[Lisa Carraway] Emily speaks of mental health to this woman who was a psychologist - no longer. Another life. But much of what she learned and studied has lingered with her, has persisted through the new style of Willworking that she has learned. Truth be told Lisa is still hard pressed to think of it as magic, most days, even if she no longer thinks of it as wholly science either. She listens without judgment, because that's what people with her training are trained to do and because there is none.

She hadn't been idly talking earlier, when she'd spoken about leadership. Many of Seattle's magi follow her, and it's a different style of leadership than the one Emily might have become acquainted with in Chicago. She has Ashley's will but none of her reluctance, has a security and a stability and a knack for bringing out the light in others that had always been hopelessly lost on the Hermetic. She has Solomon's discipline but very little of his single-mindedness.

"That makes sense," she says. "You need brothers and sisters in arms who you can trust. Sometimes in a place like that you just have to remind other people of how to be human, but you can't get pulled in too deeply." Moderation: this is another difficult lesson to learn. "I left for the same reasons. Chicago's a hard place."

She taps her fingers against the side of her mug, thoughtfully. There's a natural sort of rhythm to the little beat. Easy. "I think when I feel that way about the Awakened, it's always better for me to remember that I'm more than just an Awakened person. I make music. I teach my students. Humanity is more than just its Awakened members. It might help you to get in touch with them and to do projects that are unrelated to all of it, at least for a little while."

[Emily Littleton] Lisa does not talk idly, and Emily listens -- even when it seems as if she may not truly be bending an ear (or ever a knee). That many of Seattle's magi follow Lisa would not surprise her; the Knight has an effortless sense of command, and while she's never bent it to controlling Emily, the younger Singers knows that she would follow when the time came. If the time came. She imagines others are not so different in their responses.

It is one thing to be yoked, another to follow.

"I think you're right," she says, which is better than the initial retort that first crossed her mind but didn't make it past her teeth. It would have required too much explaining, been too strong a digression. "It's easy to lose track of that, but it was hard for me to balance the rest of my life with Awakened life in Chicago. Either I'm not very good at multitasking, or it's better for me to have places to be, outside of the city, from time to time, where I can work on being human as well as being Awake."

Emily sips thoughtfully from her tea mug. This is the first time, really, she's been able to discuss personal limitations, boundaries, with another mage. Solomon was not much for acknowledging them; Ashley's Hunger eroded them before they were built; Owen... Owen was drifting further and further from the list of formative influences on Emily's "magical" years. Kage was excellent at boundaries, so good at them, in fact, that Emily wasn't sure how to broach the topic. Lisa and Kage, then, were the influences she could count toward teaching balance, or teaching purposeful aloofness, or simply hanging there, ardent, as examples of other paths, different ways.

"There's something frenetic about most of them there. I don't know if Chicago attracts it, or if it instills it, or if it's merely been a bad year. I can't keep up and I don't... really... want to." She muses this one out, letting it test the waters between them somehow. Emily has no problem with entering the maelstrom; Chicago's magi knew that about her already. She had problems with entering it and never ever surfacing again. Frenzy isn't a state to maintain for hours, or days, or weeks, or years. It was a brief and violent thing.

"I'm considering getting more involved with the Knights of St. John. My mother's an active member, as are many of my godfather's family. They're more humanitarian than outrightly Christian these days, but it feels like an apt place to start. Either that, or finding something here, stateside, that would fill a similar role."

[Lisa Carraway] "You know what you need," Lisa says, and it's an acceptance of the way Emily tells her that she needs places outside the city. Lisa lives much of her life in Seattle proper and Lisa has managed to almost seamlessly blend her Awakened and Sleeping lives - then again, for her there isn't always much of a difference. But she knows it isn't this way for many Awakened mages. A matter of how they see things, perhaps, but the delineation is more difficult for them. "Being Awakened is a hard life. You need to do what works for you."

She offers this response in part because it is the response many psychologists would offer; it's accepting and it's neutral at the same time. It also isn't a lie. But there's a sort of knowing look there: Emily is still in the process of working through this. She is musing to herself, rolling ideas over even as they speak.

"A lot of Awakened are sort of frenetic that way," Lisa says. There's a wry little smile then. "Most of us are kind of Type A to begin with, but when you mix that with trauma and with a war mentality, it's easy to forget that you're still a human being with human needs. I think I end up telling other people they need to back off more often than not." Perhaps it's a role Emily will one day find herself in as well; perhaps Lisa expects so.

"There are a lot of charitable or philanthropic organizations you can get involved in. Personally, I think it helps me just to work with other people on a day-to-day basis and to try to help bring their best qualities out of them. There are a lot of ways you can do that that don't necessarily involve dedicating yourself to that sort of organization. But it's there to be found, if you want it. A lot of Choristers find solace and direction in it, I think."

[Emily Littleton] Calling them Type-A doesn't really scratch the surface of the sort of drive and tunnel-vision that can permeate the magical communities, but it's well enough shorthand. It approximates. Emily listens and nods, sips at her tea. They seem to have arrived at a rest in the conversation, a place where the words do not rush up to meet one another. A pause.

The Singer girl is quiet for a long while; she is not afraid of silence. In these moments, she can consider the weight of the words, yes, but also the quality of the light that comes in through the window. The clarity of the glass table top. The lines of the furniture. She can see, in some ways, how Lisa's life and her work and her space and her being come together. This place is not cold, stark, lifeless to Emily. It speaks loudly, clearly, with one voice. She liked to think her mismatched hand-me-down apartment had been much the same.

"Thank you for having me to visit," she says, which is not an answer to anything Lisa has said, not directly. It's jumbled, a little, by the other languages and accents that cling to her tongue. "If there's anything I can help with while I'm here, I'd quite like that."

Idle hands annoy her most when they are her own. She has not been idle all these months between Chicago and Seattle, anything but. There have been cities and meetings and airports and adventures. She has met dozens of new people, shook hands with delegates and diplomats, made conversation with their sons and daughters, wives and husbands. She has diluted the Reverence of her presence in rooms swimming with people. She has lived, and rested, and recovered, but Emily has not stood idle.

Among the many things she'd like to do in Seattle, first and foremost she hopes to catch the rhythm of the place. The ebb and tide of the ocean, and of its people as well. She wants to find a favorite place to get coffee, a good place to watch the moon rise, a park bench with a stunning view of the sunset and the ferries and the slosh-sound of the sea. Emily wants to be able, when she closes her eyes, to breathe in and conjure up a memory of this place so vital and encompassing that, for a moment, she can breathe out life into the memory again.

Some Singers write music. Emily strings together moments like these, like beadwork, like lifetimes she might have lived if she were more than just passing through. The gathers them all up together, glistening bits of maybes and would-have-beens. And when they're jumbled like that, tied up in her fingertips, slipping out of her hands like sand through a sieve, then she can see the patterns in them all. The similarities. The themes that stand out, vibrant and true and knowing, irrefutable. Love. Faith. War. Hope. Loss.

"Even filing away of papers, or painting walls, simple things. I have no need to move mountains, today," she tells the Knight, and psychologist, and musician, and teacher; Awakened and human; her friend.

[Lisa Carraway] Emily offers, of all things, anything she can help with - to the ex-Technocrat. To a person from an environment where there was never any rest, where she remembers long stakeouts in the summer heat and winter cold without rest or food save the bottled liquid that was often sent along or pizza that a partner would return with. To the workaholic.

Lisa laughs at that, and it's an easy sound, not an affected one. She says, "Oh, honey, you have no idea what you just volunteered for," with a quirk of her mouth as she swallows down the rest of her tea.

This is not a place for idle hands, and so that might explain why Lisa seems pleased that Emily made that offer. Then again Emily never struck her as the sort to leave her city to find herself and spend the time inside, idling, wondering what to do with herself. "You can come help at my school for a day or two if you want," she says. "There's...endless paperwork there. And I was planning to introduce you to my fiance. A Cultist, you'll like him," she adds.

A beat, thoughtful, and she holds the empty mug carefully between the fingertips of either hand. She doesn't gaze down into it as though wanting more, just lets the residual warmth seep back into her body. "And I was hoping I could talk you into coming back down to Phoenix with me. There's still some cleanup that has to be done."

[Emily Littleton] Technocrats and Traditionalists alike owe their obsessive, compulsive tendencies to their Sleeping lives and counterparts. Emily has never been one to be idle, except for the brief period of her life wherein she imagined that idleness could spare her the weight and consequence of activity. It wasn't true then, and it wouldn't be now. Finding herself was less about wasteful days of too much time and too little to do; it was about testing who she would become when commitment and fellowship drove her forward. Lisa's laugh draws a broader smile from her, a resettling of her fingers against the ceramic mug, a warmth that had be shaded in their talk of Chicago, hidden like the sun behind a passing cloud.

"I'd like that," she says, both to the school and the prospect of work and adventure in the desert. Emily knows little enough of Phoenix to not be wary of its heat, even in May. She has been to Cairo, though, and knows how to keep cool and when to seek water. "On all accounts," she adds, in case her expansive approval, muted in comparison with other, less guarded people's acceptances and smiles, was not readily interpreted.

"And I am excellent at paperwork," she says, with a smirk that is all too knowing and seasoned in the ways of red tape and its sprawling, self-perpetuating paper trails. She finishes her tea, as well, but doesn't set that mug down on the table. she keeps it delicately cradled between her hands, resting calming against her palms and fingertips. "I don't mind clean up duty either."

"If you need me to get out of your hair for a bit, so you can have time with your fiance, just let me know. There's plenty of city to explore, and I thought I might take a ferry out to one of the smaller islands one day," she says. Though the ferries are many hours each way, it should be unsurprising that Emily is interested in more than just the readily accessible pieces of Seattle. Sitting idle, see, is nowhere on her list of things to do.

"Is there anything I should do to prepare for Phoenix... or the school?" she asks easily, lifting an eyebrow when it comes to the teaching more than cleaning up after a Nephandic presence. This is telling of how skewed her time Awake has been. Lisa already knows, though, and it won't be much of a surprise. She knows and hasn't judged Emily. It is a strange but welcome friendship.

[Lisa Carraway] Lisa can remember being new to Seattle, how the sounds and the bays sprawled open like pathways to the unknown, like she could just follow them and end up in a place completely different than the one she started from. Chicago never felt that way, somehow. While she hasn't lived in quite as many places as Emily, Lisa has picked up and moved quite a few times in her life now, and each place has left a resonance within her. So too will Seattle, when she presumably moves on someday to a different place. Rather than having no home, rather than not being from one specific place, Lisa thinks of all of them as Home.

"I can probably point you toward some places you'd like," she says. "If you're in the mood for exploring anything along Awakened lines, there's an old Son of Ether base that was abandoned during the Ascension War. It's ours but no one has ever really bothered setting shop back up there," she adds. "There's some interesting stuff, though."

Then again, Lisa is a scientist; of course she would think so. Quite a bit of their information differed from what she learned in her own studies.

"You don't know how to play any instruments, do you?" Lisa guesses, looking at Emily for a moment. "If not, you might have fun just watching the students. I don't know if you like kids at all," and Lisa plainly does. She doesn't even need to say it or hint at it for it to come through. "As for Phoenix...I assume you have some kind of weapons skill. If you don't, we're going to have to work on that."

[Emily Littleton] There are things that very few people know about Emily. The way her smile slides toward something genuinely warm when Lisa mentions kids is one of them. Of all the Chicago magi, only Ashton and Owen had truly seen Emily's maternal instincts -- if you could call them that, young as she is -- come forward. With the way she cradled the small, traumatized boy to her shoulder. Or how she warmed to Marcelle.

"I don't," she admits, with an obvious note of remorse. "I've always meant to learn, but instruments don't often travel all that well." She glances over to the concert piano, and there is a sort of comprehending wistfulness to the way her gaze traces its shape. She may not be a musician, but she has known them. She understands the passion and the art; longs for it in quiet ways.

Their conversation slips into a brief discussion of Emily's weapon skills, and her bald and unapologetic self-assessment is truthful, unembellished. Before her Awakened life, she'd had very little call for violence. Even now, her violence is ranged, separated from the target by as much distance as possible. She is not an up-close-and-personal girl. She admits she'd like some time at the range before her skills are tested in ways that matter.

They likely make plans, objectives, goals. Actionable items, her father's uptight secretary would call them, in a clipped New England accent that grates on Emily's ears. Already, any imagined idle moments are slipping past her grasp, days are falling into line with schedules and timelines and tasks, and she rises to it, warms to it. Emily without a list of things to do at least as long as her arm is a thing adrift. Now, already, she is anchored in Seattle.

It does start to feel a little like home, or all the homes she might have had.

"I need to practice some of my scans and shields as well. I'm rustier than I want to be," she admits, but magic isn't the sort of thing you do baldly in a diplomatic envoy.

[Lisa Carraway] There's another smirk that pulls at a corner of Lisa's mouth. There's something sharp about her smiles sometimes, something playfully sarcastic, a kind of wit. Emily has seen something like that look before on Kage, in all likelihood. It's the sort of look that isn't always good to see on a superior; it means you're probably about to be worked hard.

Then again that might feel almost welcome to Emily after time spent idling. After a period of disillusionment, a time when she wasn't entirely sure whether to stay or go or fight or yield.

"Think of this like guardian order boot camp, then," she says. "I'll help get you up to speed." And she will. Beyond a desire that she perhaps has to see Emily succeed, she has little intention of bringing someone who is underprepared to fight Nephandi. It wouldn't be responsible, and if Lisa is nothing else she is at least that.

"Maybe I can teach you a little on the piano, too," she says, catching Emily's look toward the instrument. "If you want to learn. Even if you don't have that much time to practice, you might enjoy it in the time you do have." She might have a passion but she's more than aware that fanatical dedication isn't necessary, in order to enjoy something.

[Emily Littleton] Lisa will learn what Ashley has learned, what Solomon learned, what Emily's professors and classmates have learned, what all of her father's staff have learned -- that the girl is nothing if not dedicated, and whatever she takes it upon herself to learn, trivial or insurmountable, she is Unrelenting. If it is at all within her power to succeed in Guardian Order bootcamp, she will find a way to make it happen.

That smirk, even on a superior, perhaps especially on a superior, calls that active, unflagging note forward in the younger Singer. She hides it well, beneath the sweep of her eyelashes, in the untelling cast to her eyes, but it feels to her like a gauntlet thrown or a challenge issued. It's something to rise up to, and that, alone, feels good however hard the workload may be.

"It sounds like I will be very busy," she says, without any hint of rue or remorse. The wry smile broadens, intimates without outright saying: When do we start?

Women like these two can only sit talking for so long before one task or another sweeps them up, puts them back in motion. Before long, Emily will ask if she might make dinner for them. She might even explain that there's little time for cooking on a diplomatic tour, and that she missed self-cooked meals. Or she might wander out to a farmer's market and get some fresh fruits, the kinds that do not grace Asian markets, and fixing for a salad. A few months of hectic travels have not dampened her culinary skills, and Lisa, should she welcome it, will be treated to a variety of dishes and tastes while Emily is staying with her. They're one of the many bits of home she carries forward with her from the places she's stayed.

[Emily Littleton] [And a wrap! OMG. An Emily scene! Thank you Staci! :) ]