Britannia, NY

Ivy's been grateful for Karen's help with the office--having someone to take over some of the secretarial duties is a relief, partly because she adores company and having someone else there is fun, and partly because she's been so distracted by grief lately that she knows she'd be making mistakes if Karen weren't there to take charge of organisation.

It's the end of the week, and she knows Ken's sister is coming to visit soon, but she's in a fairly disastrous frame of mind. When she finally locks up the office and heads over to the bar for cocktails--which generally cheer her ups, so reliably in fact that she has it budgeted into her monthly expenses under Mental Health--she's dragging her feet a little, and even banter with the bartender and the Friday night regulars she's casual friends with doesn't help.

The result is that she goes over her usual limit; she doesn't really notice until the bartender ruffles her hair and says he's cutting her off, and Ivy grins her usual impish grin to see if it will change his mind, but it doesn't.

So she gets back home around 7.00, carrying her heels by the straps. She tries to unlock the front door for a few minutes before she remembers that Ken's home, and it won't be locked to begin with.

Ivy has never had bad dreams before. She's probably the only person in Britannia with these memories who hasn't, and it isn't that she doesn't dream about it, just that her dreams are usually quiet, almost insignificant; her husband and children, her forest, happy or mundane things. But this night is different.

What she dreams about is Gawain dying, and how it ran through her body like an electric shock, like a lightning bolt striking a tree into flames, like a shovel thrust into the earth, like an axe blade into a trunk. It hurts: she wasn't there for it, but she felt it anyway, and it hurt like nothing else she ever experienced, and it hurts now.

Ivy has had little shields up to hide her magical activity for ages now, ever since she realised she had it. She doesn't shield herself from other people's, as she's trying to monitor Britannia's magic content a bit, but she tries to hide what she's doing from the sort of magical party line. When that death strikes into her, though, she retaliates with a piece of magic that's stronger than anything she's ever done before. It's like a replica of the same feeling, the same fierce piercing hurt, and anyone in the town and its outskirts who doesn't have shields of their own is going to feel it. It isn't subtle, it isn't pleasant, and it pretty much blows any cover she had going.

It doesn't wake her up immediately, though. That comes a few minutes later, when she sits up in bed and reaches for Ken frantically, feeling feverish and empty and no idea why.

It is Ivy's birthday, and she is not remotely ashamed of the fact that it is one of her very favourite holidays. It's also a Saturday, so she doesn't even have to give herself the day off work, and she woke up very early in the morning to go out and buy ridiculous baked goods (cannoli and chocolate croissants) in Old Forge, then came home to make an offering to Kuan-Yin as part of her new daily ritual (her mother's suggestion, but Ivy is open to almost any idea by now, and her mother sets a great store by Kuan-Yin).

After that she heads out again to one of the greenhouses to buy plants--only flowers, because Ken always gives her a tree as a special gift on her birthday. She unloads things, then stops in at Cup of Tom for coffee before she goes back home.

She knows Ken is busy even on the weekends, so she settles down in the garden under one of the trees from one of her past birthdays, with a romance novel she's read about three times before and one of the croissants. It's shaping up to be a beautiful day, and she doesn't have any real plans.

Ken, while often annoyed, is seldom angry. It's only happened a handful of times since she met him. But this morning, angry is the only word for his expression, for all its coolness and control.

He needs to have a word with his wife.

Ivy is beginning to have her doubts about this whole thing, but she owes it to Arthur, and to Ken now too, she thinks, so she makes sure Arthur gets the invitation and on Friday evening she gets home early, does her best to clean the house (or at least the first floor) to something reasonably decent, and brings home rib steaks for Ken to deal with.

A tiny part of her, more Ivy than Ragnelle, wants to impress the King, the High King of Britain, just a little. The only outward result of this is the fact that she's wearing the nicest dress that she can get away with for the occasion, Ken's favourite green one that looks like summertime and greenery and a kind of sweet eternity, and has her hair done up much fancier than usual.

Apart from that she seems no different from usual, ridiculously exuberant as she tumbles down the stairs shoeless and starts setting the table for supper.

Ivy is tired, but on the plus side it's also getting nice, the weather turning warm and windy, and the trees putting out green shoots. That's enough to be getting her blood warm and swift-flowing, turning over in her body, and it makes her feel energetic and cheerful and ardent.

The latter of which Ken's been feeling the results of, but the rest of it is more than shared with the rest of the community; her clients are seeing even better results than usual, and she has a lot more patience with people being stupid.

She's on her way home from work. The fact that the sun is still out at five-thirty is thrilling, and she's swinging her tote bag of files cheerfully, her long hair blown out of her professional ponytail, and she looks beautiful in the yelloworange sundress under her working blazer.

The dreams have always come and gone, ever since he was young. Ken is used to that. He's accepted it, the way you accept you need glasses. As long as he gets enough sleep, he's never thought it mattered to his life. Of course, recently, he's worried about Ivy, about what it means that she dreams too, about her talk about magic.

Still. None of that braced him for this.

The dream tonight is more solid and real than any of the others have been. More solid and real than life is when he's awake. It's snowing, lightly, and he's waiting, cross and nervous, for his fool of a little brother to get back with his sword. It's his first big tournament, his first chance to test his skill against real knights. And his bloody squire couldn't be bothered to hold on to a sword. His father puts a hand on his arm for a moment.

"He'll be back in a minute," he says. "Just keep your mind on what you'll have to do when he does."

Wart comes running up, breathless, as if he's run all the way. He's still awkward angles, though he's sprung up to be just under Kay's own height in the last few months. "Here." He presents a sword that's not Kay's, which triggers more frustration. He reaches to take - probably wouldn't even be balanced right.

It's perfect. Elegant, much finer than any sword he's ever held. It seems to hum in his hand.

It's the only time he'll hold Excalibur as if he might use it.

Ken wakes up shaking and feeling more like the man that grew out of that boy than he ever has. He tries to get up without waking Ivy. He needs a drink.

It's cold, and for whatever reason that pisses her off. As if job hunting weren't hideous enough to start with. After standing at the kitchen sink while finishing up her coffee, Karen heads out, gets into what used to be her Gran's car, and heads into town.

She knows there are at least a couple places that might serve espresso, even though she's been in town only a couple of times. This isn't really then best day for job hunting, but she'll feel better if she at least fills out a couple of applications. She's got a little money cushion, but not much. She's been sleeping so badly this past week, and she's just going to keep telling herself it's the money situation and the soul-killing boredom.

Karen parks the car, and decides exploring on foot won't kill her. Her hands shoved deep into the pockets of her coat, she starts to make her way up the main drag.

Cecilia has felt so much better since her trip to visit Larry in New York. It had been wonderful - though she still wasn't sure she was ready to admit to being in love. Once home, she found that her days were astonishingly upbeat, even if her dreams had only intensified.

She still has alarmingly vivid, painful nightmares of the end, several times a week, but now she sees other things as well. Sons, her brother, memories of things that would have seemed commonplace, if they hadn't been so loaded for Morgause. Morgause, to whom most everything seemed like a chess piece to be played, something to trade for power or attention. Cecilia wasn't sure what to make of such dreams; they should have disturbed, her, probably, but more and more she found that they seemed normal, natural. That such thinking made a kind of sense.

It made her want to draw those people to her, somehow, in this life. She didn't seem to have any way of doing this; she didn't seem to have any sort of magic, or power that she could tell. So she settled for the next best thing. Against her better judgement, this Sunday morning, she's set herself up at The Round Table - coffee, coffee cake, and a crossword. She's doing her best to present an air of friendly availability.

It takes a lot to make Ivy angry, although it's been done periodically by foolish clients or foolish members of the justice system, and the occasional infuriatingly misogynistic romantic comedy. The recent burst of magic, though, has succeeded where lesser offences have not.

For the sixth or seventh time since Elaine first lit her candle Ivy has been awakened in the night by the prickle of new magic. She doesn't wake Ken. Instead she gets out of bed, goes quietly downstairs, out into the yard, and sets her hands against one of their tall trees.

She's not good at magic that's any bigger than keeping a sense of warmth in the house in winter, or sharing some of her strength with someone else, but she's borrowing from the tree, from all the trees in their yard, which know each other beneath the earth, in the deepest tangles of their roots. What she takes is enough to send a jolt down the spine of any unsuspecting practitioner without some sort of ward set up. It feels like lightning splitting an oak, and the message it leaves in its wake feels like rapid scrawled handwriting against the inside of your skull: For God's sake can't you be discreet?

All the power it takes leaves both her and the trees looking somewhat the worse for wear. She stomps into the kitchen weakly and fumbles in the refrigerator, looking for something to restore her energy. Big magic feels like getting hit by a truck.

Ivy hasn't felt right since her encounter with Elaine, and to top it off, yesterday she and Ken went to see a new gynecologist in Manhattan. This one has even better credentials than the last one, and he did lots of tests, and he's going to call them with the results by Monday but she hasn't got any more faith in him than she had for any of the ones before--he's going to call back and say that all of her tests came up perfectly fine and there's no reason she shouldn't be able to conceive. They all say that.

She's just locking up the office, her tote bag of legal files under her arm as she turns the key. For someone who's usually a bundle of manic energy, it's hard to imagine her looking more subdued.

Ken was the type of guy who made lists. He wasn't married to them (for one, no one married to Ivy could have stayed so very long without at least a modicum of flexibility), but making them seemed to cut the world into manageable chunks.

Today it was a list of errands. Monday was typically one of the two days he took for himself a week, but that didn't mean he would waste it. He needed to go pick up something at the post office, stop by the library to get something he'd put on hold, and he'd thought he might grab something at the bakery on the way home to surprise his wife.

And while Ken has never been one to strike up conversations with strangers, really, he's not in a poor enough mood to shut down attempts to talk to him. At least, from most people.

The encounter with Elaine has her jittery and displeased, and she spends the weekend fussing around the house uncomfortably, complaining about everything and rearranging all the furniture without warning Ken about it. By Sunday evening she's in front of the t.v. with her arms folded across her chest, staring at Sam Trammell on True Blood resentfully.

Elaine wasn't stupid enough to go to the Britannia library for information about magic. Nor was she going to trust anything she found on the internet. But her dreams, more and more vivid of late, had led her to two conclusions.

Firstly, that not everyone had the talent for magic, even back when Arthur ruled. If she hadn't had any natural ability, no matter how carefully she'd prepared the spell, no matter how powerful the charm, nothing would have happened. But clearly, it had worked, the magic if not the larger plan.

Secondly, she had no idea if magic would work at all anymore. But on the other hand... her past self and Lancelot were both apparently back from the dead, so her threshold for skepticism had changed quite a bit in the past year.

She'd not been dishonest - she had spent a lot of time writing, when she wasn't at work or at Gary's. But she'd also been ordering certain used books to be shipped to her home, studying and meditating and thinking a great deal. She'd made a plan, carefully. She knew that, if this worked at all, it wasn't something to be taken lightly.

It was a candle she'd start with. Lighting it without striking a match. That seemed both satisfyingly symbolic and of a modest enough scale. She waited until after sundown, though well before midnight, not wanting to tempt fate. Then she began to try.

For a long while, there was nothing much. Just enough to convince her to keep trying.

Then at about a quarter til midnight... the words seemed to turn to molten as she spoken them, pouring out between her lips in a heavy stream. The hair on the back of her arms stood up, and she felt an odd buzzing at her temples and in her fingertips. Then she finished the spell, and the candle lit, like a switch flicking on.

But Elaine didn't see that, because at the same moment, blinding pain knocked her to the floor and out of consciousness.

The candle burned down to a stub on the plate she'd luckily placed it on. All the other lights in the apartment being out, her landlord assumed she'd gone to sleep.

The candle guttered, and eventually went out a bit before the sun rose.

Open to concerned friends or those who may have felt a relatively small but noticable magical disturbance within the city limits. Her phone is on, or the landlord is available at the house itself.

The brush with Nathan left him shaken, and Arthur had just left him plain angry. He'd never cared for being told what he should think, much less what he should want. And here were two... well, strangers in one sense, at least, presuming to know him better than he knew himself. He'd been in Britannia longer than either, been alive longer than either, for that matter.

But he realized he was too worked up over the whole thing. So he was cooking. Cooking usually helped, and even when it didn't, at least he and Ivy had dinner when he was finished. He was making lasagna, which was one he'd made so often it was nearly foolproof. Besides, he could use the opportunity to think of what he might do for their anniversary, which was much more pleasant than thinking about Arthur.

...a weekend trip away, perhaps.

( There were two brothers. )

Larry's posted some fliers in public places: the grocery, of course, the library. Maybe a few others here and there. He doesn't know why he feels nervous, as this isn't the first concert he's played in Britannia, and it won't be the last. At least, he isn't planning it to be, right now.

Maybe it's just that this is the first time he's played with the full knowledge of who he was, then. With the knowledge of why he writes about the things he writes about. And the first time he's played in front of audience who he's certain will know when and if he gets things wrong.

Still. He feels like it's something he has to do.


[Feel free to approach Larry after the show, or use as a post for running into other people at the concert.]

((This is basically just a starter for any kind of gathering you'd like to have at The Round Table. Don't feel the need to involve Lexi at all - in fact, I've turned off email notifications on the post, so if you do need her, just give me a nudge. Basically, it's just an open forum for anyone who might wander in and have a cuppa or a cookie or just see what the commotion is about. Thread hopping within is encouraged; it's a good way to have your char meet people they might not normally. In short, yeah, just feel free to use this thread for whatever you like. :D Have fun. :D))

( Everybody loves cake! )

The Round Table

Cafe and Fresh Baked Goods

~*~

Now Open!

Free cookies!

Jacob is on his lunch break, and he's already been home to check on his father. That done, he's cycling slowly through town, enjoying the hint of September that's sneaking around on the breeze, counterpoint to the August sunlight that's still coming down heavy. Things are moving on, the way they always do.

When people wave to him, he waves back, balancing on his bicycle easily with one hand or none.

Ken is out in his garden, on his cell phone. He's not agitated, not exactly, but he is animated, gesturing with his free hand, his voice rising and falling.

Finally, when the call is done, he leans against the low stone wall that substitutes for a fence in his yard, his face in his hands, as he tries to lower his blood pressure and calm down.