WHERE The wine cellar below the Underground WHEN Monday, May 3rd (late afternoon) WHAT Nick takes Serefin up on his open house for alcohol, and they have a chat about terrible memory updates and missing people who are stuck in Ancient Vallo. STATUS Complete WARNINGS Mentions of death, spoilers for the final season of CAOS
Spending time in the wine cellar underneath the Underground was not as exciting as it was supposed to be. Serefin had spent a considerable amount of effort in Tranavia curating this collection, and even more effort in parsing it out to those who wanted it in Vallo. Even if he lived a hundred years, he'd never make a dent alone. He did not miss the irony of the statement as he stood alone in the cellar, testing his bad habits to rid himself of that particularly lonesome feeling.
Jacob was gone. That realization had stung the most, coupled with Diego and Evie. And while he could send letters through those journals, confirming that they were all in one piece and not missing limbs, Serefin felt cut off at his own knees without the physicality of Jacob with him. Next to him. Within reach every morning. The feeling was brutal, like the similarly painful loss of his blood magic. And his only coping mechanism he had in his arsenal was drinking.
So he did the next best thing—he invited everyone he could think of to come take a bottle, while he moped around dramatically. Even with the stars and moths at his fingertips, that did nothing in solving the problem of getting them home. This was the best solution he had: alcohol.
He watched people flit in and out, snag a bottle or two and then leave. And Serefin was left with his own open bottle of red next to him, thickly burning candles, and this little journal in his lap. He put the pen to paper—najdroższy towy nóżczko, Jacob would know—before he heard the footsteps of someone coming into the stony cellar.
"Have you come for the company or the wine? You can say both, though most are only here for the latter, and I would not be offended by the honesty."
"Both," Nick said, and he was honest. He had plenty of alcohol at his disposal, with Dorian's not in use. But at the mortuary only Allison and Ambrose remained, and for now Nick needed some breathing room from that particular place. Maybe a cellar wasn't the first thing that came to mind when one considered breathing room, but it would do the job.
The memory update was all but drowning him, so being alone was not an option. If that meant taking someone he knew by name only up on the offer of free wine and mutual commiseration, so be it. "Misery loving company and all." But Nick would moderate his misery because no one deserved to have the full extent of it unleashed upon them, the way it had flooded over him the morning everyone had disappeared to some ancient version of this place.
He glanced at the selection available which seemed vast. "Nicholas Scratch. Or Nick. Recommendations?"
"Nick," Serefin repeated, as if committing it to memory, before offering his own. "Serefin Meleski. Serefin is fine, Gideon is the only one who calls me Fin and I think it was simply to have my name fit within the meter of a dirty limerick. I've never corrected her. But I suppose you already knew that, considering this." He made a dismissive gesture to the bottles surrounding them, putting down the journal and the pen. The letter of intense pining for his assassin boyfriend could be left until he was in private.
Serefin hummed, contemplative, tilting his head to the side. "I believe my recommendations truly depend on how drunk you wish to get and how quickly. Most connoisseurs would talk about what sort of notes they wish to taste, and that is all well and good, but I believe they are the exception to the rule. I did not populate a wine cellar to talk about persimmons and plums and whatever else I'm supposed to taste."
—so Serefin might have been slightly buzzed already with his rambling. His fingers ghosted over the labels before swiping one, seemingly at random from an arbitrary shelf. He held it out to Nick.
"You are required to answer a question first. Consider it payment," Serefin said, with a wicked but sad grin. "How many of yours are traipsing around in the past, without an inkling of how to return?"
"It's easier to list the two that are still here," Nick replied. "Three," he corrected. Lucifer had remained in the present. "The rest are gone, including my girlfriend." On the worst possible day to have disappeared, she had. Though not completely. That's what he kept telling himself, a mantra on repeat that she could have departed Vallo as so many others had, but she had not. Especially as he knew her fate now and the only true future she had was here.
"Have you ever absolutely needed someone's presence for your own sanity before?" Nick asked, directing a question of his own to Serefin.
That had not been a question Serefin was expecting, and exhaled a soft bitter laugh. "Are you always this intense? I normally work myself up to asking the harder questions after a few glasses of wine. Or a few months of pestering." He took a moment to retrieve his already open bottle, and take a pull to give him time to think through his answer.
"Sometimes another person's presence caused my insanity," Serefin said, a certain old god locked away inside his head came to mind. He leaned in, inspecting Nick, looking for the cues of potential mental instability. "But are you talking about the sanity that is required to be a functioning member of society? Or the kind that makes your romantic heart do idiotic things? I suppose it doesn't matter, the answer is yes to both. I am feeling a little off kilter without—" Serefin felt his mouth dry up at saying Jacob's name; like speaking it outloud would make it real and he couldn't continue to pretend it wasn't so awful without him.
"If you are at risk of losing it, I cannot promise my methods of containing you would be kind. I assume your absent girlfriend has something to do with your question?"
Was he always this intense? He could be, but not normally, no.
"The timing of this could not have possibly been worse," Nick replied. In normal situations he wouldn't have been at this point yet, and would have been more inclined to trust Sabrina's optimism that they'd be reunited soon. Waking up the day of the disappearances after dreaming about home had destroyed that chance.
He needed Sabrina. Needed to touch her and feel her and know she was still there, with him.
But Serefin knew none of this and Nick wasn't about to unleash the entirety of it on him just because he was being given a bottle of wine, which he opened with a spell he'd learned in his physical magic class, pleased as it worked perfectly. That small little victory momentarily distracted him.
"But yes, this has to do with Sabrina."
He found a place to sit down before taking a sip from the bottle, looking at Serefin. "She's far less concerned about it than I am."
"Timing tends to be ironic and unfriendly when we need it to behave," Serefin added, unhelpfully. How many situations had he been in that were wildly inconvenient? If the timing had only been better, certain things wouldn't have happened. His death for instance. Or perhaps his second one, too.
He resumed a seat beside Nick, and knocked their bottles together in a sad toast. "I cannot claim to know what your girlfriend is thinking, however, a bit of advice—if you are open for it," Serefin asked, but he didn't expect an answer. He was going to give it regardless. "I have often downplayed situations to people I care about in order not to alarm them further."
Serefin drank deeply, knowing that he was doing something similar now—pretending everything was fine, that he wasn't becoming slowly more depressed about the situation that he was useless in.
"They have not found a way back yet, and what use is it to worry more and distract focus? One thing at a time, yes? You seem put together for someone worried about their sanity. Perhaps she is relying on you to keep it together until all of this is resolved."
Nick returned the toast, drinking thoughtfully before he spoke again. "Sabrina seems to think at the end of a week we'll be back to normal one way or the other." Which may end up proving true, but Nick had spent two months in the snowglobe and was less inclined to be so optimistic.
But more important was the fact that he was trying to downplay his stress at the situation, probably more than her. "I've done the same," he confessed. "Even when I shouldn't have. But I don't think she dreamt of home before she left," he said, wondering if Serefin was familiar with how memories of events from home could flood in, sparing him an attempt at explanation. "She has less reason to be concerned."
"Did you dream of something horrible?" Serefin asked, looking entirely too pleased. It wasn't that he reveled in other people's pain—that was left for very specific people at home who made his life incredibly difficult—but there was a certain eagerness to share. To know. He didn't want to be alone in his memory update and the terror it had torn through him. Serefin had been lucky to have Jacob with him when it happened.
"Something you haven't experienced yet? Did you kill someone you weren't supposed to?" He drank from the bottle, to give him pause. Serefin could have simply asked in a kinder manner, but his civility was slowly dying away the more wine he had. "Is she dead? Are you dead? Those seem like ones that would concern you but if she doesn't know, less important on her end. So now you have all this information you don't know what to do with except hold it all in."
Serefin gave a half-hearted shrug. "I have been there, and you should definitely drink more if I am correct."
"Are you always this intense?" Nick asked, echoing Serefin's words back to him after being caught off guard by the other man's line of questioning. There was something about it that had caused Nick to flinch, ever so slightly, beyond the questions themselves.
And they were not easy questions, shame and fear and the first touches of panic rising within him as he remembered waking up to Sabrina's untrackable absence. "Three for three," he decided, punctuating that with a long drink as suggested.
Serefin let out a short, bright laugh at Nick throwing his words back in his face. "Always, always," he said between stealing a pull from his wine. He hadn't meant to guess them all, but his were the same—Serefin had killed someone, Serefin had died twice. Memories from something that had happened but hadn't experienced were the worst kind of torture alone.
"I won't ask further. It's rude, and I am a paradigm of civility. The whole point is you're trying to forget. Not think about it for a little while? That is why you came for the wine, is it not?" He leaned in close to Nick. "And company who wouldn't ask you a hundred questions because they know you, and they can tell when you're not being honest."
How many times had he lied already to other people about how he was doing? Miserable and depressed were not helpful conversation topics.
He pointed drunkenly at Nick with the bottle, then to himself. "I have only asked a dozen questions, so I think we are both safe. Just know—" Serefin pulled the collar of his shirt down, showing off the deep scar across this throat; his first death. It was a gesture of camaraderie. "It is not good to dwell too long on things we cannot change, especially here, makes us all wretched fools and no one wants that."
It took a minute for Nick to realize what Serefin was showing him and why, but when it clicked on him, Nick nodded, unable to look away until the other man's shirt was raised again. Somehow, in answering some random offer of free drinks, he'd found one person who might actually understand his misery in the moment.
"That sounds far easier said than done," he commented drily, as sound of advice as it was. "Thank you," he added. He had come for wine to escape but right now he felt the slightest bit better even if that only came from mutual understanding of how horrific memories of life not yet lived could be. Or deaths for that matter.
"I never said it was easy, that's the one slight problem with all this good advice," Serefin said, rolling his shoulders as he slid further in his sitting position. It seemed potentially uncomfortable, but he had no intention of getting up any time soon. Eventually he'd reach for the journal again, finish his letter to Jacob, and probably say too much.
He waved away Nick's thank you. To know he had helped even a little was enough; recognizing it felt like too much responsibility that Serefin wasn't prepared to handle, not even when he was sober.
"Come now, drink up. You are the saddest looking person who has come into the cellar, and while I know why, I feel I must have put rules somewhere that said it's unacceptable. And if I haven't—" Serefin took a drink, and caught a bit on his chin. He wiped it hastily away. "I am doing it now."
He knocked their bottles together again, another toast. "To being intense and then drinking it all away."