You're not safe.

K. R. Jakes] Outside, it was a grey day, cloudy and somber. The streets were grey, and stuck in that space between too lightless and too illuminated. The coming storm would wash it out. Would set it into frost, would freeze it. This is Chicago, and it is Chicago on a Friday, and the streets are busy things. What's another day of grey? K. R. Jakes returns to her apartment from a run to the corner market, and it is not necessary to unlock her front door. The opening door changes the pressures at work in the apartment, and the window in her bedroom bumps against the windowframe in anxious sympathy: hello! You're home! Come look out me!

Her arms are full of bags, and they're paper, so they cackle as she navigates around a stack of newspapers she forgot to throw away this morning and shuts the door with the edge of her hip. Kage glances down her hallway, and the note of searching that is in her gaze is a habit that is new forming. Then she exhales, quick, and goes to dump the bags in the kitchen sink and start herself some tea.

The running water takes a few minutes to approach tepid, and she braces herself against the sink while she waits. The bags will wait, anyway, until she has something warm.

[Dylan] It's hotter than Hell in her apartment.

It has been for days. It's concentrated in the study where she had directed her strange new (hopefully temporary) roommate, but it's permeated the rest of the house, tends to linger in places where he has been, makes the bathroom steam up and the windows in the kitchen drip condensation. Their paths have not crossed since she came upon him in that misty cemetery on Thanksgiving, since he came out from behind that tombstone and dragged her into his world without giving her any indication of where he was taking her.

He's been sleeping for over a week, stretched out on the couch in the study without taking his clothes off or unfolding the mattress within to give himself more room. It's as though he has been awake for so long that he can't remain that way any longer, as though he's run himself straight into the ground; he only rises long enough to slam down glass after glass of water, to eat the soup and toast and leftover turkey that Kage leaves for him, to shower and take a razor to his face, before returning to the couch.

When the door closes on this blisteringly cold Friday afternoon, she can feel the smack of dry heat draped over the entire apartment. He's been up, and he's been moving, and when he hears the door, Kage hears movement. The nameless 'crow is not a light walker, does not walk on the balls of his feet but rather his heels, thumping as he moves, and so it should come as no surprise when he appears at the threshold between the living room and the kitchen.

Gone are the bruises beneath his eyes. Gone is the relentless stubble on his jaws. Gone is the smell of dirt and blood and underarm. Not gone is that look of glazed fever in his eyes, that sense of twitching hyperarousal in his form. He cleans up well, but there's no denying that sleep and food has not cured him of his ills. And now he's just staring at her.

[K. R. Jakes] Kage had looked up when she first heard the signs of motion from her (temporary?) houseguest. He, killer of leg razors, loud and unavoidable when he is awake, because it's as if he doesn't know how to be quiet, it's as if he doesn't care, doesn't think of it. The redhead pushes away from the sink, and as he stares at her, she looks back at him. A look that tries to compass just what is different about her houseguest now that he is less physically sick looking and what is not different. He still looks, he still feels, like madness and Hellfire; she still wonders at how he is like a brand. It makes a part of her want to pull away, to throw water on him and while the going's good to get going. It makes her anxious, see, but anxiety is second fiddle, maybe even third.

He is standing on the threshold between the kitchen and the living room, staring at her. And after she looks up and over at him, after she has pushed away from the sink, Kage shuts off the faucet. The waterflow gives a little surge and jerk, as if the water wanted to make a comment, make some pointed remark. But these pipes are old. "You're awake," she says. "Hi. Do you feel any different?" He can't, she thinks. He doesn't. "If you're hungry, I've got pumpkin apple bread and cream cheese from the church down the road, and...."

She has no idea what to expect from the nameless 'crow, not really, so she trails away.

[Dylan] How can he not know the effect that he has on her? (That's an easy enough question to answer.) He's got to have some idea of the fact that he makes her uneasy, that he makes her anxious, that she has no idea what to expect from him or how to act around him. He has to know that it was her who unloaded his weapon and hid it in the chest along with the rest of his things, filthy and caked in the proof of his weeks of exile, that she had done so for her own safety, to keep it from spitting metal fire at her.

That same warmth that she feels from him, she could feel on those bullets as she popped the magazine out of the gun's belly.

There has to be someone out there looking for him, a lover or a best friend or a boss, a parent. He's a good-looking man, tall and well-built and handsome. Handsome men are rarely wanting for company. Yet there are no Missing Person signs up, no sense that the police have been notified. Thirty-year-old men aren't the ones nabbed off the street. Children, women, they're the ones people struggle valiantly and tirelessly to find when they disappear. Thirty-year-old men can take care of themselves.

A twitch seizes him when the pipe barks at them, and when she asks if he feels any different, his gaze narrows. He doesn't answer. If he's hungry, she's got pumpkin apple bread.

That doesn't concern him.

"They know I'm here," he says, his voice low. "I felt them. They came in with their hands, they got their hands all over the space, the space told them where I am. I can't get out of this room. You've got to help me get out like you helped me before, if I can get to them first they won't... they won't find you, they're in here and I don't want them to find you."

[K. R. Jakes] Kage doesn't think there has to be someone out there looking for him. Maybe, maybe there is someone out there looking for the man he may have once been. Maybe, maybe there is someone out there looking for who he was, like he's looking for a way out of whereever he perceives himself to be, just like he's looking for a way to bring 'her' back. Eurydice. (Kage cannot keep from mythologizing the people around her. Symbols are a comfort.) But she just does not wholly believe that there can be someone out there, like a lover, or a brother, or a father, or a friend, is looking for him the way he is now.

He may be a goodlooking man, now that he's cleaned up, but Kage can't see the trees for the forest so to speak. And what she sees when she looks at Dylan is this: a mess, a man in trouble, a man who's burning himself into a sign, who's scorching himself into helplessness, a dangerous, dangerous game that she doesn't want to play, but she wants a little bit to fix or at least to understand before it ends. She sees all her broken leg razors, she sees cemetery fog and a ghost. He's not a stray cat, He'd told her, and she knew that. She knew.

(a nature, essentially heroic, will find something to champion
even in the dark, and ...)

However. Her expression sets, as she listens to him speak. Her spine straightens, and she lifts a hand to curl a lank of red hair back behind her ear. She frowns, and glances around her apartment, beyond the nameless 'crow, out. He could be talking about nothing, but Kage doesn't believe that, either. You don't just enter into the state he's in without making your fears a reality, or without some basis of reality for your fears.

"Ooookay," she says, very slowly. "I can't make any promises, but I'll try and help you out again. Like I did before." There, a note of wryness. Just how did she really help him, after all? Walked, and he followed? "But if they came in here with their hands, I want to take a look around for their fingerprints. Who are they? Can you remember any names -- any, any words?"

[Dylan] At the word 'try,' the man abruptly steps back from the threshold and turns to go back into the hallway, to retrieve what meager belongings he has to his person. In his clothing, those disgusting jeans and that rank shirt and that heavy jacket, there had been no sign of a wallet, no ID card and no passport, no driver's license, no nothing. There is nothing proving that this man exists, that he is anything other than a shard like He is, but he is not He.

No one else has seen this man. No one else has mentioned him to her. After all this time, after all the ramblings and paranoia and tics of near-violence she has witnessed, no one would think twice about wondering if maybe it isn't Kage who is the one who is losing her mind, conjuring this man out of thin air. The danger in spending too much time with the insane is that it chips away at one's sense of stability.

Her sense of self-preservation is strong, yet it is not strong enough to tell her to put him somewhere else, to turn him over to someone who can help him. There may very well be no one who can help him, if a week of slumber and sustenance has not helped slap him back together.

When she continues talking he stops, just as abruptly as he turned to go, as though a tether has been jerked and sent him returning to the threshold. He doesn't stop there. Barefoot, wearing clothing that does not belong to him, without that handgun she had found amongst his clothing after he had fallen asleep the first time, he is no less dangerous than he had been that night in the cemetery. If anything, he is even more so. He's inside her home. He knows where she lives, where she sleeps. If she were to scream, her neighbors might very well not even react. She would have something in common with Kitty Genovese.

He takes several steps toward the sink, stopping halfway, his gaze wild.

"Don't you know? They don't have to stick a foot over the threshold in order to get themselves all over. They came from far away, they came in through the space, they didn't touch anything but the Tapestry. The demons don't need to be here to see. I reached, though. The breaker had one eye. She had a guardian. He was dark and reeked of Death. They're dangerous. If I can get to them first they won't be."

[K. R. Jakes] The Orphan tries to parse this information and fashion of it some kind of sense. This is no worse than an oracle, she tells herself; this is no worse than a riddle. No worse than a particularly fleeting piece of information, a detail that doesn't seem immediately obvious.

"And..."

The woman's eyebrows quiver together, and she takes a step forward (rather than backward, which is her instinct) when Dylan takes several steps toward the sink. The kitchen isn't all that large, and they're closer now than they've been at any time since the car ride to her apartment. He claims that these demons (and why not, a good a word as any for what is haunting him, whether it be magi or actual demons or visions and anyway it's all a vision, all a fever) are dangerous, and a word surfaces in Kage's glance, but does not get spoken. A sentence. She'll keep it, for now. Save it for later.

"...what will you do when you're standing with them in the same room?"

He doesn't look any less mad. He doesn't look any more focussed. He doesn't look steadier, or less broken. He just looks cleaner, better fed, and we're going to try something different today. Kage reaches out to touch Dylan's shoulder, and unless he twitches away, violently, she'll splay her fingers against his upperarm, a grip that is meant to be firm, meant to be steadying, meant to be the opposite of madness (although perhaps her family would call her unwise, and Simon, and Caspian, and Ashes, and all the rest of them, although He would approve, no doubt, and is probably approving now while snacking on popcorn or the soul of some sad virgin).

[Dylan] God knows what's going on inside that head of his, what he thinks is going on in the world around him, what the world around him is doing as Kage steps away from the sink and moves toward him. She moves towards, rather than away, and on some level, somehow, this matters. This means something. This doesn't make him tense up or reach for something that isn't there, doesn't make him prepare to strike out with all the power and might that she can sense within him but hasn't yet seen. The entire apartment is warm as an oven, hot and dry, heavier in the study where he has been camped for the last week but she wouldn't know that yet, she hasn't been in there yet, all she has is what's around her now and what's around her, what's right in front of her, is an almost oppressive, punishing sort of heat that doesn't flinch away when she steps into his space.

He doesn't look any saner, doesn't look as though the world is looking any clearer or starker to him than it does now. All she knows is that for what it's worth, he's not running away from her right now. He isn't trying to attack her. He stands stock still, solid and unyielding beneath her hand, and she can feel the flex of muscle as he acclimates to the unfamiliar feel of human contact. For however long he's been missing his history, his name, he's had to have been missing the touch of another person. Yet he doesn't surge forward as though she is a ballast amidst a storm, doesn't reach out to even reciprocate the touch. He stares at her, breathing through his nostrils, his gaze sharp and feverish.

What will he do when they're standing in the same room.

"I thought that they would show me the way out at first," he says, "but they're not going to, they're trying to keep me here and they... and they know where I am, now, they know, and they've tried to stop me and if they're trying to stop me then you're not safe. We've got to get out of here."

[K. R. Jakes] He is intense. He doesn't even realize it. Her hand against his arm -- against his shoulder. He's a blast from a furnace, this close. But he doesn't flinch or grab her. He doesn't try and throw her across the kitchen and he doesn't run away. He doesn't disappear, popping out of her kitchen as if he were a soap bubble: iridescent, fragile, full of warped images. His heat reminds her of a window, too near a fire, which no longer quite fit its frame after years and years. Kage's gaze tarnishes up with worry and wariness, and it's difficult to untwine one from the other.

Kage is not entirely thrilled with this new development in the madman's (il)logic. This concern for her. This we. He talks, and Kage rubs his arm (we're human) as if this were normal. She takes his hand, too, the same way she touched his shoulder; careful, a little hesitant, readying herself for a blow, but determined. Here I am. Here you are. And there he is, just as stolid, just as unmoving, as if she were a flake of flame -- as if he were stone, and she was air.

"How did they try to stop -- how are you certain that they're not going to show you the way out? If they're coming here, to find you, maybe they're trying to find the way in. Or the door, in. And if they find that, even if they mean you harm, perhaps you can use that to get out." Her mouth quirks, rue. "I want to be okay. I want you to be okay, too. I ..."

We've got to get out of here, he said, and Kage'll let Dylan go. She'll lift her hand to her head, fiercely rake her hair away from her face, hold it gathered at the top of her head, out of her eyes.

[Dylan] Kage is expecting blows, violence, palpable instability from a man who doesn't seem as though he's been standing on steady ground the entire time that she's known him, and yet that is not what she gets. It might have been easier if he had, if he had shoved her into the sink or batted away her hand or surged away from her as if an electric current had jolted between the two of them, but he hadn't. He'd stood still when she'd rested her hand on his arm, as though a weight had draped itself over his body, as though a tonic had washed over his central nervous system. He's still, now, desperately so, as though to move would be to send Kage away.

That's got to be even more frightening than his halting uncertainty, his jerky movements and his sleep-deprived twitching. She'd been able to expect that he would come at her like some sort of depraved nightmare creature, unwashed and unfed and crazed with thirst. Now she's got a washed and fed almost-human in her kitchen but he's slowed. He's all eyes and coiled body now, a looming figure out in the open rather than a creeping menace in the shadows.

One or the other has to be preferable, but with him so close, close enough to snap her neck or break her arm or cast deadly magic on her--she has no idea of knowing which magics he works, which of the nine-rumored-ten Spheres he commands, whether he is versed in spatial relations or fate or energies, whether he can influence biological systems or Quintessence or the Umbra, whether he is still stumbling his way through the third rank or whether he is close to Ascension--she can't be comfortable.

Yet she is calming. Her hand finds his, and his eyes, which had been everywhere but on her face it seems, light on her gaze for the first time that she can likely recall. It's hard to tell if there's a man in there somewhere, if a shred of his sanity has survived the trip he's been on. She hasn't got a name for him. A name would be the first step back, one might think.

She takes his hand, and he grips tightly, tight enough to contain but not tight enough to bruise. He isn't going to go.

"If they're with the Ones," he says, "they'll end me. They've already tried. They sent demons after me. I stopped the ones they sent but I can't stop all of them. You don't know what they were going to do to me. I can't--"

He squeezes her hand again, his gaze dropping not with a twitch but with a slouch.

[K. R. Jakes] Right this moment, Ashley, Wharil and Jacques are looking at each other. They are deciding to get into a car. They are thinking that Dylan is perhaps shacking up with somebody. He disappears a lot. They are thinking he is being an inconsiderate asshole, but they are also thinking that maybe he is trapped, that maybe he is being held in this apartment that they glimpsed, with its books, its candles, its medieval tapestries and its latest-in-technology. Right this moment, they're coming for Dylan. To see if he's all right.

He isn't. Kage has seen some strange things in her time alive. Dylan is one of the least right things she's seen, in such close proximity, and it makes her so sad for him. She's beginning to wonder if maybe she's just not experienced enough to do what needs to be done now. [That's no reason not to try.] She's beginning to wonder what other avenues she should explore. [There's always, always something to try.]

He's clinging to her hand, and she's holding his. Fine: pax. "Hey, listen to me." Her voice is not unsympathetic. Actually, it's quite sympathetic -- she can't help it. She's horrified, that this might be some mage's fate. This, what Dylan is right now, standing in her kitchen, killing her plants just by dint of being far too much punishment. "You said 'if.' How do you know? I still think that maybe," a pause. Because what does she think, really? That she's in over her head, that's what. Arrogance reasserts itself, as it almost always does. Hubris. Kage has it. "They're coming here. What... do you want from them?"

[Dylan] He trusts her. That has to be one of the more chilling realizations that she's come to, if she's come to that realization at all: he left the cemetery with her because he trusted her. He was able to sleep in her study--or wherever it is that he thought that they were--and eat the food she left for him and drink the water in this place and shower and shave his face because he didn't think that she was with Them. He didn't think that she was going to sound the alarm, call in the guards, have him turned over to whatever it was that he was running from.

They have a name, now, a very telling name. He'd called them demons. He keeps calling them demons. Demons are malevolent spirits often conjured up to torment the wicked or the weak; they stalk the halls of literature and mythology, philosophy and theology, nagging and berating and abusing those they come into contact with. They are not to be trusted.

The warmth surrounding him is almost distracting. It isn't the soothing, suffusing heat of lying out on a beach in the afternoon with a drink in hand and waves lapping at the shore; it isn't like sunning oneself after a swim. This is heat meant to punish, and he looks as though it's burning him up, as though his blood is beginning to boil. Yet were it mere sickness that had him in this state, there would be something she could do about it, and it would not be infiltrating her apartment, would not have steamed the windows in her car during the short drive from Graceland Cemetery on Thanksgiving.

She'd thought she might have been able to hear voicing whispering and snickering when he was on the path with her that Thursday night. There are no such susurrations tonight. There's only the grip of his hand, the plaintiveness in his glassy eyes, the nearness of his form. He isn't grabbing her or holding onto her or forcing her one direction or the other. He has her hand, and that is all.

That hand appears to be enough for right now. That hand is false hope.

"I'm not the one who wants. Not from them. They have nothing I want, except... except they keep me down here. Maybe I've got it all wrong, though. Maybe... everyone who tries to get out of this place goes up, towards the light, but maybe the way out isn't up, maybe we have to go deeper, maybe... maybe we have to go down... maybe they won't follow if we go down..."

He frowns, pupils dilated with system-wide agitation despite the dim light coming in through the postage-stamp window.

[K. R. Jakes] "If they keep you down here, maybe they know how to get you out."

This is almost said more for her own benefit then for Dylan's. He's in a burning personal Hell. A literal personal Hell. He's plagued by demons, or so he says, and he's plaguing her without meaning to. He's bringing people to her doorstep. His mere presence is killing her plants, slowly, is drying them out, making them thirst. He's Trouble. A capital T. Kage is going to work this out. Kage is going to fix this, somehow. Ask her how. She doesn't know, but he's not safe. For anybody.

"I don't know who would want to keep you like this," she says, and if he were cognizent, he'd understand that belying the steadiness she's keeping in her tone there was -- sadness, or wistfulness. Kage was a wistful creature, when she wasn't an arrogant one. And sometimes even when she was.

That hand is false hope. Kage squeezes Dylan's hand, gently. "I don't think 'deeper' or 'down' are probably good plans. You go too deep, you get stuck. You go down, and you're going too deep." Give her credit. She sure tries to reason a way out of the labyrinth (all these turns look the same, all these different corners, all these different stops) that is a conversation with her houseguest.

He trusts her. She doesn't trust him.

[K. R. Jakes] ooc: ahem. strike that 'probably' from 'I don't think deeper or down are probably good plans.'

[Dylan] If the people who are coming for this man know who he is, who he really is, know his name and his identity and all those little pieces of his being that Kage can't even begin to drive at without letting herself inside of his head, then she's right: she's absolutely right. If the people who are coming for this man are actually coming for him, if they're trying to help and not trying to eliminate, then there is a very good chance that even if he doesn't find a way out of this burning purgatory--though he does seem to have gone beyond Purgatory at this point, doesn't he; he isn't simply waiting for a decision to be made one way or the other, he's actually being pursued, he's being punished, she didn't know what they did to him but when she came upon him he had blood on his clothing, his knuckles are still split open, he's cleaned up but he still carries battle wounds on his body--he's going to find a way out of this apartment, out of her life, and then she'll be relieved of whatever sense of duty she has towards him.

Whoever They are, they have to be able to scry. They have to be able to reach across space and peer into the events and happenings some distance away. They had to have something of his in order to lock in on him, if indeed he truly did feel someone scrying, if he did indeed sense that someone was looking in on him. She can feel the aftereffects of his Working all over the apartment, can feel it in the warmth of this place, so much hotter than it was when she left this morning, yet he doesn't appear to be suffering any greater ill effects or Paradox from whatever it is that he's done.

Her reason, her touch, seems to be making some sort of sense to him right now. Maybe he's just worn out from constantly searching for a way out when he isn't sleeping or scheming.

"Don't--" He pauses to wet his lips, quickly, his voice catching in his throat. The heat is killing her plants; Christ knows what it's doing to him. "Don't let them in here. If you let them in here you'll never leave. You can leave now but if you let them in then that'll... just... that'll be the end of it, you'll never leave. Don't let them in."

It's as close to acquiescence as she's going to get. He'll stay, as long as she doesn't let Them in.

He's still gripping her hand.

[K. R. Jakes] The dark-eyed mage searches the once-handsome, once well-adjusted mage's face for a sign. (Give me a sign of wonder. Give me a sign of salt, and iron and silk. Give me a sign of good strong wood, and give me a sign, oh, just give me a sign of hope.) She is wondering just how much weight she should give his warning. Don't let them in, you'll never leave. Did he let them in, whatever that means, and now he can't leave? Or does he mean something more specific? Is it something with layers of meanings? Kage grazes her lowerlip (plush) with her teeth, worrying it for a second. She lets Dylan's hand go, and takes a deep breath. With that same hand (warm, warm) she makes a gesture, like maybe she's going to rake her hair back again, but she does not. Instead, she touches her hairline, half-pinches the bridge of her nose, presses her closed hand against her mouth and looks at Dylan over her fist thoughtfully.

It would be a mistake to believe that Kage wants to foist Dylan off on the first incompetent who showed up, staking a claim. It would be a mistake to believe her conscience is so weak. But it would also be a mistake to believe that she tilts at windmills, all the time, that the kind of 'duty' she feels toward Dylan (and others, those Dylan may run into; those Dylan has run into, and Him, of course, always Him) is something easily shucked. It would be a mistake to believe that she's a giving individual, look no deeper.

"Oh, don't. Nothing's certain," she says. "Let's end no 'it' unless that 'it' is this burning place you're surrounded by, okay? I'm going to run to the car. Do you want to come?"

[Dylan] [Pause!]