[Trent Brumby] Kora had asked for some garbage bags and some baby wipes, and he told her he'd be back. He wasn't gone for too long, heading around back to the pub to see if staff were still locking up. He was in luck, able to grab some garbage bags from them without too many questions - he bluffs well anyway, as well as a few bottles of water and a clean rag. It would have to do, for now.
When he had come back to give her these, he'd help clean up the mess under her instructions. For the most part Trent is silent throughout the ordeal. He's still in somewhat of shock, but that's expected. It's not as if he runs into this sort of thing constantly. He's Kin, not Garou, and a Kinfolk that generally stayed low key. But, as tonight proved, sometimes trouble finds him.
[Kora] Black garbage bags, she said.
He dashed out, back to the pub - returned 10, 15 minutes later, with bottled water and a clean rage.
---
He returned to find her crouched on her haunches, her back against the rusted green metal of the dumpster, her hair loose, her shoulders level, her spine straight - following the subtle angle of the filthy contain, forearms on her thighs, her head up, level, watchful. The bodies were gone; dragged from the center of the alley to the shadows behind the dumpster, already disarticulated into manageable pieces. Inhuman by then. Inhuman, in any case. Just meat.
She spared him that. Kept him out of the blood pooled on the asphalt, picked up the corpse pieces herself, and asked him only to hold the garbage bags wide open as she filled them with the broken limbs, the stinking organs, just a glistening mass in the darkness those - undifferentiated, the hunks of flesh and bone - a finger here, claw protruding unnaturally from the tip. A stinking lump of blood-and-bile soaked wool.
The work is grim. In the end, she soaked up pool of blood on the ground with the discarded trench, with the filthy suit, sopping whatever remained on the ground up and bundling the ruined fabrics, into last of the big black garbage bags. It takes time, this - a slow unwinding of time - Sunday night passing into Monday as if it were being unspooled from both ends.
Finally, when the bags were piled into the lee-side of the dumpster, she called someone. It was a brief call, curt and clear.
"We need to get out of here," she said, accepting the clean rag from him at last, pouring water over her bloodstained hands, scrubbing at the dried smears on her face with the rag before stuffing it, too, into the garbage bags lined up, waiting. The blood on her clothing has dried by now, stiff again, the fabric of the t-shirt dark enough that the blood does not show except by that stiffness. The blood on her jeans is dark, dried smears. There are more on her boots - they were shining with it as if they had been polished when he came back - but she scrubbed the wet stuff off with the lining of the suit she stripped from the rat-faced man, so that the boots were again a dull black when she was ready to leave. "I'll have someone here shortly. To take care of the rest."
For the first time since they started the grim work, she looks at up, meets his eyes directly. The brightness is gone from her own, but there is still a direct, feral gleam to them. "You're alright to drive, right?"
[Trent Brumby] It is gruesome. It's parts of the war that he really hadn't considered and certainly not ever in such detail, and here he was, a part of it. He wanted to help her, to pick up those corpse bits and put them in the bag so she wouldn't have to. It's that part of him that is about being a man, about not wanting to let someone he care about do such an awful but necessary job. It pained him to watch blood and filth get on her skin. But he says nothing about it, perhaps never will.
As it was, the stench of it had his stomach turn a few times, forcing him to put his nose into his shoulder to breathe in his own jacket occasionally. The organs were a detail he wished he could scrub from his eyes, and the occasional digit really drove the night home. By the end of it, when its mopping up blood, he's almost detached by it all.
There is certainly a new pallor to his skin, one that speaks of the shock having settled in, and when he looks up to her, those pale grays are a little larger then she remembers them from before. Not quite as sharp as she remembers either. "Yeah, I'm fine to drive," he tells her, his voice level, automatic.
Hands brush down his jacket and his pant pockets, checking for his keys, wallet and phone. All accounted for, he grabs out the keys and starts to walk out of the alley. He pauses half way towards the entrance when he turns to see if she's coming.
[Kora] He stops at the mouth of the alley and looks back. She wasn't shadowing him, had not yet fallen into step beside him. Instead, he sees her a good dozen feet back, enshadowed except where the light catches the color in her her hair, which loosely twisted back upon itself and secured with some a pair of cheap blue rubber bands she found in the pockets of her filthy jeans, except for the way her pale skin reflects the ambient light in the place like a smear of watercolor, an impressionistic suggestion of a person-in-darkness. Except where her eyes catch the light.
Then, he looks back and her eyes are on him; on his back as he is walking, at the level of his shoulder when he turns around, shifting slantwise up to meet his eyes when he looks up at her. After a moment's stillness, she shoves her hands in her front pockets and kicks into a jog to catch up to him, her body stiff through the spine and shoulders, a T - all straight lines rather than the usual shifting curves, forward, back.
"You have any more of those bags?" she asks, low, sidelong when she draws abreast of him. She is breathing faster than she might normally, but its not from the brief jog. "I don't want to get blood all over your car."
[Trent Brumby] "Uh, no," he hadn't thought of that, but his brow draws together with it now. "I've got a blanket though, in the trunk. I can use that." He's walking again, moving with his eyes down on the ground, lifting occasionally to look around. With his keys he gestures to the left of the street. "My car's just down here." He hadn't been too far from it when John had caught up with him and then...
"Thank you, Kora." It comes out of nowhere, this sincerity and change of topic. This will play on his mind for awhile, but right now, he's very grateful. She can see it in the way he looks at her, that knowledge of how close he was to something terrible tonight. Trent really isn't scared of death, but this had been a humbling experience, and he now knows that there are far more things worse than death.
Again, he changes topics though, before she can say anything in return. "You can come back to mine." The way he says it isn't quite a question. He wants her to come home with him. He doesn't want to leave her in the state she's in. This isn't about him, though, she can be sure about that. Trent's natural instinct is to care for and protect those he cares about. He was going to clean under her fingernails, wash out her hair, and watch her sleep again.
[Kora] The street is quiet. It is late on a Sunday night; his car isn't far, less than half a block away. When Kora falls into step beside Trent, she keeps to the shadows closest to the shuttered buildings they pass, the closed restaurants, the darkened florist's storefront, the lights off, the windows staring blank eyes, their pattern reflections faint, sketched back at them in the dark - just an impression of movement.
There are no other pedestrians, not just here. Traffic is light, the city breathes and sighs in its sleep as the cold evening turns into a cold night, as the stars wheel overhead and the moon rises, slivered, silvered.
He thanks her; she gives him a sharp, sidelong look, taking in a deep breath to gainsay him. Something like: you don't have to thank me. Something like: it's my fucking job, with a faint twist of her expressive mouth, her lips stained scarlet from the inside out. Something like that, not clever but direct.
There is no change to say it, though. He changes topics again, her dark eyes on his face as they walk, her expression still and taut with concern, the crooked little smile at the corner of her mouth stilling until her lips fall back into their usual neutral curve. "I'm just fine," she says, quiet, her voice intense. " - you know that, right?" Her eyes are still on his face, searching . Then, as they reach the parking lot, she accedes, " - I could use a shower, though, yeah."
This time her red mouth hooks upward at the right corner.
[Trent Brumby] The expression he wears is much grimmer then any other she's seen it. There's lines that expresses his age older then he may well be, and his brows seem to shadow more of his eyes, heavier then they were before. He's not smiling, there's no compassion riding in the colour of his gaze, but there's a lot of darker thoughts there.
He looks at her, just as sharp as she had him moments before. "Yeah, you might be fine. I get that, Kora. But just give me this little peace, okay?" His words come out deeper, a little harder then he would have most of the time. A breath comes through his nostrils, heavy, a touch angry. But not at her. It's an accumulation of emotions building over the night and rolling over, turbulent and no where to go.
"I just want to," looking away from her, he's glancing down at his hand and fitting his thumb into the button of the remote, "just want to take you home and have a shower with you." Wash the night away, the blood of others from her skin. "Get that filth off you." Trent doesn't say it in a disgusted way, not at her, not even at what she had done, but it had more of tone that a guy might use with a girlfriend, when he caught another guy touching her. Not quite the same, but the sentiments are very similar.
[Kora] She cannot miss the change in him; the way his brow shadows his eyes, the lines at the corners, the firm set of his mouth in his stubbled features. Her own stillness is a stark counterpoint to his; sharp at the edges, defined as if she had been die-cut and die-cast back into the space she inhabits beside him.
Her breath comes out in a slow rush, expelled through her nose, her nostrils flaring. The car beeps its response to the remote in Trent's hand, and the sound is enough to drag her attention away from him, back to the car waiting ordinary in the parking lot. The windows are intact, gilded with the faintly amber light shed by the working streetlamps here, hte finish gleaming cool - whole, composed, ordinary.
"I just meant - " she says, after the silence has pulled itself soft and thin, like taffy. Her voice is quiet but alert, intense. She shakes her head, the tangled ponytail, doubled back on itself, swings with the movement as she shakes off whatever it was she meant to have said. Instead: "Okay," she says, after. Her voice firm, clear. "I'd like that, too."
There are a handful of other cars parked here, shadows that stretch back against the buildings, a sort of composite stillness in the air - nothing moving, dark or light, except for them, the dull retort of her bootsteps, his footsteps, on the pavement, cutting over the turf-covered berm between the sidewalk and parking lot.
Kora breathes out whatever she was going to say, stands at the back of the car, waiting as he opens the trunk to pull out the blanket for her to sit on. Get this: she waits for him to open the passenger's door, waits for him to spread the blanket across the bucket seat before she folds her tall frame into the car, still stiff through the spine and shoulders, for all that her long limbs and loose. Her might read that as alertness, now - the way she holds herself, the way she keeps her eyes on the shadows long after he would have dismissed them as empty, harmless.
[Trent Brumby] "Good. Thank you." It relieves him that they're not going to argue about that. He wanted to accomplish something by the end of the night, to wash off the effects and to feel useful in what had been a helpless situation. He hated that. That inability to absolutely anything in the face of death. It burned him like nothing else had tonight.
In the trunk is also a gym bag, zipped up, a tool box and a medical kit. The blanket is neatly folded, stored along side a large bottle of water, spare for the engine or whatever else he might need it for. Prepared for long trips, maybe. He uses the blanket, once the trunk is closed, to spread out over the seat and make sure that she's in and comfortable before closing the door.
Heading around the car has him glancing over his shoulder for the first time that night, to look around as he grabs the driver door handle and opens it. He slides inside and pulls it shut, starting up the car before he puts on his belt. He doesn't think to make conversation right then, but opens the window half way so that he doesn't continue to breathe in the smell that stinks out both their clothes, hers far more then his own.
Pulling out, headlights shine the way home.
[Kora] She watches him in profile as he drives; the tension in his jaw, the frustration still evident in the set of his shoulders, in the shape of his mouth. In the sharpness at the edges of his gestures, when he pulls on the headlights, or hits the turn signal. The dashboard casts his face in slanting green light, it catches the ridge of his brow and cheeks, cuts a sharp, stark shadow over the lower half of his face from the line of his jaw upward. There's nothing on the radio; they don't speak. She holds herself still on the blanket, her knees bent to keep her long legs close to her body, deliberately avoiding the dash, the structures on the door, the armrest and the cupholder, the upholstery, the glass.
The smell is worse in the close interior of the car. The half-opened window circulates fresh air into the mix when they accellerate, but the stench returns when they slow to a stop at red lights or stop signs, before making a left turn across traffic through the quiet streets. At some point, her eyes drift back to the road; frowning whenever headlights shine across the windshield, ready to duck - to do something - should the distant headlights resolve themselves into the familiar shape of a police cruiser.
The drive, however, is uneventful. They pull into the parking garage, rising over the speedbumps, through the echoing concrete expanse, dark and still, his neighbors cars in neat marching rows. The last time, they made this drive, it was evening, the sun still in the sky, falling. The last time, she challenged him to a race to the front door of his apartment, then pinned him against it before he could shake his keys, trying to make him late. Now: it is the hollow hour of the night, and she is stained with blood, stinking of viscera and fouler things - whatever crawled into the shells of the humans and turned them into monsters - and quiet, stark as she clips open the passenger's door, rises into the echoing stillness of the parking garage, pulling the blanket after her, draping it around her shoulders not as ward against the cold, but against detection by late night revelers, early morning workers, college students doing the walk of shame in the middle of sunday-into-monday morning.
When he had come back to give her these, he'd help clean up the mess under her instructions. For the most part Trent is silent throughout the ordeal. He's still in somewhat of shock, but that's expected. It's not as if he runs into this sort of thing constantly. He's Kin, not Garou, and a Kinfolk that generally stayed low key. But, as tonight proved, sometimes trouble finds him.
[Kora] Black garbage bags, she said.
He dashed out, back to the pub - returned 10, 15 minutes later, with bottled water and a clean rage.
---
He returned to find her crouched on her haunches, her back against the rusted green metal of the dumpster, her hair loose, her shoulders level, her spine straight - following the subtle angle of the filthy contain, forearms on her thighs, her head up, level, watchful. The bodies were gone; dragged from the center of the alley to the shadows behind the dumpster, already disarticulated into manageable pieces. Inhuman by then. Inhuman, in any case. Just meat.
She spared him that. Kept him out of the blood pooled on the asphalt, picked up the corpse pieces herself, and asked him only to hold the garbage bags wide open as she filled them with the broken limbs, the stinking organs, just a glistening mass in the darkness those - undifferentiated, the hunks of flesh and bone - a finger here, claw protruding unnaturally from the tip. A stinking lump of blood-and-bile soaked wool.
The work is grim. In the end, she soaked up pool of blood on the ground with the discarded trench, with the filthy suit, sopping whatever remained on the ground up and bundling the ruined fabrics, into last of the big black garbage bags. It takes time, this - a slow unwinding of time - Sunday night passing into Monday as if it were being unspooled from both ends.
Finally, when the bags were piled into the lee-side of the dumpster, she called someone. It was a brief call, curt and clear.
"We need to get out of here," she said, accepting the clean rag from him at last, pouring water over her bloodstained hands, scrubbing at the dried smears on her face with the rag before stuffing it, too, into the garbage bags lined up, waiting. The blood on her clothing has dried by now, stiff again, the fabric of the t-shirt dark enough that the blood does not show except by that stiffness. The blood on her jeans is dark, dried smears. There are more on her boots - they were shining with it as if they had been polished when he came back - but she scrubbed the wet stuff off with the lining of the suit she stripped from the rat-faced man, so that the boots were again a dull black when she was ready to leave. "I'll have someone here shortly. To take care of the rest."
For the first time since they started the grim work, she looks at up, meets his eyes directly. The brightness is gone from her own, but there is still a direct, feral gleam to them. "You're alright to drive, right?"
[Trent Brumby] It is gruesome. It's parts of the war that he really hadn't considered and certainly not ever in such detail, and here he was, a part of it. He wanted to help her, to pick up those corpse bits and put them in the bag so she wouldn't have to. It's that part of him that is about being a man, about not wanting to let someone he care about do such an awful but necessary job. It pained him to watch blood and filth get on her skin. But he says nothing about it, perhaps never will.
As it was, the stench of it had his stomach turn a few times, forcing him to put his nose into his shoulder to breathe in his own jacket occasionally. The organs were a detail he wished he could scrub from his eyes, and the occasional digit really drove the night home. By the end of it, when its mopping up blood, he's almost detached by it all.
There is certainly a new pallor to his skin, one that speaks of the shock having settled in, and when he looks up to her, those pale grays are a little larger then she remembers them from before. Not quite as sharp as she remembers either. "Yeah, I'm fine to drive," he tells her, his voice level, automatic.
Hands brush down his jacket and his pant pockets, checking for his keys, wallet and phone. All accounted for, he grabs out the keys and starts to walk out of the alley. He pauses half way towards the entrance when he turns to see if she's coming.
[Kora] He stops at the mouth of the alley and looks back. She wasn't shadowing him, had not yet fallen into step beside him. Instead, he sees her a good dozen feet back, enshadowed except where the light catches the color in her her hair, which loosely twisted back upon itself and secured with some a pair of cheap blue rubber bands she found in the pockets of her filthy jeans, except for the way her pale skin reflects the ambient light in the place like a smear of watercolor, an impressionistic suggestion of a person-in-darkness. Except where her eyes catch the light.
Then, he looks back and her eyes are on him; on his back as he is walking, at the level of his shoulder when he turns around, shifting slantwise up to meet his eyes when he looks up at her. After a moment's stillness, she shoves her hands in her front pockets and kicks into a jog to catch up to him, her body stiff through the spine and shoulders, a T - all straight lines rather than the usual shifting curves, forward, back.
"You have any more of those bags?" she asks, low, sidelong when she draws abreast of him. She is breathing faster than she might normally, but its not from the brief jog. "I don't want to get blood all over your car."
[Trent Brumby] "Uh, no," he hadn't thought of that, but his brow draws together with it now. "I've got a blanket though, in the trunk. I can use that." He's walking again, moving with his eyes down on the ground, lifting occasionally to look around. With his keys he gestures to the left of the street. "My car's just down here." He hadn't been too far from it when John had caught up with him and then...
"Thank you, Kora." It comes out of nowhere, this sincerity and change of topic. This will play on his mind for awhile, but right now, he's very grateful. She can see it in the way he looks at her, that knowledge of how close he was to something terrible tonight. Trent really isn't scared of death, but this had been a humbling experience, and he now knows that there are far more things worse than death.
Again, he changes topics though, before she can say anything in return. "You can come back to mine." The way he says it isn't quite a question. He wants her to come home with him. He doesn't want to leave her in the state she's in. This isn't about him, though, she can be sure about that. Trent's natural instinct is to care for and protect those he cares about. He was going to clean under her fingernails, wash out her hair, and watch her sleep again.
[Kora] The street is quiet. It is late on a Sunday night; his car isn't far, less than half a block away. When Kora falls into step beside Trent, she keeps to the shadows closest to the shuttered buildings they pass, the closed restaurants, the darkened florist's storefront, the lights off, the windows staring blank eyes, their pattern reflections faint, sketched back at them in the dark - just an impression of movement.
There are no other pedestrians, not just here. Traffic is light, the city breathes and sighs in its sleep as the cold evening turns into a cold night, as the stars wheel overhead and the moon rises, slivered, silvered.
He thanks her; she gives him a sharp, sidelong look, taking in a deep breath to gainsay him. Something like: you don't have to thank me. Something like: it's my fucking job, with a faint twist of her expressive mouth, her lips stained scarlet from the inside out. Something like that, not clever but direct.
There is no change to say it, though. He changes topics again, her dark eyes on his face as they walk, her expression still and taut with concern, the crooked little smile at the corner of her mouth stilling until her lips fall back into their usual neutral curve. "I'm just fine," she says, quiet, her voice intense. " - you know that, right?" Her eyes are still on his face, searching . Then, as they reach the parking lot, she accedes, " - I could use a shower, though, yeah."
This time her red mouth hooks upward at the right corner.
[Trent Brumby] The expression he wears is much grimmer then any other she's seen it. There's lines that expresses his age older then he may well be, and his brows seem to shadow more of his eyes, heavier then they were before. He's not smiling, there's no compassion riding in the colour of his gaze, but there's a lot of darker thoughts there.
He looks at her, just as sharp as she had him moments before. "Yeah, you might be fine. I get that, Kora. But just give me this little peace, okay?" His words come out deeper, a little harder then he would have most of the time. A breath comes through his nostrils, heavy, a touch angry. But not at her. It's an accumulation of emotions building over the night and rolling over, turbulent and no where to go.
"I just want to," looking away from her, he's glancing down at his hand and fitting his thumb into the button of the remote, "just want to take you home and have a shower with you." Wash the night away, the blood of others from her skin. "Get that filth off you." Trent doesn't say it in a disgusted way, not at her, not even at what she had done, but it had more of tone that a guy might use with a girlfriend, when he caught another guy touching her. Not quite the same, but the sentiments are very similar.
[Kora] She cannot miss the change in him; the way his brow shadows his eyes, the lines at the corners, the firm set of his mouth in his stubbled features. Her own stillness is a stark counterpoint to his; sharp at the edges, defined as if she had been die-cut and die-cast back into the space she inhabits beside him.
Her breath comes out in a slow rush, expelled through her nose, her nostrils flaring. The car beeps its response to the remote in Trent's hand, and the sound is enough to drag her attention away from him, back to the car waiting ordinary in the parking lot. The windows are intact, gilded with the faintly amber light shed by the working streetlamps here, hte finish gleaming cool - whole, composed, ordinary.
"I just meant - " she says, after the silence has pulled itself soft and thin, like taffy. Her voice is quiet but alert, intense. She shakes her head, the tangled ponytail, doubled back on itself, swings with the movement as she shakes off whatever it was she meant to have said. Instead: "Okay," she says, after. Her voice firm, clear. "I'd like that, too."
There are a handful of other cars parked here, shadows that stretch back against the buildings, a sort of composite stillness in the air - nothing moving, dark or light, except for them, the dull retort of her bootsteps, his footsteps, on the pavement, cutting over the turf-covered berm between the sidewalk and parking lot.
Kora breathes out whatever she was going to say, stands at the back of the car, waiting as he opens the trunk to pull out the blanket for her to sit on. Get this: she waits for him to open the passenger's door, waits for him to spread the blanket across the bucket seat before she folds her tall frame into the car, still stiff through the spine and shoulders, for all that her long limbs and loose. Her might read that as alertness, now - the way she holds herself, the way she keeps her eyes on the shadows long after he would have dismissed them as empty, harmless.
[Trent Brumby] "Good. Thank you." It relieves him that they're not going to argue about that. He wanted to accomplish something by the end of the night, to wash off the effects and to feel useful in what had been a helpless situation. He hated that. That inability to absolutely anything in the face of death. It burned him like nothing else had tonight.
In the trunk is also a gym bag, zipped up, a tool box and a medical kit. The blanket is neatly folded, stored along side a large bottle of water, spare for the engine or whatever else he might need it for. Prepared for long trips, maybe. He uses the blanket, once the trunk is closed, to spread out over the seat and make sure that she's in and comfortable before closing the door.
Heading around the car has him glancing over his shoulder for the first time that night, to look around as he grabs the driver door handle and opens it. He slides inside and pulls it shut, starting up the car before he puts on his belt. He doesn't think to make conversation right then, but opens the window half way so that he doesn't continue to breathe in the smell that stinks out both their clothes, hers far more then his own.
Pulling out, headlights shine the way home.
[Kora] She watches him in profile as he drives; the tension in his jaw, the frustration still evident in the set of his shoulders, in the shape of his mouth. In the sharpness at the edges of his gestures, when he pulls on the headlights, or hits the turn signal. The dashboard casts his face in slanting green light, it catches the ridge of his brow and cheeks, cuts a sharp, stark shadow over the lower half of his face from the line of his jaw upward. There's nothing on the radio; they don't speak. She holds herself still on the blanket, her knees bent to keep her long legs close to her body, deliberately avoiding the dash, the structures on the door, the armrest and the cupholder, the upholstery, the glass.
The smell is worse in the close interior of the car. The half-opened window circulates fresh air into the mix when they accellerate, but the stench returns when they slow to a stop at red lights or stop signs, before making a left turn across traffic through the quiet streets. At some point, her eyes drift back to the road; frowning whenever headlights shine across the windshield, ready to duck - to do something - should the distant headlights resolve themselves into the familiar shape of a police cruiser.
The drive, however, is uneventful. They pull into the parking garage, rising over the speedbumps, through the echoing concrete expanse, dark and still, his neighbors cars in neat marching rows. The last time, they made this drive, it was evening, the sun still in the sky, falling. The last time, she challenged him to a race to the front door of his apartment, then pinned him against it before he could shake his keys, trying to make him late. Now: it is the hollow hour of the night, and she is stained with blood, stinking of viscera and fouler things - whatever crawled into the shells of the humans and turned them into monsters - and quiet, stark as she clips open the passenger's door, rises into the echoing stillness of the parking garage, pulling the blanket after her, draping it around her shoulders not as ward against the cold, but against detection by late night revelers, early morning workers, college students doing the walk of shame in the middle of sunday-into-monday morning.
Post a Comment