[Kora] The warm spring day is sinking into a cool spring night. The city is green now. Lawn crews have been out in the parks, grooming the growing grass, trimming the early growth from the trees and shrubs. There are pear trees in bloom, the blush of cherry trees in the air, and blazing displays of tulips and daffodils along the berms and medians, in the plazas and parks of city's wealthy neighborhoods. It is still cold enough to make a jacket a necessity, when the sun sinks below the horizon and the stars flare to life somewhere beyond the orange haze of light pollution.
Kora is not wearing a jacket, though. She is dressed sparely, in jeans and a t-shirt, so freshly washed that the scent of the detergent used to clean them is stronger than her own scent woven through the fibers. She is a stark, tall thing in the wash of lights in the lobby, her pale hair pulled back, plaited tonight, the braid tucked under and secured with elastic at the end. Black cotton against her pale skin, dark bracelets at her wrists, dark choker at her throat, her dark eyes and expressive mouth still tonight.
Her reflection stares back at her all the way up in the elevator, but she does not watch herself back. There are still shadows in her eyes, through the raw immediacy has gone. When she reaches the door to the apartment (counting back, remembering the singularity of the structure on the other side, the sticky consistency of the wrapped webbing, the spare weaver's song of the place), she knocks twice, then slides her hands into the front pockets of her jeans, waiting, quiet.
[Imogen] There is not a long wait before Imogen opens the door. She had already gotten up to answer the intercom, and had merely lingered in the foyer, her shoulders resting lightly against the wall.
When Kora knocks, Imogen straightens, pausing briefly before reaching for the deadbolt. It clicks softly before the kinwoman opens the door, stepping aside to let the other in.
Kora had not had the opportunity to enter or exit this way before. She had taken the Shadow, The foyer is on the edge of spacious, boasting a closet, a small side table, upon which a small bowl rests, holding Imogen's keys, her purse sitting beside it.
The kinwoman is dressed in jeans, a loosely fitted blouse. Her feet are bare, her hair is up.
"C'mon in," she says, by way of greeting, letting the Fenrir enter before she shuts the door behind her.
[Kora] "Thanks, doc." Kora returns the greeting quietly. Her hands remain in her front pockets, fitted up to the second knuckle, as she steps past the kinswoman into the spacious foyer, then precedes her into the spare living room of the expensive condominium. She is clean tonight, Kora. There is no blood on her hands; there is no blood on her thighs; the black cotton t-shirt is soft, and smells of some chemical company's idea of rain.
It smells nothing like rain, which has always smelled to her like sorrow, ozone and metal musk, some deeper suggestion of the falling sky written directly into the scent. Kora - call her Sorrow, now. Tonight, it is still her name - stands in the center of the living room, her shoulders and spine straight, her body taut underneath. The scent of sawdust in her hair.
She does not sit; not here. Instead, she stands in the center of the living room, a raw presence, for all that the moon is falling dark above them, leaving the beast in her quiet as it will ever be. She stands in the center of the living room, watches Imogen as she walks back in, the quiet slap of bare feet on the hardwood floor at odds with the heavier sound Kora's black boots make as she walks.
"We went to the Battleground," Kora's eyes are dark on the doctor's face, watching the minute movement of muscle beneath the other woman's face, feeling the inexorable pull of the woman's breeding somewhere deep in the feral part of her. "If you still want to hear the story, I'll tell it."
[Imogen] She follows Kora into the living room, but unlike her, does take a seat. It is not quite a comfortable one. She moves past the Garou and steps around the coffee table before perching herself on the arm of one of her leather sofa chairs.
She sits poised, one leg drawn in, the other stretched out, her point of balance, and watches the Fenrir. As Kora speaks, and her gaze latches unerringly on Imogen, the doctor keeps her own attention fastened. She does not flinch and does not turn away.
With her eyes on Imogen, Kora can perhaps catch the nuances of the woman's expression. The tension at the edge of her mouth, the tension at her brow. The kinwoman undoubtedly wears make up - the subtle kind which looks as much like her own skin as anything. Still, a day's wear has allowed the dark commas beneath her eyes to show through.
It has been a long week.
She is given a choice, Imogen is. In the end, she nods. She wants to hear the story.
[Kora] "You're familiar with the church," Kora begins. Her voice is low and rich; still, there is something hoarse beneath it. It is all but indetectable, except at the bottom of her register, the resonance dampened, burred. She waits just long enough for Imogen to affirm that she is. That she is familiar with the church; that she herself remembers it. " - in the Hivelands. It remains pristine, but the cursed ones and their allies built another structure on the adjoining land. A community center, with day care, a cafeteria, classes and a swimming pool, sports courts, a gym. The food was tainted; and the water, everything."
This is the story she tells.
"Just before the last full moon, the Sept sent scouts to the Church in the Hivelands, to investigate the Elk Grove Community Center. They discovered something dark in the basement on the other side, in the spirit-world - that's all Kemp-rhya and the rest knew, going in.
"They went in blind; through a long dark tunnel leading downward, black and foul. The air was humid, too. There were six of them. Kemp. Another ragabash, three full moons, and a theurge. My Alpha took point as they crept downward. There was a skirmish part-way down, a sentry spirit that they felled before it could sound the alarum." She says the word like that: alarum - as if it were a thing, a call. "Then they came to the mouth of the tunnel, where it opened into the basement. The place was thick with bane-spirits. There were a pair of cursed ones, too - pulling more bane-spirits out of the mouth of a vortex - a Wyrmhole - regularly birthing new banes.
"Kemp-rhya was a Rotagar; he was absolutely hidden as he crept to the mouth of the tunnel, surveyed the scene that the scouts before had failed to discover. Banshee followed him, stuck close to his side.
"She did not have his skill, though.
She was visible to all."
[Silence] A small improvement: he doesn't simply appear inside Imogen's apartment. He appears out in the goddamn hall and thumps on the door with the heel of his hand.
[Imogen] You're familiar with the church, Kora begins and waits for Imogen's response.
"I am."
Sorrow continues. Imogen listens.
A frown marks her brow as the Galliard pauses in her telling. "And then?" she prompts, though one imagines she can guess. that Banshee was seen. That Kemp is dead. It occurs to her that this is pointless. She does not care how or why this happened.
It doesn't matter.
The sound of pounding on her door turns her head. The heel of a palm is different than the rap of the knuckles, the sound more muted, broader.
"Excuse me."
Absent, to Kora, as the kinwoman gets to her feet and crosses to the foyer. After checking the peephole, she reaches for the doorknob. It is worthy of note that she had not locked the door after Kora's entrance. There is no sound of undoing the deadbolt, before she opens the door.
"Rohl," she greets him, stepping aside.
[Silence] At least there's this. He's cleaned up. He's changed out of the clothes that smelled of death. Washed, bathed, even razored his jaw. He looks lean and hungry, as though the rage that fills the room to the brim has eaten a hole in him.
"'Gen." He looks past her. "Kora." Not much surprise there.
[Kora] "Silence-rhya." Kora returns, standing in the middle of Imogen's living room, her hands in her pockets, down to the second knuckle. Her narrow-shouldered frame is cheated toward the door as Imogen pads down the hall to answer the pounding knock. She remains still, standing there - her hands forgotten in her pockets now - as Silence enters the room. She does not call him his human name. She cannot contain him in his human name.
Her wide mouth is still; a new tension has entered her frame, the line of her lean body taut beneath her dedicated clothing - black t-shirt, PIXIES across it in white letters - jeans, black boots laced up her calves. Her hair is pulled back in a French braid, clean - her dark eyes stark and wary, flashing over the Athro's face - the barest impression of his eyes entering her mind's eye - before leveling out somewhere between his chin and his mouth. She breathes out, turns stiffly to Imogen, lifting her gaze in the kinswoman's direction, then - a cool reservoir of breeding against the brutal rage burning through Silence, singing in the air.
"I can come back, Doc. If you'd like." Then, back to Silence. " - or stay, -rhya. If you want to hear this now, too."
[Imogen] Silence's entrance has created an abrupt change in the air. His rage sucks oxygen from the living room. It shakes what air is left, vibrating it until the very atoms seem to irritate the skin.
Imogen lets him past her as he steps in, turning away to shut the door. The rage at her back digs into her spine, igniting the nerves.
He enters the living room, and she is not far behind.
Her breeding must be a sweet balm compared to the rage. Or perhaps, worse, just another sensation to be felt in a cacophony of irritating sensations.
Kora addresses them both, and Imogen pauses before saying simply, "She and her pack went to the Battleground to see Kemp's death," to Silence, by way of further explanation. The explanation comes more or less easily. It would not have, even eight months ago.
"She's here to say what happened."
[Silence] Silence says nothing at all. His eyes follow Kora when she asks if she should stay or go. Imogen when she explains Kora's presence. Back to Kora, then, assessing, penetrating, until finally he nods -- a short, upward jerk of the chin.
He doesn't sit. Or even take his shoes off. He comes in just past the foyer and leans his shoulder to the wall, listening.
[Kora] Kora repeats herself. Imogen hears, again, the prologue. The church; the community center; the taint. The scouts who investigated, and who failed to find the Wyrmhole. The team that Wyrmbreaker assembled to descend into the basement. This time, though, she names the Garou who followed her Alpha into the tunnel, who descended into the blind heat of the basement: Ankle-biter. Banshee. sklora-Myrgen. Cold Death. Moving Mountain. The names are always strange in human tongue. Otherwise, the words she chooses are spare, plain and direct.
She tells Silence the same story she told Imogen, her narrow body turned toward him, her dark eyes respectfully lowered. Even so, it is difficult for her to look at him and see human skin; and see how human skin can contain so much rage.
The precipice is the same. When the retelling of the prologue is finished, Kora shifts her body language subtly to include Imogen in the telling. Her dark eyes move, minutely, from the kinswoman's direct gaze to Silence's face, without meeting his eyes - or even coming close.
"They saw Banshee at the mouth of the tunnel, and charged. There were two cursed Garou; four bane-spirits, more being born from the Wyrmhole. The cursed Garou charged at Banshee. Mama Ankle-biter was in the center of the group, the only theurge. She began summoning a spirit to close the Wyrmhole, and the banes swarmed her. My Alpha took down one of the cursed Garou. Banshee and Cold Death killed another - not before he ordered the bane-spirits to kill the Theurge. One of the banes attacked Moving Mountain, but the rest clawed toward Mama Ankle-biter.
"sklora-Myrgen and my Alpha threw themselves between the bane-spirits and the theurge. sklora-Myrgen took the brunt of two attacks, and was badly wounded.
"My Alpha took four blows. The first two did not touch him. The third wounded him.
"The fourth killed him. He did not rise."
She pauses, her generous mouth flattened, her body tense, her hands still sunk in the terribly ordinary pockets of her worn jeans. There is a flare of anger corded somewhere in the undertone of the words as she speaks them, as the story of the fight unfolds. It is the spark and hiss of a match; the flare of a candle, dwarfed by the modi's rage - but it is there underneath it all.
"We fought the battle five times. Once as they fought it. Then: four more. We each intercepted the blow that killed our Alpha.
"It killed War-Handed and Gut-Song. Blood Summons and I survived, but fell unconscious from the force of it.
"The rest fought better after that. They closed the Wyrmhole, eventually.
"That's the story."
[Imogen] Silence leans against the wall, barely inside Imogen's condominium, making no attempt to make himself at home.
It is perhaps a little disconcerting. Two Garou, both with their shoes on, both standing in her living room. And Imogen, crossing the room, her body slight, breakable and fragile.
She takes her seat again on the arm of the sofa chair, turned toward the Garou. She watches Kora while she speaks. She does not frown outright, but there is a tension to her brow, to her jaw, her mouth as the Skald speaks.
There is silence at the end, a stillness. Then Imogen stirs, straightening. Kora is more easily in her line of sight than Decker - she looks at the former, only.
"Thank-you."
Simple enough.
[Silence] Shrouded in so much rage, Silence is almost divorced from it; the way the sun will flame out a camera and leave a paradoxical darkness in its place. The heat-lightning of his primal presence crackles and lances around him, but the modi himself is expressionless, listening, his lips now and then twitching as though he wants to snarl. When he first heard of Kemp's death,
(James was freshly dead in the back of the Barracuda.)
he flung everything in his den at the walls, crushed it all, broke it. For a moment that same promise of violence is in the air, curdling it, turning it hard and cutting as blades. Near at hand: he could throw the kitchen table. He could batter the stereo system to plastic and metal in one or two punches. He could --
do what he does, which is nothing at all. Which is: to shift his weight faintly. Close and open his eyes, a slow blink. He knows he should feel grief. He knows he should mourn the man who was once a packmate to him. Who was a brother to him still; whom he loved, though he didn't even fucking like him. He knows he should have something more to say, something to ask. He should tease the details out. He should ask for the specifics. Who. When. Where. What did they do. Every iota. Every minutiae. Everything, until he can reconstruct the scene in his mind; until he can judge for himself
who was right
and who was wrong
and what the sum total of Kemp's death meant.
None of this comes to mind. He cannot summon the thoughts, the feelings. Silence doesn't say anything after all. He snarls -- a short, rough, coughing noise spat from a human throat, through bared human teeth. Then he levers off the wall, turns on his heel. The door's jerked open too fast. The tongue catches the groove and shakes the frame. When it slams shut behind him, it rattles the windows in their panes.
They can hear his heavy footsteps going down the hall toward the elevator. Short visit.
[Kora] This is what she does: witness the solar flare of rage around Silence, her eyes open, just averted from the center of the whirlwind. Her jaw is set, her lips drawn back against her teeth. Kora does not close her eyes, though she holds herself with the taut expectancy of someone anticipating a blow when he coughs out an inhuman snarl through his too-human through.
Then, the opens and slams shut. The windows rattle; in her mind's eye, in her imagination, the building itself shakes. That's how some would tell it - the tower itself shook from the force of his rage - though she is too plainspoken for such histrionics.
The truth is enough.
The truth is worse.
"Doc," - this is later, after the windows have stopped rattling, when the oxygen has returned to the room. When the rage that hung around them like a cloud of combustable sawdust awaiting the errant spark it requires to explode has leaked away. Kora turns stiffly back to the kinswoman, her muscles aching from the tense line in which she has held herself since she arrived, a different sort of afterburn. Her voice is quiet. It always is. " - the rite is tomorrow. I'll come for you, if you want to attend. Or take you later, after it is done, if you prefer that."
[Imogen] Her attention had turned as Decker had snarled, her eyes had followed him when he stalked toward the door. She had not flinched as the door had been whipped open, and slammed shut.
One of her neighbours is currently home and having a very bad night. Tense and unsure why, they turn on the television and try to find something cheerful to watch to cure them of hteir insomnia and soothe them from bad dreams.
Kora speaks, and the doctor turns to look at the Skald.
"I thought of something else yeh might want to burn with him," she says, as she gets to her feet. "Eggrolls."
A shadow of a pause, barely more than a breath. "I'll attend the rite."
[Kora] Her acknowledgment is spare, a faint tip of her pale head, the sweep of the lights across the crown, the intricate interweaving of the French braid in which she has secured it. Then, wetting her lower lip with the tip of her tongue, Kora reaches into the hip pocket of her blue jeans, pulls out a folded piece of paper, holds it out to Imogen as she rises.
"I found a letter among his things. If you'd like to read it." The paper is held between her fore and middle finger. If Imogen makes no move for it, it disappears quickly.
[Imogen] To refuse to attend the rite is weakness. She will attend, not because she wants to, but to say that she will not is tantamount to saying that she cannot bear to face it.
To refuse to read the letter would be much the same.
There is much that Imogen does simply because to do anything else would be weak.
She refuses to be that.
So, after a moment of looking at the letter held in Kora's hand, she steps forward, reaching out to take it. She does not open it or even glance at the handwriting, visible through the paper, and on one side where Kemp had labelled it.
"Give it back to you tomorrow, shall I?"
[Kora] "Sure." Kora says, quiet. Releasing the paper easily, looking away, toward the dark windows, their reflections evident on the rattled panes of glass as she does so. Her hands return to her pockets, the front ones, slide in to the first knuckle. " - 'night Doc. I'll see you tomorrow."
Then she steps neatly away from the kinswoman, circling the spare furniture of the living room to foyer.
She lets herself out, Kora.
Neither the windows nor the door rattle in their frames.
The door snicks quietly closed behind her.
[Imogen] "Goodnight," Imogen answers, simply. She lets Kora see herself out.
Alone in her condominium, she puts down the letter on the coffee table, unopened. Her fingers push through her hair. The elevator has long since risen to retrieve the Fenrir Skald, and begun its descent.
A little later, she leaves the apartment, herself, the weight of her guns cool against her back, settling her coat about her body as she steps out into the hallway, locking the door before heading for the lifts.
Kora is not wearing a jacket, though. She is dressed sparely, in jeans and a t-shirt, so freshly washed that the scent of the detergent used to clean them is stronger than her own scent woven through the fibers. She is a stark, tall thing in the wash of lights in the lobby, her pale hair pulled back, plaited tonight, the braid tucked under and secured with elastic at the end. Black cotton against her pale skin, dark bracelets at her wrists, dark choker at her throat, her dark eyes and expressive mouth still tonight.
Her reflection stares back at her all the way up in the elevator, but she does not watch herself back. There are still shadows in her eyes, through the raw immediacy has gone. When she reaches the door to the apartment (counting back, remembering the singularity of the structure on the other side, the sticky consistency of the wrapped webbing, the spare weaver's song of the place), she knocks twice, then slides her hands into the front pockets of her jeans, waiting, quiet.
[Imogen] There is not a long wait before Imogen opens the door. She had already gotten up to answer the intercom, and had merely lingered in the foyer, her shoulders resting lightly against the wall.
When Kora knocks, Imogen straightens, pausing briefly before reaching for the deadbolt. It clicks softly before the kinwoman opens the door, stepping aside to let the other in.
Kora had not had the opportunity to enter or exit this way before. She had taken the Shadow, The foyer is on the edge of spacious, boasting a closet, a small side table, upon which a small bowl rests, holding Imogen's keys, her purse sitting beside it.
The kinwoman is dressed in jeans, a loosely fitted blouse. Her feet are bare, her hair is up.
"C'mon in," she says, by way of greeting, letting the Fenrir enter before she shuts the door behind her.
[Kora] "Thanks, doc." Kora returns the greeting quietly. Her hands remain in her front pockets, fitted up to the second knuckle, as she steps past the kinswoman into the spacious foyer, then precedes her into the spare living room of the expensive condominium. She is clean tonight, Kora. There is no blood on her hands; there is no blood on her thighs; the black cotton t-shirt is soft, and smells of some chemical company's idea of rain.
It smells nothing like rain, which has always smelled to her like sorrow, ozone and metal musk, some deeper suggestion of the falling sky written directly into the scent. Kora - call her Sorrow, now. Tonight, it is still her name - stands in the center of the living room, her shoulders and spine straight, her body taut underneath. The scent of sawdust in her hair.
She does not sit; not here. Instead, she stands in the center of the living room, a raw presence, for all that the moon is falling dark above them, leaving the beast in her quiet as it will ever be. She stands in the center of the living room, watches Imogen as she walks back in, the quiet slap of bare feet on the hardwood floor at odds with the heavier sound Kora's black boots make as she walks.
"We went to the Battleground," Kora's eyes are dark on the doctor's face, watching the minute movement of muscle beneath the other woman's face, feeling the inexorable pull of the woman's breeding somewhere deep in the feral part of her. "If you still want to hear the story, I'll tell it."
[Imogen] She follows Kora into the living room, but unlike her, does take a seat. It is not quite a comfortable one. She moves past the Garou and steps around the coffee table before perching herself on the arm of one of her leather sofa chairs.
She sits poised, one leg drawn in, the other stretched out, her point of balance, and watches the Fenrir. As Kora speaks, and her gaze latches unerringly on Imogen, the doctor keeps her own attention fastened. She does not flinch and does not turn away.
With her eyes on Imogen, Kora can perhaps catch the nuances of the woman's expression. The tension at the edge of her mouth, the tension at her brow. The kinwoman undoubtedly wears make up - the subtle kind which looks as much like her own skin as anything. Still, a day's wear has allowed the dark commas beneath her eyes to show through.
It has been a long week.
She is given a choice, Imogen is. In the end, she nods. She wants to hear the story.
[Kora] "You're familiar with the church," Kora begins. Her voice is low and rich; still, there is something hoarse beneath it. It is all but indetectable, except at the bottom of her register, the resonance dampened, burred. She waits just long enough for Imogen to affirm that she is. That she is familiar with the church; that she herself remembers it. " - in the Hivelands. It remains pristine, but the cursed ones and their allies built another structure on the adjoining land. A community center, with day care, a cafeteria, classes and a swimming pool, sports courts, a gym. The food was tainted; and the water, everything."
This is the story she tells.
"Just before the last full moon, the Sept sent scouts to the Church in the Hivelands, to investigate the Elk Grove Community Center. They discovered something dark in the basement on the other side, in the spirit-world - that's all Kemp-rhya and the rest knew, going in.
"They went in blind; through a long dark tunnel leading downward, black and foul. The air was humid, too. There were six of them. Kemp. Another ragabash, three full moons, and a theurge. My Alpha took point as they crept downward. There was a skirmish part-way down, a sentry spirit that they felled before it could sound the alarum." She says the word like that: alarum - as if it were a thing, a call. "Then they came to the mouth of the tunnel, where it opened into the basement. The place was thick with bane-spirits. There were a pair of cursed ones, too - pulling more bane-spirits out of the mouth of a vortex - a Wyrmhole - regularly birthing new banes.
"Kemp-rhya was a Rotagar; he was absolutely hidden as he crept to the mouth of the tunnel, surveyed the scene that the scouts before had failed to discover. Banshee followed him, stuck close to his side.
"She did not have his skill, though.
She was visible to all."
[Silence] A small improvement: he doesn't simply appear inside Imogen's apartment. He appears out in the goddamn hall and thumps on the door with the heel of his hand.
[Imogen] You're familiar with the church, Kora begins and waits for Imogen's response.
"I am."
Sorrow continues. Imogen listens.
A frown marks her brow as the Galliard pauses in her telling. "And then?" she prompts, though one imagines she can guess. that Banshee was seen. That Kemp is dead. It occurs to her that this is pointless. She does not care how or why this happened.
It doesn't matter.
The sound of pounding on her door turns her head. The heel of a palm is different than the rap of the knuckles, the sound more muted, broader.
"Excuse me."
Absent, to Kora, as the kinwoman gets to her feet and crosses to the foyer. After checking the peephole, she reaches for the doorknob. It is worthy of note that she had not locked the door after Kora's entrance. There is no sound of undoing the deadbolt, before she opens the door.
"Rohl," she greets him, stepping aside.
[Silence] At least there's this. He's cleaned up. He's changed out of the clothes that smelled of death. Washed, bathed, even razored his jaw. He looks lean and hungry, as though the rage that fills the room to the brim has eaten a hole in him.
"'Gen." He looks past her. "Kora." Not much surprise there.
[Kora] "Silence-rhya." Kora returns, standing in the middle of Imogen's living room, her hands in her pockets, down to the second knuckle. Her narrow-shouldered frame is cheated toward the door as Imogen pads down the hall to answer the pounding knock. She remains still, standing there - her hands forgotten in her pockets now - as Silence enters the room. She does not call him his human name. She cannot contain him in his human name.
Her wide mouth is still; a new tension has entered her frame, the line of her lean body taut beneath her dedicated clothing - black t-shirt, PIXIES across it in white letters - jeans, black boots laced up her calves. Her hair is pulled back in a French braid, clean - her dark eyes stark and wary, flashing over the Athro's face - the barest impression of his eyes entering her mind's eye - before leveling out somewhere between his chin and his mouth. She breathes out, turns stiffly to Imogen, lifting her gaze in the kinswoman's direction, then - a cool reservoir of breeding against the brutal rage burning through Silence, singing in the air.
"I can come back, Doc. If you'd like." Then, back to Silence. " - or stay, -rhya. If you want to hear this now, too."
[Imogen] Silence's entrance has created an abrupt change in the air. His rage sucks oxygen from the living room. It shakes what air is left, vibrating it until the very atoms seem to irritate the skin.
Imogen lets him past her as he steps in, turning away to shut the door. The rage at her back digs into her spine, igniting the nerves.
He enters the living room, and she is not far behind.
Her breeding must be a sweet balm compared to the rage. Or perhaps, worse, just another sensation to be felt in a cacophony of irritating sensations.
Kora addresses them both, and Imogen pauses before saying simply, "She and her pack went to the Battleground to see Kemp's death," to Silence, by way of further explanation. The explanation comes more or less easily. It would not have, even eight months ago.
"She's here to say what happened."
[Silence] Silence says nothing at all. His eyes follow Kora when she asks if she should stay or go. Imogen when she explains Kora's presence. Back to Kora, then, assessing, penetrating, until finally he nods -- a short, upward jerk of the chin.
He doesn't sit. Or even take his shoes off. He comes in just past the foyer and leans his shoulder to the wall, listening.
[Kora] Kora repeats herself. Imogen hears, again, the prologue. The church; the community center; the taint. The scouts who investigated, and who failed to find the Wyrmhole. The team that Wyrmbreaker assembled to descend into the basement. This time, though, she names the Garou who followed her Alpha into the tunnel, who descended into the blind heat of the basement: Ankle-biter. Banshee. sklora-Myrgen. Cold Death. Moving Mountain. The names are always strange in human tongue. Otherwise, the words she chooses are spare, plain and direct.
She tells Silence the same story she told Imogen, her narrow body turned toward him, her dark eyes respectfully lowered. Even so, it is difficult for her to look at him and see human skin; and see how human skin can contain so much rage.
The precipice is the same. When the retelling of the prologue is finished, Kora shifts her body language subtly to include Imogen in the telling. Her dark eyes move, minutely, from the kinswoman's direct gaze to Silence's face, without meeting his eyes - or even coming close.
"They saw Banshee at the mouth of the tunnel, and charged. There were two cursed Garou; four bane-spirits, more being born from the Wyrmhole. The cursed Garou charged at Banshee. Mama Ankle-biter was in the center of the group, the only theurge. She began summoning a spirit to close the Wyrmhole, and the banes swarmed her. My Alpha took down one of the cursed Garou. Banshee and Cold Death killed another - not before he ordered the bane-spirits to kill the Theurge. One of the banes attacked Moving Mountain, but the rest clawed toward Mama Ankle-biter.
"sklora-Myrgen and my Alpha threw themselves between the bane-spirits and the theurge. sklora-Myrgen took the brunt of two attacks, and was badly wounded.
"My Alpha took four blows. The first two did not touch him. The third wounded him.
"The fourth killed him. He did not rise."
She pauses, her generous mouth flattened, her body tense, her hands still sunk in the terribly ordinary pockets of her worn jeans. There is a flare of anger corded somewhere in the undertone of the words as she speaks them, as the story of the fight unfolds. It is the spark and hiss of a match; the flare of a candle, dwarfed by the modi's rage - but it is there underneath it all.
"We fought the battle five times. Once as they fought it. Then: four more. We each intercepted the blow that killed our Alpha.
"It killed War-Handed and Gut-Song. Blood Summons and I survived, but fell unconscious from the force of it.
"The rest fought better after that. They closed the Wyrmhole, eventually.
"That's the story."
[Imogen] Silence leans against the wall, barely inside Imogen's condominium, making no attempt to make himself at home.
It is perhaps a little disconcerting. Two Garou, both with their shoes on, both standing in her living room. And Imogen, crossing the room, her body slight, breakable and fragile.
She takes her seat again on the arm of the sofa chair, turned toward the Garou. She watches Kora while she speaks. She does not frown outright, but there is a tension to her brow, to her jaw, her mouth as the Skald speaks.
There is silence at the end, a stillness. Then Imogen stirs, straightening. Kora is more easily in her line of sight than Decker - she looks at the former, only.
"Thank-you."
Simple enough.
[Silence] Shrouded in so much rage, Silence is almost divorced from it; the way the sun will flame out a camera and leave a paradoxical darkness in its place. The heat-lightning of his primal presence crackles and lances around him, but the modi himself is expressionless, listening, his lips now and then twitching as though he wants to snarl. When he first heard of Kemp's death,
(James was freshly dead in the back of the Barracuda.)
he flung everything in his den at the walls, crushed it all, broke it. For a moment that same promise of violence is in the air, curdling it, turning it hard and cutting as blades. Near at hand: he could throw the kitchen table. He could batter the stereo system to plastic and metal in one or two punches. He could --
do what he does, which is nothing at all. Which is: to shift his weight faintly. Close and open his eyes, a slow blink. He knows he should feel grief. He knows he should mourn the man who was once a packmate to him. Who was a brother to him still; whom he loved, though he didn't even fucking like him. He knows he should have something more to say, something to ask. He should tease the details out. He should ask for the specifics. Who. When. Where. What did they do. Every iota. Every minutiae. Everything, until he can reconstruct the scene in his mind; until he can judge for himself
who was right
and who was wrong
and what the sum total of Kemp's death meant.
None of this comes to mind. He cannot summon the thoughts, the feelings. Silence doesn't say anything after all. He snarls -- a short, rough, coughing noise spat from a human throat, through bared human teeth. Then he levers off the wall, turns on his heel. The door's jerked open too fast. The tongue catches the groove and shakes the frame. When it slams shut behind him, it rattles the windows in their panes.
They can hear his heavy footsteps going down the hall toward the elevator. Short visit.
[Kora] This is what she does: witness the solar flare of rage around Silence, her eyes open, just averted from the center of the whirlwind. Her jaw is set, her lips drawn back against her teeth. Kora does not close her eyes, though she holds herself with the taut expectancy of someone anticipating a blow when he coughs out an inhuman snarl through his too-human through.
Then, the opens and slams shut. The windows rattle; in her mind's eye, in her imagination, the building itself shakes. That's how some would tell it - the tower itself shook from the force of his rage - though she is too plainspoken for such histrionics.
The truth is enough.
The truth is worse.
"Doc," - this is later, after the windows have stopped rattling, when the oxygen has returned to the room. When the rage that hung around them like a cloud of combustable sawdust awaiting the errant spark it requires to explode has leaked away. Kora turns stiffly back to the kinswoman, her muscles aching from the tense line in which she has held herself since she arrived, a different sort of afterburn. Her voice is quiet. It always is. " - the rite is tomorrow. I'll come for you, if you want to attend. Or take you later, after it is done, if you prefer that."
[Imogen] Her attention had turned as Decker had snarled, her eyes had followed him when he stalked toward the door. She had not flinched as the door had been whipped open, and slammed shut.
One of her neighbours is currently home and having a very bad night. Tense and unsure why, they turn on the television and try to find something cheerful to watch to cure them of hteir insomnia and soothe them from bad dreams.
Kora speaks, and the doctor turns to look at the Skald.
"I thought of something else yeh might want to burn with him," she says, as she gets to her feet. "Eggrolls."
A shadow of a pause, barely more than a breath. "I'll attend the rite."
[Kora] Her acknowledgment is spare, a faint tip of her pale head, the sweep of the lights across the crown, the intricate interweaving of the French braid in which she has secured it. Then, wetting her lower lip with the tip of her tongue, Kora reaches into the hip pocket of her blue jeans, pulls out a folded piece of paper, holds it out to Imogen as she rises.
"I found a letter among his things. If you'd like to read it." The paper is held between her fore and middle finger. If Imogen makes no move for it, it disappears quickly.
[Imogen] To refuse to attend the rite is weakness. She will attend, not because she wants to, but to say that she will not is tantamount to saying that she cannot bear to face it.
To refuse to read the letter would be much the same.
There is much that Imogen does simply because to do anything else would be weak.
She refuses to be that.
So, after a moment of looking at the letter held in Kora's hand, she steps forward, reaching out to take it. She does not open it or even glance at the handwriting, visible through the paper, and on one side where Kemp had labelled it.
"Give it back to you tomorrow, shall I?"
[Kora] "Sure." Kora says, quiet. Releasing the paper easily, looking away, toward the dark windows, their reflections evident on the rattled panes of glass as she does so. Her hands return to her pockets, the front ones, slide in to the first knuckle. " - 'night Doc. I'll see you tomorrow."
Then she steps neatly away from the kinswoman, circling the spare furniture of the living room to foyer.
She lets herself out, Kora.
Neither the windows nor the door rattle in their frames.
The door snicks quietly closed behind her.
[Imogen] "Goodnight," Imogen answers, simply. She lets Kora see herself out.
Alone in her condominium, she puts down the letter on the coffee table, unopened. Her fingers push through her hair. The elevator has long since risen to retrieve the Fenrir Skald, and begun its descent.
A little later, she leaves the apartment, herself, the weight of her guns cool against her back, settling her coat about her body as she steps out into the hallway, locking the door before heading for the lifts.
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