[Sorrow] [Kora]
Kora's response is a brief, clear laugh, appreciative of her Alpha's decisiveness and enthusiasm. The suggestion of lightness remains in her shoulders and her eyes much longer than it lingers in her throat, a neat sort of tension tying one narrow shoulder to the other, along the sloping archicture of muscle and bone.
"She doesn't," the confirmation is quiet, " - have a pack. She brought her family, though. Four kids and a pair of sisters, all kin. Seemed solid, though - grounded, you know what I mean? I think that's a smart choice, boss."
The light cuts neatly, scored along the planes of her face, patterned reflections from the lights lining the park's jogging path. Her clothes are dark with damp, now, and Joe is soaked, too - neither seems to take much notice.
[Joe Holst] Clothes slick themselves, drooping against the boiling war and drug wrought frame of the young Modi. Rain leaks into his boots, that flight jacket must weigh thirty pounds by now. But just like Sorrow, the boy doesn't really notice. Not truly. They wade every day through the exhalations and smog of humans who pack themselves like sardines.. next to that olfactory and auditory noise, rain is a blessing.
The limp orange lights, few and far between, gleam against Joe's bald head as he nods twice, warming to the subject. Things being only himself and a woman closer than a sister, the bullish skinhead is allowed, somehow. Allowed to drop the facade of calm and control that grows more tattered as Luna's smile grows to a roaring mouth.. everything is Beast beneath. From the not quite casual way he holds his arms to the cant of his head, Joe's visage is a primal, nightmare giving thing. A joyous one, though. Something shines in his chest. A hard, fever- bright want for what this time of the month promises to bring all Fenris' children.
Glistening, gapped teeth flash into a smile that is just a hair shy of mania- it is gone as soon as it comes, leaving thready deliberation in its wake.
"Dese kin aint crazy, ah they?" His hairless chin tilts toward the ground as he answers his own question aloud. "Nah... she's Forseti... dey'll be okay." Half of the statement is hope.
"Got a buncha kids tew, huh?" He sounds impressed. Pleased by this sign of tradition. It fits 'The Way 'Things Ought to Be' as hammered into place in the Fenrir's skull. He smiles at the water.
[Sorrow] "Yeah," Sorrow confirms, her head canting aslant, the rain making a damp weight of the hoodie. The line of the jacket is distorted by the knot of her hair at the back of her head. In profile, it gives her a lumpen look, misshapen and strange. The illusion disappears when she looks back at her Alpha, watching as the Beast emerges from the mask that he wears over it, to keep himself inside himself, to be in the world into which they have been given. " - she came down when she heard of our recent losses, and brought the brood because she won't be parted from the kids. Says that they are Fenrir, and bred for war and hardship."
Her attention is so close, so direct, so watchful that it cannot be human. Humans are trained against looking this closely at one another; there is something about the space they build for themselves, even out in the wind and the rain, even out in the great public spaces they have build for themselves, even pressed like sardines into their tin-can subways, into their clubs and bars - that demands a sort of casual privacy.
Look at me, people say, with their bodies and their eyes, but not too long.
She looks longer than that; his shining fever, the promise of the waxing moon above infects her, too, is magnified by his presence and the totembond they share.
"She said something," once, she looks away - out behind her, across the dark lake, darker for the rain slanting across it, interrupting the reflective surface. " - about how having a mate and a family strengthens you. Gives you more purpose, that sort of thing. I don't think the kids will be any trouble, or the kin. Good example for those we have here, too.
"Which - " she looks back at him then, her features more tense than they had been moments before, looks at his face, just below his eyes. "Boss." The title she'd adopted from Joe and adapted for Kemp, brought back to the new Alpha. The word changes things. " - there's a kinsman I think I want to claim."
[Joe Holst] Joe's eyebrows climb innocently, but openly, up his forhead. The fact is writ into his skin- literally and figuratively- he's certain she means either Matthew Oliver or John Thornton. Bright, gleaming blue eyes swivel to capture her face again as a corner of his mouth twitches into a perfunctory smile.
"Yeah? Groovy. I hope yew don' mean John dough.. cause theah's a heap uh trouble what comes widdim."
Joe drops his fists into his pockets again, bends one knee to stand more relaxed. The bull of a kid pauses in his gum chewing, the better to hear her name this kinsman who's caught her eye. His face remains expectant. Waiting with what amounts to patience in a creature such as him.
[Sorrow] "No," she responds, too tense to laugh, though the impression of laughter flashes brief and bright in her eyes. Her spine is forward, then, her forearms planted on her thighs. The stretch pulls the hood back, revealing the crown of her pale head, the pattern of raindrops slanting down her cheeks. "It's not John."
Then: " - he's kin to the Furies."
[Joe Holst] At first, it can only really be called confused blinking. For those few moments, A strange medley of emotions wars in a wartorn face. His attention is gone for a while. Glassy eyes swing unseeing from Kora, out over the water, then back again. Each ratcheting of Joe's thick neck puckers the vivid scarlet streak of a dyed battlescar that rises ropy up the side of his neck to cradle the left ear. He itches at it. Sometimes, in the wet, it starts to ache.
Curious, the things one notices and when.
Eventually, Joe's eyes seek to focus on Kora's face again. Swiveling from one of her eyes to the other as he struggles to grasp the situation. Swallows the shock, to find that blankness replaced with curiosity, then resentment- the taste of something foul.. Joe's prematurely hard but youthfully smooth face eventually resolves itself into betrayal. A deep hurt.. the sort that can grow unhinged at the best of times.
Hard hands drop from his pockets as though forgotten. Fingers twitching at his sides. His gaze passes across the lines of Kora's face as though reading a map that could show the way out of this... strangeness that billows through him.
[Sorrow] Kora sits up them, sits back straightening her spine, letting the hood of her cotton jacket fall away from her pale head. There's no breeding in her, none of the fine old blood that shows itself in so many of their tribe and their kin, the heroes who have expressed themselves again and again through the generations.
The rain falls heedless over them. She lifts her face to it, then looks back at her alpha. More revealing than his expression is the sense of betrayal that seems to rebound across the link that they share, as if she crawled up behind him and clawed him in the back. She is simply - tense, wary, alert as the shock turns to blankness, to curiousity. Bile cuts through her mouth when it rises to resentment - but then, in the end, she looks stricken.
And resolute.
"Boss." Her voice is low; she knows how to employ it. Here, the volume is dampened by the rain falling around them. "John Thornton is the only male kin to our tribe, and I don't want him. Oliver was kidnapped again by the Spirals. He's lost to the Hive.
"And Fenris takes the strong, no matter their blood."
[Joe Holst] ...The blinking, eventually becomes very like the shutter of a camera. Eyelids nothing more than a space between stares from sky colored eyes. They snap open, closed again, open.. rapidly. His hands find themselves again. Fingers twitching together rather than wandering across his palms. They're spread, those fingers. Anticipatory for all that he's truly found no more focus. Joe murmurs, half to himself. Assembling what sound like reasons. Ways Kora must have confused herself.
"I know.. I know.. John's weak.. drunk.. dumb as shit.. I heah that Matthew guy was helpin' da Federales, tew.. Ahmean.. shuwah yew don' want eiddah one uh dem.."
He murmurs as she speaks. Trying to find something to hold onto. Something he can grip and say 'here! THIS is the problem! I'll fix it!' the sounds are almost sub- vocal. Only barely reaching the ears, though the heartfelt anguish slowly occludes itself behind a rising red mist.
"Its gotta.. be lonely, like. Ahmean.. deah aint many good kin around.. nobody what's worth it.. We'll find yew one. A good one like Drew. Yew don' gotta t'ink its always gonna-"
Its when she reaches the part about Fenris.. that's when shit seems to go a bit sideways.
The savage boy stops suddenly. Even jerks. A tremor rippling through his monstrous frame that grows, settles into the fibers of his muscles. His face had ratcheted back as though she'd punched him in the face.
He turns toward Kora. The motions carry the sort of waiting, reptilian power that doesn't need to hurry. The slow turn of a warship bringing guns to bear. Joe's chin dips toward the ground, he watches her from under his brow, and the haze in his eyes would seem to indicate he's not quite aware of any of it happening.
"Don't."
He swallows saliva. His voice is startlingly sure. Calm. Even grounded.
"Don' yew try ta share dis wit Fenris. Don' use dat name ta build an excuse feh... dis. Evah."
Motionless, and waiting.
[Sorrow] Sorrow goes still, alert, intent with it as her Alpha's meandering promises - we'll find a good kin for you, someone that's worth it, it won't always be like it is - of some future where there is someone worth of her blood and her tribe, rather than a drunk and a fool, stolen away by the cursed ones not once, but twice - dead now, or corrupted, fallen, used and broken.
- and then the drift resolves itself, jerks himself to alertness; she can see the way the threat coalesces itself in his body. Her own stiffens in answer, the way a boxer's body tenses before the first blow.
There is a sort of concession in the cut of her glance as he cautions her to stop, as he warns her not to take Fenris' name in vain. Kora closes her eyes.
"You're right," she admits, the texture of her rich voice erased by the tension in it. " - I won't. Fenris hasn't claimed him.
"I want to."
Kora's response is a brief, clear laugh, appreciative of her Alpha's decisiveness and enthusiasm. The suggestion of lightness remains in her shoulders and her eyes much longer than it lingers in her throat, a neat sort of tension tying one narrow shoulder to the other, along the sloping archicture of muscle and bone.
"She doesn't," the confirmation is quiet, " - have a pack. She brought her family, though. Four kids and a pair of sisters, all kin. Seemed solid, though - grounded, you know what I mean? I think that's a smart choice, boss."
The light cuts neatly, scored along the planes of her face, patterned reflections from the lights lining the park's jogging path. Her clothes are dark with damp, now, and Joe is soaked, too - neither seems to take much notice.
[Joe Holst] Clothes slick themselves, drooping against the boiling war and drug wrought frame of the young Modi. Rain leaks into his boots, that flight jacket must weigh thirty pounds by now. But just like Sorrow, the boy doesn't really notice. Not truly. They wade every day through the exhalations and smog of humans who pack themselves like sardines.. next to that olfactory and auditory noise, rain is a blessing.
The limp orange lights, few and far between, gleam against Joe's bald head as he nods twice, warming to the subject. Things being only himself and a woman closer than a sister, the bullish skinhead is allowed, somehow. Allowed to drop the facade of calm and control that grows more tattered as Luna's smile grows to a roaring mouth.. everything is Beast beneath. From the not quite casual way he holds his arms to the cant of his head, Joe's visage is a primal, nightmare giving thing. A joyous one, though. Something shines in his chest. A hard, fever- bright want for what this time of the month promises to bring all Fenris' children.
Glistening, gapped teeth flash into a smile that is just a hair shy of mania- it is gone as soon as it comes, leaving thready deliberation in its wake.
"Dese kin aint crazy, ah they?" His hairless chin tilts toward the ground as he answers his own question aloud. "Nah... she's Forseti... dey'll be okay." Half of the statement is hope.
"Got a buncha kids tew, huh?" He sounds impressed. Pleased by this sign of tradition. It fits 'The Way 'Things Ought to Be' as hammered into place in the Fenrir's skull. He smiles at the water.
[Sorrow] "Yeah," Sorrow confirms, her head canting aslant, the rain making a damp weight of the hoodie. The line of the jacket is distorted by the knot of her hair at the back of her head. In profile, it gives her a lumpen look, misshapen and strange. The illusion disappears when she looks back at her Alpha, watching as the Beast emerges from the mask that he wears over it, to keep himself inside himself, to be in the world into which they have been given. " - she came down when she heard of our recent losses, and brought the brood because she won't be parted from the kids. Says that they are Fenrir, and bred for war and hardship."
Her attention is so close, so direct, so watchful that it cannot be human. Humans are trained against looking this closely at one another; there is something about the space they build for themselves, even out in the wind and the rain, even out in the great public spaces they have build for themselves, even pressed like sardines into their tin-can subways, into their clubs and bars - that demands a sort of casual privacy.
Look at me, people say, with their bodies and their eyes, but not too long.
She looks longer than that; his shining fever, the promise of the waxing moon above infects her, too, is magnified by his presence and the totembond they share.
"She said something," once, she looks away - out behind her, across the dark lake, darker for the rain slanting across it, interrupting the reflective surface. " - about how having a mate and a family strengthens you. Gives you more purpose, that sort of thing. I don't think the kids will be any trouble, or the kin. Good example for those we have here, too.
"Which - " she looks back at him then, her features more tense than they had been moments before, looks at his face, just below his eyes. "Boss." The title she'd adopted from Joe and adapted for Kemp, brought back to the new Alpha. The word changes things. " - there's a kinsman I think I want to claim."
[Joe Holst] Joe's eyebrows climb innocently, but openly, up his forhead. The fact is writ into his skin- literally and figuratively- he's certain she means either Matthew Oliver or John Thornton. Bright, gleaming blue eyes swivel to capture her face again as a corner of his mouth twitches into a perfunctory smile.
"Yeah? Groovy. I hope yew don' mean John dough.. cause theah's a heap uh trouble what comes widdim."
Joe drops his fists into his pockets again, bends one knee to stand more relaxed. The bull of a kid pauses in his gum chewing, the better to hear her name this kinsman who's caught her eye. His face remains expectant. Waiting with what amounts to patience in a creature such as him.
[Sorrow] "No," she responds, too tense to laugh, though the impression of laughter flashes brief and bright in her eyes. Her spine is forward, then, her forearms planted on her thighs. The stretch pulls the hood back, revealing the crown of her pale head, the pattern of raindrops slanting down her cheeks. "It's not John."
Then: " - he's kin to the Furies."
[Joe Holst] At first, it can only really be called confused blinking. For those few moments, A strange medley of emotions wars in a wartorn face. His attention is gone for a while. Glassy eyes swing unseeing from Kora, out over the water, then back again. Each ratcheting of Joe's thick neck puckers the vivid scarlet streak of a dyed battlescar that rises ropy up the side of his neck to cradle the left ear. He itches at it. Sometimes, in the wet, it starts to ache.
Curious, the things one notices and when.
Eventually, Joe's eyes seek to focus on Kora's face again. Swiveling from one of her eyes to the other as he struggles to grasp the situation. Swallows the shock, to find that blankness replaced with curiosity, then resentment- the taste of something foul.. Joe's prematurely hard but youthfully smooth face eventually resolves itself into betrayal. A deep hurt.. the sort that can grow unhinged at the best of times.
Hard hands drop from his pockets as though forgotten. Fingers twitching at his sides. His gaze passes across the lines of Kora's face as though reading a map that could show the way out of this... strangeness that billows through him.
[Sorrow] Kora sits up them, sits back straightening her spine, letting the hood of her cotton jacket fall away from her pale head. There's no breeding in her, none of the fine old blood that shows itself in so many of their tribe and their kin, the heroes who have expressed themselves again and again through the generations.
The rain falls heedless over them. She lifts her face to it, then looks back at her alpha. More revealing than his expression is the sense of betrayal that seems to rebound across the link that they share, as if she crawled up behind him and clawed him in the back. She is simply - tense, wary, alert as the shock turns to blankness, to curiousity. Bile cuts through her mouth when it rises to resentment - but then, in the end, she looks stricken.
And resolute.
"Boss." Her voice is low; she knows how to employ it. Here, the volume is dampened by the rain falling around them. "John Thornton is the only male kin to our tribe, and I don't want him. Oliver was kidnapped again by the Spirals. He's lost to the Hive.
"And Fenris takes the strong, no matter their blood."
[Joe Holst] ...The blinking, eventually becomes very like the shutter of a camera. Eyelids nothing more than a space between stares from sky colored eyes. They snap open, closed again, open.. rapidly. His hands find themselves again. Fingers twitching together rather than wandering across his palms. They're spread, those fingers. Anticipatory for all that he's truly found no more focus. Joe murmurs, half to himself. Assembling what sound like reasons. Ways Kora must have confused herself.
"I know.. I know.. John's weak.. drunk.. dumb as shit.. I heah that Matthew guy was helpin' da Federales, tew.. Ahmean.. shuwah yew don' want eiddah one uh dem.."
He murmurs as she speaks. Trying to find something to hold onto. Something he can grip and say 'here! THIS is the problem! I'll fix it!' the sounds are almost sub- vocal. Only barely reaching the ears, though the heartfelt anguish slowly occludes itself behind a rising red mist.
"Its gotta.. be lonely, like. Ahmean.. deah aint many good kin around.. nobody what's worth it.. We'll find yew one. A good one like Drew. Yew don' gotta t'ink its always gonna-"
Its when she reaches the part about Fenris.. that's when shit seems to go a bit sideways.
The savage boy stops suddenly. Even jerks. A tremor rippling through his monstrous frame that grows, settles into the fibers of his muscles. His face had ratcheted back as though she'd punched him in the face.
He turns toward Kora. The motions carry the sort of waiting, reptilian power that doesn't need to hurry. The slow turn of a warship bringing guns to bear. Joe's chin dips toward the ground, he watches her from under his brow, and the haze in his eyes would seem to indicate he's not quite aware of any of it happening.
"Don't."
He swallows saliva. His voice is startlingly sure. Calm. Even grounded.
"Don' yew try ta share dis wit Fenris. Don' use dat name ta build an excuse feh... dis. Evah."
Motionless, and waiting.
[Sorrow] Sorrow goes still, alert, intent with it as her Alpha's meandering promises - we'll find a good kin for you, someone that's worth it, it won't always be like it is - of some future where there is someone worth of her blood and her tribe, rather than a drunk and a fool, stolen away by the cursed ones not once, but twice - dead now, or corrupted, fallen, used and broken.
- and then the drift resolves itself, jerks himself to alertness; she can see the way the threat coalesces itself in his body. Her own stiffens in answer, the way a boxer's body tenses before the first blow.
There is a sort of concession in the cut of her glance as he cautions her to stop, as he warns her not to take Fenris' name in vain. Kora closes her eyes.
"You're right," she admits, the texture of her rich voice erased by the tension in it. " - I won't. Fenris hasn't claimed him.
"I want to."
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