[Kora] There's a knock on the door of Trent's apartment. It is late at night; well past midnight. The streets are emptied and quiet, the spring night cool, with a promise of rain in the air. There's a certain energy in a sleeping city, a certain kinetic potential in all that breathing space, all those empty veins and arteries, electricity singing along the wires, humming, quiet. The way sound bounces between the buildings, the way footsteps echo on the sidewalk, like something out of an old Hollywood noir movie. There's that promise, in the sleeping city, when the darkest shadows recede and the rain-promising sky is still clear in patches, such that the brightest of the stars in the sky cut through the city's haze, dimly - that promise outside the door, beyond the windows.
So: there is a knock a the door. Late. Later. After midnight, certaintly - although she does not own a watch, and measures time by the passage of the moon across the sky, by the feel of the city around her - but before the most hollow hours of the night. There's still a thread of light beneath his front door; and so - she knocks, quiet enough, considerate of his neighborhoods, all the sleeping people behind all the shuttered doors lining the hall.
[Trent Brumby] The light is on in the living room, though it must be a lamp or something of the kind given the dimness of it, and there's the sound of the television on low, or a movie - possibly the latter given the sounds of gun fire and shouting, and the reeving of engines.
Over it all, he hears the knock at the door and glances that way from where he was lounging on the sofa. He pushes up, rolling feet to the ground and padded quietly across towards the door. Although he has no idea who it is, he opens the lock and pulls open the door just enough to spot the familiar figure, before opening the door further to stand within the opened space.
He's dressed in sweatpants and a t.shirt, feet bare and looking at ease. He's showered since he saw her before, washing off the sweat he had burned off at the gym after leaving her with her Alpha. Trent hadn't been impressed and he's not sure how he's feeling seeing her now. There's something guarded in his expression, which differs from that simple, confident quietness.
He smells of beer when he tells her; "Come in."
[Kora] Kora is standing still in the hallway, her body held straight through her spine, her shoulders just forward. The ceiling fixtures halo the crown of her head with light, then cast cascading shadows, each darker than the next, down her body. Her hands are in her front pockets, both jammed in, the outlines of her knuckles sharp against the denim. She is looking away, down the hallway, at the other closed doors when Trent pulls open the front door to his apartment. There's a beat before she looks back at him, her dark gaze stark, her fine mouth still.
Come in, he says. Her eyes trace the shape of his guarded expression, the stillness behind it. Once, her attention drops; she looks past him at his apartment, the flicker of shadows against the wall, the way the light from the lamps draw shadows across the floor, the familiar scent. Then she looks back at him, meeting his eyes directly. There's no trace of challenge in that look tonight.
"I'm sorry." She tells him this before she has crossed the threshold. Then, unearthing her hands from the front pockets of her jeans, she steps over the threshold, clears the arc of the door and she swings it closed behind her.
[Trent Brumby] He leaves her to close the door, stepping back and giving her room. He doesn't look away from her, like she had him, but held his gaze on her features and the way she's far from direct tonight. There's an apology in the way she doesn't look at him, and while her spine may be straight, he takes her wandering gaze as something like that. "Why?"
Further into the room, he was turning his body from her in preparation of heading back towards the sofa, or towards the kitchen, or somewhere that way, but he's paused so that he can continue to look at her. "Were you expecting it?" He didn't think she was, but he could be wrong. He's been plenty wrong before. It being the violence and the hostility.
[Kora] Inside the apartment, Kora pushes her hands back into the front pockets of her worn, jeans, holding her arms tight against her torso. She follows him a step or two further into his space, not close. Her features are still; not unreadable, not precisely, but stark with a sort of incipient tension that leaves her feeling both spent and jagged, as if someone had been coloring her outside the lines of her body.
Her hair is pulled back into a loose French braid. Her clothes are the familiar, dedicated clothes, the black t-shirt, the worn jeans. The boots, cinched around her calves. The leather cord around her neck is pulled tight against her skin, and there's a subtle flush of color creeping up over the collar of her old tee. It has not reached her face, not yet. "I wasn't - " her voice is low, as tight as her body language. She shakes her head in subtle, unspoken negation. "I wasn't expecting - that."
Briefly, her eyes cut away from him. She is still standing in the foyer, several steps behind him, her eyes dark and troubled, the edge of her anger spent, and spent again. "But I know him. I've known him all along. I've known his extreme views all along. And I just - " her mouth ghosts in the faint outline of a familiar smile. It expression lingers at the edges of her mouth. It does not reach her dark eyes. " - ignored it, all along. I shouldn't have."
[Trent Brumby] When she says she wasn't expecting that, his heavy set shoulders shrug and he turns just after he caught hint of her smile. Joe and his extreme views, as she put it, wasn't really what he saw. To him it was just a Garou, Garou were extreme. He was raised by Black Furies that despised him for what he represented; extreme he was used to. Violence, too. But, somehow, it was always unexpected. "You have nothing to be sorry for."
It's not until he's walked a few steps, about to ask her if she wanted a drink - a beer of his already on the coffee table, pillows from his bed, too, wedged in to the space between the arm of the sofa and the cushions, to create a level lying lounge - when he pauses, quite suddenly. The thought ripping through him.
He turns to look at her, his head tilted in such a way that it makes his eyes sharper under the dark shadow of his brow. "Is this where you've come to tell me that we are no longer seeing each other?" His voice is careful, but if there's a strain there, its not anger or accusation, but a dark sort of wonder; almost an expectation.
[Kora] "This is where - " she begins, provisional, still, behind him, breathing with that slow, shallow sort of expectancy, her mouth open, her own eyes fixed on his as his look sharpens. She is as careful with her voice as he is. She is careful with the words. Each one is a thing itself. There's a stillness to her features; her eyes watchful and clear, her mouth still at the corners, the neutral curve of it. Her hands are still in her pockets, bent at the elbows to accommodate the posture, tight against her body. She is looking for the words, picking them over carefully, the way a child picks stones to throw into the ocean.
The moment shifts. She begins again, "This is where," holding herself back, giving him space in his own space. "I give you that choice."
[Trent Brumby] He looks away from her after that, shaking his head slightly. "I thought I made my choice clear already." Which he had, he had said he would do what it took to be her honoured mate, and he meant it. They weren't said in light jest or in the heat of the moment. He has had plenty of time to think about it over the course of seeing someone not of his Tribe.
"But maybe you should tell me what happens, when I've given up my Tribe for yours, and when you fall, what happens then." His gaze swung back to look at her. "Am I discarded? Tossed back to the Furies? Tell me how that works in your Tribe, so I'm at least prepared for it." There's a little bit of anger there, but he's trying not to direct it at her. This wasn't her fault, not anyone's really, but it still griped at him. Black Furies made his life harder because he was a man, and the Get of Fenris, harder because he was born of another. Nothing was ever fair, he supposes.
[Kora] "You did." She echoes his words, her voice quiet enough that he might have to strain to hear it. That he might get just the shape of them rather than the texture, which has its own underlying tension, lingering in the raw, unspoken edges. He is looking away from her, shaking his head. If he sees or senses the shift of her body language - she pulls her hands from her pockets, something eases in the set of her narrow shoulders, as if she had been writing a letter back to herself with the shape of her body, and now the letter was done.
When his gaze swings back to her, the edge of anger is still in his voice. Underneath his skin, too, in his blood - when he looks back, she's walking toward him, from the shadows of the foyer, her boots heavy on the hardwood floors. "Hey," she replies, when she's close enough to reach out and touch him, to brush her with her flank in a physical gesture of affection that is wholly animal in origin. He's asking about her death, and there's still that edge to her features, a certain liminal sharpness in her gaze that has not dissipated. "I'm sorry. I don't know what happens when I die."
Her chin is lifted, her features open, clear and direct. "My pack might protect you, until they die. If I live long enough to be highly ranked, the Furies might let you be, the Get might honor you as mine even after, claiming you still in my name. I - " another ghost smile. This one has an edge of sorrow to it, the sort that twins with joy. " - wouldn't count on that, though."
Then, a small shrug; there's a certain lack of fluidity in the motion, subtle. "The Furies, though - they can smell your blood. It's written into your skin. They'd want you back." Another pause, then " - you know," quiet, " - at the Sept where I fostered, they expected female kin to take another Garou after they were widowed, if they were wanted. They let the men be, though - after the first death. Let them pick if they wanted; or find another kin."
[Trent Brumby] There's a huff from him, the sort that is the beginning of a dry laugh cut short. It's that sort of disbelief at the irony of the situation, of what he's hearing her say and the sort of life he leads. He tries not to disrespect his Tribe and most of the time he succeeds. Trent is looking down, at the space before him, between them. Another shake of his head is slight, keeping him in silence for another few heartbeats.
The pause is long, but when he looks up and at her, he meets her eyes without that guarded light they had earlier, that has bled away as easily as his anger had threaded through his deep, slightly graveled voice. What he was about to say, to confess, about his blood Tribe, falls away before it reaches his tongue. Ultimately it doesn't matter.
"Okay." Just that, accompanied by a short nod. He searches her eyes. "Okay," repeated more solidly.
[Kora] Her eyes are on him the whole time; and when he looks up again, he meets her face, finds her eyes easily, shining with reflected light. Okay, he says, and her mouth quirks at both corners. The expression deepens when he repeats himself, more solidly.
Then she steps into his space, close enough that he can feel the heat of her body through her clothes; that she can almost taste the scent of his skin, the his soap and bodywash, the scent of his shampoo lingering in his hair. The beer on his breath. She holds her right arm against her body, but reaches up with her left, resting her elbow on the downslope of his shoulder, as she twists her fingers through his hair and pulls his mouth down to hers.
And stop him, a fractional inch or two away. "If we had kids," she says, past tense - had, this provisional self, laid in the ground, burned on a pyre, off to Valhalla. Tomorrow or next week. Next month or next year. Soon, however long it may be. There's a smile on her mouth beneath his, though. He can feel the shape of it beneath his mouth; see the curve of her cheek. " - and you wanted to be a fisherman," her head is tilted up and back to meet his. They are close enough now that he can feel her mouth move against his in a sliding caress as she speaks; that he can breathe in the faint huff of her laughter, silent, " - or a shepherd, you could go to my old Sept."
Then, she pulls him down and kills him, slowly, lingering and thorough, with a langorous sort of intensity that has her pressing her body against his as they kiss.
[Trent Brumby] His shoulders make a good arm rest, nice and solid without being hard and unforgiving. It's flesh and not wood, hard muscle and strong bones. His hair is thick, clean, and longer on the top, the shorter bits sliding through the parts between her fingers softly.
He leans down to kiss her, not just because she's pushing him to do so, and halts when he feels the tightening of fingers in his hair, pulling at his scalp, which silently tell him to do so. Gray eyes flicker up to look for hers, rather then where he had been watching the shape of her mouth, and he watches the way they shine and the light that comes from within them as much as its reflected without.
There hadn't been much of a response, not much of a chance to get anything else out but a small amused sound in the back of his throat before she's kissing him. It's almost as though she can barely get into his house before they are pressing their bodies together, two magnets attracted to one another, helplessly gravitated to bind themselves together, but he is far from complaining. As he kisses her back his hands slide across her lower back, firm in the way they slide over her backside and grip the back of her thighs. She can feel the way his knees begin to bend and his back muscles brace, seconds before he lifts her up to part her legs around his waist and steady her against him.
[Kora] [fade!]
So: there is a knock a the door. Late. Later. After midnight, certaintly - although she does not own a watch, and measures time by the passage of the moon across the sky, by the feel of the city around her - but before the most hollow hours of the night. There's still a thread of light beneath his front door; and so - she knocks, quiet enough, considerate of his neighborhoods, all the sleeping people behind all the shuttered doors lining the hall.
[Trent Brumby] The light is on in the living room, though it must be a lamp or something of the kind given the dimness of it, and there's the sound of the television on low, or a movie - possibly the latter given the sounds of gun fire and shouting, and the reeving of engines.
Over it all, he hears the knock at the door and glances that way from where he was lounging on the sofa. He pushes up, rolling feet to the ground and padded quietly across towards the door. Although he has no idea who it is, he opens the lock and pulls open the door just enough to spot the familiar figure, before opening the door further to stand within the opened space.
He's dressed in sweatpants and a t.shirt, feet bare and looking at ease. He's showered since he saw her before, washing off the sweat he had burned off at the gym after leaving her with her Alpha. Trent hadn't been impressed and he's not sure how he's feeling seeing her now. There's something guarded in his expression, which differs from that simple, confident quietness.
He smells of beer when he tells her; "Come in."
[Kora] Kora is standing still in the hallway, her body held straight through her spine, her shoulders just forward. The ceiling fixtures halo the crown of her head with light, then cast cascading shadows, each darker than the next, down her body. Her hands are in her front pockets, both jammed in, the outlines of her knuckles sharp against the denim. She is looking away, down the hallway, at the other closed doors when Trent pulls open the front door to his apartment. There's a beat before she looks back at him, her dark gaze stark, her fine mouth still.
Come in, he says. Her eyes trace the shape of his guarded expression, the stillness behind it. Once, her attention drops; she looks past him at his apartment, the flicker of shadows against the wall, the way the light from the lamps draw shadows across the floor, the familiar scent. Then she looks back at him, meeting his eyes directly. There's no trace of challenge in that look tonight.
"I'm sorry." She tells him this before she has crossed the threshold. Then, unearthing her hands from the front pockets of her jeans, she steps over the threshold, clears the arc of the door and she swings it closed behind her.
[Trent Brumby] He leaves her to close the door, stepping back and giving her room. He doesn't look away from her, like she had him, but held his gaze on her features and the way she's far from direct tonight. There's an apology in the way she doesn't look at him, and while her spine may be straight, he takes her wandering gaze as something like that. "Why?"
Further into the room, he was turning his body from her in preparation of heading back towards the sofa, or towards the kitchen, or somewhere that way, but he's paused so that he can continue to look at her. "Were you expecting it?" He didn't think she was, but he could be wrong. He's been plenty wrong before. It being the violence and the hostility.
[Kora] Inside the apartment, Kora pushes her hands back into the front pockets of her worn, jeans, holding her arms tight against her torso. She follows him a step or two further into his space, not close. Her features are still; not unreadable, not precisely, but stark with a sort of incipient tension that leaves her feeling both spent and jagged, as if someone had been coloring her outside the lines of her body.
Her hair is pulled back into a loose French braid. Her clothes are the familiar, dedicated clothes, the black t-shirt, the worn jeans. The boots, cinched around her calves. The leather cord around her neck is pulled tight against her skin, and there's a subtle flush of color creeping up over the collar of her old tee. It has not reached her face, not yet. "I wasn't - " her voice is low, as tight as her body language. She shakes her head in subtle, unspoken negation. "I wasn't expecting - that."
Briefly, her eyes cut away from him. She is still standing in the foyer, several steps behind him, her eyes dark and troubled, the edge of her anger spent, and spent again. "But I know him. I've known him all along. I've known his extreme views all along. And I just - " her mouth ghosts in the faint outline of a familiar smile. It expression lingers at the edges of her mouth. It does not reach her dark eyes. " - ignored it, all along. I shouldn't have."
[Trent Brumby] When she says she wasn't expecting that, his heavy set shoulders shrug and he turns just after he caught hint of her smile. Joe and his extreme views, as she put it, wasn't really what he saw. To him it was just a Garou, Garou were extreme. He was raised by Black Furies that despised him for what he represented; extreme he was used to. Violence, too. But, somehow, it was always unexpected. "You have nothing to be sorry for."
It's not until he's walked a few steps, about to ask her if she wanted a drink - a beer of his already on the coffee table, pillows from his bed, too, wedged in to the space between the arm of the sofa and the cushions, to create a level lying lounge - when he pauses, quite suddenly. The thought ripping through him.
He turns to look at her, his head tilted in such a way that it makes his eyes sharper under the dark shadow of his brow. "Is this where you've come to tell me that we are no longer seeing each other?" His voice is careful, but if there's a strain there, its not anger or accusation, but a dark sort of wonder; almost an expectation.
[Kora] "This is where - " she begins, provisional, still, behind him, breathing with that slow, shallow sort of expectancy, her mouth open, her own eyes fixed on his as his look sharpens. She is as careful with her voice as he is. She is careful with the words. Each one is a thing itself. There's a stillness to her features; her eyes watchful and clear, her mouth still at the corners, the neutral curve of it. Her hands are still in her pockets, bent at the elbows to accommodate the posture, tight against her body. She is looking for the words, picking them over carefully, the way a child picks stones to throw into the ocean.
The moment shifts. She begins again, "This is where," holding herself back, giving him space in his own space. "I give you that choice."
[Trent Brumby] He looks away from her after that, shaking his head slightly. "I thought I made my choice clear already." Which he had, he had said he would do what it took to be her honoured mate, and he meant it. They weren't said in light jest or in the heat of the moment. He has had plenty of time to think about it over the course of seeing someone not of his Tribe.
"But maybe you should tell me what happens, when I've given up my Tribe for yours, and when you fall, what happens then." His gaze swung back to look at her. "Am I discarded? Tossed back to the Furies? Tell me how that works in your Tribe, so I'm at least prepared for it." There's a little bit of anger there, but he's trying not to direct it at her. This wasn't her fault, not anyone's really, but it still griped at him. Black Furies made his life harder because he was a man, and the Get of Fenris, harder because he was born of another. Nothing was ever fair, he supposes.
[Kora] "You did." She echoes his words, her voice quiet enough that he might have to strain to hear it. That he might get just the shape of them rather than the texture, which has its own underlying tension, lingering in the raw, unspoken edges. He is looking away from her, shaking his head. If he sees or senses the shift of her body language - she pulls her hands from her pockets, something eases in the set of her narrow shoulders, as if she had been writing a letter back to herself with the shape of her body, and now the letter was done.
When his gaze swings back to her, the edge of anger is still in his voice. Underneath his skin, too, in his blood - when he looks back, she's walking toward him, from the shadows of the foyer, her boots heavy on the hardwood floors. "Hey," she replies, when she's close enough to reach out and touch him, to brush her with her flank in a physical gesture of affection that is wholly animal in origin. He's asking about her death, and there's still that edge to her features, a certain liminal sharpness in her gaze that has not dissipated. "I'm sorry. I don't know what happens when I die."
Her chin is lifted, her features open, clear and direct. "My pack might protect you, until they die. If I live long enough to be highly ranked, the Furies might let you be, the Get might honor you as mine even after, claiming you still in my name. I - " another ghost smile. This one has an edge of sorrow to it, the sort that twins with joy. " - wouldn't count on that, though."
Then, a small shrug; there's a certain lack of fluidity in the motion, subtle. "The Furies, though - they can smell your blood. It's written into your skin. They'd want you back." Another pause, then " - you know," quiet, " - at the Sept where I fostered, they expected female kin to take another Garou after they were widowed, if they were wanted. They let the men be, though - after the first death. Let them pick if they wanted; or find another kin."
[Trent Brumby] There's a huff from him, the sort that is the beginning of a dry laugh cut short. It's that sort of disbelief at the irony of the situation, of what he's hearing her say and the sort of life he leads. He tries not to disrespect his Tribe and most of the time he succeeds. Trent is looking down, at the space before him, between them. Another shake of his head is slight, keeping him in silence for another few heartbeats.
The pause is long, but when he looks up and at her, he meets her eyes without that guarded light they had earlier, that has bled away as easily as his anger had threaded through his deep, slightly graveled voice. What he was about to say, to confess, about his blood Tribe, falls away before it reaches his tongue. Ultimately it doesn't matter.
"Okay." Just that, accompanied by a short nod. He searches her eyes. "Okay," repeated more solidly.
[Kora] Her eyes are on him the whole time; and when he looks up again, he meets her face, finds her eyes easily, shining with reflected light. Okay, he says, and her mouth quirks at both corners. The expression deepens when he repeats himself, more solidly.
Then she steps into his space, close enough that he can feel the heat of her body through her clothes; that she can almost taste the scent of his skin, the his soap and bodywash, the scent of his shampoo lingering in his hair. The beer on his breath. She holds her right arm against her body, but reaches up with her left, resting her elbow on the downslope of his shoulder, as she twists her fingers through his hair and pulls his mouth down to hers.
And stop him, a fractional inch or two away. "If we had kids," she says, past tense - had, this provisional self, laid in the ground, burned on a pyre, off to Valhalla. Tomorrow or next week. Next month or next year. Soon, however long it may be. There's a smile on her mouth beneath his, though. He can feel the shape of it beneath his mouth; see the curve of her cheek. " - and you wanted to be a fisherman," her head is tilted up and back to meet his. They are close enough now that he can feel her mouth move against his in a sliding caress as she speaks; that he can breathe in the faint huff of her laughter, silent, " - or a shepherd, you could go to my old Sept."
Then, she pulls him down and kills him, slowly, lingering and thorough, with a langorous sort of intensity that has her pressing her body against his as they kiss.
[Trent Brumby] His shoulders make a good arm rest, nice and solid without being hard and unforgiving. It's flesh and not wood, hard muscle and strong bones. His hair is thick, clean, and longer on the top, the shorter bits sliding through the parts between her fingers softly.
He leans down to kiss her, not just because she's pushing him to do so, and halts when he feels the tightening of fingers in his hair, pulling at his scalp, which silently tell him to do so. Gray eyes flicker up to look for hers, rather then where he had been watching the shape of her mouth, and he watches the way they shine and the light that comes from within them as much as its reflected without.
There hadn't been much of a response, not much of a chance to get anything else out but a small amused sound in the back of his throat before she's kissing him. It's almost as though she can barely get into his house before they are pressing their bodies together, two magnets attracted to one another, helplessly gravitated to bind themselves together, but he is far from complaining. As he kisses her back his hands slide across her lower back, firm in the way they slide over her backside and grip the back of her thighs. She can feel the way his knees begin to bend and his back muscles brace, seconds before he lifts her up to part her legs around his waist and steady her against him.
[Kora] [fade!]
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