[Imogen] "Just another misdemeanour murder," the police officer slurs as the corpse-wagon, a modified van with tinted windows and some company's logo on the side, pulls away from the curb. He stares belligerently in Imogen's direction when she cuts him a glance, removing her latex gloves and disposing them into a plastic baggy.
"You aren't one of those bleeding hearts who refuses to hear any disrespect to the dead, are you?" he demands in a tone which shows he does not care. It's late, it's a Monday, and this is the fifth time he's been out today.
"No," Imogen answers, her voice a cool counterpoint to the officer's swagger, "I'm not." This is the sixth time she's been out today. The Green has been busy for reasons the police might know and she does not much care about. Cabrini Green is frequently busy; gangsters killing gangsters and the occasional, photogenic (or not) bystander.
"Good. I can't stand that. People like that, they haven't been paying attention." He sniffs loudly, clearing his sinuses as he turns to look at his cop car, parked askew on the curb, siren lights painting the nearby building and sidewalk in alternating red and blue, "Some folk are just less than others."
"Yes," Imogen agrees, looking steadily at the officer's back. "Some are." He does not catch her tone.
She finishes up - the last few conversations with a forensic investigator, the last coordination with the cop, whose last name is Jensen. At the end, he offers to walk her to her car, noting he does not understand why she didn't park right at the scene.
She demurs, saying it's not far. Regardless, Detective Jensen watches the slight doctor walk away until she turns a corner, part in concern, part to make sure she was out of hearing before he makes a lewd comment about her anatomy, to the shocked laughter of the investigator.
--
She walks down the sidewalk, her nondescript black wind breaker open, her shoes flat and silent on the sidewalk. Half the buildings here are boarded up - the old korean grocery store, the house shoved close beside it. The church up ahead. The buildings here are grey, dingy and dour. Even in her dressed-down attire, Imogen stands out; her bright hair, her pale skin. Her unbowed spine.
[Kora] There was a time when working and middle class immigrants and African-Americans populated these inner city neighborhoods. Good, solid brick houses mixed with rowhouses and tenements, and parents sat on their stoops of an evening, watching the kids play stickball in the street as the summer evening descended into twilight. Maybe someone opened a fire hydrant and kids ran through it. There were still shadows in the darkness. There were still murders, there were still prostitutes on the corners and drug dealers in the alleys and the slow, insidious twin taints of poverty and the Wyrm to - but something was different. Something has changed.
There are no more jobs here. Or rather: there are no more jobs here on which someone can support a family without a high school diploma, or even with a high school diploma. The factories are gone, the unions diminished, the solid work of making things shipped off to Mexico and then Brazil and then Taiwan and now China. And so: the middle class moved out into the suburbs, and the working class moved up or descended into a miring cycle of poverty and apathy, apathy and poverty that has left the streets of inner city Chicago as blasted as a war zone in some nameless Eastern European country, some sad ex-Soviet place full of concrete block architecture and iron-barred windows and corrupt officials and arrogant police officers.
It is a war zone. One of the soldiers - call her a private - is at the present moment climbing out of the broken window of the boarded up Chinese grocery. She does this carefully, swinging her long legs over the sill, careful of whatever remains of the glass. The grocery store was destroyed in some riot, years ago, and someone still cared about the building then - boarded over the broken window in hopes of salvaging wahtever remained inside. Boarded over the window and never came back.
The boards have long since been pried away. Once, the city received some grant money to deal with derelict structures and came and boarded the window over again. Most of those have been pried away, and the rest are covered in graffiti tags for local gangs. The height is awkward and Kora has a hand on the splinting boards to balance herself as she climbs out. She blows out a heavy breath to clear her senses and swings her pale head up toward the sky. It's twilight now, the sky is stained a thousand smokey colors, backed up with the baleful suggestion of fire in the west, behind the tenements against, the sky, sinking below the horizon.
She doesn't miss Imogen. She cannot miss the kinswoman, with her crimson hair and starkly pale skin. With her breeding a regal pennant against the drab surroundings. So she waits, her hands in her front pockets, her body language relaxed and alert. "Hey doc," a faint smile curves the corners of her mouth by way of greeting. " - were you working the murder 'round the way?"
[Imogen] She knows little of the history of the buildings here. Little of their previous owners, why they might be shut down. She knows, dimly of the story of Cabrini Green. It's purpose, it's many failures.
More intimately, she knows the damage which humans do to themselves, trapped in these blocks with no hope of escape, not-so-silently lashing out in fury and rage at the futility of it all.
Thereby making it worse. Increasing the futility.
Humans who bear children who will bear their same fate. Humans who kill each other for a dimebag, for a woman, for a corner. Humans who kill each other for no reason at all.
There are those who feel sorry for the denizens of these blocks, unfortunate only because of their birth, their circumstances. They make small charities, create scholarships, outreach programs. Sometimes, Imogen cuts their bodies open and tells their story, quietly in stainless steel and white tile of an autopsy suite; the weight of organs, the tapestry of damage done to flesh. Blunt trauma, sharp trauma, bullet holes, powder burns. She rarely tells these stories in a courtroom.
She cuts an uncommon figure here, bright haired, alabaster skinned. Slight, moving with confidence, without fear, with awareness. She lifts her head one of the boards creaks, just slightly, and catches sight of the Garou, her body folded to accommodate the awkward height. There is a pause in her step - but by the time Kora straightens and can see the doctor, her blood breathing breeding, Imogen is approaching again, her hands loose at her sides.
"I was," she says, offering an answer in place of a greeting, casting a glance '`round the way' as it were, then back again.
"Weren't involved were you?" Gunshot wounds to the head hardly seemed to be the Skald's style.
[Kora] "Naw," Kora replies, her voice low. "I'd be likely to blow my own hand off if I tried to use a gun." She has other weapons.
They are not alone on the street, but close to it. The other people out here have better things to do than to watch a stranger like Kora too closely. They have better things to do than to linger in their windows when there's been a murder on the corner. It's best that neither the cops nor the murder know what you might've seen, that you might've seen something. That you might linger at your window peering out through the curtains down at the asphalt-covered street and see a boy hold a gun to the head of another boy, and pull the trigger and stand there calmly as the bullet drove through the skull and the white matter, as it exploded out the other side, kick the corpse to make sure it was a corpse, then jump into the 1989 Buick Skylark with tinted windows and ridiculous rims to make his getaway.
No one in the neighborhood saw that.
That's what the cops heard from the canvass. I was watching Oprah. Cubs was on. Got a condition.
" - I was on the roof of that old Oddfellows building, checking something out, and saw it all, though." The Skald's half smile sinks away, her mouth shifts, and she lifts her chin back toward the corner where the murder occurred. "I got the license plate of the car they drove to get away," the Fenrir woman pauses, her mouth wry, " - not that I'm volunteering as a witness. Unless there's some anonymous tip line I should call, or something weird turns up with that body, I'll stay out of it."
[Imogen] Imogen makes a brief, meaningless sound, more a placeholder than anything else. "No" she says. "Don't waste yer time. S'just humans killing humans, as far as I can see."
There is something dismissive in the way that she says the words. Imogen, clearly, is not in her profession to fight crime and right wrongs.
"Let you know if that changes, though, shall I?"
[Kora] The Skald cuts her shoulders upward in a neat, narrow little shrug. For all that, the gesture is carelessly expressive. Half-way between what can you do and I figured I'd ask. "I'd appreciate it," she replies, low and quiet, " - if you did." There's not much of a pause, before Kora continues, her voice still low, always. "If you don't mind, I'll walk with you." If Imogen doesn't mind, the Fenrir woman falls into step beside her. "Still getting to know the streets, you know? And," a faint gesture over her shoulder, toward the boarded up Korean grocery. " - the other bits."
The street is quiet. There's an echo of distant traffic, mirrored back to them from some larger artery ahead. Here and there, the ever-changing chatter of commercial television asserts itself and then recedes. The buildings are mostly dark. At the least, folks inside have the blinds drawn, even when they've opened the window to drawn in the night breeze, there's little more than the impression of a bare bulb, blanket thrown over a half-open window for privacy - peeling paint, some desolute, destitute life.
Just humans killing humans.
Kora gives Imogen a brief glance; sidelong but not sly. It is closer to - aware, observant. Perhaps respectful, in that there is a certain reticence to her manner that cannot quiet be read as hesitance. "Me and Joe and Thomas are moving up here. Trying to make sure what was won isn't lost again, you know?"
[Imogen] If you don't mind, I'll walk with you. Imogen makes a faint, dismissive gesture before tilting her head in the direction she'd been headed. The kinwoman is short on words, but eloquent in gesture. Because of the former, she does not say what she can portray adequately with the latter.
They begin to walk, and Imogen shifts her steel brief case from one hand to the other, her fingers moving slightly to encourage the blood to move within the digits. She carries it on the outside now, away from Kora.
When the Skald broaches the subject of territory, Imogen cuts her a nearly unreadable glance. Her expression is reserved, her eyes unrevealing. There is tension in her brow but that - that could be anything.
"Eagle territory, isn't it?" a pause, then correcting herself. "Wasn't it." The first iteration of her question had had a slight suggestion of a lilt. The second is flat, too even.
Regardless, the question is rhetorical. "Where will you and yers be stayin', then?"
[Kora] Isn't it? Imogen says. Kora is ready to agree that it is Eagle territory. The other pack's shadow remains here - in the shadow world if not in reality. The boundaries are distinctive, as is their slow rescission - the landscape carved from nearly nothing, cleansed with a brutal sort of efficiency that scoured the Wyrm from the streets, from the backroom and underground haunts, and left it at that. Then she corrects herself: wasn't it, her voice flat and even. Too flat, too even.
They are walking on a gray sidewalk in the dim twilight. The streetlights have come on, and do something to banish the shadows, but the light they shed is orange and flat, unrevealing. Imogen cuts a glance to Kora and finds the Skald's eyes on her. The look is frank and direct, but there's nothing calculated about it. Nothing calculating.
Kora remains silent until Imogen asks where the pack will be staying. Then she looks away, gestures vaguely ahead of them. Someplace beyond this street and down another, closer to the river and the industrial core.
"You know the Methodist Church?" Kora's hands are in her pockets, her elbows at her side. Her hair is pulled back and twisted away from her face. The strands are fine and straight. " - the old neo-Gothic one. That's where. It's so overgrown you can hardly see the building from the street. One of those places where you have to get half a block away to realize what's behind all those trees."
[Imogen] When Imogen cuts a glance to Kora, only to find the Fenrir looking at her, she meets the others gaze. Though there is no calculation in the female monster's gaze, there is a steadiness in the kinfolk's, meeting the frank directness head-on and without a flinch.
She asks her question and Kora looks ahead again. After a moment, Imogen does the same. Kora asks, does she know the methodist church, and at first, Imogen does not. But by the time the description is done, she's reminded, her red-crowned head inclining in a nod, just out of the corner of Kora's eye.
There's silence, after, several seconds of it, several steps of it. Then, Imogen exhales a breath, something caught between a mirthless laugh and a scoff.
"Did you ever get any manner of religious upbringin' as a child?" she asks, her mouth twisting in a smirk.
[Kora] "Not to speak of," Kora replies, her dark gaze lifting from the street to the kinswoman briefly, lingering there, dropping from her eyes to the faint twist of her mouth before returning to the street in front of them. "Christmas, sometimes, my mother would drag us out to some church or other, but that sort of thing never stuck, with her or with us." Her voice is quieter with the memory of it - a half-dozen all told, some of them merging together into little knots of existance.
There's a subtle pause, then, " - why do you ask?"
[Imogen] The amusement remains, though it is a taut thing. The kinfolk flicks her gaze toward the Garou, then forward again.
"Neither did I," she says. "Even less than you, I think. However," the pause here has no immediate, obvious purpose. Just that - a pause.
"When I was a teenager, I was sent to St. Dunstan's Abbey - a girl's boarding school in Plymouth." The doctor's eyebrow arches slightly in irony, "There, I received a religious upbringin' in spades.
"I would not," the smirk flickers back to life again, "Ever be able to live in a church, I think."
[Kora] "No way," the exclamation is uttered under her breath, but there's still a levered note of surprise attached to the words, followed by a low whistle. When Imogen finishes her explanation, Kora huffs out a breath. If that is laughter, the rest of the markers of it are subsumed into her body, internalized - a twist of her shoulders, the subtle change in the shape of her mouth, in the shape of her eyes. "First of all, I can't imagine you in a place like that. And second of all, I thought places like that only existed in fiction, you know? Not actuality. Well," provisional, " - that's not actually true. I went to this one, Kylemore Abbey, way out in the Connemara, yeah? They claimed it was a girl's school, too.
"It was spectacular, you know? Gorgeous, and so far away from anywhere that I can't imagine what it would be like to be a teenage girl and stuck there with a bunch of aging nuns for instructors and red-faced tourists poking about the rest of the time." Then she shrugs, wordless and brief. "I don't mind the chuch, though. S'better than the junk yard. And it's sort of - grand inside. Not just human grand, either - more - caught between making and ruin, that sort of grand - right?"
[Imogen] Kora can't imagine Imogen in a place like that. The kin smirks.
"They didn't ask my opinion at the time," she inserts wryly, before falling silent as the Garou continues. She considers it in silence.
"I can see that," she says, finally. "Imagine it, anyway." An old black ford with county plates is ahead. Imogen reaches into her jacket pocket, digging for her keys.
"If yeh let me know where it is," she says, "I'll send any new Fenrir yer way." A beat. "I imagine that's the proper procedure now."
[Kora] That has Kora's dark eyes on Imogen's face, passingly, before her attention drops to the keys in the kinswoman's hand. "Yeah," the creature offers, with a narrow little shrug. "Joe War-Handed's Jarl now. You can send the Fenrir to us there, or - " the right corner of her mouth rises, faint and wry. " - give them my number. I don't mind.
"The corner of Roosevelt Boulevard and one hundred and fifteenth street," she continues, supplying the address for the Church, " - it's about a third of a mile or so from the dockhouse, due west and just south." There is a pause, quiet. Then, "I appreciate it, doc."
[Imogen] "Don't mention it," she dismisses the gratitude tightly, as she pulls the keys from her jacket pocket, starting to walk around the car to the driver's side. "S'not as if it's a pound o' flesh."
A pause as she fits her key into the lock, though the pause is a portent, holding words, or the thoughts of words, as yet unspoken.
"I'll come find yeh later in the week," she says, looking up as she gets her door opened, meeting Kora's eyes - this as much her own determination as anything else. "I could do with tha' cleansin' rite by now, I imagine."
Sometimes she imagines what taint must be like, clinging to her skin or clothes like miasma, or like oil sinking into the feathers of a water fowl.
[Kora] "I wouldn't be surprised," Kora responds, with a brief, direct look at the kinswoman. " - sometimes I do them so often that I start dreaming in rites." The direct look sweeps Imogen from head to toe, quickly and thoughtlessly. The Skald does not think about it, and does not think to hide it. She finds Imogen's gaze again.
"I'll buy you a beer, after?"
[Imogen] A brief pause. Imogen studies the younger woman - her expression contained beneath the bones beneath her skin.
"You're performin' the rite," she says after a moment. "I'll buy th'beer."
[Kora] "That'd be brilliant," replies the Skald, whose expression is not contained - not like her laughter, which lives more in her body than in her voice.
Even in its most neutral position, her expressive mouth is set into a curve that suggests that she is contemplating some sort of private pleasure - a pleasant thought, a word like a smooth stone, the music of the spheres, something - but now Kora's smiling, this easy expression that curves her mouth wide, higher at the right corner than the left, and finds an answering light in her frank eyes. "I wouldn't say no."
[Imogen] Imogen's brow contracts - just a millimetre, before smoothing, some thought passing through her mind, invisible through her shuttered eyes and reserved expression.
"Somehow," she says after a beat, "I didn't think yeh would.
"Ha' a good night, then."
[Kora] Kora's nod is a wordless thing, a dip of her pale head that barely touches the rest of her contained body, her hands half-buried in the front pockets of her worn-out jeans, her elbows bent sharply, her arms otherwise tight against her torso.
Then she walks on, stepping around Imogen and continuing down the dark, quiet street, turning to offer a " - see you around, doc," over her left shoulder before she continues in the direction they had been walking, alone now, her spine straight, her shoulders level, her gait long - faster - a sleek, hipslung tattoo of her booted feet against the darkness.
[Imogen] As Kora turns back, she can see the doctor raise her hand briefly in answering farewell, before her redhead ducks beneath the frame of the boxy unattractive vehicle. The Skald can hear the door shut behind her, the uneven chug of the engine as the doctor starts it.
A few moments later, the car pulls away from the curb, and like Kora, Imogen is gone.
[Kora] get the transcript!
to Kora
"You aren't one of those bleeding hearts who refuses to hear any disrespect to the dead, are you?" he demands in a tone which shows he does not care. It's late, it's a Monday, and this is the fifth time he's been out today.
"No," Imogen answers, her voice a cool counterpoint to the officer's swagger, "I'm not." This is the sixth time she's been out today. The Green has been busy for reasons the police might know and she does not much care about. Cabrini Green is frequently busy; gangsters killing gangsters and the occasional, photogenic (or not) bystander.
"Good. I can't stand that. People like that, they haven't been paying attention." He sniffs loudly, clearing his sinuses as he turns to look at his cop car, parked askew on the curb, siren lights painting the nearby building and sidewalk in alternating red and blue, "Some folk are just less than others."
"Yes," Imogen agrees, looking steadily at the officer's back. "Some are." He does not catch her tone.
She finishes up - the last few conversations with a forensic investigator, the last coordination with the cop, whose last name is Jensen. At the end, he offers to walk her to her car, noting he does not understand why she didn't park right at the scene.
She demurs, saying it's not far. Regardless, Detective Jensen watches the slight doctor walk away until she turns a corner, part in concern, part to make sure she was out of hearing before he makes a lewd comment about her anatomy, to the shocked laughter of the investigator.
--
She walks down the sidewalk, her nondescript black wind breaker open, her shoes flat and silent on the sidewalk. Half the buildings here are boarded up - the old korean grocery store, the house shoved close beside it. The church up ahead. The buildings here are grey, dingy and dour. Even in her dressed-down attire, Imogen stands out; her bright hair, her pale skin. Her unbowed spine.
[Kora] There was a time when working and middle class immigrants and African-Americans populated these inner city neighborhoods. Good, solid brick houses mixed with rowhouses and tenements, and parents sat on their stoops of an evening, watching the kids play stickball in the street as the summer evening descended into twilight. Maybe someone opened a fire hydrant and kids ran through it. There were still shadows in the darkness. There were still murders, there were still prostitutes on the corners and drug dealers in the alleys and the slow, insidious twin taints of poverty and the Wyrm to - but something was different. Something has changed.
There are no more jobs here. Or rather: there are no more jobs here on which someone can support a family without a high school diploma, or even with a high school diploma. The factories are gone, the unions diminished, the solid work of making things shipped off to Mexico and then Brazil and then Taiwan and now China. And so: the middle class moved out into the suburbs, and the working class moved up or descended into a miring cycle of poverty and apathy, apathy and poverty that has left the streets of inner city Chicago as blasted as a war zone in some nameless Eastern European country, some sad ex-Soviet place full of concrete block architecture and iron-barred windows and corrupt officials and arrogant police officers.
It is a war zone. One of the soldiers - call her a private - is at the present moment climbing out of the broken window of the boarded up Chinese grocery. She does this carefully, swinging her long legs over the sill, careful of whatever remains of the glass. The grocery store was destroyed in some riot, years ago, and someone still cared about the building then - boarded over the broken window in hopes of salvaging wahtever remained inside. Boarded over the window and never came back.
The boards have long since been pried away. Once, the city received some grant money to deal with derelict structures and came and boarded the window over again. Most of those have been pried away, and the rest are covered in graffiti tags for local gangs. The height is awkward and Kora has a hand on the splinting boards to balance herself as she climbs out. She blows out a heavy breath to clear her senses and swings her pale head up toward the sky. It's twilight now, the sky is stained a thousand smokey colors, backed up with the baleful suggestion of fire in the west, behind the tenements against, the sky, sinking below the horizon.
She doesn't miss Imogen. She cannot miss the kinswoman, with her crimson hair and starkly pale skin. With her breeding a regal pennant against the drab surroundings. So she waits, her hands in her front pockets, her body language relaxed and alert. "Hey doc," a faint smile curves the corners of her mouth by way of greeting. " - were you working the murder 'round the way?"
[Imogen] She knows little of the history of the buildings here. Little of their previous owners, why they might be shut down. She knows, dimly of the story of Cabrini Green. It's purpose, it's many failures.
More intimately, she knows the damage which humans do to themselves, trapped in these blocks with no hope of escape, not-so-silently lashing out in fury and rage at the futility of it all.
Thereby making it worse. Increasing the futility.
Humans who bear children who will bear their same fate. Humans who kill each other for a dimebag, for a woman, for a corner. Humans who kill each other for no reason at all.
There are those who feel sorry for the denizens of these blocks, unfortunate only because of their birth, their circumstances. They make small charities, create scholarships, outreach programs. Sometimes, Imogen cuts their bodies open and tells their story, quietly in stainless steel and white tile of an autopsy suite; the weight of organs, the tapestry of damage done to flesh. Blunt trauma, sharp trauma, bullet holes, powder burns. She rarely tells these stories in a courtroom.
She cuts an uncommon figure here, bright haired, alabaster skinned. Slight, moving with confidence, without fear, with awareness. She lifts her head one of the boards creaks, just slightly, and catches sight of the Garou, her body folded to accommodate the awkward height. There is a pause in her step - but by the time Kora straightens and can see the doctor, her blood breathing breeding, Imogen is approaching again, her hands loose at her sides.
"I was," she says, offering an answer in place of a greeting, casting a glance '`round the way' as it were, then back again.
"Weren't involved were you?" Gunshot wounds to the head hardly seemed to be the Skald's style.
[Kora] "Naw," Kora replies, her voice low. "I'd be likely to blow my own hand off if I tried to use a gun." She has other weapons.
They are not alone on the street, but close to it. The other people out here have better things to do than to watch a stranger like Kora too closely. They have better things to do than to linger in their windows when there's been a murder on the corner. It's best that neither the cops nor the murder know what you might've seen, that you might've seen something. That you might linger at your window peering out through the curtains down at the asphalt-covered street and see a boy hold a gun to the head of another boy, and pull the trigger and stand there calmly as the bullet drove through the skull and the white matter, as it exploded out the other side, kick the corpse to make sure it was a corpse, then jump into the 1989 Buick Skylark with tinted windows and ridiculous rims to make his getaway.
No one in the neighborhood saw that.
That's what the cops heard from the canvass. I was watching Oprah. Cubs was on. Got a condition.
" - I was on the roof of that old Oddfellows building, checking something out, and saw it all, though." The Skald's half smile sinks away, her mouth shifts, and she lifts her chin back toward the corner where the murder occurred. "I got the license plate of the car they drove to get away," the Fenrir woman pauses, her mouth wry, " - not that I'm volunteering as a witness. Unless there's some anonymous tip line I should call, or something weird turns up with that body, I'll stay out of it."
[Imogen] Imogen makes a brief, meaningless sound, more a placeholder than anything else. "No" she says. "Don't waste yer time. S'just humans killing humans, as far as I can see."
There is something dismissive in the way that she says the words. Imogen, clearly, is not in her profession to fight crime and right wrongs.
"Let you know if that changes, though, shall I?"
[Kora] The Skald cuts her shoulders upward in a neat, narrow little shrug. For all that, the gesture is carelessly expressive. Half-way between what can you do and I figured I'd ask. "I'd appreciate it," she replies, low and quiet, " - if you did." There's not much of a pause, before Kora continues, her voice still low, always. "If you don't mind, I'll walk with you." If Imogen doesn't mind, the Fenrir woman falls into step beside her. "Still getting to know the streets, you know? And," a faint gesture over her shoulder, toward the boarded up Korean grocery. " - the other bits."
The street is quiet. There's an echo of distant traffic, mirrored back to them from some larger artery ahead. Here and there, the ever-changing chatter of commercial television asserts itself and then recedes. The buildings are mostly dark. At the least, folks inside have the blinds drawn, even when they've opened the window to drawn in the night breeze, there's little more than the impression of a bare bulb, blanket thrown over a half-open window for privacy - peeling paint, some desolute, destitute life.
Just humans killing humans.
Kora gives Imogen a brief glance; sidelong but not sly. It is closer to - aware, observant. Perhaps respectful, in that there is a certain reticence to her manner that cannot quiet be read as hesitance. "Me and Joe and Thomas are moving up here. Trying to make sure what was won isn't lost again, you know?"
[Imogen] If you don't mind, I'll walk with you. Imogen makes a faint, dismissive gesture before tilting her head in the direction she'd been headed. The kinwoman is short on words, but eloquent in gesture. Because of the former, she does not say what she can portray adequately with the latter.
They begin to walk, and Imogen shifts her steel brief case from one hand to the other, her fingers moving slightly to encourage the blood to move within the digits. She carries it on the outside now, away from Kora.
When the Skald broaches the subject of territory, Imogen cuts her a nearly unreadable glance. Her expression is reserved, her eyes unrevealing. There is tension in her brow but that - that could be anything.
"Eagle territory, isn't it?" a pause, then correcting herself. "Wasn't it." The first iteration of her question had had a slight suggestion of a lilt. The second is flat, too even.
Regardless, the question is rhetorical. "Where will you and yers be stayin', then?"
[Kora] Isn't it? Imogen says. Kora is ready to agree that it is Eagle territory. The other pack's shadow remains here - in the shadow world if not in reality. The boundaries are distinctive, as is their slow rescission - the landscape carved from nearly nothing, cleansed with a brutal sort of efficiency that scoured the Wyrm from the streets, from the backroom and underground haunts, and left it at that. Then she corrects herself: wasn't it, her voice flat and even. Too flat, too even.
They are walking on a gray sidewalk in the dim twilight. The streetlights have come on, and do something to banish the shadows, but the light they shed is orange and flat, unrevealing. Imogen cuts a glance to Kora and finds the Skald's eyes on her. The look is frank and direct, but there's nothing calculated about it. Nothing calculating.
Kora remains silent until Imogen asks where the pack will be staying. Then she looks away, gestures vaguely ahead of them. Someplace beyond this street and down another, closer to the river and the industrial core.
"You know the Methodist Church?" Kora's hands are in her pockets, her elbows at her side. Her hair is pulled back and twisted away from her face. The strands are fine and straight. " - the old neo-Gothic one. That's where. It's so overgrown you can hardly see the building from the street. One of those places where you have to get half a block away to realize what's behind all those trees."
[Imogen] When Imogen cuts a glance to Kora, only to find the Fenrir looking at her, she meets the others gaze. Though there is no calculation in the female monster's gaze, there is a steadiness in the kinfolk's, meeting the frank directness head-on and without a flinch.
She asks her question and Kora looks ahead again. After a moment, Imogen does the same. Kora asks, does she know the methodist church, and at first, Imogen does not. But by the time the description is done, she's reminded, her red-crowned head inclining in a nod, just out of the corner of Kora's eye.
There's silence, after, several seconds of it, several steps of it. Then, Imogen exhales a breath, something caught between a mirthless laugh and a scoff.
"Did you ever get any manner of religious upbringin' as a child?" she asks, her mouth twisting in a smirk.
[Kora] "Not to speak of," Kora replies, her dark gaze lifting from the street to the kinswoman briefly, lingering there, dropping from her eyes to the faint twist of her mouth before returning to the street in front of them. "Christmas, sometimes, my mother would drag us out to some church or other, but that sort of thing never stuck, with her or with us." Her voice is quieter with the memory of it - a half-dozen all told, some of them merging together into little knots of existance.
There's a subtle pause, then, " - why do you ask?"
[Imogen] The amusement remains, though it is a taut thing. The kinfolk flicks her gaze toward the Garou, then forward again.
"Neither did I," she says. "Even less than you, I think. However," the pause here has no immediate, obvious purpose. Just that - a pause.
"When I was a teenager, I was sent to St. Dunstan's Abbey - a girl's boarding school in Plymouth." The doctor's eyebrow arches slightly in irony, "There, I received a religious upbringin' in spades.
"I would not," the smirk flickers back to life again, "Ever be able to live in a church, I think."
[Kora] "No way," the exclamation is uttered under her breath, but there's still a levered note of surprise attached to the words, followed by a low whistle. When Imogen finishes her explanation, Kora huffs out a breath. If that is laughter, the rest of the markers of it are subsumed into her body, internalized - a twist of her shoulders, the subtle change in the shape of her mouth, in the shape of her eyes. "First of all, I can't imagine you in a place like that. And second of all, I thought places like that only existed in fiction, you know? Not actuality. Well," provisional, " - that's not actually true. I went to this one, Kylemore Abbey, way out in the Connemara, yeah? They claimed it was a girl's school, too.
"It was spectacular, you know? Gorgeous, and so far away from anywhere that I can't imagine what it would be like to be a teenage girl and stuck there with a bunch of aging nuns for instructors and red-faced tourists poking about the rest of the time." Then she shrugs, wordless and brief. "I don't mind the chuch, though. S'better than the junk yard. And it's sort of - grand inside. Not just human grand, either - more - caught between making and ruin, that sort of grand - right?"
[Imogen] Kora can't imagine Imogen in a place like that. The kin smirks.
"They didn't ask my opinion at the time," she inserts wryly, before falling silent as the Garou continues. She considers it in silence.
"I can see that," she says, finally. "Imagine it, anyway." An old black ford with county plates is ahead. Imogen reaches into her jacket pocket, digging for her keys.
"If yeh let me know where it is," she says, "I'll send any new Fenrir yer way." A beat. "I imagine that's the proper procedure now."
[Kora] That has Kora's dark eyes on Imogen's face, passingly, before her attention drops to the keys in the kinswoman's hand. "Yeah," the creature offers, with a narrow little shrug. "Joe War-Handed's Jarl now. You can send the Fenrir to us there, or - " the right corner of her mouth rises, faint and wry. " - give them my number. I don't mind.
"The corner of Roosevelt Boulevard and one hundred and fifteenth street," she continues, supplying the address for the Church, " - it's about a third of a mile or so from the dockhouse, due west and just south." There is a pause, quiet. Then, "I appreciate it, doc."
[Imogen] "Don't mention it," she dismisses the gratitude tightly, as she pulls the keys from her jacket pocket, starting to walk around the car to the driver's side. "S'not as if it's a pound o' flesh."
A pause as she fits her key into the lock, though the pause is a portent, holding words, or the thoughts of words, as yet unspoken.
"I'll come find yeh later in the week," she says, looking up as she gets her door opened, meeting Kora's eyes - this as much her own determination as anything else. "I could do with tha' cleansin' rite by now, I imagine."
Sometimes she imagines what taint must be like, clinging to her skin or clothes like miasma, or like oil sinking into the feathers of a water fowl.
[Kora] "I wouldn't be surprised," Kora responds, with a brief, direct look at the kinswoman. " - sometimes I do them so often that I start dreaming in rites." The direct look sweeps Imogen from head to toe, quickly and thoughtlessly. The Skald does not think about it, and does not think to hide it. She finds Imogen's gaze again.
"I'll buy you a beer, after?"
[Imogen] A brief pause. Imogen studies the younger woman - her expression contained beneath the bones beneath her skin.
"You're performin' the rite," she says after a moment. "I'll buy th'beer."
[Kora] "That'd be brilliant," replies the Skald, whose expression is not contained - not like her laughter, which lives more in her body than in her voice.
Even in its most neutral position, her expressive mouth is set into a curve that suggests that she is contemplating some sort of private pleasure - a pleasant thought, a word like a smooth stone, the music of the spheres, something - but now Kora's smiling, this easy expression that curves her mouth wide, higher at the right corner than the left, and finds an answering light in her frank eyes. "I wouldn't say no."
[Imogen] Imogen's brow contracts - just a millimetre, before smoothing, some thought passing through her mind, invisible through her shuttered eyes and reserved expression.
"Somehow," she says after a beat, "I didn't think yeh would.
"Ha' a good night, then."
[Kora] Kora's nod is a wordless thing, a dip of her pale head that barely touches the rest of her contained body, her hands half-buried in the front pockets of her worn-out jeans, her elbows bent sharply, her arms otherwise tight against her torso.
Then she walks on, stepping around Imogen and continuing down the dark, quiet street, turning to offer a " - see you around, doc," over her left shoulder before she continues in the direction they had been walking, alone now, her spine straight, her shoulders level, her gait long - faster - a sleek, hipslung tattoo of her booted feet against the darkness.
[Imogen] As Kora turns back, she can see the doctor raise her hand briefly in answering farewell, before her redhead ducks beneath the frame of the boxy unattractive vehicle. The Skald can hear the door shut behind her, the uneven chug of the engine as the doctor starts it.
A few moments later, the car pulls away from the curb, and like Kora, Imogen is gone.
[Kora] get the transcript!
to Kora
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