[Kora] He stands close, slides his hands over her thighs. She uncurls her fingers from the edge of the retaining wall and covers his hands with her own. Her attention is briefly distant, dark eyes drifting over his shoulder as she studies the park at his back, watches for anything that might threaten him. Them.
"They're going to be Fenrir," this is quiet, all quiet. She's still looking over his shoulder, distant, but then she lifts her chin, draws her gaze back and focuses on him, clear and direct, her eyes shining. "I'll get you the best translations of the Eddas to read to them, and you can teach them how to fight. I'll show you how to read my journals. I'll - " a brief, winsome look. She leans forward, tipping her pale head down toward his dark one, swallowing hard against the strange knot in her chest. "I'll give you my mother's number, yeah?"
Then, she slides off the retaining wall. Unfolds her hands from his, plants her palms on the ledge, and lifts herself down, off the wall and into his body. Her eyes are on his, somehow in all this her arms find their away around his body. She's watching him the whole time and her eyes spark and gleam with a sharp sort of sudden longing, bone deep. "If we wait until I'm ready," she says, the unfamiliar, sour edge of fear a sharp tang in the back of her mouth, this living thing that twists through her body. " - we'll wait too long. You know?
"Thomas is still off questing, and I don't want to leave Joe in a lurch. And even when he's back - they're my pack, you know? And I know it never changes, but we're at war, and I - I have no idea how - " This isn't a rush. It's a litany. It's a confession, a quiet one, quietly spoken, her eyes on his, her mouth close to his skin. The look she gives him is askance. They are just off dead center, so her dark irises cut to the right corner of her eyes, all shadow, the pupils large in the uncertain light of the park, devouring. The litany cuts off.
There are another dozen or more fears underneath, but she's spoken the sharpest of them, the most constant. The ones that will never go away. She cuts herself off, though, shifts her attention back to him, searching her pale gaze, her own taut and direct, this sort of living expectancy written underneath her pale skin. "You do want to raise them, don't you?"
[Trent Brumby] When she slides from the wall he eases a step back to allow her room between his body and the wall at her back. Her arms find their way around him, as she expresses her fears and her desires, telling him how their children will be raised when she's not there. All the while he is watching her, listening to the tones behind the words and how it expresses on her face.
Strong hands caress up her back, press her in against him so that she's held in the embrace of his arms. His palms and fingers slide along the slope of her back, up to her shoulder blades and down to the small of her back. They are soothing strokes of a firm reality; that she's still here and he is with her. Pale grays meet her eyes, calm and understanding.
"I do," he tells her quietly, but simply.
Then he's raising one hand to touch her hair, to brush his thumb across the front of it, touching the edge of her brow in the process. His gaze tracks his hand motion, looking at the way she's got her hair up, always with something handy; pencils, chop sticks - reminding him that he needs to buy her something just as practical but more fashionable. Though, in a way, her trend has its own charm.
When he looks back down, meeting her gaze, he smiles warmly to her. "I will teach them everything you want them to know and then some more." There's a longer pause between his sentences. "I know you're scared, and if it doesn't feel right, then wait until it does. You will know when its the time for you." Trent believes that, and why wouldn't he? The Tribe in his blood is also that which raised him.
"I will enjoy being a father to our children."
[Kora] Kora stands there with her arms loosely around Trent's waist. As he fits his arms around her body, her grasp shifts, from his waist to his neck, fitting herself naturally close to him. His hands roam her back - and he can feel the tension in the long, lean muscles flanking her spine, the way her shoulder blades stand out against her skin, against the fabric of her worn - t-shirt, sharp as vestigal wings. Over his shoulder, the city rises, stark and vibrant, above the low curtain of carefully tended trees in this manicured section of the park. Over her shoulder, the lake is dark, the eastern horizon a deepening gray blue as the last shreds of daylight succumb to night.
"I'm not afraid of anything I can kill." Her gaze is fixed on his shoulder when she says it, her mouth curved more at the right corner than the left. From the way her muscles flex beneath his remaining hand on her back, he might guess that she'd be relieved to find something to kill now. To move, somehow - to use her body as it was meant to be used. At the end of the sentence, though, she flicks a glance back up as his pale eyes, calm and patient and warm on her face.
There's nothing to kill. There's no threat - just this warm space between them. Her pulse has calmed; she cannot hear her blood pumping inside her head, in the shell of her ears - but her breath comes more sharply. She is not looking at him constantly, but her face lilts upward with the touch of his hand against her hair, bound up with a broken pencil, with the graze of his thumb against her brow, dark eyes sheening with reflected light from the streetlights.
"It's right," she says, the hint of breathlessness in her voice gives it a husked undertone. " - this part of me that's - well, part of me knows - knows it deeply. I've claimed you. I'm ready. I shouldn't've claimed you if I wasn't ready. I never thought I'd claim a mate. But I know you're mine. And part of me - " the hook curve of her mouth deepens, but the animal never leaves her eyes. " - well, if we were people, we'd still be in the casual sex phase of the relationship. I never got past the three-week fling stage before."
[Trent Brumby] "Well, Kora," he says her name like someone says baby or honey, but he never uses those words, "if you fell pregnant tonight, we've still got plenty of time to move from what would be a casual sex relationship, into something else." Smiling at her, he smooths his hands down her back again, working in slow strokes to relax those lean muscles of hers.
There are all those other possibilities that they're not talking about either. Garou have violent lives, their population statistics are poor, and it's a very real factor that a female Garou might not carry to term. These are ugly truths, painful possibilities, but there's very little doubt, while looking him in the eye, that he would would do everything in his power to support his mate. This is far from a casual fling for Trent, and he knew it enough to allow her to claim him, to steal him from a Tribe that holds his deep core beliefs.
"But," he grows more serious here, his eyes taking on a harder glint he seldom uses around her, "I don't want you living in a broken school ground if you're carrying a child, and I want you to really look after yourself." Then, taking the edge out of his voice, "So you had best eat up plenty of shitty Italian sausages in park vendors while you can."
[Kora] "We've moved," she responds, her voice low and clear when his voice grows more serious. There's a liminal sort of smile on her mouth, one of those expressions that lives on the cusp of emotion, and a stubborn light in her eye as his own gaze turns stern. " - from the southside to the northside. We're claiming territory in Cabrini now, old territory that Kemp's old pack claimed."
They're all dead now, that pack. Dead or gone. She doesn't say the words, but the finality in her voice - the clear use of the past tense - tells the whole of the story without her putting it into words. " - so we've found this old Church that we claiming, near the heart of the territory. I'll show you, sometime. So you know where to find it."
Their bodies are close. He can feel her body heat, the warm of her arms against his shoulders, her hands behind his neck, filtering up through the black curls he keeps closely cropped. As soothes her with long, slow strokes of his sure hands up and down her back, he can feel the tension in her body ease without conscious thought - and then shift, in tone and direction, from tension to awareness of his hands on her body.
"You're right," she says at last, into the close space between them. " - we're not people. You're mine. And if you get me pregnant tonight, we'll have as much time as anyone has to - make it more." She leans up, stretching through the spine, rising to her toes, to kiss him, softly, directly, firm even when she is this gentle. Her eyes remain half open as she does so, shadowed by her lashes, focusing on his mouth before she claims it with her own, and then just down, this strange impressionistic view of his cheek, his now, all out of focus up so close.
Then she breaks the kiss, lifting her chin again to look up at him. "No more birth control." Her smile is thinned, taut. The fears are there. Cowardice arises in not facing them. "And we can start the getting to know you, too. My passport's in my hip pocket." His hands are closer. That sounds like an invitation. " - you've never looked at it, have you?" He wouldn't pry. She knows that, too.
[Trent Brumby] "Church, school, you get my point." But he will go and see this new place so that he knows where she is staying and how to get hold of the pack if he needs to. At worst, if he's in dire trouble, he can head there and know its protected grounds and that someone would come, eventually, to his aid - or his death. He really doesn't think that would happen though, it's more likely he would be called there in the event of her death.
A stray thought has him wonder how Joe is going to treat him from now on. He's not afraid of it. It's more of a curious, dangerous pest for him to have to put up with. Maybe in time both of their views would change of each other, but their dislike is mutual. Joe's hatred, however, is not. Trent is a tolerant man, by far.
Kora steals this away with a kiss, with words that bring him back to focus on her right before it. Both his hands become still, resting at varied angles on her back and hold her in closer. With a small step he could trap her against the wall, make her firm between them both, but it's a small part of him that he doesn't act on - he has lots of those moments. Control, discipline, has been his way of life, and that doesn't change now. There's a small but very male thrill that goes through him at the idea of no birth control, and if he was honest with himself, it's nothing to do with the idea of having a baby and everything to do with the pleasure he's looking forward to. That extra sensation that comes with lack of latex. Its enough to make him kiss her again, a little more fully and eager then the slow, firm one she had offered him.
But he breaks from it, before he stokes fires to higher levels, and takes her invitation by sliding his hands down her pants, knowing full well that its not her hip that he's feeling. "Mmm, can't find it," he murmurs to her, his gaze bright with heat. His hands spans out, around both sides of her hips, feeling the inside of them with his thumbs in a downward motion, looking for the outline of items in her pockets. He takes his sweet time sliding two fingers in, gripping the edge of the passport to ease it back out.
[Kora] He kisses fully; she opens her mouth to him, her fingers threaded through his hair, her grip tightening. When he begins to break away, she holds his mouth against hers for a handspan of heartbeats before releasing him at last, her teeth grazing his lower lip as she reluctantly allows him to break the kiss.
Her breath comes out sharply through her nose as he - touches her, and touches her, sliding his hands down her over the curve of her backside. She moves her body beneath his touch, undulant, her own dark eyes fixed on his pale gaze as the heat sparks, catches and burns in his eyes. Her mouth is open, just, and she holds her head close to his, brown to brown, her nostrils flaring with sublingual breaths, which she takes short and sharp, in strange time with the movement of his hands over her body.
By the time he has fished her passport from her hip pocket, she is biting her own lip, her eyes half-closed, close enough to his face that her pale lashes sweep over his cheeks when she cuts a look back upward, directly into his eyes. The downward pressure of her arms on his shoulders deepens, her grip on the back of his head shifts downward, so that her long fingers cup the back of his neck. Something about the way she braces her arms against his shoulders, her hands against the back of his neck, something about the way she tests the strength of her grip, his shoulders, his neck, suggests that she's ten seconds away from lifting herself onto his body, wrapping her long legs around his waist, whispering something encouraging into his mouth when she claims it again -
- and then he fishes the passport out. The grip changes, loosens, she eases her weight back onto the balls of her feet, turns her face sidelong, fine, loose strands of her hair brushing across his skin as she turns, the mass catching him maybe in the ear as she looks down between their bodies, her dark eyes lingering on his before she reaches for the passport with two of her own fingers and lifts it back up holding it open so that he can see her name. Her picture. Her human self.
It's an American passport, with an American seal on the front cover. Kora Williams, it says, a name so quotidian that it hardly seems real. It seems made up. The home address is somewhere in Missouri, some nameless town, and the girl who stares out from the picture is clearly Kora - evident in the eyes, in the wide, sure mouth - and someone else entirely, a deeply belligerent look in her eyes, as she meets the camera directly, her hair cropped short and dyed black.
[Trent Brumby] [Pause.]
"They're going to be Fenrir," this is quiet, all quiet. She's still looking over his shoulder, distant, but then she lifts her chin, draws her gaze back and focuses on him, clear and direct, her eyes shining. "I'll get you the best translations of the Eddas to read to them, and you can teach them how to fight. I'll show you how to read my journals. I'll - " a brief, winsome look. She leans forward, tipping her pale head down toward his dark one, swallowing hard against the strange knot in her chest. "I'll give you my mother's number, yeah?"
Then, she slides off the retaining wall. Unfolds her hands from his, plants her palms on the ledge, and lifts herself down, off the wall and into his body. Her eyes are on his, somehow in all this her arms find their away around his body. She's watching him the whole time and her eyes spark and gleam with a sharp sort of sudden longing, bone deep. "If we wait until I'm ready," she says, the unfamiliar, sour edge of fear a sharp tang in the back of her mouth, this living thing that twists through her body. " - we'll wait too long. You know?
"Thomas is still off questing, and I don't want to leave Joe in a lurch. And even when he's back - they're my pack, you know? And I know it never changes, but we're at war, and I - I have no idea how - " This isn't a rush. It's a litany. It's a confession, a quiet one, quietly spoken, her eyes on his, her mouth close to his skin. The look she gives him is askance. They are just off dead center, so her dark irises cut to the right corner of her eyes, all shadow, the pupils large in the uncertain light of the park, devouring. The litany cuts off.
There are another dozen or more fears underneath, but she's spoken the sharpest of them, the most constant. The ones that will never go away. She cuts herself off, though, shifts her attention back to him, searching her pale gaze, her own taut and direct, this sort of living expectancy written underneath her pale skin. "You do want to raise them, don't you?"
[Trent Brumby] When she slides from the wall he eases a step back to allow her room between his body and the wall at her back. Her arms find their way around him, as she expresses her fears and her desires, telling him how their children will be raised when she's not there. All the while he is watching her, listening to the tones behind the words and how it expresses on her face.
Strong hands caress up her back, press her in against him so that she's held in the embrace of his arms. His palms and fingers slide along the slope of her back, up to her shoulder blades and down to the small of her back. They are soothing strokes of a firm reality; that she's still here and he is with her. Pale grays meet her eyes, calm and understanding.
"I do," he tells her quietly, but simply.
Then he's raising one hand to touch her hair, to brush his thumb across the front of it, touching the edge of her brow in the process. His gaze tracks his hand motion, looking at the way she's got her hair up, always with something handy; pencils, chop sticks - reminding him that he needs to buy her something just as practical but more fashionable. Though, in a way, her trend has its own charm.
When he looks back down, meeting her gaze, he smiles warmly to her. "I will teach them everything you want them to know and then some more." There's a longer pause between his sentences. "I know you're scared, and if it doesn't feel right, then wait until it does. You will know when its the time for you." Trent believes that, and why wouldn't he? The Tribe in his blood is also that which raised him.
"I will enjoy being a father to our children."
[Kora] Kora stands there with her arms loosely around Trent's waist. As he fits his arms around her body, her grasp shifts, from his waist to his neck, fitting herself naturally close to him. His hands roam her back - and he can feel the tension in the long, lean muscles flanking her spine, the way her shoulder blades stand out against her skin, against the fabric of her worn - t-shirt, sharp as vestigal wings. Over his shoulder, the city rises, stark and vibrant, above the low curtain of carefully tended trees in this manicured section of the park. Over her shoulder, the lake is dark, the eastern horizon a deepening gray blue as the last shreds of daylight succumb to night.
"I'm not afraid of anything I can kill." Her gaze is fixed on his shoulder when she says it, her mouth curved more at the right corner than the left. From the way her muscles flex beneath his remaining hand on her back, he might guess that she'd be relieved to find something to kill now. To move, somehow - to use her body as it was meant to be used. At the end of the sentence, though, she flicks a glance back up as his pale eyes, calm and patient and warm on her face.
There's nothing to kill. There's no threat - just this warm space between them. Her pulse has calmed; she cannot hear her blood pumping inside her head, in the shell of her ears - but her breath comes more sharply. She is not looking at him constantly, but her face lilts upward with the touch of his hand against her hair, bound up with a broken pencil, with the graze of his thumb against her brow, dark eyes sheening with reflected light from the streetlights.
"It's right," she says, the hint of breathlessness in her voice gives it a husked undertone. " - this part of me that's - well, part of me knows - knows it deeply. I've claimed you. I'm ready. I shouldn't've claimed you if I wasn't ready. I never thought I'd claim a mate. But I know you're mine. And part of me - " the hook curve of her mouth deepens, but the animal never leaves her eyes. " - well, if we were people, we'd still be in the casual sex phase of the relationship. I never got past the three-week fling stage before."
[Trent Brumby] "Well, Kora," he says her name like someone says baby or honey, but he never uses those words, "if you fell pregnant tonight, we've still got plenty of time to move from what would be a casual sex relationship, into something else." Smiling at her, he smooths his hands down her back again, working in slow strokes to relax those lean muscles of hers.
There are all those other possibilities that they're not talking about either. Garou have violent lives, their population statistics are poor, and it's a very real factor that a female Garou might not carry to term. These are ugly truths, painful possibilities, but there's very little doubt, while looking him in the eye, that he would would do everything in his power to support his mate. This is far from a casual fling for Trent, and he knew it enough to allow her to claim him, to steal him from a Tribe that holds his deep core beliefs.
"But," he grows more serious here, his eyes taking on a harder glint he seldom uses around her, "I don't want you living in a broken school ground if you're carrying a child, and I want you to really look after yourself." Then, taking the edge out of his voice, "So you had best eat up plenty of shitty Italian sausages in park vendors while you can."
[Kora] "We've moved," she responds, her voice low and clear when his voice grows more serious. There's a liminal sort of smile on her mouth, one of those expressions that lives on the cusp of emotion, and a stubborn light in her eye as his own gaze turns stern. " - from the southside to the northside. We're claiming territory in Cabrini now, old territory that Kemp's old pack claimed."
They're all dead now, that pack. Dead or gone. She doesn't say the words, but the finality in her voice - the clear use of the past tense - tells the whole of the story without her putting it into words. " - so we've found this old Church that we claiming, near the heart of the territory. I'll show you, sometime. So you know where to find it."
Their bodies are close. He can feel her body heat, the warm of her arms against his shoulders, her hands behind his neck, filtering up through the black curls he keeps closely cropped. As soothes her with long, slow strokes of his sure hands up and down her back, he can feel the tension in her body ease without conscious thought - and then shift, in tone and direction, from tension to awareness of his hands on her body.
"You're right," she says at last, into the close space between them. " - we're not people. You're mine. And if you get me pregnant tonight, we'll have as much time as anyone has to - make it more." She leans up, stretching through the spine, rising to her toes, to kiss him, softly, directly, firm even when she is this gentle. Her eyes remain half open as she does so, shadowed by her lashes, focusing on his mouth before she claims it with her own, and then just down, this strange impressionistic view of his cheek, his now, all out of focus up so close.
Then she breaks the kiss, lifting her chin again to look up at him. "No more birth control." Her smile is thinned, taut. The fears are there. Cowardice arises in not facing them. "And we can start the getting to know you, too. My passport's in my hip pocket." His hands are closer. That sounds like an invitation. " - you've never looked at it, have you?" He wouldn't pry. She knows that, too.
[Trent Brumby] "Church, school, you get my point." But he will go and see this new place so that he knows where she is staying and how to get hold of the pack if he needs to. At worst, if he's in dire trouble, he can head there and know its protected grounds and that someone would come, eventually, to his aid - or his death. He really doesn't think that would happen though, it's more likely he would be called there in the event of her death.
A stray thought has him wonder how Joe is going to treat him from now on. He's not afraid of it. It's more of a curious, dangerous pest for him to have to put up with. Maybe in time both of their views would change of each other, but their dislike is mutual. Joe's hatred, however, is not. Trent is a tolerant man, by far.
Kora steals this away with a kiss, with words that bring him back to focus on her right before it. Both his hands become still, resting at varied angles on her back and hold her in closer. With a small step he could trap her against the wall, make her firm between them both, but it's a small part of him that he doesn't act on - he has lots of those moments. Control, discipline, has been his way of life, and that doesn't change now. There's a small but very male thrill that goes through him at the idea of no birth control, and if he was honest with himself, it's nothing to do with the idea of having a baby and everything to do with the pleasure he's looking forward to. That extra sensation that comes with lack of latex. Its enough to make him kiss her again, a little more fully and eager then the slow, firm one she had offered him.
But he breaks from it, before he stokes fires to higher levels, and takes her invitation by sliding his hands down her pants, knowing full well that its not her hip that he's feeling. "Mmm, can't find it," he murmurs to her, his gaze bright with heat. His hands spans out, around both sides of her hips, feeling the inside of them with his thumbs in a downward motion, looking for the outline of items in her pockets. He takes his sweet time sliding two fingers in, gripping the edge of the passport to ease it back out.
[Kora] He kisses fully; she opens her mouth to him, her fingers threaded through his hair, her grip tightening. When he begins to break away, she holds his mouth against hers for a handspan of heartbeats before releasing him at last, her teeth grazing his lower lip as she reluctantly allows him to break the kiss.
Her breath comes out sharply through her nose as he - touches her, and touches her, sliding his hands down her over the curve of her backside. She moves her body beneath his touch, undulant, her own dark eyes fixed on his pale gaze as the heat sparks, catches and burns in his eyes. Her mouth is open, just, and she holds her head close to his, brown to brown, her nostrils flaring with sublingual breaths, which she takes short and sharp, in strange time with the movement of his hands over her body.
By the time he has fished her passport from her hip pocket, she is biting her own lip, her eyes half-closed, close enough to his face that her pale lashes sweep over his cheeks when she cuts a look back upward, directly into his eyes. The downward pressure of her arms on his shoulders deepens, her grip on the back of his head shifts downward, so that her long fingers cup the back of his neck. Something about the way she braces her arms against his shoulders, her hands against the back of his neck, something about the way she tests the strength of her grip, his shoulders, his neck, suggests that she's ten seconds away from lifting herself onto his body, wrapping her long legs around his waist, whispering something encouraging into his mouth when she claims it again -
- and then he fishes the passport out. The grip changes, loosens, she eases her weight back onto the balls of her feet, turns her face sidelong, fine, loose strands of her hair brushing across his skin as she turns, the mass catching him maybe in the ear as she looks down between their bodies, her dark eyes lingering on his before she reaches for the passport with two of her own fingers and lifts it back up holding it open so that he can see her name. Her picture. Her human self.
It's an American passport, with an American seal on the front cover. Kora Williams, it says, a name so quotidian that it hardly seems real. It seems made up. The home address is somewhere in Missouri, some nameless town, and the girl who stares out from the picture is clearly Kora - evident in the eyes, in the wide, sure mouth - and someone else entirely, a deeply belligerent look in her eyes, as she meets the camera directly, her hair cropped short and dyed black.
[Trent Brumby] [Pause.]
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