Ornature

Retro!

[Kora] The hour is impossible - something hollow, the city sleeping, the streets full of shadow, the sky alight with the first threads of dawn. That's outside; beyond his newish apartment block, beyond the business district, beyond Lakeshore Drive. Off to the east, the sun rises over the dark, still waters of the lake. It sets them on fire, and the show is astounding.

Birds are awake, now. They've been awake for hours. The scabrous little things that scavenge out an existance on the city's scraps, that nest under eaves or in useless chimneys, in the caged trees that are set into the sidewalks in the nicer neighborhoods, that roost in forgotten attics or church belfreys. That's all somewhere else, too - outside. It has been oppressively hot in the city, with heat index and air quality warnings. The city officials have opened city buildings to allow homeless men and women to cool down for an hour or two in the air conditioned comfort of the courthouse rotunda. It has been oppressively hot, and so air conditioning is a near-necessity. Closed windows and the low hum of the a/c shut the world out of his apartment, until she brings it back in.

There was a full moon last night. Maybe he saw it through the windows. Maybe he went for a walk in the park, and looked up to it, huge and glowing white, so gleaming full that were it not for the city's light pollution he might have cast a moonshadow. Even to humans, there is something primal about a full moon; there's some answering rhythm in the blood or the heart, some unknowable tidal pull.

She wasn't here. After a week and a half of hovering, treating him (even after - ) as if he were broken, or - no, breakable - she disappeared for four days, returning only in brief visits at odd hours of the day or night, for a shower or a meal. i]You're okay, yeah?[/i] she asked him then, her dark eyes serious, something still and even drawn about her features. I have to go. I'll tell you later.

--

The morning after the full of the moon, the sun just creeping over the horizon, she brings the heat and the dust and the feel of the first rays of the sun back into his apartment. The sun is barely above the eastern horizon, and the city outside sleeps, quiet. She wakes him with sex, pulls him from some dream with her mouth and her hands, knits dream into waking. It is silent and rough and raw. First, she holds him down, and then she pulls him up to her because she wants to kiss him, because she wants to feel her teeth on his shoulder, or his throat, some animal act of dominance.

There is dust on her skin, and sweat. The smell of the lake in her hair, and the moon is in her eyes. Her only concession to civilization was toothpaste: when she kisses him, she fills his senses with the sharp tingle of Crest mint gel.

--

When it is finished, she pushes him back down into the bed, braces herself over him, on all fours now, her fists on either side of his chest, her knees on either side of his hips, just - watching him, underneath her. Then, she crawls off him, curls her long legs underneath her lean frame, settling on the disordered sheets at the foot of the bed.

"Joe left," she tells him, at last; she isn't look at him. Instead, the steady glow of the alarm clock has her attention, or maybe the threads of sunlight beyond his pulled blinds. " - that fucking coward."

Her voice is raw, as if she had been at a rock concert, screaming her head off all night long, breathing lungsfull of cigarette smoke and tossing back whiskey after whiskey. She's still half-clothed, having only bothed to shuck her jeans before climbing into his bed. The black t-shirt she always seems to wear is twisted around her body. Her bare legs and hips are pale against his sheets.

It's dark in the room. They're barely touching, now. Maybe her toes against his hip, along his stomach, where the half-healed stab wounds are still covered by gauze and tape.

[Trent Brumby] He had worried about her when she left for four days. He was always worried about her, but then, especially then, he had been. She had spent her time hovering around him to the point of suffocating, but he had dealt with it graciously, knowing it was her way of showing how she cared, how she fretted as much as he did. They never spoke about it though, it was a silent understanding and, importantly, acceptance. This is why they get on so well, so easily. They had yet to have harsh words with one another in this whirlwind of claiming.

She woke him with sex and not once did he protest. There was nothing to protest about, other then the fact she kept her t.shirt on, but he let her, didn't ask or take it off himself. His hands had just slid beneath, quite enjoying the way her nakedness began at her hips. She was thrilling to watch, and more thrilling to be under.

It left him hot, sweaty, and a little aching in the torso. But it felt good, being spent in the early hours of the morning. He looked up at her when she hovered over him, eyes quiet and calm, a hint of lines there between his brows. His hand had moved to touch her, but she slipped from him in that liquid way Garou can, to sit away from him. Near enough, but still away.

The sheets whisper seconds after she tells him Joe left. He hears the pain behind the anger. He remembers what it was for her to have pack. She lived with them, after all, not him. That, he understands too. Propped onto his elbows he twists to lay on his side, his thigh braced along her toes as he reaches a hand out to touch her back. Fingers slide across the top of the t.shirt, warmed and slightly damp with her sweat.

"I'm sorry, Kora." His voice is always deeper in the bedroom, in the way he tries to quietly hush it.

[Kora] He says her name and she looks back at him, then - not before. He says her name and she turns her head, finds his face and meets his pale eyes. The look is direct and silent. Her eyes are dark, her features shadowed except for the bitter twist of her mouth. He could hear the pain underneath her anger - and now he can see it in her eyes. In the dawn after the moot, when the other Garou lounged after the revel or wandered back to their respective territories, flanked by the packmates, the pain was enough to make her breathless.

She was alone.

She's alone now, too. Even when he touches her. Which means: she's singular, an individual. Oh, he touches her, his fingers on the seam of her t-shirt, where the black cotton borders her pale skin. It needs a wash. The clothing and the girl - but later, for both. Just now, she curls into the touch of his hand on her back the way a plant craves the sun. It's not the same, though. She cannot feel him in the back of her mind, making her more - larger, greater, both individual and part-of-a-whole.

She's breathless now with it, too - but only when the pads of his fingers touch her skin. Then it feels electric, both the pain of the loss and her sharp awareness of his presence. Then it feels alive.

"I can't hold the totem," there is blood flecked on her jaw, but the hunt that captones the revel. It is visible only when she turns her head toward him, lifts her chin and finds his eyes. "Thomas will follow Joe. And - " it is the full moon; her whole body - from the toes curled against his thigh to the large muscles flanking her spine, everything in between - convulses with this sort of blistering, subliminal anger that she swallows, and swallows hard.

The ruminations are pointless. Kora closes her eyes against them, against the spike of rage, then opens them again and finds Trent's pale, steady gaze. "You know something?"

[Trent Brumby] There's nothing he can do for it. He can't fill that void she feels now, not the way that she aches for Garou to. But the best he can do is be there as the steady support that he is, with his hand sliding across the lower portion of her back, never demanding. His gaze doesn't leave her, not even when she turns from him, or the Rage spikes and makes his heart beat a little harder, if only for a moment. He doesn't fear her, but she can be quite intense. Mostly it excites him. Thrills him.

"There will be others," his voice is softer still, knowing that's not what she wants to hear right now. She's angry at Joe, at Thomas, at Garou he's barely met and knows of only in an abstract sense, in the way they made her feel whole and healthy, and now left her abandoned.

He stays there, propped on the elbow, despite his want to get up and curl himself around her, to hold in her against him. Comfort and protect her. He stays there because he knows the dominance from before, the display of it, the craving of it. It keeps him in his place because that comforts her, too.

[Kora] He tells her that there will be others and her mouth curls in response. Call the expression bitter, like biting into the pip of pomegranite, the tannins sharp after the sweet pulp. Mouth closes, she breathes out a sharp breath that flares her nostrils. He could almost swear that underneath, it sounds like her near-silent laughter.

"I thought we'd die together," she tells him, her fingers twisting in the sheets, the knuckles white, blunt nails pulling against the weave of the fine, doubtlessly organic, cotton. "After Kemp. After we went to Battleground, I knew we'd die together. I was as certain of that as I am of my own name. As - "

Kora presses her mouth together, then, stopping the maundering speculation with a certain unerring discipline. She looks away from him, then, down the line of his body, shadowed against the sheets, indistinct in the early morning shadows that define his bedroom.

"When I first told him about you," she continues at last, " - he was furious. He said that I was betraying my blood and my ancestors. That your tribe had sent you to seduce me, or steal my strength." And when she continues, she finds his pale eyes again. There's a raw undercurrent to her rough-edged voice, still. "Bollucks, all of it."

"If he had told me, then, to choose between you and the pack," unflinching, she holds his eyes. Her own swim with faint filaments of reflected light, the sun through the blinds, some nightlight in the hall. The door is half-opened from where she snuck in on him as he slept. Her clothing - her boots, her socks, her jeans, her underwear - litter the path from the front door to his bedroom like the crumbs left behind by some fairy tale character to show the way back home.

"I would have chosen the pack.

[Trent Brumby] He listens to all of it, his hand still moving across her back, up until the comments that involve him. His hand had stilled then - briefly at the furious part, then continued, pausing finally with the rest of it. The idea that he could seduce a Get of Fenris, or would, was ludicrous but Joe hadn't seemed like a reasonable Garou. He was still a child compared to Trent, just a child with the Goddess gifts and curse, which made him a dangerous, unreasonable, deadly child. But a child, still.

Its as she says the last, that she sees it in him. So closely, boldly, is she holding his gaze that its as clear as day. She's sure he stopped breathing for a moment. His chest and throat got tighter, and he wasn't sure whether it was anger or pain that made it constrict. Pale eyes can't hold hers for very long. The frown is confusion, but the eyes hold the sharp pain quickly after the words broke through that moment of bewilderment.

Right then, he's not sure he wants to touch her. Doesn't want to comfort her. His hand drifts from her back, it rests his forearm and elbow across his hip. It doesn't matter that it was then, that maybe it was different now, or that she was going through the loss of a pack. He had just heard that he was second choice, when he had given up his blood, his Tribe, all those things that Joe had said he'd do of her.

It hits the Kinfolk hard; an unexpected, harsh blow. He doesn't even know what to say or where to look.

[Kora] There is this: she doesn't look away from his pain. She doesn't flinch from it. She holds his gaze until he can no longer look at her, and even then her eyes remain on his face, the spasm of tension in his set jaw, the throb of his pulse at the temple, the almost deliberate way he stops touching her, lifts his hand from her back.

Some deep, feral part of her wants him to turn that pain she has given him into violence. She wants him to turns on her, spit out harsh words, give expression to the lancing blow she can see and feel viscerally, but not hear. She wants him to hit her so that she can hold him down, so that she can feel his hands on her skin, her hands on his flesh, his body underneath her. She wants to touch him. She wants to be touched.

"I'm sorry, Trent," she says at last; she's breathless with it - his sudden spike of pain. Her own, enduring. "I didn't - I didn't - " She cannot find words, but she will not lie to him about it.

Her rage is like a brand underneath her skin, and the moon is outside the windows, somewhere under the earth. She can feel it, keenly, underneath her skin, pulling at her flesh. Her head feels half-severed from her body, the spiritual certainty that she belongs somewhere, in something.

"Tell me to fuck off. Tell me I was a fucking coward, too. I - "

Kora makes a sudden, harsh gesture, a quick slash of her forearm in a downslanting motion. It hits the bed between them with an audible impact, and then she looks away from him, uncoils from the edge of the bed, plants her feet on the floor. Her back is to him, the stiff spine, the straight shoulders, the stark edges of her shoulder blades visible against her t-shirt. "I believed in him. Underneath all that bullshit, I thought he had greatness in him. That it would be - "

She stills again, stiffens her body against another frission of rage that sparks and burns through her, closing her throat, leaving her vision sparking and her body almost shaking with it.

" - damn moon." she mutters, quiet in the aftermath. "I shouldn't be here. I should go."

[Trent Brumby] He won't give her what she wants. He won't even look back at her. There's so much he could say, and yet none of it comes out. Part of him knows she's going through her own pain, and she reminds him of that when she continues on about Joe, right after saying she's sorry.

"I don't give a fuck about Joe." There's some of it. It is harsh, it flashes in his eyes, but she's not looking at him anymore, and he's turning away from her. She can feel his weight shift on the mattress and the sheets slide across his skin. He leaves the opposite side of the bed, doesn't just sit on it, but gets up, naked and walking for his jeans that he leaves on the end of the bed. They're on the floor, now, thrown off while they were enjoying each other earlier. He bends, picking them up and immediately begins to put them on.

He doesn't tell her to go, but he doesn't tell her to stay. His own anger is far slower then hers to reach a boiling point, but it's getting there. He is breathing again, a little quicker, like the way his heart beats. Trent does not look at her still. It's quite the cold shoulder from the Fury- no, Fenrir now, Kinfolk. Oh how bitter that feels - it warms his belly with ugly, unwanted heat.

[Kora] The children of Fenris are called to stand unflinching in the face of any foe. She flinches from his anger, though - minutely - bracing her shoulders against it even as she welcomes it. Rage to match hers. Anger for anger, with the full moon somewhere, circling its way back around the deep blue disc of the earth.

She sits there, breathing it in, her lungs on fire with it; she doesn't look back as the bed depresses underneath his weight, as he finds his feet and rises. The crisp sound of his jeans as he shakes them out, though - she looks up and back at him, then.

"Where do you think you're going?" her voice is deceptively calm; her dark eyes flicker over him, from his bare toes to the crown of his head, to the white bandages taped abdomen. "You're hurt," she says, almost automatically. The phrase must have become infuriating over the last handful of weeks. "Just - just go back to bed. I'm - "

She doesn't finish the sentence. And then she, too, is standing, her bare feet on his floor, the PIXIES t-shirt twisted around her torso, the lettering distorted by the disorder. She circles the bed and walks past him, out into the hallway, following the trail of her discarded clothing, her jeans and her underwear, her socks, pilin them in her arms as she disappears down the hall, toward the living room.

[Trent Brumby] "Don't." But she had already stopped. She had not only stopped whatever she was going to say but was leaving the room. It spikes his own anger another notch, and his breathing harder through a flare of nostrils as he glares at her back, as she leaves his apartment, again.

Teeth grit, grind. It's a heart beat later, when she's padding down the hall that the bedroom door slams, hard enough to rock vibrate through the walls and felt through the floor. It still wasn't satisfying, and he was left to pace his room, hands curling into fists, clenching to unclench again and repeat the process. He prowls it, gray eyes darker, glowering at the tight confines of his room, locked into his own apartment.

As much as he'd like to trash the place, he has some level of rationality. Destruction solves nothing. He's older and more mature in that, but he burns with the need of it. To lash out and expel some of this sudden hatred he finds welling up inside of him, plenty of it at himself.

[Kora] He is alone in his bedroom. It's dark, but sunlight is gathering along the edges of the curtains, the slats of the blinds. His alarm clock is insistent red. The numbers crawl by, but even if he stares at them, it is difficult to mark, precisely, when one flips into another. The room smells of sex. The shuddering impact of the door in its frame reverberates up and down the hallway.

Kora stands in the middle of his living room, breathing hard. She's still, her clothes in her hands, her rage this bright, livid thing inside her, solid sometimes, this surety in the back of her mind and heart - but molten now, the flash of its red heart evident to her in every crack.

This room is empty; it is brighter than his living room. The blinds are not drawn, and the sun is rising against the glass windows. She feels both drunk and hung over, furious with it. What he knows is: she's gone. She turned around and walked away. He slammed the door. At some point, the pipes in the walls open up, and he can hear water running.

The sink, not the shower.

--

Later in the day, he'll find the imprint of her face smeared against the glass in the living room windows, which are made cool by the air conditioning.

Now, five minutes later, or ten, he hears a knock on the bedroom door.

[Trent Brumby] A day, half of it, is not long for him to cool down. His temper is not a quick flash of something that comes and goes, but a slow burn that lingers for days on end. It doesn't burn livid, red hot now, but it's still smoldering right there under the surface. At one point he had left his bedroom, in the quietness of the apartment, and went to the bathroom. The cool shower hadn't done him much favours, but he felt a little better. He had come back, planning on cleaning the bedsheets, but instead had lay out on them in a pair of sweatpants that rode low on his hip.

He had slept. Slept short enough to consider it a long nap, and had woken at the sound of the knock on the bedroom door. It all swims back to him the moment he lifts his head and looks down the length of the bed at the closed door beyond. His pillow is partially damp from his hair that had been still wet when he lay down, he pulls it closer to him, adjusts it to fit the crook of his shoulder and neck and fluffs it under his jaw.

It's childish not to answer. But he still doesn't know what to say, maybe he won't for a long time, but he's going to have to talk to her. He still wants to talk to her, he knows that much, just maybe not now - as if he has the privileged of time. "You can come in," he says, then shifts from where he just made himself comfortable to rise up and sit against the headboards. Fresh gauze, pillows behind him, which he lounges into, and leaves him facing the door directly.

[Kora] Kora pushes the door open; she looks at his eyes, still hot with the dragging undercurrent of his anger. Her gaze flashes to his damp hair and the fresh dressings on his abdomen, before she looks away, at the still-rumpled sheets.

She is still now. She could be a statute, standing there, something palm-sized, like a waterballoon, in her right hand. Her hair is pulled sharply back, and her clothing is the same - damp with swear from the hot afternoon, some dark stain, nameless, on the right knee and left thigh of her jeans.

She is empty, too. Emptied of rage, left with this sort of terrible calm, all by herself in her head for the first time in moons.

"I didn't mean that you were my second choice," she says, from her place at the door. Her voice sounds thinner without the undergirding of rage to bind it. " - that I weighed you against the pack, and they would have won. I meant," here she frowns, the microexpression all but lost on her face, except for the way it twists her generous mouth. " - that I[/] was the second choice. The question wasn't you versus them, in my head. It would have been [i]me versus them. And I would have sacrificed - "

Here she breaks off, and looks away, pursing her lips and straightening in the door frame. "I - I'm not making this any better."

Then, lifting the oblong object in her hand by way of explanation, she change subjects entirely. Her voice in this is low. " - the Guardians say kin can use these. So. I'll leave them on the coffee table. The gourd will heal you. The bracelet will find the nearest Garou if you break it. If you're in danger."

[Trent Brumby] He listens to her and watches her. His gaze is very direct for everything that's he's feeling. Trent is guarded now, not sure what to expect, and expecting that everything he thought has somehow been a lie. Not a deliberate one, but a lie none the less. He had believed in something that wasn't so, and that was his fault. It still leaves him in a terrible place.

He had belonged to her, wanted nothing more to have that, and when he got it, it felt right and like home. The irony of the situation isn't lost on him, perhaps later he will laugh bitterly over it with a beer, or two, or three and more. Right now though, there's none of that. She looks lost there, in damp, stained clothes, telling him what he already knew - she wasn't making it any better.

Then she changes tactics, talks about something she has for him, something for protection and healing. His first thought is to tell her to take it, he doesn't want it. His anger wants him to, his hurt does too. But he doesn't. His knee raises, sliding his bare foot to prop against the mattress and his wrist drapes over the knee, the sweatpants loose and comfortable on him. Fingers give a small flick, indicates for her to do as she wanted, perhaps. Maybe it meant something else. Subtle things are hard to read.

When he does speak, it's low, and the words are simple, speaking nothing about them and how he feels about it. "I'm sorry that he left you, Kora." The words ring true, he is. He's sorry for her pain too, and for this that he now causes her. But he's selfish in his own moment of self classified abandonment.

[Kora] When he speaks, her dark eyes go to his face, and remain there, rapt. Her mouth is closed and her eyes are bruised but clear. She nods once, minutely, in acknowledgment, her pale hair gleaming in the ambient light. Then, she squares her shoulders, straightens her spine, and stands away from the door frame, erect and upright, the posture deliberate. Her gaze drops from his eyes to his body, his bare chest, the tension in his abdominal muscles from his position in behind, his thigh.

There's a moment where she's still, framed in the doorway but not touching any part of it. Then she enters the room, her gait deliberate, hipslung and alert. The two talens are small things: a gourd, painted with harsh, angular glyphs. The sound of water sloshing around inside, and a bit of braided rope with a handful of claw beads woven into the braid. The beads are etched with the same angular markings. She deposits both, carefully, on his bedside table.

"You know that that was before - " she says to him, low-voiced when she's close, looking down at him from a sharp angle, her hands contained, in her pockets now. The moon is still out there, like some reckless satellite, and she can still feel it against the back o her skull, under her skin. She is whiplean, close enough that he can smell the blood and dust on her skin. " - before this. I didn't lie when I claimed you, Trent." She watches the line of his jaw, movement of his pulse, the tension in his bare torso, the continues, "I'm coming over tomorrow. You're mine now, and I'm not letting you go."

With that, she turns to leave.