[Trent Brumby] It's dinner and then they spend time in the bedroom or on the sofa, or anywhere else that Kora finds fitting. Already with a day at the gym and scrubbing the house had left him aching, and after the Get of Fenris Garou is done with him, he knows he's going to be in a fair amount of pain the next day. For now though, they've recovered enough to have their breath back and drink down some water or beer.
Trent hasn't bothered getting up to pull on his clothes again, he sat against the pillows with the sheet lounging across his leg, covering himself just enough to appear somewhat modest. He drinks from a bottle of water, tipping his head back and quenching some thirst before reaching over and setting the bottle back on the bedside table, capped.
[Kora] There is a certain tension in the air between them, still. Dinner was more about sex than it was about conversation. She watched him and he watched her watching him and the charge in the air was direct, physical - this wired undercurrent before it became explicit. "I can't stay long," she told him sometime earlier. Their clothes were still on then.
Now they aren't. He has water; she's drinking a bottle of beer. In the end, when they recovered their breath and their senses, she was the one who retrieved their drinks - a bottle of Yuengling for herself, a bottle of water for him - and the choice of a pair of Ibuprofen or half of one of his remaining pain pills from the hospital. He'll find the other half in the prescription bottle in the cabinet above his sink in the morning, the knife she used to cut it in half unwashed in his sink with the dishes he left to soak when she dragged him away from domesticity.
"You're going to be sore in the morning," she told him, as she tossed him the pills. "Take one, or the other, yeah?" A soft huff, that not-quite laughter as she not-quite looked at him, sidelong in the spilling light. "Or both." There was distance between them, then, but this aching sort of half-withheld affection in her voice. "I don't care which."
--
The room is quiet; the light diffuse. He is lounging against the pillows, his head lower than hers. She is sitting up nearly straight, another pillow upended behind her back, close enough to him that she can push the fingers of her free hand through the half-curls on top of his head, slowly, thoughtlessly. Her own hair is loose, is down. It makes her seem all the softer, that. She only wears it like that in his apartment, in his bed - a loose tangle, damp from sweat, or maybe a shower, pulled over her right shoulder, the fine strands falling several inches lower than her breasts. Her half of the sheet is pulled up to her waist. The outline of her long legs is shadowed underneath, some suggestion of modesty. The long, cruel scar that bisects her torso has faded somewhat - the furrows are less red, more white - but it will never go away.
"Do you want to hear the story?" The pack maybe; or Joe. Something else. He has to interpret this. She doesn't clarify, but she's close, sitting over him, twisting her fingers through his hair. She pulls him closer, to rest against her.
The silence of the room feels fraught, sharp even. There's rain, still, against the windows. The storm has passed, though. It's gentler, now.
[Trent Brumby] "I'll take them later." The pills were left with the water on the side of the bed. For all that Trent smokes - come to mention it, he hasn't been founding smoking in awhile, he'd been tempted in the last twenty four hours but he'd one out over the addiction - and how he likes to have the occasional drink, he's really never been happy about taking any sort of pills or medications. So, they were left right there, hopefully out of Kora's mind.
--
It's comfortable enough, lounging like this. That tension hasn't yet returned but there is something different in the air. It's not the same and maybe it never will become what it was before. Some things, once said, can never be taken back. That is the problem with thoughts becoming words, even if the intention was different, the delivery wrong, they are interpreted only by the listener and their moods or motivations. Words become a reality, in a way, no longer a private thought, and in turn, it drives a series of reactions and events.
They live in that now. In the consequence and, possibly, misunderstandings.
This is expected, really. For all that they have fawned over each other, fought for one another, and stripped back various ideals and future plans, they know so little about one another. But she knows that the way her hand threads through his curls makes his body sleepy, lulls it into a sense of comfort. He lays as she wants him to, perfectly compliant for all his anger and hurt shown the day before. Rested partly against her, hand over her thigh, caressing it with his thumb, he listens to her breathe.
Then ask him if he wants to hear the story. He's not sure he does, but that doesn't matter. She wants to tell it, and so, he tells her: "Sure," simply.
[Kora] This is the window he has into her world - the low whisper of her voice, late at night, when he's lulled into sleepiness by satiation and whispering touch of her fingers through his hair. She has claws, too. Those hands, with the long fingers and the short blunt nails, the bracelets at the wrists, those long deft hands are the hands of a killer; a murderer; a beast. Maybe he dreams these things sometimes, after - wakens with some lingering memory of blood in his mouth, or the pleasure of running through the woods, under a gleaming moon.
I can't stay long, she told him. She lingers, though, wrapping an arm around his shoulders when he leans back against her. Her beer bottle is in that hand, the bottom cool and wet against his chest.
She is still a moment, which is to say: quiet, trying to parse out more meaning than any monosyllabic word like sure could be meant to carry. In the end, she gives up. It's on her mind; she wants him to know.
"He was Jarl," she begins, " - our leader, yeah? And he was challenged by another Garou. He was arrogant, sure he would win. Said that he beat Kemp once, and that he could beat anyone if that was the case."
There's a pause there; her grief is subsumed, but he can still hear it in her voice, feel it in the way her fingers curl through his hair.
"I wouldn't be surprised if Kemp let him win. Some Rotagar lesson." There's a hint of wistfulness in her voice, drifting down to him. He cannot see her face, but he can feel her body against his, the way the words resonate through her chest. The way she moves when she breathes. "All month he'd been dreaming of this fallen Caern. Not - dreaming like sleep. Just getting starry eyed, like some teenager over some pop star, right - like a glory hound. No honor; no -
"I wouldn't leave; wouldn't uproot you, or leave the Caern, not when we're at war. I didn't think he would, either. Until he lost the challenge, and couldn't face the loss, and ran away. And it just - snapped. We were done."
Her arm tightens around his torso, then she lifts the bottle to her mouth, tipping it back, drinking.
"Then," she continues, finding and twisting another half-curl around her thumb and forefinger, "I challenged the Garou who beat Joe."
[Trent Brumby] As he listens he learns a few things. That the Jarl is the leader of the Get of Fenris, that's the title that they give the Garou in the place. He doesn't know if it has to do with ranks or anything of the sort; it's not his world and he's never been a close follower of it. He's always been on the outskirts, mostly unwillingly. He also learns that this is about Joe, the Alpha of the pack, the one that had hated Trent on sight, enough to make a move of violence towards him.
Trent didn't like Joe. Likes him even less now. Hates, even, that he's come between Kora and Trent, even when he's no longer in the city. More then that, there's this anger that this Joe would have been the one that Kora would have chosen over himself. That's why it really gripes him, chases away that sleeping sort of lull as Kora's hand continues through his hair. It makes him more alert, makes his hand come up and rub the scruff at the side of the jaw as if he could prevent tension sliding into it and showing.
He doesn't want to get into this, again. Let it go he tells himself.
There should be a little more interest in wanting to know these things. Truthfully before, he'd been more interested. He'd lounged in bed and listened to her stories, asked to hear them. He had promised her that he'd remember these things long after she was gone. Right now though, he doesn't have that same care for them. Maybe she can feel that distance, the detachment. Maybe she's oblivious to it. He's trying to keep that quiet and turn it back around. Part of him doesn't like that he doesn't, frankly, care. The other part, though, that one that makes his blood boil with testosterone, isn't as rational.
"What happened, then?" He asks her, so that she will continue with the story. "And who was the Garou that beat Joe?" There's a flicker of: I hope he kicked his fucking ass.
[Kora] She watches him so closely, the shine of his hair in the soft lights, the sleepy lull of his lashes against his cheeks, she will not miss the subtle changes in his posture, the way his body becomes more alert. She's so close, her arm around his shoulders, his torso, her other hand pulling through his hair. She feel the subtle flex of his deltoids, she's sitting over him, looking down the hard line of his torso under it disappears beneath the sheets. His thumb stills on her thigh. The air changes.
There is, then, a moment when she stops breathing, when she's utterly still, unutterably still, holding back her breath back in her body, refusing to breathe. Her eyes are closed, but he cannot see that unless he tips his head back and cranes his neck, looking for her dark eyes. He can just feel her, still underneath him, mirroring his tension, the twist of her arm around his body, tighter, taut - before she starts to breathe again.
"Karl Holds the Line. A Rotagar, packed under hummingbird." There is still a note of disbelief in her voice, that a son of Fenris would choose such a small, bloodless little hungry thing as his totem spirit. It is quieted by her awareness of the change in his posture, the way that awareness catches her out like a hard stone in her throat.
Tense, her voice is all the more quiet, her hand still in his hair. "War-Handed didn't even wound him. Didn't scratch him. Didn't draw blood." The contempt threaded through her words in that moment is almost entirely subconscious. "While he slunk away, I challenged Holds the Line. I told him that if he wanted my respect, he would have to beat me without his bird. I didn't think he would. I thought he picked that thing as a - crutch.
"I was wrong."
Here, she leans forward, just, lifting the beer bottle to her mouth again. It leaves beads of moisture on his skin.
"So we fought. And I won. And you know what that makes me?"
[Trent Brumby] "It makes you the Jarl," he tells her, letting her know that he was following the conversation no matter what he actually felt about other issues that linger unspoken in the air. Sliding his other hand from where it lays against his stomach, he raises it up and wipes the moisture from his skin absently.
Karl. It didn't sound like that Kora liked him. He'd have to go and meet the guy. Trent hasn't become part of the Tribe. He'd been claimed but beyond that, nothing had changed other then the fact that he had calls from his family that were unhappy and the Black Furies in Chicago openly despised him the last time he went to met with one of them.
He knew Adrian but they hadn't had much to do with each other since he'd started seeing Kora. He wasn't good like that, keeping contact. Maybe he should try and change it. His thoughts drift back to here and now though, those having just been fleeting.
"So you're the leader of the Tribe now?" The Tribe, not his or hers, just the Tribe. Which makes him part of it, still.
[Kora] "Yeah," she confirms, to both. There's a low, scoffing sound in her voice. The whole thing feels like a play. One of those weird absurdist plays that get put on by art students on the side stage at a music festival. "It's fucking absurd," she continues, quiet, her hand still in his hair now as she lifts and finishes off her bottle of beer. Then she's leaning forward, this sort of torque to her torso as she twists for the bedside table and stretches to reach the coaster left to protect the surface. " I'm a cliath Skald. Not ranked, not a modi - but there aren't many of us here."
This silence, the, as she comes back to him, sliding her right hand down his arm now, rather than around his shoulders. Her eyes are on her fingers, the way her pale skin gleams against his deeper tones. The way his muscles are outlined against his skin. The fitting his joints, and hers, all of it. "I need to find our kin, to make sure they know, to make sure they can find me if there's a need. I don't think there are many - Adrian, Thornton, Izzy - but I'd like to give them your number, too. In case."
He can almost hear her smile, the sudden curve of her mouth, supple and fleeting at once. "I'm not sure in case of what. Just, in case." It slides away, as suddenly as it came. There's this sort of ache in its absence. "I want you to get one of those TracPhones for this stuff. Right? The pre-paid ones. Pay for it in cash, so it's not traceable in case someone's phone is compromised. In case.
"Do that for me?"
[Trent Brumby] He hasn't moved much, only lays there against her in the darkness of his bedroom. Long legs are stretched out, one of them under the sheet and the other partly curled out of it. The sheet isn't white but a deep plum colour that he seems to like; it's darker on them both. His thumb, that had wiped moisture from his torso, now slides across the injuries he wears on his body. The gauze is still there and he rubs his thumb across it, probing for the painful slices stitched together.
"Yeah, I can do that," he tells her and shifts his attention then, to her. Twisting his head he looks up at her, and there's something softer in him now. That resentment has taken a back seat, allowing him to show her some warmth not just the sexual affection that they had over the course of dinner and shortly after.
"I never met Thorton, but I know Izzy." Maybe she didn't know that. But she knows it now. "Not well, but I know her, and I saw Thorton at some Kinfolk meeting when I first came into town." That obviously hadn't worked out so well since there hasn't been any other similar meetings that he knows of. He wants to shift up and grab another drink, but she's comfortable and content with him as he is, so he nestles back down again, repositions himself so he can sink into the mattress and pillows.
"I'll do that tomorrow. You just want the one?"
[Kora] Joe hated those things. The Kinfolk meetings. She doesn't say it; she swallows the words this time, pulls them back into her body and holds them there, as if her ex-Alpha were her ex-boyfriend, this presence between them now, moreso in absence than he was in reality. It makes the twist of her mouth briefly, passingly bitter - but he's below her, his view of her featurs is all architectural, the vertical shape of her body - the battlescar, the tangle of her hair, the curve of her breasts and the line of her jaw, her mouth a shadow above and her eyes, dark, looking down at him, quiet.
"I didn't know that." The brief twist of her mouth. " - Izzy's - " she doesn't finish the thought, and her voice is neutral, not carefully so, but neutral. "Thornton shot a Garou in the Caern, so now kin are banned. I think they're seeing each other, though. Maybe it'll be good for them both."
The unspoken is implicit: as long as a Garou doesn't want one, or the other.
--
Then:
"Yeah, just the one." she replies, her gaze quickening over the gauze bandages as he finds them and traces the lines underneath. For a moment, she's still - a predator's stillness, despite the sweep of her hair down over his body - a predator's grace as this complex web of emotions gleams in her eyes with the instinctive drive to protect her mate. "Promise me you'll take it easy tomorrow?"
He nestles back into the mattress, and she brushes the back of her knuckles against his roughly stubbled cheek. The affection is very much present; it is deliberate. She has killer's hands and her body is tensed against the spike of her rage when she thinks about - when she thinks about -
- but she thinks about him instead. His body, the pattern of light across his pale eyes as he looks up at her. Her fingers against his skin, her body underneath his before it disappears under the deep, plum-colored sheets. "Go to sleep, baby. I'll stay until you do."
[Trent Brumby] "Izzy has issues," he says it for her. It may not be the words she was going to use but he does, puts it out there just like that, blunt and without guilt for it. But he does not say it in a malicious way, he had sympathy for the other Kinfolk, even if he doesn't know all that made her the way she was, he understands the hardships it is to fill a certain role. "And a man or woman can change another's life." This he knows too, intimately. So should Kora.
Fingers drum on his stomach lightly when she mentions taking it easy and he finds his mouth curling in a slow smirk, a smile really, as he looked up at her to meet her eyes directly. "I won't repeat what I've done today," he promises her. Not exactly the same thing but he's not going to be stupid and angry like he was the night before and the day that followed. At least he hopes he has a reign on those particular emotions that had driven him like a man with a mission.
Reaching up, now, he curls his hand along her cheek and attempts to draw her down a little towards him. His body stretches, lifts up so that he can meet her mouth with a simple, lingering kiss. "You should stay," he tells her after, murmuring it to her mouth. But he releases her and lowers back onto the bed, inhaling a sigh before huffing it slowly outward again. Shifting, he slides his arm under the pillow, under his head. He can sleep like this, on his back, exposed. It shows that he doesn't feel vulnerable, that he's a relaxed in the comfort of his own home.
[Kora] Kora is smiling when the lingering kiss ends; she's smiling into his mouth, over his body, her hair shifting beneath the grasp of his hand. I can't stay long - she told him some time ago, in the kitchen as he pulled her dinner from the oven, while she watched him with hungry eyes. On the sofa, or in his bed. Just one more time.
It is later now, and the rain has stopped. The city's quiet outside his windows. He says: you should stay and she gives him this half-smile by way of response, which means, I can't. or I have territory to see to or gaia only knows what.
Except that, later in the night, when he wakes up, thirsty maybe, or just aching from the day's exertions, from the reawakened pain of his stab wounds - she's still there, asleep beside him, an arm flung across his chest, her naked body curled close to his, sharing heat in the artificial chill of the air conditioned room.
Trent hasn't bothered getting up to pull on his clothes again, he sat against the pillows with the sheet lounging across his leg, covering himself just enough to appear somewhat modest. He drinks from a bottle of water, tipping his head back and quenching some thirst before reaching over and setting the bottle back on the bedside table, capped.
[Kora] There is a certain tension in the air between them, still. Dinner was more about sex than it was about conversation. She watched him and he watched her watching him and the charge in the air was direct, physical - this wired undercurrent before it became explicit. "I can't stay long," she told him sometime earlier. Their clothes were still on then.
Now they aren't. He has water; she's drinking a bottle of beer. In the end, when they recovered their breath and their senses, she was the one who retrieved their drinks - a bottle of Yuengling for herself, a bottle of water for him - and the choice of a pair of Ibuprofen or half of one of his remaining pain pills from the hospital. He'll find the other half in the prescription bottle in the cabinet above his sink in the morning, the knife she used to cut it in half unwashed in his sink with the dishes he left to soak when she dragged him away from domesticity.
"You're going to be sore in the morning," she told him, as she tossed him the pills. "Take one, or the other, yeah?" A soft huff, that not-quite laughter as she not-quite looked at him, sidelong in the spilling light. "Or both." There was distance between them, then, but this aching sort of half-withheld affection in her voice. "I don't care which."
--
The room is quiet; the light diffuse. He is lounging against the pillows, his head lower than hers. She is sitting up nearly straight, another pillow upended behind her back, close enough to him that she can push the fingers of her free hand through the half-curls on top of his head, slowly, thoughtlessly. Her own hair is loose, is down. It makes her seem all the softer, that. She only wears it like that in his apartment, in his bed - a loose tangle, damp from sweat, or maybe a shower, pulled over her right shoulder, the fine strands falling several inches lower than her breasts. Her half of the sheet is pulled up to her waist. The outline of her long legs is shadowed underneath, some suggestion of modesty. The long, cruel scar that bisects her torso has faded somewhat - the furrows are less red, more white - but it will never go away.
"Do you want to hear the story?" The pack maybe; or Joe. Something else. He has to interpret this. She doesn't clarify, but she's close, sitting over him, twisting her fingers through his hair. She pulls him closer, to rest against her.
The silence of the room feels fraught, sharp even. There's rain, still, against the windows. The storm has passed, though. It's gentler, now.
[Trent Brumby] "I'll take them later." The pills were left with the water on the side of the bed. For all that Trent smokes - come to mention it, he hasn't been founding smoking in awhile, he'd been tempted in the last twenty four hours but he'd one out over the addiction - and how he likes to have the occasional drink, he's really never been happy about taking any sort of pills or medications. So, they were left right there, hopefully out of Kora's mind.
--
It's comfortable enough, lounging like this. That tension hasn't yet returned but there is something different in the air. It's not the same and maybe it never will become what it was before. Some things, once said, can never be taken back. That is the problem with thoughts becoming words, even if the intention was different, the delivery wrong, they are interpreted only by the listener and their moods or motivations. Words become a reality, in a way, no longer a private thought, and in turn, it drives a series of reactions and events.
They live in that now. In the consequence and, possibly, misunderstandings.
This is expected, really. For all that they have fawned over each other, fought for one another, and stripped back various ideals and future plans, they know so little about one another. But she knows that the way her hand threads through his curls makes his body sleepy, lulls it into a sense of comfort. He lays as she wants him to, perfectly compliant for all his anger and hurt shown the day before. Rested partly against her, hand over her thigh, caressing it with his thumb, he listens to her breathe.
Then ask him if he wants to hear the story. He's not sure he does, but that doesn't matter. She wants to tell it, and so, he tells her: "Sure," simply.
[Kora] This is the window he has into her world - the low whisper of her voice, late at night, when he's lulled into sleepiness by satiation and whispering touch of her fingers through his hair. She has claws, too. Those hands, with the long fingers and the short blunt nails, the bracelets at the wrists, those long deft hands are the hands of a killer; a murderer; a beast. Maybe he dreams these things sometimes, after - wakens with some lingering memory of blood in his mouth, or the pleasure of running through the woods, under a gleaming moon.
I can't stay long, she told him. She lingers, though, wrapping an arm around his shoulders when he leans back against her. Her beer bottle is in that hand, the bottom cool and wet against his chest.
She is still a moment, which is to say: quiet, trying to parse out more meaning than any monosyllabic word like sure could be meant to carry. In the end, she gives up. It's on her mind; she wants him to know.
"He was Jarl," she begins, " - our leader, yeah? And he was challenged by another Garou. He was arrogant, sure he would win. Said that he beat Kemp once, and that he could beat anyone if that was the case."
There's a pause there; her grief is subsumed, but he can still hear it in her voice, feel it in the way her fingers curl through his hair.
"I wouldn't be surprised if Kemp let him win. Some Rotagar lesson." There's a hint of wistfulness in her voice, drifting down to him. He cannot see her face, but he can feel her body against his, the way the words resonate through her chest. The way she moves when she breathes. "All month he'd been dreaming of this fallen Caern. Not - dreaming like sleep. Just getting starry eyed, like some teenager over some pop star, right - like a glory hound. No honor; no -
"I wouldn't leave; wouldn't uproot you, or leave the Caern, not when we're at war. I didn't think he would, either. Until he lost the challenge, and couldn't face the loss, and ran away. And it just - snapped. We were done."
Her arm tightens around his torso, then she lifts the bottle to her mouth, tipping it back, drinking.
"Then," she continues, finding and twisting another half-curl around her thumb and forefinger, "I challenged the Garou who beat Joe."
[Trent Brumby] As he listens he learns a few things. That the Jarl is the leader of the Get of Fenris, that's the title that they give the Garou in the place. He doesn't know if it has to do with ranks or anything of the sort; it's not his world and he's never been a close follower of it. He's always been on the outskirts, mostly unwillingly. He also learns that this is about Joe, the Alpha of the pack, the one that had hated Trent on sight, enough to make a move of violence towards him.
Trent didn't like Joe. Likes him even less now. Hates, even, that he's come between Kora and Trent, even when he's no longer in the city. More then that, there's this anger that this Joe would have been the one that Kora would have chosen over himself. That's why it really gripes him, chases away that sleeping sort of lull as Kora's hand continues through his hair. It makes him more alert, makes his hand come up and rub the scruff at the side of the jaw as if he could prevent tension sliding into it and showing.
He doesn't want to get into this, again. Let it go he tells himself.
There should be a little more interest in wanting to know these things. Truthfully before, he'd been more interested. He'd lounged in bed and listened to her stories, asked to hear them. He had promised her that he'd remember these things long after she was gone. Right now though, he doesn't have that same care for them. Maybe she can feel that distance, the detachment. Maybe she's oblivious to it. He's trying to keep that quiet and turn it back around. Part of him doesn't like that he doesn't, frankly, care. The other part, though, that one that makes his blood boil with testosterone, isn't as rational.
"What happened, then?" He asks her, so that she will continue with the story. "And who was the Garou that beat Joe?" There's a flicker of: I hope he kicked his fucking ass.
[Kora] She watches him so closely, the shine of his hair in the soft lights, the sleepy lull of his lashes against his cheeks, she will not miss the subtle changes in his posture, the way his body becomes more alert. She's so close, her arm around his shoulders, his torso, her other hand pulling through his hair. She feel the subtle flex of his deltoids, she's sitting over him, looking down the hard line of his torso under it disappears beneath the sheets. His thumb stills on her thigh. The air changes.
There is, then, a moment when she stops breathing, when she's utterly still, unutterably still, holding back her breath back in her body, refusing to breathe. Her eyes are closed, but he cannot see that unless he tips his head back and cranes his neck, looking for her dark eyes. He can just feel her, still underneath him, mirroring his tension, the twist of her arm around his body, tighter, taut - before she starts to breathe again.
"Karl Holds the Line. A Rotagar, packed under hummingbird." There is still a note of disbelief in her voice, that a son of Fenris would choose such a small, bloodless little hungry thing as his totem spirit. It is quieted by her awareness of the change in his posture, the way that awareness catches her out like a hard stone in her throat.
Tense, her voice is all the more quiet, her hand still in his hair. "War-Handed didn't even wound him. Didn't scratch him. Didn't draw blood." The contempt threaded through her words in that moment is almost entirely subconscious. "While he slunk away, I challenged Holds the Line. I told him that if he wanted my respect, he would have to beat me without his bird. I didn't think he would. I thought he picked that thing as a - crutch.
"I was wrong."
Here, she leans forward, just, lifting the beer bottle to her mouth again. It leaves beads of moisture on his skin.
"So we fought. And I won. And you know what that makes me?"
[Trent Brumby] "It makes you the Jarl," he tells her, letting her know that he was following the conversation no matter what he actually felt about other issues that linger unspoken in the air. Sliding his other hand from where it lays against his stomach, he raises it up and wipes the moisture from his skin absently.
Karl. It didn't sound like that Kora liked him. He'd have to go and meet the guy. Trent hasn't become part of the Tribe. He'd been claimed but beyond that, nothing had changed other then the fact that he had calls from his family that were unhappy and the Black Furies in Chicago openly despised him the last time he went to met with one of them.
He knew Adrian but they hadn't had much to do with each other since he'd started seeing Kora. He wasn't good like that, keeping contact. Maybe he should try and change it. His thoughts drift back to here and now though, those having just been fleeting.
"So you're the leader of the Tribe now?" The Tribe, not his or hers, just the Tribe. Which makes him part of it, still.
[Kora] "Yeah," she confirms, to both. There's a low, scoffing sound in her voice. The whole thing feels like a play. One of those weird absurdist plays that get put on by art students on the side stage at a music festival. "It's fucking absurd," she continues, quiet, her hand still in his hair now as she lifts and finishes off her bottle of beer. Then she's leaning forward, this sort of torque to her torso as she twists for the bedside table and stretches to reach the coaster left to protect the surface. " I'm a cliath Skald. Not ranked, not a modi - but there aren't many of us here."
This silence, the, as she comes back to him, sliding her right hand down his arm now, rather than around his shoulders. Her eyes are on her fingers, the way her pale skin gleams against his deeper tones. The way his muscles are outlined against his skin. The fitting his joints, and hers, all of it. "I need to find our kin, to make sure they know, to make sure they can find me if there's a need. I don't think there are many - Adrian, Thornton, Izzy - but I'd like to give them your number, too. In case."
He can almost hear her smile, the sudden curve of her mouth, supple and fleeting at once. "I'm not sure in case of what. Just, in case." It slides away, as suddenly as it came. There's this sort of ache in its absence. "I want you to get one of those TracPhones for this stuff. Right? The pre-paid ones. Pay for it in cash, so it's not traceable in case someone's phone is compromised. In case.
"Do that for me?"
[Trent Brumby] He hasn't moved much, only lays there against her in the darkness of his bedroom. Long legs are stretched out, one of them under the sheet and the other partly curled out of it. The sheet isn't white but a deep plum colour that he seems to like; it's darker on them both. His thumb, that had wiped moisture from his torso, now slides across the injuries he wears on his body. The gauze is still there and he rubs his thumb across it, probing for the painful slices stitched together.
"Yeah, I can do that," he tells her and shifts his attention then, to her. Twisting his head he looks up at her, and there's something softer in him now. That resentment has taken a back seat, allowing him to show her some warmth not just the sexual affection that they had over the course of dinner and shortly after.
"I never met Thorton, but I know Izzy." Maybe she didn't know that. But she knows it now. "Not well, but I know her, and I saw Thorton at some Kinfolk meeting when I first came into town." That obviously hadn't worked out so well since there hasn't been any other similar meetings that he knows of. He wants to shift up and grab another drink, but she's comfortable and content with him as he is, so he nestles back down again, repositions himself so he can sink into the mattress and pillows.
"I'll do that tomorrow. You just want the one?"
[Kora] Joe hated those things. The Kinfolk meetings. She doesn't say it; she swallows the words this time, pulls them back into her body and holds them there, as if her ex-Alpha were her ex-boyfriend, this presence between them now, moreso in absence than he was in reality. It makes the twist of her mouth briefly, passingly bitter - but he's below her, his view of her featurs is all architectural, the vertical shape of her body - the battlescar, the tangle of her hair, the curve of her breasts and the line of her jaw, her mouth a shadow above and her eyes, dark, looking down at him, quiet.
"I didn't know that." The brief twist of her mouth. " - Izzy's - " she doesn't finish the thought, and her voice is neutral, not carefully so, but neutral. "Thornton shot a Garou in the Caern, so now kin are banned. I think they're seeing each other, though. Maybe it'll be good for them both."
The unspoken is implicit: as long as a Garou doesn't want one, or the other.
--
Then:
"Yeah, just the one." she replies, her gaze quickening over the gauze bandages as he finds them and traces the lines underneath. For a moment, she's still - a predator's stillness, despite the sweep of her hair down over his body - a predator's grace as this complex web of emotions gleams in her eyes with the instinctive drive to protect her mate. "Promise me you'll take it easy tomorrow?"
He nestles back into the mattress, and she brushes the back of her knuckles against his roughly stubbled cheek. The affection is very much present; it is deliberate. She has killer's hands and her body is tensed against the spike of her rage when she thinks about - when she thinks about -
- but she thinks about him instead. His body, the pattern of light across his pale eyes as he looks up at her. Her fingers against his skin, her body underneath his before it disappears under the deep, plum-colored sheets. "Go to sleep, baby. I'll stay until you do."
[Trent Brumby] "Izzy has issues," he says it for her. It may not be the words she was going to use but he does, puts it out there just like that, blunt and without guilt for it. But he does not say it in a malicious way, he had sympathy for the other Kinfolk, even if he doesn't know all that made her the way she was, he understands the hardships it is to fill a certain role. "And a man or woman can change another's life." This he knows too, intimately. So should Kora.
Fingers drum on his stomach lightly when she mentions taking it easy and he finds his mouth curling in a slow smirk, a smile really, as he looked up at her to meet her eyes directly. "I won't repeat what I've done today," he promises her. Not exactly the same thing but he's not going to be stupid and angry like he was the night before and the day that followed. At least he hopes he has a reign on those particular emotions that had driven him like a man with a mission.
Reaching up, now, he curls his hand along her cheek and attempts to draw her down a little towards him. His body stretches, lifts up so that he can meet her mouth with a simple, lingering kiss. "You should stay," he tells her after, murmuring it to her mouth. But he releases her and lowers back onto the bed, inhaling a sigh before huffing it slowly outward again. Shifting, he slides his arm under the pillow, under his head. He can sleep like this, on his back, exposed. It shows that he doesn't feel vulnerable, that he's a relaxed in the comfort of his own home.
[Kora] Kora is smiling when the lingering kiss ends; she's smiling into his mouth, over his body, her hair shifting beneath the grasp of his hand. I can't stay long - she told him some time ago, in the kitchen as he pulled her dinner from the oven, while she watched him with hungry eyes. On the sofa, or in his bed. Just one more time.
It is later now, and the rain has stopped. The city's quiet outside his windows. He says: you should stay and she gives him this half-smile by way of response, which means, I can't. or I have territory to see to or gaia only knows what.
Except that, later in the night, when he wakes up, thirsty maybe, or just aching from the day's exertions, from the reawakened pain of his stab wounds - she's still there, asleep beside him, an arm flung across his chest, her naked body curled close to his, sharing heat in the artificial chill of the air conditioned room.
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