[Drew Roscoe] Moving isn't an easy task, it never has been and it never will be. Not even since the invention of the motor vehicle and airplanes, which have been a godsend considering what it would have taken about a hundred years ago to travel across the country (i.e., the Oregon Trail, she probably would've died from dysentery or something on the way there). Nowadays, though, you had to worry about things like leases and giving your two weeks notice, job and school transfers, being certain there was somewhere to live once you arrived at your destination.
Drew had just gotten back from the airport late last night and had slept in because of it. She was finished with work, her last day had been last week, and was in the final stages of packing, with only essentials and large pieces of furniture left intact. The house felt less like a home now, even though she'd gone through the trouble of repainting the bathrooms and bedrooms (with permission from the landlord, of course), hanging pictures and pruning the garden so well. She didn't like staying inside if she didn't have to, it felt too barren and quiet, even with Basil around.
So she was out in the front yard now, sitting on the front step with the front door and screen door both propped open behind her to let the cooler night air sweep through the house and let out some of the heat that had made the place seem like an oven through the rest of the day. She was reading a plain paperback book, holding it open from the bottom with one hand while her other hand absently scratched at the ears of the dog who sat beside her, big jowly head resting on her bare thigh. Her hair was pinned sloppily up at the top of her head to let her neck cool and she was dressed in a pair of purple cloth shorts and a plain white camisole, with her feet bare and nails freshly painted tangerine.
This Kinfolk, obviously, was intent on just killing time.
[Kora] Headlights on the street an unremarkable. Somewhere up the block, a rather non-descript sedan parallel parks, the brakelights flashing red, then white against the darkness. There's no reason for Drew to notice anything, the distant sound of a car door opening and closing, backgrounded against the constant sounds of the living city. Not until her dog's ears go alert and his body language changes against her thigh, a low growl of warning thrumming through his body. That tension in the animal when a greater predator approaches - the undercurrent of fight or flight, fight or flight.
The woman at the gait is familiar enough at a glance - tall and blond, her pale hair pulled back from her sharp features into a workmanlike ponytail. From this distance, in this light, she looks well, normal. Kora stops just at the gate leading to the yard, reaching over it to lift the latch, lifting her voice to ask, "Can I come in?" out of some native politeness, or perhaps something deeper. Presuming a yes, she lifts the latch and swings open the gait, padding up the sidewalk still radiating heat from the long hot day.
Her voice, always low and rich - is hoarse tonight, raw but not thin. Close up, she looks drawn. Her lips are dry, and her skin is white. There are no wounds visible on her skin. Strange, that she looks worse two days after she was poisoned, not quite half-way to being healed, than she looked the night of the battle.
It doesn't change her posture, which is straight through the shoulders and the spine, confident, assured. "Drew," a glance over the kinswoman's shoulder, into the house beyond, boxes here and there, the furnishings and decorations stripped down to the bare essentials. " - you're leaving soon?"
[Drew Roscoe] The neighborhood in which Drew resided was like a dry spot in Bronzeville, forgotten to time, even by those that ran the neighborhood with drugs and guns and turf wars. She lived on a small dead-end street, her neighbors were predominantly the elderly that couldn't afford to move elsewhere, that were too stubborn to abandon their homes that they had worked so hard for. Cars would park, everyone got their visitors from time to time, so she didn't pay the one up the road too much mind at all.
It was only when a presence strode up along the little picket fence circling her lawn, something simultaneous to the growl and tension rolling off the dog's back like the heat off the pavement in the street that Drew took notice of something out of the ordinary. Her big brown eyes lifted from the small text of her book, something she was reading by the light of her porch lamp, and settled on Kora's face, studied it for a moment before she let a soft smile spread across her own.
Basil barked once, a deep resonating sound that could be felt as well as heard, and Drew jumped, then patted the dog on the rear and gestured back into the house. "Go on, Basil." The dog, some sort of mix between a pit bull and a mastiff and a hound, did not move, but instead tensed forward further, as though seriously considering taking a charge at the gate and making an effort to frighten the Skald away. "Basil." The tone was firmer the second time, and accompanied by a jerk at the collar backward, back toward the house. The dog huffed, whined, growled, but retreated obediently. He was a good dog, really.
A gesture to enter was made, and Kora entered through the little wooden gate and moved up the front walk to the front of a house whose face was framed at the earth by beds of brightly colored flowers that were weeded faithfully at least once a week. Drew's smile stayed pretty steady on her face, even while Kora asked if she was leaving soon, even though Drew knew that topic had to be something like an underbelly to the blonde woman- after all, hadn't everyone?
"Yeah," she said with only half a note of apology in her tone, accompanied by a loose shrug of the shoulders. "Gotta go be with Joe. You know." It's only once nearer that Drew really seems to notice anything wrong with the woman, how her cheeks were pale and drawn, her lips chapped and voice not necessarily weak but... abused. "..You alright, Kora? Look rough."
[Kora] "We're Fenrir, Drew." Kora offers the kinswoman the edge of her generous smile. Her dry lips crack with the motion, but only just, and other than the subtle signifiers of organ damage, she's whole, intact, nearly hale. Underneath her skin, her kidneys and liver are regenerating. Her lungs are healing, ulcerated stomach, the perforated intestines. The damaged heart.
A human would need a kidney transplant, dialysis - weeks, months, maybe years of recovery. The Skald smiles; and though the mention of Joe catches the faintest flash of absolutely unstudied, unguarded, unmediated anger in the Skald's dark, sure gaze, she masters that with the sparest of grimaces before continuing. " - we're either alright or we're dead. Give me a few days, and I'll be right as rain."
Her gaze lifts again, over the kinswoman's shoulder into the interior, then returns to Drew's face. "I'm sure you've got work to do, to finish packing. I won't take too much of your time. You know Joe lost a challenge for Jarl to Holds the Line before he - " the faintest hesitation, before Kora supplies the most neutral word she can for the blank space in the sentence. "left."
Her arms are crossed loosely over her lean torso. She is wearing the most casual clothes - an old white t-shirt, and a pair of black cotton pants, the sort of thing one wears kicking around at home while recovering from the flu. "After he disappeared, I challenged and won. You're mated, but your mate isn't here. While you're in Chicago, I stand as your guardian. If you need help, I want you to call me. If a Garou presumes too far on your hospitality, send them to me. I will stand for you as if you were mine."
[Drew Roscoe] Drew just sort of grinned and nodded while Kora reminded her what it was to be a Fenrir-- you were dead, otherwise you were just fine. She knew that, with the kind of indoctrination she had of course she knew that, but it still didn't squash her nature away. She cared, she wanted to be sure, and it was reflexive to ask still. After all, she had grown up as a human, and in that world it was courteous.
Kora'd flashed a moment of anger at the mention of Joe, but either Drew didn't notice or she chose not to. It was easier that way. She didn't need to defend Joe and what he did, he could do that for himself. Besides, if she tried it would possibly cause some kind of cancer or ulcer. After all, he was many things that the world hated, that she probably should hate. Those things simply weren't heavy enough to squash the love that was there as well.
"I'm pretty much done with the packing, actually. The moving truck comes in two days then I'll be gone." Her smile, again, is only slightly apologetic, but a little bit grim as well. She loved it in Chicago, in Illinois. She loved the summers and the winters, her friends were here, her father was only a few hours away. In Oregon it would be cool and rainy and she would know nobody and would have to book a flight or drive for two days to visit her father. "Got some beer in the fridge though if you want me to go get one?"
The fact that she was the Jarl now was accepted with a nod, the fact that she would protect her while she was still in the city. "'Preciate it, Kora. I don't plan on having any adventures in the next few days, but then I haven't really planned on any of them." She chuckled, the sound slightly ironic, and dog-earred the page in her book so she could set it down on the pavement beside her.
[Kora] "Cheers," Kora says, in response to the offer of a beer. She may not want one, but she will not refuse Drew's gesture of hospitality, no matter her deep, abiding anger at the woman's mate. That's faded, now - or not faded. It has been folded into something both stronger and healthier than the initial rush of bitterness might have done. Not without work. And not without the subconcious spark of rage, in her heart, under her skin, in her blood and bones, when her once-Alpha's name is mentioned.
That tension lingers in her mouth and her eyes. Drew wisely says nothing. Kora controls herself well. She controls herself better than most of her moon or her tribe or her Sept, keeping her rage in check, fighting the unseeing spasm of it behind her eyes. While Drew disappears into the house to get the beer, Kora waits. Maybe she waves to the driver of the sedan on the street, suggesting to him that she'll be here a little while longer than planned.
--
And when Drew returns from inside, a beer in hand, she'll find the Skald - now the Jarl of the few Fenrir remaining in Chicago - seated on her stoop. Kora accepts the offered beer with a glance at the label, and drinks it quietly. It's a warm summer night, but the beer is cold and there's a breeze from the lake to cool them down. As strange as it is to see a Garou looking ill -as Kora does tonight, as if she were recovering from the flu, maybe - the story she goes on to tell Drew about the fight that left her in this state explains it.
Kora tells the tale - which she has not yet told to her own mate - in crisp, plain language, in broad, easy strokes. The call for distress from a spirit, the fight between the elementals of both water and fire and a great, monstrous incarnation of an oldslick, with a skeleton made of the detritus that people throw thoughtlessly into the Chicago river. How she was swallowed by it, suffused in blackness, breathing poison, pushing blindly through the viscous substance until finally the whole thing simply - fell apart around her. And how, when she came emerged, she found Roman, the other Garou in the story, unconscious and floating in the Chicago River, wearing his first battlescar.
And so it goes.
[Drew Roscoe] Drew comes out with two bottles of Budweiser, not Bud Lite or Corona or PBR, and hands one off to Kora while snapping the other open for herself. She'd put Basil up in the bedroom with his chewy toy while she was inside, so he could lay on the bed and have more distance from the woman(monster) that worked him up so much. She plops herself down on the cement step beside the much taller, much lighter-colored woman, and sits quietly while the Skald tells her a story.
It's a story about spirits, of fire and water and oil and garbage. About how she swallowed it, took it into herself, and how that was (Drew assumed) the reason why she seemed so sickly right now. Not because she was ill or weak, but because her energy was sucked inward and dedicated to the smothering of a monster. Even still, sitting on this step, she was fighting a battle, though it was one that her blood and bones was seeing now instead of muscles and claws. She listened while Kora told about a young Garou getting his first battlescar.
Drew nodded slowly, understanding. She didn't interrupt to ask questions or add bits of her own. Instead she sat, drank her beer, and enjoyed what breeze she could when it drifted across the yard. When time for farewells came, something marked by the finishing of both beers, Kora would return to the person waiting in the car and Drew would stay on the step and watch her go. She didn't apologize for Joe leaving, didn't apologize for leaving herself. She didn't explain to Kora that Thomas would not be returning as well, she assumed that she already knew that herself, and that if she didn't it should be the duty of someone who could handle the rage of claws better than a Kin to deliver the message.
Instead there is simply a farewell shaped in the form of 'see you around', a lifting of the beer bottle that had the very last swig in it in gesture to match the words, and that smile that the Kin called Long Shot was so well known for to place a stamp on the goodbye.
[Kora] Transcript!
to Kora
Drew had just gotten back from the airport late last night and had slept in because of it. She was finished with work, her last day had been last week, and was in the final stages of packing, with only essentials and large pieces of furniture left intact. The house felt less like a home now, even though she'd gone through the trouble of repainting the bathrooms and bedrooms (with permission from the landlord, of course), hanging pictures and pruning the garden so well. She didn't like staying inside if she didn't have to, it felt too barren and quiet, even with Basil around.
So she was out in the front yard now, sitting on the front step with the front door and screen door both propped open behind her to let the cooler night air sweep through the house and let out some of the heat that had made the place seem like an oven through the rest of the day. She was reading a plain paperback book, holding it open from the bottom with one hand while her other hand absently scratched at the ears of the dog who sat beside her, big jowly head resting on her bare thigh. Her hair was pinned sloppily up at the top of her head to let her neck cool and she was dressed in a pair of purple cloth shorts and a plain white camisole, with her feet bare and nails freshly painted tangerine.
This Kinfolk, obviously, was intent on just killing time.
[Kora] Headlights on the street an unremarkable. Somewhere up the block, a rather non-descript sedan parallel parks, the brakelights flashing red, then white against the darkness. There's no reason for Drew to notice anything, the distant sound of a car door opening and closing, backgrounded against the constant sounds of the living city. Not until her dog's ears go alert and his body language changes against her thigh, a low growl of warning thrumming through his body. That tension in the animal when a greater predator approaches - the undercurrent of fight or flight, fight or flight.
The woman at the gait is familiar enough at a glance - tall and blond, her pale hair pulled back from her sharp features into a workmanlike ponytail. From this distance, in this light, she looks well, normal. Kora stops just at the gate leading to the yard, reaching over it to lift the latch, lifting her voice to ask, "Can I come in?" out of some native politeness, or perhaps something deeper. Presuming a yes, she lifts the latch and swings open the gait, padding up the sidewalk still radiating heat from the long hot day.
Her voice, always low and rich - is hoarse tonight, raw but not thin. Close up, she looks drawn. Her lips are dry, and her skin is white. There are no wounds visible on her skin. Strange, that she looks worse two days after she was poisoned, not quite half-way to being healed, than she looked the night of the battle.
It doesn't change her posture, which is straight through the shoulders and the spine, confident, assured. "Drew," a glance over the kinswoman's shoulder, into the house beyond, boxes here and there, the furnishings and decorations stripped down to the bare essentials. " - you're leaving soon?"
[Drew Roscoe] The neighborhood in which Drew resided was like a dry spot in Bronzeville, forgotten to time, even by those that ran the neighborhood with drugs and guns and turf wars. She lived on a small dead-end street, her neighbors were predominantly the elderly that couldn't afford to move elsewhere, that were too stubborn to abandon their homes that they had worked so hard for. Cars would park, everyone got their visitors from time to time, so she didn't pay the one up the road too much mind at all.
It was only when a presence strode up along the little picket fence circling her lawn, something simultaneous to the growl and tension rolling off the dog's back like the heat off the pavement in the street that Drew took notice of something out of the ordinary. Her big brown eyes lifted from the small text of her book, something she was reading by the light of her porch lamp, and settled on Kora's face, studied it for a moment before she let a soft smile spread across her own.
Basil barked once, a deep resonating sound that could be felt as well as heard, and Drew jumped, then patted the dog on the rear and gestured back into the house. "Go on, Basil." The dog, some sort of mix between a pit bull and a mastiff and a hound, did not move, but instead tensed forward further, as though seriously considering taking a charge at the gate and making an effort to frighten the Skald away. "Basil." The tone was firmer the second time, and accompanied by a jerk at the collar backward, back toward the house. The dog huffed, whined, growled, but retreated obediently. He was a good dog, really.
A gesture to enter was made, and Kora entered through the little wooden gate and moved up the front walk to the front of a house whose face was framed at the earth by beds of brightly colored flowers that were weeded faithfully at least once a week. Drew's smile stayed pretty steady on her face, even while Kora asked if she was leaving soon, even though Drew knew that topic had to be something like an underbelly to the blonde woman- after all, hadn't everyone?
"Yeah," she said with only half a note of apology in her tone, accompanied by a loose shrug of the shoulders. "Gotta go be with Joe. You know." It's only once nearer that Drew really seems to notice anything wrong with the woman, how her cheeks were pale and drawn, her lips chapped and voice not necessarily weak but... abused. "..You alright, Kora? Look rough."
[Kora] "We're Fenrir, Drew." Kora offers the kinswoman the edge of her generous smile. Her dry lips crack with the motion, but only just, and other than the subtle signifiers of organ damage, she's whole, intact, nearly hale. Underneath her skin, her kidneys and liver are regenerating. Her lungs are healing, ulcerated stomach, the perforated intestines. The damaged heart.
A human would need a kidney transplant, dialysis - weeks, months, maybe years of recovery. The Skald smiles; and though the mention of Joe catches the faintest flash of absolutely unstudied, unguarded, unmediated anger in the Skald's dark, sure gaze, she masters that with the sparest of grimaces before continuing. " - we're either alright or we're dead. Give me a few days, and I'll be right as rain."
Her gaze lifts again, over the kinswoman's shoulder into the interior, then returns to Drew's face. "I'm sure you've got work to do, to finish packing. I won't take too much of your time. You know Joe lost a challenge for Jarl to Holds the Line before he - " the faintest hesitation, before Kora supplies the most neutral word she can for the blank space in the sentence. "left."
Her arms are crossed loosely over her lean torso. She is wearing the most casual clothes - an old white t-shirt, and a pair of black cotton pants, the sort of thing one wears kicking around at home while recovering from the flu. "After he disappeared, I challenged and won. You're mated, but your mate isn't here. While you're in Chicago, I stand as your guardian. If you need help, I want you to call me. If a Garou presumes too far on your hospitality, send them to me. I will stand for you as if you were mine."
[Drew Roscoe] Drew just sort of grinned and nodded while Kora reminded her what it was to be a Fenrir-- you were dead, otherwise you were just fine. She knew that, with the kind of indoctrination she had of course she knew that, but it still didn't squash her nature away. She cared, she wanted to be sure, and it was reflexive to ask still. After all, she had grown up as a human, and in that world it was courteous.
Kora'd flashed a moment of anger at the mention of Joe, but either Drew didn't notice or she chose not to. It was easier that way. She didn't need to defend Joe and what he did, he could do that for himself. Besides, if she tried it would possibly cause some kind of cancer or ulcer. After all, he was many things that the world hated, that she probably should hate. Those things simply weren't heavy enough to squash the love that was there as well.
"I'm pretty much done with the packing, actually. The moving truck comes in two days then I'll be gone." Her smile, again, is only slightly apologetic, but a little bit grim as well. She loved it in Chicago, in Illinois. She loved the summers and the winters, her friends were here, her father was only a few hours away. In Oregon it would be cool and rainy and she would know nobody and would have to book a flight or drive for two days to visit her father. "Got some beer in the fridge though if you want me to go get one?"
The fact that she was the Jarl now was accepted with a nod, the fact that she would protect her while she was still in the city. "'Preciate it, Kora. I don't plan on having any adventures in the next few days, but then I haven't really planned on any of them." She chuckled, the sound slightly ironic, and dog-earred the page in her book so she could set it down on the pavement beside her.
[Kora] "Cheers," Kora says, in response to the offer of a beer. She may not want one, but she will not refuse Drew's gesture of hospitality, no matter her deep, abiding anger at the woman's mate. That's faded, now - or not faded. It has been folded into something both stronger and healthier than the initial rush of bitterness might have done. Not without work. And not without the subconcious spark of rage, in her heart, under her skin, in her blood and bones, when her once-Alpha's name is mentioned.
That tension lingers in her mouth and her eyes. Drew wisely says nothing. Kora controls herself well. She controls herself better than most of her moon or her tribe or her Sept, keeping her rage in check, fighting the unseeing spasm of it behind her eyes. While Drew disappears into the house to get the beer, Kora waits. Maybe she waves to the driver of the sedan on the street, suggesting to him that she'll be here a little while longer than planned.
--
And when Drew returns from inside, a beer in hand, she'll find the Skald - now the Jarl of the few Fenrir remaining in Chicago - seated on her stoop. Kora accepts the offered beer with a glance at the label, and drinks it quietly. It's a warm summer night, but the beer is cold and there's a breeze from the lake to cool them down. As strange as it is to see a Garou looking ill -as Kora does tonight, as if she were recovering from the flu, maybe - the story she goes on to tell Drew about the fight that left her in this state explains it.
Kora tells the tale - which she has not yet told to her own mate - in crisp, plain language, in broad, easy strokes. The call for distress from a spirit, the fight between the elementals of both water and fire and a great, monstrous incarnation of an oldslick, with a skeleton made of the detritus that people throw thoughtlessly into the Chicago river. How she was swallowed by it, suffused in blackness, breathing poison, pushing blindly through the viscous substance until finally the whole thing simply - fell apart around her. And how, when she came emerged, she found Roman, the other Garou in the story, unconscious and floating in the Chicago River, wearing his first battlescar.
And so it goes.
[Drew Roscoe] Drew comes out with two bottles of Budweiser, not Bud Lite or Corona or PBR, and hands one off to Kora while snapping the other open for herself. She'd put Basil up in the bedroom with his chewy toy while she was inside, so he could lay on the bed and have more distance from the woman(monster) that worked him up so much. She plops herself down on the cement step beside the much taller, much lighter-colored woman, and sits quietly while the Skald tells her a story.
It's a story about spirits, of fire and water and oil and garbage. About how she swallowed it, took it into herself, and how that was (Drew assumed) the reason why she seemed so sickly right now. Not because she was ill or weak, but because her energy was sucked inward and dedicated to the smothering of a monster. Even still, sitting on this step, she was fighting a battle, though it was one that her blood and bones was seeing now instead of muscles and claws. She listened while Kora told about a young Garou getting his first battlescar.
Drew nodded slowly, understanding. She didn't interrupt to ask questions or add bits of her own. Instead she sat, drank her beer, and enjoyed what breeze she could when it drifted across the yard. When time for farewells came, something marked by the finishing of both beers, Kora would return to the person waiting in the car and Drew would stay on the step and watch her go. She didn't apologize for Joe leaving, didn't apologize for leaving herself. She didn't explain to Kora that Thomas would not be returning as well, she assumed that she already knew that herself, and that if she didn't it should be the duty of someone who could handle the rage of claws better than a Kin to deliver the message.
Instead there is simply a farewell shaped in the form of 'see you around', a lifting of the beer bottle that had the very last swig in it in gesture to match the words, and that smile that the Kin called Long Shot was so well known for to place a stamp on the goodbye.
[Kora] Transcript!
to Kora
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