Ornature

[Kora] Two nights ago, Kora let herself into Trent's apartment. She brought her laundry, showered and changed clothes. She sat next to him, humanskinned, on his couch holding his hand and kissed his knuckles quietly. She didn't feel like eating. I'm not feeling well, she told him, and I need to heal and nothing more of the story, though she looked well, uninjured, her skin whole except for the flushed capillaries from the heat of a scalding shower. It was already late and he had been out, the alcohol opened his bloodstream and the folds of his mind, made everything weaving, brighter maybe, out of focus.


Monday - midday, his break, or his lunch. He's at a client's house - some normal day, he received a text message from her.

- bring dinner to church later? hungry! ty.

and, five minutes later:

+ice cream.

The nights have been warm and the days have been simmering. The city is lost in a hot haze of humidity and pollution throughout the day that settles at night as the temperature drops, or is blown away - briefly - by the great, gathering storms that sweep into Chicago off the plains. Except for the city's high-rises, it is a straight shot to the lake, and beyond.

So it's night. Near-night, the sun sinking in the west, casting striking shadows against the run down warehouses and abandoned brick storefronts where the Cabrini neighborhood abuts the river. There's an old church there, abandoned for twenty years or more since the congregation died to nothing and the neighborhood became more and more industrial. Untouched for years, the building is surrounded by the quick-growing locust trees covered in Virginia creeper and fireweed, by morning glories and other quick, opportunistic weeds that can find soil in any crack in the concrete, and grow, and grow.

The place is all stone and concrete admist the humid greenery - stone and concrete steps leading up to a porch - a portico, really - and wooden doors leading inside. Above, half the old stained glass windows have been shattered, but some remain intact, reflecting back the light of the dying sun, blood-red now. The front door is cracked open, as if fire or water damage has warped the boards until they will no longer fit snugly together, but otherwise the place is quiet and apparently abandoned.

[Trent Brumby] Trent had pulled up outside and climbed out of his perfectly ordinary sedan. Taking with him some bags of food, boxes and containers filled with various Chinese take outs, another with several bottles of drinks, from soda to water and beer. Having gone home before coming out, he's changed out of work clothes and was dressed in some jeans and a buttoned down shirt. While he has shorts, sweatpants and t.shirts, he often tends towards buttoned shirts whenever he's meeting her, making himself look presentable. It's some strange wiring in his behaviour code that makes him do this, and if she knows anything of the bag in his closet, she may begin to understand the way the Kinfolk works.

He makes his way up the church steps and to the door. Knocking on it, he pushes it open a little to poke his head inside and take a look around. Eyes squint to the dimness inside, trying to make out the details of the place. It's not as if he's been here much, if at all, and if he was to be honest with her, Trent dislikes the fact that she stays here at all. Pack or not.

"Kora?" His voice echos, even if its not a very loud query.

[Trent Brumby] Edit: He also brings a picnic cooler, fit with ice.

[Kora] Light cuts through the windows set high above the nave in long slanting lines, dappling the floor in shifting patterns of brilliant sunlight and deep shadow. It is cooler inside than it is outside, and there's a certain sort of quiet, defined by the leafy shade and the thick stone walls, by the way the broken windows above shunt and filter the city's noises back into the echoing space.

As churches go, the place is not large - but it has been standing for nearly a hundred years, with all the neogothic details that the original architect could fit into such a space. The rose window above the apse is intact, but the sun comes from the other direction, so the glass there is just a deep, abiding blue. The other windows ahead are broken out, vines curling intricate stone and iron work.
,
There are rough paintings of saints - folk-art style - around the chancel, where the alter once stood. These seem to have been added sometime after the building was abandoned, by the hand of a skilled amateur, vagrant or vagabond, just passing through.

Trent pushes open the door and calls out her name. His hands are full and his voice echoes. He will not see them until his eyes adjust to the shadows inside, the sunlight at his back streaming in past him - but they are there, curled close together just below the steps leading up to the area where the altar once stood.

Animals.

One lifts its head, its eyes catch the light and gleam, and its ears are pricked forward. The wolf watches him briefly, then climbs to its feet and pads across the old stone and floors. The beast is slender, alert - gray, brown and black markings on its coat, dominated by gray. When the sunlight catches its eyes, they gleam, molten, amber or gold. Otherwise, they are a deep soft brown.

With a precision that feels both delicate and predatory, the wolf picks it way across the debris scattered over the stone floor, past what remains of the ruined pews, toward him.

[Trent Brumby] That's not what he's expecting, but he goes with it. His heart beats a little quicker as the wolf approaches him but he slides inside the church and nudges the door closed behind him with a foot. Glancing back to the wolf, he holds up the food with a clink of bottles and a rattle of ice. "Food and ice-cream." Then with a small, fleeting smile, "and beer, of course." Because that's all she seems to drink at his place. He's had to keep it stocked. Trent, on the other hand, seems to favor waters or wine, and freshly squeezed juice over coffees in the morning.

She can smell that he's showered not long ago, right before picking up ice for the cooler, heading through a grocery store for ice-cream, and, finally, dropping past the Chinese place so that the food would still be hot by the time he got there. The soap doesn't get rid of all smells, though, like the fact he's probably taken up cigarettes again, and he's been working with car grease today.

"Where should I put it?" If he thinks its odd to be talking to a wolf, it doesn't show. He is trying to wrap his mind around the fact that this is Kora. He hopes it's Kora! It's one thing knowing your girlfriend turns into a wolf, but it still warps the human mind trying to grasp the reality of it.

[Roman Turner] The other wolf only stirred when it's partner moved away. It wasn't the lack of warmth, heat bothered him right now, it was the removal of another's heartbeat, another's steady breathing. Ever so slowly this wolf shifted position and seemed to go back to sleep. Fur was simply missing across it's body where angry, blistered, peeling, weeping flesh shown.

[Kora] When he speaks, the animal's ears prick, this faint movement side to side. Its eyes are on his face, and its tail remains high. There's nothing of the Kora he knows in the animal now. Her eyes are dark blue, the wolf's eyes are deep brown, mute and wordless, all animal fixed on Trent's face. As the beast closes the last of the distant, he can see its dark nose twitching as she steals the scents - of Chinese food and cigarettes, soap and sweat, pure Garou blood, car grease, exhaust, humidity - the whole of the world he brings back inside with him, on his skin, in his hair, lingering in the fibers of his clothes.

He steps inside and closes the door behind him. She comes close and circles him, brushing her flanks against his legs, his jeans, marking him with her scent. Her tail is still held high; any other wolf would read that as dominant - but for all that he shares their blood, these subtle signifiers of feral behavior may easily be lost on him.

He speaks; she does not answer him. She doesn't think in human language in this form, but there's a certain brightness to her eyes that confirms, at the least, that animal circling him understands the question. After another circle around him, her flanks against his calves, her tail thumping twice, heavily, against his thighs, she peels away from him, padding off sharply to the north. There, in the shadow of the choir loft, on an old wooden table dragged from somewhere - is another cooler. There are a pair of rubbermaid containers - the big, multi-gallon storage containers - tucked under the table, and a discarded pile of clothes to the side.

There are Kora's familiar boots, kicked off there, too, up against the wall.

The wolf grabs one of the piles of clothing in its mouth and pads deeper into the shadows under stairs leading up to the choir loft.

[Trent Brumby] Standing still as she circles around him, he doesn't watch her the entire time, but glances off to where the other wolf is. He can make out that there is something wrong with the wolf, missing fur, but not much detail from where he is. Kora had told him that she was staying here for awhile, that she wasn't feeling well either, and he understands more of that now. There's nothing he can do, other then to bring food or anything else when requested.

Kora pads off and he watches after her, before following over towards the table. There's no more words now, just the quietness of him setting down the cooler and the bags. Food containers are taken out and set, stacked to keep the warmth. Drinks are set inside the cooler along with the tubs of indulgent ice-creams, several of them. If it's one thing he's learned as a Black Fury, is that women and ice-cream or chocolate, or any sort of food, must never be messed with. Being generous is always favoured upon. So there's plenty of variety to eat.

After doing this quietly, very aware of sleeping wolves, he rubs his hands down the back of his jeans and slips his hands into the pockets there. He stands and waits for Kora to return.

[Roman Turner] The best way to heal was shifted and the best way not to feel like a third wheel between a male and a female was to pretend like he was sleeping through all the little sounds of movement. So despite the smell of food, he actually managed to let himself float in that space between true sleep and wakefulness.

[Kora] The shadows cannot conceal the sound of her joints popping in and out of place, of her bones cracking, changing shape - growing and then contracting as the animal changes to the girl. To the woman. She has nearly a decade on Roman, for all that they are the same rank, and Kora does not look like a girl.

Just a woman - maybe a bit sick now, her lips chapped, her skin sallow, her eyes bruised, the most subtle physical signs of the damage done not to her skin by to her body, the organ systems underneath, kidney and liver and spleen, heart and lungs, healing surely, with ever beat of her animal heart.

Still pulling her t-shirt down over her torso, threading her arms through the sleeves, pulling her hair out from underneath the collar, Kora emerges from the dark where the wolf disappeared. Her hair is loose, long down her back, and her feet are bare. The bracelets, the choker, and the single iron earring she always wears are with her always, changing with her body, melding with her spirit.

She embraces Trent from the side, her chin on his shoulder, her arms around his waist loose for a moment, then tightening as she plants a kiss on his shoulder just at the attachment of the deltoid muscle, through the fabric of his button-down shirt.

"Thanks," she says, quiet against his skin. Mouths, missed you without voicing it, then says, aloud - "I'm starving." He could almost believe it. The work of healing is rough on the body, and she looks - stretched, attenuated. Her voice is roughened from disuse or something else. Then, loosening her arms from around her body, she lifts her chin in the direction of the other wolf, wounded, curled against the stage where the altar once was. "That's Roman."

Then, untangling herself from him, she starts - attacking the food, grabbing a pair of containers without regard for the contents, searching through the ice and water for a bottle of water rather than beer. "We can eat outside, on the steps?"

"Hey - " to Roman, sleeping, lifting her hoarse voice. " - dinner's ready, kid! You remember Trent, yeah?"

[Trent Brumby] He smiles seeing her, though the worry is clear in the way his eyes are shaded. These little details of her he cannot miss, does not like, but is powerless to do anything but watch. The Garou's fight is to die for a better cause, there is no other way around it. Kinfolk know this and they have to simply accept. Their fate is not as bad as the so called trueborn, so they should not complain. It still doesn't make it easy, watching friends, family, loved ones, get hurt day and day again. They're on borrowed time.

Dropping his hands out of his pockets, he had curled an arm gently around her waist and turned his head to kiss her on the side of her brow. "You're most welcome," he tells her, smiling again at her mouthed word. He finds it a little amusing that she doesn't voice it aloud. Some Fenrir pride, no doubt.

Then she's moving over to get food and he hangs back. "I should have bought more." Casting a glance over towards where Roman was, he had nodded, acknowledging, remembering. "I can always go out again and grab something. Spare ribs and pizza?" Kora had a like for disgustingly greasy food, Trent had found out. He was more like the girl in this relationship. Good food, better wines, and some gym regime.

He waits for her to lead the way outside. Apparently he wasn't eating, though.

[Roman Turner] His ears flickered like a fly had landed on one as the other swiveled towards Kora's voice. Ever so slowly his head lifted and turned towards the pair. With a huff of effort he pushed himself up like an old dog in movements. When they started outside he began the slow version of shifting back to two legs. It wouldn't be for several more minutes before he appeared in an old pair of flannel pajama bottoms, bare footed and shirtless. The flesh from his chest up was blistered, weeping and in places that too bright pink of new flesh.

"Thanks for the food mister Trent."

[Kora] "You brought a feast," she replies to his plan of leaving for more food, after thirty seconds of silence broken only by the sound of ice rattling in the picnic cooler, of paper bags and paper contains and take-out pouches and chopstick sleeves rattling as Kora inspects the meal, the Chinese food hot enough that it is still steaming. She leaves the pints of ice cream sunk in crisp fresh ice for now, claiming the pepper steak and fried rice, a bag full of hot fresh egg rolls, translucent with grease, and both a fork and a set of chopsticks. "No need to run out for more. Though, I think I will ask you to see to my bird bath and feeders, later. Remind me, before you go."

Maybe she plans to fix her hair.

Kora leads Trent outside to sit at the top of the stone steps, the portico - the porch. Somewhere between the table and the steps, she pauses, holding the door open for him to come after, and looks up at him, her dark eyes clear, the faint discoloration underneath unfamiliar, as if she were recovering from one of those minor illnesses Garou never get - the flu, or something - "You're smoking again." - she tells him quietly, though the animal cant of her pale head makes it a question that requires no answer. Not directly. Not now.

The air is cooler now that the sun is setting, though the night is still hot and humid, and despite the shade of the overgrown trees, the steps retain the sun's heat. She leaves the door propped open so that Roman can slip out - as he does, a few minutes later - after them.

Then, she folds herself to sit, applies herself to her food, watching the light change across the fronts of the buildings on the other side of the street, making appreciate sounds underneath her breath. When Roman pads out after her, she looks, flashes a look between kin and Garou, and offers her soon-to-be-packmate the edge of her smile. There's a certain shadow in her eyes, though. Which she explains, quietly, to Trent. "Roman's first battle scar."

If Roman were Fenrir, it would be a point of pride. Kora offers the bit of information with a certain quiet gravity.

"I can tell you the story, if you want."

[Trent Brumby] "I know the way Garou eat," Trent tells her in his defense. "There's no such thing as too much food." Especially, it seems, when they are in the middle of healing. He should have got more meat, more carbs, less worried about feeding some vegetables and getting a balanced diet. They're Garou for Gaia's sake, they can just about eat anything. They don't have to worry about any sort of vitamin deficiencies. Oh well.

Then comes the question, statement, of him smoking. To this he has a slight apologetic look, and as he walks out into the night air again, tells her; "I'll get some more of those patches." The nicotine ones that helped him quit last time. Being at home when he was healing hadn't done him any favours, and then trying to get back into work, it left him bored. Smoking, drinking. Or maybe it was that and something else. A particular argument that has never been raised again. Accepted and moved on, at least on the surface.

"You're welcome, Roman." Casting the other a glance, he couldn't help but look at the others blistered and healing chest. It looked painful and when he looked up, there was that glimmer of sympathy and worry in his eyes. He hated feeling helpless. That poor kid. Poor Kora.

Scruffing a hand through his black hair, he moved to settle down on the steps with the two of them, resting with his forearms resting into his thighs. Pale grays glanced over the neighbourhood. His car was parked out on the curb, but he looked beyond it, over the rough area that they called their home.

A glance is given over to Roman, brows raised with a quiet interest, before he shifts his gaze to Kora. "If he and you'd like to share it." Trent always listens. He lays awake in bed while she tells him stories while laying in the crook of his arm, with a possessive arm and leg over him. She tells him so that they are remembered and he listens so that she's comforted by that.

[Trent Brumby] [half hour warning, then I got to bail. I'd much rather stay, personally. A seven year old's birthday is not how I'd like to spend a Saturday. LOL. ]
to Kora, Roman Turner

[Roman Turner] "Telling the tales is what she was born to do. It's what she has to do."

He nodded towards Kora and gingerly sat down to dangle his legs over the edge of the porch. Shifting to be social was a pain, but you did what you had to do for those you cared about. So he sat and began to eat. His was a very calm and even disposition and as long as they didn't start getting all mushy, he was fine.

[Kora] Between the door and the steps, when they're still alone, when Trent tells her that he will get the patches, she looks back up at him, her dark eyes lingering on his pale ones, brief and searching. She looks at him the way she always does: clear and direct. There's a promise there, too, subtle as it is, not as a demand. I remember or I know or something like it.

--

There's a half-devoured quart of pepper steak on her tap, the paper container resting on a napkin on her jean-clad knees. Kora has unsheahted the chopsticks and uses them with a certain sort of familiar dexterity, scooping up bits of steak, pepper and onion.

The story is brief and she tells it quietly. Her voice doesn't feel like velvet tonight, unless it is velvet chafed by sandpaper until it pills and piles up, the rough understructure of the weave turned over by the friction.

"We were in the old Eagle pack house. I was showing Roman the shrine to sparrow - not," a faint flash of humor, lingering, "his cousin, when the wind stirred. Not the wind, just a small one, so small it couldn't have come from the window. So we crossed over - "

And so on, she tells the story quietly. How they crossed over and found a spirit, an air spirit, desperate to find Garou. There was a battle, it told them, at the River, a battle for the River, fought by the elementals - fire and water and air - a battle that the elementals were losing.

So they ran, following the spirit, through the city's reflection until they came to the edge of the Chicago River, and found a monstrous thing made of oil, pollution and trash, amorphous and grotesque, a giant bane fighting the a fire spirit, spreading its filth over the river.

And they fought: Kora and Roman, just Kora and Roman, they charged into the battle, tore at the giant oil-slick. Then, she says, quiet, looking sidelong at her mate, her dark eyes clear. She wants to share this with him, here on the steps of the church, with her packmate by her side. She was swallowed by it, and everything was black. It devoured her, filled her eyes and her nose and her mouth, and she was stuck it in, struggling to pull herself free.

- she felt heat, a rush of it in the darkness, and then the whole thing collapsed around her, this rain of poison, ooze and filth - all the trash that people have discarded into the river, thoughtlessly, beer cans and barbie dolls, toilet seats and fast food containers, and oil, and chemicals, and poison.

And she found Roman, badly burned, humanskinned, floating in the river, only his nose and mouth above the water. Near enough to dead that she did not know, at first, whether he was dead or alive.

--

She's quiet then, Kora, glancing from her mate to her packmate, watching them in the dying light. Then, quietly pushing her chopsticks into the mass of her remaining meal, she turns over her right hand and opens it to Trent, seeking his while her eyes linger on Roman. "The spirits of the River, the water elementals - healed him. And cleansed the poison from me, before it could do any worse."

That's what happened. Kora's quiet after that, content to eat with them, please enough to be alive with them both.

[Trent Brumby] He listens, his gaze switching between the two of them, considering what had happened. Imagining it. It's not anything that he can really wrap his mind around either. He knows, this words are true, the story is real, but it's still hard to believe it. How they can go through that and then sit and eat take out on the church step, ready to do it all again.

Curling his fingers around her hand, he lifts it and kisses it without much thought of her possible embarrassment. "I'm glad that the two of you made it through," he says in genuine honesty. There is a look across to Roman, he's included in this. He doesn't just say it for the hell of it. Trent is open with his thoughts.

"I'd appreciate if you'd show me how to give proper thanks," this is as he's looking off, over the neighbourhood. "I don't know anything about spirits or Gods. But if you could give me a few tips, I'd like to show my gratitude." Not just for this time, but for others too.

[Roman Turner] "I ain't so sure I want to see this proper thanks thing. Ain't proper for someone to watch something like that between a man and a woman. Besides, that's like thinking about my ma and pa doing it. And that scars my mind to think about."

He actually shuddered.

[Kora] The sun is low in the west, now - the shadows are long, and the light somes through only in these small, brilliant patches between the long lines of the buildings. It's that hour of the evening - just before dusk - when everything in the countryside is golden. In the city, things are different, but the windows of the buildings, of Trent's sedan parked by the curb, are incandescent with light, brilliant with the dying glow of it, amidst the broken bottles, the drifting trash, the pavement and pollution and grinding poverty.

Trent lifts their twined hands, kisses the back of hers, and she's still, close enough that he can feel the heat of her body, not so close that they touch, except where their fingers intertwine. Then Roman makes his comment about proper thanks and Kora shoots a look across Trent at the injured Ragabash, her nostrils flaring in that striae between humor and irritation, the line that no-moons have to tread.

"He means," she says, swallowing back a cough from her blistered throat. All that poison she breathed in, as she struggled in the dark, " - he means to give thanks to the River, for healing us. Not - "

and then it is clear, that the shuddering young no-moon had indeed hit his mark, straight-on target. Trent has never seen Kora blush, but she flushes not, blood suffusing underneath her pale, still faintly sallow skin.

Her mouth sets in a line as she composes herself, then, another glance from garou to kin, before she offers earnest and quiet, "They're so alien, you know? The river spirits called me "Thing made mostly of water." And the air spirit called us sacks of meat that become great and hairy sacks of meat. But I've been thinking about that, too. WE gives sparrows water and food so that they'll take messages back and forth for us, when we need them, yeah?

"The river healed us, the water elementals in it - and that bane was full of trash and poison. Maybe we need to - " the faintest of shrugs, nearly diffident, because it sounds so easy, " - start cleaning it up. You know, the trash from the shallows and the banks would be a good place to start. Here, on this side."

[Roman Turner] "Trash spirit wants more junk."

He mumbled the information around a mouthful of rice.

"Though where to put it all is another question."

[Trent Brumby] For what its worth Trent lifts his spare hand to cough his laugh into it, struggling to keep a straight face at Roman's remark. He knows he needs not to laugh, especially when Kora blushes. Clearing his throat, he lowered his hand back down, giving Kora's a squeeze.

He listens to what she suggests and he sort of figured that answer himself, but doesn't question her on it yet. For now he merely nods and accepts it. "I'll see what I can do, organize something. Some sort of working bee. People will come and help if there's free food or something." It's an idea, anyway.

[Kora] "Adrian's in grad school, and Izzy's in the Police Department," Kora says, stubbornly, cutting another stark sort of look from Trent to Roman, and back again. Her blush is fading, if gradually, underneath her pale skin. She's sitting rather straighter, though, right through the spine, the humor living in her body, underneath her embarrassment, when Roman pokes, and Trent struggles to swallow his laugh. " - if they gave you a hand, got volunteers from the university and the PD, or some sort of sponsorship, I bet you'd get a lot of just," then, the faintest of shrugs, her narrow shoulders moving underneath her t-shirt. "normal people. Yeah. The river borders our territory, anyway. It goes right past, all the way. I hadn't even considered until this what was in it, but yeah. I like the idea. What isn't recyclable, we'll take to the trash heap spirit."

She squeezes his hand again, loosely linked with her own, then extricates her fingers to begin attacking her Chinese food again. Later, she'll retrieve the ice cream from the coolers, giving a pint to Roman, keeping a pint of her own, wheedling Trent to take a bite here and there. Or insisting, quiet and sure. Before he leaves, Kora will give him directions to the old Eagle packhouse, with the birdbaths and bird feeders they tend in the front yard, telling him where the seed is kept, and that the water works inside the building, though she does not know for how much longer. And ask him to care for it in her stead, until she and Roman are healed, cleaning out the bath, filling it up. Filling each feeder with thistle from the plastic tubs stored inside.

And so on.

[Trent Brumby] [okay guys, I've got to bail. Assume Trent is fine company and promises to organize something with kinfolk and humans, and does as Kora's asked! Ride is expected any moment. Thanks for the scene!]

[Roman Turner] He got that kind of blank look that sometimes came when folk he didn't know were mentioned. Figuring lover boy Trent knew who Kora was talking about. Only now and then did he come up for air from chowing down.

[Roman Turner] ((take care!))

[Kora] [That is perfect. (gins) I'm calling it a scene!]