[Kora] The small pack is gone for a week and a half, without word. When he drove by the church to refill the bird feeders, to wash out the baths at the little shrine to Sparrow in the front yard of the dilapidated old clapboard home that once housed another pack, whose members are all fled, or burned, or burned in a watery grave a the Caern - when he drove by, at twilight, when his day's work - maybe some overtime - was over, the place was empty, dark, with a sense of drift about it, the empty windows, the overgrown greenery, the trees curling through stained glass windows, worming their way through the old roof, clinging to the warm cut limestone blocks with which the place was built so many years ago, dark.
--
Saturday morning, an hour or two before dawn. It's early and he's sleeping, alone in the dark. She doesn't knock. She doesn't wake him. An hour or two before dawn, the door to his apartment opens and she's inside, the cool familiar surroundings, so utterly spent that it is all she can do to unlace her boots just inside the door. Her fingers are not functioning as they should, and the criss-cross seems so maddeningly complicated that she pulls sharply at the multicolored laces just once, then stumbles toward his bedroom, opens the door, the bed depressing under her weight as she crawls up beside him.
Three times she tried, walking down the hall, to peel off her t-shirt, to shed some of her clothing, to find her way back to her skin in the darkness of his apartment, which is all stark shadows when he's asleep, just the skimming lights of the city visible where they cut through the living room windows. Three times, exhausted, she failed, foiled by her elbows every time.
Instead, she crawls into bed beside him, one last attempt at toeing off her boots succeeds it levering the right one off. She falls asleep, curled against him, her arm curving over his torso, fingers finding the faint furrows of scars on his abdomen from his stabbing early in the summer. Her mouth, her sharp white teeth close over his bare shoulder in some instinctive, animal show of dominanc.
All this as she falls into a depthless sleep, bone-deep, utterly spent. She won't wake for ten hours.
Maybe he stirs in his sleep, half-wakes, turns over toward her. Maybe he keeps sleeping, spent himself, aware that she has returned only on some visceral, instinctual level. Her skin is colder than he has ever felt it, and she smells of blood and snow.
And he dreams that night of both, blood and snow, blood hot on the snow, the sharp scent of prey's scent through a world defined by the absence of all color, and a barren sort of perilous sky, occluded by shifting clouds of a winter storm. His pack expanding around him, driving something to ground like a single organism, these simple pleasures, the ground disappearing beneath his feet, the sharp, lacerating cold as it fills his lungs, the warmth of other bodies around, the joys of the hunt and the sharp, eerie dissonance of a howl at twilight, the echoes of the others around him, his soul in his throat as he opens his mouth in praise of the moon.
[Trent Brumby] His apartment is as orderly as she remembers it, with the same scents and that of dinner that he had eaten at home that night. For a Black Fury Kinfolk, those that oppose the Weaver as much as Man, he is almost compulsive about the organization in his life, living a routine existence.
She will find him in bed, sprawled out half on his stomach with an arm tucked under a pillow and the pillow hugged to his face. One leg extends straight and the other knee is bent with his weight pressed lightly into it. He is sleeping quietly, deeply, when she finds her way into the bed, but immediately rouses with her touch. The cold of her seeps right through his warm skin to try and chill his bones, creating goose pimples long before his eyes open.
"Kora, you're freezing," mumbled. It's half a complaint and the other concern.
Despite the cold of her, he rolls over and curls her into the weight of his arm, pulling her so that she tucks in against him, and blindly pulls the blankets up and over her, making sure she's snug in against his warmth and that the blanket keeps it in. He kisses her face, just the once, and begins to rub along her back with his palm, slow and lazy with sleep.
"Good to have you home," another quiet murmur, into her hair.
Not long after, he's back to sleep. Perhaps not for long, especially with the dreams that circulate through the sleeping mind, but he gets in another few hours before he is up for work again. He makes sure that she is warm in the blanket, leaves another kiss to her hair before leaving the bedroom. Not long after, he's at work.
Dropping home for lunch has him finding her asleep still, but he cooks her up a steak and some bacon, his own made into a sandwich before he takes off for work again. He won't be home until later that night, working through until after six, and he'll bring home some dinner with him - something she'd favour.
[Kora] When he mumbles to her in the dark hours of the night, when he kisses her, her face, her hair, she turns her head to follow the sound of his voice, the warmth of his mouth against her skin. It is instinct, entirely. She is thinner than he remembers - he sees it not in her torso or her hips, but in her face and her arms, the sharp cut of her shoulder girdle, the way the skin there stretches over her bones. A few pounds, enough that he would notice because he knows her body. Few enough that no one else would be like to see it in her. Her hair is longer, too. A good inch, an inch and a half, the summer's highlights lost to the dull gray days of some remembered arctic winter.
None of it matters. In the end, she's come back.
--
When he comes home late from his long day at work, dinner in hand, a stop in the kitchen finds that she ate everything he cooked for her, and drank her way through his liter of milk besides. She's still there, though now her boots are by his door, tumbled over each other, a messy counterpoint to his neat precision. She wanders out of the hallway, wearing one of his robes, toweling her hair dry while listening to someone on the phone.
She meets him in the living room, hangs up the phone with barely a word, and pulls him close for a lingering kiss. The towel drops from her hands as she traps his against her body as the kiss ends and she simply... breathes him in.
The moment is measured in heartbeats.
It ends. She pulls herself reluctantly away from him, frees his hands from where she had secured them, one against her hip, the other against her flank, his fingers splayed across her back, his thumb spanning her ribs beneath her breast, and reaches up to drag her thumb against the line of his jaw.
"I have to work tonight," she tells him. "And I have a job for you to do, too."
They have an hour for dinner, and she doesn't talk about the job. The kinfolk who disappeared from the VA hospital. Her kinfolk, a man she is responsible for protecting and defending. They eat dinner together, sitting on the couch so that they can be close, and the conversation is light. Is lighter than it could be, easy. Maybe the television is on, the news, the weather, and Kora tells him that she's surprised it's still summer here. It seemed like months.
--
Later that night, he's outside a non-descript warehouse where his mate and her fellow Garou will fight a grotesque amalgam of human and machine for their lives when the kinsman he is there to pick up ("The place smells like death," Kora told him, when dinner was over; in the car, on her way to meet her packmate and the others from the Sept, " - he's not likely to be alive.") comes staggering out of that abattoir, missing an arm, missing an eye ("Like fucking Odin. Gods.") covered in his own filth, the worst of the visible wounds, closed, the festering infections healed, still wounded, just less grievously, and perhaps less visibly, by the ordeal he has endured.
[Trent Brumby] He will be glad to see that she has eaten everything that he had made her and gone through nearly all the full cream milk in his fridge. There is plenty of dinner to be had, and he manages to put it down on the coffee table before she is upon him. He gets out a; "Hey Kora," which sounds suspiciously like she says hey baby, before her mouth is locked onto his.
Drawing her close, he has no qualms keeping her in against him, and giving a small demand to her kiss. It had been months for her, only less than two weeks for him - but it was a very long time, wondering if she's even going to return. No word. Nothing. Until her cold frame had curled against him in the predawn hours. She knows he has missed her by the way he demands more, pulling himself up short of disrobing her.
Over dinner they had talked. He tells her about the working bee, and how he's got quite a few people interested by this point but not as many as he would have liked. Other things too, the weather, and, of course, him telling her to eat some more.
Having agreed to the job, as if he would do any less, he's in his car with some packed belongings. There's a blanket spread across the back with a plastic painters sheet under it, protecting the upholstery if need to be. Also in the back is a fully equipped medical kit, and a prepared heat pack. Perhaps he had told her at some point along the way, that he's a fully trained paramedic. A man of many trades, it seems. Before they left home he had put out a folding bed that he keeps stowed away, setting it up with fresh sheets and a blanket - just in case. It was simple enough to take down. But if he was playing medic that night, he didn't want to waste time dealing with the injured while also preparing linens. Trent is definitely organized.
"Be careful," this as she's parting, and: "The Gods be with you."
The wait had been excruciating, and it wasn't she that returned but a man that was missing the forearm of a limb and an eye. Trent had got out of the car, helped him into the back seat, wrapping him in a blanket with the heat pack, and told him to lay down. He'd drive a distance away before he'd pull over and see to bandaging up some wounds temporarily before they're heading back to the apartment.
[Kora] The man stinks. He stinks - of blood and feces, of urine and - even sharper - fear, the sort of enduring, mind-bending fear that a man like Erick Anderson, a thirty-something Iraq War veteran, former member of the special forces, Get kinfolk, Black Eagle - god, he can peel off the names like nobody's business, and he does, not in the car, when he's still in shock, so filthy that he has to sit in the backseat on a painter's tarp, so broken that when Trent parks his damned car in the damned parking lot - he keeps reaches for the hand of the door with his stump, which is mostly healed, no longer gangrenous, but which is still covered with skin that looks more like hamburger meat than human skin, pink new growth, raw and tender.
Trent opens the door, and Erick feels it all. This stranger, this fucking car, the way he's still shaking inside, the surreality of freedom after the absolute limits that come from being locked in a fucking freezer kept by a fucking madman who was cutting pieces away without anesthetic, not even for the sick, perverted pleasure of it like some regular, human madman, but because the anesthesia would have been so damn wasteful.
Erick limps, his muscles are weak from disuse, from atrophy. He's been still, locked away for days or weeks; if asked, he doesn't know, can't say, won't say anything, not his name, not his rank. Not his tribe. Just his serial number, which he mumbles underneath his breath as they walk, up the concrete steps rather than in the more well-used elevator. He says it again and again, Seven Three - so that by the time they're in Trent's apartment, Trent would swear he could say it with him. Each number in succession, Erick Anderson's last shred of sanity.
The kinsman stands in the shower under running water for forty-five minutes. He just lets it run. The water heater empties and the water turns cold and drums against the crown of his head, thumps on his broad back, where the weight loss, the atrophy, the muscle loss is so evident underneath his skin.
He emerges from the shower still limping, but clean now, the filth scrubbed away, dressed in some of Trent's clothing. It pulls against the Get of Fenris' broader shoulders, but hangs off his formerly stacked torso. Erick submits - silently - to Trent's work as medic. Offers his stump to be truly washed, cleansed with alcohol and betadine, bandaged to protest the new raw skin.
It's only when the bandaging is done and Trent offers the unfortunate man a Scotch that he seems to pull out of himself, with an I could use a fucking drink, before he introduces himself, saying I'd offer you my hand, but - with this grim, bitter humor meant to hide the grimace that pulls at the corners of his mouth.
Erick drinks.
And drinks.
And drinks, and Trent doubtlessly feeds him somewhere in the middle of all this, and then Erick drinks again, opening up as the alcohol opens his veins, regaling Trent with some brutally bitter rendition of What Happened to Me, before he settles back into more familiar stories, about Iraq, about the Get, the Black Eagles, all of it, telling story after story until everything hits him, all at once, and Trent has to take his arm and half-carry the man to the cot he's set up in the spare room.
--
She comes back while he's putting Erick to bed. Opens the door and lets herself in. The sun is an hour, maybe two, away, and she shuts the door quietly behind her. She's filthy, blood on her face, in her hair, underneath her fingernails. Her boots are wet, washed off with some convenient spigot before she found her way back to his apartment. When he emerges from the hallway to round up the scotch glasses, the remnants of dinner, the late night high-protein snack for the malnourished kinsman, she's walking through the living room, headed toward the bathroom, shrugging off her filthy clothing as she goes.
"How's our patient?" she asks Trent, quietly, her dark eyes on his face. There's a more subtle question wrapped into the words that he can read her still, half-curved mouth, the sheen of light across her dark eyes. Which is: how are you?
[Trent Brumby] Erick finds that Trent is quite adept at dealing with people in shock, usually from car crashes and the like, and while he's been out of the field for about a year, it all comes back from training, from years on the job. He handles the Get Kinfolk without any sort of judgment and with a sympathetic ear that is not overly so. The former Black Fury kin, who's blood is still strongly of that Tribe, has no qualms about getting the man drunk as long as he's eating down some food. He jokes easily, only when the other does, says something like: "Don't worry, you'll be a lefty in no time," referring to his only hand.
He listens. That's what he does best. He listens and he supports, and when needed - like tonight, he directs with a silent confidence that comes from his all steady core. There is nothing large and boisterous about Trent, not demanding, not crawling for attentions. He goes through life contained and seemingly content. Takes orders as well as he can give them. And so Erick finds himself cleaned off, of which Trent would have helped with unless indicated otherwise, dressed, fed and finally put into bed with a blanket over him.
Finished, he's coming out of the hallway as Kora is coming in. His eyes give her a sweep, takes in the blood and grime, and any potential injuries. He looks a little worn around the edges himself, but it's been a long and slightly crazy night. He hasn't had time to muse over the horrific ordeal that another kinsmen had been put through, having been focused on being the pillar of the night. "He's in bed, well drunk, and hopefully going to sleep." He suspects that he'll be up in a short order, to a man suffering from sleepless nights, and he will become the companion that sits him through it, like one tends to the injured and the sick, or the frightened.
"Are you well?" This is asked of her as she's heading towards the shower. His voice is quiet.
[Kora] This is not the first time she's encountered the steady confidence that is the core of him, the still, sure heart underneath all the rest of it. It's the first time she's encountered it like this, though, at 4:30 a.m. on a Sunday morning while the city sleeps, as the injured kinsman whom they rescued, whom he tended, after, descends into a fitful sleep that will last only as long as the alcohol remains patent in his veins.
He was stabbed at the beginning of the summer, and there she was, this frayed vessel of rage, this righteous, instinctual anger gleaming in her like the flash of a fish underwater, seen through the frothing waves. And there she was, a Get of Fenris, treating him for week after week as if he were fragile, breakable, as if she might touch him and watch him dissolve into salt, into sand.
When she's wounded, Kora curls up in the church with her pack, wolf-skinned, to heal. Before they left on their quest for their new totem, she came to his apartment poisoned, so close to death that she felt his fingers curl over her spine, felt her body unraveling by spasmodic degrees as she struggled to do something, anything, to revive her packmate before she succumbed to the poison twisting her intestines, playing havoc with her sense of balance, making her shudder and sweat and retch as a human. Her gift - from Fenris, and from Bear - kept her on her feet, sure and upright, and all she told him was that she wasn't feeling well.
Tonight, he asks if she's well. She meets his gaze, dark to pale eyes. Her chin is tilted faintly upward, because he's taller than she by a scant handful of inches. Kora does not smile at him, because the work of the night was too horrific to allow her to smile. Sorrow, spent rage, weariness, all are there in her dark eyes. They match the weary care, the wearing of his long day, and longer night.
"Yeah," she tells him, her voice low and steady. There's a certain raw note, her voice hoarse, just, from the work of the evening. "I was shot, but Roman healed me before it could reload, or take another swipe. Then we brought it down. The man who did this, too. Dead."
She smiles then, a faint thing, though it is coiled about with feeling. Glances down at his hands, his body, then the space between them before she finds his eyes. "Come with me, baby," she tells him; her voice - already low - has dropped a minor fifth. The husk in it isn't wanton. It's the sum of everything else - rage and grief, relief, gratitude. This wordless thing that opens up in her chest when she looks at him, worn, tired, his pale eyes attentive to her, asking her if she's well.
"Come wash my hair."
[Trent Brumby] That she was shot doesn't sit well with him, of course, and even if there is relief that Roman was able to heal her before whatever it was reloaded - of which he's also grateful for-, he still doesn't like the idea that bullets had torn through her flesh, caused her pain, and that something had tried to kill her. He never likes these ideas, not even thinking about the facts of their lives. But there is nothing for him to say to them, and he only nods once, mouth a little puckered in that down turned, unhappy way. He glances away from her, over to the bottle and the glasses, then back again when she asks him to come with her.
It makes his brows raised. He didn't need to say it, the expression read clearly: Seriously? at first thinking she was asking him to come to the shower to do more then he's sure his body is capable at this point. He's been up for just short of twenty-four hours by this point, his working day starting at six am, and it has been an exhausting sort of day. But reading more into her expression and tone, those had lowered, and by the time she asks to come and wash her hair, he gives a small smile and a nod. Eyes flicker with a thread of amusement before he's walking towards her, ushering her with his hands down towards the bathroom, stripping her free of clothes the moment they are walking into the bathroom.
He pushes the door closed after him, and is careful disrobing her, leaving a pile of bloodied clothes on the ground.
[Kora] There's this quiet moment, just inside the door, where everything is faintly awkward. They are in a small space together; he's exhausted, and his workday begins again with the sunrise. He was off work so long, he needs the hours, the overtime, the job. He is exhausted and she's spent, not exhausted he is, but spent - body, will, spirit and rage - all burned away for another chance, another shot, another blow that might turn the battle. It's been weeks since he's seen her, and months since she's seen him, by the strange, terrible logic of the spirit world.
There's an injured, not-quite-broken man, kin to her tribe, sorely wounded, sleeping fitfully in the spare bedroom. She lifts her arms as he pulls her t-shirt over her head, toes off her boots so that he can pull off her socks. There are elbows, knees - joints in strange places, blood smeared on her body where the bullets impacted drifted against her skin, up and down her left flank, where the spray of gunfire caught her. What Roman hadn't healed, her feral body had when the battle was over, regenerating itself at impossible speed, expelling the foreign matter of the bullets.
When he has finished disrobing her, she turns around, her arms crossed over her torso, and reaches for his own clothes. She's less careful than he was with her, but this is far from the rough, demanding way she has handled his clothing in the past.
In the shower, she lets the water run over her body, tips her head back so that he can pushes his fingers through her pale locks, washing all the blood and grime from her hair as the water works over her body. When the water runs clear, she turns back to him, curves her arms around his shoulders, holds him close as the water beats in sure time against her back. Missed you she mouths into his collarbone, as he reaches around her to turn off the water. Missed you.
They'll sleep together, then. Half-clothed, boxers for him, and one of his work-shorts for her, unbuttoned to the breastbone, drenched in his scent. An hour, or two - until his alarm goes off, until her kinsman wakes, shouting, startled, from the depths of a night terror of a memory. His arm underneath her shoulders, her hair dampening the pillow, her arm and leg thrown possessively over him.
It's the quietest time they'll have for days to come. Soon enough the alarm shatters the slow-dropping sort of peace. The world turns. Morning comes.
--
Saturday morning, an hour or two before dawn. It's early and he's sleeping, alone in the dark. She doesn't knock. She doesn't wake him. An hour or two before dawn, the door to his apartment opens and she's inside, the cool familiar surroundings, so utterly spent that it is all she can do to unlace her boots just inside the door. Her fingers are not functioning as they should, and the criss-cross seems so maddeningly complicated that she pulls sharply at the multicolored laces just once, then stumbles toward his bedroom, opens the door, the bed depressing under her weight as she crawls up beside him.
Three times she tried, walking down the hall, to peel off her t-shirt, to shed some of her clothing, to find her way back to her skin in the darkness of his apartment, which is all stark shadows when he's asleep, just the skimming lights of the city visible where they cut through the living room windows. Three times, exhausted, she failed, foiled by her elbows every time.
Instead, she crawls into bed beside him, one last attempt at toeing off her boots succeeds it levering the right one off. She falls asleep, curled against him, her arm curving over his torso, fingers finding the faint furrows of scars on his abdomen from his stabbing early in the summer. Her mouth, her sharp white teeth close over his bare shoulder in some instinctive, animal show of dominanc.
All this as she falls into a depthless sleep, bone-deep, utterly spent. She won't wake for ten hours.
Maybe he stirs in his sleep, half-wakes, turns over toward her. Maybe he keeps sleeping, spent himself, aware that she has returned only on some visceral, instinctual level. Her skin is colder than he has ever felt it, and she smells of blood and snow.
And he dreams that night of both, blood and snow, blood hot on the snow, the sharp scent of prey's scent through a world defined by the absence of all color, and a barren sort of perilous sky, occluded by shifting clouds of a winter storm. His pack expanding around him, driving something to ground like a single organism, these simple pleasures, the ground disappearing beneath his feet, the sharp, lacerating cold as it fills his lungs, the warmth of other bodies around, the joys of the hunt and the sharp, eerie dissonance of a howl at twilight, the echoes of the others around him, his soul in his throat as he opens his mouth in praise of the moon.
[Trent Brumby] His apartment is as orderly as she remembers it, with the same scents and that of dinner that he had eaten at home that night. For a Black Fury Kinfolk, those that oppose the Weaver as much as Man, he is almost compulsive about the organization in his life, living a routine existence.
She will find him in bed, sprawled out half on his stomach with an arm tucked under a pillow and the pillow hugged to his face. One leg extends straight and the other knee is bent with his weight pressed lightly into it. He is sleeping quietly, deeply, when she finds her way into the bed, but immediately rouses with her touch. The cold of her seeps right through his warm skin to try and chill his bones, creating goose pimples long before his eyes open.
"Kora, you're freezing," mumbled. It's half a complaint and the other concern.
Despite the cold of her, he rolls over and curls her into the weight of his arm, pulling her so that she tucks in against him, and blindly pulls the blankets up and over her, making sure she's snug in against his warmth and that the blanket keeps it in. He kisses her face, just the once, and begins to rub along her back with his palm, slow and lazy with sleep.
"Good to have you home," another quiet murmur, into her hair.
Not long after, he's back to sleep. Perhaps not for long, especially with the dreams that circulate through the sleeping mind, but he gets in another few hours before he is up for work again. He makes sure that she is warm in the blanket, leaves another kiss to her hair before leaving the bedroom. Not long after, he's at work.
Dropping home for lunch has him finding her asleep still, but he cooks her up a steak and some bacon, his own made into a sandwich before he takes off for work again. He won't be home until later that night, working through until after six, and he'll bring home some dinner with him - something she'd favour.
[Kora] When he mumbles to her in the dark hours of the night, when he kisses her, her face, her hair, she turns her head to follow the sound of his voice, the warmth of his mouth against her skin. It is instinct, entirely. She is thinner than he remembers - he sees it not in her torso or her hips, but in her face and her arms, the sharp cut of her shoulder girdle, the way the skin there stretches over her bones. A few pounds, enough that he would notice because he knows her body. Few enough that no one else would be like to see it in her. Her hair is longer, too. A good inch, an inch and a half, the summer's highlights lost to the dull gray days of some remembered arctic winter.
None of it matters. In the end, she's come back.
--
When he comes home late from his long day at work, dinner in hand, a stop in the kitchen finds that she ate everything he cooked for her, and drank her way through his liter of milk besides. She's still there, though now her boots are by his door, tumbled over each other, a messy counterpoint to his neat precision. She wanders out of the hallway, wearing one of his robes, toweling her hair dry while listening to someone on the phone.
She meets him in the living room, hangs up the phone with barely a word, and pulls him close for a lingering kiss. The towel drops from her hands as she traps his against her body as the kiss ends and she simply... breathes him in.
The moment is measured in heartbeats.
It ends. She pulls herself reluctantly away from him, frees his hands from where she had secured them, one against her hip, the other against her flank, his fingers splayed across her back, his thumb spanning her ribs beneath her breast, and reaches up to drag her thumb against the line of his jaw.
"I have to work tonight," she tells him. "And I have a job for you to do, too."
They have an hour for dinner, and she doesn't talk about the job. The kinfolk who disappeared from the VA hospital. Her kinfolk, a man she is responsible for protecting and defending. They eat dinner together, sitting on the couch so that they can be close, and the conversation is light. Is lighter than it could be, easy. Maybe the television is on, the news, the weather, and Kora tells him that she's surprised it's still summer here. It seemed like months.
--
Later that night, he's outside a non-descript warehouse where his mate and her fellow Garou will fight a grotesque amalgam of human and machine for their lives when the kinsman he is there to pick up ("The place smells like death," Kora told him, when dinner was over; in the car, on her way to meet her packmate and the others from the Sept, " - he's not likely to be alive.") comes staggering out of that abattoir, missing an arm, missing an eye ("Like fucking Odin. Gods.") covered in his own filth, the worst of the visible wounds, closed, the festering infections healed, still wounded, just less grievously, and perhaps less visibly, by the ordeal he has endured.
[Trent Brumby] He will be glad to see that she has eaten everything that he had made her and gone through nearly all the full cream milk in his fridge. There is plenty of dinner to be had, and he manages to put it down on the coffee table before she is upon him. He gets out a; "Hey Kora," which sounds suspiciously like she says hey baby, before her mouth is locked onto his.
Drawing her close, he has no qualms keeping her in against him, and giving a small demand to her kiss. It had been months for her, only less than two weeks for him - but it was a very long time, wondering if she's even going to return. No word. Nothing. Until her cold frame had curled against him in the predawn hours. She knows he has missed her by the way he demands more, pulling himself up short of disrobing her.
Over dinner they had talked. He tells her about the working bee, and how he's got quite a few people interested by this point but not as many as he would have liked. Other things too, the weather, and, of course, him telling her to eat some more.
Having agreed to the job, as if he would do any less, he's in his car with some packed belongings. There's a blanket spread across the back with a plastic painters sheet under it, protecting the upholstery if need to be. Also in the back is a fully equipped medical kit, and a prepared heat pack. Perhaps he had told her at some point along the way, that he's a fully trained paramedic. A man of many trades, it seems. Before they left home he had put out a folding bed that he keeps stowed away, setting it up with fresh sheets and a blanket - just in case. It was simple enough to take down. But if he was playing medic that night, he didn't want to waste time dealing with the injured while also preparing linens. Trent is definitely organized.
"Be careful," this as she's parting, and: "The Gods be with you."
The wait had been excruciating, and it wasn't she that returned but a man that was missing the forearm of a limb and an eye. Trent had got out of the car, helped him into the back seat, wrapping him in a blanket with the heat pack, and told him to lay down. He'd drive a distance away before he'd pull over and see to bandaging up some wounds temporarily before they're heading back to the apartment.
[Kora] The man stinks. He stinks - of blood and feces, of urine and - even sharper - fear, the sort of enduring, mind-bending fear that a man like Erick Anderson, a thirty-something Iraq War veteran, former member of the special forces, Get kinfolk, Black Eagle - god, he can peel off the names like nobody's business, and he does, not in the car, when he's still in shock, so filthy that he has to sit in the backseat on a painter's tarp, so broken that when Trent parks his damned car in the damned parking lot - he keeps reaches for the hand of the door with his stump, which is mostly healed, no longer gangrenous, but which is still covered with skin that looks more like hamburger meat than human skin, pink new growth, raw and tender.
Trent opens the door, and Erick feels it all. This stranger, this fucking car, the way he's still shaking inside, the surreality of freedom after the absolute limits that come from being locked in a fucking freezer kept by a fucking madman who was cutting pieces away without anesthetic, not even for the sick, perverted pleasure of it like some regular, human madman, but because the anesthesia would have been so damn wasteful.
Erick limps, his muscles are weak from disuse, from atrophy. He's been still, locked away for days or weeks; if asked, he doesn't know, can't say, won't say anything, not his name, not his rank. Not his tribe. Just his serial number, which he mumbles underneath his breath as they walk, up the concrete steps rather than in the more well-used elevator. He says it again and again, Seven Three - so that by the time they're in Trent's apartment, Trent would swear he could say it with him. Each number in succession, Erick Anderson's last shred of sanity.
The kinsman stands in the shower under running water for forty-five minutes. He just lets it run. The water heater empties and the water turns cold and drums against the crown of his head, thumps on his broad back, where the weight loss, the atrophy, the muscle loss is so evident underneath his skin.
He emerges from the shower still limping, but clean now, the filth scrubbed away, dressed in some of Trent's clothing. It pulls against the Get of Fenris' broader shoulders, but hangs off his formerly stacked torso. Erick submits - silently - to Trent's work as medic. Offers his stump to be truly washed, cleansed with alcohol and betadine, bandaged to protest the new raw skin.
It's only when the bandaging is done and Trent offers the unfortunate man a Scotch that he seems to pull out of himself, with an I could use a fucking drink, before he introduces himself, saying I'd offer you my hand, but - with this grim, bitter humor meant to hide the grimace that pulls at the corners of his mouth.
Erick drinks.
And drinks.
And drinks, and Trent doubtlessly feeds him somewhere in the middle of all this, and then Erick drinks again, opening up as the alcohol opens his veins, regaling Trent with some brutally bitter rendition of What Happened to Me, before he settles back into more familiar stories, about Iraq, about the Get, the Black Eagles, all of it, telling story after story until everything hits him, all at once, and Trent has to take his arm and half-carry the man to the cot he's set up in the spare room.
--
She comes back while he's putting Erick to bed. Opens the door and lets herself in. The sun is an hour, maybe two, away, and she shuts the door quietly behind her. She's filthy, blood on her face, in her hair, underneath her fingernails. Her boots are wet, washed off with some convenient spigot before she found her way back to his apartment. When he emerges from the hallway to round up the scotch glasses, the remnants of dinner, the late night high-protein snack for the malnourished kinsman, she's walking through the living room, headed toward the bathroom, shrugging off her filthy clothing as she goes.
"How's our patient?" she asks Trent, quietly, her dark eyes on his face. There's a more subtle question wrapped into the words that he can read her still, half-curved mouth, the sheen of light across her dark eyes. Which is: how are you?
[Trent Brumby] Erick finds that Trent is quite adept at dealing with people in shock, usually from car crashes and the like, and while he's been out of the field for about a year, it all comes back from training, from years on the job. He handles the Get Kinfolk without any sort of judgment and with a sympathetic ear that is not overly so. The former Black Fury kin, who's blood is still strongly of that Tribe, has no qualms about getting the man drunk as long as he's eating down some food. He jokes easily, only when the other does, says something like: "Don't worry, you'll be a lefty in no time," referring to his only hand.
He listens. That's what he does best. He listens and he supports, and when needed - like tonight, he directs with a silent confidence that comes from his all steady core. There is nothing large and boisterous about Trent, not demanding, not crawling for attentions. He goes through life contained and seemingly content. Takes orders as well as he can give them. And so Erick finds himself cleaned off, of which Trent would have helped with unless indicated otherwise, dressed, fed and finally put into bed with a blanket over him.
Finished, he's coming out of the hallway as Kora is coming in. His eyes give her a sweep, takes in the blood and grime, and any potential injuries. He looks a little worn around the edges himself, but it's been a long and slightly crazy night. He hasn't had time to muse over the horrific ordeal that another kinsmen had been put through, having been focused on being the pillar of the night. "He's in bed, well drunk, and hopefully going to sleep." He suspects that he'll be up in a short order, to a man suffering from sleepless nights, and he will become the companion that sits him through it, like one tends to the injured and the sick, or the frightened.
"Are you well?" This is asked of her as she's heading towards the shower. His voice is quiet.
[Kora] This is not the first time she's encountered the steady confidence that is the core of him, the still, sure heart underneath all the rest of it. It's the first time she's encountered it like this, though, at 4:30 a.m. on a Sunday morning while the city sleeps, as the injured kinsman whom they rescued, whom he tended, after, descends into a fitful sleep that will last only as long as the alcohol remains patent in his veins.
He was stabbed at the beginning of the summer, and there she was, this frayed vessel of rage, this righteous, instinctual anger gleaming in her like the flash of a fish underwater, seen through the frothing waves. And there she was, a Get of Fenris, treating him for week after week as if he were fragile, breakable, as if she might touch him and watch him dissolve into salt, into sand.
When she's wounded, Kora curls up in the church with her pack, wolf-skinned, to heal. Before they left on their quest for their new totem, she came to his apartment poisoned, so close to death that she felt his fingers curl over her spine, felt her body unraveling by spasmodic degrees as she struggled to do something, anything, to revive her packmate before she succumbed to the poison twisting her intestines, playing havoc with her sense of balance, making her shudder and sweat and retch as a human. Her gift - from Fenris, and from Bear - kept her on her feet, sure and upright, and all she told him was that she wasn't feeling well.
Tonight, he asks if she's well. She meets his gaze, dark to pale eyes. Her chin is tilted faintly upward, because he's taller than she by a scant handful of inches. Kora does not smile at him, because the work of the night was too horrific to allow her to smile. Sorrow, spent rage, weariness, all are there in her dark eyes. They match the weary care, the wearing of his long day, and longer night.
"Yeah," she tells him, her voice low and steady. There's a certain raw note, her voice hoarse, just, from the work of the evening. "I was shot, but Roman healed me before it could reload, or take another swipe. Then we brought it down. The man who did this, too. Dead."
She smiles then, a faint thing, though it is coiled about with feeling. Glances down at his hands, his body, then the space between them before she finds his eyes. "Come with me, baby," she tells him; her voice - already low - has dropped a minor fifth. The husk in it isn't wanton. It's the sum of everything else - rage and grief, relief, gratitude. This wordless thing that opens up in her chest when she looks at him, worn, tired, his pale eyes attentive to her, asking her if she's well.
"Come wash my hair."
[Trent Brumby] That she was shot doesn't sit well with him, of course, and even if there is relief that Roman was able to heal her before whatever it was reloaded - of which he's also grateful for-, he still doesn't like the idea that bullets had torn through her flesh, caused her pain, and that something had tried to kill her. He never likes these ideas, not even thinking about the facts of their lives. But there is nothing for him to say to them, and he only nods once, mouth a little puckered in that down turned, unhappy way. He glances away from her, over to the bottle and the glasses, then back again when she asks him to come with her.
It makes his brows raised. He didn't need to say it, the expression read clearly: Seriously? at first thinking she was asking him to come to the shower to do more then he's sure his body is capable at this point. He's been up for just short of twenty-four hours by this point, his working day starting at six am, and it has been an exhausting sort of day. But reading more into her expression and tone, those had lowered, and by the time she asks to come and wash her hair, he gives a small smile and a nod. Eyes flicker with a thread of amusement before he's walking towards her, ushering her with his hands down towards the bathroom, stripping her free of clothes the moment they are walking into the bathroom.
He pushes the door closed after him, and is careful disrobing her, leaving a pile of bloodied clothes on the ground.
[Kora] There's this quiet moment, just inside the door, where everything is faintly awkward. They are in a small space together; he's exhausted, and his workday begins again with the sunrise. He was off work so long, he needs the hours, the overtime, the job. He is exhausted and she's spent, not exhausted he is, but spent - body, will, spirit and rage - all burned away for another chance, another shot, another blow that might turn the battle. It's been weeks since he's seen her, and months since she's seen him, by the strange, terrible logic of the spirit world.
There's an injured, not-quite-broken man, kin to her tribe, sorely wounded, sleeping fitfully in the spare bedroom. She lifts her arms as he pulls her t-shirt over her head, toes off her boots so that he can pull off her socks. There are elbows, knees - joints in strange places, blood smeared on her body where the bullets impacted drifted against her skin, up and down her left flank, where the spray of gunfire caught her. What Roman hadn't healed, her feral body had when the battle was over, regenerating itself at impossible speed, expelling the foreign matter of the bullets.
When he has finished disrobing her, she turns around, her arms crossed over her torso, and reaches for his own clothes. She's less careful than he was with her, but this is far from the rough, demanding way she has handled his clothing in the past.
In the shower, she lets the water run over her body, tips her head back so that he can pushes his fingers through her pale locks, washing all the blood and grime from her hair as the water works over her body. When the water runs clear, she turns back to him, curves her arms around his shoulders, holds him close as the water beats in sure time against her back. Missed you she mouths into his collarbone, as he reaches around her to turn off the water. Missed you.
They'll sleep together, then. Half-clothed, boxers for him, and one of his work-shorts for her, unbuttoned to the breastbone, drenched in his scent. An hour, or two - until his alarm goes off, until her kinsman wakes, shouting, startled, from the depths of a night terror of a memory. His arm underneath her shoulders, her hair dampening the pillow, her arm and leg thrown possessively over him.
It's the quietest time they'll have for days to come. Soon enough the alarm shatters the slow-dropping sort of peace. The world turns. Morning comes.
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