Ornature

[Trent Brumby] He'd been out but had called it an early night. The smell of alcohol and cigarettes clung to his clothing and to his skin. He'd arrived home and tossed his shoes into the corner of the small foyer by the door before walking into his empty apartment and flicking on a light.

As he passed by the coffee table he grabbed up his remote and turned the television on, unable to handle the complete silence. Having been gone since before dinner, the apartment was still warm and the air moderately stale because of it. Changing remotes, he flicked on the air conditioning to get the air circulating before heading into the kitchen to get himself a drink. Standing at the fridge, with the door open, he looked over the contents before shutting it again. A glass was taken from one of the closed cupboards and set on the counter. Ice cubes from the freezer were dropped into the base, the soft clinking of it mingling with the low volume drifting in from the joined living area, voices from a late night movie inhabiting his apartment.

Some good whiskey was taken from his liquor cupboard, the bottle already previously been opened, and was poured to fill the glass half way. He left the bottle on the counter when he picked up the glass and returned to the living area, dropping down to sit in the corner of the couch. The slacks he wore moved more easily then his denim would, when he folded his leg to rest the side of his calf across the other knee and leaned back to take a sip from his glass.

Watching the television, he chastised himself for not staying out.

[Kora] Later. Later than late. God knows what's on television at this hour. Some sci-fi monsterfest on the SciFi channel, with CGI Wyverns fighting a cadre of misfits knights, including the obligatory hot brunette in a chainmail bikini. There's something better on HBO - an action movie, one of those hyper-realistic spy movies, heavy on the paranoia and car chases. A half-dozen other channels carry a half-dozen infomercials, promising relief from debt, surcease of worries if only if only you would buy -

The front door opens. Maybe he hears the key tumbling in the lock. Maybe it's just the swing of the door in the foyer, opening inward. Keys tumble against the table there, and pocket change follows, after. He hears the door shut closed behind her. And it must be her. No one else has a key.

No one else walks into his apartment at 1:36 a.m. on a Saturday morning.

He should have stayed out. The clubs are still open and the night is surprisingly mild, and there's this drifting fog rolling in from the banks of the river, spidering out into the city from the edge of the lake, that makes everything opaque, that absorbs and transmutes the ugly orange of the streetlights into colors that are sometimes heartstopping, at the right angle, or the right degree of inebriation.

He can hear her, boots thumping on the floorboards as she begins to unlace, then toe them off, one and then the next.

[Trent Brumby] Trent is still sitting on the sofa, he's had a few more drinks by this point and had taken off his socks, kicked out to lounge comfortably. Ankles crossed, hand resting around the glass, sitting on his stomach. He doesn't bother with the ice anymore, its too much of an effort. The bottle of whiskey is on the coffee table and the television is still on. He likes the spy movies, and so that's what's on.

He's probably drunk but it's too hard to tell. He's not a slurring drunk by any means, but he's had a few more then would make him just tipsy. It makes his mood better in any case, relaxes him, makes him all too casual, perhaps, to be around a Garou. Alcohol, she knows, loosens he's tongue. She first met him when he was on his way to being quite drunk with Adrian one night. He'd felt like an ass the next morning for blabbing at her.

Now, he watches where she's taking off her boots, taking in her figure over the arm of the sofa.

[Kora] The air is cooler inside the apartment than it is outside. Cooler and dryer. There's a hint of chill that stands up the fine hairs on her forearms, on the back of her neck. Her hair is loose and damp, as if she were coming from the shower, as if it were raining outside. No, it's not just her hair. Her jeans are dark with moisture, and her t-shirt clings to her shoulders, her spine, her body like a literal second skin, the sort a snake sloughs off when it is finished with it. The boots are waterlogged, and the socks underneath come off with a wet schlick. Maybe he is too drunk to see that she's moving with the sort of care she rarely gives her body. Or: not care, just slower, somehow, at the edges.

Both boots and socks come off, she's half bent over when she looks up and sees him watching her move. Kora looks right at him, a direct line of a look, her dark eyes all shaded, the color lost, the glow of the light from the television playing shadows across her skin.

"Hey, baby." Her voice sounds shredded, uncharacteristically hoarse and rought.

And she smiles, this slow-moving sort of smile that begins as a tight acknowledgment of his presence and her presences and then widens, deepens somehow, until it is almost heartbreakingly open beneath the animal gleam of her eyes as she moves, as they catch the light.

Then she straightens, tossing her sodden socks onto the shanks of the boots, leaving wet footprints behind her on his hardwood floor as she crosses behind the couch. "I need to brush my teeth. Find me something clean to wear, would you?"

- she smells - foul. As if she had bathed in the Chicago River, then rolled about in a rusting barrel of old oil. There's blood in her hair, smeared across her cheek, on her hands, though most of it has been scrubbed off, clean. As she goes, she begins peeling off her sodden clothing. After she disappears down the hall, he'll hear her at the washer, tossing the heavy, wet things onto the lid. The bathroom, next. The pipes groan in protest as some sluice is opened. First the sink, then the shower.

[Trent Brumby] The way she smiles at him has one beginning in return, deepening to something warm in his slightly glassy eyes. She calls him baby along with it, and he had answered with a quiet: "Hello to you, Kora." Much in a similar tone that she had used. But he refrains from calling her pet names. Not because he wouldn't like to, but because it's a habit that he never picked up and he is always very mindful of Black Fury behaviour, not Get of Fenris.

When she's telling him to get her something to wear he seems happy enough to roll up from the couch and set the glass on the table by the bottle. The smell hits him as she passes by and his gaze darts back to her, following her walk towards the hall. He takes notice of blood and wetness and everything that he's sure he doesn't want to know about, but will worry over anyway.

Water runs and he leaves her to shower, moving down the hall and into the bedroom to find her some clothes that he keeps for her here. It was cooler inside the apartment now, so he grabs her a pair of sweatpants and a t.shirt, and better to be safe then sorry, he had fetched her preferred under garments too, laying them on the bed in the order she dresses herself.

He's back on the couch then, sitting up, draining his drink while he waits for her.

[Kora] The shower goes on and on. She washes the oil from her hair and scrubs the blood from her skin, closes her eyes against the beating water, and opens them again to assure herself that she can open them. That she can see, that she can breath. Alone in the bathroom, she gives in to her weakness, leaning forward against the cool tiles, her forearm braced there, her forehead in the crook of her arm. The water she uses is scalding hot, and when she emerges, her wet hair twisted away from her face, dripping a damp line down the length of her spine, her skin is flushed red, slowly fading to pink. Steam billows around her like the fog outside.

Dressed in a t-shirt and black cotton pants, she returns to the living room, cuts in front of the television, and sits down beside him on the couch. There are no visible wounds; she's whole, the blood scrubbed away, and the filth, and the scrabbled memory of it, airless, struggling for breath through some viscous - thing. She's whole, just - stiff, through the shoulders and the spine, like someone recovering from the flu, shaking off the worst of the body aches, and nausea, cautiously returning to the world.

Still careful - seated, her lean frame in that C-curve to sink back into his couch, but stiff, as if she were made of one piece of curved metal, unjointed and unmoving - close enough that she can feel his body heat, she plants her bare feet on the edge of his coffee table, and opens her hand, palm up, excepting his in return.

She can smell the alcohol on his breath, the cigarette smoke in his hair tracing down through his skin, interrupted by the clothes he's changed into, which are laundry fresh. She leans toward him, inhaling deeply again, his scent a rich substrait in the back of her mind, well-remembered.

"Did you have fun tonight?"

[Trent Brumby] He watches her come back into the living room and how she's moving a little oddly. He can't quite place what it is that doesn't have her sitting right, but she distracts him by the way she demands his hand and how she leans to inhale the smell of him. It's only then that he becomes conscious of how he must smell to her, which has his free hand reaching up to rub the buttoned down, short sleeved shirt he's still wearing.

"Yeah," he answers, giving a small shrug of his shoulder before looking her way, "it wasn't too bad."

Pale eyes flicker over her face, taking in the details of it from close up, before lifting to meet her gaze. "Are you alright?" He doesn't ask her about her night, not in as many words, but inquires about her health, physically and otherwise. His thumb had began to stroke along her hand where he held her, fingers laced.

[Kora] The television is muted. Half-muted, now. Someone's talking, there's a flash of gunfire, all very distant. Outside, the night is quiet. He's far enough off the ground that the creeping fog doesn't obscure the view from the windows of his apartment building. Of some other apartment building, across the way, on the concrete struts of the parking structure.

Trent asks if she's alright. And Kora squeezes his hand in hers, folding her fingers to lace them between his, her eyes on their entertwined hands, the tips of her fingers between the thrust of his knuckles against his olive skin.

"Yeah," she says, after a moment, with a huff of breathless laughter that sets her lungs burning again, enough that she closes her eyes once, and breathes in sharply through her nose. There. All better. "I'm alright. I'm not feeling too well right now," the edge of her smile, in his peripheral vision. " - give me a few days, though, maybe a week, and I'll be right as rain."

There's a long, quiet moment of consideration as she studies their intertwined hands, turning his first this way, then that direction, taking this quiet pleasure in the way his bones and muscle move underneath his skin.

"Roman's going to be okay, too. Just a scar."

Just as thoughtfully, just as quietly, just as slowly, she brings his hand to her mouth, holds it quietly against her lips, tastes the salt on his skin without exactly kissing him.

"I have to change to heal, you know?" She shoots a sidelong look at his profile, then, slowly lowering his hand. "So I'm probably going to sleep at the church for a few days.

"I wanted to see you first, though."

The edge of her half-smile again, in his peripheral vision. " - and get my laundry done."