[Kora] The first night he sent her a text at midnight or after. The moon was thin and had long since set, and she smiled indulgently, called him, said yes to ice cream and they ate it on the steps of the church, quiet. Her feet were bare and there was blood on the cuffs of her jeans, someone else's, drying now.
The second time she called him laughing and said, I'll come by and they ate stuffed grape leaves sitting on his couch, the windows open, because she mentioned the night before.
The third night, she calls him directly back, and says - okay, later - and there's a frown in her voice, the sounds of the lake in the background.
--
Friday night, she texts him before he can her. Just this -
I want to see you.
Find me at Grant Park.
and, not long after, a blurry picture of the Millennium Fountain from a certain distance perspective taken with the camera of a cheap, disposable cell phone.
There is a retaining wall here, where the land falls away from the in-fill of the park to the lake proper, the constructed beaches dark at night. Navy Pier is slowly shutting down, but the Ferris Wheel is still bright against the darkness. Somewhere to the north, the Caern and the old docks, remnants of the city's industrial past, listing to a quiet sort of decay where the river meets the lake.
She is sitting on the retaining wall, looking out over the lake. The moon is slowly waxing, just past half now, and it makes her feel bright, and untoward. She sits straight, her legs dangling down over the edge, her hands braced on either side of her, fingers light against the stone. It is a cool night, cool enough that she's wearing one of the hoodies he bought her months ago, before any of this. From a distance, he might not pick her out, with the cotton jacket unzipped and therefore loose, shapeless down her back, the empty hood - she could be any other young woman.
Closer, though, and the hint of her profile is there against the horizon, where sky and water come together. Closer, and he can see the distinct slope of her trapezius, the tendons that hold her skull upright against her body, standing out against her pale skin. Her hair is pulled back as it always is, wrapped with an elastic band and a leather thong. The subtle thud of her heels against the other side of the wall is a regular rhythm, like a heartbeat.
[Trent Brumby] It had not been every night that he texted her, but enough that it was frequent, indulgent and obviously bordered on becoming quite irritating. He had noted that in the last call and took it to heart. There had been no text from him tonight, but she got in first anyhow. He'd been finishing up dinner at home and starting to have a few drinks with Erick, who has become quite a fixture in Trent's life now. The two of them get along well enough even for their differences. He left home the moment she had sent it, sending back that he was on his way.
Twenty minutes later he's parked his car and has walked through the park to find where she's sitting. He spots her, not immediately, but when the distinctions become clear. Jeans, a t.shirt, some sneakers and a jacket undone is what he's wearing. Thrown on before he headed out into the night. Hair combed, smelling of fresh breath mints to try and conceal some of the whiskey on his breath.
"Kora?" He comes up beside her, checking before he gets there, and approaching closer once she turns or otherwise confirms that it is her and not some identical twin.
[Kora] Not a twin. He says her name, and she turns her head, shoots him a glance over her shoulder. The weight of her hair catches in the empty hood, pulls the jacket with it. The clothing makes her look like some college student, but the gesture, that glance, is wholly animal. Her head canted, her eyes gleaming - the wolf there, always just under her skin.
"Hey," she returns, shaking her head to dislodge the hood from the heavy twist of her fine blonde hair. Her cheek curves with the familiar shape of her smile - the private sort, that she reserves just for him, on nights like this, when the shape of the world is changing. When the shadow of the earth moves over the surface of its moon.
"C'mere," she says, still smiling her half-smile as she reaches across his body for his right hand, then pulls his arm around her, settling her hand, her forearm, her elbow over his as she lifts his hand, turning it palm up, and dips her head to brush her mouth over his knuckles before she catches the meat of his thumb between her teeth. "I don't want you to break your thumb, with all this texting," she tells him, quietly, this sort of bemused indulgence underlying her tone. "You hear me?"
Then, with another, sharp nip at the flesh by way of exclamation, she lifts her mouth and tucks his arm firmly around her torso, pulling him so that he has to stand behind her.
"How's Erick?"
[Trent Brumby] Obediently, he comes closer to her and slides his arm towards her waist. She catches his skin with her teeth, smiles at him, and it eases some of the worry that he had hidden under the surface. He knows that luna is heading towards full, and this is her phase in the cycle. Trent is still not sure about how the Get of Fenris are, for all their stories, and all the rumours he's heard through another Tribe's eyes, he hasn't figured out where and how he's meant to stand with them.
"Okay," he says easily, winding his arm around her and coming to stand up behind. Lowering his head he brushes his mouth across her ear and cheek after that, "no more texting. I just want to make sure you have everything you need." in that awful place you insist on calling home.
With his other arm around her, the hold is comfortable, firm enough to be snug and loose enough to not be constricting. The slightest movement has it loosening more, too, so that she can move about as she pleases. "He's sitting in front of the tv with a bottle of Jack." In other words, he's doing well enough.
[Kora] She turns her cheek into his mouth as he drops his chin, to feel the heat of his breath lingering that much longer against her skin. Her eyes are closed, her lashes a pale shadow against her cheek. Her shoulders are still, her spine straight against his chest, scapulae faintly prominent from her posture.
"I think it's kinda cute," she remarks, in reply, now tipping her head backward so that she can catch a sharp glimpse of his features, made strange by the changed perspective - his black hair, his pale gray eyes. Her settles over his again, and she splays her thumb over his, stretching it as if they were thumb wrestling to fix it against her flank. " - you know," she continues, quiet. "In moderation."
That's quiet, low and affectionate. Her voice lingers in that low register. "I promise I'll call you when I need something, too," she offers, in a tone that sounds like a pledge she means, and means to keep. " - whatever I need. I just don't want you to worry."
- which seems like an impossible request, really.
[Trent Brumby] He's still and quiet, listening to her and feeling the way she touches him. It doesn't really relax him, not with the questions and worries that slide into the forefront of his mind with this particular conversation. His hands rub slowly across her stomach, already well aware of the baby growing within - it's all he thinks in his spare time.
"I don't know how things are with the Get of Fenris," he begins, his words picked carefully and his tone trying for something mild, "but the Black Furies rarely let their male kinfolk raise the children. If it's a boy they're given to other Tribes, unless they're well bred."
She hears him draw a slow breath and exhale it through his nose. He's watching beyond her, but continues to hold, caressing for his own benefit more then hers if he was to be truthful about it. "If it's a girl, forget about it. You have as much say as the women wants you to say."
[Kora] This makes her go sharpened and still. The faint prominence of her shoulder blades sharpens and she leans forward, breaking the warm circle of his arms with the gesture. She puts one of her hands out, the heel of her palm hard against the stacked stone wall, her fingers curled downward for balance, and turns back to look at him, her brows drawn sharply downward, this frown settling across her mouth that mirrors the sudden tension in her body as she looks back at him, alive, this sort of strangled surge of anger, of rage sudden-bright in her eyes.
"Are you saying - " she says to him carefully, her breathing controlled, deliberate, and all the more dangerous for that, the spike of anger under her skin, sudden and unreasoning, the way it washes over her in sheets, leaving her with her heart beating faster and faster, thudding in her chest, this sort of constriction inside as the world seems to dilate. " - that you want me to give away our child to some - some stranger?
"Is that what you're - fucking - saying to me?"
[Trent Brumby] It's the first time he's really had it directed at him, her Rage, at least when he wasn't in his own little fit of anger. He doesn't understand it, not at first, but eases his hands back down to his sides and stands relatively still. Heart rate picked up, he forces himself to stay calm aside from that, looking at her face and how the Rage changes it.
When she says that he actually takes a step back as though struck. The look is bewildered and wounded, before he covers it, shaking his head. "No. Gaia, no." He's alarmed that she would have thought that way. He's stumbling to get past the surge of emotions running through him, reacting to hers and her thoughts.
"I'm saying I want to be a part of raising our child."
[Kora] Regular as her breathing is, it is faster now, a little sharper, it punctuates her body like a exclamation point. She is still, this sort of animal wariness alive in her eyes, her blood spiking with hormones, adrenaline, epinephrine, unleashed with that spike of range that has him easing way from her, watching her up close, the way her eyes flash nd her pupils constrict, the way her pulse leaps in her throat, the -
- and that look, not the confusion that first widens his eyes but the pain that comes after makes her throat constrict, this sort of punch to the gut heightened by her emotional surge, the dark, churning sea that moves inside her.
"Who else do I have? Who else would - who - you have to be there, and - tell - "
That moment, naked, her eyes stark in her pale face, her frame still, reveals in a stutterstep flash just how disconnected she is from all things human, from family and even tribe beyond the immediate.
Then, she takes another moment to master herself, pulls those questions back, drills them back under her skin, down into her body and bones. "Trent, I don't have anyone else. I can't do it without you."
[Trent Brumby] "Kora," her name is drawn out, it's soft, swallowed back the momentary wounding to feel his heart go out for her. Reaching for her is slow, not because he's afraid, but because he doesn't want to set off some other reaction in her, and he knows how close her wolf rides to the surface in times like this. "Kora, I'm not going anywhere."
"I'm smothering you with ice cream as it is. Where do you think I'm going to go?" Stepping in closer, his hand slides up her arm towards her shoulder, fingers kneading in a soft massaging caress. "I'm here for you. You're my mate, my lover, the Mother of our child."
"I'm devoted to you." Which could sound romantic or strange really, but comes out of him like it's perfectly natural. This is his choice and his home. This is the way he lives his life and makes him feel whole. Like a pack does for her. "And us, and the family we will have, are having. I am not going anywhere but by your side or where you tell me to go."
"You are not alone. Not ever alone, Kora." His voice is serious and so is that look in his pale eyes, focused and direct. He has strength in him in ways that he doesn't boast about, but it shows, this solid, steel core, all wrapped up in this submissiveness that is the sort far from a walked on mat.
[Kora] He says her name quietly, softly, pulling it back into her throat and reaches for her slowly, wary of what might happen next. Her moon is in the sky, close to its zenith, waxing slowly toward the full. Her reaches for her, tracing his fingers up the back of her arm. The hoodie is loose, the zipper that bisects it hanging open, the cotton is soft, woven in shifts shades of blue and gray that blend into the darkness and never quite match her eyes. He reaches for her, and she's already got one foot up on the back of the retaining wall, turning back toward him as he reaches for her, as his hand finds her shoulder at last, and he begins kneading the knots out of the long slope of her neck and shoulder with the slow work of his firm fingers.
Her eyes close briefly, her open features momentarily taut, constricted with this unfamiliar sort of glottal pain that sticks in her chest, underneath her heart, and closes her throat.
When she opens her eyes, they are - not clear, precisely, just shining, and the look she gives him is raw and unreserved. "I know."
She meets his eyes so directly, it both reveals and belies the turmoil inside her.
Swinging her left leg after her right, she turns all the way around, facing him at last. The lake is open behind her, dark except where it glitters with reflected city lights.
"My father was Garou," she tells him. "I don't know his name. He was just a cliath, and he died before my mother knew she was pregnant. So she left, and then - she just stayed away. I didn't know what I was until my first change. Linus, his father came for him later - but me -
"I just want him to know. Or her. I don't want to be nameless.
"So sometimes - " she's leaning toward him, but maintaining a certain distance, her knees sharp between their bodies. There's a faint grimace as she considers and discards whatever she was going to tell him. He can still see her pulse in her throat. In the aftermath of the rage spike she feels briefly raw, spent - but it is there too, underneath her skin, warming her flesh despite the cool night, as if she were fevered.
It is his strength she likes best, that steel at the core of him.
"Whatever else happens, I believe in you. I wouldn't - do this if I didn't."
The second time she called him laughing and said, I'll come by and they ate stuffed grape leaves sitting on his couch, the windows open, because she mentioned the night before.
The third night, she calls him directly back, and says - okay, later - and there's a frown in her voice, the sounds of the lake in the background.
--
Friday night, she texts him before he can her. Just this -
I want to see you.
Find me at Grant Park.
and, not long after, a blurry picture of the Millennium Fountain from a certain distance perspective taken with the camera of a cheap, disposable cell phone.
There is a retaining wall here, where the land falls away from the in-fill of the park to the lake proper, the constructed beaches dark at night. Navy Pier is slowly shutting down, but the Ferris Wheel is still bright against the darkness. Somewhere to the north, the Caern and the old docks, remnants of the city's industrial past, listing to a quiet sort of decay where the river meets the lake.
She is sitting on the retaining wall, looking out over the lake. The moon is slowly waxing, just past half now, and it makes her feel bright, and untoward. She sits straight, her legs dangling down over the edge, her hands braced on either side of her, fingers light against the stone. It is a cool night, cool enough that she's wearing one of the hoodies he bought her months ago, before any of this. From a distance, he might not pick her out, with the cotton jacket unzipped and therefore loose, shapeless down her back, the empty hood - she could be any other young woman.
Closer, though, and the hint of her profile is there against the horizon, where sky and water come together. Closer, and he can see the distinct slope of her trapezius, the tendons that hold her skull upright against her body, standing out against her pale skin. Her hair is pulled back as it always is, wrapped with an elastic band and a leather thong. The subtle thud of her heels against the other side of the wall is a regular rhythm, like a heartbeat.
[Trent Brumby] It had not been every night that he texted her, but enough that it was frequent, indulgent and obviously bordered on becoming quite irritating. He had noted that in the last call and took it to heart. There had been no text from him tonight, but she got in first anyhow. He'd been finishing up dinner at home and starting to have a few drinks with Erick, who has become quite a fixture in Trent's life now. The two of them get along well enough even for their differences. He left home the moment she had sent it, sending back that he was on his way.
Twenty minutes later he's parked his car and has walked through the park to find where she's sitting. He spots her, not immediately, but when the distinctions become clear. Jeans, a t.shirt, some sneakers and a jacket undone is what he's wearing. Thrown on before he headed out into the night. Hair combed, smelling of fresh breath mints to try and conceal some of the whiskey on his breath.
"Kora?" He comes up beside her, checking before he gets there, and approaching closer once she turns or otherwise confirms that it is her and not some identical twin.
[Kora] Not a twin. He says her name, and she turns her head, shoots him a glance over her shoulder. The weight of her hair catches in the empty hood, pulls the jacket with it. The clothing makes her look like some college student, but the gesture, that glance, is wholly animal. Her head canted, her eyes gleaming - the wolf there, always just under her skin.
"Hey," she returns, shaking her head to dislodge the hood from the heavy twist of her fine blonde hair. Her cheek curves with the familiar shape of her smile - the private sort, that she reserves just for him, on nights like this, when the shape of the world is changing. When the shadow of the earth moves over the surface of its moon.
"C'mere," she says, still smiling her half-smile as she reaches across his body for his right hand, then pulls his arm around her, settling her hand, her forearm, her elbow over his as she lifts his hand, turning it palm up, and dips her head to brush her mouth over his knuckles before she catches the meat of his thumb between her teeth. "I don't want you to break your thumb, with all this texting," she tells him, quietly, this sort of bemused indulgence underlying her tone. "You hear me?"
Then, with another, sharp nip at the flesh by way of exclamation, she lifts her mouth and tucks his arm firmly around her torso, pulling him so that he has to stand behind her.
"How's Erick?"
[Trent Brumby] Obediently, he comes closer to her and slides his arm towards her waist. She catches his skin with her teeth, smiles at him, and it eases some of the worry that he had hidden under the surface. He knows that luna is heading towards full, and this is her phase in the cycle. Trent is still not sure about how the Get of Fenris are, for all their stories, and all the rumours he's heard through another Tribe's eyes, he hasn't figured out where and how he's meant to stand with them.
"Okay," he says easily, winding his arm around her and coming to stand up behind. Lowering his head he brushes his mouth across her ear and cheek after that, "no more texting. I just want to make sure you have everything you need." in that awful place you insist on calling home.
With his other arm around her, the hold is comfortable, firm enough to be snug and loose enough to not be constricting. The slightest movement has it loosening more, too, so that she can move about as she pleases. "He's sitting in front of the tv with a bottle of Jack." In other words, he's doing well enough.
[Kora] She turns her cheek into his mouth as he drops his chin, to feel the heat of his breath lingering that much longer against her skin. Her eyes are closed, her lashes a pale shadow against her cheek. Her shoulders are still, her spine straight against his chest, scapulae faintly prominent from her posture.
"I think it's kinda cute," she remarks, in reply, now tipping her head backward so that she can catch a sharp glimpse of his features, made strange by the changed perspective - his black hair, his pale gray eyes. Her settles over his again, and she splays her thumb over his, stretching it as if they were thumb wrestling to fix it against her flank. " - you know," she continues, quiet. "In moderation."
That's quiet, low and affectionate. Her voice lingers in that low register. "I promise I'll call you when I need something, too," she offers, in a tone that sounds like a pledge she means, and means to keep. " - whatever I need. I just don't want you to worry."
- which seems like an impossible request, really.
[Trent Brumby] He's still and quiet, listening to her and feeling the way she touches him. It doesn't really relax him, not with the questions and worries that slide into the forefront of his mind with this particular conversation. His hands rub slowly across her stomach, already well aware of the baby growing within - it's all he thinks in his spare time.
"I don't know how things are with the Get of Fenris," he begins, his words picked carefully and his tone trying for something mild, "but the Black Furies rarely let their male kinfolk raise the children. If it's a boy they're given to other Tribes, unless they're well bred."
She hears him draw a slow breath and exhale it through his nose. He's watching beyond her, but continues to hold, caressing for his own benefit more then hers if he was to be truthful about it. "If it's a girl, forget about it. You have as much say as the women wants you to say."
[Kora] This makes her go sharpened and still. The faint prominence of her shoulder blades sharpens and she leans forward, breaking the warm circle of his arms with the gesture. She puts one of her hands out, the heel of her palm hard against the stacked stone wall, her fingers curled downward for balance, and turns back to look at him, her brows drawn sharply downward, this frown settling across her mouth that mirrors the sudden tension in her body as she looks back at him, alive, this sort of strangled surge of anger, of rage sudden-bright in her eyes.
"Are you saying - " she says to him carefully, her breathing controlled, deliberate, and all the more dangerous for that, the spike of anger under her skin, sudden and unreasoning, the way it washes over her in sheets, leaving her with her heart beating faster and faster, thudding in her chest, this sort of constriction inside as the world seems to dilate. " - that you want me to give away our child to some - some stranger?
"Is that what you're - fucking - saying to me?"
[Trent Brumby] It's the first time he's really had it directed at him, her Rage, at least when he wasn't in his own little fit of anger. He doesn't understand it, not at first, but eases his hands back down to his sides and stands relatively still. Heart rate picked up, he forces himself to stay calm aside from that, looking at her face and how the Rage changes it.
When she says that he actually takes a step back as though struck. The look is bewildered and wounded, before he covers it, shaking his head. "No. Gaia, no." He's alarmed that she would have thought that way. He's stumbling to get past the surge of emotions running through him, reacting to hers and her thoughts.
"I'm saying I want to be a part of raising our child."
[Kora] Regular as her breathing is, it is faster now, a little sharper, it punctuates her body like a exclamation point. She is still, this sort of animal wariness alive in her eyes, her blood spiking with hormones, adrenaline, epinephrine, unleashed with that spike of range that has him easing way from her, watching her up close, the way her eyes flash nd her pupils constrict, the way her pulse leaps in her throat, the -
- and that look, not the confusion that first widens his eyes but the pain that comes after makes her throat constrict, this sort of punch to the gut heightened by her emotional surge, the dark, churning sea that moves inside her.
"Who else do I have? Who else would - who - you have to be there, and - tell - "
That moment, naked, her eyes stark in her pale face, her frame still, reveals in a stutterstep flash just how disconnected she is from all things human, from family and even tribe beyond the immediate.
Then, she takes another moment to master herself, pulls those questions back, drills them back under her skin, down into her body and bones. "Trent, I don't have anyone else. I can't do it without you."
[Trent Brumby] "Kora," her name is drawn out, it's soft, swallowed back the momentary wounding to feel his heart go out for her. Reaching for her is slow, not because he's afraid, but because he doesn't want to set off some other reaction in her, and he knows how close her wolf rides to the surface in times like this. "Kora, I'm not going anywhere."
"I'm smothering you with ice cream as it is. Where do you think I'm going to go?" Stepping in closer, his hand slides up her arm towards her shoulder, fingers kneading in a soft massaging caress. "I'm here for you. You're my mate, my lover, the Mother of our child."
"I'm devoted to you." Which could sound romantic or strange really, but comes out of him like it's perfectly natural. This is his choice and his home. This is the way he lives his life and makes him feel whole. Like a pack does for her. "And us, and the family we will have, are having. I am not going anywhere but by your side or where you tell me to go."
"You are not alone. Not ever alone, Kora." His voice is serious and so is that look in his pale eyes, focused and direct. He has strength in him in ways that he doesn't boast about, but it shows, this solid, steel core, all wrapped up in this submissiveness that is the sort far from a walked on mat.
[Kora] He says her name quietly, softly, pulling it back into her throat and reaches for her slowly, wary of what might happen next. Her moon is in the sky, close to its zenith, waxing slowly toward the full. Her reaches for her, tracing his fingers up the back of her arm. The hoodie is loose, the zipper that bisects it hanging open, the cotton is soft, woven in shifts shades of blue and gray that blend into the darkness and never quite match her eyes. He reaches for her, and she's already got one foot up on the back of the retaining wall, turning back toward him as he reaches for her, as his hand finds her shoulder at last, and he begins kneading the knots out of the long slope of her neck and shoulder with the slow work of his firm fingers.
Her eyes close briefly, her open features momentarily taut, constricted with this unfamiliar sort of glottal pain that sticks in her chest, underneath her heart, and closes her throat.
When she opens her eyes, they are - not clear, precisely, just shining, and the look she gives him is raw and unreserved. "I know."
She meets his eyes so directly, it both reveals and belies the turmoil inside her.
Swinging her left leg after her right, she turns all the way around, facing him at last. The lake is open behind her, dark except where it glitters with reflected city lights.
"My father was Garou," she tells him. "I don't know his name. He was just a cliath, and he died before my mother knew she was pregnant. So she left, and then - she just stayed away. I didn't know what I was until my first change. Linus, his father came for him later - but me -
"I just want him to know. Or her. I don't want to be nameless.
"So sometimes - " she's leaning toward him, but maintaining a certain distance, her knees sharp between their bodies. There's a faint grimace as she considers and discards whatever she was going to tell him. He can still see her pulse in her throat. In the aftermath of the rage spike she feels briefly raw, spent - but it is there too, underneath her skin, warming her flesh despite the cool night, as if she were fevered.
It is his strength she likes best, that steel at the core of him.
"Whatever else happens, I believe in you. I wouldn't - do this if I didn't."
Post a Comment