Ornature

[Missing the first half of the scene!]

[Trent Brumby] The way he responds to her, that flat line of his mouth, the way he looks away from, the thrill inside him going sour and wrong imprints itself on his face, twists his mouth, darkens the light in his eyes. She's still now, grown rather more still at his silent reaction. The way he pulls back from her, withdraws just so from the space between them. The way he watches the breeze dancing through the curtains instead of her eyes and her mouth.

He always watches her; sees her the way no one else can or will. It is no small thing that he looks away from her now. That he picks up his knife and his fork and cuts precisely into his multigrain French toast, with cage-free eggs and organic cinnamon in the batter.

Her toes still over his, and then withdraw. She is breathing more sharply now, her heart beating quickly inside her chest. The moon has changed, now. Shadow has eaten away at the full and now there is no more in the sky, just a void - so the pressure inside her doesn't come from her rage or the tidal rhythm by which she is pulled, just here. Just now.

Two of the tests he purchased are in the medicine cabinet, tucked amidst his old pain prescriptions from his injuries earlier in the summer, his toiletries, behind the mirror. The others, god knows what she's done with them. Every time he gave her one she went just a hint stiff and kissed him on the cheek and said thank you and that was that.

Now, she pushes her chair back from the dining table, wipes her mouth with her napkin the way people do in movies, on television shows, never in real life. She stands up. Her hands are shaking, like someone with stage fright about to go on in front of a thousand people, like some reluctant witness about to take the stand. The tremor is subtle but present, the sudden excess rush of adrenaline opening her in her veins, coursing through her body with every beat of her heart.

She slides them into her front pockets, that familiar, easy gesture that now looks somehow awkward as she disappears down the hallway into the bathroom, silent except for the slap of her bare feet on his hardwood floors.

[Trent Brumby] He glances towards her when she reaches for a napkin and wipes her mouth. His gaze drifts across her face and meets her eyes as she moves back from her seat. Still holding his cutlery he stills as he watches, swallowing down his mouthful of food as she begins away from the table and down the hallway. The shaking of her hands makes him feel guilty.

Once she is gone he sets down his cutlery and rubs his face with his hands, sighing quietly as he rests an elbow on the edge of the table and rests his brow into his palm. There's a war of emotions in him and he's on the verge of getting up and following her, to tell her that she doesn't have to, and that he's sorry for pressuring her. But there's others too. He wants to know. Needs to know. That they both should.

Dropping his hand down, he leans back in his chair and waits with a knot in his stomach. He watches the drape in the breeze again, silent and listening out. The television is louder then any sound coming from further in his apartment. But he listens out for anything from the bathroom.

[Kora] Trent is left at the dining table alone for five minutes. Longer maybe. There's no noise, except maybe Kora putting the toilet seat down, both the ring and the lid. Dinner cools slowly on the table. Outside, the sounds of the city shift and change as full night falls. It's cooler now. There's someone on the street shouting. The sound of a car backfiring, or gunfire maybe. A siren, someone else's television program drifting back through the ordinary night.

What Kora does when she is alone is quite simple. She finds the two tests where they are tucked away among the linens, opens the first box, unfolds the tissue-paper thin instructions, with their close crabbed script and half-dozen precautions and instructions and caveats and warnings and legal regalia, each repeated in three different languages.

And sits there, cross-legged on the toilet seat, her elbows on her thighs.

And reads.

And reads.

- and reads. She reads every line, breathing slowly, letting herself think about knowing, which is right, underneath, in this strange and animal way. The bathroom is quiet, almost hermetically sealed. She's still. There's just the sound of the her breathing, her fingers on the paper, the television in the background, heard through the bathroom door.

Ten minutes later, the bathroom door opens again. Kora's barefeet on his hardwood flares are a quiet, subtle slap against the floorboards. She ghosts down the hallway, pauses at the table, grabs her nearly full glass of juice, and gives him this - little look, this tremulous little smile that seems fragile until widens, wry.

"Turn up the television," she directs, a flush underneath her skin. "The volume, yeah? I don't want you - " but it's uncomfortable, in this strange and wholly human way, and the flush deepens and she tucks the glass of juice against her body and disappears back into the bathroom where she seems to have camped out as she drinks the juice and reads the second set of directions.

---

When she comes back out with an empty glass of juice, the whole thing has taken an absurd amount of time. Dinner's cold, the maple syrup is sort of congealing on the plate, starting to crystallize. Her hands are damp from washing, and she dries them on her thighs like a heathen and she says to him not yes or no or anything else.

Just, "So," she breathes out, short and sharp, lifts her dark eyes to him in a sidelong glance, half-shadowed by her pale lashes, " - how accurate are those things?"

[Trent Brumby] She's taking awhile, and the food is getting cold. It wouldn't do for him to just sit there, so he gets up with the single minded purpose of starting to put the food in a warm oven. Kora may be too absorbed by the details of instructions to pay much attention to the shift of crockery as he moves about keeping himself busy.

But when she comes out, he wipes his hands on a kitchen towel and slings it over his shoulder as he walks towards her. There's question in his eyes, and his stomach is curled into a tight knot by this point. He can't remember the last time he was anxious like this. Pale eyes flick to her hand as she picks up the juice and then up at her face as it flushes and then some more. She's stumbling over words and leaving him confused, and he doesn't understand until she walks back off towards the bathroom.

Goddamn it. She hasn't even done it yet. Huffing out a sigh, feeling strung out, he walked over to the television and turned it up loud enough that next door neighbours are going to wonder if he's suddenly gone deaf. Leaving the living area then, he goes back to putting food away to be eaten and keeping himself occupied.

She takes forever, and when she comes out the next time he's sitting on the arm of the couch, looking like he needs a cigarette and a bottle of whiskey by this point. He looks up at her, less expectant than last time as he schools his expression. "They're ninety-eight percent accurate, or thereabouts. There's blood tests that can be done that can tell you, but ... I wouldn't recommend those." His smile is short lived, nervous.

[Kora] The television is so loud now, that she reaches past him for the remote and hits the mute button. He looks up at her, haggard but careful, his pale eyes still, his expression composed, the agitation lingering underneath his skin.

He tells her more than she needs to know - about blood tests that he wouldn't recommend. She cuts him off before he's finished the sentence, reaching out to touch her fingers to his thigh as he sits on the arm of the couch. She's standing no, an arms' length away, but she inches closer. Half-an-arms' length now, as she finds his eyes, shuttered a bit from the strain of being out here while she - thought her way back into her body, while she read every last word typed into the thin paper tucked away and folded into halves and quarters and eights and gives him this direct look, meeting his gray eyes, standing cross-wise to him, and says just,

"Yeah," the edge of the half-smile fades. She's still and even somber, the beginnings of a thoughtful look between her brows. It's not a frown, not yet. She's watching him in that still, sure way though. "I am."

[Trent Brumby] Instantly he's quiet when she touches him and comes closer. His head tilts so that he can watch her without anything between them. He's waiting with his heart beating hard enough that if he was a thinner man she would have been able to see it pulse through his flesh. As it is the veins at the side of his neck is throbbing, and his hands, curled to the sides of his legs resting on the arm of the couch, have his fingers curling into the fabric. He's still, too, breathing deeper and slow.

"You are?" He repeats, breathing out through his mouth. "You're pregnant?" Is that what she means? He doesn't want any mistakes or misunderstandings. Was she asking something else? Something about the blood tests or? His brain tries to catch up to the situation. Already once she had fooled him running back off into the bathroom again with her juice when he had thought she was coming out to tell him whether she was or not.

And now that she is, he's not sure that is what she's saying. If he was being more rational, he'd know it. But there's nothing rational about waiting to know if a woman, a Garou, is carrying his child. Especially not when he comes from the Tribe that he has and the sort of cultural upbringing that comes with it.

[Kora] He repeats her affirmation as a question and he is sitting there, his pulse throbbing hard enough that she can see it move, that she can imagine the way his heart is beating somewhere inside the cage of his chest. It is a muscle like any other, four-chambered, with a didactic, echoing beat. All she sees is his pulse. He's still just like she is, and it's quiet her, the shadows moving mutely on the television absurd without their voices, divorced from the present.

There's this moment where she laughs, her mouth curling around it, one of her swallowed laughs, more of it living in her body than given voice in her mouth and throat.

"I am," she repeats, her fingers spreading out over his thigh, her palm flattening against his tense quadriceps. Except for that touch, her palm warm aganst his thigh, warmer than his skin, she's still half an arm's length away, but the hint of laughter warms her otherwise still expression, gleams in her eyes. "I'm pregnant."

[Trent Brumby] "Oh my ... " the rest fades away. He can't believe it. Eyes become wider like saucers and he breathes out in a pant that breaks that stillness in his body and makes it thrum with energy. There's no way to describe the way his face lights up. The olive undertones become more evident as his skin glows and his eyes are bright as they dart from her smiling mouth, down to her flat stomach. He's amazed and thrilled, and so much more that he couldn't ever contain it. But his blood sings.

He reaches out and grips her by the waist, sliding from the couch to lower himself enough, and brace his back against the arm of the couch in some awkward way, as he kisses the material of her top right under her navel. "You're pregnant." Fingers flex, hold her tighter, staring as if he could see through cloth and flesh alike to the little bud that's growing inside. Folding his head forward he rests his brow into her stomach and breathes against her, eyes closed. His throat constricts a little and his world is dizzying. He can hear the blood rush past his eardrums, his heart thudding hard enough he's not sure he can contain it much longer.

His hands slide around to her back, cradle her in as he pulls her in against him, pinning himself between her body and the couch arm at his back. He buries his face into the flat of her, rubbing hands along her back as if it could soothe her, apologizing for his behaviour, or maybe just because he's suddenly got all this living energy that he doesn't know what to do with it.

[Kora] There's something provisional in her expression, the suggestion of some live-wire thing underneath the warming laughter, evident in the way she holds herself apart from him that dissolves with his reaction, all the firm chemical bonds holding all that fraying connective tissue of her awareness and her - not alarm, not fear, just something else, sharp as both but different in tone and quality - underneath her skin are broken down, liquified, bathed in the strange, perfect solvent of his simple, heart-wrenching delight.

She's closed her dark eyes as he finds and kisses her stomach through her cotton t-shirt, which is taut, fitted against her long, lean frame. There's a sliver of pale skin between the dark hem of the t-shirt and the waistband of her jeans, which skim her hips rather than fit against her waist. Her fingers slide into his hair, twist through his half-curls, the gesture utterly familiar, soothing, the suggestion of strength in her hands as she holds him against her body, feels his breath against her skin, warm, and imagines she can feel his heartbeat through her clothes.

Maybe it's her own.

His hands are on her back then, cradling her close against him, following the line of her spine as he does when she is aggitated or griefstricken, when rage has left her raw, when he wants to find her again through her skin and sooth her back into her body, her self. His mouth is against her somtach, his eyes closed, her scent, the heat of her body, the rough junction of her jeans and her t-shirt against his face, the rivets on her belt loops, her hip pockets digging into his skin as he presses his face to her frame and she edges into him, rubbing her thumb through his curls now so that they will splay over her fingers, watching him through downslanting lashes, absorbing his joy by osmosis to quiet all her anxieties about What It Means.

Underneath, too, something moves in her eyes - dark and animal and possessive - this primal, feral sense that this is exactly what is right. It is wordless and nameless; when it rises, it leaves her breathless.

[Trent Brumby] It's a selfish moment of celebration that he takes, unable to think much more then his mate, his not-wife, his keeper too, has their child growing inside of her. Life is there, growing into something that they could hold, if death does not steal them before then. He knows this too, as he holds her, as if he could protect her, keeping her right here and letting this hope have a chance.

But he draws himself out of it, swallowing before he pulls back and looks up at her. If, before, she thought he would bend over backwards, now, as he stares up the length of her body, there's this devotion that could be utterly frightening. In a single moment she has shifted from mate and lover, to something more akin to a goddess, creating life. That's how he sees it and how he feels it, and she's let him be a part of this. Maybe someday he would explain that, that this is something he could be a part of, not settled on the fringes.

At least he hopes she allows him that. There's fear there too, that she will take this away from him. But it's a distant one, nothing he'd ever voice.

He kisses her belly again, watching her, and sliding his hands down to the curve of her jeans. Slowly he begins to rise up, holding to the back of her thigh. He finds his footing and lifts her up, steady and certain as he seeks to wind her legs around his waist, and hold her against him as he's done so many times before. Except this time he has initiated it without any sort of hesitation.

"I'm sorry Kora," he tells her, voice low but still unable to hide that sheer elation in it, "how do you feel?" Searching her face, he looks for those signs again. That fear that he'd seen on the beach, the worry, more that he didn't understand. Kora is Get of Fenris, not a Black Fury, and he's realized that there's a large difference between the two, when he had first asked her if she was pregnant and she hadn't glowed with pride. Right now he has enough for the both of them, but he tries to swallow it down, for her, so that she may express how she feels without more pressure - too late, now.

[Kora] "Don't apologize," she tells him, her voice quiet but firm and fierce at once. Her right hand is stilled twined in his hair. Her grip shifted as he rose from his knees, as he slide his hands down her legs to pull her thighs up around his waist, and settle her weight on his. She leans into him, then, locking an ankle behind the opposite calf to hold herself in place, bracing her forearms on his solid shoulders. Her hair has mostly unwound itself from its haphazard twist to spill down the middle of her back. Long loops and whorls frame her face, and a thick hank spills forward to curtain his face as she leans down to look at him.

"Don't." He can feel the warning in the word, sure as he can feel the edge of her smile against his mouth as she dips her head to touch her forehead to his. A deep breath expands through her chest, lifts her shoulders, moves her body against his. She is still like this for a long moment, her thighs tightening around his waist, her weight shifting closer because she wants to feel his body underneath hers, his hands gripping her thighs, the way his muscles are taut with the strain of her weight on his body.

He asks her how she feels, struggling to swallow his elation, to give her space for the worry, the fear he has already seen in her, every time the subject arose. Some distinct substrate of her would rather not think about it than give voice to the confusion of emotions that thrum underneath her surface; but she reminds herself how simple it was - to sit cross-legged on the toilet and read the damn directions. Every last one of them, until she was ready to know.

"I'm happy." That's the first thing she tells him. Her voice is low, it rumbles through his skin. Her brow slips from his to his cheekbone, and her mouth is close to his ear. She sounds surprised that it is true, and appends, like it was a mystery, " - I think. I think I'm happy. And I'm happy you're happy, yeah?"

"And I'm worried." This is more quiet. She's still, leaning close to him. Usually she tells him stories that tell him what she feels; whom she admires, what she misses. When she was grieving her Alpha she told him a half-dozen stories in one night, one after the other, sitting on a park bench under a spring sky.

The world's turned, and now she doesn't have a narrative for him except her own, stripped back to its essentials. The ancestor spirits inside her dream of war and ruin, not first-borns. They hunger for death and glory, nothing more. "Because I don't know what I can do. If I can shift or go into the spirit world, or - " or fight, but even she has the self-possession not to say that to him. " - or anything. Yeah? That has to do with whom I am. I have my pack to lead. And I have my tribe to lead. I'm the Jarl, and I - I'm afraid that they'll see me, and think me - think me weak. Right? Fragile, and selfish. But mostly - weak."

[Trent Brumby] Stepping back, he settles some of their weight into the arm of the couch. He sits himself there and balances her on his lap taking her weight upon himself and allowing his hands to slide up and curl around her back there, comfortable and solid with fingers spread wide. He tries to look at her after she murmurs into his skin, her words having the effect of cutting back some of his bursting emotion. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it doesn't change the fact that he still feels that way, only he's aware of her more now then living in the moment, attuned to her as he is himself.

"You're not weak Kora," he tells her this in a steady, firm voice. "And they won't see you that way, because you are not, and therefore it's impossible." This logic he uses is sound, trying to work through her fears with her to the heart of it.

"You can still fight and lead, and do what it is you must do. The Black Furies do it all the time." This doesn't mean he mentions how he feels about it, because he also knows that there is more important things at stake, even as awful as that sounds. It's the truth and a reality and he has never shied from that and does not start doing so now. "As for the rest, Garou have been doing this for generations, so there will be answers easily found for those questions. I wish I knew myself, but I don't know when you can shift or anything to do with that. But there's plenty of Garou that can tell you, and we'll work with it."

"Strength is not only your ability to tear your enemies apart with your claws or throw your body in harms way." Pale eyes are steady on her. "You know this, too."

[Kora] He seeks her eyes in the end, and finds them. She brushes her mouth against the rough stubble covering his jaw as she turns her head back to looked down at him again, to find and meet his eyes. He tells her that no one will see her as weak because she isn't, and she smiles at him, wisely not reminding him of what a bunch of testosterone-charged freaks her fractious tribesmates are. She's still, comfortable her weight on his lap, his warmth underneath her thighs, his shoulders underneath her forearms, in the intimate space between them.

When he mentions that Garou have been having kids for generations, she laughs in that physical way she has - her body moving, her eyes bright, but no more than a huff or two audible of the laugh, and leans close, kissing his temple, his brow, sliding her mouth to find his ear again. "You mean we didn't invent this whole sex thing?" The laughter lingers. Sometimes when she's with him if feels like their own personal discovery.


"At my old Sept - in Hjaltland, yeah? - there were a couple kinswomen who were midwives. You know - generational, mother to daughter to granddaughter, that sort of knowledge, I suppose they took care of kin and Garou. It's not the same here, but maybe there's someone like that. I could ask my ancestors, but they're not - " a faint snort, " - a maternal lot. Mostly they like talking about the size of their hammers."

"You're right, though." Quiet, this isn't new. This is what she was thinking about when she sat cross-legged on the toilet, reading through the directions. "Roman and Sparrow won't see me as week. Though Roman might try to protect me when he finds out. But my tribe, baby. They're not Black Furies. There are no guarantees."

[Trent Brumby] "As adventurous as we are, " and they're not really, not compared to some other uh relations he's had, "we didn't invent sex." But this makes him laugh too, a quiet deep sound in his chest. His hands slide around her back, hugging her to him and soothing her at the same time. He enjoys this closeness, this happiness welling up inside of him again, and so easily. His life is changing from now. There's something to look forward to other then the loneliness that comes after a Garou dies, and they do, all too soon and often. Hope, something to hold onto, a physical reminder and something of him, too, that he can call his own.

He listens then, brushing his mouth across her shoulder and neck in a soft way that doesn't hold any hint of reservations. He doesn't hold back, forgetting for the moment the dominance of her, or completely content with his place now that it doesn't register in the front of his mind, which is full of a simple amazement. "There's midwives everywhere. I know it's not the same," hesitation lingers here, "but I can help you. I am a qualified paramedic, Kora." This is a gentle reminder. It's not the same but he's capable. "I'm not a woman, you know, but .. uh, well, we can look. Don't worry. You're Garou, your body isn't the sort that has problems that humans do." She has superior genetics.

"It's going to be fine." Looking for her eyes again. His voice is full of confidence and holds no sort of worries that hers does. "You are in charge. You're Jarl. Nobody has questioned that and there is no reason to start now. You are fulfilling a duty of having a mate. You're strong Kora, believe in yourself instead of your fears."

[Kora] "It's weird," she returns, looking up again when he seeks her gaze, apprehension still underneath her skin, for all that edge of it has been chased away by his infusion of confidence. "You know? This idea that I have - some part of you inside me, wherever I am now."

Then she leans closer, lingers, enjoyng the quiet intimacy in the space between them until something shifts, until something catches and sparks.

And then she tells him to take her to bed.