Ornature

[Sorrow] The revel finishes close to dawn, leaving Garou equally energized and spent. Sorrow lingers in the bawn for a quiet half-hour amongst the graves, after, then leaves, picks her familiar way through the concrete and metal, over the tarmac, between the ruined ships, ducking out into the wider world through one of the rents in the chainlink fence. The sun has not yet risen, and the city is quiet. Her territory is close, bordering the Caern immediately to the north.

I'd like to talk to you, she said to Victor sometime, between the tales and the revel, perhaps. you know where the church is, yeah? In the middle of things. Now, she slips back through the deserted streets of the industrial neighborhood along the river's edge, walking back toward the ruined church she and her pack call home.

[Victor Oseragighte] He'd been there once. Not inside, but on the steps. He remembered, though; Victor had a head for places. He came now, in the twilight moments of early dawn when the world was waking up and traffic was just beginning to build. Without the blessing of the Charm his footsteps are heavy, heavier than they were before he joined the Moonrunners even. Trudging along, thumbs tucked into the pockets of his black jeans, his dark eyes dart scan ahead.

[Sorrow] He comes trudging up the street. The church is huge, old, looming. God knows why the congregation built it here, in the middle of an industrial neighborhood, hard against the river so polluted with human and industrial waste that th city engineered it to flow away from the lake rather than to it. The building has been abandoned twenty years, wounded by a fire somewhere in the middle of that, but its bones are strong. Solid stone, the sort gouged up from the depths of the earth, rather than manufactured in some tumbling drum of concrete mix and aggregate. The building is surrounded by trees, locusts mostly, which have a particular, sharp scent when the leaves are stripped or when the bark is torn away from the heartwood. They grow everywhere, and they grow fast, and their growth now, in late summer, is at its zenith.

There's other greenery. Fireweed and virginia creeper, eunonymous escaped from some corporate planting, and morning glories twining everywhere.

Victor appears at the bottom of the stairs, and Kora appears at the top. She has an easy confidence to her, though there is something about the morning after a moot that makes it seem hollow. "C'mon up," she tells him, as she ducks back inside the church for a minute. She returns quickly, a couple of Nalgene water bottles in her hands, slick with moisture, cold as ice. " - water? I could probably dig out a beer if you'd rather."

[Victor Oseragighte] "Water's good." In truth, he preferred it usually. Water or milk. He accepts the bottle, savors the chill, presses it a moment to his brow unselfconsciously and then opens it with his other hand to take a good swallow before capping it once more for the moment. A grateful nod is offered. He does not take offense that he is not invited inside. Not his territory. Not his place. He understands. He settles onto a step and raises a hand to brush back hair that never quite stays in place properly, picked at constantly by the winds that seem to love him so.

He doesn't ask what she wants, either. She'll get to it in due time, he figures. Victor's patient, and is more than willing to grant others the space to compose their own thoughts.

[Sorrow] The front doors are heavy, wood bound with iron. They're old, too, but the hinges do not creak or groan as they did when Kora and Joe first found this place. That was moons ago. The door swings closed as she slips back out, one bottle of water for Victor, one for herself. Her packmates are around, somewhere close. That's new, that they are packmates in truth.

So, the door swings closed, and Kora crosses the portico to the front steps, sitting down on the top step, her booted feet planted two steps, maybe three lower. Her water bottle hangs lightly from her fingers, but as she sits, she sets it down on the step between her denim-clad thighs. For a moment, she examines Victor's profile, the faintest of frowns etched between her brows. "If you don't mind my asking, what happened to your pack?" Thre is a faint, lingering pause. "Karl left, yeah?" A snort, this flare of her nostrils, otherwise wordless. "The rest of you couldn't hold the totem?"

[Victor Oseragighte] He stiffens at the question, but it's not her, and he knows people will ask. Still, he does not immediately answer. The Philodox chooses his words, mulling them over before he finally offers something up to her.

"Karl left. Then Faith went with him. Mama... I think it angered her too much. Saddened her. Marni I heard was angry. Hardly ever saw her, though. I thought we might make it. But then Mama announced us defunct. In no position really to argue. Still the new guy. Really. But..."

He trails off. Pack is family. The way theirs fell apart, just like that, it shakes him, and it shows a little.

[Sorrow] Victor offers his terse accounting, and Sorrow watches him quietly, evenly, through the whole of it. The sky is still dark, but there are striations of light at the edges of it, as if the horizon were about to be cracked open, as if the sun were leaking in through the faults in the sky. There is a certain stillness to the Fenrir woman, a gravity that lingers around her as she takes in Victor's story, her neutral expression sliding twisting with some echo of feeling here, or there.

"That pack was formed no more than a moon before your arrival," Sorrow rejoinds, immediately. "Hardly the new guy." She tips back her palehead, swallows a mouthful of water from the bottle, lifts her dark eyes toward the sky, visible between the darker shadows of the buildings. "I'll be honest with you," she continues after a moment, "I always wondered what sort of a Fenrir would follow hummingbird. A flock of hummingbirds. Not a proper spirit of a son of Fenris. Too small and too flighty. And Mama, you say, disbanded the pack in anger, dismissed the spirits without speaking with you and yours."

That is something Sorrow is digesting, by slow piece. There's another silence, before she asks, her dark eyes on his profile, shadowed against the gray-black shadows of pre-dawn. "Would you follow her again, after?"

[Victor Oseragighte] He doesn't look to argue philosophy with her, tribal stances and views of totems. He'd found the totem curious himself, but oddly fitting, perhaps because it was a uniquely North American patron, perhaps because it spoke to the part of him that seeks the sky.

She asks a very serious qestion of him then, and it's one he hasn't considered. He's been busy distancing himself in general, seeking solace for a time in solitude. Now he has to face that possibility. He closes his eyes, opens the bottle, takes a long, cooling sip. The bottle is lowered again before he swallows and answers.

"Mama never really wanted to lead. I don't think she'd found a new pack. She was uncomfortable with leadership. She cared, though. Karl leaving hurt her. I don't think she could quite... quite take that. But to follow her again... she'd have to find her confidence first."

[Sorrow] "She's a Fostern," here Sorrow half-smiles. It's an engaging thing, her smile, curving across a generous mouth, the sort that was meant to be kissed. Except that she is Garou, more animal than human on a morning like this, in the aftermath of a moot, with the fullest of moons hidden somewhere below the horizon, turning in its course around the earth, bright and hot in the back of her mind. " - in a Sept where cliaths lead."

--

A pause, quiet, not contemplative precisely - just, quiet. She is going to tell him a story.

"When I came to Chicago, the Fenrir Jarl was Kemp Truth-in-Frenzy. Kemp-rhya was an Adren and a Rotagar, and he earned every rank he earned here, in Chicago. He fought to bury the old Caern rather than allow it to fall to the unmaker, and he fought to raise Maelstrom as one of Eagle's Chosen, and he fought for the Caern ever since. When Silence-rhya abandoned the Caern, Kemp left the pack, and stayed, dogged to the end, fighting for Maelstrom. He was my Alpha, and that's how he died: fighting.

"Joe and Thomas and I traveled to Battleground, and we fought the fight that killed our Alpha five times to see if we could have saved him, taken the blow that killed him. When we returned, I thought that we were one. That we would cleave to each other, that the trust I placed in Joe, a modi, was properly placed.

"Then Joe War-Handed lost a challenge to Karl, and turned tail, while Gut-Song was off on a quest. I'll tell you, though, if even one packmate of mine had remained behind, I would have fought to the end to keep the totem, to hold troth with my own."

Another pause, the edge of her smile again as she tips her head to the sky. "So," the half-smile deepens. This brief, lingering thing. "I think you're being easy on her. Grief is never an excuse for weakness. It should be the foundation of new strength."

[Victor Oseragighte] He watches her from the corner of his eye initially, but as she launches into her tale fully, he grants her the due respect of his full gaze. Victor's eyes are black, as difficult to read as he is typically. Not because he is a secretive sort, but because he is a private sort, given to expressing himself in actions more than words, in a nation where introverts and the quiet are too often overlooked and pushed down.

Her tale brings him back to HIS encounter in the Battleground. Brutal. Confusing. And ending in his apparent death to a packmate fallen to Thrall. She did not have to tell him that loss was inevitable; it was a lesson he'd learned all too well already.

Her words about Mama, though... he looked off, up at the lightening sky where he longed to be.

"Maybe. Can't say you're wrong. World was logical. world was perfect, it'd be so. But we're half human. We forget this, too. Emotions still rule us. And sometimes it takes an outsider to remind us of the path we need to take. Why we have the Half-Moon."

He lowered his gaze to fix upon her. "And Gibbous."

[Sorrow] Kora rarely tells stories for their morals. She tells stories because they are: stories. Because Garou have nothing else except for a handful of glyphs etched into stone to remember the dead. Because living without the past is nothing more than a slow death of the spirit. She tells stories, and so this - this oblique analogy of him-to-her is foreshortened both by her reticence to besmirch her tribesmates names - even those she deems cowardly, or false - in front of a strance and by the underlying point.

Still, at the end, she snorts this faint - something, this laugh, or this sharpened little huff, really - which twists itself into a crooked smile.

"I was fostered in the Sept of Wind and Rain, in Hjaltland," she tells him, after another mouthful of cool water. "You would know it as the Shetlands, yeah? My tribe reclaimed it from the cursed ones after that tribe fell to the unmaker, and it is been held by the Fenrir ever since." Kora's accent is entirely American; there's nothing exotic, no hint of Norway, no shadow of an Islanders' brogue. "When I came back to the states, I flew in on a C-130 from an airbase n Iceland to Oklahoma. That was the first time I met any of the native tribes, and I've not had dealings with you or yours, ever. You're the only Wendigo I've ever met.

"But Garou aren't meant to run alone, Swallow. You should run with us for a moon, see if you fit. See if you can bring yourself to follow a totem from Fenris' brood. If nothing else, help us patrol our territory until you find another pack closer to your history and your heart." There's another pause, a little solid sound as she puts the water bottle down on the stone steps betwen her thighs.

"I don't make this offer lightly. Hospitality is sacred to my tribe."

[Victor Oseragighte] Shetlands. Scotland? Ireland? Victor didn't have that clear of a sense of geography outside of North America, but he could make some leaps of logic. His lips spread a little in a bittersweet smile of his own.

"I don't fit well with my tribe. Some say. Impure. Not the blood. The life. Six generations of high iron workers. Construction. It's what my Res is famous for. Keeps our families eating, housed. There were some who said I'd be better off going to another tribe. Some who choose to believe that Wendigo made a mistake in me, and I'll prove it, given time."

"My point is... I'm an outsider. I'm used to it. Had to give up my tribe, my human tribe. Family way. To do this. And I did. Used to losing things. I'll not wither. Not die. Don't like what happened. It won't break me."

He pauses, meeting her eyes, letting her see that despite the loneliness and the sorrow and the knowledge that he is alone, he stands firm. Strong. He'll go on. He knows his duty and will not swerve from it.

He knew about hospitality, too, though he did not say so. He recognized what she offered, and he nodded faintly. "We'll see. Won't be leaping up so quick to take oaths that end up cracked and shattered, though. I think you understand that."

[Sorrow] "I'm not offering you an oath, -yuf." There's a faint flre of her nostrils, some backgrounded humor in her body, underneath her skin. "Not tonight. This isn't, welcome to my clubhouse, do you want to meet the boss?" He meets her eyes, and she holds the look. Her own eyes are a deep blue, the color of the sky at twilight. The color of the sky at dawn.

Her features are still and sure underneath. "I take those oaths seriously enough that I wouldn't offer it to you, now. And if you were the sort to accept now, I wouldn't want you. Roman, Sparrow and I ran together for more than a moon before we sought our totem. I'd expect the same from you: run with us for a moon. Get to know my packmates and my territory and my kn. Then decide if you want to stay. I'm going to be here until I die, and I expect the same committment from my pack.

"I offer them that committment, too." Then, she stands, pushes herself up, her hands on her thighs. She's taller than he is by a handful of inches, and she's never been the sort of woman who would hide from her height. Straight-spined, sure-shouldered, she wipes off her wet hands on her thighs.

"If you want to see if you fit," she tips her head backtoward the wooden doors. "They're open. Find Roman, sometime. Have him show you around. If not, I wish you luck whereever you go. For now, though - I'm going to catch my mate before he goes to work. 'Night, -yuf."

[Victor Oseragighte] He notes the designator she uses, one of respect. He is heartened by her caution, too, and takes that in silently. When she rises, so does he, flowing to his feet smoothly, never once imbalanced. His gaze follows her nod to the doors and then drops back to her, and his head tilts, acknowledging.

"Good night, -yuf," is all he says. Much to think about. Step by step.