Ornature

[Imogen] She has stolen a blanket but not entirely for warmth, eschewing the idea of wrapping it around herself and instead using it as a barrier between the chilled hardwood floor and her posterior. There is no heat here yet, and though it is now warm enough to rain, the house is still chilled.

Her light comes from a floor lantern, ironically set up on the seat of a wooden chair, the only one in the room. It casts an orange halo over its immediate vicinity, the sound of its battery operated electricity droning on.

Her hair is back, carelessly so, a bun which has begun to uncoil, tendrils of hair sliding forward across her cheek as she tilts her head, eyes on the artpad in front of her. She wears a sweater with sleeves that she alternately pushes up (as their presence annoys her) and pushes down (as the chill seeps deeper into her bones.

It is full dark, well into the night and the rain falls steadily against the high window panes. Somewhere, she thinks she can hear a leak, a steady drip-drip-drip which she has not bothered to investigate.

[Kora] The floors are uneven but solid. This building - a chapter house, maybe, once - is as old as the church proper. The big hewn blocks of limestone frame the exterior; the glass in those windows still intact shows the wavy imperfections of an earlier age, framed in by lead mullions gone vertigris green against the stone casements. Most of the furniture was been long-since looted, but the larger pieces, the most elaborate, the heaviest - a handful of those remain. There are shadows against the walls where long-forgotten paintings hung. Layers of graffiti overtopped them in some rooms. Others seem to have been entirely neglected by the squatters and Garou who came after alike: black walls, peeling wallpaper, and a layer of dust the texture of fur on the wooden floors.

Only the cleverest sort could make it across the floors without making a sound; and then it would require work. Deliberation. Some damn knowledge of architecture, some fine attunement to weight distribution, some care. So the hint of a knock, less a question than a suggestion, the opening of a door, that halo of sound bringing the muffled sound of rain against the windows into sharper relief, the fresh, raw cold wind of early spring, then the creak of floorboards underneath some new weight precede her.

"You're up late, doc - " Kora offers by way of greeting, as her shadow crosses the threshold of the room, interrupting rather than throw by Imogen's lantern. Looks up then, at the ceiling, then the walls, then back to Imogen on the floor, the artpad open there in front of her.

[Imogen] The kinswoman straightens as someone knocks, an eyebrow stirring somewhat sardonically as she turns toward the door. She sits with one knee drawn up, the art pad balanced against it, a pencil in hand. A sharp turn of her head moves hair from her eyes, brushing it back against the curve of her cheekbone.

"So are you," she answers, her mouth twisting wryly. "Since we're statin' the obvious."

[Kora] "Couldn't sleep after the excitement that was the Bermuda-Sri Lanka World Cup qualifying match," the creature quips, some hint of self-mockery underscoring her voice. The details so absurd as to be absolutely untrue, but she says it with same irony she might use to order a Pabst Blue Ribbon in some hipster bar. Part of / apart from that world, entire.

"Since we're stating the obvious." Dry, that; a twist of her generous mouth near the end of it, mostly lost in shadow. Her hair is looser than Imogen usually sees it; not twisted into a messy bun, just caught loosely at the nape of her neck by a loose elastic band. The strands are fine and flat; the only wave comes from the hours then spent pulled up, twisted together, and that's already being pulled out by the weight of it. "Couldn't sleep."

She's not still; she needs to move and she does, restlessness burrowing under her skin. "And can't really go out looking for trouble on my own, just now." A brief, glance, sidelong, defined by the curve of her cheek, the shadows beneath her jaw. "You finding what you need here?"

[Imogen] At the quip, Imogen exhales a breath, something like amusement, but does not seek to lengthen the joke. It is not quite worthy of the effort, and dies well now.

Kora says she can't sleep, and Imogen's mouth twists slightly. "Must be th'rain," she says, circumspectly, perhaps inferring that she too cannot sleep.

"Well," she says after a moment, "I've found four walls and a roof, which is a start." She lifts the pad, waving it absently. "I'm tryin' t'write down all th'things I might need. I thought th'appropriate surroundings might help."

A pause, thoughtful, regarding the Fenrir, though not her belly, her pregnancy. It is not an obvious aversion so much as straight forward lack of acknowledgement.

"You must find full moons difficult," she observes.

[Kora] She's still now, Kora. Not still, but stopped, by the window. The glass is intact, by there's plywood across it in an X. Light comes in; watery light, indirect and distant, refracted through the prism of raindrops streaking down imperfect glass. A spare hand on the frame, long-fingers tipped against the work of it. Wood, solid - heartwood, carved by human hands rather than some fucking factory in GuangDong or Xichuan or some other unpronounceable province in some distance, guttered heart of some other ancient land - beneath her fingers.

She looks back; finds Imogen regarding her steadily and returns the glance, then lifts her dark, darkly reflective gaze upward. The ceilings are high here, lose in shadow. A quiet breath, out.

"I like the promise of an empty room," she returns, the look taking in the quiet corners, filled by nothing more than shadows and the memory of mice; the echo of that leak somewhere. Dripdripdrip. Dripdripdrip. A trebled beat, so its nothing to do with the work of her heart.

"The last one, yeah," she returns, with a kind of grim certainty. "Next one'll be harder."

Maybe she'll skip the moot. Find someplace where she can spend herself without being surrounded by warformed Garou. Given in to the itch to move, the itch to hunt, the itch to be a fucking animal in its light in some safe, circumscribed way. Jesus. Gaia.

There's an awareness about her, though, even in the midst of this. She looks back at Imogen, then. Dark eyes searching the kinswoman's features. Not looking for secrets, just a survey of the way the incandescent light from the lantern cuts across the sharper lines of her face, the way shadow pools in the hollows. "I imagine I'm not the only one, though."

[Imogen] Imogen shifts slightly to ease her view of the Garou, turning a little on the floor though she does not bother to stand. The light from the lantern casts a pale glow over her features, deepening shadows on one side of her profile and completing vanquishing them on the other. They spark colours in her hair, bringing certain strands into sharp relief as they echo their blonde tones, with the majority of it burning red. There are not many with a hair colour quite like hers. A true red, lit by rare strands of blonde and a darkened undertone of oak.

Her body is lithe beneath her sweater, her jeans, a certain promise of lean strength, of stability in the core muscles, of a stamina in her shoulders and spine. She was never a soft woman, but she has grown harder - though perhaps, to Kora, coming in near the very beginning of the shift has simply always known Imogen to grow harder by every passing day. She may think nothing of it; it is simply the way the kinswoman is, working her way toward titanium.

It is a mistake of many that titanium is the strongest metal known to man. It is, instead, a metal with one of the highest strength to weight ratios. For its light-weightedness it bears more than one would expect.

She likes the promise of an empty room - the edge of Imogen's mouth twitches. "S'not that -" a pause before she chooses a relatively obvious word, "promising fer me. So long as it does what it should in the end, that's all that matters." Kora has seen the kin's flat. Black leather, a media centre with no television. The room's she had seen merely served a purpose, fulfilled a function. The living room, the dining room. No art on the walls, no pictures or mementos.

She steadily regards Kora as the Skald's gaze searches her features. It is a mirror to what happened less than a minute before. "I suppose tha' depends on your circumstances," she says after a moment. She might have said more - but stops before it truly becomes full-thought. The memory of it lingers as tension in her mouth.

[Kora] There's a spare smile on Kora's face; a sort of intent there. It's distant, though, informed by rootlessness. By restlessness. By whatever woke her to a cold rainstorm in the middle of the night. She's softer than Imogen; the curve of her mouth, the frame of her body. The new layer of fat on top of the frame. Imogen disavows the poetic promise of an empty room, and Kora's spare smile deepens, fractionally.

Then she looks away; finds the empty spaces, the voids of shadows, places the space in time, however fractured her sense of time may be.

"At Vindur und Ringing - " her pronunciation is not native, but close enough that she learned by speaking with them, rather than by listening to tapes in a classroom, or half-fluent descendants admist the fires of some American lodgehouse. "There was a man named Runólfur Jóhannsson. Fisherman. Captain of his ship, yeah? Big, but not in that American way, you know? He knew his shit, man.

"They have those - those oil derricks out in the North Atlantic, yeah? On the other side they look like multistory vertiginous mosquitoes when they've been awakened. They're either pumping some sort of poison in or sucking the blood back out of the world. Or both. Runólfur Jóhannsson - " she breathes out with his name; there's a withheld memory there. Incomplete. Still distant. " - well, he could maneuver in so close to the damn things that you could step from deck to platform without getting your feet wet, and stay close, hidden until you needed off. Never lost anyone for leaving them behind. He was fifty, maybe sixty. The sort of man whose strength you never questioned. Just there, solid.

"Full moon, though," and here she cuts a glance back out through the window. "He'd start drinking two days before, and wouldn't sober up for two days after." A brief twist of her narrow shoulders at the end.

[Imogen] She is silent then, first looking at Kora as she imparts a small sliver of detail - not about herself, but about a kinfolk in a Sept of which Imogen has never even heard.

The doctor's eyes move to the window, the rain streaking the glass, distorting the ambient and diffused light that seeps in through the rippling glass. She can hear the drip-drip-drip of the water somewhere, and the more regular tapping of cold icy rain on the window and eaves of the abandoned house.

"I'm in the mood fer a cigarette," she says, suddenly, getting to her feet. The ease of motion with which Imogen moves, her body unweighted by a foetus, her ligaments still tight, her hips unshifted, must seem almost alien now to the pregnant Garou. The idea of the motion, dimly remembered but now foreign with her own reality.

"Want to come along?"

[Kora] "Sure," returns the Skald, the quiet in her voice matched by the quiet of the rain. There's no hesitation, though Imogen will find the creature's dark gaze on her, sidelong and shadowed in the darkness as the kinswoman stands, the lean economy of motion clear. She breathes in, one of those long, deep breathes meant to clear the senses, eyes half-closed, a glance cut toward the windows, then just starts walking back through the ruined rooms, past the gloom of the peeling wallpaper and the cut points of light pooled on the still dark floors. A tip of her head toward the pattern of rain shedding down windows as they walk back to the door, her own gait heavier, interrupted with weight.

"I could use the sky overhead." The feeling of being without walls, especially when there's no danger of seeing the moon tonight. Outside it is sharply cooler. The rain has gentled by now, but the gutters are full of runnels that echo as they sluice down. In places, sheets of rain drop right from the eves to the ground, where the gutts have been torn or fallen or crumbled away.

[Imogen] Imogen only nods, and reaches down, picking up her jacket, not to put it on, but to retrieve the package of cigarettes, her lighter and step outside.

It is cool enough she should have brought her jacket, but the kinswoman does not seem to regret it much, merely drawing the lines of her body tighter together, her elbows to her ribs, her forearms brushing her chest as she lifts the accoutrements of her addiction.

She stands beneath the eave of the building, protected from the steady, quieting fall of rain. Lights up in silence, her eyes on the falling water. An inhale, an exhale, her head turning away to the wind, the smoke exiting her mouth grey and slowly fading through the rain.

Another drag.

"I used to play music," she says. "On a full moon. Bars, mostly. Surrounded by humans, blessedly rageless, simple and ignorant humans." Her choice of phrasing is deliberate. Humans, she calls them, as if she were outside of them. As if she were not one of them.

Another careful drag. "It never really made a difference. H-" beat, "I was usually found anyway."

Here now, less of a pause, more of a nod to her addiction as she takes another drag, her next words choked in smoke. "And now. Well." The smirk is mirthless, quiet, her eyes are on the rain, "it doesn't bother me as much as it used to."

[Kora] Without a cigarette to occupy her hands, Kora tucks them into the pockets of her sweatshirt, tugs up the hood, too, against the chill as they walk. Even in this advanced state of pregnancy, she does not require her arms for balance. Not to walk through the deserted building, down the steps. She keeps her arms close to her body, elbows against her flanks, hands in the pockets.

Outside, she looks up, brows raised skeptically underneath the shade of her hood, watching the rain pelt down out of the dark sky. When the cigarette catches - that familiar sound - she cuts a glance back, watching the kinswoman with that close-eyed attention fixed on her profile, the cut of her jaw, the drift of smoke from her nose and mouth. The pattern of rain gives them a sense of privacy, dampening sound. Still: the quiet, supple exhale in answer to Imogen's last statement - or perhaps just the edge of her smirk, the twist of muscles beneath her skin - is perfectly audible.

"Lost my guitar when I changed. They sent someone for my things, but the guitar was back at the performance space. I'm sure someone at Vindur und Ringing had a guitar, yeah? but when I first went there I couldn't speak the language, had no idea what the fuck - "

A pause here, the words withheld, a moment's remembered passion snapped off behind her teeth. It passes; she pulls it back in, twists her narrow shoulders in a brief, supple gesture. "Well, by the time I learned the language, I didn't need it anymore. The guitar, you know?" Everything'd changed by then.

Kora looks away again, this time up toward the dripping eaves. Listens to the pattern of rain on the ground. "If I were to hear a story about him," she says this quietly, without hesitation once she has decided to ask, but with a certain implicit, respectful distance. " - sometime. Would you want to know?"

[Imogen] She listens as Kora speaks, in a smoking silence, her cigarette scissored between her middle finger and fore, the ember burning orange, the only light beyond the ambient that they have around them. They can hear the tires of a car on a nearby road, the sharp sound of a backfire. Someone shouts. Though no one truly bothers the Garou where they are, this place isn't ever silent.

The sound of the gang wars, the inherent violence of the neighbourhood in which they live bleeds through.

She stills, as Kora asks the question, not only her body language but her face. She wipes of it emotion, of reaction, tamps it down, stamps it out. Her hand is still, the cigarette lowered, her fingers poised to ash it to the ground.

Then, a muscle in her jaw moves, her molars tightening together, and it is the first minute movement, but it signals her unpausing. She inhales a breath, tapping the cigarette free of ash, and lifting it to her mouth again. Her fingers in front of her lips, she speaks, once, shortly. "No," she says, with finality that belies her next phrase.

She drags on the cigarette, inhales it deeply. She smokes Dunhills. Imports them - the British brand. A gold band about the filter makes them distinctive, their flavour slightly different than the usual, American brands.

"Not unless he's dead," she amends.

[Kora] During the interregnum, Imogen takes another drag on her cigarette. Kora glances back at her, then, a look steady as the (nearly) spring rain falling in front of them. They are more than half in shadow. It is well after midnight, dark, but the city is never still and the city is never silent, not even when rain falls on and through the roof of the cathedral. Here, though - they can pretend. The grounds are overgrown enough that come summer you will not be able to see the street from this vantage point, just a tangled sea of green in the heat-haze of a continental summer. Now, they see the buildings opposite through a lacework of bare branches, slick, gleaming with rain.

"Got it," the Skald returns, turning away again. Her voice is dampened by the rain. By some trick of place there's little resonance and no echo. Then she inhales again, deeper, through the nose, her eyes closed, that ozone scent that lingers close to the pavement, here, the scent of waking ground underneath the dripping underbrush. And says, "Smells like spring."