[Rain] It is evening in the belly of the great Church, the stout stone sanctuary in the Green. And that Green is growing more vibrant as the climbing tendril-vines and slumber-trees about the city begin to stir, awakened, revive from their long hibernation. The church smells damp these days, owing to the rivulets that come down through the lofted roof timbres, mixed snow-melt and new rain, and the dampness is redolent with slow-decaying wood and long-standing stone. It is musky, not quite clean, and it throws off even the crackle of the fires that push away the humidity, suck it up out of the air, bake it in brilliance and low-cast light.
The others are out on patrols or errands or other things, and the kinfolk that keep to the Church have been around less and less. Since the hollering and huffing in the kitchen last weekend, Rain's really only been back to sleep and leave her regular tithes in the kitchen. Starla's been less noticeable. The Unicorns are keeping out from underfoot as much as possible; it's a subtle but noticeable change.
Tonight, though, Rain has left something low simmering on the back burner of the stove. A great pot of chili, with two types of meat and three types of beans, heavy enough to help fill even a wolf's belly. Perhaps its the smell that calls, or the soft and infrequently heard sounds of the Gaian playing in the Sanctuary. Wherever she has been hiding, she is not hiding there now.
[Kora] The sun lingers longer at the edge of days, but there's a cold front passing through Chicago this evening so everything has a unform gray look. The drizzle dampens the reflective glow from the cloud cover and plays tricks with sound. High in the clerestory, the stained glass windows have a muted look, the light behind them restrained, bright only where raindrops cling to the exterior glass, focus and magnify the light just - so.
There are other changes in the church. No Linus; not for two weeks or more. He used to sleep on the hard wooden pews in the sanctuary or stumble in when the scent of pizza and the tug of the pack bound pulled him back across the gauntlet. Some of the fires he insisted on stoking are still burning in the vast old stone fireplaces. Gray smoke coils upward through blackened chimneys to merge with the unrelentingly gray sky.
The door between the church proper and the social hall/kitchen is not original to the old stone structure. It was carved out later, sometime in the 1950s when the addition was built. When the congration, full of a brief, wild optimism, overburned the property with debts to expand the secondary buildings just before membership plummeted. Thirty years later, the whole thing was left to rot. Thirty years after that, the wolves moved in.
So here: the door is like something out a red brick school building, circa 1953. Not visible from most of the nave, just the crossing and transept, fitted awkward into the space of an old alcove. The subtle sound of springs from the handle as someone pushes the door open not with hands but bodily: hip first, then back against the long metal bar.
Kora walks into the sanctuary, a bowl of chili in one hand, a half-gallon of chocolate milk hanging from the other. She has crumbled nearly half a sleeve of saltines over the surface of the chili, and added a great load of cheese on top of that. In the church proper, she follows the sound of Rain's playing and takes a seat close by, dropping the half-gallon of milk to the seat of the pew before lowering her awkward frame to sit in the hard right angle of the bench.
"Do saltines, cheese and chili make a three-way?" she asks rhetorically, when there's a lull between songs. "Or os that chili, spaghetti and cheese?"
[Rain] "I don't know, but saltines sound better to me," she tells Kora, glancing over with a small, somewhat close kept smile. Rain has been quieter for these few days that have comprised her near absence. It's been more like having a church mouse around than a songbird.
Rain doesn't break her song for Last Watch's Alpha, but she does wind it down to something quiet at the end. She lays one hand across the strings to keep them quiet when Kora speaks, and the defeaning quiet of the building rushes in around them, punctuated by the drip-drop of rain let in through the roof, and the rustle of feathers high about the rafters.
"You're nearly there, right?" she asks the Skald, as if Kora were just another expectant mother waiting out the endless last days of gestation. "I mean, soon you'll be back to you, well, the new version: now with less sleep."
Rain hugs the guitar against her side with one arm, lets the other fall away to brace against the back of the pew. The seats are awkward for playing, so she has to turn partly sideways. She manages, somehow.
[Kora] "You've never had Cincinnati-style chili?" Kora returns, pale brows lifting over her dark eyes. She's holding the bowl in one hand, and has tugged the kneeling bar down from beneath the pew in front of her chosen perch for a footrest. There's a terrible groan when it moves, followed by a sharp slap of solid wood against solid stone. Both unintentional. She was not preprated for the shearing of the hinges, metal on rusting metal, but she closes her eyes against the retort as the kneeler-become-footrest hits the stone floor.
"Seven ways, man. Spaghetti, cheese, onions, beer, bratwurst, ice cream, fish tacos - " somewhere in there she's gone off the rails, and done so with enough gust that her generous mouth twists upward at the rightmost corner. Her expression is a little distant; she's hungry and has wrapped that around with some memory or other. Wherever she first had Skyline chili, maybe.
Kora offers a brief, narrow lift of her shoulders by way of answer. She's nearly there. She supposes. It serves as answer until she swallows another mouthful of chili. "I hope to Fenris I am," she says, with a certain fervance when she replies, her low voice carrying between them, the distant half-smile settling into a more neutral expression when she does. A line of tension appears briefly between her brows.
"It's not - " then she breathes out, a subtle, mostly withheld laugh, more wry than humored. " - I don't have it down to the day, you know? It's all guesstimates. And I've not been sleeping much lately, anyway. We don't keep the same schedule." With the we her dark eyes drop to her stomach. It's the closest she gets to babyspeak. "You're quiet, though. Something wrong?"
[Rain] Rain has not had Cincinnati-style chili, and shakes her head accordingly. She's listening, mostly, to the Skald recount the many ways in which Chili can be adorned and there's a hiccough, a little what the?, a narrowing of her eyes and a skeptical look --
-- Ice cream? Fish tacos? --
when Kora's thoughts go off the rails and veer into combinations that only a pregnant woman, perhaps only a pregnant wolf could love. All this softens, though, to a sort of wistful empathy, an understanding when Kora speaks of being out of sync with her babe. For the fondness she sees in the wolf that softens her without rendering her weak. Motherhood becomes her, though Rain would not say it aloud just yet.
"I..." Here a pause. She is not sure how to answer. Rain thinks on it for a moment, taps her fingertips against the resonant body of the guitar. A little exhale, neither amused nor wry. Weary. Regretful.
"I'm thinking of a getting a place, so I'm out from underfoot," she says. The words are cautious, testing out the idea as she speaks them. They are uncertain. "I think Roman needs his space, though he'd never say it, and havin' me and Star around just brooks arguments."
[Kora] Kora's turn to watch, now. The Skald has both booted feet braces on the kneeler bar, bringing her knees slightly higher. Enough to support some of the weight of her stomach. She leans back, not fitted into the hard right angle of the puritan-style church pew, not precisely. Her low back curves from hip to spine, inscribing a softer curve against the back of the old mahogany.
She puts her chili aside, and picks up the chocolate milk, resting it on her knee, index finger loosely looped through the plastic handle. Draws in a deep breath, and then exhales.
"If you want your own place because you need your own space, Rain, you should get one. In our territory or close to it to make things easier for us. But if you're thinking about being here means you're - " here she shakes her pale head, the loose twist of her hair swinging heavily at the nape of her neck, the half-knotted loop threatening to come undone with the motion. " - underfoot, you aren't."
The Fenrir's mouth flattens when Rain mentioned Roman and then Starla in nearly the same breath, though her expression is mostly restrained - leashed, really - the weight of it pushed out with another breath. "What sort of arguments are you having?"
[Rain] The kinswoman is better equipped, now, to bear the weight of Kora's attention and weather the burn of her Rage than she had been when she arrived in Chicago. She's tempered and healed, come back from the diminished place she'd been.
The girl runs her tongue over her eyetooth, distending the shape of her mouth just so, being thoughtfully quiet for awhile. It drags out longer than it needs to; Kora hasn't known Rain to be at a loss for words often. Quiet? Yes. Unable to string her thoughts together? No.
"I spoke out of turn," she admits, first and foremost. Clearly. Without apology. "He's probably still cross about that, but he ..." Rain hesitates.
"He's got an odd way with words," she says, couching it carefully. "I know he cares about us, but when he talks to us it's about how everything we do affects him or his honor or his standing. He wants us to tell him things, and when Starla told him some things he scolded her. There's no middle ground there, and I think maybe we're agitatin' him by being around all the time, and not bein' the kin he wants us to be."
[Kora] Kora's quiet for some time afterward. Seconds. Moments maybe. Listen: the creature looks away, relieves Rain of the weight of her dark-eyed gaze and sweeps that look back to the empty dais on which the altar was once situated. Soft as her mouth seems, the Skald's profile is all sharp lines: a straight nose, a strong jaw. There is a pull of tendon underneath her skin, and her long fingers spider out over the top of the jug of milk. If she meant to drink it, she's forgotten. Now the half-empty jug is just a resting place for her hand.
"Roman's not said anything to be about being cross with you. Starla," a lift of her shoulders, something at the jointure between resignation and acknowledgment. " - she went to a Shadow Lord and a Bone Gnawer for help instead of her own kin and her own tribe. If she were mine, I'd ki - "
Here, the speech pulls up short; Kora flashes a look back at Rain, her features still and serious. "I'd call that betrayal. Regardless of extenuating circumstances, yeah?" The Skald is still mostly in profile, mouth still, her gaze direct, sheened with ambient light. The iron-worked charm that hangs from a ring through the cartilage of her left ear gleams dully in the light. "Somehow, though, I think there's more to this, yeah?"
[Rain] [Empathy: You'd what? +WP, reading this situation is very important to me.]
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 1, 1, 2, 5, 5, 7 (Failure at target 6) [WP]
[Rain] If she were mine, I'd...
Rain shifts, just enough to look over at Kora more out of the corner of her eye than directly, just enough for the set of her jaw and the subtle tension in her frame to come forward, bracing for whatever that next word might have been. She isn't afraid, or even surprised at the hard consonant that begins in. She lifts an eyebrow in query when it drops away without completion.
Kill her?
Kick her ass?
Kick her out?
The dark of the Skald's eyes and the cant of her posture is inscrutible to the songbird, whose mouth works a little, bends and tucks in at the corners instead of outright frowning.
"I'm not saying she was in the right. Starla's..." It's Rain's turn to let her words die on her lips, to fail to offer them up to the once-holy place quite so freely.
"She reckless. An' I think there must be somethin' deeper going on, cuz she more than asked them for help. They were closer than that," she says, without entirely saying what Starla had told her, and now Roman. It's there, though, blatant insinuation. Kora was wise to these things, how a word could be bent, turned, offered up as a pointer to some hidden other thing.
"He called her a whore," Rain says. Flat. Like she's reporting the words. The insult sounds horrific in Rain's accent, vulgar and uncalled for. It is so out of place to hear from her. "Said her knees were sprung. Said it reflected poorly on him. I get bein' angry, but she's his blood."
[Kora] There's a moment of tension there. Kora closes her eyes and sets her mouth over her teeth, lips drawn close together. She breathes out - long and controlled - with an expressive little fillup near the end of the exhale.
"He's right," the Skald returns at last, half-way through replacing the air she just expelled. "What you and Starla and August and Jackson do reflects on him. You all hold his honor in your hands. If you fail, if you fuck up, if you - break the veil, or open your hearts to the Jormungandr - any of it - the Nation will hold him accountable for those faults.
"But that's because he is responsible for you. It's his responsibility to set boundaries; his responsibility to - " a brief twist here, something close to giving, " - make sure you and Starla and everyone else know what he expects of you. The Litany demands respect both ways. My tribe's pretty free with the fists, but words like that - "
Her jaw tightens. There's a flare of rage that courses underneath her skin, without outlet. Her shoulders tension, and she begins to bounce one of her heels, as if that physical gesture was some sort of ground to her rage. Some sort of circuit breaker.
"I'll speak to him." A brief, subtle pause, and a sidesweeping glance. Kora's dark eyes touch on Rain's face. "But Simon, christ. After the way he behaved here. Disrespectful of both my territory and my packmates and my kin. Raving." Here, Kora gives a shake of her pale head, exhales again, and shifts whatever she'd meant to say into another, quieter, darker, "I'll speak with Roman."
[Rain] Rain is quiet. She is terribly quiet. In that moment of tension she doesn't even dare breathe. It's heady, this tenseness, this worry. Rain does not like to bring things forward, to cast light on the worrisome details of their lives. It would be clearer for her, easier to understand, if they would just backhand her when they were upset and leave her alone when things were otherwise. That's clearer than words; the lack of words, for the whole of her life, is part of the resident problem here.
Her fingerprints slide against the guitar string, leaving a low whine, something on the edge of audible music. Bending notes, no phrases. Plaintive with no further case to bring before the Skald.
Kora tells her about Honor. About Responsiblity. About the Litany. Into that darkness of her expression, her words, the way she repeats without recanting (I'll speak with Roman), Rain offers:
"I mean him no disrespect, and I don't challenge his Honor or refuse whatever requests he will and has made of me. I meant what I said to the Elders: You and Yours have been good by me; I have no complaints."
These are offered more as balm than obsequience, but that fealty and submission is present too. Her chin tips down, slightly, her eyes are downcast, gaze falling against the back of the pew before them.
"Thank you," she says softly, reaching up with the hand that has cradled her voice to her side to push away a piece of hair from her face, to give outlet to the anxiousness she carries.
"You tell me if I'm out of line, please. If what I do brings dishonor to your pack, or to him. I don't to be trouble. I don't need to be underfoot. But I still don't know where I fit and it feels, some times, like casting about in the dark.
"If I'm doin' it wrong, I'll mend things." She swallows. There's a bit of a lump in Rain's throat, but she's good enough at modulating her voice to keep the unsteadiness out of it. To keep that worry from surfacing wholly.
[Kora] "Rain," here Kora opens her eyes, cuts a dark, shadowed glance back at the young kinswoman. Her regard is open - but quiet again, and her moving foot slowly stills. The Skald is a good half-head taller than the kinswoman, maybe more, so the look slants downward, half shadowed by her pale lashes. In the soft, grayed shadows, of the cathedral's sanctuary, her skin glows, winter-pale. "Roman dishonored himself when he used language like that with his kinswoman." She pauses here, mouth twisting flat against her teeth before appending, in a darker voice. " - Whatever her failures.
"Wolves, we have instincts. To dominance and submission, yeah? Pack hierarchy is nearly unspoken, unless a challenge comes and it changes. It's a hell of a lot less natural for you, yeah? You just make it up as you go along, I think. All of you. There's not one place to fit, or one thing to be.
"This place," a gesture, up toward the soaring, broken rafters is meant to encompass not just the church but the city beyond it. The urban Sept to which they are attached. " - is nothing like the Sept where I fostered. Everyone there was Fenrir, except the odd visitor, and all the people on the islands were kin. Both easier and harder to find your place there. Easier if you just wanted to slip into the rhythm of daily life; harder if you had different dreams.
"If I ever have a problem with you, I'll tell you. That's - " a brief, sharper exhale here. " - that's the compact, yeah? The fucking agreement. Nevermind the hierachy we have, it's goddamned reciprocal. That's why the litany tells us to respect those beneath us as well as above. That's our rule, not yours. Just promise me you're not going to sleep with a fucking Shadow Lord."
[Rain] "People have instincts," she says, testing the idea out between them. "I've known people who led by dominance, by forcing submission. But people also yield to idealized things, follow morality over instinct, make choices based on obscure reasons... it's not so simple; the rules are muddy."
They are saying the same thing, arriving at an understanding. Kora is so much easier for the songbird to talk to; she makes things about the Nation seem plain-faced, clear, accessible. Maybe that's what Galliards did that was so different from Philodoxes. Painted in broader strokes before honing in on a myriad of technicalities.
And then the last. Rain's eyes widen, incredulous for a moment, as if she would not dream of such a thing. She huffs, half chuckle, half offended, half surprised -- and clearly unlearned in Maths; three halves?
"Oh... I..." She glances up to Kora, lets the resurfaced warmth in her eyes be open to the Skald's scrutinty. "That's not going to happen." Plain put and simple. It was off the table. Entirely.
[Kora] "Alright," Kora returns, straightening then. Dropping her booted feet from the kneeler to the stone floor before lifting it with her toe in a creak of rusting hinges. For the first time all night, the familiar half-smile finds its way to the Skald's mouth as Kora stands up, grabbing her empty bowl of chili and half-finished half-gallon of chocolate milk. "It's a deal. Let's seal it with some ice cream, yeah? There's that place that has it homemade over on High, close to the park? I figure Guinness ice cream isn't going to hurt anyone."
The others are out on patrols or errands or other things, and the kinfolk that keep to the Church have been around less and less. Since the hollering and huffing in the kitchen last weekend, Rain's really only been back to sleep and leave her regular tithes in the kitchen. Starla's been less noticeable. The Unicorns are keeping out from underfoot as much as possible; it's a subtle but noticeable change.
Tonight, though, Rain has left something low simmering on the back burner of the stove. A great pot of chili, with two types of meat and three types of beans, heavy enough to help fill even a wolf's belly. Perhaps its the smell that calls, or the soft and infrequently heard sounds of the Gaian playing in the Sanctuary. Wherever she has been hiding, she is not hiding there now.
[Kora] The sun lingers longer at the edge of days, but there's a cold front passing through Chicago this evening so everything has a unform gray look. The drizzle dampens the reflective glow from the cloud cover and plays tricks with sound. High in the clerestory, the stained glass windows have a muted look, the light behind them restrained, bright only where raindrops cling to the exterior glass, focus and magnify the light just - so.
There are other changes in the church. No Linus; not for two weeks or more. He used to sleep on the hard wooden pews in the sanctuary or stumble in when the scent of pizza and the tug of the pack bound pulled him back across the gauntlet. Some of the fires he insisted on stoking are still burning in the vast old stone fireplaces. Gray smoke coils upward through blackened chimneys to merge with the unrelentingly gray sky.
The door between the church proper and the social hall/kitchen is not original to the old stone structure. It was carved out later, sometime in the 1950s when the addition was built. When the congration, full of a brief, wild optimism, overburned the property with debts to expand the secondary buildings just before membership plummeted. Thirty years later, the whole thing was left to rot. Thirty years after that, the wolves moved in.
So here: the door is like something out a red brick school building, circa 1953. Not visible from most of the nave, just the crossing and transept, fitted awkward into the space of an old alcove. The subtle sound of springs from the handle as someone pushes the door open not with hands but bodily: hip first, then back against the long metal bar.
Kora walks into the sanctuary, a bowl of chili in one hand, a half-gallon of chocolate milk hanging from the other. She has crumbled nearly half a sleeve of saltines over the surface of the chili, and added a great load of cheese on top of that. In the church proper, she follows the sound of Rain's playing and takes a seat close by, dropping the half-gallon of milk to the seat of the pew before lowering her awkward frame to sit in the hard right angle of the bench.
"Do saltines, cheese and chili make a three-way?" she asks rhetorically, when there's a lull between songs. "Or os that chili, spaghetti and cheese?"
[Rain] "I don't know, but saltines sound better to me," she tells Kora, glancing over with a small, somewhat close kept smile. Rain has been quieter for these few days that have comprised her near absence. It's been more like having a church mouse around than a songbird.
Rain doesn't break her song for Last Watch's Alpha, but she does wind it down to something quiet at the end. She lays one hand across the strings to keep them quiet when Kora speaks, and the defeaning quiet of the building rushes in around them, punctuated by the drip-drop of rain let in through the roof, and the rustle of feathers high about the rafters.
"You're nearly there, right?" she asks the Skald, as if Kora were just another expectant mother waiting out the endless last days of gestation. "I mean, soon you'll be back to you, well, the new version: now with less sleep."
Rain hugs the guitar against her side with one arm, lets the other fall away to brace against the back of the pew. The seats are awkward for playing, so she has to turn partly sideways. She manages, somehow.
[Kora] "You've never had Cincinnati-style chili?" Kora returns, pale brows lifting over her dark eyes. She's holding the bowl in one hand, and has tugged the kneeling bar down from beneath the pew in front of her chosen perch for a footrest. There's a terrible groan when it moves, followed by a sharp slap of solid wood against solid stone. Both unintentional. She was not preprated for the shearing of the hinges, metal on rusting metal, but she closes her eyes against the retort as the kneeler-become-footrest hits the stone floor.
"Seven ways, man. Spaghetti, cheese, onions, beer, bratwurst, ice cream, fish tacos - " somewhere in there she's gone off the rails, and done so with enough gust that her generous mouth twists upward at the rightmost corner. Her expression is a little distant; she's hungry and has wrapped that around with some memory or other. Wherever she first had Skyline chili, maybe.
Kora offers a brief, narrow lift of her shoulders by way of answer. She's nearly there. She supposes. It serves as answer until she swallows another mouthful of chili. "I hope to Fenris I am," she says, with a certain fervance when she replies, her low voice carrying between them, the distant half-smile settling into a more neutral expression when she does. A line of tension appears briefly between her brows.
"It's not - " then she breathes out, a subtle, mostly withheld laugh, more wry than humored. " - I don't have it down to the day, you know? It's all guesstimates. And I've not been sleeping much lately, anyway. We don't keep the same schedule." With the we her dark eyes drop to her stomach. It's the closest she gets to babyspeak. "You're quiet, though. Something wrong?"
[Rain] Rain has not had Cincinnati-style chili, and shakes her head accordingly. She's listening, mostly, to the Skald recount the many ways in which Chili can be adorned and there's a hiccough, a little what the?, a narrowing of her eyes and a skeptical look --
-- Ice cream? Fish tacos? --
when Kora's thoughts go off the rails and veer into combinations that only a pregnant woman, perhaps only a pregnant wolf could love. All this softens, though, to a sort of wistful empathy, an understanding when Kora speaks of being out of sync with her babe. For the fondness she sees in the wolf that softens her without rendering her weak. Motherhood becomes her, though Rain would not say it aloud just yet.
"I..." Here a pause. She is not sure how to answer. Rain thinks on it for a moment, taps her fingertips against the resonant body of the guitar. A little exhale, neither amused nor wry. Weary. Regretful.
"I'm thinking of a getting a place, so I'm out from underfoot," she says. The words are cautious, testing out the idea as she speaks them. They are uncertain. "I think Roman needs his space, though he'd never say it, and havin' me and Star around just brooks arguments."
[Kora] Kora's turn to watch, now. The Skald has both booted feet braces on the kneeler bar, bringing her knees slightly higher. Enough to support some of the weight of her stomach. She leans back, not fitted into the hard right angle of the puritan-style church pew, not precisely. Her low back curves from hip to spine, inscribing a softer curve against the back of the old mahogany.
She puts her chili aside, and picks up the chocolate milk, resting it on her knee, index finger loosely looped through the plastic handle. Draws in a deep breath, and then exhales.
"If you want your own place because you need your own space, Rain, you should get one. In our territory or close to it to make things easier for us. But if you're thinking about being here means you're - " here she shakes her pale head, the loose twist of her hair swinging heavily at the nape of her neck, the half-knotted loop threatening to come undone with the motion. " - underfoot, you aren't."
The Fenrir's mouth flattens when Rain mentioned Roman and then Starla in nearly the same breath, though her expression is mostly restrained - leashed, really - the weight of it pushed out with another breath. "What sort of arguments are you having?"
[Rain] The kinswoman is better equipped, now, to bear the weight of Kora's attention and weather the burn of her Rage than she had been when she arrived in Chicago. She's tempered and healed, come back from the diminished place she'd been.
The girl runs her tongue over her eyetooth, distending the shape of her mouth just so, being thoughtfully quiet for awhile. It drags out longer than it needs to; Kora hasn't known Rain to be at a loss for words often. Quiet? Yes. Unable to string her thoughts together? No.
"I spoke out of turn," she admits, first and foremost. Clearly. Without apology. "He's probably still cross about that, but he ..." Rain hesitates.
"He's got an odd way with words," she says, couching it carefully. "I know he cares about us, but when he talks to us it's about how everything we do affects him or his honor or his standing. He wants us to tell him things, and when Starla told him some things he scolded her. There's no middle ground there, and I think maybe we're agitatin' him by being around all the time, and not bein' the kin he wants us to be."
[Kora] Kora's quiet for some time afterward. Seconds. Moments maybe. Listen: the creature looks away, relieves Rain of the weight of her dark-eyed gaze and sweeps that look back to the empty dais on which the altar was once situated. Soft as her mouth seems, the Skald's profile is all sharp lines: a straight nose, a strong jaw. There is a pull of tendon underneath her skin, and her long fingers spider out over the top of the jug of milk. If she meant to drink it, she's forgotten. Now the half-empty jug is just a resting place for her hand.
"Roman's not said anything to be about being cross with you. Starla," a lift of her shoulders, something at the jointure between resignation and acknowledgment. " - she went to a Shadow Lord and a Bone Gnawer for help instead of her own kin and her own tribe. If she were mine, I'd ki - "
Here, the speech pulls up short; Kora flashes a look back at Rain, her features still and serious. "I'd call that betrayal. Regardless of extenuating circumstances, yeah?" The Skald is still mostly in profile, mouth still, her gaze direct, sheened with ambient light. The iron-worked charm that hangs from a ring through the cartilage of her left ear gleams dully in the light. "Somehow, though, I think there's more to this, yeah?"
[Rain] [Empathy: You'd what? +WP, reading this situation is very important to me.]
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 1, 1, 2, 5, 5, 7 (Failure at target 6) [WP]
[Rain] If she were mine, I'd...
Rain shifts, just enough to look over at Kora more out of the corner of her eye than directly, just enough for the set of her jaw and the subtle tension in her frame to come forward, bracing for whatever that next word might have been. She isn't afraid, or even surprised at the hard consonant that begins in. She lifts an eyebrow in query when it drops away without completion.
Kill her?
Kick her ass?
Kick her out?
The dark of the Skald's eyes and the cant of her posture is inscrutible to the songbird, whose mouth works a little, bends and tucks in at the corners instead of outright frowning.
"I'm not saying she was in the right. Starla's..." It's Rain's turn to let her words die on her lips, to fail to offer them up to the once-holy place quite so freely.
"She reckless. An' I think there must be somethin' deeper going on, cuz she more than asked them for help. They were closer than that," she says, without entirely saying what Starla had told her, and now Roman. It's there, though, blatant insinuation. Kora was wise to these things, how a word could be bent, turned, offered up as a pointer to some hidden other thing.
"He called her a whore," Rain says. Flat. Like she's reporting the words. The insult sounds horrific in Rain's accent, vulgar and uncalled for. It is so out of place to hear from her. "Said her knees were sprung. Said it reflected poorly on him. I get bein' angry, but she's his blood."
[Kora] There's a moment of tension there. Kora closes her eyes and sets her mouth over her teeth, lips drawn close together. She breathes out - long and controlled - with an expressive little fillup near the end of the exhale.
"He's right," the Skald returns at last, half-way through replacing the air she just expelled. "What you and Starla and August and Jackson do reflects on him. You all hold his honor in your hands. If you fail, if you fuck up, if you - break the veil, or open your hearts to the Jormungandr - any of it - the Nation will hold him accountable for those faults.
"But that's because he is responsible for you. It's his responsibility to set boundaries; his responsibility to - " a brief twist here, something close to giving, " - make sure you and Starla and everyone else know what he expects of you. The Litany demands respect both ways. My tribe's pretty free with the fists, but words like that - "
Her jaw tightens. There's a flare of rage that courses underneath her skin, without outlet. Her shoulders tension, and she begins to bounce one of her heels, as if that physical gesture was some sort of ground to her rage. Some sort of circuit breaker.
"I'll speak to him." A brief, subtle pause, and a sidesweeping glance. Kora's dark eyes touch on Rain's face. "But Simon, christ. After the way he behaved here. Disrespectful of both my territory and my packmates and my kin. Raving." Here, Kora gives a shake of her pale head, exhales again, and shifts whatever she'd meant to say into another, quieter, darker, "I'll speak with Roman."
[Rain] Rain is quiet. She is terribly quiet. In that moment of tension she doesn't even dare breathe. It's heady, this tenseness, this worry. Rain does not like to bring things forward, to cast light on the worrisome details of their lives. It would be clearer for her, easier to understand, if they would just backhand her when they were upset and leave her alone when things were otherwise. That's clearer than words; the lack of words, for the whole of her life, is part of the resident problem here.
Her fingerprints slide against the guitar string, leaving a low whine, something on the edge of audible music. Bending notes, no phrases. Plaintive with no further case to bring before the Skald.
Kora tells her about Honor. About Responsiblity. About the Litany. Into that darkness of her expression, her words, the way she repeats without recanting (I'll speak with Roman), Rain offers:
"I mean him no disrespect, and I don't challenge his Honor or refuse whatever requests he will and has made of me. I meant what I said to the Elders: You and Yours have been good by me; I have no complaints."
These are offered more as balm than obsequience, but that fealty and submission is present too. Her chin tips down, slightly, her eyes are downcast, gaze falling against the back of the pew before them.
"Thank you," she says softly, reaching up with the hand that has cradled her voice to her side to push away a piece of hair from her face, to give outlet to the anxiousness she carries.
"You tell me if I'm out of line, please. If what I do brings dishonor to your pack, or to him. I don't to be trouble. I don't need to be underfoot. But I still don't know where I fit and it feels, some times, like casting about in the dark.
"If I'm doin' it wrong, I'll mend things." She swallows. There's a bit of a lump in Rain's throat, but she's good enough at modulating her voice to keep the unsteadiness out of it. To keep that worry from surfacing wholly.
[Kora] "Rain," here Kora opens her eyes, cuts a dark, shadowed glance back at the young kinswoman. Her regard is open - but quiet again, and her moving foot slowly stills. The Skald is a good half-head taller than the kinswoman, maybe more, so the look slants downward, half shadowed by her pale lashes. In the soft, grayed shadows, of the cathedral's sanctuary, her skin glows, winter-pale. "Roman dishonored himself when he used language like that with his kinswoman." She pauses here, mouth twisting flat against her teeth before appending, in a darker voice. " - Whatever her failures.
"Wolves, we have instincts. To dominance and submission, yeah? Pack hierarchy is nearly unspoken, unless a challenge comes and it changes. It's a hell of a lot less natural for you, yeah? You just make it up as you go along, I think. All of you. There's not one place to fit, or one thing to be.
"This place," a gesture, up toward the soaring, broken rafters is meant to encompass not just the church but the city beyond it. The urban Sept to which they are attached. " - is nothing like the Sept where I fostered. Everyone there was Fenrir, except the odd visitor, and all the people on the islands were kin. Both easier and harder to find your place there. Easier if you just wanted to slip into the rhythm of daily life; harder if you had different dreams.
"If I ever have a problem with you, I'll tell you. That's - " a brief, sharper exhale here. " - that's the compact, yeah? The fucking agreement. Nevermind the hierachy we have, it's goddamned reciprocal. That's why the litany tells us to respect those beneath us as well as above. That's our rule, not yours. Just promise me you're not going to sleep with a fucking Shadow Lord."
[Rain] "People have instincts," she says, testing the idea out between them. "I've known people who led by dominance, by forcing submission. But people also yield to idealized things, follow morality over instinct, make choices based on obscure reasons... it's not so simple; the rules are muddy."
They are saying the same thing, arriving at an understanding. Kora is so much easier for the songbird to talk to; she makes things about the Nation seem plain-faced, clear, accessible. Maybe that's what Galliards did that was so different from Philodoxes. Painted in broader strokes before honing in on a myriad of technicalities.
And then the last. Rain's eyes widen, incredulous for a moment, as if she would not dream of such a thing. She huffs, half chuckle, half offended, half surprised -- and clearly unlearned in Maths; three halves?
"Oh... I..." She glances up to Kora, lets the resurfaced warmth in her eyes be open to the Skald's scrutinty. "That's not going to happen." Plain put and simple. It was off the table. Entirely.
[Kora] "Alright," Kora returns, straightening then. Dropping her booted feet from the kneeler to the stone floor before lifting it with her toe in a creak of rusting hinges. For the first time all night, the familiar half-smile finds its way to the Skald's mouth as Kora stands up, grabbing her empty bowl of chili and half-finished half-gallon of chocolate milk. "It's a deal. Let's seal it with some ice cream, yeah? There's that place that has it homemade over on High, close to the park? I figure Guinness ice cream isn't going to hurt anyone."
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