[Kora] Late afternoon on a bright clear day. Cold, too. The weekend's brief heat wave was followed by a series of storms, constant flood warnings on the radio for outlying areas, creeks and storm drains rising out of their banks - cold, flooding rains, all, that turned the lake and the sky into one cold gray mass. This is the reward: the impossibly blue sky, the huge sun now meandering westward, bright enough to give the illusion of warmth. In the street's quiet shadows, though, the air is sharply cool, damp still from yesterday's rains.
The great facade of the church is bathed in the sun's late afternoon brilliance, the light just enough to warm the stone. The trees and brambles surrounding the long abandoned structure are beginning to green up. The forsythia has long since bloomed, now its slender branches are the bright green of new growth, tangled amidst the great mass of weedy growth. There are buds on the other trees and vines; mostly still furled, but giving them a halo of green around the edges. Somewhere deep in the mass - in the midst of an old, long-overgrown garden - daffodils push up through the mud, and a Bartlett pear tree blooms bright white.
The gate in the chainlink fence is wide open. The sidewalk is still damp, and there are a few puddles in the shadows of the portico. The big doors are closed, of course, keeping out some of the chill. One of the residents - the pregnant one - is sitting out on the front porch, pale face lifted toward the afternoon sun. She's leaning back on her elbows, long legs stretched out down the front steps, boots dark against the gray stone, eyes closed, soaking in the spring sun.
[Nash] And here comes Bessie.
No one has actually referred to the early-90s model Ford Ranger by this name aloud yet, yet so far as anyone who has gazed upon her is concerned, that is the vehicle with the Alabama plate's name. Her owner has been dragging his feet insofar as getting new license plates and changing his address has gone, as though by some bizarre chance he was going to turn out to not be the father of the rumored Cub who has been wandering around Chicago for months, now.
Spirits have very limited sense of time. Many of them don't understand linear relationships or chronology. One would think he would have grasped this readily; yet his mother was a Forseti, not a Godi.
Regardless, he has to stay, now, and that truck still coughs and wheezes as he drives. It pulls onto the block, and Kora can likely hear it before she sees it, though she might not recognize it, yet. That truck is a piece of shit, though it isn't, by some standards, That Old.
It's like its owner.
It pulls up to the curb, Nash having healed sufficiently to be able to parallel park without a twinge of pain or a sudden spasm causing him to smack up onto the curb. The manual transmission truck is skillfully parallel parked, and he gets out, pocketing his keys and hauling out of the cab a drink tray from Dairy Queen. It contains two Blizzards. He holds it in his left hand, using his right--the wrist confined to a pharmacy-bought neoprene splint while it finishes healing--to lock and close the door.
A pause for traffic, and he moseys across the street, letting himself up onto the curb and through the gate.
"Howdy!" he calls, boots thumping against the concrete as he draws closer. It's not warm enough for him to consider lounging in what little sun there is; the long-haired kinsman still wears a leather jacket. "Workin' on your tan?"
[Kora] Neither the coughing, wheezing engine nor the back and forth of Nash's parallel parking are enough to bring her alive. When the car door slams shut, though, the pregnant Skald cracks open her right eye, peers through the sun's glare at the streetscape. In the space of another breath, she has both eyes open, and watches Nash cross the street from beneath the shadow of pale lashes, still squinting against the glare.
She is sitting up when he reaches the base of the steps, pulling her feet back up to plant her heels on the flat edge of a stone step three steps down, dusting off her hands as she leans forward, resting her elbows on her thighs. When he's close enough to speak, she offers him a narrow half-smile, somewhat wry but aware.
"Never managed to find that middle ground, yeah? Between stark-white and red-as-a-boiled-lobster." The half smile lingers at the corners of her generous mouth, but the rest of her face is lost in shadow as she leans forward, dark eyes gleaming with faint threads of reflected light. "It's been gray for so long, though, I'm glad to see the sun."
There's a pause there; a lacuna as she flickers a look at him, up and down. Looking for blood, maybe. Or assessing the state of his recovery in a single, watchful glance. "Good to see the world's longest meeting didn't drive you off, though."
[Nash] In that pause, Nash works himself down onto the step one below her; either it's a subconscious thing, keeping himself lower than the Trueborn female, or he's attempting to compensate for the scant few inches of height he has over her. He's long and fairly lean, giving off a greater impression of being tall than he actually possesses. That isn't to say he's not tall, but he is not as tall as he looks.
He sets the tray of milkshake concoctions between them, and rolls his shoulders as if to work out a kink. The right arm rests on his knee, and he gives her his gaze.
"The concussion I had and the Vicodin the Doc got for my arm certainly helped," he says, of the world's longest meeting. "I don't remember a damn thing from that meeting."
[Kora] "Not a damn thing?" she returns, pale brows lifting in fine arches about her shadowed eyes. Her expressive mouth is still; set into its neutral position, a faint curve that makes her seem as if she were always on the verge of smiling. Now, she just twists up one corner of her mouth, wry, her dark-eyed attention steady. "Not even flipping off the grand elder?"
Some hint of bemusement wraps itself into her words; braids itself into the quiet spaces between them.
Then she tips her chin toward the blizzards in the cupholder. "First in share to the greatest in station, yeah?" That's quiet, humor at the forefront, though it's a still sort of humor, reserved, dry. "What flavors?"
Sunlight hits her shoulders, pulls out the secondary colors in the weave of her oversized gray swearshirt. It was make for a man or woman who came by his girth by eating Chicago's delicacies - hot dogs, deep dish pizza. Endless beer - and so although it fits well over her swollen stomach, the shoulders are too wide, the arms voluminous.
She has pushed the cuffs up over her forearms, rolled them so that they do not slide far, and beneath those oversized rolled up cuffs the sleeves of a pale green cotton tee fit closely to her skin.
[Nash] There's a brief moment where it seems as though he believes her when she claims that he ended up flipping off the Grand Elder; brief, yet no so scarce that it escapes notice. He stares at her in suppressed horror for a few seconds, then cracks a grin and shakes his head, about the time she's indicating the huge cups of frozen dairy product.
"Didn't take you for a leg-puller," he says.
Her humor persists when the conversation drifts to the matter of the share. Nash, who's got some sort of gum in his mouth that does not require constant gnawing, is mid-reactivation of the nicotine-infused rubber when she asks, leaving him grinning while chewing. All he does is flick his eyebrows, as if to confirm her suspicions, and then the question of flavors.
"One of 'em's got some sort'a candy in it," he says. "Peanut butter cups or somethin'. Other one's chocolate-covered cherry."
Nash doesn't move to let more sunlight hit his flesh. He doesn't need to: if he hails from the land that bears its name on his truck's license plates, he undoubtedly soaked up a considerable amount of sunlight before making the trip north. It persists on his skin, which is deeply tanned even after the winter Chicago just endured. It's bleached out his hair. The stubble on his face is salt-and-peppered, the white existing prominently on his jaws where it does not have neighbors in the blond atop his head.
"It ever gonna get warm?" he asks.
[Kora] She makes a sound in the back of her throat, a barely voiced laugh returned through closed lips so that it sounds like no more than a quiet hmm. The steadiness lingers, but when he calls her out for pulling his leg her curving mouth twists briefly wide and she looks up and away, toward the bright, cloud-scattered sky.
There is a huff of breath, but she does not look back down until he explains the flavors. Candy. Chocolate covered cherry. She pushes up the falling cuffs of her sleeves again, then reaches to examine each blizzard through the cloudy plastic translucence of the lids, picking the peanut-butter one for herself, lifting it up and out in an ironic echo of a toast.
"Cheers," she tells him by way of thanks, already pulling up the lid with long, sure fingers, easing the spoon stuck deep into the ice cream back out with a certain precision. A specific fastidiousness that he may well read as animal.
The spoon's halfway out when he remains on the weather; she returns his question with a soft snort. "I fostered at Hjaltland in the north Atlantic, yeah? This is warm." She pauses, here, lifting her chin in his direction. "But yeah. No worries. Come summer it'll be fucking sweltering."
Her gaze drops to the surface of her ice cream as she stirs up the candy pieces. Then glances back at him through the scrim of pale lashes, dark eyes touching on his jaw before finding his gaze. "You find your kid yet?"
[Nash] By the time summer rolls around, it'll be sweltering. Nash considers this, or else considers the propriety of firing a wad of nicotine gum into the shrubbery around the steps of a former church. Rather than unleashing bacteria-laden rubber into holy earth, the kinsman reaches into his pocket for the plastic sheet he'd drawn it from in the first place and sticks it back in the reservoir. There are seven untouched blisters in the pack. He folds the popped bit of foil back over the hole, crams it in his pocket, and picks up the fruit-and-chocolate concoction left behind by the pregnant Skald.
He find his kid yet, she wants to know, and the kinsman looks over at her, his face betraying minimal emotion. Right hand is charged with keeping his cup still while his dominant hand moves the spoon through the cup's innards.
"Yeah," Nash says, in that lazy, letter-accentuating manner of his. "That little bird spirit wasn't lyin'."
[Kora] "Gwen?" Kora returns, dark eyes sharp on his face, now, the red plastic spoon marooned in the midst of the ice cream. "Or the kitty-hat girl? What's her name. Jocelyn."
[Nash] "Jocelyn?" he says, as though the very idea caused him to suffer heart palpitations. "Jesus Christ, I'd have myself castrated if she was my fault."
[Kora] That earns him another half-voiced laugh, accompanied by a supple twist of her expressive mouth. Her amusement is mostly subliminal, contained inside her body, held back somehow, but that instinct toward control is frayed and twisted by the hormones flooding her bloodstream; by the too-often unspent rage that spikes through the feral part of her changing soul.
"Gwen's a good kid," the Skald offers, musing. Mostly background. It's all she can say about the future-Forseti. She does not know the girl well. Still, a quiet glance here, sweeping back down the steps to the horrified kinsman. "She'll do right by you."
Then her dark eyes lift beyond Nash's rough gray(ing) beard, his blond hair made brighter by the cold spring sun, to the truck he's packed across the street. Visible between the rusting diamonds of the old chain-link fence.
A thoughtful line appears between her brows. The stirring slows, and she reaches to catch a stray drip of ice cream from the lip of the cup with the meat of her thumb - this without looking - and glances back toward him.
"You working this afternoon?"
The great facade of the church is bathed in the sun's late afternoon brilliance, the light just enough to warm the stone. The trees and brambles surrounding the long abandoned structure are beginning to green up. The forsythia has long since bloomed, now its slender branches are the bright green of new growth, tangled amidst the great mass of weedy growth. There are buds on the other trees and vines; mostly still furled, but giving them a halo of green around the edges. Somewhere deep in the mass - in the midst of an old, long-overgrown garden - daffodils push up through the mud, and a Bartlett pear tree blooms bright white.
The gate in the chainlink fence is wide open. The sidewalk is still damp, and there are a few puddles in the shadows of the portico. The big doors are closed, of course, keeping out some of the chill. One of the residents - the pregnant one - is sitting out on the front porch, pale face lifted toward the afternoon sun. She's leaning back on her elbows, long legs stretched out down the front steps, boots dark against the gray stone, eyes closed, soaking in the spring sun.
[Nash] And here comes Bessie.
No one has actually referred to the early-90s model Ford Ranger by this name aloud yet, yet so far as anyone who has gazed upon her is concerned, that is the vehicle with the Alabama plate's name. Her owner has been dragging his feet insofar as getting new license plates and changing his address has gone, as though by some bizarre chance he was going to turn out to not be the father of the rumored Cub who has been wandering around Chicago for months, now.
Spirits have very limited sense of time. Many of them don't understand linear relationships or chronology. One would think he would have grasped this readily; yet his mother was a Forseti, not a Godi.
Regardless, he has to stay, now, and that truck still coughs and wheezes as he drives. It pulls onto the block, and Kora can likely hear it before she sees it, though she might not recognize it, yet. That truck is a piece of shit, though it isn't, by some standards, That Old.
It's like its owner.
It pulls up to the curb, Nash having healed sufficiently to be able to parallel park without a twinge of pain or a sudden spasm causing him to smack up onto the curb. The manual transmission truck is skillfully parallel parked, and he gets out, pocketing his keys and hauling out of the cab a drink tray from Dairy Queen. It contains two Blizzards. He holds it in his left hand, using his right--the wrist confined to a pharmacy-bought neoprene splint while it finishes healing--to lock and close the door.
A pause for traffic, and he moseys across the street, letting himself up onto the curb and through the gate.
"Howdy!" he calls, boots thumping against the concrete as he draws closer. It's not warm enough for him to consider lounging in what little sun there is; the long-haired kinsman still wears a leather jacket. "Workin' on your tan?"
[Kora] Neither the coughing, wheezing engine nor the back and forth of Nash's parallel parking are enough to bring her alive. When the car door slams shut, though, the pregnant Skald cracks open her right eye, peers through the sun's glare at the streetscape. In the space of another breath, she has both eyes open, and watches Nash cross the street from beneath the shadow of pale lashes, still squinting against the glare.
She is sitting up when he reaches the base of the steps, pulling her feet back up to plant her heels on the flat edge of a stone step three steps down, dusting off her hands as she leans forward, resting her elbows on her thighs. When he's close enough to speak, she offers him a narrow half-smile, somewhat wry but aware.
"Never managed to find that middle ground, yeah? Between stark-white and red-as-a-boiled-lobster." The half smile lingers at the corners of her generous mouth, but the rest of her face is lost in shadow as she leans forward, dark eyes gleaming with faint threads of reflected light. "It's been gray for so long, though, I'm glad to see the sun."
There's a pause there; a lacuna as she flickers a look at him, up and down. Looking for blood, maybe. Or assessing the state of his recovery in a single, watchful glance. "Good to see the world's longest meeting didn't drive you off, though."
[Nash] In that pause, Nash works himself down onto the step one below her; either it's a subconscious thing, keeping himself lower than the Trueborn female, or he's attempting to compensate for the scant few inches of height he has over her. He's long and fairly lean, giving off a greater impression of being tall than he actually possesses. That isn't to say he's not tall, but he is not as tall as he looks.
He sets the tray of milkshake concoctions between them, and rolls his shoulders as if to work out a kink. The right arm rests on his knee, and he gives her his gaze.
"The concussion I had and the Vicodin the Doc got for my arm certainly helped," he says, of the world's longest meeting. "I don't remember a damn thing from that meeting."
[Kora] "Not a damn thing?" she returns, pale brows lifting in fine arches about her shadowed eyes. Her expressive mouth is still; set into its neutral position, a faint curve that makes her seem as if she were always on the verge of smiling. Now, she just twists up one corner of her mouth, wry, her dark-eyed attention steady. "Not even flipping off the grand elder?"
Some hint of bemusement wraps itself into her words; braids itself into the quiet spaces between them.
Then she tips her chin toward the blizzards in the cupholder. "First in share to the greatest in station, yeah?" That's quiet, humor at the forefront, though it's a still sort of humor, reserved, dry. "What flavors?"
Sunlight hits her shoulders, pulls out the secondary colors in the weave of her oversized gray swearshirt. It was make for a man or woman who came by his girth by eating Chicago's delicacies - hot dogs, deep dish pizza. Endless beer - and so although it fits well over her swollen stomach, the shoulders are too wide, the arms voluminous.
She has pushed the cuffs up over her forearms, rolled them so that they do not slide far, and beneath those oversized rolled up cuffs the sleeves of a pale green cotton tee fit closely to her skin.
[Nash] There's a brief moment where it seems as though he believes her when she claims that he ended up flipping off the Grand Elder; brief, yet no so scarce that it escapes notice. He stares at her in suppressed horror for a few seconds, then cracks a grin and shakes his head, about the time she's indicating the huge cups of frozen dairy product.
"Didn't take you for a leg-puller," he says.
Her humor persists when the conversation drifts to the matter of the share. Nash, who's got some sort of gum in his mouth that does not require constant gnawing, is mid-reactivation of the nicotine-infused rubber when she asks, leaving him grinning while chewing. All he does is flick his eyebrows, as if to confirm her suspicions, and then the question of flavors.
"One of 'em's got some sort'a candy in it," he says. "Peanut butter cups or somethin'. Other one's chocolate-covered cherry."
Nash doesn't move to let more sunlight hit his flesh. He doesn't need to: if he hails from the land that bears its name on his truck's license plates, he undoubtedly soaked up a considerable amount of sunlight before making the trip north. It persists on his skin, which is deeply tanned even after the winter Chicago just endured. It's bleached out his hair. The stubble on his face is salt-and-peppered, the white existing prominently on his jaws where it does not have neighbors in the blond atop his head.
"It ever gonna get warm?" he asks.
[Kora] She makes a sound in the back of her throat, a barely voiced laugh returned through closed lips so that it sounds like no more than a quiet hmm. The steadiness lingers, but when he calls her out for pulling his leg her curving mouth twists briefly wide and she looks up and away, toward the bright, cloud-scattered sky.
There is a huff of breath, but she does not look back down until he explains the flavors. Candy. Chocolate covered cherry. She pushes up the falling cuffs of her sleeves again, then reaches to examine each blizzard through the cloudy plastic translucence of the lids, picking the peanut-butter one for herself, lifting it up and out in an ironic echo of a toast.
"Cheers," she tells him by way of thanks, already pulling up the lid with long, sure fingers, easing the spoon stuck deep into the ice cream back out with a certain precision. A specific fastidiousness that he may well read as animal.
The spoon's halfway out when he remains on the weather; she returns his question with a soft snort. "I fostered at Hjaltland in the north Atlantic, yeah? This is warm." She pauses, here, lifting her chin in his direction. "But yeah. No worries. Come summer it'll be fucking sweltering."
Her gaze drops to the surface of her ice cream as she stirs up the candy pieces. Then glances back at him through the scrim of pale lashes, dark eyes touching on his jaw before finding his gaze. "You find your kid yet?"
[Nash] By the time summer rolls around, it'll be sweltering. Nash considers this, or else considers the propriety of firing a wad of nicotine gum into the shrubbery around the steps of a former church. Rather than unleashing bacteria-laden rubber into holy earth, the kinsman reaches into his pocket for the plastic sheet he'd drawn it from in the first place and sticks it back in the reservoir. There are seven untouched blisters in the pack. He folds the popped bit of foil back over the hole, crams it in his pocket, and picks up the fruit-and-chocolate concoction left behind by the pregnant Skald.
He find his kid yet, she wants to know, and the kinsman looks over at her, his face betraying minimal emotion. Right hand is charged with keeping his cup still while his dominant hand moves the spoon through the cup's innards.
"Yeah," Nash says, in that lazy, letter-accentuating manner of his. "That little bird spirit wasn't lyin'."
[Kora] "Gwen?" Kora returns, dark eyes sharp on his face, now, the red plastic spoon marooned in the midst of the ice cream. "Or the kitty-hat girl? What's her name. Jocelyn."
[Nash] "Jocelyn?" he says, as though the very idea caused him to suffer heart palpitations. "Jesus Christ, I'd have myself castrated if she was my fault."
[Kora] That earns him another half-voiced laugh, accompanied by a supple twist of her expressive mouth. Her amusement is mostly subliminal, contained inside her body, held back somehow, but that instinct toward control is frayed and twisted by the hormones flooding her bloodstream; by the too-often unspent rage that spikes through the feral part of her changing soul.
"Gwen's a good kid," the Skald offers, musing. Mostly background. It's all she can say about the future-Forseti. She does not know the girl well. Still, a quiet glance here, sweeping back down the steps to the horrified kinsman. "She'll do right by you."
Then her dark eyes lift beyond Nash's rough gray(ing) beard, his blond hair made brighter by the cold spring sun, to the truck he's packed across the street. Visible between the rusting diamonds of the old chain-link fence.
A thoughtful line appears between her brows. The stirring slows, and she reaches to catch a stray drip of ice cream from the lip of the cup with the meat of her thumb - this without looking - and glances back toward him.
"You working this afternoon?"
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