[Kora] The hour is late, the dark heart of the night when some semblance of stillness – though never silence – coalesces through the city. The bars are closing, the after-hours clubs slowly filling up, but otherwise the streets are silent and still. Here and there a few late-night wanderers circle through Grant Park, always well lit – linger beneath the great gleaming lines in the fountain square, or wander down the otherwise empty walking paths that cut through copses of well-tended trees now beginning to bud and to bloom, that hug the U-shaped curve of the lake here.
It was raining earlier. The paths are damp, puddles gleam in the low, still light and the sky is clotted with clouds. Without the stars and the moon visible, with the low mass of moving orange clouds overhead, the great expanse of the lake feels more claustrophobic, as if it were some dark expanse of nameless water underground rather than a huge, living thing, open to the sky.
There’s still rain in the air, that ozone scent, both a remnant of the last storm and promise of another one. It was raining earlier. It will rain again soon. The lampposts here are ironworked, meant to evoke Chicago’s industrial golden age – gasworks and brick and iron – and the fitful light they shed is deliberate, flicking as gaslights would have, years ago.
There are a trio of teenagers down the way – barely visible, their shouts damped by distance, humidity, darkness – throwing stones over the retaining wall into the lake. There is, also, a solitary creature seated on the back of a stone bench, her feet firm on the seat, hunched over so that her spine defines the letter C against the darkness, her forearms planted firmly on her thighs, a bottle wrapped in brown paper on the bench beside her boots. Her clothes are dark, recede in the shadows, but her skin is pale, and glows.
The flickering light catches out colors in her damp hair, loose down her back. It was raining earlier, and her hair is dark with it, except where the faux-gaslight pulls out other colors. It will rain again soon, but she doesn’t care.
[Trent Brumby] His car is parked in an area where it's normally full during the day, but lies relatively empty other then a handful of others. It's not the best night to go for a walk, it's been raining and it's muggy and warm, but Trent is out in his black slacks and equally dark t.shirt. It defines him in the way it's meant to, to intimidate, to show strength and keep a visual reminder to those seeking to drink too much or cause strife, that he is there to toss them out and break up fights. But that being said, it doesn't hug him like a second skin, it's worn comfortably, like those black boots his wearing.
Jacket left in the car, he's walking along the path, detouring around larger puddles and walking through those that are small and shallow. He can hear the kids further on and was on his way to casually move past that way, checking for some trouble, but he comes across Kora first. He knows her. He knows the way she sits, the way her hair hangs and the clothes she wears. He knows the way she smiles, the way her eyes look in both light and darkness, and the way her mouth feels. He knows the way her body curls, not also in the shape it is now, but the way he can drape, tantalize and share its heat. In some ways he knows that, in others, he's imagination is so vivid that it almost becomes knowledge.
Approaching, slower, so not to startle the Garou - a feat that is unlikely but not impossible, he calls out to her quietly, "Kora?"
[Kora] He knows the way she sits. He knows the way she keeps her shoulders straight, her spine level. He knows the way her hair spills down her back, the way she wears her clothes, close to her narrow frame. He knows the set of her eyes in her face, the subtle curve of her mouth that is its most neutral expression. He knows the pallor of her northern skin, but has not seen it like this – starched in the darkness, so white that he might imagine she had been exsanguinated. He knows how dark her eyes are, but they are darker now, stark with shadow and far too dry.
Close enough, he can see the articulations of her spine defined through the dark cotton of her t-shirt. He says her name, careful, and she turns her head, pale hair pulling against her clothing. The t-shirt is black, and does not show the blood. It is stiff with it, against her abdomen as she sits up, pale as a ghost, utterly stricken, her cheeks wet from the rain, and the rain only.
Her voice sounds as if it had been scoured by steel wool, then wrapped in threadbare velvet. "My alpha died." That's all she says. He can read everything else in the shape of her body; in the darkness in her eyes.
[Trent Brumby] There's plenty to the Garou that he does not understand. But he does understand the importance of pack, and the importance of pack to Kora. Once, she had hinted at how it felt to have the pack, being here in Chicago. The death of anyone is hard, and he imagines, that the death of a pack member is much like loosing part of your immediate family. An Alpha being the head of it.
He walks over and climbs up to sit next to her, but with a polite distance between. As much as he'd like to wrap her in an arm, hug her closer, it's not about what he wants and Kora isn't the easiest to read. Garou are terribly temperamental. He sits on the back, like she does, putting wet boots on the seat while being mindful of the bottle in the paper bag.
"I'm sorry to hear that," he offers, quietly.
[Kora] The paper bag is damp from the rain, but the bottle inside is unopened. She smells of rain, the ozone of a storm promised on the horizon. Underneath that, she smells faintly of blood - the copper scent of sorrow. The creature's dark eyes remain on him as he walks over, as he climbs up to sit beside her. When he is seated at last, she drops her head in a low, swinging arc - and looks back out toward the dark mirror of the lake.
"His name was Kemp Oates. He - " she swallows back whatever word should come next, swallows consulsively against it, sitting parallel to him, her body curving forward again, the line of her spine delineated against her dark tee where the tangle of her damp hair does not hide it. She swallows her words; eats them, like a sibyl. She has been to the underworld and returned. This time, he did not. She swallows her words, and begins again. "Do you remember when you said you would remember me?"
[Kora] The paper bag is damp from the rain, but the bottle inside is unopened. She smells of rain, the ozone of a storm promised on the horizon. Underneath that, she smells faintly of blood - the copper scent of sorrow. The creature's dark eyes remain on him as he walks over, as he climbs up to sit beside her. When he is seated at last, she drops her head in a low, swinging arc - and looks back out toward the dark mirror of the lake.
"His name was Kemp Oates. He - " she swallows back whatever word should come next, swallows consulsively against it, sitting parallel to him, her body curving forward again, the line of her spine delineated against her dark tee where the tangle of her damp hair does not hide it. She swallows her words; eats them, like a sibyl. She has been to the underworld and returned. This time, he did not. "Do you remember when you said you would remember me?"
[Trent Brumby] As she looks off towards the water, Trent does too. He leans his forearms into his thighs with his hands hanging between his knees. His back is straight and his shoulders broad; he doesn't curve like she does, being lines and angles. While he listens to her, he continues to look forward, except for the part where she stalls and chokes on the words. He looks at her then, taking in her side profile with his pale eyes.
And he's still looking at her when she asks him that question. "I do," he tells her quietly and without hesitation. Of course he remembers. Drunk he might have been, or well on his way to it, he still remembers saying that to a Garou, and had full intentions of keeping that word.
[Kora] The look she casts him is sidelong; she cheats her head sideways, still mostly in profile, her features defined by the line of her nose, the curve of her cheek, the shape of her mouth in that moment rather than the strong line of her jaw. When she meets his pale gaze, her own dark eyes are raw as cut onions, naked as a cloudless sky.
And her voice is like wood pulp, soft, splintered. "Remember him, instead."
[Trent Brumby] "As well," he tells her, pausing as he looks away from her raw gaze, finding it hard to meet. "I will remember him as well."
Dropping his head, he looks down to his hands before pushing off his thighs to sit upright. His hands take his forearms place, fingers grasping the solid length of his thigh, down by the knee. He braces himself there easily, unnecessarily. "Do you want to tell me about him?" If he's going to remember Kemp, a Garou he does not know but means a lot to the one he's sitting beside, he wanted to know about him. But it wasn't a push, it was also meant to be an outlet for her grief.
[Kora] He looks away; her gaze falls to his hands, his thighs. In three-quarter profile, she stares, her mouth open, her breathing steady, slow and shallow, narrow shoulders moving faintly with every breath. Momentarily wordless, she nods her agreement - then turns her face again to the dark expanse of the lake, the lights of the city reflected in the dark, choppy mirror of its surface, dampened by distance and the moisture in the air.
"Yeah," she says then. Quiet, as if the word were an experiment whose outcome remained uncertain. " - yeah."
Much as he did, she straightens, breathing more deeply - in through the nose, out through her just-parted lips - deliberately so, to lift herself upward through the torso and the shoulders. Every muscle in her lean frame is taut, there is a kind of withheld expectancy about her, some terrible energy, so tightly leashed - but all she does it sit still, open her hands wide, and push the base of her palms down the length of her thigh before leaning forward again.
"He didn’t have a family," she tells him, quiet. "He didn’t have a mate. He just had a kid he never knew, and the Caern."
"He had the Doc. He had us." This is a story. This is a life that is turning into a story. It is the only story inside her, now, and it is both too small and too large for her body. She tells it leaning forward, her arms braced, her narrow frame defined and apart, as if she had been cut out of the world with an exacto knife and then superimposed over it once more.
"Silence pulled him from behind a dumpster when he was fourteen. Some fucking place - " her momentary frustration - that she does not know the name, that she cannot name the place - so evident, then. " - in New Jersey. Foster kid. Runaway fifteen times over. Two weeks later, Silence scared him into his first change. I think - " she pauses, looks up with a stretch of her chin, her neck, " - I was graduating high school, then.
"Trent. He was younger than me."
[Trent Brumby] He listens to her every word, the way she says it and the frustrated pauses between. His gaze had returned to her, watching the way her mouth offers words and how her expression shifts. The more she tells him, the more he knows about Kemp. It's only a story now, her memories and knowledge of him passed on to another. Trent will never know Kemp outside of what is told him; at least not now. This is how heroes are remembered, no matter how great or small. No matter how they started or how life ended, this is how they are remembered - through word of mouth. If only humanity understood what these Garou, part people, sacrifice.
He's thinking these things as he's listening, and when Kora mentions that Kemp was younger than Kora, he looks at her directly. "Age doesn't play a part. The Goddess knows when it's time." He tells her this like he knows its true. It's his faith and the way he was raised. Without faith and hope life, Kinfolk have nothing but stories, like this, of death. The world is ugly enough without the faith that Trent offers her now, whether or not she agrees with it. "You do what you can while you are here, and it's different for everyone, Kora." His words are quiet still, not gentle, but quiet.
[Kora] She looks up again when he says her name, looks up at him, her mouth open, her breath a shallow cycle now, defined by the faint movement of her shoulders and chest. For the first time in two long nights, her dark eyes shine with unshed tears. There is a moment between breaths when she is unutterably still.
Then she nods once, mutely, wordlessly.
"He raised the Caern," she resumes, her voice still raw, still low. This time, she does holds Trent's pale gaze and does not look away. Each word is made quiet and sure, solid as a river-smoothed rock. " - and when Silence left, he stayed. He was an Adren, and I'm just a Cliath. When I came here, he offered me hospitality and I never left. He made a catapult to throw snow balls at other Garou. He loved a girl and gave her away to see her smile. I'm going to do his rite. I'm going to tell his story. I'm going to turn him from something living into something legend. No one else who comes here is going to know him. They'll just know him the way I know the other graves there - the glory, the sacrifice. Not the rest of it.
"That's what I'm going to do. That's what She expects of me."
[Trent Brumby] Lifting a hand from his thigh, he reached across and lay it onto her back. It's tentative at first, because he doesn't know how she's going to take it, and providing there's no growls, or moving away, he runs his wide palm and long fingers up and down her back slowly. His hand squeezes her shoulder lightly. "He sounds as though he had good heart as well as great courage."
"He sounds like an inspiration." That's what he gets from this conversation. Kemp wasn't only Kora's Alpha, but she looked up to him a great deal. He could see why, too. "And you will tell his story well."
There's a longer pause, where Trent's hand has come to rest just there, between her shoulder blades. "I am sorry for your loss." He doesn't say it like he had to Adam, about the other Furies, because he's more involved in this. He's far closer to Kora and her pain then the Sisters that keep him at arms length. Trent is emotionally invested with the Garou beside him. There's no detachment. He is sorry for her loss. In fact, he adds: "I'm sorry for everyone's loss." Because this Kemp seems to be a very large, important part of the Garou society.
[Kora] Every one of the long muscles lining her spine are taut beneath his hand as he moves it up and down her spine. She breathes out once, a sharp exhalation of air when he first makes tentative contact, alive to the possibility that she could pull away, could turn on him, could snarl some feral refusal, some snapped negation. There is a moment, then, when he can feel the lashed line of her body contracting beneath his touch, but that is all. She doesn't growl. She doesn't pull away. She does move closer to him. She just sits there, watching him, watching mouth move as he speaks to her; watching the dark shadow of her reflection in his pale eyes. Watching the light smear in the periphery of her vision, as her focus narrows to the stark space between them.
He can feel the ridged articulations of her vertebrae. Her t-shirt is damp from the rain, her hair is tangled and wet. Her shoulders are rounded forward, the deltoid a tense knot beneath his hand when he squeezes her shoulder. There is a band of tendon evident between her jaw and cheek, working somewhere beneath her skin. Her pulse beats fast at the bast of her throat, as if she had been running this whole time, rather than telling a story she has told herself too many times in the last two nights, to far too many grieving people.
He touches her, and she is watching him, her dark eyes bright with tears she refuses to shed. Perhaps it is simply not in her to cry.
"We're going to the - " she pauses, her mouth flattening over the word she must know will be unfamiliar to him. " - to a place where we can see his last battle. Fight it again, so we know what happened, soon. My pack."
What remains of it.
"So we know." A beat. "We'll come back, after."
[Trent Brumby] When she moves closer to him, it's a sign of trust and he takes it that she's inviting his comfort. His hand is more sure then, and his own tension leaks away. He's glad, then, that he's done the right thing. Fingers gather her hair, just a little, glancing towards the blond as he smooths the tangles together; he doesn't try to unknot it. It leaves more of her back free, for smooth sailing of his hand.
He looks back to her when she's talking. There's compassion in his eyes, but worry leaks in at the mention of witnessing his last battle. "Is there a danger to you?" It's his first thought. He doesn't imagine its anything like television. He can't imagine where one can go to visit something that has already passed. Maybe it was time travel. Trent doesn't ask.
[Kora] "No - " she tells him, her voice low, still raw with grief but intent, certain, her eyes shining in the dim light and flickering shadows of the artful streetlamps here. " - when you die there, you wake up, just outside. It's like a dream you can repeat over and over and over." Her instinct is not, however, to reassure him, to dampen the faint thread of worry in his eyes with a companionable lie. I'll be fine. Instead, she leans forward, lifts her chin in his direction, her tangled hair pulling across the knuckles of his hand as he rubs her back.
"We'll hunt, when we come back. So he has trophies. So the Valkyries and the hosts in Valhalla read his deeds in the them." Her eyes are fast on his face as she tells him this. The tears are still there, still unshed. They aren't for herself, though. Or, perhaps, anyone now. Not even for him.
There's a moment where her gaze falls from his eyes to his mouth. The night is still around them, except for the movement of his arm as he rubs her back. Even the breeze has died down; the teenagers have shouted their last, wandered further in search of greater amusement. Traffic on the loop is a low hum, washed with rain that has come and gone and will soon come again.
Then, quietly, very deliberately, she says, "Take me home. Tonight."
[Trent Brumby] He doesn't know about the ways of the Get of Fenris, but he listens to their plans and the way they want to send their deceased off. It's a lovely thought, in the way they care and in the details. He's not sure if he'd want to relive a battle in which he lost a loved one. Maybe, though, if he wasn't there in the beginning - just maybe he would. He had given a small nod, as she watched him, telling him about Valhalla and their intentions.
Around his mouth the hair is short, carefully looked after, like that across his jaw. While he liked to wear hair there, perhaps a reminder of how masculine he is in the face of his Tribe, it was rarely sloppy and overgrown. Trimmed, neat, and added to his gruff charms. His had a haircut recently too, the sides shorter than the rest, and the top no longer threatening to curl over. That split is pretty much gone, like the bruise on his cheek.
"Okay." He nods again, meeting her eyes. His hand slips down from her back and he pushes off the chair. Boots hit the ground, one after the other, as he steps down onto the ground. Turning to her, he offered out his hand, palm up. The other picked up her bottle, which he'd carry. "Come on. Have you ever had your hair washed by a man?" There's a small smile at the edge of his mouth. It's something he can do for her, wants to do, in fact. Something intimate and caring. Besides, it needed a wash.
[Kora] She slides easily from the back of the bench, her own booted feet hitting the ground with a soft slap seconds after his. Then, deliberately, she takes his hand, palm down. She wears the same bracelets she always wears - a half-dozen or more on either wrist, which she perhaps never removes - but the traces of black polish usually evident, in some state or other of decay - have largely flaked away. There's no blood on her hands, but there are traces of it under her nails, so dark as to be black. And when she stands, the bloodstains are evident in her black cotton t-shirt, stiff hem, and in patches over her midriff.
There is a fleeting glance over her shoulder as she rises, back down the path lined with artful lights, the city's attempt at romantic historicism. Then her shining dark eyes return to his eyes, his mouth, the faint smile at the corner of it as he offers to wash her hair. Her pulse was already fast; he could see it in her throat, the force of her grief charged with her rage, with the sorrow she has shared with her pack and her tribe, amplified and echoed by their connections, sparked by the particularities of her office in it all. It quickens further with his question, though she could not articulate why.
"No." Her brows lift, heralding the shift of her attention from his mouth to his eyes. She holds his gaze, carefully articulate, giving each syllable its due deference, the movement of her mouth around the words clear and precise. There is the most minute shake of her pale head. "I haven't."
Then, her grip tightens around his hand. "I want you to." She is strong, though her body wears her strength differently than his does - in the long, lean muscles that flank her spine and her abdomen, in her long legs, in the possibility of movement written into them. Her grip tightens on his hand, and she pulls herself closer to him; or pulls him closer to her. Somehow, they are closer, and she is standing on the balls of her feet to kiss him.
The smiling corner of his mouth, the scratchy edge of his rough jaw. Then the whole of his mouth.
When she kissed him before she was smiling. Tonight, she is half-drowning, and the even the kiss has a stark edge to it, wild. She doesn't want to devour him; she wants to step outside of her skin, crawl her way into his - to be outside of herself for a moment, or an hour.
[Trent Brumby] His hand is warm and his fingers are a lot thicker then hers, less bones, more substance. He doesn't have any callouses, despite that he has been working with his hands in the past, including the recent past. Trent is careful about some things, his grooming is very careful, very... metro-sexual. This includes care of hands and fingernails, which are blunt and short. He tightens his hand in return, slighter then her grip still, and steps in closer to her.
Her kisses make him inhale through his nose, quickening the beat of his heart in an instant, and has his arm, with the bottle in hand, slide around her waist. The forearm embraces her side, presses her closer in, slowly, not suddenly. He kisses her back, slower, but deeply. It's less about exploring her and more about comfort. If she could crawl inside his skin, he'd keep her safe.
It's probably he that breaks off, but not too soon, and with kisses from her mouth to cheek. "My car's close," he's murmuring faintly against her skin. As his warm mouth ceases traveling across her skin, his eyes are opened, head close enough for his brow to be a hairs breadth from hers. "I'll take you somewhere warm." It's a promise of that comfort, if only for awhile, before she has to run off again and face the world. Before she has to come back to herself.
[Kora] He can still feel the hinged tension of her body against his; the taut muscles of her abdomen and her lower back against her arms, the tension in her jaw and cheek as his mouth travels across her skin, as she holds herself - still, again - just back from him, stiff except where her mouth touches him, where his breath warms her skin. His eyes open, but hers remain closed. She holds her chin forward, her face still against his, her mouth open, her breathing clear, clarified, hushed and deliberate, so even that she might be counting each one against some invisible time keeper in her body. The beat of her heart, or the throb of her pulse.
"Okay," she says, standing close, not embracing him except where she holds his firm hand. Her grip is harder than it should be, would leave bruises on someone less solid than he is. Her eyes are still closed, her nose close to his cheek, her mouth open against his stubbled cheek. Her chin drops slowly, by feel, to the line of his jaw. Then she leans in, touches his skin with her teeth before pulling away. "Okay."
If grief had a scent, it would be bitter almonds, ash, the white pith of a fruit more seed than flesh. When she pulls away, her cheeks are wet. It isn't raining, though.
"Let's go." Not yet.
[Trent Brumby] Knuckles feel like they are crushed and grinding together, but he bears it. It's tight and a reminder of what she's capable of, but it's an anchor for her that he's willing to give. A little discomfort is nothing, and his concern is beyond that. His thumb, though has began to stroke along the taut tendons of her hand, seeking to relax them, relax her.
But the witness of wet streaks of her face, when he's able to look upon it again, has his hand tightening around hers instead. His arm snakes further around her back. "Come here." It's not an intentional order, and his head shifts along side hers, drawing her into an embrace proper. A kiss on her cheek is light and makes him swallow a little thicker. His forearm rubs her back again, just lower this time, and the bottle is kept away from bumping her.
He'll hold her for a moment, until she wants to pull away, or until she stands still and stiff, and it becomes obviously uncomfortable. When he does pull away, it's to look over her face, into the dark rawness of her eyes and the pale complexion of her skin. A kiss for each cheek has a soft mouth against the harsher bristles. Then, he pulls back, slowly, ready to part from her as he watches her eyes, stares into them with a tenderness he doesn't bother to hide. "Do you want to go now?"
[Kora] This time she does not kiss him. She lifts her cheek to his mouth, though. Each cheek against each kiss. He cannot see her crying, but he can taste the salt on her skin. Her grip relaxes in his hand, the subtle shift of muscles and tendons evident beneath her pale skin. There is still a beast inside her, livid and raw and inescapable, but somewhere in the middle that she embraces him back, worms her free arm beneath his, around his back, to feel the strength of his broad chest beneath her arm and hand.
Then he is pulling back and staring at her, his pale eyes softer than her own have ever been, could ever been. As if that look were a facedown, she is the first to look away, out over his shoulder toward the dark line of trees, their branches still bare except where the early understory trees are beginning to blossom, the bark dark and wet.
Her hand slides down his back, around his flank and over his abdomen before she steps away, breaking open the embrace, her body opening to the humid night around them as she falls into blind step beside him.
"Yeah." Her mouth bruised from the kiss, but still and taut like her tall frame, her set shoulders, her stiff spine. Then, again, " - take me home."
His car is close, he said. He'll take her someplace warm.
[Trent Brumby] His hands fall away from her, slowly, leaving her to step away from him rather then the other way around. It's nothing that he will hold against her or take offense to. He turns to walk with her, instead, heading along the path that leads back through the park. Switching the bottle into his other hand, it leaves the one closer to her free, but he does not reach to guide her along, as though they were familiar lovers. It rests by his side, moving loosely with his slow paced, long leg walk.
Trent doesn't offer conversation or try and fill the space with needless words. He's there for her, right by her side, anytime she wants to turn to him. He had already spoken on what he needed and doesn't repeat himself. There is nothing he can say that will make her feel better, and he doesn't seek to. Grief is natural and should never be rushed, only offered support for when in need, and that's what he does.
His car, she's seen before, is a common sedan. It opens by remote, locks popping open with a press of a thumb. The keys jingle softly until they are cupped in his hand. He opens the door for her, because he does that with everyone. Inside the car the interior is clean. It smells a little of cigarette and booze, mostly coming from his jacket in the back, where the scents of the pub lingers from work. His ashtray in the car is empty. He hadn't lit a cigarette on his walk, hadn't had one for half the day now. He hasn't told anyone, but he's trying to quit. There's a patch on his upper arm, clear and plastic, that helps get rid of those terrible, nagging urges.
Once in the car, her bottle is stowed in the back with his jacket, and he gets in the drivers side. The car is started, his belt is pulled on. He glances across to see if she's put hers on too, before he'd put the car into reverse, pull out, and kick it back into drive. Trent lives in the Green, just closer to the Mile. She's never been there before, by invitation, but he takes her there now, obeying road rules and mindful of traffic.
[Kora] They walk close enough that he can feel her body heat just at the apex of her stride, when her arm swings past his own. She doesn't reach for him as they walk. She doesn't turn to him as they walk. Somewhere, though, between the open space on the bench, amidst the dark shapes of the well-tended trees, the facsimile of the forest the city tends so carefully at the lake's edge, she begins to speak.
Her voice is still low and quiet, but raw beneath, the rawness he can hear in her voice, and see in her eyes. The rawness he knows he cannot talk away, or kiss away, or wish away; it has to live itself out inside her heart, her bones, her blood, her marrow, beast of the earth that she is. She tells him stories, small ones, all of them - of her dead Alpha, of the other dead she has known - how when she fell in battle together, she woke up every time to find him standing over her, snarling at whatever came. How she died and came back, and found him there. How he drank hot chocolate, like a kid, turning up his nose at decent coffee; how much fun he would have in Valhalla as a teetotaller, where the only thing to drink is mead; how he took Moira back when her mate died, without a cross word; how he teased her about the new clothes, the night before he died.
In the car she does not think to click her shoulder belt home until she catches him watching her - in that moment, her eyes spark a bright momentary challenge before she tugs it across her body, clicks it home. The lights of the dashboard swim across her pale face, her dark eyes. She holds herself stiffly in the bucket seat, much as she did the other night, when he drove her through this neighborhood, dropped her off at a desolate corner close to the ghetto that she labeled "close enough - " with the faint curl of a wry grin he has not seen tonight. She walks, usually. That's what she said that night. She doesn't mind it. She doesn't mind it at all.
When the car is parked, she climbs up and out, not waiting for him to open the passenger's door, but rather leaning back against the car frame as he comes around the front, looking up at the sleeping city, still, sure, her hands in her front pockets, her body stiffer than he knows her to be, her stark gaze dropping back to him as he rounds the car, remaining there as he comes closer to her.
[Trent Brumby] It gets easier to know Kemp with the more that she talks. He gets to know more about Kora, too, in the stories that she tells and how she tells them. These details she tells, lets him know how she thinks and what she holds dear. It's not about his physical prowess that she's telling him, but about the human attributes that he can understand. They are quietly surprising, at odds to the picture others paint of the Get of Fenris. He supposes it's the same about his own Tribe.
The apartment complex has multiple stories and its own car park. He takes the bottle and jacket out of the car when he gets out. The shutting doors echo in the space around them, shadowed deeper in areas where the light doesn't reach. Compared to her streets, here is well lit and cleaner. Hard working class live here, a step up from gang territories, and not quite the yuppies of Chicago. He comes around to meet her, his jacket over the same arm that's holding her bottle.
He wonders, briefly, if she's changed her mind, and so he approaches her leaning against his car with an open curiousness and a small lift of his brows. "I'm up on the third floor." He always takes the stairs, even though there's a working elevator. Nodding his head, he gestures towards the double glass doors that lead into the building.
[Kora] The city is shaped differently here, framed by the dark shadows of the concrete struts. The breeze has lessened and the space feels diminished. He circles the car, approaches her with a spark of curiousity in his pale eyes; she returns the look, her own less stark than it was earlier, but no less raw. The wounds remain, but they are no longer bleeding.
He approaches and she straightens her body, stands up, pulls herself upright through the hips and drops her eyes from his to his mouth, to his body, back to his eyes. The car park is still and quiet, except where the expanse, the acoustical echoes expand the sound of their footsteps, the minute movements of their bodies and toss them back at them. She does not like the concrete all around them, prefers the open ground at the lake's edge, the sky - even cloud-covered - to all this concrete, to the promise of walls all around and there's a new edginess to her in the space, the shadow of the beast inside her. Still, she stands up, approaches him as if she were brushing past him, puts her cheek against his cheek and her mouth against his ear as she does so.
"I'm right behind you," she announces into his ear, her voice pulp again, but still soft, threaded with control.
And so she is.
Through the double glass doors, and all the way up the stairs.
[Trent Brumby] Part of him chastises the way his body reacts to the way she brushes their cheeks and speaks hot air into his ear. She likes to prod at his control, and he's glad that he has a lot of it. It stops him from doing foolish, impulsive things, but it doesn't diminish his want to do them. Trent has reason and he clings to it in moments like these.
And so they walk up the stairs, the doors held open for her, up through the lit expanse. There's no smell of urine in the corners, as there might be elsewhere, or signs of syringes laying about. Lights work here, they don't flicker and threaten to give seizures. On the third floor he's got out a key and approaches one of the many rows of doors. He opens it up easily - the lock is new, shiny, and allows the door to swing open. He reaches around the frame and flicks on the light, before gesturing for her to enter.
Inside is floorboard, not carpet. It's not a typical bachelors, either. Everything is neat, has its place. Right down to the coat rack at the immediate entrance. Its here he leaves his own jacket and offers to take hers. His boots he can't just take off here, he'll have to sit and unlace them later, but there's a pair of loafers under the coat rack, lined neatly with toes into the wall.
His living area is opened. There's a suede navy sofa, the sort that is modern and can be arranged into separate sofas or made into an L-shape, with sections that can be moved and locked into place. The coffee table is ornate, wood with a glass top, sitting on a rug with simplistic bold colours and lines rather than a pattern. The entertainment unit is long with lead piping on the glass doors, and a flat screen sits on top. His dining table seats six, it's dark wood with cushioned seats. His kitchen isn't that large, but it's neat.
It smells clean in here, and the scents of flowers and plants hits her nose. He has a herb garden growing in long planters on the kitchen window. Large plants sit in corners, in carefully chosen pots, and she will find ferns in the bathroom, which is just as orderly as the rest of his two bedroom apartment when she gets there. The decore fits in well with everything and it's not overly furnished. It leaves room to move and comfort enough to make it feel like home. He doesn't have any photographs up, but there's some store purchased canvas on the walls to fill up blank spaces.
It holds only Trent's scent. He has no visitors.
[Kora] She doesn't fit in such a space. She stands just inside the door, watches him as he slips off his jacket, her dark eyes catching the light, but still bruised with shadow. She is quiet now, her stories finished, her body taut beneath her clothes. His apartment - his territory - is clean and orderly, it smells of green things, and him. There are windows, a rug, a well-made dining room table, more things that she has ever or will ever own.
Everthing is well-kept, considered, fits warmly together, like he does. She's wearing clothing - her old clothes, the dedicated clothes, the black PIXIES t-shirt and the worn old jeans - stiff at the hem and thighs with the blood of a dead man, and perhaps some of her own. It has been two nights since her Alpha died, and she has delivered the same news again and again, to other people who live in places like this, smelling of blood and rain.
He offers to take her jacket and she slips off her hoodie in an easy gesture, sliding her hands back into the front pockets of her jeans, her elbows held tight against her body as she walks into the living room, circles the well-made couch, surveys his territory with the sort of closely observed attention he has come to expect from her. When she has reached the other hend of the couch, though, she unearths her hands from her pockets, sits down on the edge of the couch in a fluid motion, and - quite deliberately - begins unlacing her own black boots.
It was raining earlier. The paths are damp, puddles gleam in the low, still light and the sky is clotted with clouds. Without the stars and the moon visible, with the low mass of moving orange clouds overhead, the great expanse of the lake feels more claustrophobic, as if it were some dark expanse of nameless water underground rather than a huge, living thing, open to the sky.
There’s still rain in the air, that ozone scent, both a remnant of the last storm and promise of another one. It was raining earlier. It will rain again soon. The lampposts here are ironworked, meant to evoke Chicago’s industrial golden age – gasworks and brick and iron – and the fitful light they shed is deliberate, flicking as gaslights would have, years ago.
There are a trio of teenagers down the way – barely visible, their shouts damped by distance, humidity, darkness – throwing stones over the retaining wall into the lake. There is, also, a solitary creature seated on the back of a stone bench, her feet firm on the seat, hunched over so that her spine defines the letter C against the darkness, her forearms planted firmly on her thighs, a bottle wrapped in brown paper on the bench beside her boots. Her clothes are dark, recede in the shadows, but her skin is pale, and glows.
The flickering light catches out colors in her damp hair, loose down her back. It was raining earlier, and her hair is dark with it, except where the faux-gaslight pulls out other colors. It will rain again soon, but she doesn’t care.
[Trent Brumby] His car is parked in an area where it's normally full during the day, but lies relatively empty other then a handful of others. It's not the best night to go for a walk, it's been raining and it's muggy and warm, but Trent is out in his black slacks and equally dark t.shirt. It defines him in the way it's meant to, to intimidate, to show strength and keep a visual reminder to those seeking to drink too much or cause strife, that he is there to toss them out and break up fights. But that being said, it doesn't hug him like a second skin, it's worn comfortably, like those black boots his wearing.
Jacket left in the car, he's walking along the path, detouring around larger puddles and walking through those that are small and shallow. He can hear the kids further on and was on his way to casually move past that way, checking for some trouble, but he comes across Kora first. He knows her. He knows the way she sits, the way her hair hangs and the clothes she wears. He knows the way she smiles, the way her eyes look in both light and darkness, and the way her mouth feels. He knows the way her body curls, not also in the shape it is now, but the way he can drape, tantalize and share its heat. In some ways he knows that, in others, he's imagination is so vivid that it almost becomes knowledge.
Approaching, slower, so not to startle the Garou - a feat that is unlikely but not impossible, he calls out to her quietly, "Kora?"
[Kora] He knows the way she sits. He knows the way she keeps her shoulders straight, her spine level. He knows the way her hair spills down her back, the way she wears her clothes, close to her narrow frame. He knows the set of her eyes in her face, the subtle curve of her mouth that is its most neutral expression. He knows the pallor of her northern skin, but has not seen it like this – starched in the darkness, so white that he might imagine she had been exsanguinated. He knows how dark her eyes are, but they are darker now, stark with shadow and far too dry.
Close enough, he can see the articulations of her spine defined through the dark cotton of her t-shirt. He says her name, careful, and she turns her head, pale hair pulling against her clothing. The t-shirt is black, and does not show the blood. It is stiff with it, against her abdomen as she sits up, pale as a ghost, utterly stricken, her cheeks wet from the rain, and the rain only.
Her voice sounds as if it had been scoured by steel wool, then wrapped in threadbare velvet. "My alpha died." That's all she says. He can read everything else in the shape of her body; in the darkness in her eyes.
[Trent Brumby] There's plenty to the Garou that he does not understand. But he does understand the importance of pack, and the importance of pack to Kora. Once, she had hinted at how it felt to have the pack, being here in Chicago. The death of anyone is hard, and he imagines, that the death of a pack member is much like loosing part of your immediate family. An Alpha being the head of it.
He walks over and climbs up to sit next to her, but with a polite distance between. As much as he'd like to wrap her in an arm, hug her closer, it's not about what he wants and Kora isn't the easiest to read. Garou are terribly temperamental. He sits on the back, like she does, putting wet boots on the seat while being mindful of the bottle in the paper bag.
"I'm sorry to hear that," he offers, quietly.
[Kora] The paper bag is damp from the rain, but the bottle inside is unopened. She smells of rain, the ozone of a storm promised on the horizon. Underneath that, she smells faintly of blood - the copper scent of sorrow. The creature's dark eyes remain on him as he walks over, as he climbs up to sit beside her. When he is seated at last, she drops her head in a low, swinging arc - and looks back out toward the dark mirror of the lake.
"His name was Kemp Oates. He - " she swallows back whatever word should come next, swallows consulsively against it, sitting parallel to him, her body curving forward again, the line of her spine delineated against her dark tee where the tangle of her damp hair does not hide it. She swallows her words; eats them, like a sibyl. She has been to the underworld and returned. This time, he did not. She swallows her words, and begins again. "Do you remember when you said you would remember me?"
[Kora] The paper bag is damp from the rain, but the bottle inside is unopened. She smells of rain, the ozone of a storm promised on the horizon. Underneath that, she smells faintly of blood - the copper scent of sorrow. The creature's dark eyes remain on him as he walks over, as he climbs up to sit beside her. When he is seated at last, she drops her head in a low, swinging arc - and looks back out toward the dark mirror of the lake.
"His name was Kemp Oates. He - " she swallows back whatever word should come next, swallows consulsively against it, sitting parallel to him, her body curving forward again, the line of her spine delineated against her dark tee where the tangle of her damp hair does not hide it. She swallows her words; eats them, like a sibyl. She has been to the underworld and returned. This time, he did not. "Do you remember when you said you would remember me?"
[Trent Brumby] As she looks off towards the water, Trent does too. He leans his forearms into his thighs with his hands hanging between his knees. His back is straight and his shoulders broad; he doesn't curve like she does, being lines and angles. While he listens to her, he continues to look forward, except for the part where she stalls and chokes on the words. He looks at her then, taking in her side profile with his pale eyes.
And he's still looking at her when she asks him that question. "I do," he tells her quietly and without hesitation. Of course he remembers. Drunk he might have been, or well on his way to it, he still remembers saying that to a Garou, and had full intentions of keeping that word.
[Kora] The look she casts him is sidelong; she cheats her head sideways, still mostly in profile, her features defined by the line of her nose, the curve of her cheek, the shape of her mouth in that moment rather than the strong line of her jaw. When she meets his pale gaze, her own dark eyes are raw as cut onions, naked as a cloudless sky.
And her voice is like wood pulp, soft, splintered. "Remember him, instead."
[Trent Brumby] "As well," he tells her, pausing as he looks away from her raw gaze, finding it hard to meet. "I will remember him as well."
Dropping his head, he looks down to his hands before pushing off his thighs to sit upright. His hands take his forearms place, fingers grasping the solid length of his thigh, down by the knee. He braces himself there easily, unnecessarily. "Do you want to tell me about him?" If he's going to remember Kemp, a Garou he does not know but means a lot to the one he's sitting beside, he wanted to know about him. But it wasn't a push, it was also meant to be an outlet for her grief.
[Kora] He looks away; her gaze falls to his hands, his thighs. In three-quarter profile, she stares, her mouth open, her breathing steady, slow and shallow, narrow shoulders moving faintly with every breath. Momentarily wordless, she nods her agreement - then turns her face again to the dark expanse of the lake, the lights of the city reflected in the dark, choppy mirror of its surface, dampened by distance and the moisture in the air.
"Yeah," she says then. Quiet, as if the word were an experiment whose outcome remained uncertain. " - yeah."
Much as he did, she straightens, breathing more deeply - in through the nose, out through her just-parted lips - deliberately so, to lift herself upward through the torso and the shoulders. Every muscle in her lean frame is taut, there is a kind of withheld expectancy about her, some terrible energy, so tightly leashed - but all she does it sit still, open her hands wide, and push the base of her palms down the length of her thigh before leaning forward again.
"He didn’t have a family," she tells him, quiet. "He didn’t have a mate. He just had a kid he never knew, and the Caern."
"He had the Doc. He had us." This is a story. This is a life that is turning into a story. It is the only story inside her, now, and it is both too small and too large for her body. She tells it leaning forward, her arms braced, her narrow frame defined and apart, as if she had been cut out of the world with an exacto knife and then superimposed over it once more.
"Silence pulled him from behind a dumpster when he was fourteen. Some fucking place - " her momentary frustration - that she does not know the name, that she cannot name the place - so evident, then. " - in New Jersey. Foster kid. Runaway fifteen times over. Two weeks later, Silence scared him into his first change. I think - " she pauses, looks up with a stretch of her chin, her neck, " - I was graduating high school, then.
"Trent. He was younger than me."
[Trent Brumby] He listens to her every word, the way she says it and the frustrated pauses between. His gaze had returned to her, watching the way her mouth offers words and how her expression shifts. The more she tells him, the more he knows about Kemp. It's only a story now, her memories and knowledge of him passed on to another. Trent will never know Kemp outside of what is told him; at least not now. This is how heroes are remembered, no matter how great or small. No matter how they started or how life ended, this is how they are remembered - through word of mouth. If only humanity understood what these Garou, part people, sacrifice.
He's thinking these things as he's listening, and when Kora mentions that Kemp was younger than Kora, he looks at her directly. "Age doesn't play a part. The Goddess knows when it's time." He tells her this like he knows its true. It's his faith and the way he was raised. Without faith and hope life, Kinfolk have nothing but stories, like this, of death. The world is ugly enough without the faith that Trent offers her now, whether or not she agrees with it. "You do what you can while you are here, and it's different for everyone, Kora." His words are quiet still, not gentle, but quiet.
[Kora] She looks up again when he says her name, looks up at him, her mouth open, her breath a shallow cycle now, defined by the faint movement of her shoulders and chest. For the first time in two long nights, her dark eyes shine with unshed tears. There is a moment between breaths when she is unutterably still.
Then she nods once, mutely, wordlessly.
"He raised the Caern," she resumes, her voice still raw, still low. This time, she does holds Trent's pale gaze and does not look away. Each word is made quiet and sure, solid as a river-smoothed rock. " - and when Silence left, he stayed. He was an Adren, and I'm just a Cliath. When I came here, he offered me hospitality and I never left. He made a catapult to throw snow balls at other Garou. He loved a girl and gave her away to see her smile. I'm going to do his rite. I'm going to tell his story. I'm going to turn him from something living into something legend. No one else who comes here is going to know him. They'll just know him the way I know the other graves there - the glory, the sacrifice. Not the rest of it.
"That's what I'm going to do. That's what She expects of me."
[Trent Brumby] Lifting a hand from his thigh, he reached across and lay it onto her back. It's tentative at first, because he doesn't know how she's going to take it, and providing there's no growls, or moving away, he runs his wide palm and long fingers up and down her back slowly. His hand squeezes her shoulder lightly. "He sounds as though he had good heart as well as great courage."
"He sounds like an inspiration." That's what he gets from this conversation. Kemp wasn't only Kora's Alpha, but she looked up to him a great deal. He could see why, too. "And you will tell his story well."
There's a longer pause, where Trent's hand has come to rest just there, between her shoulder blades. "I am sorry for your loss." He doesn't say it like he had to Adam, about the other Furies, because he's more involved in this. He's far closer to Kora and her pain then the Sisters that keep him at arms length. Trent is emotionally invested with the Garou beside him. There's no detachment. He is sorry for her loss. In fact, he adds: "I'm sorry for everyone's loss." Because this Kemp seems to be a very large, important part of the Garou society.
[Kora] Every one of the long muscles lining her spine are taut beneath his hand as he moves it up and down her spine. She breathes out once, a sharp exhalation of air when he first makes tentative contact, alive to the possibility that she could pull away, could turn on him, could snarl some feral refusal, some snapped negation. There is a moment, then, when he can feel the lashed line of her body contracting beneath his touch, but that is all. She doesn't growl. She doesn't pull away. She does move closer to him. She just sits there, watching him, watching mouth move as he speaks to her; watching the dark shadow of her reflection in his pale eyes. Watching the light smear in the periphery of her vision, as her focus narrows to the stark space between them.
He can feel the ridged articulations of her vertebrae. Her t-shirt is damp from the rain, her hair is tangled and wet. Her shoulders are rounded forward, the deltoid a tense knot beneath his hand when he squeezes her shoulder. There is a band of tendon evident between her jaw and cheek, working somewhere beneath her skin. Her pulse beats fast at the bast of her throat, as if she had been running this whole time, rather than telling a story she has told herself too many times in the last two nights, to far too many grieving people.
He touches her, and she is watching him, her dark eyes bright with tears she refuses to shed. Perhaps it is simply not in her to cry.
"We're going to the - " she pauses, her mouth flattening over the word she must know will be unfamiliar to him. " - to a place where we can see his last battle. Fight it again, so we know what happened, soon. My pack."
What remains of it.
"So we know." A beat. "We'll come back, after."
[Trent Brumby] When she moves closer to him, it's a sign of trust and he takes it that she's inviting his comfort. His hand is more sure then, and his own tension leaks away. He's glad, then, that he's done the right thing. Fingers gather her hair, just a little, glancing towards the blond as he smooths the tangles together; he doesn't try to unknot it. It leaves more of her back free, for smooth sailing of his hand.
He looks back to her when she's talking. There's compassion in his eyes, but worry leaks in at the mention of witnessing his last battle. "Is there a danger to you?" It's his first thought. He doesn't imagine its anything like television. He can't imagine where one can go to visit something that has already passed. Maybe it was time travel. Trent doesn't ask.
[Kora] "No - " she tells him, her voice low, still raw with grief but intent, certain, her eyes shining in the dim light and flickering shadows of the artful streetlamps here. " - when you die there, you wake up, just outside. It's like a dream you can repeat over and over and over." Her instinct is not, however, to reassure him, to dampen the faint thread of worry in his eyes with a companionable lie. I'll be fine. Instead, she leans forward, lifts her chin in his direction, her tangled hair pulling across the knuckles of his hand as he rubs her back.
"We'll hunt, when we come back. So he has trophies. So the Valkyries and the hosts in Valhalla read his deeds in the them." Her eyes are fast on his face as she tells him this. The tears are still there, still unshed. They aren't for herself, though. Or, perhaps, anyone now. Not even for him.
There's a moment where her gaze falls from his eyes to his mouth. The night is still around them, except for the movement of his arm as he rubs her back. Even the breeze has died down; the teenagers have shouted their last, wandered further in search of greater amusement. Traffic on the loop is a low hum, washed with rain that has come and gone and will soon come again.
Then, quietly, very deliberately, she says, "Take me home. Tonight."
[Trent Brumby] He doesn't know about the ways of the Get of Fenris, but he listens to their plans and the way they want to send their deceased off. It's a lovely thought, in the way they care and in the details. He's not sure if he'd want to relive a battle in which he lost a loved one. Maybe, though, if he wasn't there in the beginning - just maybe he would. He had given a small nod, as she watched him, telling him about Valhalla and their intentions.
Around his mouth the hair is short, carefully looked after, like that across his jaw. While he liked to wear hair there, perhaps a reminder of how masculine he is in the face of his Tribe, it was rarely sloppy and overgrown. Trimmed, neat, and added to his gruff charms. His had a haircut recently too, the sides shorter than the rest, and the top no longer threatening to curl over. That split is pretty much gone, like the bruise on his cheek.
"Okay." He nods again, meeting her eyes. His hand slips down from her back and he pushes off the chair. Boots hit the ground, one after the other, as he steps down onto the ground. Turning to her, he offered out his hand, palm up. The other picked up her bottle, which he'd carry. "Come on. Have you ever had your hair washed by a man?" There's a small smile at the edge of his mouth. It's something he can do for her, wants to do, in fact. Something intimate and caring. Besides, it needed a wash.
[Kora] She slides easily from the back of the bench, her own booted feet hitting the ground with a soft slap seconds after his. Then, deliberately, she takes his hand, palm down. She wears the same bracelets she always wears - a half-dozen or more on either wrist, which she perhaps never removes - but the traces of black polish usually evident, in some state or other of decay - have largely flaked away. There's no blood on her hands, but there are traces of it under her nails, so dark as to be black. And when she stands, the bloodstains are evident in her black cotton t-shirt, stiff hem, and in patches over her midriff.
There is a fleeting glance over her shoulder as she rises, back down the path lined with artful lights, the city's attempt at romantic historicism. Then her shining dark eyes return to his eyes, his mouth, the faint smile at the corner of it as he offers to wash her hair. Her pulse was already fast; he could see it in her throat, the force of her grief charged with her rage, with the sorrow she has shared with her pack and her tribe, amplified and echoed by their connections, sparked by the particularities of her office in it all. It quickens further with his question, though she could not articulate why.
"No." Her brows lift, heralding the shift of her attention from his mouth to his eyes. She holds his gaze, carefully articulate, giving each syllable its due deference, the movement of her mouth around the words clear and precise. There is the most minute shake of her pale head. "I haven't."
Then, her grip tightens around his hand. "I want you to." She is strong, though her body wears her strength differently than his does - in the long, lean muscles that flank her spine and her abdomen, in her long legs, in the possibility of movement written into them. Her grip tightens on his hand, and she pulls herself closer to him; or pulls him closer to her. Somehow, they are closer, and she is standing on the balls of her feet to kiss him.
The smiling corner of his mouth, the scratchy edge of his rough jaw. Then the whole of his mouth.
When she kissed him before she was smiling. Tonight, she is half-drowning, and the even the kiss has a stark edge to it, wild. She doesn't want to devour him; she wants to step outside of her skin, crawl her way into his - to be outside of herself for a moment, or an hour.
[Trent Brumby] His hand is warm and his fingers are a lot thicker then hers, less bones, more substance. He doesn't have any callouses, despite that he has been working with his hands in the past, including the recent past. Trent is careful about some things, his grooming is very careful, very... metro-sexual. This includes care of hands and fingernails, which are blunt and short. He tightens his hand in return, slighter then her grip still, and steps in closer to her.
Her kisses make him inhale through his nose, quickening the beat of his heart in an instant, and has his arm, with the bottle in hand, slide around her waist. The forearm embraces her side, presses her closer in, slowly, not suddenly. He kisses her back, slower, but deeply. It's less about exploring her and more about comfort. If she could crawl inside his skin, he'd keep her safe.
It's probably he that breaks off, but not too soon, and with kisses from her mouth to cheek. "My car's close," he's murmuring faintly against her skin. As his warm mouth ceases traveling across her skin, his eyes are opened, head close enough for his brow to be a hairs breadth from hers. "I'll take you somewhere warm." It's a promise of that comfort, if only for awhile, before she has to run off again and face the world. Before she has to come back to herself.
[Kora] He can still feel the hinged tension of her body against his; the taut muscles of her abdomen and her lower back against her arms, the tension in her jaw and cheek as his mouth travels across her skin, as she holds herself - still, again - just back from him, stiff except where her mouth touches him, where his breath warms her skin. His eyes open, but hers remain closed. She holds her chin forward, her face still against his, her mouth open, her breathing clear, clarified, hushed and deliberate, so even that she might be counting each one against some invisible time keeper in her body. The beat of her heart, or the throb of her pulse.
"Okay," she says, standing close, not embracing him except where she holds his firm hand. Her grip is harder than it should be, would leave bruises on someone less solid than he is. Her eyes are still closed, her nose close to his cheek, her mouth open against his stubbled cheek. Her chin drops slowly, by feel, to the line of his jaw. Then she leans in, touches his skin with her teeth before pulling away. "Okay."
If grief had a scent, it would be bitter almonds, ash, the white pith of a fruit more seed than flesh. When she pulls away, her cheeks are wet. It isn't raining, though.
"Let's go." Not yet.
[Trent Brumby] Knuckles feel like they are crushed and grinding together, but he bears it. It's tight and a reminder of what she's capable of, but it's an anchor for her that he's willing to give. A little discomfort is nothing, and his concern is beyond that. His thumb, though has began to stroke along the taut tendons of her hand, seeking to relax them, relax her.
But the witness of wet streaks of her face, when he's able to look upon it again, has his hand tightening around hers instead. His arm snakes further around her back. "Come here." It's not an intentional order, and his head shifts along side hers, drawing her into an embrace proper. A kiss on her cheek is light and makes him swallow a little thicker. His forearm rubs her back again, just lower this time, and the bottle is kept away from bumping her.
He'll hold her for a moment, until she wants to pull away, or until she stands still and stiff, and it becomes obviously uncomfortable. When he does pull away, it's to look over her face, into the dark rawness of her eyes and the pale complexion of her skin. A kiss for each cheek has a soft mouth against the harsher bristles. Then, he pulls back, slowly, ready to part from her as he watches her eyes, stares into them with a tenderness he doesn't bother to hide. "Do you want to go now?"
[Kora] This time she does not kiss him. She lifts her cheek to his mouth, though. Each cheek against each kiss. He cannot see her crying, but he can taste the salt on her skin. Her grip relaxes in his hand, the subtle shift of muscles and tendons evident beneath her pale skin. There is still a beast inside her, livid and raw and inescapable, but somewhere in the middle that she embraces him back, worms her free arm beneath his, around his back, to feel the strength of his broad chest beneath her arm and hand.
Then he is pulling back and staring at her, his pale eyes softer than her own have ever been, could ever been. As if that look were a facedown, she is the first to look away, out over his shoulder toward the dark line of trees, their branches still bare except where the early understory trees are beginning to blossom, the bark dark and wet.
Her hand slides down his back, around his flank and over his abdomen before she steps away, breaking open the embrace, her body opening to the humid night around them as she falls into blind step beside him.
"Yeah." Her mouth bruised from the kiss, but still and taut like her tall frame, her set shoulders, her stiff spine. Then, again, " - take me home."
His car is close, he said. He'll take her someplace warm.
[Trent Brumby] His hands fall away from her, slowly, leaving her to step away from him rather then the other way around. It's nothing that he will hold against her or take offense to. He turns to walk with her, instead, heading along the path that leads back through the park. Switching the bottle into his other hand, it leaves the one closer to her free, but he does not reach to guide her along, as though they were familiar lovers. It rests by his side, moving loosely with his slow paced, long leg walk.
Trent doesn't offer conversation or try and fill the space with needless words. He's there for her, right by her side, anytime she wants to turn to him. He had already spoken on what he needed and doesn't repeat himself. There is nothing he can say that will make her feel better, and he doesn't seek to. Grief is natural and should never be rushed, only offered support for when in need, and that's what he does.
His car, she's seen before, is a common sedan. It opens by remote, locks popping open with a press of a thumb. The keys jingle softly until they are cupped in his hand. He opens the door for her, because he does that with everyone. Inside the car the interior is clean. It smells a little of cigarette and booze, mostly coming from his jacket in the back, where the scents of the pub lingers from work. His ashtray in the car is empty. He hadn't lit a cigarette on his walk, hadn't had one for half the day now. He hasn't told anyone, but he's trying to quit. There's a patch on his upper arm, clear and plastic, that helps get rid of those terrible, nagging urges.
Once in the car, her bottle is stowed in the back with his jacket, and he gets in the drivers side. The car is started, his belt is pulled on. He glances across to see if she's put hers on too, before he'd put the car into reverse, pull out, and kick it back into drive. Trent lives in the Green, just closer to the Mile. She's never been there before, by invitation, but he takes her there now, obeying road rules and mindful of traffic.
[Kora] They walk close enough that he can feel her body heat just at the apex of her stride, when her arm swings past his own. She doesn't reach for him as they walk. She doesn't turn to him as they walk. Somewhere, though, between the open space on the bench, amidst the dark shapes of the well-tended trees, the facsimile of the forest the city tends so carefully at the lake's edge, she begins to speak.
Her voice is still low and quiet, but raw beneath, the rawness he can hear in her voice, and see in her eyes. The rawness he knows he cannot talk away, or kiss away, or wish away; it has to live itself out inside her heart, her bones, her blood, her marrow, beast of the earth that she is. She tells him stories, small ones, all of them - of her dead Alpha, of the other dead she has known - how when she fell in battle together, she woke up every time to find him standing over her, snarling at whatever came. How she died and came back, and found him there. How he drank hot chocolate, like a kid, turning up his nose at decent coffee; how much fun he would have in Valhalla as a teetotaller, where the only thing to drink is mead; how he took Moira back when her mate died, without a cross word; how he teased her about the new clothes, the night before he died.
In the car she does not think to click her shoulder belt home until she catches him watching her - in that moment, her eyes spark a bright momentary challenge before she tugs it across her body, clicks it home. The lights of the dashboard swim across her pale face, her dark eyes. She holds herself stiffly in the bucket seat, much as she did the other night, when he drove her through this neighborhood, dropped her off at a desolate corner close to the ghetto that she labeled "close enough - " with the faint curl of a wry grin he has not seen tonight. She walks, usually. That's what she said that night. She doesn't mind it. She doesn't mind it at all.
When the car is parked, she climbs up and out, not waiting for him to open the passenger's door, but rather leaning back against the car frame as he comes around the front, looking up at the sleeping city, still, sure, her hands in her front pockets, her body stiffer than he knows her to be, her stark gaze dropping back to him as he rounds the car, remaining there as he comes closer to her.
[Trent Brumby] It gets easier to know Kemp with the more that she talks. He gets to know more about Kora, too, in the stories that she tells and how she tells them. These details she tells, lets him know how she thinks and what she holds dear. It's not about his physical prowess that she's telling him, but about the human attributes that he can understand. They are quietly surprising, at odds to the picture others paint of the Get of Fenris. He supposes it's the same about his own Tribe.
The apartment complex has multiple stories and its own car park. He takes the bottle and jacket out of the car when he gets out. The shutting doors echo in the space around them, shadowed deeper in areas where the light doesn't reach. Compared to her streets, here is well lit and cleaner. Hard working class live here, a step up from gang territories, and not quite the yuppies of Chicago. He comes around to meet her, his jacket over the same arm that's holding her bottle.
He wonders, briefly, if she's changed her mind, and so he approaches her leaning against his car with an open curiousness and a small lift of his brows. "I'm up on the third floor." He always takes the stairs, even though there's a working elevator. Nodding his head, he gestures towards the double glass doors that lead into the building.
[Kora] The city is shaped differently here, framed by the dark shadows of the concrete struts. The breeze has lessened and the space feels diminished. He circles the car, approaches her with a spark of curiousity in his pale eyes; she returns the look, her own less stark than it was earlier, but no less raw. The wounds remain, but they are no longer bleeding.
He approaches and she straightens her body, stands up, pulls herself upright through the hips and drops her eyes from his to his mouth, to his body, back to his eyes. The car park is still and quiet, except where the expanse, the acoustical echoes expand the sound of their footsteps, the minute movements of their bodies and toss them back at them. She does not like the concrete all around them, prefers the open ground at the lake's edge, the sky - even cloud-covered - to all this concrete, to the promise of walls all around and there's a new edginess to her in the space, the shadow of the beast inside her. Still, she stands up, approaches him as if she were brushing past him, puts her cheek against his cheek and her mouth against his ear as she does so.
"I'm right behind you," she announces into his ear, her voice pulp again, but still soft, threaded with control.
And so she is.
Through the double glass doors, and all the way up the stairs.
[Trent Brumby] Part of him chastises the way his body reacts to the way she brushes their cheeks and speaks hot air into his ear. She likes to prod at his control, and he's glad that he has a lot of it. It stops him from doing foolish, impulsive things, but it doesn't diminish his want to do them. Trent has reason and he clings to it in moments like these.
And so they walk up the stairs, the doors held open for her, up through the lit expanse. There's no smell of urine in the corners, as there might be elsewhere, or signs of syringes laying about. Lights work here, they don't flicker and threaten to give seizures. On the third floor he's got out a key and approaches one of the many rows of doors. He opens it up easily - the lock is new, shiny, and allows the door to swing open. He reaches around the frame and flicks on the light, before gesturing for her to enter.
Inside is floorboard, not carpet. It's not a typical bachelors, either. Everything is neat, has its place. Right down to the coat rack at the immediate entrance. Its here he leaves his own jacket and offers to take hers. His boots he can't just take off here, he'll have to sit and unlace them later, but there's a pair of loafers under the coat rack, lined neatly with toes into the wall.
His living area is opened. There's a suede navy sofa, the sort that is modern and can be arranged into separate sofas or made into an L-shape, with sections that can be moved and locked into place. The coffee table is ornate, wood with a glass top, sitting on a rug with simplistic bold colours and lines rather than a pattern. The entertainment unit is long with lead piping on the glass doors, and a flat screen sits on top. His dining table seats six, it's dark wood with cushioned seats. His kitchen isn't that large, but it's neat.
It smells clean in here, and the scents of flowers and plants hits her nose. He has a herb garden growing in long planters on the kitchen window. Large plants sit in corners, in carefully chosen pots, and she will find ferns in the bathroom, which is just as orderly as the rest of his two bedroom apartment when she gets there. The decore fits in well with everything and it's not overly furnished. It leaves room to move and comfort enough to make it feel like home. He doesn't have any photographs up, but there's some store purchased canvas on the walls to fill up blank spaces.
It holds only Trent's scent. He has no visitors.
[Kora] She doesn't fit in such a space. She stands just inside the door, watches him as he slips off his jacket, her dark eyes catching the light, but still bruised with shadow. She is quiet now, her stories finished, her body taut beneath her clothes. His apartment - his territory - is clean and orderly, it smells of green things, and him. There are windows, a rug, a well-made dining room table, more things that she has ever or will ever own.
Everthing is well-kept, considered, fits warmly together, like he does. She's wearing clothing - her old clothes, the dedicated clothes, the black PIXIES t-shirt and the worn old jeans - stiff at the hem and thighs with the blood of a dead man, and perhaps some of her own. It has been two nights since her Alpha died, and she has delivered the same news again and again, to other people who live in places like this, smelling of blood and rain.
He offers to take her jacket and she slips off her hoodie in an easy gesture, sliding her hands back into the front pockets of her jeans, her elbows held tight against her body as she walks into the living room, circles the well-made couch, surveys his territory with the sort of closely observed attention he has come to expect from her. When she has reached the other hend of the couch, though, she unearths her hands from her pockets, sits down on the edge of the couch in a fluid motion, and - quite deliberately - begins unlacing her own black boots.
