Izzy:
2am:
The mattress is settled on top of the new bunk. She doesn’t make it. It would be stupid, considering she has nothing but bloodsoaking clothing and injuries – why force laundry when the dorm like mattress is coated in plastic and can be wiped down? At some point, they go to bed. She does not. She remains in the common room, where it is blissfully silent, open, and there is plenty of room. Only when she can no longer keep her eyes open – even the small bit they can open still – does she go to room 8.
4am:
She stands by the door for a long moment. Silent. There is no meltdown – there is no voice in her ear, triggering voices in her head. She steps across the threshold for the first time without trembling – she looks at nothing, at no one, only the window. That window. The one thing she can concentrate on. She doesn’t bother being silent about climbing to the bunk – she doesn’t care. She slips from her coat, and uses it as her blanket, she pulls her gun from the small of her back, and slides it under her pillow, her hand remaining against it’s comforting presence. Her cell phone is tucked into her bloodsoaked bra. Her other hand touches the chill of the window.
Exhausted, she sleeps.
6am:
The alarm on her phone goes off.
She wakes with a mouthful of blood, and an extreme amount of pain. She swallows both. Again, she doesn’t bother being specifically silent as she grabs her things, gets down from the bunk, and steps away from the room. She returns to clean up the sawdust – he said when she woke, and she’s awake. She makes her bed, and then slips her coat on, her gun back in it’s place at the small of her back. She checks her pockets, and by 7:00am she’s in her car, smoking a cigarette with shaking fingers as the motor warms.
Sometimes you have to give a little. Sometimes you have to give a lot. Sometimes they take every little bit that you got… Fuckin country music. She silences the radio, and thumbs through the messages on her phone. One she answers. She sends two new ones. She then checks her schedule, and only when that is finished and all messages deleted as is her custom, does she tuck the phone away again, props the cigarette between her lips, and drives the short distance to her home.
The doorman gasps, and asks if she’s alright. She tells him to fuck off. He decides he doesn’t want to see the other guy. As usual, she ignores the elevator and takes the stairs. All three flights.
8am:
She’s finally seen the damage and swallowed a handful of advil with a generous serving of 15 year old scotch. Merry fuckin’ Christmas. There is no amount of makeup in the world… There will be questions and a lot of them. Time for a phone call.
“….no, I’m not pressing charges. It was a bar brawl, that’s all. I’ll be in for some files – work from home today – maybe tomorrow too. Yeah.”
She’s gonna need a lot of ice.
10am:
She arrives at the station, some of the swelling reduced for now. She’ll balloon up again – but if she times it right… And she’s got some new kick ass sunglasses – that do nothing to hide anything at all.
Finn sees her first. Of course he does.
“Fucking hell, Iz… Detective Montoya! What did you do?”
“Bar brawl.”
“Jesus, what’s the other guy look like?”
“I lost fuckin’ track after my face hit the bar.”
“Iz…Izzy, babe are you…”
“Shut up, Finn.”
“But…”
“Finn? I’m fuckin’ telling you. Drop it.”
“Ok.”
She fucks him in the ladies locker room 10 minutes later. He finally drops it, despite the fact he kisses her so desperately it splits her lips again, and they both taste blood. He wants to protect her – and knows she won’t let him. All she knows that she has exerted some sort of control once again.
“Keep them off my fuckin’ case, Finn.”
“Sure, Iz. Sure.”
10:30 am:
“No, Sarge. I’m not gonna tell you shit. Just – just stop. I’m not pressing charges. It was a stupid brawl and I zigged when I shoulda zagged and got a face fulla bar. I’m on call, gimme the files, and I’ll work from home a few days between calls. I’m fine.”
Fucked up, Irrational, Neurotic, Emotional. FINE.
But she’s also the best damn homicide detective he has. That buys a few favors – and she’s calling them in. He makes sure she knows that this… he doesn’t want to do this, he wants her to press charges, give up a name, let him kill the son of a bitch.
She knows the feeling well.
She doesn’t give in.
He gives up.
11am:
She’s back at her apartment, files spread out on the desk. She’s fielded some calls. She’s answered messages. She’s deleted a shit ton of spam. She’s plowing through the backlog of paperwork, and smoked her way through a pack of cigarettes. It’s as normal a routine she can make it for now.
Noon:
Sleep never felt so fucking good.
5pm:
Gang fight in Cabrini. Three dead. Izzy leads the field, like every breath isn’t an icy stab of agony, like she can see clearly, like she is hearty and hale in every way and not trying to eat her weight in advil. Finn has her back. Evidence is bagged n tagged, statements taken, arrests made. Thank god for the smoking gun.
9pm:
Body found in Lake view. Izzy again leads the team. Her head is pounding. She’s in agony. And she can barely see – but she’s there, smoking like a freight train and determined that she not be seen as slacking in her job. Her job is all she has – it’s often what she is. Jackson follows her home to make sure she arrives in one piece. He doesn’t know she won’t be staying there long. He leaves a pamphlet for the shelter for battered women on her windshield. She throws it away.
11:45pm:
Corner booth, the Brotherhood, downstairs. Her laptop is open, the files a neat pile next to her, and she continues working. At some point, she buys dinner. At some point, she’s drank the better part of a bottle of whiskey on her own. At some point, Daniel checks to assure she’s at the brotherhood. She is, and she is still silent. She has precisely one change of clothing with her, and her laptop and work files. This is by no means a permanent situation.
2am:
Same, but upstairs in the common room. Paperwork is a bitch.
4am:
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Daniel:
11:48pm:
Daniel comes through the kitchen doors, sits across from his kin. His eyes are narrowed and he’s sniffing the air, but he doesn’t say anything.
2:14am:
There’s a desk in the common room, on which sits a Vaio laptop. The Vaio is set aside for Izzy’s paperwork. Her paperwork is set aside when Daniel pulls up a chair and seats himself.
“The man you coupled with earlier today. Is he going to be your mate?”
It appears to be a genuine question.
Izzy:
11:48pm
He sits across from her. She doesn’t react. She doesn’t look up. She simply keeps working. He sniffs the air. She quirks a brow. She closes one file, opens another. He leaves.
She orders another drink.
2:14 AM
She’s been working again for less than 15 minutes when he appears and sits himself down. She closes the file she’s been pouring over for the past hour, and leans back in her chair folding her hands across her stomach. Her clothing is rumpled, and she looks tired. Her injuries aren’t much better than they were last night – it will take weeks of healing. She looks – in short – like well groomed hell.
Business casual at it’s grisly worst.
The question comes. Some part of her knew it would. There is no outward reaction.
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“No.”
Part of her might be impressed with his perception, considering the precautions she took, and the fact she has bathed since fucking Finn over 14 hours ago. Of course, he may very well just have expected her to rebel however she could. She doesn’t deny it, however. She does not even try.
Daniel:
The Forseti’s brow furrows. He studies her for a moment, as though she were some strange and novel creature. An insect or an alien.
“I have heard of certain afflictions amongst humans; a twisted pleasure derived from humiliation and pain. Do you suffer from such perversions? Do you actually want to be beaten, stripped of all liberty and kept under lock and key? Is that why you continue to disrespect me?”
Izzy:
“No.”
Simple that answer – though not really simple at all. Perhaps he thinks for a moment that’s all he’ll get, perhaps for a long moment that’s all she considers giving. Finally, a question of her own.
“Do you remember what I said the night we first met?”
DanieL:
“You said many things. I assume you refer to the passage where you touted all the benefits of whoring yourself. Even if you do not, that’s what I want to address now.
“Izzy,” this is the first time he’s spoken her ‘stupid’ human name since … well, since before he beat her face into the wall, “you may think that taking multiple males into your bed demonstrates strength or independence. You may think that it somehow elevates your status. You may use it as a tool to get what you think you want or need. You may be so weak as to be addicted to pleasure. Or you may even be so sick as to think that this is evidence of how wanted you are, or how worthy.
“I don’t know the reason for your promiscuity. But that does not matter. There is no good reason. We are wolves and men. We are born to be faithful to one mate and one alone. Doing otherwise offends Gaia and degrades you.
“When you lie with male after male, when you throw yourself at anything that catches your eye — or worse, anything whose eye you catch — with no intention of ever devoting yourself or being an object of devotion, you degrade yourself. You degrade your bloodline, which was forged in battle and glory. You make a thing of yourself, a possession to be used and discarded.
“Eventually, such degradation will corrupt your soul and your ability to bond to a true mate. Worse, your name will be besmirched. You will be known as the slut, the whore, she who opens her legs to many. You may think you do not care about your name, Kinswoman, but it is the only one you have. You can regenerate blood. You can recover from wounds of the flesh. You can even live well and proudly with one arm or one leg or one eye. But once you lose your good name, that is final. Your shame will live on beyond your death.”
Izzy:
Izzy.
He uses her name, and a brow quirks upwards. It hurts, to do so, but it does. And she listens to him, and then.
“You assume a lot about how I think – what I may think and feel, how things may seem. Do you want to know what I think, and why I do – and did – what I did?”
Daniel:
“Tell me,” simply.
Izzy:
It’s not the answer she expects. That much is clear. Her eyes are not quite so swollen, and there is the glitter of dark depths seen though the bruised and battered flesh – but it’s still not enough to get a full read, a full view into the thoughts, and emotions of the beaten woman before him…
No. Injured woman. Not beaten. Not yet.
She takes her time before she speaks, gathering her thoughts from where they so easily stray with the pain she’s in. It’s almost time for more advil. Almost time to attempt sleep. Almost time to try to get into that room again without flipping the fuck out. Almost.
“I ask that you hear me out then. All the way through. My thoughts are still… muddy.” She stops.
And then, she nods. “You are from a sept where women have nothing to aspire to but to be mated. That is their driving goal – to find someone, settle down, further the line in a place cut off from the rest of the world, cut off from us. To you that is normal. That is what there is to expect. That is simply the way it is.
This is not the Sept of the Seventh Isle.” She remembers. She remembers everything.
“I grew up in a different world, where there is more to aspire too, more that can be done, more that needs to be done for the Nation to survive in the cities. We have to adapt, or we die. We have to change, or we fail. We have to learn, or we remain stagnant. I grew up under the shadow of a great Foresti. The law is in my blood, and the protecting of it bred into my very fucking bones. When I was 18, I made the choice to pursue the law, uphold it in the human world, as well as do whatever needed to be done for the Nation. It’s not easy to walk that line. I’ve gotten very good at it – but there is never anyone who says job well done. What they say is – get mated, have a kid. We don’t fuck up. We don’t need you.”
A beat. “Protecting the Nation near ended my Career. It took seven years to rebuild it again. To return home again.” This is something they have in common, something he should understand. Cast out- rebuilding life to get back home. She lifts her hands to her hair, pushing it back, lifting it off her face, the skin of which bears heat and burning from the bruising, the swelling. She drops it, her hair falling down around her shoulders again as she folds her hands against her belly once more.
“To demand I mate, I mate for life, I propagate the species, to bow to this I allow you to dictate everything I can do, everything I am to be, without any ambitions for myself without being true to myself, no matter who hates me for it – THAT is what marks me as a possession. It marks me as worthless in your eyes. I am more. I do more. I am more that what lies between my thighs. That you force that one me makes me worthless, lower than a whore. It makes me a slave.”
She is lost for a moment, lost in that memory
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but she fights it back. Visibly.
“I have no wish to be mated. I have no wish to be tied to one man, to be paraded about on his arm as he forces child upon child on me. I am more. I want more. I make no secret that I enjoy sex. That is no crime. Many do. Many garou here are not faithful to any, let alone to one. But I control who I fuck, I control who takes me to bed, and I control if or when I have kids. I am nobodies toy, nobodies possession. Once…”
No.
He has not earned that Memory.
He has not earned that Trust.
She studies her hands for a long moment…
“To force me to your will in this degrades me, to be used only at the discretion of a male, for his intentions with little to no thought to mine, or what I wish. That is what being only a ‘kinswoman’ means to me.”
A pause, and then… “You sent a cop to work obviously beaten beyond anything that a simple bar brawl would result in – and you had someone hotwire my car and bring it here, from a crime scene -where it would have been simpler for us to retrieve it ourselves on the way here. Cops are like packs – and when one of their own is injured, they want blood. When something is wrong, they seek revenge. For obvious reasons I could not tell them what happened. They want whoever did this to me destroyed. By fucking Finn, I proved I was still me – to myself, to him. I proved that I was still alive, kicking, the Izzy Montoya they know and love and fight beside every single day on the streets of Chicago. I proved to them that this was nothing more than a brawl. It ensured his loyalty -whether or not he fully believes the story I was forced to tell. It protected the Veil, the Nation.”
And here she looks up at him. “It protected you.”
Softly, now. “Do not degrade me further by demanding that I be your possession. It does not make you better than what you think of them. It makes you the same. I followed everything else you set before me, even though it caused me a great deal of agony that you can’t possibly know or understand. The terror in that…”
She stops. And then simply looks at him. “In this, I choose. I do not disgrace the tribe. I am discreet where it concerns the Nation. I do not thin my blood by allowing them to impregnate me. I do not choose lovers that will spread rumors and stories and lies. I choose wisely. It is my body and I control who has access to it, and when. I choose. I do not condemn you for your beliefs on the matter – do not condemn me for mine.”
Daniel:
For what it’s worth, Daniel listens carefully, intently, his dark eyes fixed on the kinswoman’s face. And when she’s finished, there’s a beat or two of silence.
“I am glad,” he says then, “that you have at least chosen to speak to me logically and courteously. And it is good to see that you have some sense of your duty to your Tribe and your people. That is progress.
“However, everything you said I have already addressed. You may think,” he repeats, “your promiscuity demonstrates strength or independence. You may use it as a tool to get what you want or need — or even want or need for the sake of your people.
“But it degrades you.
“As we cannot agree on this, we will have to disagree. When you have convinced me and Truth in Frenzy-rhya that you are fit to live independently without endangering yourself or others, and when you are no longer my ward, you can smear your own name and sully your own body as you wish. But until then, you will honor my orders, as I honor those of my Jarl. Even if you do not like them.
“Since you have chosen to disobey, you will choose your own punishment. But make no mistake: if it is insufficient, I will decide for you.”
Izzy:
And just like that, the curtain closes. The moments she offered him refused, ignored, discarded. The muscle in her jaw clenches, her teeth grind.
“Nothing I said is any different than what I have done or believed before. The progress comes in someone deciding to ask before judgment. However – I am not a child.”
A beat, and she meets his gaze evenly. “No matter what I say, you will decide for yourself anyway. So choose. I have done nothing wrong. ”
Daniel:
A flicker of a shadow crossing Broken Hammer’s brow — disappointment, evident as daylight.
“Clearly you feel the need to make up for your single step closer to maturity and independence with three in the opposite direction.
“Very well. Tomorrow, move whatever necessary belongings you might need to the Brotherhood. Until you prove that you deserve greater freedom, you will spend every hour you do not spend at work here in the Brotherhood. The Brotherhood provides food, shelter, and clean water. I cannot imagine any reason you might need to go elsewhere. Therefore, you will travel from one to the other as directly as possible without stopping. You will be questioned every night to ensure that you have not violated this order. If the demands of your job absolutely requires that you make detours, you will request permission in advance.
“These orders are in addition to all others I have given you. Do not disobey me again, Kinswoman. If you push me again, you will regret it.”
Izzy:
She says nothing.
She cares very little that she’s disappointed him – it’s nothing, nothing to the regret she holds for opening even an inch to him, for making even that effort. When he is finished, she simply leans forward, takes up the file she had been working on before he arrived, and grabs her pen, and goes back to work.
There is only silence now.