[Izzy Montoya] Another night, and it’s the same old thing. It’s 11:30, and Izzy has taken over the corner booth once more. Her laptop is open, the table before her strewn with various file folders, filled with pictures and reports and various other sundry items. She works through them steadily, between drinks from the whiskey glass on the table before her.
On the edge of the table is a plate with the remnants of her dinner on it – set aside a while ago. There’s also an ashtray, though she cannot smoke in here. It’s currently empty, but is there for when she steps outside to smoke again.
This fucking city drives her to it.
She’s dressed in what could be called ‘Business Casual’ but on her, the slacks and tailored blouse simply screams “cop”. There’s a leather coat next to her on the seat, and a holster pressed against the small of her back.
And she looks like someone beat her face into a brick wall- repeatedly. Recently. Which is pretty much exactly what happened, though the swelling in her eyes has gone down enough that she can open them completely now. The bruising is fantastically gruesome, her lips split and occasionally splitting again with any small facial expression. I certainly explains the bottle of advil also on the table – which she looks up from her work to grab and open. Time for another dose.
[Kora] The hour is late, and the night is cold. Outside, a full-moon shines over Chicago’s icy streets, fighting with the toxic glow of the city’s perpetual illumination. Most of the ordinary patrons have gone home, and the warm interior of the downstairs bar is nearly empty. Someone keeps playing the same song on the jukebox – over and over again – one of those songs from the 1990s that has no discernable tune except when it is actually playing – and then, only then, does it seem immediate, necessary, and inevitable.
The front door swings open again: a blast of snow, the breath of icy cold sharp with the scent of the lakewater and car exhaust, and a tall, lean figure in a black wool coat. The Fenrir woman stops just inside the door and has the courtesy to pull it closed behind her – quickly, preserving the heat, the instinct of someone used to cold climates and long dark nights. She stands just inside, stomping ice and salt from her boots onto the welcome mat just inside, shaking snow out of her pale blonde hair. Her cheeks and the tip of her nose are red from the cold. A half-minute passes as her eyes adjust to the light. Izzy might feel the woman’s dark gaze pause at her booth during the creature’s first survey of the room, but the Garou does not interrupt her – not yet. Instead she walks – with that feral grace so many of the monsters of the world seem to have – toward the bar.
Izzy is drinking whiskey. Kora, in celebration or concession to the full of the moon, inquires about their single-malt Scotches – asking for an Islay. “Lagavulin, then – ” she says, pronouncing it lahk-a-voolin with perhaps too much emphasis on the central a. ” – and,” she continues, cautioning the bartending as he goes to put ice in it, ” – neat, please.”
[Izzy Montoya] Izzy has long since tuned the jukebox out, tuned the room out, tuned out anything and everything but work. It’s something she’s good at, something she understands, something that keeps her sane. Lockdown means she must be here, but it certainly doesn’t mean she has to be upstairs, that she has to sleep, that she has to do anything but be sitting right here, somewhere in the building.
She pours out a few of pills into her hand – more than 2, less than 8 – and tosses them into her mouth, following it by the burn of whiskey. She closes her eyes, briefly, and then sets her glass down, recaps the Advil, and pulls a file over. She starts to flip through the pictures, making sure only what should be there is there, and already beginning to formulate exactly how it will be subtly different once it’s entered into the computer.
It never ends.
Ever.
[Kora] With her scotch in hand, Kora turns around and leans back against the bar, ignoring the stools in favor of standing. Her coat flares out around her lean frame, long and dark, the marching rows of buttons on either panel glint dully in the ambient light. She props herself up with her elbows on the bar, closes her eyes long enough to savor the first smokey mouthful of the Lagavulin in her glass, breathing in the fumes to bathe her senses in the rich peaty undertones – then opens her eyes again.
Once more Izzy comes into focus. The light of the woman’s laptop casts her in a ghastly glow – all blue light, reflecting her injuries from below, darkening the hollows and deadening the bruises, giving her warm skin – undergirded by all that noble Fenrir breeding – a corpse like glow.
[Izzy Montoya] “You gonna stare at me all fuckin’ night, or what.”
She’s only met the woman once – and truth be told, she doesn’t remember what she looks like. It’s the voice that triggered recognition, and even that was muddled by the amount of agony she’d been in that night, sitting on the floor where she was dumped, getting nagged at for daring to bleed on the floor. Like she had much choice. It was that voice that told a story as she was coming to about being forced to mate in order to learn one’s proper place, or some shit. Those details are fuzzy too.
Like as not, as with most old school stories, it was bullshit anyway.
Izzy looks up from the file, though, and meets Kora’s gaze directly, a brow quirking slightly over one eye. “The bruises are even better up close.” She smirks, and then drops her eyes back to the file in her hands.
[Kora] The Garou does not respond. There’s a – coiled sense about her tonight, something to do with the moon above, the way she feels the silvered light underneath her skin, tidal pull against her blood, the extra gravity that both fixes her to the earth and separates her from it. And so: ya gonna stare at me all fuckin’ night, or what says Izzy, and she smirks, her swollen face creased with the expression. Kora ignores that; she swallows it down with the Scotch, perhaps. the bruises are better up close.
There’s something intense about her expression; not avid so much as – alive, interested in other in the way that few people can find it in themselves to be. Then she finishes her drink, orders another – neat – trying hard not to think about the impact that the single-malts will have on her meager cash supply. Her attention seems to have left the Fenrir woman in the corner; she turns back to the bar – except that ten minutes later (another file, another photo) – Izzy will feel that pregnant bush of rage against her skin. Now, the Fenrir woman has two glasses in hand: her own Scotch, and a refill of Izzy’s whiskey. She sits on the opposite bench and pushes the drink across the rough planks of the table between them.
“What are you working on?”
[Izzy Montoya] For Izzy’s part, she pays attention to where the other woman is, though she works through the files just as steadily. Multi-tasking has always been one of her strong points. One on a very long list, though few people would know or believe she is capable of more than cussing every other word. After all – she’s useless in so many other ways. Or so they believe.
Kora settles, and there’s a slide of rage across her skin, settling along her shoulders, twisting around her lower spine. It resides there, the sense of it, the heat of it, reminding her of what the woman that now sits across from her is. Not that she’d likely forget it- but still.
She sets the current open file on the keys of her laptop, sliding the rest together into a pile, which she then lifts and places in the corner beside her. Out of the way of that sliding glass, a glass that she wraps her fingers around, lifts in something like a silent toast, and tips back for a swallow. She drinks like a damn Fianna – she’s been told that more than once. Most folks just don’t spend bonding time with the guys from the station behind bars – bonding in a way that demands she be able to hold her liquor and take a punch.
…both of which come in handy more often than one might think – even if it simultaneously loosens her tongue, which isn’t always a good thing.
“Paperwork. Long answer: a coverup – though I shouldn’t bother, as the der old Jarl is pretty fuckin’ sure he don’t need folks like me covering up fuckups, as ya’ll never ever fuck up. Ain’t tat the shit? But if I don’t, then.. well. Someone’s gonna be all over the case of a dead fomore with claw marks in what I’ll make sure is simply considered a domestic violence situation gone bad.”
She glances up, and smirks, slightly. “And you know who’s fault it’d be then?” Another lift of the glass, and she tosses back another swallow before setting it down. “Welcome to the motherfuckin’ Nation.”
A beat.
“Short answer? Jus’ doin my duty.”
[Izzy Montoya] (Behind bars? no. AT bars. *L* preposition fail!)
[Kora] Here’s the thing: Kora does not respond to any of that. She watches Izzy intensely, and Izzy has the clear sense that the blonde creature with the banked rage is listening to her – listening to her closely – there’s something present – active, even – in the way she listens to the kinwoman. She doesn’t swallow it, though. She doesn’t inhale the woman’s bitterness the way the other Garou had. Not now; not tonight. It’s a deliberate choice, perhaps – to hear someone else without immediate judgment.
“How are you covering it up?” The woman’s attention has dipped from the kinswoman’s face to the papers scattered over the table top. Faint lines suggestive of a frown mark her brow, but her expressive mouth remains neutral.
[Kora] (OOC: I confess – I bugged Damon and popped into his one-shot scene. So! I will be slow. If you’d rather, we can pause now and continue later? I definitely want to give this scene its due, but want to like, kill something too. :) )
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[Izzy Montoya] (No worries. Everyone MTs round here, and if Mandrake pop’s on after his night out, I’ll be doing the same. *L* I’m very patient with slow posting. I kinda have to be since I tend to post like the wind myself. :) )
to Kora
[Izzy Montoya] “Carefully.”
She closes the file, and tucks it onto the pile, flipping the top of the laptop down as well, and shoving it over to sit on top the pile of the folders. She studies the other woman for a long moment – and then relents.
Sorta.
“It’s better that you don’t know. Plausible deniability. Only one that takes the fuckin’ fall is me.” Somehow, there’s the distinct sense that it wouldn’t be the first time she’s take such a fall.
[Kora] “You’ve done that before.” This is a statement, not a question. Izzy closes the file, and Kora – who is now inside, wearing a heavy wool coat – shrugs her way out of her winter coat, neatly stripping her arms out of the sleeves, revealing the worn t-shirt and thermal undershirt she wears beneath. The planked wood here is stripped and varnished and polished nightly – polished enough that the Fenrir woman’s long fingers and black-painted (peeling, always) nails cast a soft-focus reflection in the warm wood. The corner of her mouth twists upward. ” – the fall thing.”
[Izzy Montoya] It’s a statement, and a very true one. The swelling around her eyes has finally subsided at least enough that she can open them almost fully, which allows the sudden shadow in the dark depths of her eyes be seen. Izzy is a master of the small expression – a slight smirk, a quirk of the brow, a bit crease of her brow… Rarely does she let her expressions evolve into anything more than that. Her lovers see her smile, one in particular has seen every thing she is, all she shadows and light and everything in between. A few have seen her laugh. Very few have ever seen her cry. Even beaten and bleeding – Kora did not see her cry. Daniel will never see her cry.
“Yes.” A statement that isn’t really a question is answered with honesty. Izzy’s always been good with honesty – though few people ever want to hear it. “Almost cost me my career.”
[Kora] The Garou is sunk back in the booth, her shoulders low, the coat askew all around her. She has a boneless grace in the moment, the sinuous incurve of her lean torso is interrupted only when she half-straightens to reach for her drink. Izzy drinks – well, furiously tonight, downing the whiskey she’s ordered as if it could make something wrong inside her right. Kora drinks – slowly. She’s still on her second Scotch – her second single-malt Islay – and does not want to consider the impact a third one would have on her bank account, so she drinks slowly, savoringly, spending more time inhaling the aroma of the alcohol than she does drinking it.
“What happened?” Her eyes are on Izzy, but not on Izzy’s eyes. Were Izzy a ballistics specialist, she could estimate the trajectory to some point on her jaw, where the tendons and muscle move beneath her skin to open and close the tempomandibular joint as she speaks – watching the words form underneath her skin, maybe, the way her head turns when she speaks, the twist of her split lips into those nanoexpressions in which Izzy specializes.
[Izzy Montoya] She doesn’t say anything for a long time. It may seem like she’s not going to say anything at all, for she’s well known for not pausing to think before she speaks. There’s a clench of her jaw, despite the flair of agony that sets off along the bones, through her sinuses, in her skull, which dances behind her vision. She inhales sharply once, then holds her breath until she can let it go without a sound. It’s really something how much pain the physical body can withstand at any point in time… how it settle to a dull roar that’s almost livable between the agonizing flairs.
She has to know. “Do you really give a shit?” Only one person has asked her about it. Only one person of the Nation knows all the details. Only one person, in all this time.
But she continues, anyway. “Kemp believes the Nation never fucks up. I know better than that – so do you, so does he. 7 Years ago, the Nation fucked me up the ass without lube, and I willingly did my duty, and willingly took the fall. I only had one condition from my bosses – they had to leave my partner completely in the dark. The Nation didn’t give a fuck about one kinfolk losing her job.”
A beat, and then. “It was a cover up – bigger than this one. There were bodies that had to disappear, and evidence to be planted elsewhere, to point the finger at simple human fucked up bullshit instead of a veiled war. I got caught. Was a stupid mistake on my part, and luckily what they caught me doing was the smallest piece of the pie. It was be fired and disgraced completely, or take a transfer. I spent 7 years in Miami scratching my way to the top again. It took me five to get my shield back, and another two to convince them that I could come home.”
[Kora] Do you really give a shit – The boneless creature’s eyes narrow for the first time with that question; there’s something dangerous there, in the half-lidded look that Izzy earns from the Skald, the suggestion of sparks beneath the surface of her dark eyes. So the rage is there, underneath the wash of the expressionless exterior after all.
Then: it subsides again, sinks back below the surface, settles into the coiled architecture of her body, the concave incurve of her flexible spine, somewhere at the seat of her body, amidst the viscera, against the bone. She listens again; her attention is close – that’s clear – but her eyes are no longer on Izzy’s jaw, or Izzy’s eyes, or Izzy’s anything. The Garou woman stairs at the table-top, now, at the reflection of her (killer’s) hands in the wood, little more than a smear of light. Her head is turned aslant, her hair falls forward over the table.
When Izzy finishes, there is silence – except for the slow, quiet rhythm of the Skald’s deliberate breath, in through the nose, out through the mouth.
Then, at last, she looks up. “What do you think the Nation should have done for you? When your job was threatened – or thereafter.”
[Kora] (Sorry! I really had to think about that one. :) )
to Izzy Montoya
[Izzy Montoya] Her gaze narrows, Kora’s does – at Izzy’s question. It’s an honest question though, from one in a job that has to ask the questions, and sometimes they really don’t want to know the answers. Sometimes, being in the dark makes things so much easier. And often times, when people ask questions – they already have formed their own answer in their mind. No one answer will be will match what they’ve already decided.
Case in point: Daniel.
But, she meets Kora’s gaze evenly as she asks her next questions. “Nothing. I do my duty because it is that – my duty.”
There’s a beat, and when she starts to talk again, it begins soft, musing even, but soon she’s meeting Kora’s gaze again, studying as she talks. “But every once in a while, it’d be really fucking nice to have you all quit telling me that I’m worthless, and do nothing – that my only wish should be to fuck the purebred and squirt out kids. I do what needs to be done, without ever drawing attention to myself or you – sometimes drawing attention TO myself INSTEAD of you. Sometimes, it’d just be really fuckin’ nice to hear you think that we kin are more that fuckbuddies for the true born, that those born true are fuckin perfect, and we’re fuckin trash. I saved my own motherfuckin skin, I saved my own motherfuckin hide. And I came back to folks like Daniel trying to tell me what I can and cannot do with my own body and refusing to call me by my name despite REPEATED requests, from nice until I snapped the last time, Kemp telling me that ya’ll NEVER fuck up, and that my pride will get me killed and that i should feel HONORED that he’s let me live, since I’m such a giant pain in the ass because I ask that you do something so fucking simple as call me by my motherfuckin’ name.”
Here, she leans forward on her elbows, and closes the distance between them. “I’ll take a beating every fucking day of my life before you’ll ever get me to admit I’m less than you. I’m different, I don’t have fangs and claw, but I have my mouth and my gun, what’s between my thighs and whats between my ears. And ALL of them are in use for the motherfuckin perfect Nation.”
[Izzy Montoya] (*L* no worries. Izzy’s… a handful. (waits for another beatdown. *L*) )
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[Izzy Montoya] .
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[Kora] There is a long moment of snapping tension, then. Izzy leans in close to a Fenrir Garou during the full of the moon. The female’s eyes close as the kinswoman closes the distance, the staccato beat of her speech punctuated by “fucking” so often that the word becomes something like a tattoo, the punctuate of a bassline through the larger architecture of the song, perhaps.
Close as she is, Izzy can smell the peat-smoke of the single-malt Scotch in the Fenrir woman’s grasp. She can see the way the woman’s nail-beds go white with tension beneath the peeling black polish. A band of muscle snaps across the woman’s cheek, and her mouth pulls back against her teeth in a tight expression that could not be mistaken for a smile as her jaw sets. The Fenrir woman swallows; the gesture is deliberate, and Izzy can see the way her mouth worlds, then the contraction of the creature’s throat, taut against her skin, pulling at the braided choker of black leather she wears at her neck.
“Kinswoman.” The word that Izzy hates to hear, the title that she despises bearing, comes out in the Skald’s mouth. The woman’s voice is low and it is rich and it is clear. “I call you that now – ” Her eyes open, then – all dark iris, for the pupils are dilated with tension, with subdural rage, “so that I will remember my duty to you tonight. Your bitterness ill becomes you. I would say more,” her hand is nearly a claw around the whiskey glass. She swirls the remaining liquid once around, then tips her head back and drains it all, not bothering to savor it. The woman rises with the snap of gracious efficiency so common to Garou, and grabs the collar of her coat behind her. ” – but I have the distinct sense that it would be futile. You will not hear me.”
[Kora] Okay, that was SO bad. I am really sorry! (thinking/other scene) (kills self). I think I should let it go there – but I hope we play again sometime?
to Izzy Montoya
[Izzy Montoya] “Just as none of you hear me. It goes both ways.”
Lips curve into a smirk, despite the fact that it causes them to crack and bleed again, despite the fact that it stings. The smirk is at once knowing, and bitter. Judging and frustrated. Determined, and proud.
But she simply settles back into her seat, and pull the laptop back in front of her, opens it, and grabs the file folder once again.
[Izzy Montoya] (Hahahah! if that was bad? I really totally suck balls :) No worries, and of course. Grab me anytime. I have other chars that aren’t so combative too. *LOL*)
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