[Grace] She had come downstairs because she was hungry.
She had come downstairs, more accurately, because she was hungry and she was, for all intents and purposes, almost lonely. She had been for some time, and for all that she was, though she had been chastized before, seh was debating something. The desire was there, nagging at the back of her little lupus brian that she wanted to sneak out.
She might sleep at the caern tonight. Grace wasn’t sure yet.
[Izzy Montoya] She’s exhausted. It’s been a week of this bullshit, and she’s not sleeping, she’s still in pain, and she’s… exhausted. But, once again, she’s sitting in the back booth, surrounded by her files and folders, her laptop on the table in front of her, along with a glass of whiskey, the bottle she refills it from, and a plate with half a sandwich still on it.
She doesn’t talk much, to anyone here at the Brotherhood. Her one night with a few hours actual sleep came with the help of a friend, who sat with her in the common room upstairs, and ensured she wasn’t woken up, and forced to sleep in that room. It helped, but it wasn’t enough. It won’t be enough until she’s able to sleep once more in her own bed, in her own home.
The nightly interrogations have been brief, and she’s yet to have one tonight. She simply keeps on working – certain that it’ll come one way or the other. What this enforced solitude is supposed to teach her is anyone’s guess. She’s running fresh out of whogivesafuck.
[Grace] Kinfolk are precious.
It is what she remembers from the tribe whose blood she bleeds. She remembers that she has been told, again and again, that kinfolk are precious. That kinfolk are your future, that you are supposed to care for kinfolk. That you are supposed to protect kinfolk, that you are supposed to treasure them as gifts. This is all that Grace knows she is supposed to do with kinfolk. Wolfkin, she understood.
Izzy is the first kinfolk she’s attempted to interact with here. Human kin. The Coltranes were nice, but Grace avoided them like the plague.
She looked at Izzy, and her approach was tentative. Tall and thin. Lanky, underweight. She taps on the table near Izzy.
She doesn’t say a word.
[Izzy Montoya] Kinfolk are precious, and precious few feel that they are considered such. She is no different. For one so precious, she’s been beaten near to death, and still bears the astonishing bruising from it. Her eyes are black, the whites more red than white due to broken blood vessels, her nose and cheeks filled with healing abrasions, her lips split and healing.
In short, she looks like shit.
Grace approaches, tentatively, and taps on the table. There’s a quirk of a brow, and the fenrir kin (beaten, not broken) looks up. The brow hitches higher, slightly, as she takes in the teenager. ”
And waits. Silent.
[Grace] She looks at her, and a feeling starts to overwhelm her.
She looks at Izzy, and the first thing that came out of her mouth was simply one thing.
“I’m sorry,” she says. As though whatever had happened to Izzy was her fault, as though all of it was something that could have been avoided, as though the lupus didn’t know what to say or how to say it without devolving into inarticulate whines and moans and sounds and scents left unsmelled. She was half mute to her own people, why would now be any different.
“… you are unhappy.”
[Izzy Montoya] That brow arches again. Thankfully, it’s not a movement that causes her instant pain any longer. Things are better in that respect, though a clench of the jaw still causes a shot of agony through her skull, forgetting and rubbing her face in frustration can almost drop her to her knees. She’s better, but there’s a long way to go.
“Why?” Curious – enough so that it isn’t snapped. The last though… the last statement brings a bitter smirk to her lips. “Whatever gave you that idea… doesn’t everyone enjoy incarceration?”
She lifts her glass and takes a swig of the whiskey within, and then sets it down with a sigh. She flick her fingers toward the other side of the booth. An invitation to sit, if she wants.
[Grace] She cocks her head to the side, and the sound that comes from her lips is one that goes from low to high, voiceless, wordless, a sound that gives the indication that the knit-but-raised brows and the set jaw does not. the girl is painfully thin- whatever nourishment she receives is sufficient, but not enough to fatten her up. Not enough to keep up with her metabolism. She doesn’t seem to have an eating disorder that anyone’s seen.
The gesture, though, is strange, though she says nothing.
Something of this interaction is lost on her.
She sits down, though, and does not say a word.
after a long while, she speaks again. “You’re kinfolk,” she says.
[Izzy Montoya] She doesn’t answer the question. That must be something that reserved only for garou, the ability to hear a question and completely ignore it, and let it slide away. Heaven forbid they admit that a question has any merit whatsoever if it’s not one of their own…
But she sits down, and Izzy moves her paperwork out of Grace’s way, setting it to the side. She doesn’t close the laptop yet. The silence is long, and Izzy spends the moments after the first few scanning the file she’s been working on already.
Then Grace speaks the obvious, and dark eyes glance up again. This one is weirder than most… “Yeah, and?”
[Grace] “What’s that like?” she asks. It’s another question of the obvious.
Indeed, it is a trait most garou have. Theyc an ignore questions so easily; it is surprising. There is a chance GRace didn’t understand, or had no idea how to answer, or worse thought the uestion rhetorical. So much of this interaction was lost upon her. Problematic, this.
[Izzy Montoya] The answer is instant. “Look at my face. That’s what it’s fuckin’ like.”
What the hell is with this one? Clearly, there is something that Izzy is missing in this interaction too.
[Grace] She seemed almost uncomfortable, and there was a sound, a half whine again. Uncertainty. She looks at her again, and she looks at her. She was confused, she was uncomfortable, she was so muc all wrapped up in the form that looked human.
“You’re supposed to treasure kinfolk,” she says, “you’re our future.”
[Izzy Montoya] “Is that so.” she smirks, and reaches to pull the top of the laptop down, and close it. she rests her fingers around the glass, and studies the teenager across from her.
Izzy’s a perceptive creature, though this is a bit out of her league. “And why would I want to be that, when this is what I get for a request – despite the fact that I do my duty for the nation every fucking day? Why the hell would I want to have any part of any future for your kind?”
[Grace] “You wouldn’t,” she says. It’s simple and to the point. Obvious.
She looks at her face, at bruises, and the teenaged female is staring, looking at her. She is intent, intense. She doesn’t realize her eyes watered slightly. She didn’t realize her reaction was intense, from her gut. That she felt a little sick to her stomach.
“Our kind,” she corrects, “we are the same.”
[Izzy Montoya] She shakes her head. “No. We are not the same. You are garou. I am a slave, a possession to be owned, passed around, and used. Told where to live, how to act, how to speak, who to talk to, who to fuck. I am to be humble and submissive and overjoyed with any Tribal Warrior who wants to spread my thighs and plant his seed in hopes of birthing another warrior. I’m to do whatever I do for the Nation selflessly and without ever getting so much as a nod of tanks. I’m not to be a person. I am to be a kinswoman. We are not the same.”
She tips her head, slightly, and then, only then realizes that shes made the kid cry. She sighs, softly, and mutters “…fuckme.” She leans back in her seat, and finishes off her whiskey and pours herself another glass. “I’m just a bitter old bitch, kid. Don’t listen to me.”
[Grace] Izzy made her cry. It was hard to tell what did it, if it was the words or the truth or what.
She looked at the kinfolk woman, and when Izzy looked at her all she could see was palpable, genuine, distraught confusion. It’s hard to tel, and the female has no idea that the young lady in front of her is a cub. That she’s not yet gone through her rite of passage, that Izzy Montoya is the first kinfolk Grace has had the liberty to sit and have a serious conversation with in Chicago.
“Duty is more than that,” she says, slowly. Finally after it’s all processed. Grace sounds pained.
Finally, she moves from confused to frustrated, which makes her half whine come out more like a growl. she mutters something, it’s hard to hear.
[Izzy Montoya] Izzy is confused by the kid before her, she has no idea that she’s a cub, that she is anything other than human. She’s never been exposed to this – born and bread in Chicago, Lupus are few and far between, and all have managed to miss meeting the one and only Izzy Montoya.
She lifts a hand, and starts to rub her temple – remembers at the last second and instead stuck her hair behind her ear. “I didn’t catch that.” she says of the odd whine/growl/mutter. And then. “So what is Duty… it is more than what?”
[Grace] “Humans,” she says. Articulates clearly, “mistreat their own kind… I expected more out of the homid-born. I was wrong, though.”
She is upset by this. She takes a second, and finally replies.
“Duty is more than breeding. Much, much more.”
[Izzy Montoya] That brow hitches upwards again. And then… “You’re not homid-born.” It’s a statement, as Grace’s replay made it perfectly clear. That leaves only two other possibilities, and something tells Izzy that Metis isn’t one of them. “….wellfuckmesideways.”
She’s staring. She can’t help it. But it would explain a lot…
And then, Grace speaks the ultimate truth, and Izzy laughs softly. “Funny, that’s what I keep fuckin’ telling them. They don’t like it much, as you can see…”
[Grace] Grace isn’t apologetic enough to be metis. She’s not browbeaten enough to be metis.
She looks back at Izzy, head cocked tot he side, and the slightly more feral gestures become more aparent. Izzy laughs, and she continues to look confused. She purses her lips, and looks down and away. She doesn’t say anything.
[Izzy Montoya] She takes another drink, when Grace falls quiet, so does Izzy. Grace is working something through in her head, or is confused, or something, and Izzy is… well.
She’s Izzy. So she finishes off what’s in her glass and reaches automatically for a cigarette, before remembering she can’t smoke it in her. Just another thing to piss her off, really. City drives her to smoke again, and she can’t do it inside anywhere but her own home, and she’s not “allowed’ to go there. Ain’t that the shit.
But Grace is quiet, and perhaps by some miracle, so is Izzy.
[Grace] “… you seem tired,” she finally says.
[Izzy Montoya] She nods, slightly. “I’m fuckin’ exhausted. I can’t sleep here.” One thing Izzy’s always been good at. Honesty.
[Grace] “Why can’t you sleep here?”
[Izzy Montoya] “It’s just too much. The rooms are too small, there’s too many of you, and it’s too much.”
[Grace] She stops, and she seems to think about this. Grace is trying, she really is, but her thoughts seem to come in a different order than most homidborn would.
“Couch?”
[Izzy Montoya] Her lips just twist into a smirk. “I’m not ‘allowed’.” She shakes her head, slightly. “I force myself to lay in the bunk he made long enough to say I was there, then I go to work. I sleep when I can there.”
This can’t last forever.
It can’t.
She’s gonna lose her motherfuckin mind.
[Grace] She paused.
“What if you fell asleep on the couch and I moved you to bed?”
Trying to find a loophole, this one.
[Izzy Montoya] She smiles. it’s small, it’s brief, but she does. “I appreciate the thought, kiddo, but I.. well, it just won’t work for me. I might hurt you before I fully wake, and you aren’t such a bad kid, so I’d feel like shit if that happened.”
There’s reasons there. A lot of them. And none that she’s willing to share. “I’ll be alright. Believe it or not, I’ve been through worse. He’ll get sick of keeping me shackled to him soon.” Only question is – will it be soon enough?
[Grace] “If you hurt me, then it’s my fault,” she tells Izzy. Matter of fact, straight to the point, “injuries heal. It just takes time.”
All things take time, but that is neither here nor there. Grace doesn’t discuss it, really.
[Izzy Montoya] “So is it my fault then, that he hurt me?”
[Grace] “No,” she said, “I’m a stranger. Moving you somewhere you do not wish to be. the reaction to fight and protect yourself? Natural.”
[Izzy Montoya] That… was a good answer, and Izzy accepts it as such. “I’ll be alright, but I appreciate the offer. It’s about time for me to make my night appearance – before he comes to find me.”
She starts to gather up her things, and put her files and the laptop back into her briefcase. She nods to the rest of her sandwich, the half untouched on the plate on the edge of the table. “You can have that if you want.”
[Izzy Montoya] [and…fade]