[Howard] He knows where she lives. This is probably the last thing her missing Alpha wants, period, let alone would want if he were ever to meet Heir of the Ruined Day or have extended conversations with him, yet when their paths deviated last week after the completion the surgical procedure on the eight-slice toaster Rory hadn’t shyly handed him a phone number or confessed that she had a room at the Brotherhood. She gave him an address. Where she could be found alone. Without supervision.
Clearly, Rory either trusts this tall, goofy motherfucker, or she has a profound lack of self-preservation. More likely she’s seen him in a fight and knows he’s about as dangerous, to other people, as a wet paper towel. Whether or not he’s a danger to himself is an entirely different matter, but what evidence exists supports the following: Rory tore apart a seven-foot-tall Gorehound and bit a hidden sniper in half. Howard pissed off and ran from said seven-foot-tall Gorehound and had his limb blown off by the sniper.
If anything, he ought to be afraid of her.
It’s a Saturday evening, and he shows up at the packhouse dressed fairly standard for him. Rain calls it his “rock star garb.” He’s wearing his sunglasses when Rory answers the door, and he cuts her a grin before lifting up a plastic bag full of what appears to be take-out.
“Hungry?” he asks. The faint aroma of marijuana clings to him as heavy as cold-wrought perspiration.
[Rory] Maybe it’s the fact that he gave her her first weed. Maybe it’s the fact that he apologized for laughing at her – but not because she couldn’t smoke said weed. The clarification stuck with her, struck a cord. Maybe it’s because he got the toaster or any number of things. Fact is – he’s Tribe, and he doesn’t seem to hate her and she’s awful lonly without Edwin and Delmar around. So, she gave him an address.
Something forbidden.
Something dangerous.
…wait, that’s just her. Dangerous and forbidden, among so many other things – like timid and shy and unable to talk in complete sentences without messing it all up. In the face of gorehounds and snipers, she is fearless. The rest of the time she’s just… Rory.
It’s this Rory that opens the door to the apartment when the bell rings. She peeks around the door, showing only one green eye and those red, red curls at first, as she studies him a moment, hiding the shy little grin behind the door – though he can hear it in her voice as she answers “….starving.”
There’s a moment’s hesitation, then the door opens the rest of the way, with her hiding mostly behind it. The short hallway opens into a standard, if rather run down, apartment. It’s clean, spotlessly so. They come to the door to the kitchen first, then it opens into the living room, with a hallway off to the side that presumably leads to bedrooms. Small and run down, but good enough for the Bogeymen.
Or, rather, for the only Bogeyman left in Chicago.
There’s shockingly little of her around – nothing that really says she even lives there, except for her tattered jacket over a chair, and her backpack at it’s side, her boots nearby. It’s as if she is a ghost, that could disappear in a moment’s notice.
Bogeyman indeed.
“bunt a weer?”
[Howard] Even though hers could only resemble Howard’s less if she were frowning, her smile is somehow brighter; at least, it is to him. His own is cocky and assured, as though he knows damn well he isn’t turning up unwanted even if he’s entirely unannounced, but it isn’t brash. He doesn’t turn up empty-handed and expect to be greeted. For as much as he attempts to eschew and ignore everything that makes him Garou, as much as he tries to deny his heritage or pretend as though his auspice means nothing to him, the charitable virtues among their kind can be seen in him: he shares what he has, be it marijuana or alcohol or food, be it the simple pleasure of his company, and he doesn’t ask for a whole hell of a lot in return.
Anything else, though, he’ll find some way to enact payment. Asking him to, say, do his duty will usually result in him trying to barter, trying to get something out of the exchange. There is no duty in his vocabulary. He does what he does because he wants to, and if he doesn’t want to do it, he can be persuaded only if he’ll somehow gain from it. He is by no means virtuous, and he certainly is not a saint.
But he brings food, and he smiles when he sees Rory.
She’s starving.
When she lets him in, Howard puts away that grin and steps inside with a vocal, theatric shiver that rattles the zipper on his jacket. He clomps off his combat boots as he moves over the threshold, and leaves his sunglasses on even as they move down the short hallway and into the kitchen. It’s hard to tell if he’s looking around, or looking at her, or what.
Perhaps they’re even. He can’t tell, exactly, what it is she’s asking him. Most of the time he can, but when he’s stoned it’s a considerably more massive effort.
“Hey, yeah, sure,” he says, hefting the bag to rest it on the nearest flat surface.
[Rory] What she asked becomes abundantly clear once he agrees, and she opens the fridge that holds a 6pack of beer, a couple take-home cartons, a jug of orange juice, and something that might have once been a block of cheese. Maybe. sorta. It looks like it might growl if someone investigated it, though, so it grows alone in the back corner.
So it was a beer she asked about, as she takes two bottles from the fridge, and then leans against the table to peek into the bag of takeout. She didn’t ask that he take off his boots, or his coat, but her little smile suggests that she’s happy he’s made himself at home. She grabs the bag though, and her beer, before leading him to the living room, where she gestures to the couch, and settles herself on the floor between it and the coffee table. Then she starts unloading the bag to the clean surface ahead of her.
She fits easily curled up in the smallish space, much as one who’s used to keeping out of the way, and unnoticed. It isn’t hard to imagine that, despite her mop of red hair and two left feet, she fit in well with the bogeymen and their reputation for sneaking around. Despite her rage under the swollen room, she makes it easy to forget she’s there.
[Howard] There is nothing about Howard that makes him easy to ignore. Between his height, his hair, the way he dresses, the way he talks, the way he acts… removing any one of those variables would do very little in terms of toning him down, making him easier to tolerate. His Rage is so low as to be ignored, so long as he is rested, so long as there is balance in him. He isn’t a Full Moon, and given what he’s been through since his First Change it is highly unlikely that he will ever become angry enough to have his brother’s problem, to have Rory’s problem, where being around humans, Kinfolk, even their packmates is an exercise in surviving until the next solitary moment.
It’s his personality that gives other people problems, the fact that he doesn’t know how to just sit still and not talk or touch anything; or, if he does know, he just doesn’t care to. Somehow, Rory is able to be around him without wanting or actually making the attempt to snap his skinny neck.
Once he’s led into the living room and it’s clear that is where they’re going to be staying, the Theurge pulls off his gloves, the fingers long since snipped off, and pushes them into the pockets of his jacket. It’s shucked off of his shoulders, his willowy arms hauled out of the sleeves, and he unwinds his obnoxiously bright green scarf before tossing the entire affair onto a nearby piece of furniture and folding himself onto the floor next to the Ahroun. He grunts and groans with the effort of getting his tall frame down from such a height, but he manages.
Before he turns his attention to the food, Howard reaches for the beer.
“Cheers, darlin’,” he says, and takes a voracious swallow. A loud exhale, and he leans back against the sofa. His sunglasses are still securely on his face, but when he looks over it’s with his entire head turning, not simply his eyes. The Theurge jostles her with his leg, then takes another tug of beer and asks, “What do you do all night?”
[Rory] If she’s curious about the sunglasses, she doesn’t ask. She doesn’t ask much, really, though it is almost certain that she has questions – lots of them. She is simply unused to questions being answered so has learned to leave them unasked and find her own answers. Maybe she’d even come up with an answer that’s close to the truth – maybe not. Likely, it doesn’t matter at all.
She takes up the bottle, and lifts it in a returned salute, takes a sip and then sets it down, before returning to setting out their meal. When it’s all there, she sits back for a moment, for two reasons. One, he lets him eat first – which is his right, as one who is not sinborn, despite the ranking she has enough renown for, even if she has yet to challenge to attain it. Secondly, it gives her time to think of the answer to his question.
“Patrol.” it’s what she does. And, of course. “thix fings.” So that she can eat. It’s a simple life – but uniquely hers.
[Howard] [Pause, trying not to puke!]
[Howard] Neither of them ask questions about things that plenty of other people zero in on and make a topic of conversation without too much thought put into it: anyone else, anyone human perhaps, would have asked Rory weeks ago why it is that she switches up the sounds in her words. Howard hasn’t done that. He hasn’t made fun of how she speaks, and he hasn’t asked her why it is when she shifts to another form she doesn’t have any claws, and he hasn’t asked her anything other than what might be construed as Difficult Questions: why she sits out in the cold, why she is here by herself, what she does all night.
He wants to know. So he asks.
The Theurge doesn’t seem terribly interested in the food they’ve laid out, far more interested in putting beer in his belly than noodles and vegetables and whatever processed crap they’re trying to pass off as meat, far more interested in listening to Rory speak. She never says much. It means he has to listen far more closely when she does.
Howard isn’t much of a listener, one wouldn’t think. He’s hyper and he’s loud and he is, most people think, utterly disrespectful.
“Toasters and shit,” he asks, after completing another swallow of beer, “or do you fix other things, too?”
[Rory] Toaster’s and shit. She smiles that shy lil smile again, hiding it behind a duck of her head, the slide of blood red curls along her chin. There is no denying her tribe, not with her coloring, not with the purity of the blood that runs through her veins. It sings songs of heroes and victory along with loss – as she will never pass the blood to further her line. As much as she strives to hide, to be still, to be unnoticed – her blood, her rage, it all makes it something impossible to achieve.
People notice her, but so few notice the small details. Howard would, perhaps, be shocked to know that the Ahroun Leader Himself can’t manage to remember that she has no claws, and makes impossible demands of her because of it. He would also, perhaps, be surprised to know she had spoken back to him, about it. The ire and ridicule that followed from the Ahroun and his Packmate however – THAT was more natural, more expected. That was something she is so well used too, so much so that she simply walked away.
She has yet to walk away from Howard. And she still clings to the hope of Edwin’s return, though other’s would have given up long ago. When she loves, she does so completely, without reservation. She also does so very, very rarely. Friendship, companionship – concepts so foreign to her that Howard can’t possibly know what this little visit means to her.
Especially when she keeps hiding her face like that…
She reaches for the noodles – her favorite, and digs in hungrily, her belly grumbling at her impossible slowness in feeding it. He asks if she fixes other things, and she shrugs a shoulder.
“thall smings. Mechanical bits and bobs. Thike lat.” She nods to a jewelry box that looks like it has breathed it’s last years and years ago sitting on the coffee table, shoved to the side with her tools to allow room for their meal. She shoves another bite into her mouth, then stabs the chopsticks into the carton, so that she can reach over and flip open the lid…
it shouldn’t play. it should creak and groan and whine and fail to do anything at all. What it does, however, is play Fur Elise, practically perfectly…
[Howard] The last time they saw each other, Rory coaxed a toaster that had ceased working into returning to life, into fulfilling its intended purpose, and she had done so while a terribly stoned Howard had looked on in something akin to awe. He hadn’t been able to wrap his head around the idea, at the time, that it was possible to fix something that had been near-irreparably broken in the first place.
Never mind that Howard himself possesses a great deal of mechanical aptitude, that he can create just about anything if given the right materials: he has built homes, knows how to fix plumbing in houses that are old as dirt, has been accused of possessing some semblance of artistic ability, but he will never admit to such a thing because then he might be accused of having dreams and talents and shit like that that he doesn’t truly have any use for.
There isn’t much place in the world for a painter who can’t see color, and there are plenty of illegal, uneducated immigrants trying to find construction jobs in this country. Howard makes money by standing in train stations and in parks, playing music that other people can’t produce themselves, and somehow that’s enough for him. It beats what he used to do, how he used to make a living, and it’s considerably more legal.
Legality or the lack thereof has never stopped Howard from doing anything he’s decided he wants to do. The Litany, so far as the Crescent Moon, is just a set of guidelines. Some of them are fairly obvious, are almost common sense, but the rest of them…
That’s neither here nor there. He’s sitting on the floor with a gorgeous Full Moon who hasn’t tried to pound his face in yet, and she’s talking to him even though she’s obviously shyer than a nun out of her habit, and she’s showing him what she can accomplish with a few spare minutes and the right tools.
His interest is piqued by the appearance of the music box, which doesn’t look as though it’s remotely capable of doing anything other than collecting dust. When Rory lifts the lid, though, tinkling bits of music waft out into the apartment’s air like a relic from another time. Howard’s eyebrows lift, surprise gripping him, and he sits back against the couch, the concealment of his eyes giving off the impression of shock.
“That’s fuckin’… wow.”
[Rory] His reaction has something of a predictable effect on the full moon – or will be as soon as he knows her better. She blushes. She peeks sideways at him, to be sure he’s not making fun, and then blushes brighter when she discovers that he’s not. She lets the music play for a moment, then reaches over to shut the lid again. It’s far from finished, though it certainly works. It needs cosmetic work, things to make it as pretty on the outside as it is on the inside, though the innards are certainly the most important of the equation.
There’s some sort of lesson there, perhaps.
She lifts a shoulder in a shrug, while she takes another bite, though it’s quite evident she’s pleased at his delight in her work. It warms through her, setting her skin on fire, so that her eyes sparkle with it – which he’d know, if she ever lifted her gaze to meet his.
“I thix fem, and a lady sells them mor fe. Not worth much, but fets good, at least.” She gestures toward the side of the room, where the only bit of true disorder is revealed in her work table – a jumble of pieces and parts and miscellaneous things. “Is what i do.”
Well, that and eat snipers in a single bite.
[Howard] As bright as the flush of blood appears on her pale skin, the effect is lost on the Theurge: he can’t see the color at all, can’t even made out variations in shades, but he can read her embarrassment, even if there is some measure of happiness beneath it, in the way she keeps dropping her head, trying to keep herself from making eye contact. It has to do with her birth, with the shame that the metis tend to carry around with them.
He doesn’t always consider other people’s wants and needs when he’s in the midst of a conversation. It doesn’t occur to him, it seems, that other people do take the Litany seriously, that they consider the Nation and their duty and everything having to do with the two to be the entirety of their reasons for living. Even if it does occur to him, it doesn’t matter. For all he knows just being alone in her apartment with some fuck-up of a Fiann when her Alpha had told her not to, expressly, is enough line-toeing for Rory for one evening.
The beer, the food, the fact that they’re sitting so close in the first place, isn’t the best first impression that anyone could find themselves presented with if they were to walk in right now. They’re sitting still, Howard’s attention diverted by the tinkling of the music box as it plays. At first it’s riveted to whatever dancing figurine appears once the lid is lifted, but when Rory gestures to the workspace, to the part of the apartment that is truly hers, he doesn’t follow her hand’s guidance.
He’s looking at her face.
Blame it on the alcohol, blame it on his lack of pride or shame or morals, blame it on the fact that Howard doesn’t exactly believe in blame anyway, but he can’t see her face with all the hair in the way. That hair, even with his vision being what it is, is a strange color: it doesn’t look the way dark hair does, isn’t as sharp as blond hair. The color it’s supposed to be doesn’t leap out at him.
Howard reaches out a long arm to set down his beer, thunking it on the table as the music box keeps playing in the background. His opposite hand comes up to push wild curls out of Rory’s face, his fingertips brushing against her skin as he does so. After a moment of simply looking at her through the impenetrable plastic over his eyes, he takes them off.
His eyes are green. She’s never seen him in any sort of light where they’ve been visible.
There’s no fanfare or warning once he drops his shades on the coffee table, no hesitation despite the consumption of beer and Chinese food. The stupid bastard kisses her.
[Rory] He reaches for her, and she doesn’t exactly flinch so much as falls motionless, completely still. She expects the worst, because that is what she has been trained to expect, it is what she understands. This – touch in kindness, touch in need, touch at all – is still new, is still foreign. Edwin would hug her, Delmar would thump her on the shoulder – but only after she kicked his ass so thoroughly he almost had to rage back. Ray, Marc… they taught her the joys of touch, and what it could mean, what it did mean when fingers brushed a cheek, slid into hair, when lips came close… they taught her that to be sinborn was not always the totality of her existence… that she too could feel, delight, live, love.
Though it is still, always, a surprise. Especially in another trueborn – this trueborn. He touches her, his fingertips cool across the heat of her skin, curls caught and pulled back to bare her face and all the easily read expressions within to his scrutiny. He takes the glasses off, and she has a moment to realize his eyes are green, much as her own.
And then, the stupid bastard kisses her.
She is not stoned. She is not drunk. She is barely fed. She is lonely. She is… shocked, honestly. Her breath catches, her lips parting with the slight gasp, her eyes widen…
There’s a soft sound – questioning and soft – at the back of her throat…. and then she does the unthinkable.
She kisses him back.
[Howard] There are those who would claim the appeal for women like Rory lies in the fact that she cannot reproduce. Depending on how shallow the those in question believe him to be, that could very well be the case. It doesn’t help that Rory is a beautiful young woman who makes it abundantly clear, through her reticence and her ducking of her head, that she would speak more if it weren’t for her shyness.
He didn’t know, right away, that she was what she is. It didn’t sink in until he saw she and the Godi talking together one night, until he realized she had no claws in Hispo, that she fought with more inherent ferocity than he has ever seen in a Garou before. That isn’t saying much, given that he hasn’t spent all that much time around Garou, period… but the way Tongue Twister threw herself into combat against a Gorehound that was nearly as large as a Crinos wolf spoke volumes about her life.
Perhaps girls who are quiet and don’t seem as though they’d knee him in the testicles if he tried something like this are what draw him in, rather than the fact that Rory seems lonely and vulnerable and, beyond that, willing.
With her, he has been respectful, and interested. He hasn’t been entirely honest, if only because she hasn’t given him a chance not to be. She has asked him no questions that he would then later have to dodge like a wrench hurled at his head, and in asking no questions has given Howard little opportunity to reveal how slippery and untrusting he is. If she doesn’t ask him where he’s from or what he’s doing in Chicago, what his ambitions are, what he does with his nights, then he doesn’t have to lie.
They are not at all alike, these two, yet something has drawn him in this far. Their opposition to each other, perhaps, or her breeding, or the fact that she is female and attractive and willing to have a conversation with him. She isn’t asking him why he’s doing what he’s doing; perhaps it doesn’t matter. Howard kisses her, Rory makes a quiet, seeking noise in the back of her throat, and though the kiss itself shares those qualities–weightless, imploring–it doesn’t stay like that.
She kisses him back.
His fingers burrow into her hair, not so much holding her in place as giving himself an anchor without sight available to him, and he leans into her, deepening the kiss without hesitation or fear. They both should know better, she more than anyone, and yet they are fae-blooded; they are Fianna. Theirs are a people who throw themselves into all they do, even if all they do doesn’t, in the end, amount to very much.
Even if it ends in creatures like Rory.
Which brings us back to the original point.
Howard isn’t thinking about repercussions or consequences or anything other than the feel of Rory’s lips and skin against his, the heat of her body, the smell of her hair. Without being pushed off, he has nothing but a metaphorical green over his head. The Theurge kisses her with a single-minded purpose for what seems like mere seconds, what seems like an hour, before he starts to touch her with his free hand. It isn’t the blindly horny fumblings of a teenager, yet it isn’t the dextrous touch of an enamored lover, either: he’s clumsy, but certain.
It’s no different than how he usually is.
[Rory] She should know better.
She does know better. She knows better than anyone why this is forbidden, why it is against the laws of their kind. It results in beings like her: broken, battered, good for only one thing. (no, Howard, not that …this) They are rage machines, and meant to live and die in battle. They are meant to go willingly, to sacrifice all they are in hopes for one moment of glory that will cause their name to bear something worthy, instead of only the sin of their parents.
She should know better.
She has asked him no questions, but not because she is not interested. She is too used to ridicule, to laughter, to even try. She has, however, let him know that she would listen to the answers in the simple way she gave him her address, lets him into the apartment, and now… lets him kiss her.
It’s entirely possible that Rory finds it impossible to resist. He is by birth alone, her better, and she is the epitome of submissive in all things. It is more realistic that the girl has lost everything, and has been treated harshly most recently by a man she had admired, and she is lonely. She misses the simple things, and the acceptance she had never expected, yet had gotten the chance to experience here, in Chicago.
She lets him touch her – he is clumsy, but determined.
She, after a moment, guides him and helps, and finds herself returning the favor.
She is shy, inexperienced, but oh so willing to learn, oh so willing to try, to bring him comfort, to bring him excitement, to bring him but a tiny bit of what his acceptance and desire brings to her….
Joy.
[Howard] [FADE I HAVE TO GO TO WORK GO HOME YOU PERVERT]
[Rory] (hahahah!)