[Howard] There isn’t a soul in this city, let alone a man, let alone a man whose spirit has been bound to this hyperkinetic bastard’s for the duration of their ability to tolerate and stand each other, who would blame Rory if she was honestly starting to believe that she would never hear from Howard Ivers again. It’s entirely possible she would hear him, would be forced to watch him flirting with the Fianna kinswomen for something like an eternity while waiting for him to acknowledge her existence, let alone that something had happened.
That’s the fairest indication of Howard’s mindset and attitude toward just about everything, let alone affairs remotely involving the Nation. Apathy doesn’t even begin to cover it, but when one lives the entirety of one’s life without sharing anything other than sarcasm and biting humor meant to keep others from digging too deeply.
Rory, God love her, made the latter significantly easier by not asking him any questions at all.
Whether she’s out on patrols or hiding out inside or simply Not Here, whenever she returns to the empty packhouse or to the land of consciousness and productivity, Howard is standing on the doorstep not entirely empty-handed. Last time it had been Chinese takeout; this time it’s a bouquet of cheap art supply store flowers that smell vaguely of perfume. They don’t have a vase but he’d thought far enough ahead to tear off the price tag.
He’s dressed like his closet exploded. This is nothing new.
[Rory] She had been out on patrol, she had been checking in with those she does work for, she’d managed to scrounge up breakfast, and knows there is cold pizza in the fridge from the visit of a certain Shadow Lord that shall remain nameless to protect the guilty innocent.
It would not be entirely untrue to state she had given up. It would be untrue to think she thought it had anything to do at all with Howard rather than herself. She is not supposed to have many things, she’s not supposed to do so much more. She is supposed to show up when called, or when enemies present themselves, and she is supposed to fight. She is, at some point, also supposed to die. She is to do these things without knowing love, without knowing compassion, without knowing friendship. She is supposed to do – no. She is supposed to BE Duty, and nothing more.
She had watched him flirt. She had watched him ignore her existence. She had given up in hope for even a friend out of their prior meeting. It is not without sadness, but it is also without blame. She is mule. She is Duty, alone.
So, to find him on her doorstep – of an apartment that’s actually paid for now, that she can call hers, AND has reliable heat because of the aforementioned nameless ShadowLord – is a surprise. It flickers through her face, it settles in her eyes, it is in the catch of her breath. Then, she hides her eyes behind those red red curls, and looks at the flowers, then peeks back up from under rusty lashes.
“Hi.”
Verbosity is not her strong suit.
[Howard] It would seem as though he tends to respond with greater speed and interest when the person with whom he’s speaking can keep up with him in a conversation, yet on the instances that he’s spent time with Rory, Howard hasn’t seemed deterred by the fact that conversing with her is more like an interrogation than an actual reciprocal exchange of information. If she senses that he would only lie to her anyway, she doesn’t advertise this; and if she isn’t interested in asking him questions, if there is some underlying reason why she doesn’t pose questions the way that the Theurge does, Howard hasn’t dwelled on it. When they were together, he didn’t find himself having to parry and dodge and pretend.
One would think that would be a plus for him, that he would be nothing but interested in a woman who didn’t ask him questions.
Rory catches sight of him on the porch, lets her gaze disappear behind the curtain of her curls, and Howard stiffly pulls himself away from his perch on the doorframe, grimacing as though the cold as settled into his barely-protected bones and he’s creaking. She can’t tell where his eyes land, the stark greens of their irises, the direction of his pupils, hidden by his sunglasses. He opens his mouth to say something, closes it again; the ten seconds before he speaks is palpable. Ten seconds of silence is a long time for someone so used to constant speech and motion.
“I got you these,” he says, and slowly holds out the multicolored plastic flowers like an actual bouquet. “I didn’t know if you were, like, allergic to real flowers, and real flowers just die, anyway. You don’t even have to water them.”
[Rory] He starts to say something, then doesn’t. The next ten seconds is heavy enough to feel, thick enough to cut, and just long enough to wonder…
And he got her flowers.
He holds them out, and she peeks up at him again, before she moves closer to him, and reaches for his offering. They’re multicolored, and plastic, and also? The first flowers she’s ever been given. There’s a softness to the edge of her lips, lips that curl shyly into a genuine smile of thanks, as her fingers slide around the plastic stems and take them from him, lifting them to her nose to smell them as if they’d been real – which also provides her with something to hide behind.
She peeks up at him again, then moves past him to her door, digging through ehr pocket for the key. She didn’t have a key last time – she entered and left through the fire escape, but he wouldn’t have known that. She slides the key into the lock, and only then looks over her shoulder at him. A pause, where she might ask him a question… but what comes out instead is this…
“Come in.”
[Howard] “Oh, I’m not…”
Howard is dressed the same for the mid-thirties as he is for when the weather is in the negative degrees due to wind chill; his hair serves as a protective barrier between his scalp and the outside world, his leather jacket is unzipped not to reveal his outfit underneath but because the zipper is annihilated, and fingerless black gloves make a valiant effort to protect hands whose knuckles seem perpetually scraped and bloody. He chews his cuticles.
He stuffs his hands into his pockets, chews on his lower lip. Apparently he chews on his lips a lot as well, or else he doesn’t believe in proper hydration: they’re chapped, themselves.
Those sunglasses are a barrier for him. It may or may not be intentional, but it’s an effect of human communication, the necessity of eye contact for most normal interaction. When he wears them, his companions, his partners, can’t see his eyes. They think he has something to hide, and so they cease to trust him. In terms of psychology it makes perfect sense, and it makes even further sense when one takes into consideration the fact that in light bright enough for humans to boast 20/20 vision, he is practically blind.
“I was just droppin’ by. Y’know… you’re a busy woman and all.”
[Rory] He’s not… and she hesitates, the door partially open, her slender form partially inside. She slips her pack off her shoulders as she waits for the inevitable end of that statement, and lets it fall to the floor with the clank of something far heavier than it looks. She nudges it inside, and leans back against the open door.
She’s a busy woman, he says, and she furrows her brow, slightly, and shakes her head. She has few friends, few acquaintances, few things to do at all but her Duty. He, perhaps better than most, knows exactly how lonely her existence is.
“Rot neally.” not busy, she admits, but she doesn’t force him to follow her inside. She probably could, if she were that type, but she is the very antithesis of said type. But one question still hangs at the back of her throat, held behind her lips, until it falls out all by itself, while she was distracted by the need to breathe…
“..why?” Why was he dropping by. Why did he bring her flowers. Why did he do so after ignoring her so pointedly before…
[Howard] Most of what Howard says is for his own amusement rather than because he’s actually trying to make light of a situation for another person’s benefit. The distinct impression most people walk away with is that he could not care less what sort of impact his action, behaviors or words have on other people. For all Rory can tell, he was purposefully ignoring her on Christmas. It seems like the sort of thing he would do, is make a conscious decision to not acknowledge a tribeswoman, and she doesn’t question the notion, hasn’t come to him to ask for explanations. She’s waited for him to come to her, and he has.
That’s as far as he managed to go, though, before recognizing that he doesn’t know what the next step in this strange dance is.
So, Howard is standing in the doorway like a vampire who hasn’t been invited in, not properly, his hands in his pockets as though he’s afraid of frightening the smaller yet stronger female, and Rory is standing inside, hiding in plain sight, asking a question of him that he cannot answer.
He knows that she’s lonely. He’d said so much himself the last time they saw each other, had asked her what the hell she does all night, and the answer she’d given him had seemed satisfactory. Maybe Rory liked being alone. There are people out there who legitimately enjoy solitude, who don’t look at it as a sign of weakness or frailty. They can be alone without being lonely.
She asks Why, and he fidgets, fingers itching for a cigarette that he doesn’t go for just yet.
“Why am I droppin’ by?” he asks, skeptical. “‘Why’ what?”
[Rory] He parries with another question, and she lifts a hand to rub at the side of her nose, absently. She isn’t the type to question much, and the fact that she has been questioning more lately… she cannot tell if it’s a form of growth, or rebellion, if it’s what normal people – normal Garou – do, or if it’s something reserved for things like her. She doesn’t know, and she doesn’t know who she could ask and trust to give her a real answer should she dare ask the questions.
She sighs, softly, a barely heart exhalation, as she turns to head inside, and instead of answering, asks another of her own. “Bunt a weer?” Due to his last visit, he likely can decode it easier than the first time she asked him that question. She searches in vain for something, through cupboards, and then with another exhalation, moves into the living room.
Only then does she answer. Why is he dropping by, why what? “Yes.”
Everything. Sort of.
[Howard] [PAUSE]
[Trashed because Howard’s player loves being a dick.]