[John] The big lug has finally figured out that plugging the weird black cord into the tiny hole on the underside of his phone lets him turn it on and use it after the screen has gone black and stopped responding to his commands.
Izzy might have given up on the prospects of ever hearing from him, even after she entrusted him with her phone number, but in the midst of what was likely a grueling shift in her new home in the South Side, she finds herself the recipient of a text from the number John had warned her was his. Its spelling is about as bad as it is when he writes it out, but the message is simple enough:
To mutch food. Hungre? Hav lots of fryd ris.
So, somehow despite the wind and the cold and the fact that he has the directional sense of a blind eight-year-old, John comes out of the gloaming tonight, hood on his jacket down, free hand pushed into his pocket, a large white takeout bag with THANK YOU emblazoned on the side dangling by his thigh. This is a shitty neighborhood, but it’s his neighborhood, and the locals have learned not to fuck with him.
Strangers don’t have to learn; instinct keeps them as far away as is possible. He looks like a serial killer with his blazing blue eyes and that untouched scruff that is slowly inching towards mountain-man territory, but anyone who has talked to him more than once knows the guy is as gentle as one can expect from a Full Moon, and a Fenrir besides that.
He walks up to Izzy’s car, and doesn’t knock on the window unless she doesn’t see him first.
[Izzy Montoya] It’s been a shit week. A shit month. The assignment that was supposed to last a week, has been stretched to a month. They broke her fuckin’ coffee cup. They’ve stopped her on every turn when she knows KNOWS that they’re wrong. They’re numbers, they’re cleaner streets are due to nefarous means, not good fuckin’ police work. And it rankles. Annoys. Pisses. Her. Off.
So, when the poorly spelled text arrives, and she flips to it to check it out, and she sees who it’s from and deciphers the writing.. well. It almost makes her smile. It certainly makes her huff an amused breath as she replies.
Starving.
So, when he appears by her car, she has seen him already. She thumbs the locks, so that he has free access, and lifts her chin in wordless hello.
[John] For being laid back and not inclined to become unnecessarily aggravated compared to his cohorts, John is not a smiling, happy sort, either. Simply being alive does not fill him with mirth and merriment, and while he is as friendly as one can expect from a creature that cannot speak, he isn’t bubbling over with good cheer, either. When Izzy unlocks the car and lifts her chin to him, his first response isn’t to flash her a smile but to mirror the upward nod.
He’s pleased, though, to see her. It’s in his eyes, in the way the corners crinkle slightly as he hauls open the door and quickly gets in so he doesn’t assault the interior of the car with frigid air.
With him comes the smell of cold-induced sweat, of cooked egg and meat and vegetables. He holds up the bag, making a face that could very well say Dear god without the words, and starts rifling through the bag for utensils and boxes.
[Izzy Montoya] He slips in, and she adjusts in her seat so that she’s facing him, slightly, her back angled so as partially to lean against the door. He doesn’t smile or go googly eyed when he sees her, but he is pleased, and that is enough.
He lifts the bag of food, and the smell hits her. Her belly rumbles it’s complaint that it’s been hours upon hours since she had eaten, and she arches a brow slightly. His look says -dear god- and hers repeats it, with voice added. “Good god, man, you weren’t kidding. That is a LOT of food. And you are now my motherfuckin’ hero.”
[Patrick Llewelyn] [Why is Patrick in Bronzeville?
1-4 Fighting something
5-7 Buying Weed
8-10 Other activities that require thought]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 7
[John] That gets a laugh out of him, or so much of a laugh as one can expect to get out of him when the moon is this fat and his Rage is this high: his lips tug into a near-smile, a huff of air leaving his sinuses, and he looks up briefly to flick his eyebrows. Aw shucks, it says, though his cheeks are concealed by facial hair, combine with the darkness to keep away any signs of blushing that he might have otherwise betrayed.
Modis don’t blush anyway.
Handing over one of the boxes, along with a sleeve of chopsticks, John settles back in the seat, angling his body so he’s facing her and careful not to treat the vehicle as though it’s his own. He doesn’t thump a hiking boot up on the dashboard or take off his shoes; he just sits, quietly, and appropriates his own box of food. The only sound from him is rustling as he starts to tuck into his food. Whatever interest in her activities or progress with the case is hinted at in the way he watches her with some curiosity.
[Patrick Llewelyn] Bronzeville.
All public housing and dark corners you stayed clear of; all gangs and thug life and the homeless under bridges warming their hands over trash-bin fires. It was the territory of Bone Gnawers and criminals, the dispossessed and the downtrodden; the low income households and the struggling immigrants. It was the kind of neighborhood where a police cruiser was a beacon for every last rat and cockroach to scamper off into the shadows.
No wonder it was where Detective Montoya found herself spending the evening.
Down the block from where the Modi and his Kin are sharing food; there’s a hooded figure skulking from a building; hopping down stairs and coming across the street toward a sagging chain link fence. Propped against it with a boot pressing into the wire is another figure; masculine; intimidating with a lowered face; shadows cast over features. There’s a swell of anger clouding this one and the hooded figure, slighter, smaller hesitates a minute as he gets closer.
The one against the fence lifts his face as a train sounds its horn in the distance; carriages rattling across tracks.
—
When he’s glimpsed minutes later, it’s walking, collar turned up against the chill, a lit joint in one hand. There’s so little care paid to danger it’s easy to write Prayers to Broken Stone off as another delinquent youth out haunting the sidewalks. But he’s a little too white for it, a little too old, and aside from the serial killer vibe that flows from him, he looks alternately like predator and prey tonight.
[Izzy Montoya] Modi’s don’t blush, and Fenrir don’t flinch, and all sorts of things like that are proven to be false on a regular basis. She flinches. It’s rare, but she does. And Modi’s blush. Equally rare, but it happens. His rage fills the car. It heats the small space, it creeps on her senses, down her lungs with her breath, across hr skin, along her spine.
She doesn’t flinch.
She simply takes the box offered, prys open the chopsticks and breaks them apart, before peeling open the box and digging in. She doesn’t hesitate, she doesn’t wait for her ‘better’ to have the first bite, she simply goes for it. She wasn’t kidding. She’s starving.
It’s a few bites later, that has her finally lifting her gaze from the food and falling back into her seat with a pleased sigh. Now she can eat at a regular pace – without feeling like a gnawer that hasn’t eaten for a week. “Mmmmm good.”
Then she looks at him with a slight smirk. “So. Just hungry, or is this some nefarious plot to get me naked…” a beat, an arched brow, and dark amusement glittering through her gaze briefly. She must be glad to escape to joke so openly with him.
[John] It’s an innocent-enough joke, asking if a tall, strapping young man who can’t possibly be wanting for female companionship if the point of all of this was to work his way into her pants through her stomach, but this particular tall, strapping young man is still working on telling the difference between a joke and sincerity.
In the dark, Izzy can see John abruptly stop chewing, his eyes widening with shock either genuine or feigned. After a moment of imitating a deer caught in a car’s brights, perhaps imagining Sorrow hunting him down and relieving him of his testicles with a klaive, he laughs, the sound muted by food and his own absent vocal cords, and flicks his eyebrows again. Nods.
Very funny, it says, and then something catches his eye through the windshield. His chewing slows again, brow furrowing. For whatever reason that figure in the distance is immensely interesting right now.
[Alertness+Perception: WHODAT]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 1, 3, 4, 7 (Failure at target 6)
[Izzy Montoya] She gets a reaction from him, and her smirk slides into something that could possibly, someday, grow into an actual smile. Few have seen it, really. It’s an expression only rumored about. The man in the distance, though. That man has even seen her laugh.
And seen her naked.
But that is a different story, and right now she’s watching the expressions flicker across John’s face, before he flicks his eyebrows and settles onto amused. She chuckles, briefly, before following his gaze to the figure in the distance.
[i’d know you anywhere…]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 3, 7, 8, 9, 9, 10, 10 (Success x 6 at target 6)
[Izzy Montoya] She looks a moment, then nods. “S’Patrick.”
[Patrick Llewelyn] [Izzy can count the whiskers on Patrick’s chin where he neglected to shave. And how many notes are in his pocket.
And possibly can also see through time and space.
John thinks he’s some random white boy.]
[Izzy Montoya] [*cracks up*]
[Patrick Llewelyn] There are changes in Patrick since Izzy Montoya last saw him, most decidedly. For one, he is far less angry, and in another, less natural way, far more angry. As if the hurt he had suffered after Howard’s death had morphed from a physical ache into a supernatural reminder. It was not fair, not by anyone’s standards that Patrick, of all Garou, who hated what he was most of the time and didn’t desire to fight at all, most of the time —
— now carried with him the Rage of the Modi seated beside her.
That was different, she can sense the power difference the closer he gets; even though John’s Moon is not the one in the sky above them; that too, is visible in the young man’s face as he stops, close to the car and stares at the pair of them within it. In the moonlight, Patrick’s face is all sharp angles and shadow; they can barely see his gaze narrow, the flare of his nostrils as smoke trails from them; the corner of his mouth.
There’s a pungent, sweet aroma about it that marks it different from whatever he typically is seen smoking.
He steps from the curb, one hand in a pocket and comes around the car on the full moon’s side; leans in and mouths: hi there.
[John] It’s Patrick.
Oh, okay.
Someone with some semblance of decorum and manners would get the hell out of the car and walk over to greet the other Garou. John is visibly thinking about it, even going so far as to ignore his dinner so that he can observe the Galliard for any signs of having been in a struggle tonight. These streets are technically under his pack’s protection but there are so fucking many streets, so many places a person can be ambushed, that it’s nearly impossible to take care of them all with four people.
No one is complaining, exactly, but silent suffering isn’t the same as proactive progress either.
He follows the Fiann as he wanders towards the car, and when he comes around his side rather than the kinswoman’s, looking as though he’s out here to cause some sort of trouble, John looks by parts amused and beleaguered, like a high school sports coach who’s trying to enjoy a break and sees one of his athletes running through the parking lot with his pants around his ankles.
The Modi looks over at Izzy, sighs while forcing a smile, and sets his food down on the armrest, chopsticks sticking out like grave markers. He opens the door, smacking the Fiann with it if he’s too close, and steps out into the cold.
[Izzy Montoya] She studies Patrick as he comes closer, without bothering to hide it. She searches his face, as it goes from dark to lines and shadows, familiar as if she were tracing it with her fingertips. She studies the set of his shoulders, the strength in his core, the fact there’s a hole beginning to appear in the left thigh of his jeans. Everything.
Even the intensity that is newly directed. Permanent.
He chooses John’s side of the car, and she arches a brow, lips curving into a slight smirk as John sighs and exits the car. She remains, only calling out. “Patrick.” as a greeting, between bites.
[Patrick Llewelyn] John looks beleaguered, getting out of the car as if Patrick had just stumbled over into a ditch, singing about Werewolves and their great battle rather than simply giving the pair of them a rather ridiculous greeting through the window, his breath awash not with alcohol but rather another mind altering substance.
The moon is burning him from above, and Izzy, watching his movements so intently can see how tense he is, despite the calming influence of the weed in his bloodstream. John opens the door against Patrick all right, but he rolls with the motion, simply sliding along the car door until he’s perching against the hood.
“Sorry,” he isn’t and doesn’t sound it, there’s untapped violence in those bright eyes; in the bladed little quirk of his mouth. “Did I interrupt your date? Hey, Iz.” He calls without hesitation, and leans back a little, his hood dropping from his head. The shirt he’s wearing under the zip-up is ridiculous; bright colored.
Not in his own more muted style at all.
“You want some?” He offers the joint out between forefinger and thumb. “Takes the edge off … pretty much everything.”
[John] Now, John has a somewhat altered view of reality simply by virtue of the fact that he cannot get stoned, drunk or high by mundane substances. He has to go out of his way to reach a state where he’s ‘fucked up,’ to quote his more foul-mouthed comrades, and even were it worth the effort, he doesn’t look like the type of Garou who feels the need to sand down his edge in order to function.
He has a completely different outlook on life than the Fiann does; he’s lost less, one could posit, or else he simply doesn’t acknowledge his emotions, his hardships, in the same fashion. If Patrick is dwelling, or wallowing, he hasn’t revealed this much to John. John doesn’t look all that amused, and it’s perhaps because he’s thinking of all the various sorts of trouble the blond can get into when he’s stumbling around the neighborhood stoned out of his mind.
Eyebrows are lifted as if to ask Seriously? It isn’t an eager, grateful tone, either, but one of almost amused disbelief. Eyes flick between Patrick’s own, gauging his pupils or his sclerae as though he possesses any idea of what to look for. The joint is ignored for now: the Modi holds up his left index finger, centering it between Patrick’s eyes, and moves it back and forth without issuing a command.
[Izzy Montoya] She lifts her container of food in wordless toast when Patrick says hello, and leans against the hood of her car. She doesn’t accept the joint though – not because she hasn’t, or wouldn’t, but because she’s technically still on duty, and sneaking away for dinner with John, simply to get away, to be with someone she has learned to enjoy spending time with.
Likely, because he don’t talk back – – though, despite the fact she didn’t deny it, she isn’t dating.
She watches John start a field sobriety test, and chuckles, once more.
[Izzy Montoya] (vedy sleepy – send her off on a call or something, an’ we’ll play again soon! *MWAH!*)