[Henry Allard] He’d sounded tired on the phone.
Stammering on the phone isn’t something new for the man who’d called Imogen Slaughter this afternoon. What might have struck the average empathetic person about the way he set this up was the fact that Henry didn’t stammer, that his voice sounded flat and he didn’t laugh out of nervousness. He didn’t laugh at all. He just asked if she was busy today, if they could meet up because he wanted to cross-check an incident that had occurred the other night, and suggested they meet at a café rather than asking if he could swing by her place or have her come over to his.
That shouldn’t have been much of a surprise. The man hasn’t started asking her for much until very recently, and then it’s been with such reluctance that an observer would wonder if he was going to have his teeth yanked out after the exchange was over.
==========
Sneaking out to go anywhere is nearly impossible these days, and as he had been in the process of doing so today he’d been caught. So Tristan is with Henry as he walks down the sidewalk in his old neighborhood today. Henry is wearing his disgusting running shoes and a pair of tan cargo shorts and a gray fire department t-shirt, loose, with a sports watch on his right wrist and the bandage that had been there for two days removed.
In its place is a ragged, fresh scar. This does not look like an intentional cut. It’s too wild. He hides it by pushing his hands into his pockets.
[Imogen Slaughter] Imogen is already at the cafe when Henry and Tristan arrive. She’s seated at an indoor table out of the hot overcast humidity, a sweating glass of iced coffee on the table before her, barely touched. She sits facing the door, so when it opens to let the kin pair inside, she sees them easily, and watches them approach.
She’s dressed in a pale beige cotton suit, a pale blue blouse, her short sleeved suit jacket cut to her body and just long enough to hide the black tattoo on her arm. A pair of sunglasses rest upon her head, her purse at her feet.
“Henry,” she greets the person who called her, first. Then, “Tristan.” A tilt of her head brief, “Pull up a chair.”
Unaware that Henry had been caught on his exit and was not alone, Imogen had chosen a table for two.
[Tristan Stern] It’s has not been long since Tristan had last seen Imogen, since she saw exactly the state of constant worry and agitation he’s been in since his husband decided it’d be fun to try and save the world with nothing but lack of sleep and caffeine on his side. Not that there’s anything wrong with trying to save the world – but one would think doing it with more sleep, more common sense, would make it easier on everyone involved. Everyone except for Henry, apparently. And don’t even get him started on the ‘I’m going to die…’ conversations. Those are fun for the whole family…
He’d tried to sneak out, and though their vacation plans have been viciously halted, Tristan still has through wednesday off, and Henry’s attempts to sneak out had been thwarted. Things aren’t necessarily tense between the two, but there is signs of strain born of worry and a touch of fear on the part of one prettyboi Gnawer kin.
They arrive at the cafe, and Imogen is the recepient of a smile that’s a shell of it’s former glory. “Hey. Thought I’d tag along. Hope you don’t mind. ” And he follows instructions and flips a chair around to join them at the table made for two, now occupied by three.
[Henry Allard] Henry looks rested enough. He ought to–he’s not losing sleep, but what sleep he is getting is coming out of a bottle and it’s not happening at night. He’s only been out of bed for a few hours, after all, and it doesn’t matter that things had been looking up a few days ago, that Henry has been disclosing things to Tristan and not trying to shoulder everything himself. It’s not letting up. It seems as though he can’t go out in public for longer than five minutes without something happening, and it’s draining both of their reserves faster than any round of sleep can recharge.
Yet he smiles when he sees Imogen, forced though it seems, and he waits until Tristan flips a chair around and sits before he pulls his own back from the table and lowers himself into it. What little consolation there is to be had in this situation is that he doesn’t look painfully thin like he did several years ago, after he broke his arm. He’s a little on the lean side, has a long distance runner’s gawky teenage build, but bones aren’t jutting. He isn’t pale to the point of unhealthiness. He’s just tired.
Scooting up to the table, Henry doesn’t lean on his elbow or on the tabletop but rather drapes his arms in his lap and swallows dust out of his throat. He isn’t going to be paying for coffee today, it seems.
“This shouldn’t take long,” he says, in lieu of a ‘How are you’ or ‘You look well.’ His voice is gravelly, and he has to clear it to bring it level again; it doesn’t rise enough to be heard over the din, not unless anyone is listening. “Have you, um… have any bodies turned up lately looking like they’d been… stuffed, or, ah, like someone had been trying to taxidermy them?”
Lovely afternoon coffee discussion, Allard.
[Imogen Slaughter] “It’s no matter to me,” this to Tristan as he comments that he hopes she doesn’t mind that he joined.
Then, Henry settles and speaks. Imogen’s eyebrow lifts upward. “Yes,” she says concisely, “Perhaps you’d better explain what’s happened.”
[Tristan Stern] It’s no matter to Imogen, and Henry dives right in. Tristan, for his part, keeps quiet as he lets them do the talking. Here’s here for moral support, first and foremost, as well as to simply know what’s going on. He’s well aware that while Henry is finally telling him things? Full Disclosure does not stop his husband from glossing over the particularly worrisome parts in an effort to “save” Tristan’s feelings.
Tris slouches back in his chair, the picture of lazy confidence [on the outside]. The obscenely gay (not that there’s anything wrong with that and it means HAPPY too) work pants have been replaced by the more typical jeans, and a t-shirt, dark in color. There are new scars on his hands, forearms too, but these are small and consistent with his newfound profession.
And so, he listens.
[Henry Allard] “Alright.”
This man has never been in a position where he has had to speak about himself for long periods of time. Firefighters are paid to rescue trapped individuals and stop fires from spreading to adjacent buildings, from causing more damage than nature or God has intended; most of his patients as a paramedic are unconscious or on their way out when he gets to them. He doesn’t have to do much persuasive consoling to calm them down. And ask Tristan: his powers of self-disclosure are so close to being nonexistent that listening to him try and explain his day is more like asking Henry what he observed and what other people have done in twelve hours of separation.
He had had a dead-eyed expression when he told this story to Tristan. Imogen isn’t addressed now. He may as well be talking to the table. He forces himself to look up occasionally, at the end of certain sentences, but he can’t continually look at either of them. It’s as if he’s ashamed.
“I was out running… Wednesday, I think? Right, Tris?… and someone must have… I don’t know what happened but I blacked out, and when I woke up I had my hands duct taped behind my back and was in this room with barred-up windows, in an apartment that had… um… I don’t know if they lived there or if they were brought there or what but there was… I think it was a family or something but they were all dead, and they’d been stuffed, or just had their bones and organs removed, and they were just sitting there…”
He’s got to be losing it. This entire story is being told in a voice so flat that even his questions and his hesitations are with the bare amount of inflection necessary to make it seem like he’s even still in there. He’s not even fidgeting like he tends to when he’s telling a particularly unpleasant story.
“I didn’t stick around to talk to the person who did it. I had to cut the tape off my arms and as I was leaving this… woman, she felt like one of them–” One of them. He has to be talking about their cousins. “–but she reeked, and she called me Jacob. I haven’t gone to the police yet. I don’t know what to tell them that won’t have me arrested.”
[Imogen Slaughter] Imogen is silent after Henry’s spoken, her expression still.
“Do you remember where the bodies were?”
[Tristan Stern] His arms aren’t loose in his lap, not for long. As the story is told (retold) he crosses them over his chest, and studies the table in front of him, listening.
Who knew jogging was such a hazardous activity?
[Henry Allard] He’d looked up at her towards the end of the story, forcing himself to; he can’t bring himself to look at Tristan.
“Yeah,” he says. “Didn’t get the address but I could find it again.”
[Imogen Slaughter] “I don’t want you to go,” she says, rather bluntly.
“Can yeh find it on a map or gi’ me directions, landmarks, anything?”
[Tristan Stern] “Makes two of us.” He says to Imogen, just as bluntly, though his ends with a slight chuckle.
[Henry Allard] “You got a pen?” he asks. He couldn’t sit up any straighter if he had a rod in place of his spine, and he doesn’t shift in his seat. He just sits there.
[Imogen Slaughter] Imogen’s gaze strafes to Tristan as he speaks, chuckling, but her humour does not echo his. There is a sense – though perhaps this can be explained by her remoteness – that she does not do this for Henry’s benefit. A lack of empathy, of concern.
Her attention returns to Henry, then wordlessly, she leans down, retrieving her purse from by her feet, picking it up and setting it on her knee as she unzips it, reaching inside to root amidst the contents. She pulls out a pen, a small notepad and flips the latter to a new page, moving past pages of notes written in her scrawled hand.
She pushes pen and pad over to Henry, and picks up her iced coffee again.
[Tristan Stern] Her humor doesn’t echo his own, and for his part, there was little humor to be found in that chuckle either. He’s worried. He’s exhausted. He’s hating the fact that he cannot simply fix this for his husband.
And he is, once more, quiet.
[Henry Allard] Bringing Henry along on whatever it is that Imogen is planning on doing next would be suicidal. The man isn’t stable, or if he is stable he’s so stressed out that it’s a wonder he isn’t bordering on paranoia and locking himself in the apartment to never come out. He has that shell-shocked look of a man who’s seen too much too quickly to process it all, and no one could blame Imogen for not thinking of him as she’s planning. He could get both of them killed accompanying them, and he knows this.
No words, after all that he’s said already. Henry just reaches out his ring-bearing left hand to take the pad and pen, and he scrawls out the address in his southpaw chicken scratch, slowing down to make sure that Imogen can reach his directions. He uses medical short-hand to indicate lefts and rights; he draws out lights and intersections in the margins. She’ll be going into the south side for this venture, in a shitty part of town. His description of the location is clear enough that she should be able to find it without issue.
Henry doesn’t say anything as he passes it back to her.
[Imogen Slaughter] Imogen takes the paper back and turns it toward her so that she can read it, her attention following the scrawled directions as she clicks the pen shut and returns it to her purse.
“Thank you,” she says.
“Shall I let you know what I find?”
[Tristan Stern] He doesn’t try to view the directions, as he’s heard them before, when Henry told him what had happened, that he’d been hit and kidnapped AGAIN, and while such things are becoming common place, it’s no less worrisome.
He does, however, answer when Imogen asks if she should let them know. “Yeah, if ya would.” Better to know than not, he always says.
[Henry Allard] Tristan answers not just for Henry, but for both of them, and despite the fact that Imogen is right there, that there are people all around them, that this sort of thing makes him so uncomfortable it’s a wonder he doesn’t blush straightaway, the Gaian kinsman reaches out his right hand to take Tristan’s left. It isn’t the intimate lacing of fingers together that occurs in private but a comradely grasping, and it doesn’t last long.
He still can’t look at him. This he does without even glancing over.
“Thanks, Imogen,” he says, and pushes back from the table.
[Imogen Slaughter] Imogen inclines her head to Henry as he thanks her. “Don’t mention it,” she says. She considers Henry a moment more before turning her head toward the man whose hand he has just clasped – “Tristan,” she says, “May I speak to you for a moment, please?”
A tilt of her head, “Over there.”
[Tristan Stern] Henry reaches and clasps his hand, briefly, and dark eyes study his husband a moment as his hand turns and grasps briefly in return. The corner of his lips curl up in a bit at the corners, a brief and fleeting shadow of it’s former glory.
Imogen asks to speak to him, and he nods, curls sliding along his chin as he stands. “Of course.”
He waits for her to stand, and then follows her ‘over there’ for a private moment.
[Henry Allard] Imogen asks for a moment of Tristan’s, and Henry doesn’t say anything to indicate where he’s going or where he’ll be waiting. He left his cigarettes at home, and it’s bordering on ninety degrees outside. The tall paramedic just wanders off a scant distance, then reconsiders and steps outside. The windows overlooking the sidewalk are large, and he does not go out of sight. He just sits at an umbrella’d table and pulls out his cell phone.
[Imogen Slaughter] There is a stark difference between Imogen and the two male kinfolk. In their relationship, difficult though it may be and in their personalities. That moment of handsclasping, uncommon though it was, is likely more than Imogen has shown in public. The rings they wear on their fingers, words they use to refer to each other, are words that will never pass her lips, a ring she would never be offered or put on.
Still, she has known Tristan for some time, and there is perhaps familiarity when she looks at him. There is, perhaps, some sign of respect that she speaks to them now.
She leads him merely away before stopping, one hand resting on a nearby empty table. The plastic is cool beneath her touch and she stands beneath the air conditioning vent. The moving air stirs loosened strands of her hair.
“When Henry is cleared by the police,” she says, quietly, “you should consider whether or not he can or should continue to live this kind of life.
“Whether or not perhaps you should both move somewhere that he has less to handle.”
[Tristan Stern] They have known each other for a long time. She has seen him fight to find his place, seen him mourn the loss of the Brother that brought him to the Eagles to begin with, seen him fight with Skaldi, seen him work with Kemp and the pain of letting go. She’s seen him go through much – and that she says this, here and now, is testament to a friendship that’s grown through the years, however unconventional it may be to the outside view.
He nods, slightly, and tucks his arms unfold and tuck into the pockets of his jeans. “It’s crossed my mind more than once. We were doing well, laying low and finding some balance, but now it seems everyone wants a piece of him. And he’s clearly not handling it well.”
Or at all. He looks toward the door, the windows outside where Henry sits. “That’s part of what I was going to do on the trip too.” Someplace where they’re not known, at least not for a while. He takes a breath, holds it, and lets it go again. “But yeah. Problem is convincing him. Might have to do what everyone else seems to be doing- and kidnap his ass.” The humor there is fleeting, and morbid.
[Imogen Slaughter] She shakes her head slightly, “A trip won’t be enough. You should take him away from th’Garou.” A lift of her shoulder.
“And don’t look back.”
She lifts a hand to her hair, pushing the strands back from her eyes, tucking them behind her ear.
A shadow of a smirk crosses her mouth, mirthless and humourless, “S’all I wanted t’say, really.”
[Tristan Stern] He nods. “I know. Was hoping he’d fall in love with the ocean, and not look back.”
Of course, that plan is clearly on hold. He smiles at her, as it’s clearly his defense mechanism, though it normally holds far more warmth. She is not a creature of touch, not one for making public displays of any kind, and as such, he simply reaches out and touches her arm, just above the elbow, as he moves past.
“Thanks, Imogen. Let me know if you need any help with…” he nods to the notepad. Its clear that he won’t tell his husband if she does, that he’ll do anything to aid her if she voices the need. “I’ll talk to you soon.”
And with that, he’s moving past her, to join his husband outside.
[Imogen Slaughter] She shakes her head slightly at his offer for help. “I’ll use th’Eagles,” she says as if the pack were a commodity and not Garou she has known for years.
“Good-bye.”
Tristan returns to the out-doors and Henry. Imogen returns to her table and her coffee.
[Henry Allard] [Le wrap! Thank you, Mei!]
[Imogen Slaughter] “Oh, Tristan,” Imogen says as the Bone Gnawer reaches the door. When he turns back, there is a pause.
It might be humour, but she is too deadpan to tell: “Tell Henry to try a treadmill.”
[Imogen Slaughter] (NOW le wrap)
[Henry Allard] [*dying*]
[Tristan Stern] (*LMAO* Whoo! Thanks for playing, Mei. :) )
[Imogen Slaughter] (thanks everyone!)