Kemp

[Imogen M.] A spirit leads her, her gnosis diminished in the exchange, seeking the red-haired woman with Fianna blood in her veins.

Perhaps Kora describes her to direct the little air gaffling the way it needs to go. Maybe she gives a variety of details. Fianna-born, Fenrir-claimed. Musician, doctor. Gun-wielder and mated. No children.

Whatever it is, the air gaffling dashes off, chattering at itself in whispers as it forces the Garou to fairly run to keep up with it. It darts and swerves, dips and dives, and for all intents and purposes, appears to be having a gay old time.

Its joy and glee is a sharp contrast to the purpose of this visit, the motive behind it. It is likely a stark contrast to Kora's mood, a sharp and dark irritant.

It leads her from the docks toward more affluent areas of town. Warehouses give way to office buildings give way to apartments stacked atop of restaurants and stores. Eventually it leads Sorrow to a building, half visible in the umbra, it's supports and struts made of webbing, crawling with spiders. The world here is grey and monochrome, from the gauzy pale webbing to the tiny grey arachnids which scuttle over them. The ground beneath Sorrow's feet is grey, the sky above, the colour of old tin.

Water falls with a whisper of spirits, a murmur of sound. When droplets fall over her skin or her fur they hum.

A little ways away, a light spirit dances in the cusp of a metal elemental, a street lamp in the tellurian.

She is led up the side of the building to the ninth floor, prompted to climb it, the webbing catching at her, and sticking softly. A few smaller spiders crawl closer, then scurry away when she moves. At the ninth storey, she is led through a gap to walk down a hallway, surrounded by metal elementals, groaning mightily beneath the weight of the others above them.

The apartment at the end of the hall - she reaches where there would be a door - the air elemental dances through, making a soaring sound of joy - mission accomplished.

[Sorrow] There are other choices Sorrow could make. She could leave, climb back down the sticky superstructure, find her way to the street, slip from this world to the other in some shadowed alcove, some bolt-hole, walk through a door as if it were a door and find her way back, counting in the back of her mind, the steps and the storeys, staring her way through the challenge at the security desk, pushing her way past the doorman.

She could knock.
She could walk through the front door.

- there's blood on her hands, though. There's death in her dark eyes. There's a reason the Nation calls her Sorrow.

In lieu of the alley and the street, the doorman and the elevator, the counting of steps and the memorizing of directions, Sorrow walks follows the singing air elemental through the suggestion of the door, stands on the flimsy net of patternwork that defines the building in the spirit world and first - looks. And then - looks at her reflection. And then - steps through.

---

There is a distinctive pop in the apartment. It is not the first time a Garou has entered Imogen's home in this manner. It is, however, the first time this Garou has entered Imogen's home in this manner. It is the first time this Garou has entered Imogen's hom.

Sorrow is tall and spare, and her hair is loose. She has blood on her hands, smeared on her bare arms, on her jeans and her t-shirt. The t-shirt says PIXIES on it, white letters on black. Dr. Slaughter has seen it innumerable times before. They wear the same clothes as they wear the same skins - because the clothes are woven into their beings, and become their kins.

None of the blood is hers.

Still, there is something stark about her pallor. An ER physician would read it as shock. They would not be wrong. A Garou would read it as rage. They would not be wrong. So: stark in her pallor, contained, her body stiff and lashed, her dark eyes appallingly clear, her voice more quiet and direct that Imogen has perhaps ever heard it before, Sorrow pushes through the Umbra, steps into the Fianna doctor's apartment, the song of the air elemental still a sharp burr under her skin, an irritant she cannot shake, and turns in a circle on her heels, looking for Imogen.

When she sees her, she says. "Doc. I have news."

[Imogen M.] The gauntlet bends, then tears, the pop the sound of the air sucking through the gap made between the worlds and then abruptly cutting off.

Where there had been no one, there is now a person - a familiar form. Where there had been the smell of wood and leather, there is now added scents of blood and sweat and Rage. It smells like burning ozone, like scorched oxygen. The smell of the Umbra lingers in the air, but Imogen can neither name nor describe it, other than feeling vaguely unsettled.

Under normal circumstances, she would be relived when it faded. An easing of tension she had not even known she had.

She is seated on an armchair in the living room, one foot tucked beneath her body, the other on the flat and bare on the floor. She is dressed in jeans, a pale blouse, her hair pulled back and absently out of the way, held in place by a covered elastic.

Her apartment is sparsely decorated and pristine. There is no television set, no DVD player. There are no photographs on the wall.

Kora does not belong here - a beast of blood and bone and marrow, of Rage and death. Of earthly, messy things, with her earthly, messy news. She stands out, a beast dressed in a human's attire. A stone dropped into a still pool, causing ripples across a once smooth surface.

The kinwoman straightens from her chair, turning sharply toward the intrusion, her leg unbending, her other foot coming to the floor. It is not entirely sure what she had expected, but it had not been this. Kora can see the doctor's dark eyes touch the blood on her hands, on her arms, on her jeans and t-shirt. Where blood would smear after carrying a body.

I have news, Kora says, and the woman's jaw tightens, her mouth clamps shut. She does not need to be told why Kora is here. The purpose at least, if not the details.

She does not need to be told that this conversation is not one she wants to have.

There is a clock on a wall somewhere and it ticks the time. It breaks the silence and ticks five times before Imogen lifts her chin, and undoes her mouth.

"Who?"

[Imogen M.]

[Sorrow] This has happened a thousand times a thousand times a thousand times. Not in this place. Not in this city. Not in this metalskinned building, where the pelting spring rain is a distant sound on the shuttered windows rather than a present thing, direct and immediate, a song of the sky to the earth.

It is raining. A poet might say something about that, mark it foolishly, give it meaning, make it rhyme, but Sorrow is not a poet. She is a messenger. This part is easy. In this world - contained and spare, without the usual distractions of modern life - where the ticking of a clock marks the passage of time, regular as a heartbeat, unerring as a metronome - Sorrow stands with her arms loose and her gaze sharp, clear.

Who? Imogen asks.

"Kemp." Sorrow says. Her voice is quiet as the ticking of the clock behind them.

She meets the kinswoman's eyes, then. Dark blue against dark blue.

Sorrow is the first to look away.

[Imogen M.] There is a split second of reaction. Barely the space between a heart beat. The clenching of her jaw, a spasm in her mouth. A flinch of pain.

She shuts every last inch of it down. Closes her face until it is merely a mask. Flattened mouth, unrevealing eyes.

Sorrow looks away first, and Imogen keeps her eyes on the Garou. After a moment, she deliberately closes the book she was reading (The Aeneid) and leans forward to set it down. By now, she has looked away and her eyes come to rest on the back of the book - a small photograph of a bust of Virgil, followed by a sea of text, a photograph of the translator balancing it at the end.

Three more seconds. The unrelenting ticking of the clock keeps the time.

She turns back.

"How?"

[Sorrow] The clock keeps ticking. Sorrow looks at the relentless little machine on the wall - finds it by the noise, by its shadow in the corner of her vision - before returning her dark and clear-eyed attention to Imogen.

There is a moment cut into the spaces between the seconds delineated by its unerring tick-tick-tick where Sorrow is fractional!seconds away from destroying that damn thing. Pulling it from its moorings in a cloud of drywall dust, tearing the metal from the plastic casing, breaking open the batteries or the clockwork findings, hidden within - all the metal gears, all their inevitable teeth - and strewing them around Imogen's pristine apartment. This is when it happens: between tick and tick. Then, it passes.

"In the Hivelands." Sorrow begins. This time, she does not look away. She knows, in her bones and her blood and her marrow, inside the skin of her, that Imogen will not look away, either. The story is sparse. It is all that she knows. "He lead the assault on the Hivelands, on the center the Hive used to poison the church. He died there. They brought him back, and told some story about how he fell. What -

lessons

- they learned. We are going to go to see it for ourselves. When I know it all, I will tell you." Then, the slightest concession. Beneath the control, Sorrow's voice is raw. "If you want to hear it all."

[Imogen M.] She had not looked away as Sorrow had offered her sparse story, but at the question, her eyes close briefly. They open again, still dry, and still direct. The tension sings in her jaw, in the line of her spine. She sits straight in her seat, on its edge, unreclining.

"I don't," she says, the words clipped at their edges and sawed off at the ends. "But come and tell me it anyway."

A beat.

"The kitchen's behind you," she says, "You can use the sink to wash -" -- "the blood off."

[Sorrow] Imogen is left alone in the living room for five minutes. Her kitchen sink runs the entire time. The water drums its familiar pattern on the stainless bowl, interrupted now and then - stopped, filling hands, a glass, some leaking vessel - to sluice through in a great deluge.

Then Sorrow returns. Her hands and arms are clean, washed of the blood. She has scrubbed her face clean, too. Water is still drying on her cheeks and brow; her hairline is dark with wet, but her dark eyes are still clear. Now, her news delivered, the words spoken, the evenness of an ordinary night broken open by them, she feels ungainly in the sparse surroundings, the precise, spare orderliness of Imogen's home.

"There will be a rite," she continues, her voice clear in the room, soft but still too loud to her ears. Underneath, it sounds as if her vocal cords have been scoured with sandpaper - " - when we come back with the story." - until the blood runs. "I spoke with the Warder. He will allow you, Tristan, and Moira to attend the rite, or visit the grave, whichever you choose."

[Imogen M.] Outside, rain soaks the windowpane, streaking it, pattering against it. When the wind blows, the rain lashes, but more often than not it simply falls arrhythmically, a pit-patter.

While Kora cleanses herself of her fallen packmate's blood, Imogen does not remain in the living room. She gets up, her bare feet quiet on the floor, and disappears down the hallway toward the apartment's bedrooms. One door opens, then closes a few seconds later.

She stands in the silence of her bedroom, and stares briefly at the window. There are no lights on, and the rain casts irregular shadows, created by the light passing through. She watches the patterns without seeing, her chest rising and falling with the rhythm of her deliberate breaths. She does nothing and makes no sound.

She hears the water turn off, and turns away, pulling open the door and stepping back down the hallway. She returns to her living room as not long after Kora does.

Her hands smooth over the curve of her jean clad thigh, a meaningless gesture before she slides her fingers into the pockets of her jeans. They slide as deep as the first knuckle, her thumbs hooking into her belt loops. By this, her hands are still.

She watches the Fenrir woman when she speaks; she carries herself stiffly, tightly. Her posture is perfect, if rigid. Her jaw is clenched.

"What would the rite be like?"

[Sorrow] When Imogen returns, Sorrow is standing, facing the windows - not the walls, blank and spare, not the inevitable, merciless clock mounted to one of them. This room is lit from within; the shadows cast by the raindrops against the glass are far less distinct. The city lights visible through the panes are smeared as if by some painterly artiface into streaks of color, illuminated but, instinct, impersonal.

The question catches her unawares. Imogen can read the surprise in the creature's chased pale brows, rising over her dark eyes. Sorrow tips the pale crown of her head away from Imogen, lifts her jaw and chin toward the kinswoman - the animal cant with which she must be, by now, so familiar from these beasts in human skin - and studies her face. Her gaze drops to Imogen's hands, then flickers back to her eyes.

A spare moment passes; something pulls taut in Sorrow's jaw. "We will build a boat," she says, the rawness in her voice more clear now. " - or find one. For the rite, we will put his body in it, with trophies from his kills. Charms for his next life. Alcohol or - " the smile that flares here is a wintry one; little more than a spasm of pain. " - hot chocolate. Pictures of his son, if you have them. Reminders of his life in death. Then, we will build a pyre, and burn it all until it is ash. If the Mistress of the Rites deems it fitting, we will give it all to Maelstrom.

"While the pyre is burning, we will tell his story. The Skalds, and the Fenrir, and the Galliards. Anyone who wishes to speak, from dusk to dawn, so that the Aesir in Valhalla know who is coming to him. So that they know what they have gained, whom we have lost, and what he means to us."

[Imogen M.] Imogen's eyes are dry, almost unblinking as Kora speaks, a tension at her brow speaking of a frown the kinwoman does not quite permit. Her elbows are drawn tight to her body, her fingers rigid, where they are stuck in her jeans' pockets.

There is distance between them and Imogen does not move to close it. Nor does she move to make herself more at home or comfortable. She stands as she is, her feet cool on the hardwood floor.

She swallows reflexively - in that gesture her emotions breaching the surface then settling again.

A pause. "He built a catapult a few years ago. To throw snowballs at other Garou. It would be worth burning."

[Sorrow] "We'll burn it, Doc." The words are constrained. Sorrow is looking away again, out into patterned darkness, the striated lights smeared against the windows. Her arms are stiff at her side, held taught and straight at the elbow, defining the narrow line of her rigid frame, as if she had been constructed of right angles, right angles alone, nothing more.
"We'll burn it. Maybe - " here, she offers another strained smile. This one has some sort of terrible light behind it, though, like the promise of dawn on the darkest night of the year. " - someone has a snowball. In a freezer somewhere.

"Maybe the spirits of Fenris' brood will make it snow."

---

Sorrow's eyes are dry, but her face is wet. Baldr's brother took an oath

His hands he washed not nor his hair combed
Till Baldur's bane was borne to the pyre

- but Sorrow lives in this world. She has already washed her face and hands. There is something in her throat that does not belong there. It started the size of a pea, a bean, but it is a living thing, grief that is rage, rage that is grief, and like a seed it grows. She swallows hard against it.

"You know Tristan, right?" she looks back up, her face stark, white. "Will you tell him?"

[Imogen M.] Her mouth moves slightly as Sorrow suggests that Fenris' brood might make it snow. The expression stretches her mouth, but offers no light to her eyes.

"Perhaps."

She continues, she asks of Tristan. "I do," she says. "I will. He'll want to attend the rite, I imagine."

Her gaze moves, shifting toward the window, then back again.

"Does Rohl know? Silence."

[Sorrow] There is a moment, then, where Sorrow turns away from the window, looks back to Imogen. The greatest spasm of her grief is passed; her skin is white, and her eyes are dark, but clear and so direct. Imogen will tell Tristan. Sorrow lifts her chin in Imogen's direction. "Thank you."

Then, with the last question, Sorrow's gaze sharpens somehow. As if she were a blade passed over a whetstone, casts sparks. "He should have heard the howls. Or - " The cliath shakes her head, her loose hair rippling in the artificial light. It was raining in the spirit world, and she can still hear the song of it from her hair, smell the rain musk when she moves. "I don't know."

Her voice is stricken, raw. Then, "I will find him next. I will tell him."

[Imogen M.] She shakes her head slightly. "I can."

A flick of her gaze away, toward the clock, still measuring the seconds, inexorably. The tendon in her jaw shifts as she tightens it again. The tension in her jaw has been relentless, making the joint ache with pressure.

She turns back.

"Thank-you," she says, abruptly, deliberately. "For coming to tell me. You should get back t'yer pack."

[Sorrow] "I think the rite," this is her farewell. " - will be under the new moon."

Sorrow says nothing more.

She'll return, when they return, the battle that felled him under their skin, again and again and again. Inevitable. Invariable. Changed by their presence. Charged by their presence, and still: inevitable, already written into the records of the world.

She will return, later: with word of the rite. She will return, later. For now, she turns and finds her reflection in the stormcast windows of Imogen Slaughter's 9th storey condominium, stark white against the painted darkness. She turns, and finds her reflection - steps through -

- and is gone.