Reaching Out.

[imogen]
Some time after Kora's visit, Imogen finds her way to the dockhouse. She parks her Volkswagen and gets out - but instead of walking up to the door, she pauses.

Takes a cigarette from a bronze case and lights it with a bronze lighter. As the smoke fills her lungs, she turns the lighter in her fingers, studying it in the ember glow of her cigarette. She exhales smoke. Inhales it again, her eyes lifting toward the stars. The air still smells of the earlier rains, but it has begun to clear. There are not as many lights here - each pinprick of light is brighter than it ever is closer to the city, closer to the building in which she lives, the neighbourhood in which she lives.

She leans her back against the car and smokes her cigarette. When she is done that one, she lights another. Pitches it away after her first drag. She crosses the path to the squat, desolate building, and climbs the stairs that permit her up the crumbling foundation.

She'll knock on the door. If he isn't there, she'll wait, seated on the cold concrete edge, smoking another cigarette.


[silence]
Strange; the docks seem somehow different, though even Imogen's precise senses can't determine how or why. They just are.

It's springtime, though. The air smells like rain. It's cool and moist here at the edge of the lake. The beachhouse Decker built years ago -- or the thing he calls a beachhouse -- looks as worn and old and rundown as anything else in this part of the city. Abandoned. Ready to crumble.

There's no reply to her knock. Not for a long time. Then an ocean of rage shakes through the door. Three or four seconds pass before she even hears his footsteps, and then the locks unlatching.

Silence -- because the name Decker suits him less and less now -- shoves door open. His cheeks are unshaven, lean and taut; there's a hollow, hungry look to him. His eyes are pits of fury, and the rage shedding from him is unreal.

He looks at her for a second, and then he steps back, aside, lets her in.

The dockhouse feels oddly empty. His pallet is still there. The couch, the crates that serve as seats, tables, coffee tables, counters. The microwave. The toaster. The minifridge, the icebox, the space heater. No trace whatsoever of his other packmates, though. Every last belonging of theirs -- few as they were, especially in this less hospitable packhouse -- gone.

"Ya look like hell," he says. The pot speaks.


[imogen]
She never suits the places in which he lives. She never quite suits this city, this life, the world in which she lives. Has chosen.

But this, she suits: the desolation, the unfamiliarity. After five months, they are as strangers. In the month since his return, it has not improved. They've barely spoken; barely touched.

This does not change, in this second, in this moment. She steps passed him and into the dock house - steps away from him, even adroitly, as if her path had simply carried her that way. He steps one way to open the door, and she steps another to enter it, even as she turns to face him.

His rage crashes into her like a tidal wave. Fire can act as water, when it's moving. It pours down stairs, surges over surfaces. In seconds, her skin feels as if a layer's been moved. Her jaw draws inexorably tighter.

You look like hell.

Her gaze flicks down him, then up. "So do you." The exchange would be suited by something wry, a faint smile. Nothing as such breaks the surface of her mouth.

There isn't much traffic out here. When they stop speaking, the only sound is the wind rattling the imperfectly framed windows, moaning through cracks of his low-rate building.

The windows rattle. The wind moans.

When she speaks, there is no hesitation. Some might call the lack of adornment in her word choice, but if it is, it is equally masochistic.

"Kemp is dead." A pause. "I told them I would make sure you knew."


[silence]
His reaction is barely a tic in his face. A brief spasm of the muscles of the eye, the cheek.

Then he turns away. Goes to close the door, snorting.

"Yeah? So's James."

Decker doesn't shut the door after all. He grabs the side of the door and tears it the fuck off its hinges instead, throws it across the warehouse the way a man might throw a frisbee. It slices through the air, spinning, heavy, metal, cuts right through the corrugated metal of the wall with a crash that shakes dust from the rafters.

The sound Silence lets go of then is not a yell, not a scream, not a roar. It's sheer whitehot rage poured into noise, an openthroated, bloody bellow of fury that turns into a snarl when he turns into a beast,

and leaps across the space between the door and the domestic circle,

and there goes the fridge, carelessly batted aside to fly thirty feet and smash into one wall, exploding into circuits and coils; there goes the icebox, lifted and sent flying against another, smashing into scrap metal; and then the countertop battered to dust on the ground, the metal sink yanked loose and whipped clattering into a corner, decapitated pipe hemorrhaging cold water now; and then the microwave, and then the toaster oven pitched like a baseball, and then he's down to chunks of concrete pulled up from the ground, flung every which way, and --

when he's out of shit to throw, shit to destroy, shit to wreck, he slows, he stops, his sides are heaving and his fur is on end. With effort, he forces himself back to homid form. He gulps air.

The air bleeds lightning.

The words are snarls:

"Now who tha fuck is 'them'? 'n why tha fuck is they sendin' you?"


[imogen]
When he tells her his one remaining packmate is dead, she has no opportunity to react. When he rips the door from the frame, she flinches, stepping back, her hands coming loose to her sides. Her fingers are spread, her palms out, and the reaction is instantaneous, giving him ground. As he shifts, his body surging, shifting and changing, she watches, half fascinated as the smell of her fear hangs heavy in the air, her pulse pounding in her throat.

She does not stay fascinated for long.

She in fact, steps outside entirely, as the the debris of the fridge clanks and settles on the floor, as it picks up the ice box. She steps over the threshold as the box whips against the concrete wall, the plastic shattering, showering ice and smashing cheap beer cans on the floor. She steps to the side, her back to the wall the seething rage beyond it. The sound it makes shakes her marrow.

What she does out there - if her hands shake from fear or if she covers her face with them, if she tries to light a cigarette before impatiently pitching it away. If she merely stands there, cold, still and silent - well.

He knows none of that.

What he does know is that as he returns to his human frame, she returns, her heeled shoes clicking softly on the concrete as she re-enters, the door much more gaping than it had been the first time, the door misplaced, the dockhouse torn apart, in shambles, as if it had been the victim of a hurricane or perhaps World War III.

Her eyes pass over it, swiftly taking in the disaster before she turns her attention back to the beast.

He snarls, his words barely human, and he, less than.

Her fear does not show in her face, but it hangs in the air. It beats a staccato tattoo at the pulse point in her throat, pounds in her chest. She enters no further than the door, not bothering this time to move much beyond the threshold.

"No one sent me."


[silence]
Silence pivots. There's nothing neat about the motion, nothing precise; it's all swaying, heavy menace, the tread of his feet on broken concrete. He closes the distance so fast his rage hits her like a freight train.

"Don't take fuckin' that tone on me, woman." Almost casually, his fist slams the wall beside the door, or what used to be the door, takes a chunk out of it. "You hear me? Don't take that fuckin' tone on me!"

His knuckles are bleeding and battered: eagle's might too much for the mortal body to stand. He doesn't seem to feel it.


[imogen]
She falls back as he comes at her, a sudden fluid giving of ground, a retreat that brings her shoulder hard up against the edge of the door's frame. He smashes his fist against the wall, crumbling the concrete and she flinches. She never takes her eyes off him. But this is less a defiance or a show of strength - and more prey watching predator.

Waiting for the inevitable.

"Or what."

Or maybe, bringing it on.


[silence]
A long, burning silence.

Then, abruptly, the Fenrir turns away. Something animal in that pivot, too, sharp, an abrupt shift of balance.

"Jus' git tha fuck out. Just go."


[imogen]
"No."


[silence]
"What the fuck do you want?"

His temper spikes instantly; this time the closest thing at hand is the floor lamp -- swept off the ground, flung out to break and shatter against the wall, extension cord trailing.

He's not still in the aftermath. Too much rage to be still; too much everything. He paces, back and forth, to and fro, balance low, shoulders swaying, nothing human. An animal.

"You want me ta hitcha?" Voice low now, too; seething. "Is that it? You tryin'a git me ta hitcha so you kin quit pertendin' we's even together anymore? Huh? Ya want us to be over, you jus' say tha word, 'Gen. Ain't no need ta gitcher fuckin' face broke."


[imogen]
Their distance has never so clear as in this moment as she looks at him. It is not the emotion or scorn in her eyes, but the near lack of anything at all.

Over the years, she has opened to him, millimetre by millimetre. Trust was earned, inch by inch. Though never the most expressive, she let him in, let him see her smile, or her fear, or her devastation.

There is nothing of that there, now.

It does not mean the mask is perfect; he has known her too long, and there are things he knows, like muscle memory. The stiffness of her spine and joints, the tightness of her jaw. The rhythm of her breath. The smell of her fear, a sharp undertone to the acrid scorch of his rage.

Seconds tick out, measured by the trip-hammer of her heart.

She doesn't speak.


[silence]
There's no response.

There's no response, which infuriates him, which makes him want to grab her by the shoulders and shake a fucking answer out of her, which makes him want to pick her up and throw her the way he threw the fridge, the icebox, the microwave and the door. For a second the urge is so strong it chills his blood. For a second he can see it, can envision this act of irrevocable violence with such clarity that he has to closes his eyes and lock his jaw to make it go away.

Go away. Just go away.

But she doesn't go away. She stands there, mute, tense, silent, hiding the fear he can smell. And after a moment Silence raises a foot, swings the couch behind him around with one thoughtlessly powerful shove of his heel. Drops down on it, elbow on the arm, hand shading his eyes.

A beat. Two.

"'least tell me this much." His pack: gone. Kemp Oates: dead. And this is what they talk about. "Is we over?"

He drops his hand. Looks at her frankly, starkly.

"Do ya want this ta be over?"


[imogen]
Her eyes never leave him. Not even when he closes his. He can feel the weight of them through the clashing pulse of his rage. Her breeding hangs in the air, never a calming measure but another tension. Just one more assault on his senses.

Concrete dust still hangs in the air, slowly settling. The cool, damp air from outside is seeping in through the naked door frame. The smell of wet earth, of earthworms coming topside to escape the deluge of rain, only to be crushed beneath a boot, a shoe, the tires of a car. One or two of the beer cans from inside the icebox cracked open. The smell of cheap, low-quality alcohol cuts the air.

The distance between them is miles. As far as it had ever been.

She stands still near the door frame, her backdrop the hard concrete wall, the torn and twisted door hinges. The blackness of the front yard beyond the jamb. Some light seeps in through the doorway, at a glancing angle. It offers bare illumination, the yellow sodium lights tacked to the exterior wall casting her in an inhuman hue. It washes her skin of its light, dims her hair to dullness.

He is shadowed and shaded, and there is something utterly incongruous about the way he carelessly whips around the couch as if it were a chair he was angling for the best position. The frank way he asks her a question, and such a question, as he takes a seat, a repose which might be casual were it not for the destruction behind him in the kitchen, around him at the walls.

She makes no move to join him, no move to come closer. She stays where she is, her eyes fixed on him, her expression ungiving, unrevealing.

When she speaks, it is not to answer his question, not at first.

"Not long before you came back," she says, quietly. "I shot a toddler. Then a few seconds later, while a Garou killed it, I shot its infant sibling. They were at the kitchen table, in front of plates of organs. Heart. Liver. Spleen. They had been feeding on humans.

"I killed their mother before that, but not before I held a gun to her head, threatening her if she did not tell me where she had been bringing the body parts; what she had been feeding. I told her that if she told me the truth, I would let her go. When I knew for sure she would not answer me, I pulled the trigger.

"The eldest child died before that, killed by a Garou who arrived in the Sept while you were gone. That was the time that my gun jammed."

She looks away then, toward the broken body of the lamp, its cord trailed limply behind it. Her hand, which had been closed into a useless fist unfolds, lifting up to push back carelessly at her hair, shoving it back from her eyes. The gesture is so quick, sharp and thoughtless, that half the strands fall back into her field of vision. She clears them when she turns her head sharply, back to look at him.

"I was once touched by a fomor and I was sick fer a week. I've not been that ill since-" a beat, "well. You were still in th'city, but we didn't see each other. So I didn't tell you."

These are not quite aimless phrases and words. They are offerings, perhaps. Some attempt to bridge the gap.

"Every time someone comes to tell me that another Garou is dead, my first thought is that they've come to tell me it was finally you. And then it's not, but it's someone else who matters. Be it a little or a lot." The last word does not crack, but it tightens. Narrows until it is a wire, pulled taut and vibrating. She lowers her head briefly, her eyes on her expensive, but understated shoes. There is a small speck of dust on the black curve of one. She has to resist the urge to bend down to brush it away.

There are no tears in her eyes or on her cheeks when she looks up, her gaze finding him unerringly. When she speaks again, it is different. Not half-snippets of stories or offerings of herself, but something more direct. Something sharper.

"The last time we were here," she says it evenly, unhesitatingly, "you said we would take it one step at a time. Then we did nothing. It's not even pretendin', Rohl. A half dozen words at the bonfire, a dozen at a bar.

"It is nothing."

A pause. It is the most she's said all night. It is the most she's said to him in -

It would be nice to say that it has only been five months. But it is the most she has said to him in much longer than that.

Before the dream, maybe. She can't be sure.

"I want you," she says it baldly, quietly, intensely. "But I don't want this."


[silence]
Shadows and rage. That's all that's left of him now that the lamp is gone, broken and mangled. A hint of the curvature of skull. The heaviness of the knuckles and the shoulders. A glint in the darkness, which are his eyes: grey as a storm.

Still. Always.

He watches her now. His turn to watch her, and his regard, though she can't quite see it, is unmistakable. This crawling dread, this silent menace: this is what drove mankind out of the jungles, out of the treetops, and into villages with walls. With fire. With weapons to keep the monsters at bay, until they'd convinced themselves utterly that there were no monsters.

Here sits a monster now. That is what Silence is: monstrous. A monster.

When she says you said we would take it one step at a time, he stirs faintly. Chin lifts a little. Then a twist at the neck, straining the muscles there looser.

A few seconds, when she's finished.

"'n remind each other."

It doesn't even make sense at first. Then it does. He adds:

"'s what I said. Take it one step at a time. 'n remind each other."

It's not spoken as censure, as blame, as a shifting of blame. It's just: laid down, low, a reminder. A hand lifts. He scrubs the heel of his palm across his nose; sniffs sharply in the dark. Familiar gesture. Human; thuggish. He's not, though, is he? Human. Never was. Even less so now. Another rank higher. Another rung on the ladder. Another step higher, more removed; changed; a bleeding burning pit of rage, widening.

"In tha last six months," he says, then. Quiet as she'd spoken, "I done lost jus' about every bond I had. Evan. Joss. Andrew. James."

Curata is noticeably missing from the list. Silence never really even knew him at all.

"Kemp," he adds after a moment.

"You.

"'n in tha five months I was gone, I followed a Black Spiral Dancer like an Alpha. Followed her into the Umbra. So deep and far I lost track'a everythin' I was. I been places you couldn't believe. Places that warped my mind 'n my perception'a things. I seen shit I cain't even put in words, 'r hold in my mind. I vomited every last bit'a taint out of me, 'n some'a it was wormed it so deep it took things from me that I cain't never win back. I went places where I could'n remember who I was. 'r where I came from. 'r what I was doin' there."

His throat moves. She probably doesn't see it in the darkness.

"Startin' ta feel like I ain't never made it back. Like maybe this is jus' one more umbral realm I've wandered inta. Some sorta ... " a short search, the word, which one? yes, "purgatory spun outta nothin'. An illusion'a bein' back when I ain't, 'n everythin's really slippin' farther away. Everyone slowly fallin' away from me. Me gittin' farther away all tha time.

"Sometimes 's like all there is is rage, 'r nothin'. Cliaths come ta me fer guidance 'n leadership 'n trainin'. If they ain't actively pissin' me off, I barely givafuck. Kemp 'n I talked Jarlship 'n I wanted ta take it from him 'cause it means dominance. It means strength. Not 'cause tha title 'r position 'r tribe meant jack shit ta me.

"James died. I still ain't sure if I feel angry 'r just empty.

"Kemp died. 'm angry about that. I want blood. I barely care whose."

A short pause.

"You done told me twice now. Yer gun jammed. You coulda died. That don't even scare me tha way it did. That jus' pisses me off. I wanna hurt somethin' that mighta hurt you. Break it. Tear it to pieces. Eat its fuckin' heart."

So flat, that. Level and calm now.

"'n that's it."

Another pause; shorter. He straightens slowly, then bends. Sets his elbows on his knees, curves his killing hands over his head. His killing hands, his killing arms, that solid, brutal wedge of a torso.

"'Gen, yer my mate. I would kill 'n die fer ya. No question." No romance there. Quiet, blunt fact, poured out like concrete. "That ain't gon' change 'less you change it. It ain't in my nature 'r capability ta change like that.

"But I cain't remember how ta love ya. Don't tell me you need more'n this. I know ya do. I jus' cain't remember how ta give more."


[imogen]
The dimness of the dock house and the distance between them robs them of the subtleties of each other's expressions. They look at each other intently, but do not see much. The broad strokes built from body language, but no the finer points of twitches of the face or even a swallow in a throat.

The tension in her jaw as he speaks is lost on him, though the tension in her body is not. She is as taut and arched as a bow-string, her body held rigidly, as if her surroundings were dangerous or she were china that could shatter and break with a touch. In these moments, in this context, all of this is true. Her surroundings are dangerous. He could break her with a touch.

She is still as he speaks, still when he's done. Her eyes never leave him, and if any particular phrase or word pains her more than the other, he cannot tell. He can barely tell that she breathes.

"What do you want, then?" she asks, before amending, "Out o' what you can have, what do you want."


[silence]
"What do ya think I want. I wantcha ta help me!"

A flash of anger goes through him, like flame over alcohol; it burns out and leaves almost no heat in its wake.

"I want you ta reach out 'n remind me."

There's a long pause here.

"'n if y'ain't willin' ta do that, then I wantcha ta tell me."


[imogen]
She hadn't expected that.

He cannot see a change in her expression, but he can hear it in the tone of her silence, feel it in the air, which in the end, really, is reading the nuances of her posture. The way her breath had drawn in, the way she had moved, turning further towards him when her body had been half turned away, before.

In paradox, she looks away turning her head, throwing her gaze downward to look at nothing, seeing nothing.

Most of her night has been filled with silences. Back at her flat, the sound had been broken by the ticking of her clock as she and the Fenrir, she who offers sorrow, had stood, far apart, trading careful words of not-quite grief. Here there is nothing to mark the time. Her heart rate has calmed until she cannot hear it.

She looks back, sharply, her head tilted, hair half fallen in her eyes as she looks at him while the silence drags on, unmeasured.

She steps forward, almost before she's made a decision. Crosses the distance and closes the gap, the sound of her heels echoing on the high ceiling, on the walls. His rage washes over her, needling her skin and tightening her ribcage, constricting her breath.

She stops in front of him, seated in the couch, the image jarring for the misplacement of it. The couch still whole as it ever was, but facing the wrong way, its back turned on the destruction of the kitchen.

When she speaks, it is almost apologetic, quiet. "I need you to reach out, too."

She offers him her hand, her palm up, the fingers half curled.


[silence]
There's this to be said.

There's nothing tentative or hesitant about him. He watches her approach. Hands lower from his head as she does. Shoulders roll back. Spine straightens.

Silence looks at her hand for a moment. When he takes it, his grip is sure and firm. He draws her forward and bows his head against her body for a moment, eyes closing.

A moment after that, they open again, and he lets go her hand.

"Tell me 'bout Kemp," he says.


[imogen]
Her hand is slender, the fingers long, delicate. A musician's hands with calloused fingertips, with carefully shaped nails. Her skin is cool and her grip is firm as she closes her fingers about the blade of his hand.

She steps forward as he pulls her, stepping into the bracket of his knees. When he leans forward and comes to rest his forehead against her body, she breathes in, an inhale which shudders the frame of her bones. Her free hand moves, as if to touch him, but the gesture is never fully realized. She never does, and in another moment, he straightens from her, anyway.

He releases her hand, she releases his. Her own drops back to her side, her fingers curling toward the palm. Her thumb rubs absently at her forefinger, tracing an old, nearly forgotten scar.

Tell me about Kemp, he says, and she looks down at him, close but not touching. Close enough for him to see a line in her brow deepen in emotion.

"Kora says he was in Moraine Hills," she says, her voice quiet. "He led an assault against a community centre that the Sept knew was creating taint to attack the church there. She said that those who brought him back told a story of what happened, and they were going to see it for themselves. They being her pack, I can assume." A beat, little more than a hitch, "His pack.

"She'll tell me the rest when she knows it," she finishes, imperfectly. It is the bare bones of what had already been a stripped down story. Kora had not had much. Imogen has even less.

She looks down at him, a rare vantage point for a Garou who has risen as high as he has. The contraction in her brow has faded, leaving only the impression of tension.

Moments pass.

"And James?"


[silence]
Silence looks at Imogen steadily as she speaks. He neither bows his head again nor covers his face, nor turns aside, nor flinches.

When she's finished, he's --

empty. Or angry. He can't be sure which.

"James," he repeats, and then utters a low, humorless laugh. "Don't even know what tha fuck happened ta James. Connection snapped. Found his corpse behind that old Fiann bar. Claddagh's. Him 'n a fuckin' pack'a Spirals."

Pause.

"Good fuckin' death."

There it is again. It's anger. He's sure this time. He recognizes it, roaring, an uncontrollable wrath that he thought he'd left the fuck behind a long time ago. When he grew stronger. When he grew strong in the mind. Ironic, then, that now that everything else is gone, everything else stripped back, stripped away, this is what remains.

The red beast. The raw, bare-toothed beast.

The Modi bows forward at last, puts his head in his hands, grips his own skull until his nails turn white. It's not grief at all. It's a silent howling in his head, the inexorable urge to tear the world down around his ears.

"You best go," Silence says, low. "'ll come findja later."

A long pause.

"'n if I don't, you come find me. All right?"


[imogen]
When he speaks, it is her turn to watch him and not look away. It is harder to look at him, face his rage, then to hear of James' death, stripped to bones as it is.

But she does.

She can only watch as he he bows his head, and grips his skull, his shoulder and back muscles standing out in relief through the thin cloth of his white beater. It feels, in that moment, as if nothing has changed at all in the last few minutes. They stand apart still - it is only their geographical locations which have moved. The gap yawns between them, broadened by the harsh scorch of his rage.

He tells her to go, for the second time tonight. Her fingers close, gently into her palm. She wants to -

it doesn't matter. She does none of it.

"I'll see you."

She turns and walks away. If he remains as he is, he can hear her departure, the steady click of her heels. He can smell the change in the air and feel the fading of her breeding.

There is no door to shut, but even so, the moment he is entirely alone is unmistakable.