Dinner's a solitary affair. Wolf eats downstairs and girl eats in her room. Wolf's still hungry when he's done so he heats up some more leftover meatloaf. Devours that too.
Stands out in the tiny backyard a while, reverted to his man-shape, sipping his beer. They slept all day and woke in late afternoon. Now it's just approaching evening, the mountains to the west shortening daylight by a couple hours. Air's just starting to have a nip to it, but not so much that the wolf feels the need to bundle up. Stands out there in his bandages and his lounge pants while the sky goes from blue to orange to red to dark.
Comes back in. James meets him at the door. Their voices are muffled and low through the walls, the doors. It's a short conversation, and then the whole house can hear the wolf coming up the stairs. Can feel it too, low-frequency vibrations through the structure. Undoubtedly back to his near-man form again.
Quiet for a while. He keeps to his room. She to hers. Some time after nightfall she comes back out to check on her concoction. That's when he comes back out as well, rumbling down the stairs, taking that tight spiral with unconscious, bonedeep ease.
Has a ragged strip of rust-tinged gauze in hand. Catches up to her in the kitchen and holds it up.
"Where do you want it?"
witchHe took the beer. This, she fixates on. Wolfing down pizza. Sitting angrily against the pillows. Scowls at the air. Irritated already, the six-pack plucked from her hand only aggravates. She tries to read after she eats. Curls up on the bed and can't focus. Tries to nap again.
Ends up crying. Couldn't explain why, but does it quietly, holding a pillow and dampening it with her tears. Smudging it, a little, with black mascara, liner.
She ends up falling asleep. Drowsily, lightly, dreamlessly. Her eyes flutter open when the stairs and the hallway shiver with his step. She waits, motionless, until she hears the door down the hall open. Close again.
--
Night falls and she stirs again. Doesn't bother washing her face. It grows dark and she grows grateful. Her hair is only more tousled from lying in bed again. Her eyes are smudged and dark, shadowy. She goes lightly down the stairs, an almost soundless counterpoint to the way he moves in his own house. She drifts; he thumps.
In the kitchen she goes to the window, holding up the jar and looking at it. Watches something inside swirl as she turns the jar, watches how it has broken down, how it has combined. When he comes out she is at the sink, her long sweater's sleeves rolled up and a cheesecloth -- not his, something from her bag perhaps -- laid into a bowl.
Her hand is on the lid of the jar when she hears him. Feels him. Looks up. There are no lights on in the kitchen. Her expression is... flat. Dark, perhaps. Unliking and unlikable.
"Shitty pickup line," she declares, and goes back to unscrewing the jar. Perhaps surprisingly, it doesn't smell bad. It looks disgusting -- a green sludge floating with leaves and specks of something. Smells like its ingredients, though, and something else. Something elusive, and familiar, and warm, and sensual, and powerful, and
fading, almost as soon as it is scented. Vanishing. Lingering in the memory very much like a dream you remember,
and have no memory of.
She pours the sludge into the cheesecloth-and-bowl. Which, at least, sounds gross. Slop slop slop.
wolfman"You know what I'm talking about." Stuff is slopping into a bowl. Wolf eyes it distrustfully, watching over her shoulder. "The hell is that. Stop. Lemme just put a bandage on you and you can save that for later."
witchIf she knows, she does not say. If she hears, she does not tell him what the hell it is, since he asked last night. She does not stop.
"An moment's thirst shouldn't drain the river," she says, shaking the jar slightly to get the last few droplets into the cloth. Sets it down in the sink to rinse later, wash out. Folds up the edges of the cheesecloth to being squeezing, draining. Her hands soon turn green. Seems natural, that she should have stained hands somehow.
Glances at him while squeezing, casting a look over her shoulder. "Those things are strong. Should be saved for stronger wounds."
Looks back down, hair falling over her face, a curtain between them.
wolfman"Didn't we already have this conversation?" Hand's a fist around that flimsy scrap of gauze. He presses it to the counter, leaning around her to get the look she's denying him. "It's mine. I can do what I want with it. If you want me to save it for myself, there's no point. Won't be a mark on me by the end of the week.
"Now hold out your hand before I smack it on your forehead again."
witch"And you think you won?" she says, to his non-question. She scoffs, pressing harder on the cheesecloth. "They're my wounds. I'll keep them if I like."
Which she doesn't. Her head and her side hurt so badly before she put on the last few drops of that balm that is currently keeping him from so much as itching. She's exhausted as her body tries to heal the last of the wounds from those venomous, quivering monsters. She can't even put much gumption in the stubbornness. Her voice is aloof and unconcerned, but there is a sigh shivering outside the windows of the words.
A memory, when he warns her that he'll smack it on her head again. She pauses her work, turning her head. Her eyes glint like gemstones catching whatever light is available, however faint. Sapphires. Bright auras, dark hearts.
"Why did you have to act that way? Hitting me to heal me. Telling me to 'finish them off'." There's a beat of a pause; they've already had this conversation, too, and she learned things about him in its course. Her voice, sharp with the question, softens a touch, or at least: lowers.
"I was scared. No threat to your pride there."
wolfmanWolf wants to fight. At least, he wants to argue. He's taking a breath to do that when she tells him she'll keep her wounds if she likes. Only think keeping him from arguing, really, is that he hasn't figured out what to say yet. He's working on it, though.
Is, until she catches him off guard. Turns. Her eyes meeting his suddenly pushes him a half-step back. He gives her a bit of her personal space back. Truth is she makes him as uneasy as he makes her. Maybe more so. He doesn't really know how to deal with her.
Especially when she's like this. Honest. Bareboned. Vulnerable. It's the last that drives his eyes away, makes him turn away and plant his hands on the counter and lean into it like her words are a physical burden he's got to shoulder.
"Didn't hit you." He splits that hair first. "Wasn't all gentle about it, is all. I know you were scared." Couple of moments, nothing to say. "Guess I just didn't want you to think it meant something, me going back for you. Didn't want you to think you could start, I don't know, taking advantage. Expecting me to always help you. Expecting me to start always protecting you even if you get yourself in trouble."
Bandage is a rumpled mess in his hand. He remembers it suddenly and holds it out to her.
"Just take it. Okay?"
witchWhen do wolves want to do anything but fight?
He doesn't know what she is yet. Kinfolk. Woman. Scentless. Witch of some old craft, turning kitchen herbs into poultices, oils and moonlight into potions. Seer, reading cards and runes and god knows what else for people who can believe easier in that than in a jar of magic brew that heals their wound and leaves no scar. Young, though perhaps not far off from his own age. Looks younger than she acts. Seems. Feels. Talks. Looks that way, until you get to her eyes.
Of course she makes him uneasy. She knows what his rage is. She knows what he is, if she knows nothing else about him. Perhaps that's why she isn't trying much, if at all, to know anything else about him. Except when she does this: outright asks him why. Points directly at the core of it and demands explanation. There's something fearless in that vulnerability, something sharp and uncanny.
He didn't hit her. He just wasn't gentle. She just snorts, looking away from him, shaking her head as she squeezes. So what if he knows she was scared. She works on pulling as much fluid as she can from the cheesecloth, wasting nothing. The bowl is filling with green fluid, which looks like it is congealing slightly.
He talks, and she works, and by the end he's holding the bandage out again. Says okay like an entreaty. She looks at him again, that dark look past her shoulder, through her hair, with those eyes. It's a dry look. It would wither lesser men. Which he is not. Not lesser. Not a man.
"Don't think it meant anything, me calling you. I meant to call 911." She turns back to her work again. "I got my phone out; it dialed the last number I called. Then fell on the ground."
Oh, she's been holding on to that one. It's important that he knows: she didn't want him there. Didn't call to him. Didn't go begging him to come save her.
She seems to finish. Moves the cheesecloth aside, full of its bundle of herbs and leaves falling apart from the boiling and brewing. Her hands are dripping, slightly, with green juice that is staring to get viscous on her hands. Her eyes glint as she turns, though not with savagery. She positively throws herself at him, though careful of his gauze, and slimes her hands on his shoulders and chest and flails gently and weakly at him, batting her eyelashes so fast you'd think her eyeballs were about to fall out.
"Mah hero!" she says, affecting a (very poorly done) southern belle's accent. She cackles perversely, making sure to get as much goo on him as she can. "Saaave me!"
wolfmanSurprise: he doesn't growl. He grins, sudden and unexpected, a quick flash of sharp teeth. Not a pretty expression, but then, he's a fucking man-wolf right now.
"I know you didn't call me. Bet it was still the best damn butt-dial you ever -- "
Girl goes fucking berserk right about then. Girl launches herself at the wolf, and wolf's so damn surprised he doesn't get out of the way fast enough. Wolf gets slimed. Weirdly good-smelling gunk gets all over him and she's faking this absurd Miss Charleston accent and wolf's fending off hands full of green crap and
all of a sudden it's like the air around him fluoresces, it's like creepy-crawlies under the skin again. He's managed to smack that bandage on her. Underside of her goopy forearm this time.
"Don't complain." Untangling her limbs from his; not so rough as he could have been. She doesn't go flying, at least. "Attacked me first this time. Euch. What was in that shit?"
witchSome part of her knew that would happen. And maybe batting at him, leaving him with trails of goo on his flesh and green handprints, was a way to make it acceptable. Maybe attacking him, laughing like that, was an excuse allowing her to permit him to heal her again.
That is how it happens. It is hardly worth speculating, in the end, what the motives were. This is how it happens; this is how it goes.
Good-smelling gunk feels cold and does not tingle but feels strangely effervescent on the skin, almost instantly fading. One can only imagine how it would feel on an open wound, a deep one, clarifying and soothing and surprising. But it fades quickly, having no work to do, and he just has traceries of slime on his skin as a result. It's pretty gross, but has a gel-like consistency: it soaks in, as it is meant to. It doesn't leave too much of a tacky feeling on the skin.
What she feels is different, and she remembers it. Leeches under her bandages, pulling blood and pain and the possibility of rot out of her head and her side. It works so much faster this time, having less work to do. It wriggles, and she squirms, uncomfortable. She smells the tang and metal of blood, his blood, her own. She feels a strange swelling sensation as the torn tissue beneath her skin rebuilds, a tightening as the skin itself reknits.
He tells her not to complain, since she started it. She says nothing about it. Steps back, a little dazed from the healing, exhaling a small breath. Then he goes euch at her work and calls it shit and her laughing, bright-eyed expression -- momentarily turned to a dazed look of discomfort -- shifts to a small scowl.
"Sage," she says. "St. John's Wort. Some other things." A bit of magic.
The scowl doesn't last. She reaches up, gingerly peeling the bandage away from her brow. It sticks to her hair a bit, which makes her wince. The bandage has some blood on it. Her head does not, but for a few flecks of the dried stuff. Her head looks fine. Better than fine.
Like her other bandages, she'll keep this one. To burn later. Blood magic is powerful, and not something she wants turned her way.
wolfmanWolf reaches out when the bandage comes undone. Heavyhandedly -- heavypawedly, is that the better expression when he's like this? -- he pushes back her hair and looms over her and inspects the wound. Well. Used to be a wound. Now it's just new skin, perfect and smooth. Bits of dried blood flecked at the edges. His palm is burningly hot, his thumb rough as he rubs at the blood.
"Oughta go wash that off." Lets go with a little push, ungentle but not actually violent. "Then eat more. And sleep. Talens'll do some of the work but your body still does most of it. Anyone who tells you different is retarded."
witchThat make her breath catch. Big as he is, rough as he is, she rocks back ever so slightly, inhaling through her mouth. She scowls up at him as he's rubbing her scalp and forehead with his thumb.
"So tidy," she says, mocking both his advice to wash and his earlier discomfort with the goo on his skin, "for someone who just slapped a bloody rag on my arm."
He's bossing her. She steps away, turns away, giving a flick of her eyebrows upward and own, yes that's nice. She is going to wash her hands first. Down here. And do as she likes.
Even if she's hungry. Even if the pizza didn't last.
She scrubs her hands quickly, efficiently, and thoroughly. Cleans under her nails as well. That stuff sticks to the skin, wants to blend into her body. She cranks off the water and starts drying them. "You have anything better to drink than that beer?"
wolfmanTurns out he follows her to the sink. She finishes and he puts a finger under the handle, keeping her from turning it off. She moves off, dries her hands. He starts washing his, soaking a paper towel, wiping goop off his skin.
"Water." He thinks a minute. "Might be some juice in the fridge, go look."
witchShe smirks, vaguely triumphant, as he wets the towel to clean up after her attack. This is after, however, the way she steps away when he comes nearer again, pushes into her space again. Again. She just looks at him, vaguely disturbed by this answer. "All that money and no decent whiskey?"
In this instance, she doesn't sound like she's mocking him, or teasing him, though he might. She just sounds genuinely incredulous.
wolfmanEarns her a smirk back. "Oh. Forgive me for not realizing the Fianna was after booze. I think there's some stuff in the pantry." He nods in a vaguely appropriate direction. "Go knock yourself out."
witch"You don't have enough," she quips, when he tells her to knock herself out. That's how she shakes off his smirk, his tribal condescension. She goes to the pantry, leaving mush sitting in cheesecloth in a sink to dry, leaving a jar to soak, leaving a bowl of goo to... congeal.
She opens the pantry wide. "So what's for dinner?"
wolfmanTurns out he's got quite the collection in there. Maybe not enough to impress the girl, but enough to impress most people. A whole wall of bottles on the rack. A lot of wine, truth be told. A lot of cognac and armagnac and, yes, vodka. But scotch, too. Irish whiskeys. Maybe even a bottle or two of Kentucky bourbon whiskeys.
Bit of dust on the bottles. Doesn't seem to indulge much, this wolf.
"I don't know," he retorts. "It's eleven o' clock. If you wanted something, should've told me earlier. Cook usually stays at the other house unless he's needed. Probably some meatloaf left. Or maybe a microwave burrito. You could always cook for us."
witch"Reh reh reh," she echoes, standing in his pantry, turning bottles, inspecting labels.
He suggests she cook. She pokes her head out, holding a bottle of -- perhaps surprisingly -- not whiskey. Wine. Red. A dust-covered but rich-looking syrah. Correction: two bottles. The other is a merlot. Different vineyard, different vintage.
"Dick," she says, and switches the necks of the bottles to one hand to search for a corkscrew.
wolfmanWolf snorts. "Why? You're the one that wanted to eat. And drink." He drags a drawer open. Inside's a corkscrew. One of those fancy, mechanized, idiot-proof ones.
witch"I bet you're not hungry at all," she retorts, setting bottles on the counter. She takes the corkscrew out of the drawer without seeming to notice that he opened it for her. She fiddles with it, figures it out like someone born to anything to do with alcohol, and moments later, out comes the cork from the syrah.
Devon lifts it, sniffs it, takes a drink. Licks her lips, looking at him for a moment.
"You said it yourself," she tells him, looking him over, dragging her eyes slowly back up to his face. "Body does the work. And your body's... workin'."
She takes another drink. Straight from the bottle.
wolfmanCork comes free with a soft pop. Syrah's damn good. Rich, earthy, spicy-sweet. Girl drinks it straight from the bottle like she was born to do this. Wolf watches her, caught somewhere between annoyed and amused.
Then she licks her lips.
Then she looks him over like he's a piece of prime beef.
Then she says something that drips of insinuation -- at least he thinks it does -- keeps her eyes on him while she takes another drink.
Wolf frowns at her wordlessly for a second. Then he straightens up, shuts the drawer decisively, doesn't say a damn word. Walks the hell away.
witch"I was teasing!" she calls after him.
At least she doesn't deny it. But saying she's teasing isn't the entire truth, either. That's not exactly what it was.
"Come back," she says to his spine. Takes another drink, somewhere in there. "Rafael,"
and if he has not stopped she is walking after him now as she says his name perhaps for the first time or at least one of the only times, carrying the syrah by the neck,
"it's good. You should have some."
wolfmanWolf turns at the foot of the stairs. Tight spiral going up. Their bedrooms upstairs, separated by the safety of a long hall. Long for a city residence, anyway. She hasn't seen the house in the hills.
His house. In the hills. He has to start thinking of it like that.
She's got the bottle by the neck like it's a Christmas goose. Wolf's eyes, green as an animal's, flicker from her face to her hand to the bottle and back. He quirks a little smile. He's still hulking, hirsute, huge. Stooped and growly when he speaks.
"Enjoy yourself. I'm going back to sleep."
witchDevon follows, pauses about six feet away when he pauses at the stairs. Holds the bottle. Doesn't understand his little smile. She's frowning. It's clear enough she doesn't want him to go, that's why she called, why she chased
But he says he's going to sleep, and she doesn't chase after him again, doesn't call after him again. She smirks a little, after a moments. "Cheers," she says, and lifts the bottle to take another drink. Turns, then, going back to the kitchen. She'll drink alone. Bottle the green goop. Eat meatloaf. Watch t.v.
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