a broken hand [Will Reiter]

[Linnea Bartlett] Late Sunday morning, early Sunday afternoon: the Brotherhood is empty or near about empty. Spring might be on the horizon, but Philadelphia is still caught in the hard teeth of winter. The night was cold and bitter, refreezing the melting slush. People up early for morning mass cursed beneath their breath, chipping away at the frost coating every windshield.

The common room of the restaurant and pub quiet, warm. The fire in the hearth has just been started, and most of the oil lamps and candles that provide such a warm, diffuse glow against the antique woods have yet to be lit. The room looks old and worn in the bright illumination of the morning light, as it spills through the front double doors.

Andy McIlroy is anchoring the far end of the bar already, a black and tan in hand, a plate of half-eaten eggs and toast at his elbow, gnawing on a piece of bacon as he swills back a mouthful of ale. Will the tender is working his way through the well liquor, refilling and restocking, humming beneath his breath.

He turns as the door opens, shoots Reiter a stark look that closes down immediately, blinds drawn over the windows of his eyes, beckons the true born kid closer. "Morning Will. Cold outside, eh? Makes ya long for global warming."

The humor's stale, the kinsman's voice is flat. By the time Reiter has walked up to the bar, the tender has pulled and opened a pair of bottles for him, whatever beer he might've seen the Fenrir drink in the past or, if nothing comes to mind, a pair of Coronas. He stuffs limes into the necks of the bottles and shoves them at Will, fizzing to life, " - on the house - " then turns and reaches for the bottles at lining the back of the bar. Will pauses in the middle of the motion, thinks better of it, and instead adds another pair of beers to the first two, glass clinking against glass.

"Someone's looking for ya, kid." Will says, low-toned, serious. "Back room."

[Will Reiter] It's there from the moment he steps in. Foreboding. The dread sense of it, heavy as responsibility. He knows that scent well. He's smelled it before, coming to again after his rite of passage, surrounded by his elders that congratulated him with voices far too grave. McIlroy's joke falls flat. He doesn't bother to resurrect it, choosing instead to bestow a fragment of a smile on the man. Then Will the Bartender is there laying out the drinks. Will's usual drink is a coke, though he's shared a shot or two of Jameson with Cassian. So it's that the 'tender sets out for him: a doubleshot, and then another.

Reiter frowns at the drinks for a moment. "I'll just have a coke, Will," he decides. It's a compelling voice he has; clear as a bell, yet backed with an underscoring of depth and timbre. "Thanks anyway."

Someone must've died, he thinks to himself. His brother Alaric? The thought is a pang of hurt followed immediately by resentment, irritation. What the hell's with the show? The eyes that won't meet his. The free drinks. The news that everyone but he already knew, and no one felt like imparting on him. Did they really think he was new to all this? He's Fenrir. And this city, he's reminded for the thousandth time, is not.

Picking up his coke, the young Forseti heads into the back, through a confusing series of employees-only doors into the so-called den. An awful name, to be sure. Wonder which would-be clever-guy thought of it -- but perhaps that was unkind. He sets his rancor aside. Pushes the door open, and lets it shut quietly behind him.

"Linnea." If she's at a table, he sets his glass down at it. "What's up?"

[Linnea Bartlett] The Silver Fang is curled in on herself at the far south eastern corner of the room – closest to the Caern, farthest from the door. She looks like hell. There’s blood dried in her pale hair, crusted beneath her fingernails, soaked into her clothing, what was an off-white thermal undershirt and a pair of jeans. Two layers of blood, old and new, the latter in the wild spatter of arterial spray. The old blood is unremarkable, soaked so deeply into the denim fibers of her jeans that it has become part and parcel of the weave.

The door opens and she looks up; her face is pale and stiff, her eyes are bloodshot. She reaches up and wipes at her nose with the cuff of her undershirt, sniffles and wipes again, but she’s composed, goddamnit, and she isn’t crying. She hasn’t cried for an hour, at least, and she’s scrubbed the tracks of her tears from her cheeks and jaw with the back of her hand.

“It’s, uh - ” she starts, but it doesn’t work, her mouth clamps shut. It’s not like death or loss is new; this isn’t the sort of death or loss she - “It’s – it’s - I - ” She’s cradling something in her lap, in the V defined by her torso and her canted legs. She closes her eyes tightly, grabs the bundle and thrusts it at him, wrapped twice around in the tattered remnants of an old t-shirt. “There.” Jaw setting, sullen, she leaves the thing on the table between them and pulls back her arm suddenly, quick as a whip.

[Will Reiter] For a moment Will doesn't move. Doesn't reach for the bundle, doesn't shy away. The meaty thump as it hits the table gives him hints aplenty. He already suspects what he'll find inside. Hell, he already knows: body parts. Whose, is still up in the air.

The Forseti's keen eyes flicker from the bundle to Linnea, to the bundle, and back to Linnea. She's been crying. She's bloody, a mess, looking like she wants to rock in a corner, tune out. If she were a girl, Will would feel sorry for her, perhaps even sympathize. Sometimes Will wants to rock in a corner too. And every night, waking from a dream that counted one number closer to his fate, he wants cry.

But she's not a girl. She's a Silver Fang. An Ahroun at that, two moons fuller than his own steely half. Long live the queen: the thought flits sourly through Will's mind, and there is no compassion in his pale eyes. Then he reaches out and flips the cloth back from the flesh in a single flick of his wrist. There's no reaction to be read there; none. It's hard to say if he even recognizes whose it is. After a moment's observation, he leans back in his chair. They were never pack-bound in truth. He would not know if Cassian died.

"What happened?"

[Will Reiter] (wants TO cry. sheesh.)

[Linnea Bartlett] "He was drunk." Linnea turns her head, her pale gaze flashing silver in the minimal light. She has folded into herself - drawn her knees close to her body, wrapped her arms around her knees - but her spine is straight and her eyes are dry. She spits out the words at Will, flaring like an incandescent bulb about to gutter, like a filament overloaded with energy.

Skinny she may be, but her bones are knit together with a layer of lean muscle, and the long paraspinals are bunched and tense beneath the weave of her undershirt. "He was drunk. I found him drunk on - on - on a porch asleep. And he - he ran into the alley. He ran into the Umbra. He wanted to summon a - a unicorn or - or the - or the thimble wolves. He wanted - " She could spit nails, hard cold nails from between her teeth suddenly. She lifts her chin and shoots an accusatory gaze at will, her pale eyes wild. "I tried to stop him. I - He - He wouldn't stop. Talking about unicorns and - and checkers - I told him. I hit him and he wouldn't stop."

[Will Reiter] Will feels his temper rising; that infamously steady temper of his, rising. He closes his eyes for a moment, then stabs the severed arm in front of him with a look. "And this is what's left? What killed him?"

[Linnea Bartlett] "He - it was - " she breathes out, audibly, breathes in. Something moves in her chest like ground glass. Her words are not stuttered with grief; or not merely stuttered with grief, they are swollen with rage, with that ever-present subdermal tide that clots her throat with feeling.

She stops herself, presses her wrists firmly against her knees, pushing hard against their bony prominence until her whole body is a tense circuit. She doesn't look back at Will, now. She looks at her hands, the nails crusted with blood. "He didn't listen to me. I wasn't fast enough. By the - by the time I knocked him down, he had already started. I - I couldn't stop him chanting short of killing him. He summoned - " Here she pauses, her breath hitches. "Otin? Odin? Wotan? Odin did that. Odin cut off his hand."

[Will Reiter] Inexorable, "And?"

[Linnea Bartlett] She bends forward, presses her forehead against the back of her hand and is quiet for some time. Then: "He left." After a moment's pause, "He's not coming back."

Then, in a much smaller voice, an unwanted afterthought hitched onto the last car of the train, a castaway. "It was - it was awful. He was so sad."

The rest remains unspoken.

[Will Reiter] Will takes a moment. He takes a drink. He takes his time. He lays out his thoughts, sifts through them, orders them one by one, arranges them.

Then:

"STOP BABBLING." His fury is palpable. He shouts at her, all his strength behind it. "WHERE IS HE? WHERE DID HE GO? WHEN? WHY?" By the end he's on his feet, leaning over the table, palms planted, tendons standing out in his neck, veins bulging in his temples, veins beating across his forehead, veins snaking down from cheekbone to jugular. A second later he drops back into his seat with a panting exhale. Gulps coke convulsively. His rage is a blistering tide of electricity, beating like a drum. You wouldn't believe how much he had, this unassuming young Forseti, always so calm, always so quiet. He's screamed so hard at her his voice cracked and his throat ran raw, until it feels like he might've ruptured something inside. He's grasping for calm, and she can see it in the way his eyes flit everywhere but over her, and his free hand is knotted into a white-knuckled fist, delicate even now.

"For god's sake," he says, quiet and unsteady, setting down his coke, "cut the fucking drama and tell me what happened, or don't talk to me at all."

[Linnea Bartlett] STOP BABBLING.

Rage against rage. His ignites; her own coruscates like wildfire. He begins shouting at her, leans across the table, tense and wild: she doesn't cringe or rock or cower. She erupts to her feet, in one brilliant, balanced motion - to stand, blazing, not on the floor but on the bench of the seat on which she has been curled. Her eyes are hard and diamond bright, her pale face smothered red. The thermal sticks to her torso where the blood has dried against her skin, her jeans move stiffly against her hips and things, but the body beneath them is all smooth oiling motion.

She plants her hands - her fists - on her narrow hips and stares wildy down at him, now unmoving except for the inexorable rise and tidal fall of her chest and the snaking danger of the pulse leaping in her throat.

"I told you." Blazing, she leans forward like a raptor, like a bird of prey. "He wanted to fucking play checkers with a unicorn. Instead he summoned some guy with - with a gigantic fucking scythe who cut off his hand. He was drunk. He was terrible. That's what - that's what harano looks like - you - you - I HATE you! He looked like everything inside his head was broken, he looked so - so - so fucking lost and he kissed me and he left and he isn't coming back."

Abruptly, she crosses her arms, leans back against the paneled wall, feels the weight and solidity of the Brotherhood around her. "Are you fucking stupid or something? Do you think I am? I told him to come back and get healed. I - I followed him, but he wasn't even there anymore. I don't fucking know where he went, but I know where he was, and it was the worst place in the whole fucking world. He's gone, okay? He left.

"Maybe you can find him. Maybe you should. That's why I walked across half the fucking city to find his arm again. I hate you. I hate him. I hate this."

[Will Reiter] Will draws a sharp breath, as though to shoot something back. A beat goes by. Another. Then the young Forseti simply lets out his breath in a long, slow hiss. And he gets to his feet. Grabs up the arm. Thinks better of it; wraps it up. When that's done, he pauses a moment, both hands on the table, and looks Linnea in the eye.

"Thank you."

-- curt, though not without courtesy. And that's it. He turns and starts to walk out.

[Linnea Bartlett] That's enough to deflate her. She curls her crossed arms under and looks away, at the wall, at the high beamed ceiling. Her voice is smaller again, her body is shaking with the runneling aftermath of rage. "You're welcome."

Then, as he turns toward the door. "You can't fix him, Will. But if there's anything we can do." we - her pack - "We will. I - I'm sorry didn't stop him. I'm really really sorry." That said, she falls silent and lets him go.

[Will Reiter] At the door he turns, frowning. He seems to frown for a very long time, weighing god knows what in his head as his pale, perceptive eyes move over her. At last, "Don't be." There's a poetic cadence to this next: " 'There upon Yggdrasil I hung for nine nights and days, my side pierced by a spear, sacrificed, myself to myself' -- that's how Odin Allfather gained his wisdom. Of all Fenris' children, the Godi as closest to Odin.

"Cassian's Godi, and he's a good one. He'll do what he has to. It's not your place to decide what that is. He'll go or he won't; he'll come back or he won't. It's not your place to try to stop him, or to speak of him as though he were lost. He's not a child. He's Godi. You shame him with your hysterics. It's his place to do as he did. It's your place to stand as foe to the Wyrm. And you won't be much of one if you can't even brief your troops on the situation, no matter how dark it is, without falling apart."

There's no smile, no gentleness, nothing this time to dull the edge of his words. After another moment, Will shrugs his narrow shoulders. "I've got a patrol to run."

[Linnea Bartlett] "You might think you know everything, Will Reiter," she remarks in reply, quietly, a low, snaking whip of the sullen peeking through the rounded corners of the words, underscored by conviction, a Silver Fang's conviction. "but you don't. I know what I saw. I know what happened. You can't - you can't change it with your words, even if they make it feel better. I hope you're right," she finishes, her voice quiet, as she fishes a narrow disc of silver out of her pocket. A pale glance at the mirror, and she's fading from view, pushing through the barrier between worlds. " - but I was there."