endings [Cassian]

[Linnea Bartlett] Winter's yet to release its grip on the city. The slush that has been melting and refreezing, freezing and remelting for the last several weeks has frozen again. Oh, the streets are clear, even the sidestreets, even the alleys, and half the sidewalks, shoveled by the community-minded or tramped down and melted by the pale disc of the winter sun.

It's just after dawn; the sun is visible to the east, the rays fly straight down the street. Except for the narrow bands of interruptions - the elevated train, the fat concrete curve of I-95 - there is a straight shot to the fat width of the river, the glitter of Camden beyond. The shadows are long, her own shadow skips ahead of her, impossible attenuated, long and spindly, reacting in strange concert with her own strides. Its steps seem impossible, exaggerated, but it swings in motion so synchronous as to be mesmerizing.

Walk the streets, get to know them. That's what she's out to do, in the early winter morning, in the frigid first-light of a Sunday, when the whole world is sleeping blind and even St. Michael's has yet to wake up for early mass. There's no one about except for the paperboy, trudging opposite her, a heavy-slung bag full of morning Inquirers, stuffed to the brim with glossy advertisements, who stops occasionally and flings his paper onto a stoop.

Linnea pauses to watch him, her gaze flickering over the monotonous facade of the brick rowhouses. On this street they're three or four stories, subdivided into apartments, with strange little tumorous outgrowths looming over the sidewalks, to maximize available square footage. Each jutting second story sports two windows like half-lidded eyes, the sashes lowered, the sun glinting off the glass. The girl breathes slowly, the cold creeps into her knuckles, the tips of her fingers. She shoves her hands into her pockets, lowers her eyes, catches her gaze on something - a moment's pause; then, jolted by recognition, negotiates the crossing of the street, careful at the curb where ruts of ice remain, darting over the bleached out asphalt like a doe, all long-legs and insupportable grace.

Cassian might wake, bleary-eyed, to an inverted world; the sun too bright, streaming past the dark womb of the stoop, dazzling against the remnants of ice and snow, the invasive cold, worse than he could remember it, insulated by drunken excess, Linnea's hand, on his knee, the another against his cheek, the delicate fingers cold, but no colder than his exposed skin, the miasma of her voice running an indecisive and meaningless commentary as she tries to wake him. "Hey - you okay - ? Wake up! It's like, cold - and - " and so on.

[Cassian] Cassian sits in on the stoop, his large form looking like that of a puppet who's strings have been cut. Both legs are splayed out before him, toes pointing towards the bleak morning sky, and his chin rests on his chest, eyes closed, hands lying loose in his lap. A faint blur of bluish stubble covers his cheeks and chin, and his toffee colored hair has slipped its tie, and hangs about his face in random strands. There's a definate smell about him too - alcohol, perhaps, faint and acrid.

It takes a moment to rouse him - a couple of shakes, enough for a panicked thought or two to surface in Linnea's mind - and then he grumbles something, head lolling back, and opens his eyes. They're slightly bloodshot, the brown irises swimming for a moment, pupils dilated, before they focus on Linnea's face, and a crease appears on his brow as he regards her with obvious confusion.

Slowly, almost awkwardly, he places both hands flat on the ground and pushes himself up, sitting more erect, no longer needing to lean against the doorframe. He leans forwards instead, hair falling over his face, and raises a hand to touch his face, to roughly massage his cheeks and chin, to probe at his eyes. After a moment the large hand falls, and he looks up again, at Linnea, past her and down the street.

His frown deepens, and then washes away like pain before the soothing tides of morphine. He leans back once more, and takes a deep, unsteady breath. He looks at Linnea, and in the depths of his eyes she can see a fatigue that goes beyond the physical, a weariness and faint melancholy that touches his smile.

"Hey, Linnea. Did you bring me my breakfast?" He speaks quietly, a low rumble like the distant sound of a car starting, or rocks shifting deep below the surface.

[Linnea Bartlett] He wakes up; she draws herself back into her own space, slides to the edge of her perch on the step just below his and looks away as he gathers the far-flung strands of his consciousness into something like coherence, a moment's privacy. The sun is dazzling, down the street, the paper-boy heaves another awkward, oversized Sunday paper onto someone's porch and turns the corner. The interstate hums in the distance, electricity hums mindlessly in the nearground. Otherwise, the city is as silent as a city can be.

Linnea stuffs her hands into the pockets of her coat to warm her red, freezing fingers. He has slept off an evening in the gutter - an hour or two, maybe three - she's bright with dawn. She looks back at him, pale eyes shining, watery from the cold, the tip of her nose red above the muffling warmth of her aqua scarf, the brightest color in the immediate foreground, sufficiently saturated to defeat the shadows of the porch.

"No - " her brows draw together, pale eyes scouring his face, some twist of familiar sympathy wrenching her gut before she glances away. That look. That weariness. " - no I didn't? But - but there's an Italian bakery two blocks down. They're open, I think. It smelled good - I could get you something if - well, I mean - " She uncurls her right hand from its pocket, reaches up and nudges the edge of the muffling scarf down past her mouth and looks back at him. Her voice restarts, quieter. "I could get you something if you're hungry. Are you okay?"

[Cassian] Something seizes him, an animation born perhaps of a burgeoning desperation. Something that makes him heave himself to his feet and stand swaying above her. He does not look steady, but he's awake, and now he scours the sky for something, an omen, a suggestion, an implication.

Disappointed, he sees nothing, but does not let that dissuade him. Instead, he rakes his fingers through his hair, quickly and several times, and then rolls his head. A very severe pop crackle sound machine guns in the brittle air, and he grimaces for a moment before looking down at her. An almost manic energy seems to have seized him, and he takes a deep breath, forcing his great chest to expand, to expand and grow till he can't inhale any further, and lets it all out in a whoosh.

"Come on, Linnea, come on let's go."

No mention of the Italian bakery. No mention of breakfast, his state of being, his mental health. Instead, he trips down the steps of the stoop, fumbling a mirror out of his pocket as he goes. A quick one-two up and down the street, and then he walks quickly to a side alley, chock full of trash cans and mounted crates, and ducks into it. Linnea might notice that he moves with a noticeable limp in his left leg.

He steps in and around a monster olive green dumpster, hoary survivor of a thousand backyard alley encounters, and stares down into the mirror, into his bleared reflection. He gazes deeply into the mirror, and feels the world around him, feels a caul that's sluggish and rancid. Feels it and attunes himself to its resistance, pushes through the reflection in his mind's eye, forces himself to not simply imagine a physical sense of movement through, but a dissolution into. He sublimates himself, and lips pulling back from his teeth, penetrates the Gauntlet.

[Linnea Bartlett] Linnea rushes in his wake - "Hey, stop. Are you okay - " the quiet concern in her voice animated by a sudden, wild desperation deeper and wider than any such emotion a human being might begin to feel. It churns through her stomach, enlivens her nerve-endings, bright silver, wild light, sharper than the pale, cutting rays of the morning sun. "Cassian - what are - " For all the feeling shoved and sublimated into the words, her voice is quiet, a narrow hissing sound, whipcord controlled, framed by her urgency.

She doesn't stop him, so she follows him, scrambling for purchase on the patches of ice on the sidewalk, punching through the layered lace of well-melted, refrozen snow on a narrow patch of dead crabgrass, circling the detritus of the alley deftly and then - with a faint, muttered curse, a cloud of visible breath - following him through the Gauntlet, her reflection in the mirror, a pale bright eye, her face red with cold, the cloying insistence of the barrier, like swimming through a vat of glue until the air where she had been pops suddenly, rushing to fill the momentary vaccuum left in her wake.

[Cassian] Cassian appears in the alley, and doesn't even pause to take in his bearings. Instead, he shakes his head, as if clearing it of tangles, of effluvia and detritus, and barges back out into the street. He moves quickly, his lumbering gait made awkward by his knee, but with a purpose. Out into the street, and back up the stoop, to stand with his legs spread, arms akimbo, gazing up at the sky. He takes in a deep breath, holds it, exhales. Takes in a deep breath, holds it, exhales.

When Linnea emerges around the corner he trains his brown eyes on her, and smiles, the expression made almost jagged by the nervous energy that courses through him. Cassian is but twenty years old, and now, large as he is, slow as he can be, wise as he sometimes seems, he looks like a kid, a ragged and worn young man who's clearing skating on thin ice.

"Let's do something, Linnea. C'mon. I'm going to summon something. I'm going to call something to come visit us here in this street. What do you want to see? A - a unicorn? Ever see a unicorn? What about - what about a..." He pauses, eyes searching blindly as he tries to think of something, "What about a fire giant? A Surtur? Or - or we could try and summon the Talons of Horus! Wouldn't that be a laugh? The whole sky aflame with a million birds, screaching and - and wheeling, here at my command?"

He laughs, and rubs his hands. "Let's do it. Let's summon something huge, something massive, and lead it into battle. Or - or ask it to play checkers. Imagine the expression on a Thimbul Wolf's face when I challenge it to a game of - of -" He pauses, opens his mouth, closes it, and looks down once more at the Silver Fang.

[Linnea Bartlett] The girl's coat and scarf have disappeared, she's dressed in the clothes she seems to wear all the time - the jeans, stiff with dark stains that have worn themselves deeply into the denim, a new thermal, beneath a new t-shirt, old hiking boots. Her skinny arms are wrapped tightly around her torso to conserve warmth, her shoulders are hunched forward, her head tucked low in a strange echo of a boxer's protective stance.

"Cassian - no." She's frightened. Garou aren't supposed to be frightened, Ahrouns aren't supposed to be frightened. No, wait, fear is fine - isn't it - it's the paralyzation that follows that's wrong. But they aren't frightened in the stories told at the moots, when they stand up and shout their deeds. They aren't frightened in the aftermath, the deaths, every last one, are glorious or shameful. She glances up and down the street, her eyes darting wild, narrowing on the shadows of movement in the ghostly shells lining the street, instinct running through her like water.

"This isn't funny - " she says, planting herself in front of him, turning in a slow, watchful in circuit, her birdwing shoulderblades etched in the sharp strain of relief against her t-shirt, strain clear in the tendons standing out against the skin of her neck, her spine pricked against the pale flesh.

"This isn't - this isn't funny. It's not - We'll go back to the Caern. We - c'mon - you aren't thinking." She wants to turn around, reach out, but she doesn't know the street or the neighborhood, not yet, perhaps not ever, and he might be bigger and older and sometimes wiser, but she's the warrior. She's the Ahroun. "You're drunk you can't - " her mouth narrows, sets, she flashes a pale glance over her shoulder, half-turns, opens her arms, plants the tips of four-fingers on his chest. "You can't play tiddlywinks with - with a unicorn - stop. Look where we are - C'mon - we - "

[Cassian] "And why not, Linnea?" He's breathing heavily now, but considering her, really looking at her. "Why can't I play tiddlywinks with a Unicorn? Why - not?"

He reaches down into his pocket and draws forth a knife. It's a typical Garou blade - black iron embedded in a hilt of horn, the crosspiece tied tightly with thick thread. It looks compact and hard and old and vicious. He pulls this out, and looks down at the blade. Turns it slowly so that Luna's light runs down its length and disappears off its tip.

"I can do whatever I want. I can summon - try to summon - anything. Sure, there'll be consequences. I ain't an idiot. But so what? You know, if I bite a piece of my own flesh and spit it into a fire, I can summon a Thimbul wolf instantly?" He looks up from the blade and at her, his eyes growing dark, stormy, his Fenrir heritage manifesting itself. "I can do that. All I have to do - is bite a chunk of my own flesh off."

He gazes down at his own arm now. "I mean, how fucked up is that? What kind of world is this - I mean, what kind of forces do we follow - when - when -"

He pauses, and looks up at her, the structure of his skull apparent under his skin, his eyes darker, almost furious.

[Linnea Bartlett] "Give me that." She turns and faces him again, a wide stance, her feet spread, her crossed arms unfolding again, when the blade appears, wild, rage chasing away the delicate strands of curling fear. "Give me that now!" She doesn't have the experience or bearing to match her breeding; her voice bleeds thin and girlish at the edges, there's that undercurrent, that ripcurrent beneath it, beneath the human veneer.

"You know - I don't care, it's fucked up - I hate you right now, I don't - you - you - " The words swim through her brain, all white-hot, all impossible, with strange twisting edges and unmannered endings, like metal filings curling in the heat at the edge of a furnace, like paper given over to flame. "You know what kind of forces we follow - I don't care - we're going to die. I'm going to die and you are, and Severina and Ben, we all - we all are and someone's going to tell - "

Suddenly, she can't see him - or rather, she sees double, triple, through the tears swimming in her eyes. " - but you know - Cassian, I know you know. You - you - you told me. This - this is just the riptide. You - you have to - stop it. Stop it - "

[Cassian] Cassian laughs, his head thrown back, his laughter deep and rich, a warm tide of chocolate, molten and amused, its timbre full and loud. He laughs, and then looks down at her, looks down at her tears and outstretched hand, and almost, almost her command simply forces him to obey, to hand over the knife, she looks so pure, so perfect and brilliant and compelling. He feels his heart swell in his chest, feels her lineage ringing in her voice, and he, somewhere deep inside, laments.

But it's not enough. Instead, with a suprising cruelty he's never felt before, or never displayed so blatantly, he sneers at her. "Do you believe everything people tell you?"

And then he's pulling the tip of that dark blade down the length of his forarm, cutting deep into the flesh so that blood runs down his skin and scatters from his elbow almost immediately, his face writhing at the pain, and begins to call out to the sky in a harsh language, all disonance and utterly inhuman, the sound of ancient and vast machines, rust choked and forgotten, grinding back into life.

[Linnea Bartlett] Her face twists terrible, wounded, the mouth compressing narrowly, the eyes sparking impotent silver fire. Every muscle in her body quivers with forces she cannot contain and cannot understand. The tears swimming in her eyes breach and spill, she reaches up, shoves her hand across her nose, smears salt water across her cheeks, opens her mouth to respond to him - scream maybe, or cry - but manages only a hiccoughing sort of sound, little more than a lurch of her diaphragm against her lungs.

Which melds into a snarl as he draws the blade down his arm. She takes two steps back - glances behind her, looks up at the sky - then launches herself at him, human on the ground, Glabro at the apex of her launching arch, pulling Falcon's strength to her, midflight.

[Cassian] He's almost oblivious to her attack, and makes no move to defend himself. She collides with him with stunning force, and despite the terrible disparity in size, knocks him back into the front door of the building and then drops him to the ground, pinning him beneath her. Blood smears across her side, slicking her hand, and the sheer force of the blow knocks the knife from his own hand and sends it skittering across the ground.

But he doesn't stop chanting. Holding him down, his size now in Glabro, she pins him but he goes on, strangely unaffected by the force of the blow. He looks over her shoulder, calling out in those mechanical, wrenching tones, chanting and intonating. Summoning.

The blood has been spilt. And his words hang in the air, thrumming like powerful chords.

[Linnea Bartlett] He defies her. Her authority, her command, her blow; he keeps chanting - she bares her teeth in a deep-throated snarl of warning, feels the fine red mist welling up in her vision, bathing the dark folds of her brain in regimental fury, the animal mind, the primal mind. It doesn't matter that she's pinned him, he keeps chanting and chanting, the words grate against her skin and her grinding teeth.

She rears back, lifts herself half from him, hits him once, twice - the open flat of her hand, then a closed fist - but he continues, his words bubbling and crawling like - like oil in the back of her mind. Blood, saliva, tears all mingle - somehow she's still crying - growling out Stopstop Stop her girl-child's voice gone bass, the words bitten off as she twists to follow his gaze over her bunched shoulder.

[Cassian] And something is there. Something has heeded his words, and is now coalescing in the air. Something has been pulled from the depths of the Umbra, and is now manifesting even as she turns to gaze at it.

The street is bathed in the light of Luna, which limns the ice and snow and pavement and stoops with her cold, lambent light. The darkness that roils in the air defies this light, inhales it, soaks it and reflects nothing. The shape within grows more distinct. It's a tall man, easily as tall as a Crinos, lean and dangerous looking. One eye is covered by a black patch, and from his shoulders sweeps a cloak of raven feathers, oleaginous and sumptuous. He's wearing gray beneath this cloak, and a long scythe is held in the other hand. The blade of the scythe is so sharp that its edge is not distinct - it seems to fade into the air, which whines as the wind plays over its edge, and ruffles the feathers of his cloak.

He turns his storm gray eye from the Godi that summoned him and looks at Linnea, crouched over him. His face hardens, his one eye as flat and cold as the head of a railroad spike.

[Linnea Bartlett] Her breath boils from her lungs, the lean tension in her changed body outlined in the swells and shadows of her musculature. The thing - the thing appears and she goes stark still - as if she has been captured by the sudden flash of a shutter frame, a perfect frozen half-second, illuminated by a temporary flash, discarded moments later. She turns and stares back, her face still and unmoving now, the tracks of her tears briefly luminous, scoured from the sloping, jutting features by the cold, frozen. Her jaw hardens, twists with tension as she snaps her mouth closed, shoves reason through the shunts of her mind and releases the Fenrir, hands flat on the hand surface of the ground. She pushes herself aside and then, twisting, rises to a low watchful crouch, her weight balanced on her haunches, neurons sparking bright in her mind, adrenaline a wild forward surge in her blood-beating heart.

[Cassian] Cassian lies still for a moment, having fallen quiet. Her punches had not hurt him, but had definately jogged a few things loose in his mind, so that it takes a moment for him to gather them back up, and force them into their correct places.

Slowly, he moves a hand to his jaw, and rocks it loosely before clamping his mouth closed. Then, sitting up, he looks at Linnea's tense, crouched form, and over to where the tall figure stands in the middle of the street, scythe teasing a high whine from the wind as it picks up. Cassian looks at the figure, who peels his gaze slowly from the Silver Fang and looks at the Fenrir, who very, very quietly, whispers, "Shit."

Silence follows this, as nobody moves. Cassian blinks, rubs his eyes, and then takes a deep breath, as if about to go out on a stage before thousands or a lectern to give a speach. He seems almost instantly more sober, more controlled, but something in his eyes seems wilder. He coughs, and steps forwards, to the edge of the stoop, just before the first step.

[Linnea Bartlett] That one-word curse swims through her, electric, and her pale gaze - clarified in this form, without any of the murky inclusions one might see swimming through her iris' in homid - swings between Cassian and the figure, the figure and Cassian. Her body oils forward, she leans into that crouch then rises, leaving the stage to the Fenrir but shadowing his path a half-step behind, watchful, waiting.

[Cassian] Cassian opens his arms wide, as if seeking to encompass the street, the world, the ominous and inscrutable figure he has summoned. His fingers extend, and the blood continues to run down his arm. It's a dark crimson, sullen, the wound giving, generous, letting more and more blood slip free and course down to the elbow and then spatter free, to plash on Cassian's shirt, the ground.

Cassian stands thus, and then calls out in a gutteral voice, intoning a series of phrases with a falling cadence, each full and grim and cold. His words are near torn from his mouth by the wind, but the figure hears them all the same.

Archaic trenched lines on the figures face shed time in runnels, a tangled skein of lines and creases. He seems weathered, hard, like a washed up trunk of wood, worn smooth by the tides. He seems utterly without give, as wise and sere and uncaring as the elements themselves. The wind picks up some more, causing his cloak of feathers to undulate out behind him. Dark clouds are beginning to gather.

Cassian awaits a response, gets none. He speaks again, and begins to walk down the stoop, his posture confrontational, his voice growing more insistent, demanding. And still the tall figure stands still, scythe in hand, watching. As silent as the grave.

[Linnea Bartlett] There's a moment's hesitation, watchful, dark-turned, and then Linnea follows, still shadowing the Godi, a smaller, brighter shadow in his wake. Her frame is expanded, expansive - all the supple lines one cannot quite see on her in homid, all the lean strength stands out in marching and fluid lines, framed by the dedicated clothing that has expanded to suit her. Her arms hang at her sides, the meaty hands folded into a trenchant fists, swinging. One moment, she is in the Fenrir's shadow at his shoulder. Then she dwarfs him, Crinos, then folds to all fours, like a house of cards folding into a pack, a silver direwolf pacing at his hip, triangular head brushing his flank in unspoken communication.

It's cold, but clouds are gathering like thunderheads. Black dried leaves flutter past, scoured forward by the rising wind and ozone scorches the air.

[Cassian] Cassian approaches the figure, and after one last sentance, stops, waiting expectantly. Despite the cold wind, a film of sweat has appeared on his brow, and he stands with both fists clenched, as tense as a guitar string.

The figure quietly lifts his scythe, and then slowly twirls it around in his hand, his long fingers surprisingly dexterous. The scythe whirrs through the air, and then with a snap the tall man extends his arm while simultaneously causing the scythe to blur through the air, the whine becoming a shrill scream.

It happens so fast. So god damn fast, and then there's a flash of blood being sheeted into the air in the scythe's wake, and Cassian is holding the stump where his left hand had been, fingers tight around the wrist, face aghast and white.

His hand falls to the ground like a palid crab. The figure looks at Cassian with utter disdain, and begins to fade from view.

[Linnea Bartlett] The scythe's whine is matched by one low in direwolf's throat that expands and vibrates through her chest. Once more, she follows Cassian, surges in his wake - then there is a flashfire moment and a faking crackle of energy snapping across her synapses. She lunges, jaws closing on the oily air, tasting nothing, tasting the diffuse arterial spray washing the street, her fur, the Godi's face red.

Oh, god, she wants to charge that thing and she shakes off a snarl, the thick ruff on her shoulders shaken out, standing on end. There's a narrow tether holding her in place, however - a sure cord. She circles in front, cutting defiantly between the two until whatever it is he summoned has faded wholly from view, then turns back to the Godi, rising, massive, Crinos, folding compactly into Glabro, reaching out for him, wild, her mouth working, her voice choked quiet, soundless for several long moments.

She turns, sharply, her long braid has reappeared and it rises and flies with the movement, searching for something, anything to be done. The quiet street, half-empty, its strange shifting shadows, the moonlight slashing through the translucent shadows of the least solid buildings. There's nothing for her, no cue card, to direction, nothing. The logjam in her throat gives way, a low sound, grotesque, jolts through. She melts into homid and peels off her t-shirt, pulls at its seams. It rips instantly, a wet sound as the tension of the weave are broken, the cotton hanging in long strips, enough that she might be able to fashion a crude tourniquet.

[Cassian] Cassian is simply staring at the stump. A part of his body that had always been taken for granted is now gone, and instead of extending from his wrist is lying on the street. Almost stupidly, he leans down and picks up his hand in the other way, the sensation of his own palm held like dead weight between his fingers so strange and utterly creepy that he can't help but drop it again. It falls on its back, fingers curled inwards like the legs of a dead spider.

He doesn't feel the pain. His stump is gouting blood and he feels nothing. It's like watching a strange foreign movie, where things are in black and white and the women look voluptuous and alluring and smoke cigarettes at the ends of those long stick things. Cassing puts his hand around the stump, and squeezes as hard as he can, moving back some more till his heels catch on the first step and he falls back, landing hard on his butt.

He closes his eyes, and then he surges, his very body roils and changes, his massive form ballooning out into Glabro, massive and meaty, a coarse and fell human form that makes him look primitive, dangerous, crude. He wraps his long, thick fingers around his ruined arm, the dark nails of his fingers sharp and elongated now, overlapping where they meet.

The Godi starts to wheeze, and then helplessly, the sound almost terrifying in its black tinged despair, to laugh. He opens his eyes as Linnea approaches, as she sees tears running down his cheeks.

"Wotan. Odin. He didn't want... to play." He pauses, eyes unfocusing for a second. The combination of fatigue and alcohol and massive blood loss is hitting him hard. "Didn't want to play... tiddlywinks."

[Linnea Bartlett] "I know." Linnea says, suddenly, sharply, her voice bleeding sullen as she stalks in his wake, the fluttering ends of her t-shirt pricked up and dancing in the shifting wind. Her lower lip juts out, her round cheeks puff to an absurd size, a childish gesture. She shoves a fist across her eyes, scouring the sockets, dry and granular. Her feet leave behind a pregnant trail, the souls of her boots smeared with his blood. "I told you." Mad, bitter. "Cassian."

She sinks to her haunches in front of him, then leans forward, falling to one knee, balanced upright, stablized by her right foot. "I'll tie this, okay? I'll -" Looping the twisting cotton around his massive forearm, above the circuit of his hand, without any real skill on knowledge beyond a basic first aid course and a few episodes of ER, snuck in the study as a child, strange Thursday nights in the flickering blue flame of the television, usually locked and barred, she loops it, and loops it again, pulls tight, but it's cotton, it's not a vise, pulls tighter and tighter and the weave stretches, the stitches distorted, the torn edges pulling, the fibers twisting.

Her foot slips in his blood, she blunders forward into him. Her pale fingers are slick with it, too. She's sniffling, turning her head to the side, swiping at her eyes, her streaming nose with her shoulder, pulling the tourniquet tight, reinforcing it with another strip. The blood flow eases, but doesn't stop. She pulls tighter, mutters beneath her breath. "Fuck. Jesus." Then: "Hey, hey c'mon - we'll go to the Caern. The - Casts Bones - c'mon. Please stop laughing - Cassian. Damnit."

[Cassian] Cassian's laughter, weak as it is, subsides easily into chuckles, and then she blunders, slips into him, rights herself, tightens the tourniquette as best she can. The chuckles fade away like tumbleweeds driven before a hollow wind, and he's looking down at her face, his own bestial one as tired and worn and sad as anything she might have seen.

He ignores the stump. The pain doesn't touch him. It seems unreal, and is unreal for the moment - he seems not to care, instead looking down at the girl who growls and struggles with the cotton, struggles to pull it tight.

Reaching out with his own blood slicked fingers, he cups her chin, raises her face to his, and leans down and kisses her.

[Linnea Bartlett] Linnea's gaze flashes wider in that moment, as he lifts her face to his. Her shoulders tense and her jaw sets - her face is a wild riot of color. Pale beneath the freckles, the slow, somehow fire of blood beneath the morass of pallid freckles, her eyes leaking tears at the corners, tracing wavering silver lines toward her jaw, her ears. His blood is livid against her skin, and a bubble of clear snot billows from her nose. She sniffles audibly, clearing her sinuses.

Her mouth is stiff beneath his; she has never been kissed. She has never been kissable. Her pulse leaps in her throat, the bizarre moment dovetails wildely with a half-dozen others. Then her mouth gives, momentarily, beneath his, and she's talking against him, "Cassian," - his name, "Cassian. - " Then she's pulling away, pushing away, heart fluttering like a tattered flag, her body stuff with riotous tension, her face slick with his blood, renewed streams of tears. " - stop it. C'mon, that's not - I - "

[Cassian] It's not a passionate kiss. It's not the kiss of an enflamed lover, or a sensual seducer. It's not even really romantic at all - if anything, it feels like a farewell, a pressing of lips, a tender and fleeting moment of contact and then she's pulling away, and Cassian is standing, and he's looking down at her with blood still pouring from his stump, pale and swaying and unshaven and serious now, as grave and sad as the day she saw him in Fairmount Park.

"I'm sorry, Linnea." His voice is almost soft, and he blinks, trying to retain focus. "I'm sorry." He looks over at where his hand lies in the gutter, and then back to her face. "You're a good kid." Said so softly, and without a trace of condescension. "You'll do great things, if - if you stay true to yourself."

He shakes his head, unable to muster the right words. To be inspiring. "I'm - I'm going to go." He says this in a vague way, but it's clear he doesn't mean back to his apartment, or round the block, see you tomorrow kind of way. There's a look in his eyes. A blend of pain and melancholy and returned sanity and perhaps some wisdom. He looks at his stump, shakes his head, and then at the Silver Fang scion once more.

"Listen, you take care and... just... take care of yourself, alright?"

He takes a last step off the stoop, jarring himself as he does so, and begins to walk down the street, heading drooping.

[Linnea Bartlett] "I'm not - " Linnea starts, stands in his wake, pushing back, confused. She bites of her words, swallows them back, sensing the air of finality in them and hating it. Hating it. She casts about, his hand in the gutter, the trail of blood spatter staining the grainy impression of a sidewalk, the street, half-asphalt, half-cobblestoned, and then runs in his wake, dogged and persistent, squelching blood with every step.

Half-way down the block, maybe - at the crossroads, where the vista toward the great riot of skyscrapers wrapped in cocoons of pattern web opens up - she catches up to him, tugs on his shirt. "I'm not letting - " Her voice is quiet, stained by tears, momentarily sure before it unravels again, all those loosening threads. "I'm not letting you go like this. Come back. Get healed, then - whatever - go home - go - go walk in - in a forest or something - I don't - please, okay? Just - just get healed and - "

[Cassian] Cassian turns, and looks at her. He doesn't say anything. He stands as immovable as a monolith, and his eyes, his gaze which it seems is really quite mutable, a mercurial shift from wise to manic to grave to despairing, is now blank. It's like looking into the eyes of a sphinx, utterly blank and emotionless as gazing into the sun. Wherever Cassian said he was going to, he's clearly already part way there, and the shirt that she's holding onto, the person before her, is just waiting for her to release his shirt so that he can follow.

[Linnea Bartlett] Fury billows up, suddenly, from somewhere deep inside her. The delicate tug at his shirttail becomes harder, her hand forms a fist and she rips it back. She wants to hit him, suddenly and hard - the sensation wires through her, jolting and hot, like scorched metal pouring along her the fine pathways of her nerves. She stumbles back a step, two, a handful of his shirt in her fist, stretched and fraying, and then lets go.

"You can't do this," she shouts, to the unmoving, blank-faced Fenrir. The bubble of snot billows out of her nostril again, spills over her mouth. She stomps, furiously, her hands, now fists swinging at her side. "You can't do this to me."

[Cassian] So many things that could be send. So many wise, Theurge like things that could be said, to comfort her, help her accept it, help her understand. But Cassian says nothing. His face is as hard as stone. He looks at her, as she steps back, a shred of his shirt in hand, and then, without blinking, he turns once more. Turns, and begins to walk away down the street, head bowed, leaking blood, moving away, away and deeper into the Umbra.

[Linnea Bartlett] It's not that easy, of course. It never is. Life doesn't wrap itself up like a Hollywood ending, life leaves little trailing threads that drag us from place to place, moment to moment, raveling and unraveling. There aren't any storylines until we pack them up and make them real, give them structure, mold them into word shapes, thought objects. We don't know where we begin, and we never know where we will end. Oh, Garou might: something bloody and quick, foul and inglorious, but a quick passage into the falling darkness, and then maybe another life, on the wind, whispering to the next line of fallen, falling heroes, until the Atropos snaps the thread of the world as roughly as she snapped your own.

So she follows, like a buoy bobbling in the Fenrir's wide wake, her arms furiously crossed, smearing blood on her thermal, her skin, stomping inelegantly, gradually drifting to the end of tethering sight, then running to make up the distance in a sudden rush of clarify. She can still stop him. Until, perhaps, she allows that line to be played out too far, in the war between duty and fury and desire and fear and bone-deep sullen self-absorption, and runs, breathless around a corner, at a dark crossroads laced with pattern web, eerily empty.

Her gaze flails in each of the cardinal directions: but she sees nothing, no sign of him, not anywhere.