(eva)
It is too cold a night, too rainy for so late in the year. The sky reminds her of November: leaden patches of gray interspersed with darker, threatening ridges of dangerous black. Only the lushness of early summer growth belies all the evidence to the contrary. Summer, not winter, is somehow upon them, obscured by the chill rain and the dull skies. Sometimes it feels like swimming backwards, she doesn't have a sense, now, for the season.
The rain spits and drizzles off her windshield. One of the wipers has begun making an inopportune noise, a dull squeak that begins ominously in the first degrees of its arc of motion, then disappears a few degrees after that. In a quick shower, the annoyance would soon fade. Constant rain, and thus constant motion, and the sound is grating to her senses as sandpaper pulled heavily across raw skin.
Headlights are reflected in the rearview mirror, a thin scrim of too-bright light, dazzling. Her eyes roam elsewhere as she flicks the indicator (animal sound, and rhythmic, the syncopated clicking) and pulls off the street into the driveway. The garage door opens, a low hum of sound, and she eases the Passat in alongside her landlord's car, casting a glance back over her shoulder and across the street before pressing the button and allowing the garage door to skim closed, shutting off her view.
They're still out there.
Her mouth flattens in a wafer-thin frown as she considers the state of affairs, then she shakes the thoughts free with a sharp breath exhaled through her nostrils. Her fingers skim her briefcase's curving handle, but she lets that, too, go. She won't touch anything in there tonight. She wants a good meal, a bath, a glass of wine, a few pages of perfect summer absorbed from a glossy magazine, anything, now, to banish the darker edges of the cobwebbed world from her consciousness.
And so, only the canvas shopping bag slaps against her thigh as she climbs the stairs to her flat, jingling out her many keys for the many locks. The stairwell is dark but wide. The lights downstairs are already out. She cannot remember if the Petersons are on vacation, or if something else has taken them out for the evening. Keys inserted, the locks whir and tumble as she opens the door, half-skimming for some answer in her last conversation with Mrs. Peterson, half-thinking about the salmon steak, the crisp fresh spinach nestled in the shopping bag. Is there a glass of wine left in the last bottle, or will she need to open a new one?
As the door swings open, she decides, with certainty, that even if there is a glass left in the last bottle, she will toss it and open a new one. She'll give herself that much pleasure, at least. Her fingers fumble for the light switch as she tosses her keys on the credenza and turns back to re-engage the locks, but her eyes skim to the windows framed by wisps of gauze curtains, the dark shape of a non-descript parked across the street. Another frown then, neither dark nor particularly troubled, surfaces, tugging down the corners of her mouth.
Two glasses of wine, then. Two glasses of wine.
(santiago)
Sometime after the bath, after the cloudmasked sunset - which is late as a late spring sunset should be, but dark and grey as a winter sunset is - the world is fading into shapes of blue and grey and black. A glass of wine from her new bottle already warms her veins; a second is slowly making its way there as well. She's closing her curtains one by one, shutting the tall and narrow windows that, on a good day, spill light into her flat.
At the third west-facing window, she might notice him standing below on the street, looking up. Who knows when he came, or how long he's been standing there, or what he's thinking behind his black eyes, straight eyebrows. He sees that she sees him and lifts a hand in greeting, nodding in the direction of the stairs to her door: a question.
If she nods, he turns in that direction. He does not look up at her again. There is an animal assurance in his gait, smoothly steady, and no concern whatsoever whether she watches him or not. Some grow nervous when watched, studied, examined, scrutinized. Not Santiago.
Around the corner, up the stairs, to the door. There he rings her doorbell and waits.
(eva)
Watch him she does, expressionlessly, a sentinel silhouetted by the soft lights behind her, framed by the narrow window. Only when he disappears does she lift her wrist and allow the curtains to fall closed. Another moment, and the curtains stir again as she glances out the window, another frown sketched lightly across her brow.
Locks click, and the door swings open a bare half-breath after he knocks. Her gaze rises and her eyes skim across his face before she steps back in wordless invitation. One worn board in the old hardwood floor creaks quiet as she steps away from the door, but otherwise, the flat it largely silent. Muted, the television flickers on, bathing the couch in a blue-white glow.
Casually dressed, tonight, in long cotton pants and an old comfortable t-shirt that still bears evidence of paint spatters around the worn shoulders, she lifts her wine from the credenza without looking and curls her right arm in front of her, cradling the bowl of the glass between splayed fingers. Absently, perhaps self-conciously, she reaches to smooth her hair, still twisted into a professional upsweep. Only the darker, damp curls along her hairline, the faint humidity in the air, remain as evidence of the relaxing bath.
"Evening," she greets him, belatedly and only after she has put some apparently comfortable distance between them. "I was," she offers a brief, spare smile that flickers to her eyes and a gesture of a glance, over her shoulder toward the kitchen. "about to put the finishing touches on dinner." Pause, or hesitation. Then: "Have you eaten?"
(santiago)
His penetrating eyes watch her for a moment, black and somehow utterly expressive and utterly opaque all at once. There is the sense that all of her - ALL of her, being body and soul - is drunk in and reassembled, understood.
Then he purses his lips briefly - a gesture of amusement, perhaps, given that it slides into a small smile - and beneath his overcoat, his lean shoulders shrug. "Yes, but I can pretend I haven't if you'd rather. I've been told it's uncomfortable to eat with someone else looking on."
A pause. He looks over her shoulder at her apartment, neither furtively nor prying. A casual, thorough glance, breathing the space around her in as well. Then he shuts the door behind him, and locks it. Back to her, he slides the coat off and hangs it up or, if there is no place to hang it, folds it neatly and unobtrusively over a chair. He only tosses it declaratively over the most obvious surface when he's in his killing clothes, with all their grim connotations.
"Can I help?" It might take her a moment to realize he means dinner.
(eva)
She stands still and alert as he watches her, dark eyes so clearly watchful in return, so studious and suddenly wary. Her grip on the stem of her wineglass tightens. Tendons stand out in her forearm. He looks over her shoulder, and after a moment, she follows the path of his glance, uneasily. What crime does he see?
The view is so familiar to her that she often does not remember as a thing apart and only sees it, distinctly, when she wishes to change it. There is nothing unusual here: her tastes are neither particularly expensive nor particularly gauche, and the room tends to clean colors that seem somehow coolly feminine without verging off into the uncertain world of pastels.
Startled back into the present, she says, too quickly, "No." Such an abrupt sound. Whether in response to his first statement, or his second question, she isn’t sure. Her mouth slips into a rueful curve, and she finds herself release a breath she had not realized she was holding as he tucks his coat, so neatly, into the alcove by the door.
"I mean," she continues, deliberately turning around, thinking about turning around as she turns around, focusing carefully on each step, the smallest of the words she chooses, through the nice, swimming warmth of her mind. "I meant - " the soft snort of laughter, mild, as she walks into the kitchen, pausing long enough to cast him a brief glance over her shoulder, abashed but amused, " - that you need not eat again, merely to keep me company. As for dinner, the preparation is more pleasure than chore. I wouldn’t - " /think about asking you to help./
From this angle, she is both obscured and framed by the open doorway between the kitchen and living room. He can see the contraction of muscles in her shoulder and upper arm, perhaps he can hear the faint clink of glass against tile, as she puts her wine aside. Her eyes flicker down and drifting, away, to follow the hidden path of the wineglass, before she disappears entirely into the kitchen. "- I mean, the offer is kind and unnecessary."
(santiago)
Somewhere in the midst of her halting speech, somehow balanced between the confidence of her professional aura and the uncertainty of an almost-human faced with an almost-beast, he has turned to face her again. The shirt is plain and old, but clean and crisp; its edges and facets still catch the light. He watches her for a moment, and then another.
"I've already eaten, then." A smile. "But your generosity is appreciated, kinwoman."
A silence that might be awkward, only the sureness of his mountain-cat presence and fluidity makes it impossible for him to ever seem awkward. Then: "Are you wondering why I'm here this time?"
(eva)
The silence is broken only by the sizzle of oil in a pan. The kitchen: bright and cheery, the walls painted some buttercup yellow, the cabinets stained a mellow oak, the counters lined with appliances. She has cast a handful of garlic into the pan, and is following it with another handful of wilted spinach when he rounds the door and his presence becomes a lodestone, somehow, in the bright room.
Mid-stir, she looks up from the pan. Unerringly, her eyes find his face, flicker over the rim of her glasses and across his eyes and then down, away. It's a slow, wandering trail they trace back to the garlic, shallots and spinach sizzling in the stainless sautée pan.
"Yes." She is no longer looking at him. She stirs, perhaps she forces herself to stir, the rapidly wilting spinach. The dark leaves grow bright green, almost translucent. Then she lifts her chin, lifts her eyes from the pan, and glances back at him, over her shoulder because conversation requires such touchstones, perhaps. Or perhaps, some instinct demands that she keep him - almost-beast - in her view. "I am."
(santiago)
"So am I," he says with a small smile, which is somehow closer to wan, perhaps even touched by sorrow, than it is to mirthful.
In the wake of those words there is only silence, long and tenuous, bubbled by the sound of spinach in the pan. He moves, rubbing one lean tricep with the other hand. His musculature is not thick, but beneath his fingertips there is no give at all. Swarthy skin over muscle as hard as bone, and bone as hard as steel: that seems to be all there is to Santiago. Not an ounce of spare flesh or excess emotion.
"I'm leaving for a while," he finally decides to say, though the decision is made so quietly that the pause seems merely a deliberate space in time. "A man I've been tracking for some time has surfaced again. I'll be back for Lieutenant Davis and all the other unfinished business I have here but I don't know when. I thought you should know."
(eva)
The heat from the sautée pan, the rising steam has fogged her glasses. No matter, she looks over them, dark eyes roaming his face as the silence stretches, flickering to his arm, his hand, as he moves. And then back, of course, to his own face.
Her own eyes have narrowed minutely, just crinkling at the corners. The distant concentration is mirrored by the mild quirking her mouth, downward.
She has studied others with just this sort of careful attention. Witnesses. Suspects. Police officers. Jurors. Sometimes a glance will give them away, a smile, a frown, the slow clenching of a jaw. Just as often, these minute tics are ask opaque as the rest of their lives, the motivations she does not quite understand, the desires she does not share, the conspiracy theories, whatever makes it right, whatever makes it easy. No matter how simple or obvious their lives, most people are somehow opaque, foreign, hidden. It’s so hard to crawl beneath another’s skin.
/Click-click-click-click-Click./
The nozzle, as she reaches across her body and turns off the heat. It startles her from her study, quickly grounds her inside her skin. Though she was not watching the color of the spinach, she turned off the heat automatically, some muscle-memory-response, some other-level of her brain, not quite conscious. The quality of the sizzle had changed, bright popping to a sullen hiss, or the scent sharpened. Some sensory cue, then movement, her movement, an oddly hard-wired response.
“I see,” murmured, just above the bubbling spinach, as she steals her eyes from his face and busies herself watching herself lift the pan from the front to back burner. Her chin rises in some precise, almost rigid gesture, and she studies the spinach with a casual, offhand glance. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
(santiago)
It must be unnerving, that even when she looks away he watches her, that even while she fiddles with the controls on the stove he continues to watch her, that even when she looks back he is still watching her.
A beat. Black eyes.
"I didn't come fishing for courtesies, kinwoman." There could be a cold menace in the words. Then the moment passes, or seems to pass: he smiles and shakes his head a little. A touch of rue. "I just thought to tell you, in case you have more information but find me gone. And if you do, keep it with you, or give it to Billy the Wendigo if you think it best."
(eva)
The watching does not unnerve her; she is used to being watched. She is used to being watched and weighed and judged: in the courtroom, in the prisons and jails, in the ghettos where her clients invariably live. Everyone else can afford their own attorney, prefer someone they hire to someone the state pays. Human eyes are commonplace. The eyes of a Garou, less so.
Subtle, physical signs of nervousness might be apparent, but only to the most keen of senses: the heightened pace of her pulse, the rise in respiration rate, the faint suggestion of color in her cheeks, already mildly flushed from the wine. She cannot control these responses, nor the way they intensify when he speaks again, icy and distant. Biological reactions, they do not bend to her will, though to be sure, the rest of her being does.
"Of course not," she says crisply, her chin rising a fraction of a inch. She does not glance back at him now. To do so would be to dare his gaze. To dare his gaze would be to dare his anger. She had forgotten, perhaps, how much she dared. No longer. "The information on Neuro-Dynamic Laboratories is in a manilla folder on the credenza. It's a small corporation, which supplies chemicals to Endron for use in its refineries. They also have a division involved in genetic research, primarily centered around cancer cures. The same division has been involved in research on wolves, to determine how wolves determine territory choices and how they recognize their territory. The stated purpose is to find some way to make wild wolves avoid human settlements, ranches and the like, thus easing the concerns of ranchers regarding the reintroduction of wolves to their traditional habitats."
She turns back then, meeting his eyes briefly before allowing her own to flicker down and focus on some indefineable point on his face: nose, mouth, chin. The suggestion of forthrightness that comes from human eye contact, this, without the challenge to Garou dominance, so nicely packaged together. "If I learn anything more of importance, I will take it to Billy the Wendigo." She pauses a moment, deferential. "Is there anything else you require?"
(santiago)
A turn. He lifts the file from the credenza and leafs through it - quickly but carefully handling each page, skimming the contents for later perusal.
"Genetic research and wolves?" The bridge between them is fragile at best; it had whittled down to the last strand again: business and war. He closes the file gently and raises his head, one eyebrow. "They don't hide their tracks very well, do they?" That might be a smile shadowing his mouth. He will pass the information on before he leaves. "Let me know if you can dig up a link between Neuro-Dynamic Labs and Endron Oil. Petroleum and genetics don't seem terribly related, so it's odd that they're sharing the same remote, guarded encampment."
And, leaving now, as is apparent from some small but significant change in carriage, in watchfulness, in the very fiber of his presence, he regards her with a shake of his head. "No, that's all." A grave and measured pause. "Though if you have a copy of this," holding up the file, "I think my neighbors in the Pine Barrens would thank you for it."
(eva)
"No, they don't hide their tracks very well, though that was not easy to find. Minor news, no headlines, some objections, little more." Stepping away from the oven, she crosses her arms over her torso and leans back against the counter. The far counter. "I misspoke. NDA has several divisions. One is a chemical manufacturing/engineering division, which supplies chemicals to Endron, which are used in processing petroleum. Another, and completely unrelated to the first, is the genetic research division. There only business connection between the companies is the supplier/customer relationship. There is no relationship between the division engaged in genetic research and Endron."
Her eyes flick over the folder, and after a moment she offers him a clipped nod. "I'll send a copy to Dr. Vong. And since that's all, I'll wish you safe journey."
The lights in the kitchen are stark compared to the rest of the flat. Brighter and flatter and whiter, for all that the cheery yellow paint on the walls wants to soften them. The flush of good will from the wine has been chased from her veins. Her hands tighten on her biceps, minutely - This is my home - and then relax by forcible degree. She glances up once more and offers Santiago the smile she must offer a thousand times a day, humorless but patient and even polite, though just a bit strained, or harried, depending upon one's perspective. Like most currency spent so recklessly, it is worthless, a form dredged up from somewhere. Necessary, but thoughtless and second-hand. "Goodbye, Eyes-Like-Flint."
