CoR The First's Interrupted Reverie

Dashmiel

Mr. Nobody
Administrator
Nexus GM
Pronouns
He/Him
Location
Man's Coffee Shop, Phantom Quarter.
The sound of a newspaper rustling hit Ragenard's hearing with the same frequency of a pendulum’s swing. He began counting his breaths; five in, five out. He didn’t bother with any visualization; that wasn’t how he worked. The faint buzzing and thrumming of his blood vessels as they rendered the strange gray-green-red field of his Eigengrau was all the visual his closed eyes needed.

Five more in, and five more out. Evenly measured. Not too deep or shallow.

The newspaper rustled again, exactly when Ragenard expected it. In many ways, the sanity of that frequency was the only solace he had left that the world still made sense. The news changed, but Man always read every page at exactly the same pace.

It wasn’t the weirdest thing he’d seen within the spotlessly clean but lightly scuffed interior of the locale. This was the kind of place where those who knew about it, simply enjoyed the simple and inexpensive fare without many questions. A place to go and be lost with one’s thoughts.

Tucked between a pawn shop and the place where Ragenard bought his surplus military boots, the shop was located just past the border of Lupaix and into the Phantom Quarter, where the last remaining businesses abutted the oncoming desperation that baked off the PQ.

The small coffee shop didn’t have a name or even a sign. The only way you could tell if ‘Man’—the only name the nondescript and average height proprietor gave of himself in highly accented Lutetian and nothing but shrugs as elaboration could be had further—was in was if the small green crystal figurine in the shape of a ‘C’ that he hung by a string on the door above its small window was up. Ragenard had only ever seen it around Man’s neck in those rare occasions when he arrived before—but never by more than a few minutes—the proprietor himself.

The mystery used to interest him some sixty years ago. Nowadays he was simply quietly glad that Man never even asked him how his day was and doubly so that it never felt rude for some reason.

So it was that he sat at the bar when it happened. Sipping at a cup of inexpensive but easily ‘middle shelf’ coffee—with a splash of very expensive Iverian whiskey delivered with a raised eyebrow as the only query as to the size of the splash—when the scent of guilt that he swore couldn’t be suddenly coming from himself assaulted his nostrils alongside with the ring from the small bell above the door. With it came Rhetta’s scent as well, for his memory was just fine.

Man was no longer anywhere to be seen, leaving Ragenard alone with the only sign that he was still within the world of normalcy; the small thud the little green crystal figurine did as it bounced lightly off the door where it still hung.
 
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Morning had come. Night had come harder - Rhetta had slept for a bit, fitfully, on and off, until she'd given up well before dawn and gone out to the place where she should have been sleeping.

It looked like the ashes of hell. She didn't know what exactly she'd expected, but she'd sat there for a while, on the street in front of what had once been the Den, flicking a lighter she'd swiped from Xandre and burning a lock of hair, hating the smell of it but feeling like maybe the unpleasantness was part of the whole experience. She should have been here. She'd have been killed, of course - she had no illusions about that. She'd have stood and fought and died, but maybe some of the others would have gotten out. She'd have done her duty, anyway. Shown the kids what that meant.

After a while, the sun decided to join her. She watched it come up, just sitting there and watching the light change over the horizon, starting to creep over all the little bits of things that hadn't gotten swept up, the cracks in the asphalt, the empty shell casings in the corners. She'd missed that, she thought. Not the quiet - fuck the quiet, there should have been people here - but the light. The change. Being outside.

She'd let the sun follow her, not even really minding when it caught up with her as she parked her bike outside the coffee place. Lark had done a damn good job keeping it up. She'd have to thank him later. This wasn't about him, though, or about anyone else that was where they were supposed to be, doing their damn jobs.

Nah, this was about someone who should have been somewhere else. She'd had a feeling she might find him here. Rhetta still thought it should have been on him to track her down and not the other way around, but that hadn't happened, so here she was.

She slipped in through the door, almost silent, though she didn't pretend she was going to be able to sneak up on him, or want to. He'd know her scent as soon as she walked in, just like she recognized his immediately. Instead, she just walked over casually and took the barstool next to his, leaning back and propping her elbows on the bar itself, keeping the rest of the coffee shop in her field of vision while he covered the area in front of the bar with his. It wasn't necessary. It was just habit.

After a moment to satisfy her desire to scout the room, she shifted her eyes to the man next to her and her hand to the cup in front of him, picking it up without bothering with a may-I and taking a sip, her gaze unblinking, waiting to see if he wanted to challenge the subject.

"Lot of whiskey in there for this early in the morning, Ragenard. I'd almost think you were trying to dull your senses so I'd have half a chance at kicking your ass."
 
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“You want him break, break outside!” shouted a heavily accented voice from the backroom located behind the kitchen. The voice was old, sweet, and clearly exceedingly amused. The latter was obvious as a laugh resounded through the coffee shop, filled with the gravel of a lifelong smoker.

It was the exact momentary pause Ragenard needed to gather his thoughts, curiously enough.

“I dunno, Rhetta, you’ve had half a chance for a long time,” Ragenard started with a careful tone. It wasn’t mirthful nor was it contrite. Ragenard knew he should go for the latter, but he couldn’t afford to debase himself before a pack member; they couldn’t stand any more challenges.

He waited for the phantom laughter to come, but all he could hear still bouncing around his brain was the echo of Man’s. He took a deep breath and reached across the bar for the bottle of Iverian Thistlefire—1815 special reserve, a true rarity within Lutetia—whose luster and solid gold gimmick seal top above the cork was out of place in the good-natured dingy shop. As out of place as a pair of criminally inclined lycanthropes clearing the air between them.

Ragenard undid the cap and gently placed it on the bar before uncorking the bottle. The scent of fiery top shelf suffused the room immediately. He poured a capful into the inverted golden receptacle, raised it, and then poured right it on the linoleum lined floor.

Tears silently began to slide down his face, but his voice remained steady. “I reckon you might be up to having three-quarters of a chance now—” before Rhetta could react, he muttered an addition uncharacteristically: “I’m sorry. I couldn’t save them.”
 
The Man's voice came from the back, and Rhetta raised the stolen coffee cup in acknowledgement of his words, not really taking them too seriously. All of them here knew that this place was one of theirs, or at least close enough to it to count. Packs weren't going to last long if they started causing trouble for the little businesses and things that supported them. This particular coffee place had probably been around longer than Rhetta had, or at the least it'd been around longer than she had known about it. Maybe it'd been here longer than Ragenard.

It something happened to it, it wasn't going to start with her. She might, as he said, break outside, but that was part of the reason she'd picked to confront him here. It gave them a reason to start with talking, to say some of the words that needed to be said, before she decided to take that half-chance.

Half chance, three-quarters - he was overestimating, or just feeling whimsical. Maybe if he held back, sure, but if he really went for it - no, she didn't think so. "Hm. Less now, I'm out of practice." Jail wasn't exactly good for that sort of thing. She'd stayed in shape, carefully, deliberately - but it wasn't the same as fighting, or even sparring. She'd avoided all of that, as much as she'd hated to do so, because the Bloodstones had needed her to get out in five years and not ten, and the system would have just loved to add a few more months on to her sentence every time she screwed up.

The quiet admission that followed... she didn't know if she'd expected it or not. It shouldn't have been her, but there just fucking wasn't anyone else, was there? Rhetta set the coffee cup back down in front of him, because there really was an egregious amount of whiskey in there. She wouldn't say it wasn't tempting, but it'd been five years since she'd had a drink and her tolerance was probably gone to hell along with everything else. One drink wouldn't do it, but why risk it? The Pack came first, and there were precious few other people who would be ready to go if something came up.

She was silent, while he poured a shot out. She might be ready to disrespect Ragenard, sure, but not their dead. That Desmond's voice echoed in her head, reciting the names: Renard, Marc, Carlisle, Christian, Ulrich, Camille, Nieve, Graham, Thomas, Ginny, Salem, Noel, Gia, and Jean-Pierre...

Jacques.

He hadn't listed that one in the litany, but she added it in her own mind. He'd been one of them, once.

"I couldn't either."

The admission was quiet, as quietly as he'd spoken, tinted with the shades of her own guilt. She should have been here. The system be damned, she should have been here. Maybe she could have done something. Saved someone.

Maybe she could have been there for Jacques, all those years. She didn't even know what had changed, with him. Would he have done it, if...

It was easy to run into those thoughts, all of those what ifs, scenarios where things could have gone better, could have gone differently. Where their people were still here, alive, where they ought to be. And there were just as many scenarios where every single one of them was dead, Baron and Ragenard included.

She ignored the tears, just like he'd ignored hers at times. Things like that, you pretended you didn't notice. Don't notice, don't speak of it. It never happened.

It didn't mean she wasn't enough of a callous bitch to take advantage of the moment of weakness, though. It'd be, like everything else here, just between them.

"What happened, Ragenard?" The softness in her voice was no longer crushed velvet, but silk, wiping the blood off of the blade. "With the pack. With the Scions. With Baron. Your sacrificial pup gave us the sanitized version. Tell me how it went down. Tell me why you didn't protect him, Rage. Because either you are a fuckwit, or there's more going on here that I need to know about."
 
Ragenard’s heart lurched painfully upon hearing the shift in Rhetta’s voice. He wouldn’t ever point it out; however, he had no trouble scouring himself of the worst of his guilt.

“I do believe,” Ragenard added before draining the rest of his coffee-tinged whiskey, “that I am a bit of a fuckwit.”

He affected a slur steeper and more uncontrolled than he truly felt. Rhetta hated it when others allowed substances to be their mask. Part of him wished he had a joint on hand so he could blow the weed smoke in her face and really piss her off.

“There we were a year after you got put away. We’d won, Rhetta. The peace was holding.” He looked into the bottom of the mug, where an image was printed under the porcelain. It depicted an ancient Iverian knot tale—a literal excerpt of an ancient fable—and the image of a wolf biting itself. Regulars at Man’s coffee shop were gifted personal mugs selected for them by the proprietor himself, gifted at his discretion as to when he would consider it time for the gifting.

Ragenard recalled the anger he felt when he first got his, and how quickly it was frozen solid when he looked up with his dark intentions into the shop owner’s steely unafraid yet kind gaze. It took him many months afterward to even attempt it, but he eventually looked into a discrete therapist in Iveria thanks to that gaze and had gotten some meaningful information at a time when all he wanted was to find out how many multiples of thirteen a rope sized for him required.

“It was so fucking boring, Rhetta…and James...” he took a deep breath. “He didn’t need me. None of them did. So I started fucking off more and more into my own escapades and problems. Weeks at a time, just adrift…”

Ragenard’s voice hitched, and an undercurrent of fury peeked through before he buried it back down with the fake drunk act. “Rowan paid attention to my absences and acted accordingly when I was off with my head up my ass.”

He said the last with a tilting of his chin upwards, looking directly into Rhetta’s eyes. Daring her.
 
It was a story she could work with. Oh, Rhetta was absolutely sure that there was more to it than all of that, but sometimes it was just as important to know what people wanted to tell you as to know what the truth really was. Sometimes it was more important. That was one of the few things she'd learned from her mom - she'd always been a daddy's girl, but there'd been a few little things she'd picked up, here and there. So, that was the story he wanted to tell - or maybe the story he didn't want to tell, but felt obligated to tell her, because he needed someone to hear it and for whatever stupid ass reason, he'd picked her.

She could smell the whiskey, measured, noting the pressing little slur in his voice and the little misattentions.

"Aww, Rage," Her voice was saccharine, as if to a puppy. "Are you tryin' to figure out if I'm a fuckwit?" Her eyes didn't leave his, quite aware of the intensity, but when had she ever shied away? She leaned in, just a little closer, because she could. "I haven't forgotten how much it actually takes to put you under, and it'd be more than's missing from that bottle." She could smell the difference, how drunk someone was, especially with people she knew well. So, he wanted her pissed off or something, probably because he actually was a fuckwit.

Because he was First now and he had to be responsible and shit and he was still probably bored, except now he couldn't fuck off to wherever and instead he was fucking off to a coffee shop.

And because she was a bit of a fuckwit, too, and it had been too fucking long - so kept her eyes on his with a grin, then raised a hand and flicked him with her finger, right between the eyes, fairly certain he was just going to let her, because he wanted it as much as she did.

"Come on then, you arrogant shitpurse. Let's take it outside."
 
Ragenard’s eyes crossed slightly as they tracked her hand, before uncrossing and flashing amber at the irreverent flick. The fuck am I mad about, I asked for it didn’t I? he roared internally at the laughter.

He dropped the pretense of drunkenness and flashed to a standing position with a smirk. “Hey Man, still okay with you to use the back lot as a playground?” Ragenard called out as he removed his cut and draped it on the back of his chair. His tone was animated by the challenge accepted but remained polite.

“Yes, yes, kiddie games out back,” came the amicable voice mimicking faux long suffering as the proprietor came around the back and shooed them towards the door.

“I’d say ladies first but we both know I’m the more lady-like amongst us,” quipped Ragenard, as if the pot needed any more stirring. Or maybe it wasn’t stirring, but a feeble tugging at a long dormant connection. He wasn’t sure himself, and for the moment he didn’t care. He needed to move. The caffeine had finally hit his bloodstream, and he welcomed the twin rumble it added within his perpetually agitated chest.

He led them out the small front door and around the back to a consolidated backlot shared amongst the coffee shop, pawn shop, and military surplus stores, his steel-toed combat boots clacking on the surfacing of the road. Ragenard then made a point of stretching while he quirked an eyebrow at Rhetta.

Rather than asphalt like so much of the more modern quarters, the area behind the shop still featured the original cobblestone that was once so common in Lutetia and which still permeated the Phantom Quarter as the du jour road finishing of yesteryear.

Rolling his shoulders and then progressively working his way downwards, he let the unspoken question dangle in the air for a moment; he was waiving his right as the challenged to choose the form they would fight in. The muscles on his arms bulged absurdly beneath the pale gray skintight workout shirt he wore while he continued the pretense of needing to work them, waiting to see if Rhetta was actually going to make him wait half a fucking hour to throw down.

Tufts of grass and weeds swayed gently in the breeze where they grew amidst the time-loosened cobbles, moving to and fro as if cheering them on.
 
The amber eyes, the quickfire anger… some things changed, but some things remained the same. Rhetta wasn’t surprised when he hopped up off of the stool, suddenly towering over her in a way that was familiar enough that it bothered her not at all. The difference had only gotten smaller over the years, after all.

He’d gone for the door with a speed bordering on desperation once he’d gotten the go-ahead, and she followed at a more leisurely pace, waving him idly through the door. “Yeah, yeah. You are a delicate flower, Ragenard Guiscard.”

Maybe she should have gone out before him anyway, just to check the area, since he was the fucking First and all now, but Rhetta thought if she pointed that out, he probably would kill her, so she left him to it and came along behind him instead, scoping out the area around them with one hand in the pocket of her cut, wrapped around a switchblade. He'd know she had it, of course, because she never went anywhere without one if she could help it, but it wasn't for him. It was a just in case sort of thing.

The cobbled yard was empty save for the two of them and the little bits of scraggly grass. Rage had started stretching while she'd checked the area, and she half watched him as she slipped out of her own cut, down to the standard cheap sports bra and cheap workout shorts; inexpensive and easily replaceable, clothes that indicated she'd had a fairly good idea where this was going heading into it, and was prepared for whatever she was wearing to end up full of holes.

"We doing unarmed?" Healing factors or not, it was still relatively easy to kill someone with a weapon, and she didn't think either one of them wanted it to end up that way. The Pack needed people, after all.

Well, they'd probably be fine. He was still stretching, doing that thing he did when he was trying to pretend he was being patient. Rhetta wasn't fooled. She'd seen him be patient, and it was a lot more lethal than this. He didn't seem to be carrying any current injuries that she could tell from the stretches - she'd been watching, just in case he was already favoring something, though whether she'd respect that or use it against him was-

No, it wasn't anyone's guess, she'd absolutely go straight for the weak point, and both of them knew it.

It was tempting to make him wait on her to shift, just because he'd fucking do it, and watching him try to pretend he could be patient would be really fucking funny - but she'd come here with intent of-

Well, she didn't actually know what she'd come here with the intent of, just that there was going to be an ass-kicking involved either way. The area was clear enough, and she'd already stretched beforehand, because she'd known where this was going - and since he was just faking it anyway:

Her motion shifted, and suddenly she was moving right up next to him, moving past and seeing if she could get an elbow into his kidney from behind before he had a chance to put her on her ass.

She'd get up again, though, even if he did, and she'd come back - he knew it. Rhetta wasn't the fastest of the Pack, she just sometimes seemed quicker than she really was. It wasn't that any one particular motion was exceptionally fast for a wolf, it was just that she didn't fucking stop. All the little pauses, the places where people usually stepped back, got their breath, assessed the situation and tried to figure out what to do next?

Fuck 'em. She was already moving.
 
Ragenard saw Rhetta watching him. He watched her back, then smiled. It had been five years, and he worried he might have to find out how to gently suggest to Draaven or Xandre to run Rhetta through the paces to make sure she was sharp.

He quickly saw that he needn’t have worried about it over much, however. She’d smoothly scanned the sight lines as she followed along—she still telegraphed that somewhat by the way she held her elbow out of the way and ready to slash rather than risk the moment’s delay fully relaxing it would bring—and as she doffed her outer layers, it was evident that she’d retained her fighting trim inside, despite the herculean effort not picking up new charges must have been.

He made a point to figure out how to praise her on that later; it was the First-y thing to do, and he damn well knew he wouldn’t have been able to do as good, no matter how much the pack needed him. Not even a battery charge? It almost made him question if this really was Rhetta or if they’d gotten a changeling in return.

He nodded in the affirmative to her question and continued to force himself to stretch. Memories of the explosions of power he’d been trying to control lately threatened to surface but he mostly cast them aside—Skye’s quickly hidden fear upon his losing control in their weird bout still bothered him however, and at the thought of seeing the same from Rhetta a slight feeling of vertigo threatened to overcome him, but he disguised it by stretching his neck in particular.

He continued to study her, despite the caffeine—was it the caffeine?—turning sour in his chest, as if a fire was being starved of oxygen.

The way her gaze lingered on his joints as he stretched, however, left him reassured. She’d worked out her angers away but hadn’t lost the practice of keeping an eye on how to take down a man the easiest—where it would hurt. He felt a swelling of pride mingled with self-hatred; it was pointless to wonder if he’d taken the same choices if he still had her, Xandre, and Draaven around the past year.

What was done was done. Speaking of, here she came. He couldn’t accuse her of telegraphing: it truly was a beauty of economical motion. She simply burst into it on a whim, disguising the sudden explosion with a casual moment before.

She just didn’t know that what constituted a moment for Ragenard had shifted a bit more in the interim period. He could tell by the brightness of the world and the low stinging pain it brought him that his eyes had already developed those sickly electric blue lines within.

If he had any doubts, the slow falling of the disturbed beetle as it tumbled free from the dandelion flower her passing disturbed was all the proof he needed. He studied her face carefully, taking the time to revisit and add to his understanding of who Rhetta was.

The pique in her gaze and the way her brow scrunched as she sinuously angled to move past him was something he hadn’t had a chance to study carefully before. He had what subjectively felt like closer to 10 seconds to study it before it became clear that she was coming for his left kidney with her elbow. It would have been trivial for him to just reach out and grasp her arm…

Except he couldn’t move anything other than his eyes at the moment. The sound of distant laughter roared through him as Rhetta’s elbow painfully bruised his kidney, and the force of her blow staggered him back into normal time.

“Good fucking damn it, that hurt,” he groused before separating from her with a quick jump. He bounced on the balls of his feet, trying to get his legs to normalize but to no avail. It looked like he was in for some pain as whatever transformation his wolf was undergoing turned upon him, leaving his prowess well diminished from his norm. “Wolf Sick, no comment, shut the fuck up,” he growled at the nascent questioning look before it could manifest.

People’s wolves acted up sometimes. It happened. Just never to him, as far as anyone knew. He didn’t want to give her time to take pity or wonder, however, and experience wasn’t impacted by his lack of control over the finer points of his extraordinary power. So he burst back her way immediately and faked a right hook to bait her—would she think he’d forgotten she was a southpaw?—before pirouetting in place to come in at her left with a wide haymaker with his left.
 
Blue?

Just a hint of it, in the corner of her vision, and Rhetta didn't really have time to focus on it - but she was sure that hadn't been there before, the blue in his eyes. She was also sure that strike shouldn't have landed, and his excuse didn't actually help the situation at all, from her perspective.

Focus on the moment. His fist came in - she didn't try to do anything stupid like catch it, because he was big enough to pack enough power into it that she'd end up breaking something in her hand. She knew that; she'd done it before. She caught just enough of it to turn it to on side, moving the punch past her rather than into her. His other hand came in, just like she'd known it would. Of course he remembered she was left-handed, hadn't she spent years watching him switch back and forth, learning how it was done?

Her dad had trained her to fight left when she was tiny. She remembered holding out her right arm for him to break so she wouldn't be tempted into using it, until she was confident enough to stop using getting hurt like a crutch. She'd learned the habit from her dad, but she'd learned the finesse from Rage, once she'd gotten a little older. She usually started right for the same reasons he did, because then coming in with the left was a surprise.

It just didn't work on her, that was all. She twisted her body just enough, taking it on the ribs, feeling a couple of them crack. Not broken loose yet, but a good fracture in there. Good start. She'd needed that, she thought - the pain made it real. Maybe they'd both needed that, too.

She let the motion shift her, just a little bit, planting one foot on the ground and bringing her knee up in the sort of motion that made the uninitiated wince and cover their crotches - but he wasn't uninitiated, and anyone at his level was either able to fucking take it or just wore something protective, and Rhetta was determined not to be the fuckwit here - so the motion shifted before it connected, becoming a kick instead, downward and out towards the inside of the knee, hard enough to crunch the bone or dislocate the joint if he didn't see it coming.

Of course, they'd known each other long enough that they at least knew most of each other's moves, so that changed the dynamic a little bit.

"So, when I fucking said Is there anything else going on that I need to know about, that shit? That's the shit you mention right there." Wolf-sick. Sure.

What the fuck was up with his eyes?
 
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He had her. He weighed nearly four hundred pounds of unnatural musculature in perpetual need of more body fat. She wouldn’t go for his balls. For one, she knew to expect him to end up angrier than hurt in such a maneuver; the biology behind his wolf didn’t care what he was putting it through, just that he survived to procreate.

Ragenard often wondered what the affliction would regenerate faster, all of the necessary parts of his baby maker or his brain.

All it would take was a precisely timed crossing of his legs, and he would drag her skinny ass like a crocodile in a death roll with his powerful thighs and—

The world lurched to slow motion upon her ill-timed question. Once again, Ragenard found himself with a perception several notches faster than the rest of him. This time stuck in slow motion, watching Rhetta pretend to come at his ‘nads and instead...

Ah goddammit you recalcitrant bitch, not the fucking knee, Ragenard thought as Rhetta’s leg began to angle away from her initial feint and towards the inside of his knee. At least the intimate view of her breasts this close was kind of nice. Maybe he’d pleasantly bounce off them once he was on the floor in a mome—

Pain.

An explosion of it wracked Ragenard as the delicate tissues hiding behind and beneath his patella crunched into pieces. Ragenard fell, off-balanced by Rhetta’s momentum and the force of the strike, unable to recover thanks to the fact that apparently he could get sleep paralysis or some shit while awake.

“Fuck!” Ragenard roared as he lurched up to one foot. “Uncle, you goddamn psycho, who the fuck goes to maim their boss on their first day back on the job!?” He was stalling.

While the words left his lips, he gave the equivalent of a titanic mental heave towards the part of himself he’d come to associate with control over his monstrous form. The ever-present laughter ringing through the depths of his imagination seemed to grumble at that, and a thrumming like an engine starting seemed to come alive once more in his chest.

A visible ripple—the same cue that typically signaled a ‘normal’ active shift in a good portion of Issunar lycanthropes—roiled through his skin from head to toe, and the tissues in his knee mended audibly as it passed through them. As they should have nearly immediately upon her assault, which would have been the expected reaction and why she went for such a brutal attack so casually.

That was the danger in a reputation, he thought ruefully. He dismissed the idea that an answer to his unspoken comment was awaiting just beneath his awareness with a quiet desperation that he drowned by speaking instead.

“‘Oh Rhetta dearest, I do believe I’m having a second puberty wolf revamp’? How the fuck do I broach that with anyone, without it being used against the pack?” Ragenard groused at Rhetta’s incredulous look. He supposed it sounded a bit petulant, but still.

He could feel it now, so perhaps she deserved to see a bit of the flip side of the coin that terrified him so much. Ragenard stared at Rhetta with a furrowed brow for a moment, and one of his eyes bulged slightly as the blue lines striating through the amber pulsed.

Ragenard disappeared from Rhetta’s gaze. When next she perceived him, the sound of the cracking cobblestones behind her, the wind of his passing, and the cold bite of her own knife reached her concurrently with his arm being wrapped around her neck from where he now stood directly behind.

“It’s so, so, so much more than I’m used to controlling,” he whispered with the barest ghost of the terror he felt at what he was becoming naked in the air between them.
 
Again, the connection that shouldn't have happened, or at least shouldn't have done that much damage. Rhetta was used to him getting out of the way. He had a few things to say about that, and she just gave him an impertinent grin and held up two fingers.

"Second day. Besides, when I left, you weren't my boss. So we're still working that part out." Also, she was pretty sure he'd been staring at her tits for a moment there, which wasn't exactly objectionable, it just wasn't like him to get distracted during a fight.

He rippled, pushing regeneration to do something about the knee she'd just taken out. She probably should have capitalized there and kicked the other one out as soon as he'd tried to heal up, but she was more interested in the information than the pursuit, and sometimes when you left people alone with their pain and their thoughts, they'd try to get away from one or the other - and Rage had never shied away from pain.

The dearest got him a one-finger gesture, probably not entirely unexpected, but it was as good a follow-up to the sarcastic tone as any. The question itself, though, that was a tough one, and she was debating how exactly she wanted to tell him he was a fuckwit when he suddenly wasn't there.

She barely even had a chance to tense, and then he was there again, behind her, an arm wrapped around her throat and the point of a blade touching her skin, not quite enough to break it. His whisper was soft, almost intimate - no, fuck that. It was intimate, the admission far more so than any wayward bit of screwing ever could be.

"Ragenard." Gently, softly, but firmly. She didn't fight back yet, because they'd get to that soon, and right now, he was listening. "You tell the people you trust, and you let them keep it from getting used against us. Just because you're First doesn't mean you're not a Bloodstone. We look out for each other. Fuckwit."

A smile, felt more than seen - and then, only then, a motion - the movement of her arm as her elbow drove down, the sickening crunch of bone as she'd driven it into the ribs she'd goaded him into punching earlier, taking the fracture clean through to leave it floating. The scent of blood as she popped one out through the skin and grabbed it, pulling it free and stabbing it back behind her, hoping to slip it between two of the ribs she could feel pressed up against her. Might get his spleen - had to be fast, though, before he decided to choke her out or use the knife.

Or maybe he would, and then she'd be stuck sitting there pinching the artery for half a fucking hour until she could shift it out. It wouldn't be the first time.

That was why she didn't fear it.
 
That is so fucking disgusting ugh…Still, Draaven ain’t pulling that shit off, Ragenard thought to himself with mild appreciation as he appraised the picture his senses were drawing for him. It was a slow one, on account of their having once again decided he wasn’t the one in actual control of what things like pacing and fucking experiencing time meant anymore. Every time he thought he was finally getting a handle on his condition, something came along and destroyed that understanding to pieces. Much like Rhetta’s rib-shank, which his nose told him was coming his way, and proprioception seemed to place—soon, would place soon, he reminded himself—somewhere within his spleen.

How was he tracking her fucking rib? Ragenard screamed in thought inside his brain.

It turned out that the scent of just dying bone marrow was quite distinctive; an amalgamation of iron, water, and the haywire chemicals produced by cells undergoing apoptosis. The dying throes of blood were familiar to th—

The fact that Ragenard shouldn’t know what a word like apoptosis meant was suddenly not important anymore. The fact that another one amongst the coterie—groupsmall, intimately aligned group of people that Ragenard probably would be healthier if he could allow himself to simply think of as “friends” was about to stab him with a piece of her own bone was suddenly not important anymore.

It wasn’t because he finally decided to come to grips with the obvious, no. That wasn’t Ragenard’s wont. He wasn’t going to allow himself to be reasoned into a position without trying the most violent way possible. This would be no exception, but in fact, was quite within his rule of resolving his problems in the most violent way possible. No, what suddenly filled Ragenard’s mind was the practical realization of what had activated this “ability” of his.

He hadn’t forgotten that Rhetta’s slow-ass shift came awash in an impressive regenerative wave that rivaled his own, no. But he no longer internalized this information. He’d been startled into surprise when the gestalt of his senses registered the event of Rhetta’s bone cracking free. Thus it stood to reason that if he—

The world became suffused with pain as every alarm in Ragenard’s body rang out the moment he allowed himself to relax and accept Rhetta’s well-being. So that answered the question of the accidental ‘bullet-time’ activations. Though it sure would have been nice for things like pain to be removed from his evolving equation, Ragenard felt, he also knew it wouldn’t be as funny. He did not entertain the terror inherent in the notion however, on account of having a chunk of foreign rib inside his spleen, at the moment.

“God fucking damn it you psychopath,” Ragenard wheeze-roared whilst shoving Rhetta off himself forcefully, with perhaps more gas on the preternatural pedal than he normally would have applied.

He immediately reached through the smaller hole through his mid-section's upper left with Rhetta’s knife and rummaged within the wound with a grimace until he managed to pull the offending makeshift weapon out. “Do you have any idea how unsanitary that is?” Ragenard groused through a thin veneer of agitation as he lied to himself and lowered his shaking arms.

If it weren't for the nature of his predicament, Ragenard would have been fully capable of believing the disjointedness of his selective time-pace was to blame for his lapse on the order of events. If the sanctity of his own mind still remained, he could have been able to tell himself that his arms shook from the pain and adrenaline (the actual old friends of his) instead of the real reason why.

”Silver, thorn and elderberry/You must never cross a fairy/Bone, yarrow, and scorn/No tomorrow for a black dog”, Ragenard whispered in what he thought was Iverian under his breath. The soft words rang out to a tune and tempo he would never have been able to hear outside of childhood field trips to museums. “Alright, that’s about enough of your shit,” Ragenard barked at Rhetta’s form with a dismissive motion meant to call the spar to a halt, while staunchly keeping his mind away from the one time he had tried to bring home a permission slip for a school field trip.

Ragenard opted to forget that Matthis had torn it to pieces, and this did not elicit any laughter within his mind. Despite all the irony that would have been implicitly present, otherwise. Some pains were universal.
 
He'd shoved her, hard - hard enough that Rhetta instinctively moved into the push, tucking into a roll and twisting, coming up facing him again, just in case. She'd been surprised -

No.

He'd been surprised how hard he'd pushed her. Now he was covering it up by complaining and poking around in his side with her knife, because sometimes if you kept your hands moving people didn't notice they were shaking.

Yeah, she knew that one. And she noticed - and she knew enough to pretend she didn't. Sometimes, you pretended you didn't - even if it was just for a bit. He called her off, and she gave him a nod of acquiescence. "All right. Truce, then."

She was still more out of practice than she wanted to be. Not with the pain; that was a familiar companion after five years in prison. But the movement - she could have done better. Should have done better. The only reason she'd landed some of those was because he hadn't been moving. It'd been brief, little lapses of time, but she'd noticed that, too.

"Here, toss it back. I'm gonna stick it back in." 'Unsanitary' be damned. Wouldn't be the first time she'd had his blood on her, or hers on him. While she could regenerate the missing bone just fine, she generally pretended it was easier if she had all the bits in approximately the right place. Rage knew, and James, and... most of the inner circle. Beyond that, though, she'd rather people underestimated her, and keeping at least a few things private was second nature at this point.

She'd moved back enough that she could lean against the wall, sliding down on it to the detriment of a few struggling weeds which now had to contend with her bleeding on them. Rage was bleeding on the weeds, too, she couldn't help but notice. It was funny, in an absurd way. Something had to be, she supposed, because the rest of this was absurd, but not really all that funny - unless it had looped around, and come back to the other side, where it was fucking hilarious, but for all the wrong reasons.

Rhetta took a breath, not too deep, but definitely deep enough to remind her that she had a number of cracked ribs still in there, and leaned her head back against the wall to watch Rage, or watch the space behind him just in case anything else snuck up on them. Her eyes were shining, bronze rather than brown, denoting her triggering her own shift. It'd be a while. It always was.

"So. Who knows, besides me?" That'd be a good thing to start with, wouldn't it? "And - what, exactly, do I know, Rage?"
 
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"Desmond's cousin Skye, saw me being weird a few weeks ago," Ragenard answered as he tossed the grisly shiv back at Rhetta with a mild look of disgust. "Other than that, I've kept it pretty well under control." His face was suddenly inscrutable. A death-mask. "As for what do you know? Fuck if I know, I'll let you know if I figure it out. Until then, I'm wolfsick." Ragenard barked with finality. "No big deal. Might as well be sniffles, understand"?
 
"You really do have werewolf puberty, you're as pissy as a teenager." She was mostly teasing. She was also, Rhetta thought, mostly correct. She'd shoved the bits back where they went, roughly, and held her hands up, open and empty even if they were covered a bit in blood - some of which was his.

"I'm not your enemy, Rage." That was softer, and more serious. "Shouldn't have to tell you that, either. If you want it kept quiet, I'll keep it quiet." Bloodstones knew how to keep their mouths shut, when they were asked to. If he wanted her silence, it was his. She was still watching him, though - the carefully blank expression, the end of discussion tone. She hadn't thought she'd miss the sparks in his eyes, but they'd suited him better than this did. This was too closed off, too impersonal. She'd gotten him to open up for a minute there, but she didn't think it'd been enough - or maybe it'd been too much, and it'd scared him.

Rhetta exhaled slowly, wiping her hands on her shorts and tucking one of them over the spot where she'd popped the rib out - might as well keep some pressure on it, keep some of the liquid in there. It was less because she had to, more because it gave her something to do while she tried to figure out what to do about all of this.

"First doesn't mean alone. You know that, right?"
 
The words rang out within Ragenard’s ears. Their echo was as oversized and anomalously loud as the feeling of laughter that came unbidden with it. First doesn't mean alone. You know that, right? Rhetta’s words left him feeling bell-like, hollow but with a metal lump at his throat aching to ring. The fuck does the bitch know? It’s lonely, being king, Ragenard found himself thinking.

The thought was uncharacteristic and unkind, and it troubled him that he couldn’t stop it before “voicing” it. And that he agreed, to a degree. He didn’t consider himself a king however, and the sudden dissonance in the thought threatened to make the sudden vertigo return. Ragenard quickly stopped puzzling over it and replied. “It has to. At least for a while. The pack has hurt enough, let the burdens fall on my shoulders for a while,” he muttered lowly before straightening up. Ragenard let out his own heavy exhale and made a big show of re-arranging his facial features. He was First Amongst Wolves, and he was in control, the look dared.

Whether to himself or the world, Ragenard didn’t much care; he’d stubbornly scowl reality down until it bent his way. He always had.

“Speaking of the wonders of being First, now that I’ll have you captive for half an hour… let’s go over how you’re now the Pack boxing coach, close-quarters trainer, and I guess improvised weapon’s expert,” he said, his face shifting into a grin as he pointed at the general area in her mid-section where a gaping hole still oozed. “I obviously won’t do it anymore, and Baron is too old for that shit,” he joked. “Us old men need our beauty sleep.” Ragenard’s high regard for James wasn’t exactly hard to gauge; Ragenard could have challenged his brother at any point in the past eight years and handily wrestled control long before the pack had a chance to get used to more peaceful options. He followed him instead, as best as he could.

No, Rhetta wouldn’t be foolish enough to see only the joke’s surface. He just had to hope she was canny enough to give him the benefit of the doubt as to why he was seemingly dismantling aspects of the SAA’s role and handing them to individual enforcers. No one, not even Baron himself, had ever considered that he’d be doing the bodyguard portions of the SAA job. This gave Ragenard the idea he had settled upon only that morning; letting the world expect how they’d behave. Ragenard knew Baron could fulfill his new role’s namesake his own way, and the broad latitude meant more chances he’d be covering angles Ragenard may miss.

The pack needed a bodyguard more than he did, and that was why Ragenard had made his brother the Sergeant at Arms. It was the boring and ceremonial position during their eight years of relative peace, but before that it was more than that. Ragenard was counting on the streets being too focused on him loudly new “Firsting” to catch Baron’s subtle motions as he carried out the SAA’s unspoken role-mishmash of defense coordinator, armament maintenance, and offensively aimed vanguard turned spymaster.

Ragenard would get Rhetta and Xandre to help with the first two; Moons knew they both needed the growing and socializing as much as the current pack needed their rough and oftentimes ruthless examples. That would give his brother the latitude to do what he did best. See Rhetta? I have plans and machinations and shit… Just like Da!

The thought’s addendum came like acid and Ragenard almost bit his lip. He hoped he could get a handle on why he was being such an asshole randomly lately, especially since it didn’t seem like he was excluding himself out of his own sights. Ragenard forced his scowl to simultaneously deepen until his thoughts started to drift then transformed his features into a sardonic grin once again, which seemed to dispel the weird pall once more.

“Not used to a captive audience for meetings, thanks for always expanding my boundaries, Rhetta,” Ragenard said in jest as he settled down to sit at Man’s patio furniture to watch over Rhetta. “So first rule of business, there’s this prospect, Liam, that I think could pull off the rib-stab if pushed…”​
 
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