CoR Title Pending: Baron & Rhetta

Tiko

Tiko

Draconic Administrator/Mentor
Mentor
Administrator
Baron was brooding over the day’s events and occupying himself with taking apart and cleaning an array of firearms that lay lined up on the table in front of him. Their armory was lacking, but they had acquired some additional firearms from the fallen Jackals. It was these he was working through, examining each one as he went. He appeared focused, but it was just busy work to occupy himself during his musings.

While typically approachable, most knew to steer clear of him when he was in a mood. All it took was one glance to realize he wasn’t interested in any company at the moment. Well, for most people to realize anyways. Liam on the other hand could be quite dense at times.

“Hey, uh… I wanted to ask you something…” the kid said awkwardly.

Baron’s stare had him shifting uncomfortably. Baron was never cruel or violent towards those under his protection, but he still had a way of unsettling people when he wished to be alone. The unreadable expression and intense focus of his gaze could unnerve all but a few within the pack. Behind that stare lay the whisper of a promise of what could be, rather than what was.

He couldn’t determine if Liam was brave, stupid, or just clueless. Perhaps even a combination of the three. He let the drawn out silence between them do the talking until Liam’s nerve broke.

“I… ah… I’ll be back later,” the kid said as he hastily retreated.

The cafeteria turned mess hall was uncharacteristically empty for the time of day, but everyone was either busy with something, or laid up in the infirmary. Ragenard included. How quickly they had reversed positions he thought. He wasn’t concerned though. There wasn’t much that Ragenard couldn’t pull through. He would be up and about soon enough. Until then Desmond was acting First.

Baron had made no moves to upset the status quo as some speculated he might.
 
"You're scaring the prospects."

This was not, strictly speaking, a condemnation. Scaring the prospects was a time-honored Bloodstone tradition. Overcoming that fear was part of what made them who they were. By the time they'd been with the Pack a while, they would only find each other a little terrifying. Some more so than others, of course.

Rhetta had never found Baron to be terrifying, even when he was at his broodiest. To be fair, she had been trained for that, but she still had no problem dealing with his moods. If he wanted to take over the cafeteria and reassemble weapons and glare at anyone who came in, that was his prerogative. She was just here to check in and make sure that he was scaring people for the right reasons and not the wrong ones.

She leaned against the doorframe, keeping an eye on the hallway outside for a little while, unconcerned with whatever looks he might be leveraging in her direction. Rhetta wasn't surprised that he hadn't tried to change up the leadership arrangement. Disappointed, maybe, but not surprised - and in a way, not disappointed, because if he had, then he wouldn't have been who she thought he was, and that would have been worse. If he'd stepped down, he meant it - and she was the last person who'd try to convince him otherwise, even if she was the first person who'd have supported him if he did.

Regardless of that - if Baron wanted First back, he'd do it honestly. He wasn't going to do anything with Ragenard in the hospital. Everyone should have been able to see that, but some of them were fucking idiots.

"You want help with that?" Rhetta didn't much care for using guns, but her dad had been a marksman. She'd helped him clean weapons at the kitchen table from about the time she'd been old enough to handle them, which, in a Bloodstone family, had been about three. She thought he'd hoped she'd take to them, but she'd always liked fighting closer up. Still, there was something familiar in the ritual of taking them apart, cleaning everything down, and reassembling them again. They could probably all do with a little familiarity.

James, especially.
 
"After the hazing Ragenard has already put him through, if it was something important he wouldn't have been so antsy," Baron replied.

His brother had already put Liam in more than a few uncomfortable positions. More than enough for the kid to have learned to speak up, even if the one you're speaking to is glaring daggers (or worse) at you.

He didn't look up this time as he worked. Rhetta wouldn't be deterred by a look, and truthfully her presence rarely bothered him. They could sit in silence, trade heated words, or shoot the breeze about the olden days, and it never felt like an intrusion. It was good to have her back.

He slid one of the weapons across the table towards her.

"Any news?" he asked.

While Desmond was busy seeing to things on the home-front, Baron had asked Rhetta to reach out to a few of their contacts, to try and get word on ongoing Jackal activity. They had been caught with their pants down, and he didn't intend to let that happen again.

There hadn't been much for her to learn though that hadn't already made it to mainstream news. Several prominent businesses had been vandalized. The Rusty Nail and the Shake and Bake had endured the brunt of the damages. Both had been successful in repelling the Iron Jackals, but their opposition had come at the cost of collateral damage. There hadn't been any casualties on their end at either location.

There was no news of current Jackal movement, and they seem to have withdrawn for the time being. Despite being the aggressors, casualties had been heavy for them. They had the numbers for it though, and they would recover quickly. Meanwhile the few losses the Bloodstones had endured would have resounding repercussions for the pack.

The locals where divided on the matter. Many where angry, and would stand behind the pack. Others where questioning the strength of the pack and what it would mean for Lupaix in the days ahead.
 
For him, she abandoned the vantage of the doorway, moving into the room in silence and taking a stance across the table. She didn't worry about what was behind her; he would do that. The trust was still there, even if everything else was strange. Reaching out to the gun was second nature, taking the time to start cleaning it carefully, unhurried. There was no sense in rushing the moment - when it was needed, it needed to be in the best possible condition.

Much like the rest of them, she figured, though she wondered at how they were going to get put together in after they'd been so thoroughly disassembled. His question was met with a one-shouldered shrug; Rhetta didn't need to insult him by telling him things that he already knew.

"Our people can hold their own." Could, certainly, but shouldn't have to. They needed to know that the Pack would be there to back them up, if something happened again. "It's quiet for now. Waiting-quiet." The sort of quiet where people were watching, seeing what happened, making decisions about what would happen next. The Bloodstones had a certain amount of faith built up, but that sort of faith would diminish if it wasn't rewarded. Blind faith wasn't something that most people possessed.

"They need to see us out there."
 
"Desmond will make the right call," Baron answered.

He didn't need to specify what the right call was. He knew as well as her, that they couldn't afford to project weakness right now, but they couldn't afford a divided pack either. Desmond would need to step up, sooner rather than later.

He finished reassembling the weapon he was holding before smoothly moving on to the next. His hands moved with practiced ease as they spoke.

"We need to be ready for when he does," he added. "The remaining prospects need to be assessed as well."

Today's battle would be a make or break moment for them. It's one thing to seek out the security of a pack, and another to find your commitment to that security put to the test.

"Were you able to get a feel for any of them before the attack?" he asked. "Or during it."
 
"Desmond's an idiot." Desmond was a former idiot. He'd certainly done a lot of growing. It was entirely possible, even, that he was no longer an idiot. Rhetta had talked to him enough to know that he was pretty solid, all things considered - it was just that she still thought of the Desmond she'd once knew, and he'd been a fucking idiot. She'd found him rather charming.

On the subject of fucking idiots: "Liam has a lot of potential, but he doesn't know how to use it. He heals well but he thinks of getting hurt as something to avoid." That was perfectly rational thinking, but both of them knew that Rhetta didn't always think rationally. "Might take him aside some time. Give him some pointers. He'll be good once he settles in, as long as there's someone there to shepherd him, because he's also an idiot." Putting Liam in a position where he needed to be responsible was, absolutely, a terrible mistake.

"That Jimmy kid worries me. I don't know what all those drugs have done to him long term, and I don't know if there's a way of knowing. He's got a lot of trauma. I think he needs to settle some of it, before he'll be ready to start thinking seriously about the Pack. He's got too many ties to the outside, and none of them are good." He'd told her a fair bit. Rhetta wondered if he remembered telling her, or if he'd even been lucid at the time. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't, but there was enough of a story there that she felt needed to find some good endpoints before the Pack got him started on anything more than healing up. For now, at least, he could just focus on that and the rest of them could figure out what to do with him.

"How's Aimee?"
 
Baron didn't bother trying to dissuade Rhetta of her views of Desmond. The only thing that would change that was Desmond himself. And honestly, he wouldn't have been Baron's first pick for Second even just a few months ago. Unreliable would have been his choice of words. No one had predicted his quick thinking in facilitating the aid of the Iverians, and Ragenard's legitimate claim to pack leader.

Baron himself had been skirting death's door, but while the pack was in a state of confusion and disarray, Desmond had shown everyone that there was more to him than they had considered. Baron had taken to Desmond quickly, as had Ragenard. He was charismatic, loyal, and good natured without shying away from the rougher aspects of pack life. Baron had recognized the innate strength Desmond carried. He could have led a pack of his own had he wanted to. But there was a pointed lack of ambition, and a state of contentment that had allowed Desmond to coast through life without any real sense of responsibility.

He let his feelings on the matter show through his lack of a response. Neutrality. He would leave her to make her own assessment.

"She's still alive," Baron answered. "That's about all we can keep hoping for. Jesse's doing the best he can with what he has. Colette has been helping to keep her stable while he works. Fucking Colette. What in the hell compelled her to come to the city after all this time?"

Despite the roughness of his language, it was dismay rather than anger that lay behind them. There hadn't been a chance for him to speak with her yet. Helping to keep Aimee alive was more urgent, but he couldn't begin to fathom what would have driven her to Lutetia City. And with Amara too for fucks sake. There wasn't much that could truly shock him anymore, but nowhere could he have ever predicted their arrival.

But that mystery would have to wait. It was better to focus on something useful in the meanwhile.

"Bastien wasn't in much better of a state when we took him," Baron replied.

He left the rest unsaid. Rhetta had good reason to be wary of Jimmy. Bastien may have turned out right, but his brother? Well his brother was still a fuckup that was willing to betray them to the Scions for a pat on the head when he couldn't hack it with the Bloodstones. If it wasn't for Rowan, that little shit-head would have been dead years ago.

"What can you tell me about his ties?"
 
Rhetta let him vent, because she figured he needed it. There weren't a lot of people he could vent to, especially with his brother in the hospital. She noticed that he wasn't venting about that, but maybe that one was still too close. Easier to vent about Colette, about Amara, about little things. He wasn't avoiding the bigger topics, just letting them be in the back of his mind, clearing out the smaller things to give himself space.

So she let him swear, and she didn't say anything to contradict him, and she let him change the topic when he wanted to. Bastien was all right, for a topic. If Baron was going to equate his whole thing with the Jimmy situation, then he must be feeling relatively confident about it.

"That's why I brought him in for you." For him, he'd undoubtedly notice, not for Ragenard, but she wasn't going to lie to him, and it wasn't like he didn't already know. She still hadn't swapped her patch out. The convenient excuse would be that there hadn't been time, but she'd have made time if she wanted to, and she had chosen not to. Ragenard might be First, and she could accept that - but he wanted her to be something she wasn't, and what she was, was Baron's. Just like always. The Pack wasn't his, but Rhetta was.

"He lived with his aunt and uncle," she answered the question. "They're about as anti-were as it gets, from the sounds of it. Kid's dad is the one that turned him, just a bit ago. Sounds like they shot him, or someone did. He wasn't clear on that part. He wasn't clear on a lot of things. Too many drugs, I think, even before he got in with whatever the Jackals were peddling. Whatever's going on with the relatives, though, sounds pretty bad. He's scared - scared they'll hurt him again, scared they'll kill him. The way he acts, it might not be unfounded."

There was a difference in the way people acted when they were projecting the idea that someone might kill them and the way they acted when they really thought it likely. Jimmy, she thought, was more the second. Of course, that just made it more likely that Baron would have a soft spot for him, but she'd expected that already. He'd always been like that, with young people.

That was why she was trained to be there with him, so that he would know there was someone who'd do whatever was needed, if being soft didn't work out. She'd failed him once, not being here when she should have been. She wasn't going to do it again.
 
"See if you can dig into his connection to the Jackals. Make sure they don't have anything on him. I don't want any surprises," Baron said. "I'll have Jesse look into local medical records for a pattern of abuse."

While Jesse had been largely ostracized from the medical community after he contracted lycanthropy, he had a few reliable contacts that weren't above helping out an old colleague, for the right price.

"In the meanwhile we'll keep him here where we can keep an eye on him until we have more information," Baron added.

"And what about you?" he asked.

He looked up from his work and gave her a pointed look.

"How are you adjusting?"

They had predicted this, but it had come on much faster than they had anticipated. Rhetta had scarcely had a chance to get her feet under her after a long prison sentence before shit hit the fan. He already knew the answer, but he asked all the same. Rhetta had been gone a long time. This life was the life she had left. Not the years of peace.

All it had taken was seeing Bastien impaled to that wall for Baron to unleash a side of himself that he hadn't revealed in many years. A side that -

The crack of a rifle filled his senses. Julienne's voice pierced through the gunfire. He had to get up he had too...

Rather than flinch away from the sharpness of the memory, he found it stirring that cold ferocity back to the surface once more. His expression never changed, but she would know. She always knew. This was a dangerous side to Baron, one that he had not donned since his enforcer days under the leadership of his father, Mathias.

He felt the bullet slam into his knee, shattering bone and dropping him to the ground.

It hadn't been Rowan who had pulled the trigger, but it was his face that filled Baron with loathing. The gunman had been a tool, nothing more. He would never forgive Rowan for reducing him to such a state complete powerlessness. As Baron had laid in the back of a van slowing the flow of blood from his throat with his own hand, the only thought that had kept that fire burning in his eyes was the desire... no the need to seek out and punish those who had been responsible. But Rowan was dead by Ragenard's hands, and Jacques' demise had come swiftly once he had outlived his usefulness to Rowan.

It had been a difficult adjustment since he had recovered from his injuries. That fury had sought a target, but there had been no one for Baron to unleash it against. Not until now.
 
"I'll see what I can find." Rhetta wasn't sure which of her contacts would still be around, or if they'd even know what they should have, after five years. The Bloodstones always had contacts, but sometimes things changed up - who knew what, who got themselves killed. Things happened. That wouldn't stop them, though - she'd ask around, find out what she could. She'd already been scoping out the Jackal situation even before this Railyard mess, so now she'd just have one more question to ask people when they decided they felt like answering. She'd always been good at convincing people they felt like answering - hopefully she still had the touch.

The question about her was equally unsurprising. She'd known he would ask, just like she knew he probably at least half knew the answer. She was, and she wasn't. Adjusting to the relentless attacks and oppression from every direction was easy - it felt comfortable and familiar, despite how horrifying it may have seemed. Adjusting to the changes in the Pack? No, she wasn't adjusting to those at all.

She'd have told him as much, because he'd asked, and because she wouldn't lie to him - except there'd been something else, after the question. Not another question, just a hitch in things, an arrhythmic beat that showed not at all but was felt purely by resonance, deep within the core of herself, reacting to something that didn't need expression at all, much less words.

Her body shifted, angling slightly, giving her space to watch the door as if knowing that, for a moment, he didn't have it covered for them. She didn't look at him; she didn't need to, and she wouldn't have seen anything there anyway. Better to stand guard, for whatever else came. The pause lengthened, and they both could have pretended that it was waiting for her answer, but neither one of them was likely to care to pretend. Not with each other.

"James?" Softly, this time: the old name and not the new, because she recognized it in him that, for a moment, he was the person he'd been and not the person he'd come to be. He'd taken a different name, but whatever he was thinking had taken him away from that, and so she slipped back into the way things had been, wondering, silently, if that was the way they were now, or the way they were about to be.
 
James. It was a name remembered by few, and used by fewer yet. It grounded him and brought his focus back to Rhetta, and to the present.

"I haven't been that person in many years," Baron answered. "Too many years. It's time the Jackals, and all the rest of them remember why they once feared us."

There was a coldness to his next words.

"We're going to buy Desmond time."
 
Rhetta let him work through it: who he had been, who he had become, and what he wanted to be next. They hadn't earned respect so much as taken it by force, back then. Things had gotten better, people would say - but they'd gotten better because there had been not just an opportunity for growth, but a place for it, carved out of the earth with blades and watered with blood.

She didn't flinch at his words, nor at the coldness that followed. Her expression flickered only once, a minute tilt of her head at a word, one word:

Desmond.

Not Ragenard.

Even to this, though, she didn't say anything, merely nodded in acknowledgement. It was his decision to make, and presumably he had his reasons. If he wanted to share them, she would listen - but if he didn't, she would follow him anyway, because that was what she had always done, and only one of them had ever changed.

"Let me know what you need me to do." Anything that he needed her to do - he knew. Anything, no matter what it was, or whoever else might have shied away from doing it. He didn't need to ask. All he had to do was inform, and she would see to it that it was done.

That was how it was always meant to be.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top