[flashback] slamming doors. (cy & clem)

[Cyrah]

40th Day of Winter, 509 A.V. Location: Home Sweet Home A door slammed. Normally, Cyrah came and went quite quietly. She didn't like a lot of noise, as her ears were so sensitive, and her movements were generally delicate enough that whole days could go by and Clement might have no idea whether or not she was in the apartment, when she might have come in during a night, or if she'd finally moved out, as she often threatened she would. A nocturnal creature by design, the cooling shadows of evening typically heralded her disappearance, and she spent most days curled up in bed, asleep. So when the door slammed, as it did then, it shattered the near-silence of the middle of the night with a resounding crack of wood slung back on its hinges. And she hobbled into the little space, an arm curled protectively about her midsection, wearing what looked like...a stolen sheet. Stolen, because Cyrah did not typically go out and about wearing sheets. And it was patently a sheet, as it trailed behind her by a few feet, got stuck on an uneven plank just beyond the door's frame, and she bit back a curse and yanked on it til it ripped itself free. In the year since she had formed an uneasy alliance with Clement, she'd grown at a rapid rate. No longer the gangling youth he'd found thrashing about the sand. Closer to full woman, with a figure and face to match, it might have been utterly alluring to see her flapping about their shared living quarters with a sheet half-slung to cover herself...except there was a blood-stain, on the sheet, and it was blossoming like some gruesome flower along the right shelf of her ribs. “Petching sonovabitch godsdammit petching piece of shyke--” She'd adopted some of Clement's vocabulary over the course of the year as well, of course. And the string of curses continued, breathless, after she'd tripped over the sheet and landed in a sprawling pile of sifting sand and twisted limbs. “-- Fuck."

[Clement Reijnder]

A door slammed.

He jerked up into a sitting position. Though he wasn’t standing, he still seemed to wobble back and forth. He wreaked of beer, herbs, and whatever woman he’d left someplace else before coming home to his own bed. His bed. The good bed. He let out a loud, “I have a sword!”

But he didn’t. He didn’t even know how to use a sword, because his parents had been too worried about him getting hurt as a child. It was just some empty threat, because he was rather certain that someone had broken into the place to slit his throat for something he did – Most likely while drunk. Worse yet was the fact that he probably deserved it.

Clement didn’t really take well to being rousted from his sleep in such a manner. He started to say something sharp to the woman he shared his living space with. He was quick to bite his tongue, trying to take in the situation. Cyrah had slammed the door. Cyrah was cursing, a lot, as if she’d been possessed by some ghost of a sailor.

“Cyrah?” he asked, still a little drunk and more than groggy. “What’s wrong?”

He groped in the dark, searching for the flint and steel to get a candle lit so he could see. There came the click-click tapping of it before the room illuminated. What he saw caused his blood to run cold. Despite the fact that he was still pretty convinced she didn’t think he cared, he did. He really did. A year was an awfully long time to spend around a person only to not care. The protective streak in him had never gone away, though at least once a week he found himself wishing it had.

She was bleeding, wasn’t she? He squinted, jumping out of bed, forgetting that in his drunken half-crawl to bed he’d shed his clothing about the room. He bent down next to her, trying to at least right her enough that she didn’t look so… Uncomfortable.

“What the petch happened?”

[Cyrah]

Cyrah had maintained a very strict set of rules as regarded the human with which she shared space. He served as go-between, as a strategist, being of a mind more inclined toward outright cruelty; Clement could design the work she did, and his face was more predisposed to intimidating people. And so between them the arrangement was businesslike; he handled clients, and she exacted the contract. There was to be no bonding, absolutely none, and so even though she had grown more comfortable with him – arguably even companionable, at times – there remained to her a cool reserve, a detached aloofness, always. Except at that moment, as he arrived at her side. “It hurts,” she whined, her voice a flickering shadow of the thirteen year old girl he'd first met. “Petching sonovabitch had a knife and he slashed at me. Ow. Ow! And I – fell – and I couldn't wrap it with paws so I – shifted – and it hurts...” Still a little girl in so many ways. Like as not, she hadn't made a sound when the target had actually stabbed her, but safe at home with Clem, she seemed about ready to burst out crying. Kicking at the sheet about her legs, she struggled to sit up, a palm pressed to her side. Long, dark lashes wet with impending tears, shadowing bright, crystalline eyes. “Just get me a bandage, would you,” she mumbled, wincing a little as she straightened. And then she got a whiff of him and wrinkled her nose, turning her face sharply away. “And wash, for gods' sake, you smell like a brothel. Like the worst parts of a brothel. Like the below-the-stairs parts for people who don't have enough coin to pay for four walls and a roof. So they just roll around in it. Ewugh.” The wound couldn't have been that bad, then, at least. If she was already hurling insults.

[Clement Reijnder]

“She owed me a favor,” he said it defensively, too quickly. He refrained from reaching out and thumping her forehead with his fingers; it was his favorite response to her being such a… He looked at her. Was she about to cry? “I came home drunk and assumed you weren’t going to be home until morning. How do you know what that smells like, anyway?”

Despite the fact that he asked, he didn’t really want to know the answer. He pushed from his crouch. If she was cold, he could answer with his own chill. He was the face of business. “Did he see your face? Did you kill him?”

He needed to know if he needed to go clean up the mess before word got out what she looked like. Their whole little operation would go down if they knew some pretty woman was the terrible jackal. That wouldn’t do. Petch, he needed the job for some sort of income. He did like food to eat, and he didn’t really want to go back to fighting for a few coppers while others watched for sport to do so. Though she wasn't the only one to threatened, and sometimes he used that as an empty promise. Not that she rightly bought into it or cared.

That’s what he told himself as he went to find a bandage in the truck of randomness that he kept together for them. It was how he knew she’d not moved out when she threatened. He assumed that, since the trunk was technically hers, she’d pack it up and take it with her. He’d find the things he kindly shared littered across the floor. Possibly broken if she was feeling particularly mean. Whether she’d actually bother to do that was up in the air, but that’s what he told himself the little shyke would do.

When he came back out, he stopped to look at her in the dim light. He was having flashbacks to the day he’d met her. How little and helpless she was, and how he was stupid or lucky enough to be there, to act as he did, to take control of the situation. Well, until the part where he started arguing with a little girl and losing.

“No,” he said leaning down. “I’ll do it so it gets wrapped better. Quit acting tough for a moment. Just tell me what happened. Please.”

He had a habit of playing to her pride. She was not acting tough. She was acting like a baby. He didn’t let his opinion come out, and he expected her to continue on as she was whether he did or not. There was no point wasting energy.

“Off with the sheet already.”

[Cyrah]

“Oh sure, owed you a favor, and by favor I assume you mean some sort of transmutable genital disease--” She bit back the rest of the insult when he started asking questions over her, and though she rolled her eyes and grit her teeth, she resituated her attention on answering them. “No, nobody saw my face, and yes I killed him. I wouldn't have just – of course I killed him.” Cyrah never missed a contract. Or if she did, she didn't come home until it was completed, eradicated, every scrap of flesh and splatter of blood gone. Like as not, she'd also shifted in order to clean the mess up faster, when simply devouring the corpse would not suffice. Jackals were not overly large canines; she could eat a man to dust and bones, but it took some time. In this particular instance, she simply hadn't had the wherewithal, and so she'd disposed of the corpse in a different, but no less effective, manner. She let out an irritable little growl and glared right back up into his eyes, but a hand came up and curled fingers about the hem of the sheet, promptly snapping it away from her figure, as he'd ordered. With a swish, she tossed the fabric away and sank down, rolling onto her side with her back to him, as she would have done had she been in jackal form and letting him tend a wound. This way, he had full access to the vicious little slash marring the narrow slope of her ribcage. Not a deep wound, and mostly finished bleeding, but aggravated by sand and so it must have stung fiercely. “I kill people in brothels all the time,” she muttered, glib.

[Clement Reijnder]

He was left blinking as she turned away from. She’d not been quick enough. He’d gotten plenty an eyeful. It occurred to him that at some point she’d turned into a woman. She wasn’t some little girl anymore. She was some… Very beautiful woman. He’d like to…

He froze for a moment, forcing his brain away from the thought that was drunkenly threatening to surface. While he was proudly capable of keeping his brain from carrying on with that line of thought, sadly his body was a different story. He found himself happy she wasn’t facing him.

“Aye, I assume that’s the favor she paid me,” he said quietly as he ran his fingers down her side, looking over the wound. It was said with a hard measure of sarcasm, the kind that was perhaps a little too forced to be honest. “Later when you’re feeling better we can see if it passes to your kind.”

He reached to put the bandage over the wound, taking the long strip of cloth he’d found in his hands. He lifted her up the slightest bit, careful not to cause too much contact. Just enough that he could hold her up to get the bandage wrapped completely around her mid-section.

“We’re getting up first thing in the morning to get you to a proper doctor. The wound needs to be cleaned out, but I’m not going to attempt it for you. I fancy my testicles staying where they belong. Stay there for a moment.”

He gently put her back down to the ground. The clause might have been no bonding, but he’d not been able to play by the rules. While not a Kelvic bond, he still felt… Responsible. He figured the emotion was responsibility to her. The need to care for her. To provide in some way and take care of her. He hated it.

He pushed from the ground, moving across the room in hopes of locating his pants. When he found them, he bent to put them on.

“You take the good bed tonight.”

[Cyrah]

She made a face that he could only half see. "You're disgusting," she muttered, annoyed, as she rested her face on her hands. It was an entirely canine posture, though she was presently in her human form. Sometimes, it was hard to tell which form she found to be more comfortable. Sometimes, it was easy to think that perhaps she only barely noticed shifting, and that she was always both, somehow, simultaneously. "Keep your diseases to yourself." When he lifted her to wrap the bandage about her midsection, she didn't fight him. Just let him move her as he would because, despite all her grumbling and sourness, she trusted him to treat her wounds without taking advantage of them. That was about as far as she trusted him, but it was enough. If Cyrah, in her increasing pace towards adulthood, had noticed that Clement was a strikingly good-looking specimen of humanity, well...she was better at hiding it. But then, she'd always kind of been aware of it, ever since they met. She just hated him, and that was more important. "I'm not going to the doctor," she argued vehemently, shifting, as soon as he walked away, to push herself up into a stand. The long, twisting lengths of her hair only covered her to the bottom of her ribcage, but she didn't seem to care. "It's just a scratch -- I'll clean it myself tomorrow." A scoff in the direction of how much he cared, and she turned to pace over to her trunk and root around for her nightgown. "And it's my bed, anyway. The good bed."

[Clement Reijnder]

“Yes, I am very disgusting. I constantly stink like a human. I sink myself into anything with two legs that’s still warm. And I eat too much fruit for your liking. Plus you’re pretty sure that my parents weren’t wed when I was conceived. And I'm likely to have my bits fall off at any moment from whatever disease you've thought up in your head. You never fail to remind me of this,” he said flatly like it didn’t bother him. Some of it was indeed fact.

When he got tired or upset, he seemed to lose the ruffian in his voice. Out came the smooth, modulated tone of an educated man from an upper-merchant class. He hated it. His past was his past, and he wanted to keep it there. He was not what they were. He was different. He tried so desperately hard to be different than them, hiding his interest in books and things of import beyond women, drink, and death.

“You are going to the doctor, or I will wipe my uncleaned arse on the meat you think you keep hidden around here. By the time you get to it, the stink will have worn off so you won’t know. But I will. I will know.”

He glanced over his shoulder to look at her, something troubled clearly resting in his eyes. He rubbed at his mouth, the telltale sign that something was bothering him. She’d know the look most likely, but he was quick to turn back around and hide it.

“To bloody Talboa it is your bed. It is my bed, and I am nice enough to let you lay your sorry head down on it.”

[Cyrah]

It seemed every time she summoned an insult to hurl at him, he hurled it at himself for her. Which suited her just fine, thank you, so she let out an unladylike snort and fished her nightgown out of the trunk, struggling it on over her head. A few months ago, it had been an oversized nightgown stolen off some poor family's laundry line; she'd been swimming in it. Now, though, it fit her just as it was likely meant to, leaving very little to the imagination, its hem only long enough to cover her to mid-thigh. She hauled the wealth of her hair up and began pinning it back, but she twisted as she did so, unfinished with the argument. “There is no amount of time,” she hissed at him. “That could go by that might remove the stench of you from just about everything in this place, but if you get your arse anywhere near my food, I will feed you your own disease-ridden bits, Clem.” She saw the gesture, when he lifted his hand to his mouth, even as he turned away from her. It only inspired her to cross the room to him, and get up in his face. That gesture meant that something was bothering him, and she presumed that she was bothering him, and she'd had a bad night. A good row with him would make her feel better; maybe she'd go so far as to break his nose again, or let him crack one of her ribs. They'd learned to function not unlike a pair of animals, each always vying with the other for dominance. “It isn't your bed!” she snapped, jabbing her fingertip into his chest. “I found this place, it's my bed, and sometimes you just stink it up when I'm not home to stop you!” Additionally, Cyrah hated doctors and physicians, of any kind. They frightened her.

[Clement Reijnder]

“I will have you know that my bits are quite clean and much desired by dozens – No! Hundreds of women in Ahnatep. Not to mention the other places I’ve been.” He never talked about those places. He didn’t talk about his past at all, in fact. Clement didn’t even bother to artfully dodge it, he just flat out refused to answer any questions. He also wasn’t sure he was really in the mood to fight with her. He was tired, drunk, and rather disturbed by the entire situation. She’d been bleeding… And nude. He added quickly, “And quite a few men.”

He looked down at her as she got in his face. His jaw set stubbornly and his eyes narrowed. The man wasn’t an animal, but he did know how to growl. The sound rumbled deep in his throat. No, he didn’t want to fight. He wanted to go back to bed now that she’d been taken care of.

It wasn’t as easy as it had been to overpower her. He was missing a molar to tell that story. Damn girl was all limbs and teeth. He found himself wearing his hair just a bit shorter now that she was around to rip it out of his head. A hand shot out to push her away. He stepped back in hopes he could get out of the way before she swung. And she would swing. She always did.

“Get the petch away, you worthless hag. It’s my bed. And I know what you’re up to. You’re not getting out of going to the doctor. I’m not having you pop at the side like some dead Benshira cow bloating in the sun.”