Petching Knives (Cy and Clem)

[Clement Reijnder]

5th of Spring, 510 “Petch… Petchin’ petch.” Clement was a man known for his far-reaching vocabulary. Really. Sometimes he was just downright eloquent. “Petchin’ shyke!” Varied even… He came staggering into the hidey with a swollen eye. His pants were ripped, and since they were leather one knew that the scrap he’d gotten into had to be pretty bad. The worst, though, was the fact that his shirt was covered in blood. Now, fortunately, quite a bit of it wasn’t actually his. Unfortunately, the giant hole with the visible gash across his shoulder said that someone had tried to upset that ratio. “I petchin’ hate knives! Argh!” He was headed for the pail of water he went to fill every morning before he took off for the day to do whatever it was Clem was wont to do. But he was being very honest. He hated petchin’ knives. The placement of the wound, though, said that someone had actually tried to kill him. It wasn’t just one of his little scraps that he amused himself with. The way the cut ran said that’d he’d moved in just the knick of time before someone had sunk the knife fully into his shoulder. Had they done it, they would have hit an artery – A very special one at that. The one that, if cut, would cause a man to bleed out in a manner of seconds. He wouldn’t admit to it later, but he was actually… Tearing up. Maybe even a little shook up.

[Cyrah]

Cyrah was seated at their tiny make-shift desk. The apartment was underground, carved out of the catacombs and, as such, required several candles spaced at intervals around the main room in order to properly light the place. She was curled up on one of two rickety chairs, her chin on her knees, rifling through pieces of parchment. Ledgers. Cyrah had a great many ledgers. Firelight licked at her profile, brightening the sparse threads of gold that littered the sable lengths of her hair where it fell loose about her shoulders. When Clement came staggering in, she didn't look up from her work. He came staggering in with some frequency, and she made a point of ignoring it, most of the time. Too often they came to blows if she didn't. Usually he was drunk, sometimes he was bleeding. A bloody lip here and there, a broken bone. How he spent his days and nights was largely his own business; she didn't stick her nose into it. And preferred him to stay out of her way. That was their...very uneasy...situation. Her nose crinkled though, and she blinked away from the ledgers. Her head came up, and she turned to actually look at him. “Who's blood is that?” she asked, eyeballing the stains on his shirt, and his ripped trousers. She could smell the blood of two men, one more powerful than the other, and it wasn't his. A frown threatened one corner of her mouth but didn't manage full purchase, and she climbed down from the chair to pad over to him. Even as he was straightening from the water bucket, she had a hand on his arm and was leaning in to sniff at the wound on his shoulder. Wide awake, as it was night, she wore a flimsy house-dress in cream-colored cotton, something that could be easily pulled on and off, like most of her clothing. Cyrah never wore jewelry, either, save for a series of earrings that decorated the entire length of each of her ears. Those shifted with her when she took her canine form. The only glittering sign that she was more than one's typical, city-dwelling jackal. "If you hate knives so much," she muttered, crinkling her nose again. "You shouldn't let people stab you."

[Clement Reijnder]

“Petch if I know who the arse was!” he snapped, quick to wince and recoil at his own movements. “Some arse with a knife that came outta no where and stabbed me in the petchin’ shoulder!” He then started to pull his shirt off. It wasn’t that Clem was a baby. Obviously he wasn’t considering the amount of injuries that he wandered home with. This wound, however, really hurt. He was starting to worry that the dagger used had been painted with something. He splashed some water up onto his shoulder, squeezing his eyes shut and gnashing his teeth together, groaning random swears under his breath in an attempt to act tough. It just wasn’t working. His skin felt like it was burning, and he couldn’t twist his head enough to see if there was sand in it or not. For once he’d not been up to anything when it had happened. He’d not started a fight. There was no brawl that he’d been fixing to get into. No. He’d been walking home. Just walking home. Not that he probably didn’t deserve it for something he’d done at some point. Even he wasn’t that delusional. “Damn it, Cyrah! I don’t just let people stab me!” He paused then, quickly adding before she could get anything out of her mouth, “That time with you doesn’t count. Shut up.”

[Cyrah]

“Smells deep,” she commented, a little off-handedly, stepping back as he pulled his shirt off. If all he wanted was to whine and bitch about it, far be it from her to get in his way. A shrug turned one of her shoulders, and she half-twisted to go back to her work, but paused. And sighed. And rolled her pale, pale eyes at him. “I can clean it and try to stitch it if you want.” Cyrah only had a very rudimentary understanding of medicine, but she supposed it was probably more than Clement himself knew. She couldn't stitch for shit, but she'd seen it done, and cleaning the wound, at least, was easy enough. As long as he didn't squirm too much. She'd been extraordinarily careful never to really touch him, in the past year. After their last altercation, she'd been gone for a few weeks, and done to him exactly what he'd done to her so many times. Nary a word or a woof in the darkness, and then one day she'd appeared, asleep in the bed when he came home, and not a word had been said about it. Only in those weeks she'd been gone, she'd grown ever older, and the absence had likely pronounced those changes starkly. Her features were still sharpening into maturity, but gone was any lingering adolescence. By human standards, she looked like a complete adult – a young adult, perhaps, but still fully a woman. Every so often, though, a stitch in her personality reminded them both that she'd only been in this world for three years, if that. “Unless you'd rather just be a big baby about it and probably die of blood blackening,” she added, with a flip of her hair.

[Clement Reijnder]

“Well…” He looked at her, eyeing her warily. He had a feeling she had no idea how to stitch him up, but then again neither did he. He wasn’t really mood to pay for a healer or a doctor to wake up in the middle of the night to get it done. She’d not tried to touch him. He’d not tried to touch her. The fact that she’d touched him at all this evening actually rather worried him. Maybe he really was going to die. A little touch of paranoia crept up as he wondered if she’d sent someone to kill him. It didn’t last, because he knew full well that if she had wanted to kill him, she would do it herself. And rightly enjoy herself doing it. Petch, it wasn’t a far cry for him to imagine that he might enjoy it too. His eyes narrowed a little out in the distance. He was quick to scowl and slow to amble towards the table. He could believe he was about to say what he said, “Fine.” He sat down with a grimace and looked over at her with an expression that said that maybe for once he wasn't going to fight for dominance.

[Cyrah]

“Sit,” she instructed, pointing to the chair she'd previously been inhabiting. While he did so, she went to the trunk and flipped it open, rummaging through it until she came up with bandages, a needle and thread, and some of the foul-smelling ointment the physician had given her the last time she got herself properly ripped into. It was a numbing agent, and she suspected Clement would want to be as numbed as possible for this procedure. She set the numbing ointment on the table in front of him, along with the needle and thread. After soaking a fresh rag in the water bucket, and ringing it neatly out, she came to stand behind where he sat. Cyrah carried with her the scents of desert sand and candlelight, perpetually worn into her skin. And something more dangerous, sharper, like spice or the quicksilver tinge of magic in the air. She tucked her hair behind her ears, and leaned over his shoulder, settling one hand carefully on his back so that he knew where she was and what she was doing. The touch was light, but very much present. And so gently he might not have actually believed the fingers were hers, she began to press the rag over, and into, the wound, to clean it. “Did he steal any of your money?” she asked quietly. All business, this jackal. His money was their money was her money.

[Clement Reijnder]

He continued to glower as he moved to sit down. As he sat down, he moved to unbutton the buttons his pants. Typically he just took them off, but apparently he was trying to perform a courtesy to the so-called lady of the house. Or maybe he just didn’t want to distract her when she was planning on sticking a needle into him. He was, he figured, a rather fine specimen of mankind. Not that she’d ever seemed to get distracted by him before, but he didn’t really want to take the risk now. Plus if she got mad at him, he’d rather have a layer of leather she’d have to force the needle through in order to get to skin. It was kind of sad. He actually flinched when she touched him despite the fact that she was gentle. Or maybe it was the gentleness of it that made him flinch. It was hard to say. Whatever it was, though, caused him to just freeze and stare off into the flickering shadows of their home for a long moment. “Did he… My money?” He kind of scoffed at her question, though he wasn’t sure he wanted to do that either. He was starting to feel a little helpless and at Cyrah’s mercy. That combination didn’t seem like a safe place to be… It seemed a little like a viper pit. “I don’t have any money. I mean, I don’t take all of my money out. I only take out what I intend to drink or use. I’d already done that by the time he’d got to me. But no. He didn’t ask for my money. The shyke just stabbed at me like he wanted me dead.”

[Cyrah]

"Maybe you fucked his wife," Cyrah muttered. Was it -- glib? Yes, it might have been. Even though he couldn't see it, the smirk on her mouth sneaked into her voice, as well. Cyrah's sense of humor revealed itself at very odd moments. And of course, that was certainly an option. She knew it and he knew it, no use nancying about the subject. The moment when Clem put aside sex because his potential partner was married, well...on that day, Cy herself would promise never to eat another dead man ever again. Highly unlikely. She wrinkled her nose, and sniffed at the air, but the scent she caught was unsatisfactory. Between him, his blood, and the other man's blood, it was hard to make heads or tails of what may or may not have been in the wound. Carefully, she peeled back the cloth, eyeballing the jagged tear in Clem's shoulder. Couldn't tell from the edges either. "I'm not going to hurt you," she murmured, and there was a warning in her voice. If he reacted and hit her, or any other such nonsense, he'd pay for it. She lowered her face to the wound, her cheek brushing the slope of his jaw for just a second. The warmth of her breath on his skin, and then she inhaled deeply, like scenting the body of a fine, aged wine, and licked the wound. She'd never tasted his blood before. Let it linger on her tongue, parceling out what information she could. "Not poisoned," she decided, on a low mumble, as she straightened and padded away from him, to the chest of drawers. Pulled one open and fished out a bottle of whiskey, which she uncorked and up-ended for a swig. Swilled it around in her mouth and then spit it all out, into a bucket nearby. "Just dirty." She rounded where he sat, then, and set the bottle on the table, picking up the needle and thread where he could see her do it, could watch as she slipped the thread's edge through the needle's eye.

[Clement Reijnder]

“Hadn’t thought about that,” he said as if surprised of himself. His eyebrows lifted up as he gave a little, thinking nod. “Could be. Though last I knew I hadn’t been giving it to any married ones lately. Other than the one I was caught with ‘bout a month ago… The one I ended up…” He cleared his throat and left the rest of the story alone. He hadn’t actually told her about that, and really he didn’t care much to let her in on his sexual exploits. Maybe that was a bit odd considering that he typically attempted to bore her with every other part of his day-to-day life from the beers he drank to the fights he was in to the pisses he’d taken and what color they were (Ideally not bloody). Women, though, he tried not to talk about. Like maybe it would offend her, or he still thought her too young for it. Neither of those really panned out either. In the end… Well… It was kind of circular. The reasoning, that is. He wasn’t thinking clearly. That was because his eyes had shot to the back of Cyrah’s head. Because she was… Rather close. His eyes closed as she touched him. His breath caught. He’d play it off like he thought maybe she was going to take a bite out of him, but he found himself rather dazed by the warmth and scent that came off of her. “I… Uh…” She was moving away from him. And then she did something that completely distracted him from being distracted. She was spitting out whiskey. “Oi!” He yelled, “Don’t be wasting that by spitting it out! That shyke’s days worth of Mizra’s to replace! It’s supposed to go like this.” He reached out to take the bottle. He took a good long pull from it, swallowing down the fire as he tried his best not to gawk at the work she was doing in front of him. It was best not to think too hard about what was about to happen. Sometimes he remembered she still had so much to learn.

[Cyrah]

"Don't--" But he was already drinking from the bottle. She sighed, and reached over, snatching it back from him and setting it at the opposite end of the table. Pale eyes glared. "-- That will make you bleed more, idiot. No drinking until after. Then you can suck down the whole bottle however you like, I don't even like it." She licked her lip, like maybe the taste of him still lingered on her tongue despite the whiskey, and then tied off the thread and snapped it between her fingers. Instead of drifting behind him, this time she came up on his side. Her attention was focused almost entirely on the gash in his shoulder, a tilt of her head as she examined it, trying to figure out the best way to sew it shut. Cautiously, she grasped his arm and lifted it, straightening the line of his shoulders, so that the flesh knit a little closer together. She slid in at his front, and picked up the jar of numbing salve. "Don't drop your arm," she said, as she uncapped the stuff. Set the needle between her teeth as she scooped out some of the salve and smoothed it across the wound, and the skin surrounding it, over the full length of his shoulder, in fact, but not the entirety of his arm. It smelled awful, but worked quickly, and soon what pain remained in his shoulder would be gone. "Let me know when you can't feel anything." Perhaps surprisingly, she was watching his face. "Hope she was worth it," she quipped quietly.