Unaware that I’m tearing you asunder
Currently in Saint Claire, it is a cloudy day. The temperature is 54 degrees Fahrenheit (12 degrees Celsius). The wind is currently coming in from the west at 8 mph. The barometric pressure reading is 30.03 and rising, and the relative humidity is 71 percent. The dewpoint is 45 degrees Fahrenheit (7 degrees Celsius.)
Currently the moon is in the waxing Crescent (Theurge) Moon phase (37% full).
It is currently 23:24 Pacific Time on Sat Mar 20 2010.
Harbor Park — The Meadow
One of the last bastions of green left in the city, mottled and withered grass and weeds covers the earth like a badly stained carpet, with the construction work turning what is left into just bare dirt. The vegetation seems marginally healthier the further it is from the river and much healthier towards the central area of the park around the fountain. Construction work is ongoing here: a raised earthen berm about five feet tall is being built all around the park perimeter, with two breaks each at the Bridge Street entrance and the First Street end. Wooden posts are being erected at regular intervals all along the earthen wall, while tasteful iron gates and fences are being added at the entrances. Overpowering the scent of living vegetation are the exhaust fumes from a busy street to the west and an unpleasant stench from the Columbia River to the east. From the street view or river view, the park is now isolated, as if it existed apart from the city. People in tall buildings have an excellent view of any goings-ons for now, though. In the center of the park, a small glade of six tall trees and a flower bed surrounds the fountain.
The murky waters of the Columbia River flow swiftly along the east side of the park. Bracketing the park to the west is First Street and the city of St. Claire.
Obvious exits:
Bridge Street Fountain First Street River
The park is almost empty save for a few kids flaunting curfew, the occasional bum on a bench, and Tim, who is idly moving from tree shadow to tree shadow. His sheepskin coat is far easier to spot than he’d like, but he does little else to draw attention to himself as he moves around the meadow. Sometimes he takes out a paperback and reads from it, and sometimes he just looks out over the new spring grass, thinking.
It might be startling when Shaozu materializes from the deep shadows of the park trees. Has he been there the whole time? Suddenly, it’s difficult to know. “Sonahari,” he says quietly, approaching Tim silently, wearing his jacket (over clothes this time).
[Shaozu]
A gentle-featured Chinese man in his late twenties, Shaozu looks like a scholar-poet who should be practicing calligraphy in a misty garden. Standing a couple of inches under six feet tall, he’s got a little chub on him, particularly around the belly region, but he carries it gracefully. He’s rather handsome, with a clear golden complexion, high cheekbones, and dark, thoughtful, beautifully shaped eyes. He wears oval-lensed glasses with steel wire frames, and his hair–classic thick, shining black hair–is twisted into a long glossy braid. The end of the braid thumps gently against his tailbone.
Dressed simply, he wears trousers and shirt made from a heavy soft cloth. The trousers are black, the shirt cream, and both have some matching embroidery on cuffs and seams. It’s rich, yet subtle, and the clothes don’t rustle like stiffer cloth would. His shoes are sleek and narrow, made from very supple leather with a very thin sole. They fit more like gloves than normal shoes, a flexible sheathing rather than a protective heavy garment.
Most obvious to Garou is the fact of his exquisite Silver Fang breeding, shining like a pearl in an inadequate setting.
Tim tenses and looks askance at Shaozu, remaining unnaturally still and poised until he places the voice and its source. His stance relaxes, and he blinks at the sight of his jacket. He shakes his head and laughs quietly. “That’s ah, some kind of fire you’re playing with there.”
“Water’s more my element,” Shaozu says with an oblique little smile. He slips out of the jacket and proffers it with a bow. “I return to you what is yours, honored elder.” He adds, “I didn’t take anything out of it. Even though I have no idea what you want with a bag of flour.”
“Flour’s explosive if you make it airborn,” Tim explains, giving the Kinsman a consternated look at ‘Honored elder’. “Sort of like Syd would be if she saw you wearing it.” He goes to reach for the jacket, but stops as something seems to occur to him. He puts his hand back into his sheepskin pocket. “Let me try something.” For a second he concentrates, his jaw set, and there’s an impression he’s reaching for something.
Shaozu murmurs, “I made sure that didn’t happen.” He waits for Tim to finish, still holding his bow, the jacket hanging neatly over his hands.
Tim stays like that for almost a minute, then lets out his breath in a rush and sighs. “Can’t do it yet.” Now he does take his jacket, and returns the bow with his own, hands together. “Namaskar.” He eyes Shaozu. “You’re not cold now, are you? Since I have this other one, and Zo would kill me if you got sick because,” he gestures vaguely, trying to encompass the situation of Shaozu having no jacket in the middle of the night while he retains two.
Shaozu grins, shaking his head. “I’m not wet,” he points out. “Anyway I trained in the mountains in Chongqing, it gets /really/ cold up there. But thank you for your concern. What were you trying to do?”
“Wow.” Tim looks away, maybe imagining a map in his mind. “I bet it *does* get cold up there.” He refocuses on Shaozu and says, “Ah, a Gift.” After a quick visual sweep of their immediate area to check for evesdroppers, he continues, “If I Dedicate something to myself, I can summon it from anywhere. I have to be on the same side of the Gauntlet as it, though. Supposedly physical distance doesn’t matter, but I’ll have to test that. Once I can do it.”
Shaozu looks impressed. “That’s a nice trick.” He too glances around, following Tim’s line of sight. “Is everything okay after the fight?” he asks quietly.
Tim nods, and speaks in an equally low voice. “Okay as it can be. We didn’t lose anyone, and we’ve got a good line on where they might be. I imagine we’ll be rolling out to knock on their door soon.” He flashes his teeth, a sign that he’s plenty eager for that to happen.
Shaozu sighs, rubs the back of his neck and looks out over the park. “It never ends, does it? All the fighting. I never thought about it much before, but now–I don’t know, it seems to be everywhere, all the the time.”
“Yeah. Never seems to,” Tim agrees. He grimaces and runs a hand over the old, faded embroidery on the back of his jacket. “I used to hope when I was younger that shit would get better, you know? Even though everyone was always talking about how the end was close.”
“How close is that, though?” Shaozu says, getting a distant look in his eyes. “What’s ‘close’ to the universe? We can’t know, as mortals. And since all is illusion, the end of the world can’t be that big a deal anyway.”
Tim glances up at Shaozu from his jacket, thinking over what he’s said. “It’s probably not a big deal if you believe in rebirth and the never-ending cycle for the whole universe,” he agrees. “A lot of us don’t, though. They’re convinced that after the End the world will be gone.” He shrugs that aside. “I don’t buy it, though. Everything gives rise to something new.” His eyes narrow briefly when he says that. “But maybe that’s the Hindu in me talking.”
Shaozu hitches a shrug, looking at Tim with a coy sideways glance. “Maybe, but I think so too. Nature doesn’t waste anything, so why /should/ the world end? Maybe we’ll just all come back as bugs in the rubble of civilzation, but life would still go on. The End is such a Western concept.”
“Tell me about it,” Tim says, and sighs. “Dad and mom would argue about it all the time when the moon was small. And then when I got old enough *I* argued about it too.” Despite the notion of a house full of contention, he remembers it with a small smile. “Being a bug doesn’t sound so bad,” he adds, but his voice turns distracted.
“Life would be simpler,” Shaozu says, then, concerned, “What is it?”
Tim shakes his head and looks at Shaozu. “Nothing. Brain cobwebs and old age.” He tosses his jacket over his shoulder. “So. You, me, and some calligraphy. What do I need to bring, and where am I bringing it?”
Shaozu rolls his eyes, expressively Californian. “Because you’re /so old/.” He shakes his head. “I’ve got stuff. You know, brushes, ink cakes, rice paper, all that jazz. But you’ll get to practice in a sand tray before I let you at the rice paper. It’s kind of fun, like drawing in sand at the beach.”
“I’ll be thirty this year.” Though some of Tim’s lament is put upon, not *all* of it is. The promise of drawing on sand brightens him, at least. “Oh, cool. So I’m not producing a lot of paper smeared with black ink.” He nods, finding that completely acceptable. “So, your place, or do you have a studio you like?”
Shaozu assures Tim, “It’d be depressing if you tried to just start on paper. You’ll have to make a mess to get the ink right, but you can at least know what character you’re mangling. We’ll go to my place. There isn’t really…” He pauses, thinking. “There isn’t a studio around here for this kind of thing. I think there is in Seattle, but.” He spreads his hands, evoking all the problems of Seattle.
Tim makes a face, and shudders. “Yeah. Seattle. Well, if there isn’t one around here, maybe you should open one.” He raises his eyebrows. “You’re at loose ends, right? And I bet the Asian Studies department at the campus wouldn’t mind.”
Shaozu winces a little, self-consciously. “Well…I’m not sure there’s a lot of demand for it. And, you know, Zosia. And all that. And… I don’t know. Things are kind of confusing.”
“Maybe not a lot,” Tim admits, but his fondness for the idea clearly remains. He gives Shaozu a puzzled frown for the rest. “What would she care if you got some digs going?”
Shaozu looks away. “I just don’t want to wave it in her face,” he says quietly. “If I start being too obviously independent, I think she’ll make me live in the house, and I don’t want that. I’ve gotten to like my independence. She might order me to breed with one of the guards or something.”
Tim stares at Shaozu in horror and anger in equal measure. He clears his throat and makes himself look at something else, anything else. “Right,” he says; contempt almost makes the word a curse. He spends a second mastering his temper.
Shaozu, not seeming to notice Tim’s flickering ember of Rage, goes on as if to himself. “She’s starting to be affected by my pure blood. I was engaged to her cousin, you knew that, right? It was arranged between our folks. It can’t be far from her mind, every time she looks at me she sees the children I could have…” He trails off. “I like Jana, but I don’t know if I can live like that again.”
Tim shuts his eyes and rubs at one temple. He takes a deep breath, lets it out, and finally says, “Are you seriously saying she’d make you have kids.” He’s focused entirely on keeping his voice low and steady, but it trembles with Rage anyways.
Shaozu finally looks back at Tim, frowning a little in honest inquiry. “Well, yeah. I mean. We’re Silver Fangs. I’m kin. I’m…very highly bred. The way they see it,” ‘they’ is obviously the Garou, here, “it’s her duty to get me to marry and start reproducing. My folks–my folks, they sacrified everything to get me raised right and engaged to a Fang of breeding. I’m the last in the Emperor’s line.” He says all this with a calm neutrality that is nearly perfectly flat. “I didn’t know anything else, before. I thought that /was/ everything.”
If ‘don’t freak out’ is a Hindu mantra, Tim is probably repeating it to himself as quickly as he can form the bija and focus on them. He doesn’t respond at first, just standing there with one hand to his head and his eyes closed. Presently he takes another slow breath, and says, “She might be okay with you having a city base for the Tribe. Or you could put it to her like that. Then it’s not independence,” he has to force the word out, “it’s just a business proposition.”
Shaozu now seems to realize that Tim is struggling with emotion, and looks alarmed. “Uh, well, yeah, maybe I could do that. Don’t worry about it, Sonahari. I’ll be fine.” He smiles reassuringly to demonstrate his fineness. “I thought you’d have had a few kids yourself by this point, actually.”
Tim accepts the excuse to think of something else when the reassurance doesn’t really take hold, and his anger trades places with regret. He grunts and opens his eyes again. “You and my parents both.” He manages a rueful smile. “Not easy to pull that off when you move around too much, or wind up with women who aren’t interested in kids. Not that I can blame them, since in my case they’re stuck having the baby *and* with the short end of the stick raising it.” It doesn’t come out bitter so much as resigned.
Shaozu hesitates. Things go unsaid behind his eyes. After a moment he looks away. “Ah, well, there you go,” he says with teasing rue. “Footloose and fancy free. I’m off, my friend. We’ll meet up /very/ soon and I’ll show you how to draw in sand.”
Tim watches Shaozu’s reaction, openly curious, but like the Kinsman he leaves it be. “Yeah. I’ll find you as soon as the full passes.” He turns out towards the park, moving to another tree. “Road rise to meet you,” he says over his shoulder.
