Cristo & Mari - A heart of stone, egg shell for bones, they lead you to be lost.
Who: Mari and Cristo
When: post this
Where: The Market -> Jack's basement
Rating & Warnings: PG-13 for blood, amputation, cannibalism, creeper and desperation.
All in all, an average Saturday for Ginga and Green's casts.
He was less cautious now. The more he was out in the city, the squalor of it, the noise and the constant drain of people from north to south, east to west, the more he realized that he was nearly invisible in their midst. Besides that, 'Lord Sabreme' was gone. He was ragged now. His beard, his unevenly cropped hair, the stained clothes he wore, these things were no longer a disguise. They were him. He no longer had to wear a hood or slip among the shadows of storefronts and alleyways. He could walk in the open without fear.
He walked the market path now. It was a daily ritual; he would walk the path and play a game with himself. Every scent he caught had to be isolated, named. He had to notice as much as he could about his surroundings. The man who tended one of the butcher's stalls was dying; he smelled of decay and of ale. A woman that stumbled into him was pregnant. And there were the other smells - spices, meats, herbs, cloth, wood. Slowly Cristofolo had begun to recognize them all. Places, that was harder, but he was getting the hang of it. The Hour's neophytes had a certain smell to them, as did priests, sailors from Tartessos, guards from the Hold. It was harder to catch here in the market, where smells from everything would assault even a human nose, but he still caught whiffs here and there. And one, one in particular, made him smile and walk faster. The back of her head bobbed through the rest of the crowd as she walked. Almost obscene, for a girl to have hair so short.
Cristofolo caught her by the back of the shirt and hauled her up against him. "Two fingers, yes?" he crooned in her ear.
Mari immediately pulled forwards, trying to get away from the person who'd grabbed her, only to slump reluctantly against Cristofolo at the sound of his voice. "Two fingers."
Why had she suggested this? Loneliness, that was the foremost. It felt like nobody understood her these days; her friends were all angry with her and she was angry with everyone else. She spent most of her time wanting to cry or exhausting herself until apathy overcame her. Nobody had faith in her; the only people to treat her as though she wasn't just a collection of bad decisions to be re-educated were Silence and Magister Jones. "Bad place" was not an adequate term for how alone, how upset she felt.
She'd had one conversation with Cristofolo that'd been civil, but until he'd brought up trying to eat her again it'd been...nice. Sort of. And he'd changed too. It'd be nice to speak to someone who hadn't always been an Other; it'd be just as nice to have someone as strong as a werewolf on her side. "I can't do it here," she muttered. Where was he planning to take her?
He laughed, low and throaty. "You think I would do that here? Stupid girl." He kept his grip on her shirt and started walking uphill. Inanna's was close, and beside it was the Fibra house. It'd been boarded up recently; the family had either fallen to hard times or left, Cristofolo didn't know which. Either way, the basement was as good a place as any to feed from the girl. For how many years had Jack hidden what he was down in that room?
Cristofolo glanced down at the girl's hands, yellow eyes narrowing. He snatched one of them and lifted it up near his face to examine it critically. "There is hardly any meat on these," he objected, rubbing the meat of her fingers between two of his. "I will starve with you."
Mari hopped along, dragged by her shirt. "I don't know what you'd do," she hissed under her breath, obvious annoyance beginning to show on her face. Wiggling the fingers Cristofolo held, she twisted to frown at him. "Do you only eat," she paused as someone pushed past them, waiting so they wouldn't over hear, "flesh, or can you eat animals?" She could always cook him a nice filling stew to go with her fingers. Could she even spare anything else?
"Where are we even going?" The further they got to the edge of the markets, the more her stomach twisted with worry. What if he took her somewhere nobody would find her and killed her? Her heart began to thud even faster below her skin, the blood powering through her ears. Don't throw up, she told herself. Or at least try to get it on him.
He dropped her hand with a twitch of his mouth. "Anyone can eat animals," Cristofolo replied vaguely. He'd hunted deer regularly when he'd lived in the forest, but more for the rush of the hunt than the actual meat he took from them. He could eat a hundred deer and still not feel sated. But one human - that filled him for days.
He kept his eyes on the crowd as they walked, her shirt balled in his fist. No one seemed to notice. It was almost funny. "A place I know. You will see." The front of the house was boarded up, but there was a door to the cellar around the back, and that was where Cristofolo led them. He unlocked the chain that bound the doors and opened them, gesturing for Mari to go inside.
Mari hesitated, then stepped down into the dark cellar, rubbing her hand now it was freed. It was, at least, a relief from the wind outside. Swallowing, she looked around the room and tried to hide her fear. Would he take advantage of her offer and kill her? How much would it hurt? Of course, it wouldn't hurt for long but...being able to get rid of pain didn't stop her from balking at it.
"I could cook you something," she suggested, "to go with the fingers." Arms close to her side she watched Cristofolo carefully, her eyes skimming over his face. Would he reject the offer?
"I don't like cooked things." He pulled the doors shut behind him and crossed the room, pausing to toe at a half buried bone. "Sit down," he said, glancing up to her then. She looked nervous. Good. It was about time she showed fear for him. It was much harder, he expected, to try to talk down to a murderer when you were locked in a basement with him. The thought made him smile.
He took a small hunting knife from his belt and pointed at her with it. "Sit."
Mari thought for a moment about saying 'no' and running. But Cristofolo blocked off the door. She couldn't hope to get past him- and she'd asked for this. She did want him to be her friend. It'd be nice to have an ally in him, rather than someone who kept threatening to eat her.
She pushed a hand through her hair, so it stood on end. Then she sat down, stared at her fingers, then wiggled them. Goodbye, she told them mentally. You've served me well. I'll think of you.
God, now she was even treating replaceable parts like dying friends. Was she going to keep herself permanently in mourning? Mari laughed suddenly, but it choked off into a sob; she sniffed and cut it off. "Alright."
His eyebrows rose at the noises she made. Late to be having second thoughts, wasn't it? All in all, it was a satisfying experience to see her so cowed. "Hand against the dirt." He'd take the two fattest... thumb and index, he decided, from the left hand. Really, he thought indignantly, he was doing her a kindness. If she couldn't regenerate as quickly as she said, well, he'd still only crippled her left hand rather than her right.
He crouched down in front of her and set the knife beside him so he could pull off his gloves. His claws were much longer now, cracked and yellowing. He took her hand in one of his and placed it flat, palm-down, against the dirt floor of the cellar. He took up the knife in his other hand. "Stay still," he warned, his voice almost sing-song. He could get them free in one cut, maybe two. If she'd been contrary he'd planned on sawing, but there was no need for that now. He took the knife, set it against her thumb, and then forced the blade downward.
Mari had had the foresight to lift her shirt and bite down on it. Now, as the blade cut into her bone she found herself screaming into it, glad of how it muffled her. Tears pricking her eyes, the urge to vomit and faint simultaneously making themselves known to her, it was pain that kept her hanging on, however slightly.
As her thumb and forefinger were finally removed, she gasped with pain. Already though, as if in defence against the pain, she could feel the cut disappearing.
The new bone came first, growing out of the old. It stretched like a strangely coloured twig, tapping sickeningly against the ground as she stretched out her fingers to give it more space to grow. Tendons stretched out, veins wrapped themselves around it, and then there came muscle and the skin, growing taught over her new finger and thumb.
The process took only a few seconds. Mari lifted them to her eyes and nearly retched. The whorls on her fingertips, her fingerprints, they'd disappeared. What covered the pad of her thumb and index finger was unnaturally smooth skin. Transfixed, she wriggled her fingers and stared wonderingly at them. Just as anything human about her was slowly being erased, so was her identity. It was an odd mix of terrifying and liberating.
He had her thumb between his teeth before he noticed her regeneration; his eyetooth pierced it, dribbling blood over his lip and down his chin, but he didn't notice, too transfixed by the sight of new bone sprouting from the old. Would his own limbs do such a thing if they were hacked off? He'd never asked Jack. He'd never asked Jack far too many things. Slowly, he tore some of the meat from her thumb and swallowed it, tongue sweeping out to catch the blood on his lips.
"I hope your Magus knows what he's doing," he mumbled around the finger, eyes still on Mari's newly regrown hand.
God only knew what the Magus thought. Mari rubbed the smooth new flesh with her right thumb, half amazed and half simply not wanting to look at Cristofolo eating her.
Mari didn't notice the grim smile that stretched over her features. Replacing fingers as...complicated, impossible. There was an old Irish folktale about something like this, wasn't there? Yes, one from the days of the Tuatha dé Danann. Miach, the healer, replaced a hand. Whatever had happened to him? She'd have to find out.
But this meant she could heal more complicated things than cuts and gashes. Mari curled her fingers into a fist, then stretched them out again. This would come in handy. "Amazing, isn't it?"
Cristofolo grunted in agreement, then pointed to her with the stump of her finger. "Next time, you give me a hand. I could get more meat from a bird than from these." It didn't stop him from stripping both the thumb and index finger down to the bone in minutes, teeth catching and pulling free every last string of muscle. When he was done he tossed the bones into the dirt.
After a moment's consideration, watching her, he smirked. "I still wonder... a snapped neck, is it harder than a finger?" He reached out to touch the side of her throat with the tip of a claw. "Maybe you are immortal now, little girl."
Forcing herself not to shrink back, Mari met his eyes, reaching up to touch his claw with her newly smoothed down fingertip. If it didn't kill her outright, a snapped neck should be fine to heal. If. "It'll be better if you don't. Meat for longer."
An entire hand. It would be easier to give him food from somewhere else. Thoughtfully, she pinched her left arm with her right. There was more there than there was on the hand, wasn't there? That'd do.
Hopefully, she looked up at him again. "We're friends now, though?"
He let his hand drop, one eyebrow raising. "Friends?" Was she serious? That was hope in her expression, nothing sly, nothing joking. She meant the question. Cristofolo's lips spread into a disbelieving grin. "Do you often make friends this way? Let them eat parts of you?" He laughed and took his gloves from the dirt, slapping them against his thigh to get the dirt off before he pulled them back on.
"Do you even know what a friend is?" he asked when he'd finished, glancing back down to her, his smile crooked. "No. I'm not your friend. You're useful to me. That's all."
Mari picked up the bones of her fingers, turning them over in her hands and frowning. Two people useful to each other, wasn't that essentially what friendship was?
Slipping them into a pocket, she put her chin against her chest, not sure what to say now. At least being useful to him meant he wouldn't kill her. "If I do this again, if I offer you," she paused briefly, "more next time. Will you do me a favour?"
He flexed his hands when his gloves, satisfied when the tips held against his claws. "Hm?" He looked back down to Mari. "That depends on what it is." The meat of her fingers had done little to fill him, but he supposed it would keep him calm enough for the next day or two. Living in Inanna's was a kind of torture; everywhere around him were humans, loud, drunk, sweating, rutting. It took more restraint than he'd ever admit to Shiri to not break out of his room for a kill.
Mari licked her lips. This would be good for Silence and Jai. "To be determined," she suggested, her voice quiet. Cristofolo might even grow to view her as a friend on his terms and if not, then he wouldn't try again to kill her for a while, at least. What did losing a finger matter when she could regrow them?
For the second time in their short meeting, Mari wanted to cry. She sniffed again, her throat tightened, and she rubbed her eyes, brushing away a hint of tears. "We'll work it out in the future."
gurl you crazy
Cristofolo grunted and glanced back to the cellar doors. He'd gotten what he'd come for; there was no reason to linger. "You know how to contact me. When you decide what you want..." He shrugged. Perhaps it would even be something sensible; someone she wanted frightened, or hurt, or killed. He could do that. He could do that gladly.
"Pull the lock shut when you leave," he told her over his shoulder as he made for the doors, squinting against the sudden brightness of the sunlight that poured into the cellar when he pushed them open. After a quick sniff, a quick glance around, Cristofolo climbed the steps and slipped around the alley, back into the steady flow of humans.
When: post this
Where: The Market -> Jack's basement
Rating & Warnings: PG-13 for blood, amputation, cannibalism, creeper and desperation.
All in all, an average Saturday for Ginga and Green's casts.
He was less cautious now. The more he was out in the city, the squalor of it, the noise and the constant drain of people from north to south, east to west, the more he realized that he was nearly invisible in their midst. Besides that, 'Lord Sabreme' was gone. He was ragged now. His beard, his unevenly cropped hair, the stained clothes he wore, these things were no longer a disguise. They were him. He no longer had to wear a hood or slip among the shadows of storefronts and alleyways. He could walk in the open without fear.
He walked the market path now. It was a daily ritual; he would walk the path and play a game with himself. Every scent he caught had to be isolated, named. He had to notice as much as he could about his surroundings. The man who tended one of the butcher's stalls was dying; he smelled of decay and of ale. A woman that stumbled into him was pregnant. And there were the other smells - spices, meats, herbs, cloth, wood. Slowly Cristofolo had begun to recognize them all. Places, that was harder, but he was getting the hang of it. The Hour's neophytes had a certain smell to them, as did priests, sailors from Tartessos, guards from the Hold. It was harder to catch here in the market, where smells from everything would assault even a human nose, but he still caught whiffs here and there. And one, one in particular, made him smile and walk faster. The back of her head bobbed through the rest of the crowd as she walked. Almost obscene, for a girl to have hair so short.
Cristofolo caught her by the back of the shirt and hauled her up against him. "Two fingers, yes?" he crooned in her ear.
Mari immediately pulled forwards, trying to get away from the person who'd grabbed her, only to slump reluctantly against Cristofolo at the sound of his voice. "Two fingers."
Why had she suggested this? Loneliness, that was the foremost. It felt like nobody understood her these days; her friends were all angry with her and she was angry with everyone else. She spent most of her time wanting to cry or exhausting herself until apathy overcame her. Nobody had faith in her; the only people to treat her as though she wasn't just a collection of bad decisions to be re-educated were Silence and Magister Jones. "Bad place" was not an adequate term for how alone, how upset she felt.
She'd had one conversation with Cristofolo that'd been civil, but until he'd brought up trying to eat her again it'd been...nice. Sort of. And he'd changed too. It'd be nice to speak to someone who hadn't always been an Other; it'd be just as nice to have someone as strong as a werewolf on her side. "I can't do it here," she muttered. Where was he planning to take her?
He laughed, low and throaty. "You think I would do that here? Stupid girl." He kept his grip on her shirt and started walking uphill. Inanna's was close, and beside it was the Fibra house. It'd been boarded up recently; the family had either fallen to hard times or left, Cristofolo didn't know which. Either way, the basement was as good a place as any to feed from the girl. For how many years had Jack hidden what he was down in that room?
Cristofolo glanced down at the girl's hands, yellow eyes narrowing. He snatched one of them and lifted it up near his face to examine it critically. "There is hardly any meat on these," he objected, rubbing the meat of her fingers between two of his. "I will starve with you."
Mari hopped along, dragged by her shirt. "I don't know what you'd do," she hissed under her breath, obvious annoyance beginning to show on her face. Wiggling the fingers Cristofolo held, she twisted to frown at him. "Do you only eat," she paused as someone pushed past them, waiting so they wouldn't over hear, "flesh, or can you eat animals?" She could always cook him a nice filling stew to go with her fingers. Could she even spare anything else?
"Where are we even going?" The further they got to the edge of the markets, the more her stomach twisted with worry. What if he took her somewhere nobody would find her and killed her? Her heart began to thud even faster below her skin, the blood powering through her ears. Don't throw up, she told herself. Or at least try to get it on him.
He dropped her hand with a twitch of his mouth. "Anyone can eat animals," Cristofolo replied vaguely. He'd hunted deer regularly when he'd lived in the forest, but more for the rush of the hunt than the actual meat he took from them. He could eat a hundred deer and still not feel sated. But one human - that filled him for days.
He kept his eyes on the crowd as they walked, her shirt balled in his fist. No one seemed to notice. It was almost funny. "A place I know. You will see." The front of the house was boarded up, but there was a door to the cellar around the back, and that was where Cristofolo led them. He unlocked the chain that bound the doors and opened them, gesturing for Mari to go inside.
Mari hesitated, then stepped down into the dark cellar, rubbing her hand now it was freed. It was, at least, a relief from the wind outside. Swallowing, she looked around the room and tried to hide her fear. Would he take advantage of her offer and kill her? How much would it hurt? Of course, it wouldn't hurt for long but...being able to get rid of pain didn't stop her from balking at it.
"I could cook you something," she suggested, "to go with the fingers." Arms close to her side she watched Cristofolo carefully, her eyes skimming over his face. Would he reject the offer?
"I don't like cooked things." He pulled the doors shut behind him and crossed the room, pausing to toe at a half buried bone. "Sit down," he said, glancing up to her then. She looked nervous. Good. It was about time she showed fear for him. It was much harder, he expected, to try to talk down to a murderer when you were locked in a basement with him. The thought made him smile.
He took a small hunting knife from his belt and pointed at her with it. "Sit."
Mari thought for a moment about saying 'no' and running. But Cristofolo blocked off the door. She couldn't hope to get past him- and she'd asked for this. She did want him to be her friend. It'd be nice to have an ally in him, rather than someone who kept threatening to eat her.
She pushed a hand through her hair, so it stood on end. Then she sat down, stared at her fingers, then wiggled them. Goodbye, she told them mentally. You've served me well. I'll think of you.
God, now she was even treating replaceable parts like dying friends. Was she going to keep herself permanently in mourning? Mari laughed suddenly, but it choked off into a sob; she sniffed and cut it off. "Alright."
His eyebrows rose at the noises she made. Late to be having second thoughts, wasn't it? All in all, it was a satisfying experience to see her so cowed. "Hand against the dirt." He'd take the two fattest... thumb and index, he decided, from the left hand. Really, he thought indignantly, he was doing her a kindness. If she couldn't regenerate as quickly as she said, well, he'd still only crippled her left hand rather than her right.
He crouched down in front of her and set the knife beside him so he could pull off his gloves. His claws were much longer now, cracked and yellowing. He took her hand in one of his and placed it flat, palm-down, against the dirt floor of the cellar. He took up the knife in his other hand. "Stay still," he warned, his voice almost sing-song. He could get them free in one cut, maybe two. If she'd been contrary he'd planned on sawing, but there was no need for that now. He took the knife, set it against her thumb, and then forced the blade downward.
Mari had had the foresight to lift her shirt and bite down on it. Now, as the blade cut into her bone she found herself screaming into it, glad of how it muffled her. Tears pricking her eyes, the urge to vomit and faint simultaneously making themselves known to her, it was pain that kept her hanging on, however slightly.
As her thumb and forefinger were finally removed, she gasped with pain. Already though, as if in defence against the pain, she could feel the cut disappearing.
The new bone came first, growing out of the old. It stretched like a strangely coloured twig, tapping sickeningly against the ground as she stretched out her fingers to give it more space to grow. Tendons stretched out, veins wrapped themselves around it, and then there came muscle and the skin, growing taught over her new finger and thumb.
The process took only a few seconds. Mari lifted them to her eyes and nearly retched. The whorls on her fingertips, her fingerprints, they'd disappeared. What covered the pad of her thumb and index finger was unnaturally smooth skin. Transfixed, she wriggled her fingers and stared wonderingly at them. Just as anything human about her was slowly being erased, so was her identity. It was an odd mix of terrifying and liberating.
He had her thumb between his teeth before he noticed her regeneration; his eyetooth pierced it, dribbling blood over his lip and down his chin, but he didn't notice, too transfixed by the sight of new bone sprouting from the old. Would his own limbs do such a thing if they were hacked off? He'd never asked Jack. He'd never asked Jack far too many things. Slowly, he tore some of the meat from her thumb and swallowed it, tongue sweeping out to catch the blood on his lips.
"I hope your Magus knows what he's doing," he mumbled around the finger, eyes still on Mari's newly regrown hand.
God only knew what the Magus thought. Mari rubbed the smooth new flesh with her right thumb, half amazed and half simply not wanting to look at Cristofolo eating her.
Mari didn't notice the grim smile that stretched over her features. Replacing fingers as...complicated, impossible. There was an old Irish folktale about something like this, wasn't there? Yes, one from the days of the Tuatha dé Danann. Miach, the healer, replaced a hand. Whatever had happened to him? She'd have to find out.
But this meant she could heal more complicated things than cuts and gashes. Mari curled her fingers into a fist, then stretched them out again. This would come in handy. "Amazing, isn't it?"
Cristofolo grunted in agreement, then pointed to her with the stump of her finger. "Next time, you give me a hand. I could get more meat from a bird than from these." It didn't stop him from stripping both the thumb and index finger down to the bone in minutes, teeth catching and pulling free every last string of muscle. When he was done he tossed the bones into the dirt.
After a moment's consideration, watching her, he smirked. "I still wonder... a snapped neck, is it harder than a finger?" He reached out to touch the side of her throat with the tip of a claw. "Maybe you are immortal now, little girl."
Forcing herself not to shrink back, Mari met his eyes, reaching up to touch his claw with her newly smoothed down fingertip. If it didn't kill her outright, a snapped neck should be fine to heal. If. "It'll be better if you don't. Meat for longer."
An entire hand. It would be easier to give him food from somewhere else. Thoughtfully, she pinched her left arm with her right. There was more there than there was on the hand, wasn't there? That'd do.
Hopefully, she looked up at him again. "We're friends now, though?"
He let his hand drop, one eyebrow raising. "Friends?" Was she serious? That was hope in her expression, nothing sly, nothing joking. She meant the question. Cristofolo's lips spread into a disbelieving grin. "Do you often make friends this way? Let them eat parts of you?" He laughed and took his gloves from the dirt, slapping them against his thigh to get the dirt off before he pulled them back on.
"Do you even know what a friend is?" he asked when he'd finished, glancing back down to her, his smile crooked. "No. I'm not your friend. You're useful to me. That's all."
Mari picked up the bones of her fingers, turning them over in her hands and frowning. Two people useful to each other, wasn't that essentially what friendship was?
Slipping them into a pocket, she put her chin against her chest, not sure what to say now. At least being useful to him meant he wouldn't kill her. "If I do this again, if I offer you," she paused briefly, "more next time. Will you do me a favour?"
He flexed his hands when his gloves, satisfied when the tips held against his claws. "Hm?" He looked back down to Mari. "That depends on what it is." The meat of her fingers had done little to fill him, but he supposed it would keep him calm enough for the next day or two. Living in Inanna's was a kind of torture; everywhere around him were humans, loud, drunk, sweating, rutting. It took more restraint than he'd ever admit to Shiri to not break out of his room for a kill.
Mari licked her lips. This would be good for Silence and Jai. "To be determined," she suggested, her voice quiet. Cristofolo might even grow to view her as a friend on his terms and if not, then he wouldn't try again to kill her for a while, at least. What did losing a finger matter when she could regrow them?
For the second time in their short meeting, Mari wanted to cry. She sniffed again, her throat tightened, and she rubbed her eyes, brushing away a hint of tears. "We'll work it out in the future."
gurl you crazy
Cristofolo grunted and glanced back to the cellar doors. He'd gotten what he'd come for; there was no reason to linger. "You know how to contact me. When you decide what you want..." He shrugged. Perhaps it would even be something sensible; someone she wanted frightened, or hurt, or killed. He could do that. He could do that gladly.
"Pull the lock shut when you leave," he told her over his shoulder as he made for the doors, squinting against the sudden brightness of the sunlight that poured into the cellar when he pushed them open. After a quick sniff, a quick glance around, Cristofolo climbed the steps and slipped around the alley, back into the steady flow of humans.