John Barrister

[John Barrister] It's another slow night out in Bronzeville. This shouldn't come as a surprise. Bronzeville, after all, is not a place one should wander after dark.

Still, Barrister keeps his store open until well into the night. Maybe he's banking on furtive midnight customers, the eccentric and the guilty. Maybe he just doesn't see a reason to hurry home. To appease Bruin, he's taken to leaving a jumbo-sized pet bed behind the counter, where the hound usually sleeps while his master goes through the inventory or pages through some book or other behind the counter.

It's the latter, currently. John Barrister is sitting hunkered on a stool, his heels propped on the middle rung, his arms folded atop the counter. A rather large, dusty hardback is open in front of him. He chomps a cigar between his premolars, occasionally rescuing it over to the ashtray before it hemorrhaged ash all over his book.

The night is cool and still. He can hear the crickets through the slatted windows high up in the rear of the store. A little rain would make it perfect, but the weather is clear.

[Maya Nevskaja] Does he have a bell in place over his door that chimes softly to signal her arrival? Or perhaps it will be Bruin that feels the en-cringing approach of something not quite human before the door is opened, and a woman enters the kinman's store. There is chiming anyway, her wrists are adorned by various small bracelets, they slide into one another noisily as Maya Nevskaja carefully fits the door back in place behind her.

The night is cool and still, but her skin feels hot with the crawl of Luna fresh upon it, the prickle of the animal caged in layers of skin and muscle and bone. She has left her jacket tied to her waist, her hair loose and stirred by the Chicago air. She can glimpse him through the shelving, the kinsman to her blood, she can smell him.

She had sought him out, listened to the tales of the wind, cross-legged on the roof of the Eagles' kinhouse. She wandered his store, and her hands slid over the shelves caressingly, sweeping along fine plumes of dust in their wake.

[John Barrister] The store is, frankly, tiny. From front door to back wall there is perhaps twenty, twenty-five feet; from wall to wall, fifteen or so. The counter bisects this store across the middle; behind it are more, higher shelves, crammed full of un-inventoried inventory.

As for the shelves in front: they are stocked with all manner of things, useful and useless. The organization is haphazard at best. Dust is settling over the items at the backs of the shelves. The already narrow aisles are cluttered with overflow from the shelves: lamps, books, candleholders, baskets, bags, a sony boombox circa 1992.

John doesn't look up at the bell jingling over the door. He reminds his late-night shopper: "I'm closing in about half an hour, or when I get to the end of this chapter. Whichever comes second." Behind the counter, though, Bruin awakens. Keenly attuned to rage as only an animal can be, the loose-jowled hound shakes his head, ears flopping, and then gets to his feet, tense.

[Maya Nevskaja] Her shadow seeps into his reading light, cast across him. A rather obscure artifact set down upon the counter. It's some old fashioned lamp, gold-trimmed and in dire need of rewiring, and then beside this is set a dog-eared copy of The Call of the Wild, the cover depicting a pack of snow-covered wolves, heads raised to the moon.

"How much for these?"

She has a heavy accent, the woman, barely past her teens if she is that, the hints of adolescence almost gone, a touch of something very un-American there in her deliberation on each word. Her face devoid of makeup, save for the heavy decoration of her eyes, leaves her bared, open for scrutinisation.

[John Barrister] Distractedly, John drops a hand atop Bruin's head to scratch the hound behind the ears as he stands. The gesture is familiar, affectionate, familial. When the woman speaks, Barrister looks up, startled: perhaps because it was a woman, perhaps because of the unexpected accent.

There are a lot of accents in Bronzeville. Not a lot of heavy Russian accents, though.

The store is lit in unpleasant fluorescent. It washes colors out, leaves people looking pallid and tired. John Barrister looks every day of his thirty-five years. In fact, he looks like he might've spent those years dug into a trench somewhere behind the Allied lines, 1911. Husky, weatherworn, heavy of shoulder and jaw, the backs of his hands are furry. Judging by his twelve-hour bristle, his hair, beard and chest hair would form one unbroken carpet if he didn't take a razor to it now and then. His tribal affiliation is faintly but recognizably proclaimed in his heavy bone structure, the deep-set eye orbits and sharp cheekbones, high nose and square jaw.

He looks at the book she holds up. "A dollar," he says, "but I have a better copy back here somewhere." He leaves the flap of the dustcover between the pages of his own book as he closes it. The title is Hunger, the author a single word: Chang. When he gets up off his stool he has to duck to avoid the fluorescent bar-light hung low over the counter to light the display inside: cheap jewelry on one side, guns on the other. As he wanders back into the tall shelves behind the counter, "Are you lost?"

[Maya Nevskaja] She is patting down her jeans, searching between the skin-tight layers of fabric for a crumpled fistful of notes she had collected since she'd come to the city. She really had no use for them in the wilds of the last Sept she called something close to, but not quite, home. Storm's Eye finds them, and begins to sort them, searching for the correct change when he asks -- "Are you lost?" -- and she smoothes out the bills against the counter, her eyes betraying the faint confusion. "This city is easy to lose yourself in, but no, I am not lost."

She watches him, searching for the book, turns her dark eyes on his dog, and receives the benefit of a soft growl for her troubles.

The Godi smiles, and continues to watch the animal until its owner reappears, her brown eyes shifting focus, the smile remaining, brightening her face from concentrated irritation.

She had never enjoyed the way she felt, the first night of her moon. At odds with the world, and all within it. "I was looking for you, as a matter of fact."

[John Barrister] JB is in the back of the store for a long time. She can hear him there, shuffling and thumping through his anonymous stacks of random items some down-on-his-luck junkie or other had unloaded on him; or perhaps some widow who could no longer afford to pay the bills and pawned her wedding ring for it. The idea of being a glorified junk collector had appealed to John Barrister, but the reality of it left him cold and sorry. To assuage his guilt he paid out more than he made selling some of the junk in here, and as a result his ledger was looking more red than black lately. But that was all right; this is, after all, only something he did on the side, in the end.

He reappears: blowing the dust off a hardcover copy, old but in good repair, the binding still tight. He's smiling as he runs his big hand over the leather cover. "Here. This is a second-edition printing. Not worth much, but it's nice for conversational purposes." He lays it down on the counter, and that's when she tells him: I was looking for you, as a matter of fact.

His hand hovers atop the book for a moment. Then his face closes up some and he sits down behind the counter, hunkering over it, his shirt tight across his shoulders. "Were you?" he asks, neutrally. "Is that why Bruin's up in a snit?"

[Maya Nevskaja] Maya Nevskaja would probably have made a wonderful Fury, to judge her by her history with men. To judge the Furies by an outdated stereotype, too. Certainly, she had foul beginnings, to be created in an act of revenge, to find her first change at the hands of a hormone-driven boy.

To be hung from a tree, and be called upon to prove herself worthy, again and again -- she takes up the book, and roves the cover with her eye, dances the pads of her blunt fingertips over the pages and lifts it to her face, inhaling the scent of the novel, the history, the imprint of a dozen other owners. John Barrister's face closes as quickly as the pages do, flipping closed.

"Da, but I am not here for a purpose, I do not," Maya hesitates, and the frustration leaks into her noble features, the crease of her brow, the pinch of her mouth. "Seek you, I only wished to know who you are." She pushes the money toward him, stays her hand until he will give her his gaze again. The smallest sliver of her moon, as irritant as an insect's bite, itching her very blood.

"Bruin should not be so quick to judge," She taps his book, her bracelets jingling, sliding against the fine bones of her wrist. "The cover is misleading, it can be changed."

[John Barrister] She does not, pause, seek him -- and in spite of himself Barrister feels a smile creeping onto his face, crinkling the corners of his eyes.

"I didn't mean -- " he falters, at a loss for a delicate way to put it, gives up, "I didn't think that for a second." His wariness has been broken, if only for a second, and it's hard to put it back in place. "It's just that usually when strange Garou have been looking for me, they need me to do something for them." He realizes this sounds not much different, and turns one palm skyward in a helpless sort of gesture. "A job, I mean."

She slides the money across the counter. He looks at it. There's a pause when neither of them move. It seems fairly ridiculous to him, to deal in amounts of single dollars. Still, he takes it, dutifully putting it away in an old cash register.

"You don't need a receipt, do you?" he asks, wryly, returning to his seat. "As for Bruin, I don't think it's prejudice." He gives the hound another rough pat, then points him back to his pet bed. "It's more like fear." He gets a small plastic bag out from behind the counter and bags the book for her. "I'm John Barrister. I guess you know that already."

[Maya Nevskaja] "If you did, I don't blame you." She offers, brushing aside strands of heavy hair, sifting through it with her fingers. Weaved into the ebony mane are small beads, and then more again adorn her neck, rest against the beating pulse point in her throat. In many ways she is awkward, her upbringing so disjointed, sheltered in its own way that the woman across from him finds herself at a loss to express herself as she would wish.

She was not taught to be a man's equal -- and then she became something beyond most she met. It had never left room for any kind of interaction on a social standing. "Hello John Barrister," Maya repeats, softly spoke and throatily pronounced, her tongue stumbling briefly before regaining itself on the form of the english names. Her eyes smile before her mouth, a pleasant, if sharp-toothed thing.

"I am Maya Nevskaja, and I am of your blood." Pause, the warmth of reciprocated wry humor. "But Bruin guessed that already."

[John Barrister] "Maya Nevskaja, huh?" John is not a man without humor, nor particularly one who insisted on hiding his humor behind a hard facade. He reacts well to the smile insinuated in her eyes before her mouth follows, and smiles back. "That doesn't sound much like a name of 'my blood'."

It might be noted he does, in fact, meet her eyes. His own are dark, shaded beneath thick eyebrows just this side of bushy and a deep brow ridge. They might be blue, but it's impossible to tell in this light.

[Maya Nevskaja] At that, her smile dims a little, though it returns with the mangled pronunciation an American offers a traditional Russian's name. "My mother was born to the Silver Fang courts of Russia." She explains, keeping hold of his eyes, taking possession of the bag with her newly purchased second edition, faintly worn copy of Call of the Wild.

"It was my father who carried the blood of great Fenris." There is a pause, a stretch of silence. "You wish to close your shop, I will not keep you."

[John Barrister] "But you carry your mother's name," Barrister notes. Then, perhaps realizing he was likely pressing on a bruise now, he grimaces. "I'm sorry. I don't mean to pry." He straightens, unfolding his arms, retrieving from beneath the counter and impressively old-fashioned ledgerbook. "It's all right. I have to balance the books anyway. Do you want to sit?" He indicates a chair in the corner, low-backed and high-seated, the sort designed for the bar at a traditional pub. There's a price tag on it, and a coating of dust that suggests no one's been even remotely interested in the past few weeks.

[Maya Nevskaja] Maya sets her purchase on the countertop, and passes toward the indicated chair, earning herself the watchful eyes of the hound, even from the far reaches of his pet bed. Her actions are musical, hidden beneath the long cut of her jeans are more adornments around her slender ankles, as much disguises as jewelry.

The spirit talker wraps her feet around the stool legs, and then talks into the relative stillness surrounding John Barrister's store at this late hour, with only the crickets chorusing their orchestra in the grasses outside. "I do not know the man who fathered me, I know only his name, and his reputation in deeds he has done."

The Godi's fingers absently search out the faint scars on her wrists, her thumb feeling the throb of her pulse, the puckered skin around the scarring.

"It didn't seem fitting to take the name of a stranger."

[John Barrister] It's an uncomfortable topic. The sort you typically didn't discuss with strangers. The sort that has the potential to make both the discusser and the discussee uncomfortable, and perhaps the former more than the latter. Under normal circumstances, John reflects, he would've cut the topic short. Then again, under normal circumstances, the topic would've never come up at all.

And maybe it's their shared blood: it makes them family, right? Or maybe it was her strange manner, removed, distant, eldritch, that made convention a non-matter. Whatever it is, John Barrister finds himself oddly not uncomfortable. He seems to keep half of his life's belongings under that counter, and now he pulls another one out: a large thermos, which he unscrews the reveal the humid no-smell of hot water. His other hand brings up a handful of single-pack teabags; nothing fancy, just bigelow's, in several flavors.

"A good reputation, I hope?" He puts the handful of teabags down in front of her in offering. For himself, tonight, he picks a cranberry-apple chamomile tea. Nothing that'll keep him awake.

Also, he finds a mug under the counter. She might wonder what else he kept down there. Dog biscuits, most likely. More books. Trail mix, perhaps. A gun. He remembers his cigar belatedly, and ferries it over to the ashtray just in time. He leaves it balanced on the edge, the scent of herb-cut tobacco making redolent the air of the cramped little store.

[Maya Nevskaja] Her eyes darken, but it is more the turn of phrase that applies than the actuality of the term, because Maya's eyes are already quite dark enough, so perhaps they show a flicker of the temper so well received as a virtue of Fenris. "It would depend a great deal on whom you asked, I think." She retorts, a breath expelled from her nose her sign of controlled anger, a tip of her head downward to study the proffered offerings of herbal teas.

The Garou chooses lemon tea, and watches with concentrated effort as he prepares it, shifting herself on the seat, covering her posterior in a light dusting of month-old stagnation. "What about you, John Barrister, what lies behind your name, since we are sharing ourselves."

[John Barrister] Maya is not a full-moon, or even anything close. The Crescent is known as the most placid of the moons, at least in the less warlike tribes. Even so, a show of anger, no matter how well controlled, would be enough to pale a human. It's certainly enough to raise Bruin's head and bring a low growl to his throat.

The big man across the counter, however, simply shifts his seat. His stool creaks under him. Seen from the back, he would be vaguely ridiculous: a huge bear of a man balanced on a small, creaky stool -- the very definition of top-heavy. However, there's a certain rough dignity to his actions. An unflappability, as it were, to his bearing. His hands are perfectly steady as he fills first her mug, then the cap/cup of his own thermos.

"Nothing so interesting here," he replies, sharing a small smile along with his hot water out of the thermos. He rips a satchet open and drops the teabag in, pinning the paper tab under the thermos cup. "My paternal grandfather was English. I suppose one of my more illustrious ancestors was a barrister; hence the name. At least he wasn't a smith. Then I'd be another John Smith out of millions." He makes a wry twist of his mouth, raising the cup to sip gingerly at the piping hot tea. "Anyway, I suppose if you traced back far enough, my father's side of the family descends from the Anglo-Saxons. My mother's ancestry is Norweigian. We haven't had a Garou in the family for years." His brow furrows in thought. "I think maybe a cousin of one of my great-grandfathers was a Forseti."

[Maya Nevskaja] Maya notices many things, and among the most fascinating to the Godi's eye is the wedding ring that flashes dimly as he offers over her mug. She accepts it, gingerly cupping the steaming mug against one jean-clad thigh as the kinsman speaks of his ancestors.

The tea scalds her throat, warms her belly and leaves her with an overheated system, her cheeks flagging pink as she sips, as silent as another who bore the name as his own. When he finishes, she considers his words, and her wrists rattle as she lifts her mug to her mouth, leaving a trace of tea behind, glistening her lips to be compressed away by the frown that forms, gathers weight in tiny lines. "What of your wife?" Her eyes find the ring again, a focal point.

[John Barrister] Just like that the caution is back in his eyes. Or perhaps not caution, but a shuttering away. Involuntarily, his thumb rubs over the underside of the ring, which rests snugly at the base of his left ringfinger. There was some superstition about that, though John was never quite clear about it; something about the blood vessel there running straight back to the heart, which never really made sense to him. Didn't all blood vessels run back to the heart? Despite that, he wears his ring there anyway, and has for the last eight and a half years without fail, night and day, even when he showers. The only times he's taken it off have been to wash blood off, and in those times he's seen that his hand has developed a tan line at the precise circle of the ring -- a wedding band engraved into his very skin.

He's left the question hanging for a long time. Her eyes find the ring as a focal point. He has none; his eyes wander restlessly, touching here and there on her face, the many bangles she wears about her wrists. When he'd first looked at her there'd been an instant, a brief flicker, in which his eyes widened. She must be used to the reaction -- mostly from men, sometimes from women, and sometimes from children. She stands out: her Slavic cheekbones, her fierce and noble profile. She is beautiful, in an unusual way, and makes no attempt to make herself usual. Still, at the moment, he doesn't like to look at her. Eventually he folds his hands, turning the ring around and around the base of his finger as he speaks.

"She died last fall. Emily-Anne Thompson. She was a Skald, from Nebraska. I'm sorry, I don't remember her Garou name. I think she was -- Adren?"

[Maya Nevskaja] It was like admiring a wild stray. It was unusual, and beckoned the eye with its obscurity in such a familiar setting, Maya Nevskaja was appealing in so much as she was bathed in mystery. But there was that hint, that flare of something darker, repulsive. Too primal and overwhelming to be ignored, even in spite of the smoothness of her skin, the flawless shape of her cheekbones, her beauty was magnified because it was not obvious, it was a gem that caught the light occasionally, glimmered and shone with a smile, but died like morning dew beneath the rising sun when it chose to.

She was moulded for her moon.

Finely crafted, it was a shame she had not known her father, because the chances were high that many of her ways stemmed from a parent who cared more for his weaponry that a girlchild who chanced to breed true. She waits for his words to find expression -- Storm's Eye had great patience when she chose to, when it was required of her -- and when they do her smile is waning, empathizing.

"I will remember her name, I will keep the memory of Emily-Anne Thompson, Adren Skald from Nebraska." Now it is her turn to mangle the names of things, in her Russian tongue.

[John Barrister] This earns her another smile. He gives his ring a last turn and leaves it be, opening the heavy ledger and taking a pen from his breast pocket. Barrister was the sort of man that always wore a buttondown shirt; he was also the sort of man who wore them often enough to be able to wear them casually. His shirt is plain and rumpled, the sleeves currently rolled down, but unbuttoned and showing the creases of the many times he's pushed them up past the elbow over the day.

"Truth be told, I didn't know her as well as I should have. We didn't see each other very often, all the years we were married. I guess that's not unusual, being what we are." Another object produces itself from beneath the counter: a big accountant's calculator -- nothing but the simplest functions, the keypad big, the numbering huge. "Still, it's strange. The house isn't any more empty now than it was before, when she was away. But it feels different.

"What about you?" He slips the cap off the pen with his thumb. It's an expensive piece, heavy and well-crafted, liquid ink from a fine nib. It, and the subtle quality of his clothes -- casual and far from new though they may be -- proclaimed access to a means well beyond the income of your average Bronzeville denizen. It seems that while John Barrister might do business here, he was not truly of this world. "Mated yet?"

[Maya Nevskaja] "Knowledge of time changes perspective," She draws out from beneath the hem of her camisole her tiny hourglass, the glass very warm from being kept in the hollow between her breasts. She lowers her face to study it, to turn it between her fingers, fingers that were rougher than many of the women John likely saw day to day on the streets of Chicago.

Maya's hands sifted dirt, cut birds and smelled faintly of charred offerings, something cooked, something bled to appease a spirit, to coax a favor. She was not a delicate flower, Storm's Eye, no matter what first impressions told. Mated yet, he asks and she gives a huff of laughter, her eyes lifting, connecting, lingering.

"I spend too much time in conversation with spirits, and not enough with kinfolk." She stirs, tightens her hold on her mug as he crunches numbers with his big hands. A rueful, teeth-baring smile. "It was my mother's heartbreak that I was born beneath a crescent moon."

[John Barrister] "It's usually a mother's heartbreak that her child is born Garou at all, isn't it?" His fingers are not very dextrous on the calculator, and from that alone she can tell he hasn't been at this shopkeeping business for long. He pauses often to look at what he's doing and make sure he's hitting the right keys. "No matter what the party line is, I think it's generally against maternal instinct to wish the Good Death for a child." Lift, connect, smile. Then he looks back at his calculator just in time to save himself an extra zero or a misplaced decimal. "Even Achilles' mother begged him not to go to Troy."

He finishes a page on the ledger and, in careful block print, writes the date and sum at the bottom. Then he turns it over, the big page making a sound not unlike ripping cloth as it leaves over, and starts anew.

[Maya Nevskaja] She has finished her tea down to the dregs, and now merely cradles it for the sake of having something to curl her fingers around, soaking up the lingering warmth. "I think it depends on the mother, and greatly on why her child is born to begin with." Maya supplies with quiet brevity, her dark eyes no longer searching for the kinman's at all, instead they are roving, sliding from object to object as though she would find purpose in something in the small space.

"For some it is a relief when their child leaves them, more so if the choice is removed from their hands. They only," Again the break in the flow of her words, frustration as she loses the word she seeks. "They have only guilt, but heartbreak, Net."

[John Barrister] For this, John has nothing to say. But there's a penetrating sort of understanding in his eyes; as if he knows by choice rather than ignorance that this is one topic too harsh to broach here and now.

So there's only that. A long regard, and then the quiet clacking of the calculator as Barrister finishes up his accounting for the night. Below the last line of annotations -- item sold and price in a strong block hand, the writing cramped into the narrow lines of the ledger in a way that suggests Barrister's native handwriting tended toward the generous -- he draws a line in a smooth freehand slash. Beside that, he writes the date.

Then he caps the pen and slips it back into his pocket. Draining his tea as well, he drops the teabag into the trash and whistles Bruin out of his sleep. Turning back to Maya, "I'm going to close up and go home. Do you need a ride?"

[Maya Nevskaja] She finds his regard, she receives it with her dark, dramatized eyes, with lashes that seem too feminine and delicate for such a thing as her, because she was a thing, leashed within a woman's body. A monster, yes.

But there were as varying types of monsters in the world as there were men.

"Ne-No," She corrects, strains to keep to english and stands, slides from the stool with a wash of dust that covers the back of her jeans, her shirt, tiny specks following in the raven-haired Godi's wake, as she reclaims her book, the plastic bag rustling in her hands. "Spaseebo, but my moon is out, I will walk with her," With her, she gestures, meaning Luna, meaning the night.

Storm's Eye smiles her bright, tooth-filled smile, sharp and pointed and radiant for that moment. "But I will come back, another time."

[John Barrister] "I'll be here," Barrister says, smiling a little because it seemed somehow funny to him to say such a thing in all seriousness. And, as he stands, his height and breadth alone marking him as one of Fenris' even if the cut of his jaw, the tone of his voice and the very scent of him did not, he adds, "It was good to meet you, Maya." He means it; his sincerity is a thing rare in this day and age.