Rhiannon Lee (rhiannon_lee) wrote in birthrightrpg, @ 2020-09-06 16:35:00 |
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Entry tags: | npc, rhiannon lee |
Sinking Like a Stone
Who: Rhiannon and NPC Rob Corrigan (Written by Stargazer)
What: Phone Call
When: After Sunset (During Full Moon)
Where: Searchlight and Chicago
Ratings: Language
Rhiannon sat cross-legged on the hood of her car. The sky was blue-purple with a few stars and the remains of a full moon. Quiet settled over Indian Street as families collapsed onto couches to watch television or shuffled off to bed. There were insects buzzing around the nearest streetlamp. She watched them swoop and collide with it, their tiny bodies fluttering and clicking.
The phone waited in her hand. She thumbed through her contacts list until she found the right name: Rob.
Rhiannon drank from the neck of a bottle and let the alcohol burn her throat. Wiping her mouth on her wrist, she thumbed the call icon and waited.
When his phone sounded, Rob had just putting the garbage cans out on the curb. The night was cooler than it had been last week, but only a bit. Soon the leaves would start to change.
He slipped the phone out of his pocket as he walked back towards the front door. They lived in a nicer neighborhood now, though they went on as many jobs as ever. His father wasn’t home, having gone out for the night for drinks with some of the others. Rob’s steps slowed from a casual walk to a snail’s pace, and then he stopped in the middle of the sidewalk.
How long had it been since he’d heard from his wayward cousin? He looked at the glowing letters - Rhiannon - and then used his thumb to hit ‘accept’.
“Yeah?”
“Hey.” She cradled the bottle in the space between her legs and feet and stared at the clear label, the small typeface of letters. It felt like she hadn’t heard his voice in ages, but it set off a dull ache. How could she be homesick for a place she couldn’t wait to leave? But it was there waiting for her in the familiarity of her cousin’s voice. He was three and a half years older, thirteen when Sean came to collect her. Rob, with all his toughness and edges, had been the only other kid she really knew. When she dreamed of being home, of being on a hunt, it was Rob’s back she felt at hers.
She needed to start this conversation with Rob. If she called Sean first, she might never get the chance.
“You doing okay?” Rhiannon looked at the empty road in front of her Nevada license plates. “How’s your shoulder? Sean said you hurt it, back in July.”
“It’s a little better. I went through a door a little too aggressively.” Rob took a seat on the top step instead of going inside, the phone tucked between his neck and shoulder while he went into his shirt pocket for his pack of Winstons. It felt like it would have been disloyal to bring the phone, this halting start at communication, into the house. Even long distance, Rhiannon and anything to do with Rhiannon was a loaded subject. He lit up, toyed with his lighter while he watched the street. “When’d you talk to Dad? Last I heard, you weren’t on speaking terms.”
Rhiannon heard the sounds of a cigarette being lit and immediately thought of the pack in her glove compartment, which had sat unopened since she came back from the Nugget with Phanuel. Her body felt pulled towards the bumper, wanting to climb down and reach into that open window. She took a sip of alcohol instead. The liquid sloshed in its glass container.
“July, when he gave me the details for that job.” You know, the one someone leaked. She stopped herself from saying it because there was no need to start that argument with Chicago’s biggest company man (Yes, Dad. Whatever you say, Dad. Please shut up and fall in line, Rhi.).
“I take it he didn’t share that piece of intel.” That was an interesting kernel to tuck away for later reflection. Rob still didn’t know everything his father did. The power was always tipped to Sean’s side.
“We don’t really talk about you. Not anymore.” It came out clipped, because he’d heard what she didn’t say, and smoke escaped from his nostrils when he added, “It was a job like all the other jobs. You know how things work around here, or you used to.”
Used to.
Rob made himself take a moment, to de-escalate before things got too heated. They’d been kids when they met, when his father took her in because she was family, and no matter what had happened later, they’d been as close as any siblings. Beyond the front yard, the street was quiet.
“You didn’t call me to argue,” he said, his voice gentler. “What’s up?”
The dig was designed to hurt. Rhiannon recognized the trap and tried to step around it, but she still felt its sting because she thought of them every day of her life, the miserable memories, the mundane ones, and the good ones she didn’t let herself think of much. Rob was the first hunter who ever hit her. She remembered the indignation in her little body, the balling of fists, the howl of ten-year-old rage as she launched herself at him while Sean laughed from the back porch. Her uncle was probably thinking of his own childhood, his skirmishes with his baby sister Ciara, while he watched the two remaining hunters in the Corrigan bloodline.
Rhiannon felt the weight of that, too.
So they didn’t talk about her anymore, like they didn’t talk about Ciara. If it wasn’t true now, it would be. Rhiannon set her vodka down and climbed off the nose of her car. She walked into the street and stood under the hum of that streetlamp. “I’m calling because I’m out for good.”
He let it sit, what she’d said, smoking into the silence as the sounds of the night around him picked up strength. And what he’d said had been the truth to a point, but only to a point. They did talk about her, usually when his dad wasn’t around. Or sometimes when Sean was drunk and not quite so angry. The cigarette in Rob’s mouth burned on as he pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead, the spot above his right eye. “Why?”
Because if she wasn’t a frequent subject of conversation, it might have been because everyone thought she’d come back eventually. Families fell out with each other all the time, that was why it had taken him so long to get to know his cousin to begin with. If he kept it close, if the others kept it close that Rhiannon was missed, it was because there was still something like hope. You couldn’t mourn unless there’d been a death or a similar permanent severance. “What happened, Rhiannon?”
Rhiannon crossed her arms, her feet, a compressing of her body. She stared at the laces of her boots and made herself as small and hard as she could in the circle of light. “If it was just you and me, I never would have left,” she admitted. The teeth in the back of her mouth fit firmly together. When she could talk again, she said, “I can’t go on those jobs anymore. You know what I’m talking about. The ones where he’s not vetting anymore. We can’t kill things just because they’re not human, Rob. For all we know, we’re not human.”
That kind of thinking didn’t carry in her family; they’d rather think of it as divine right than genetic mutation, and she wanted to believe that, but until someone could explain to Rhiannon why their blood made them different without conjecture, who could say?
She covered a rock with the sole of her shoe and rolled it on the asphalt. “It’s been bad for a few years, but it started way back. You remember all those bitten Weres in that house we raided, right? They weren’t doing anything, they were asleep. We just went in and killed five people.”
Rhiannon thought of the old house in Chicago, the outright lie she’d told Rob when he called to her from the kitchen. ‘Clear’, she had said, her body hiding Siofra in the dark. Her fingers had fallen away from the cougar’s fur when she went to ease open a window for him, moving so quietly that she started to sweat for fear that her cousin would hear it. She grabbed her knife and went back in the kitchen, taking in the horror of a dying wolf and spotted cat beside an overturned kitchen table. ‘I count five. There were supposed to be six’, Rob had said, and she’d just shrugged and mumbled, ‘C’mon.’
Rob let out a soft breath, removed the burning Winston from his mouth and looked at the glowing tip. They’d had this conversation a dozen times, probably more. Sparks scattered as he put the cigarette out on the bricks next to him.
“They’re not human,” he said, and his voice was low and even. Because he believed it, and to cover the hurt. “You know that. You know that. Doesn’t matter if it comes from a bite, once that something extra has been passed on, they’re not people anymore.”
He got up, his long legs stretching as restless energy made him have to move. Craned his neck to look up the street. Not much traffic that night. It seemed like the slight bite in the air had made most people stay home.
“You can’t tell me that the fears aren’t legitimate,” he added. “The folks who come to us, they do it because they’re scared. Those stories they make movies about exist for a reason.”
“They make movies about us, too.” Rhiannon tipped her head back and looked at the stars, or what she could see of them on her residential street. “Y’know, some Weres go their whole lives and never hurt a soul. We can’t say that. We’ve got more in common with vampires than humans. All we ever do is dream of the next time we get to kill something.”
She took a slow step away from the light and began to follow a crooked crack down the road. “Anyway, fear fucks with everything. It makes it so you can’t see clearly. Those people who beg us to take a life because they’re scared? How many of them were actually in danger? And that’s the point, Rob. We have to know, and if we’re not interested in knowing because it makes it too hard to follow through, then who’s the bad guy?”
“Jesus…” He pinched the bridge of his nose, thumb and forefinger bearing down as the other hand gripped the phone tighter. “Is this what you called for, so you could tell me we’re a bunch of murderers? You talk about souls. How do you know they have those? You don’t. You can’t. Not really.”
Rob stomped back up the front stairs, went into the house. Closed the door behind him. Rhiannon had never lived here, they’d moved in only a month ago. He moved into the kitchen and opened the fridge, pulled out a can of Coke and cracked it. Then stood there staring at it before putting it on the Formica countertop, untouched.
“Was it the money?” Because they’d talked about that too, over and over again. “That we started getting paid?”
“No!” she said, her voice booming off the side of a neighbor’s trailer. “But I couldn’t help but notice Sean got a lot more liberal with the trigger once money was an option.” Her feet picked up the pace, carrying her off-road, back past the houses and onto the old service road where nobody would hear her if she screamed her head off.
“As for souls? Nobody knows who has what. And it doesn’t matter. It’s more important what they do. What any of us do. I’ve seen you treat stray dogs better than you treat werewolves. I’ve seen you take three minutes to cut a vampire’s head off. Where does that come from, Rob? Did Jesus make you do that?”
“Call it a healthy disgust.” He fell silent again, stewing as he tapped his fingers on the closed door of the fridge. And it wasn’t as if he never had questions. But he couldn’t afford to overthink it, because he’d been in fights long before they’d started making a profit, fights where it was either kill or die, and he didn’t know how Rhiannon had gotten to a point where she could consider ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ when she’d come from the same place he had. “We do the dirty stuff so other people don’t have to,” he said after a few minutes of quiet. “Maybe that doesn’t come from God or Jesus, maybe it isn’t noble, I really don’t know.”
Rob pushed his fingers through his thick black hair, an unconscious imitation of his father, who he loved and admired despite everything. Sean Corrigan was a hard man to get along with, a difficult man to disagree with, an almost impossible man to say no to. So if Rob stood with his father now, the love and admiration outweighed the rest of it.
“You know what else ain’t noble, Rhiannon?” he asked, his voice very quiet. He hardly ever said ‘ain’t’ anymore, had gradually broken the habit. “Poverty. If somebody told you it is, they should get their head checked. Mashed potato sandwiches, remember?”
Chin lowering to chest, Rhiannon’s feet lost the pace and direction of wherever she’d been going. The need for money stretched back as far as her memories of life, to Detroit and her father’s layoffs and the plain urn that held her mother’s ashes where there should have been a casket, to Chicago where money went to weapons and keeping the lights on, where you avoided using bullets and you never ever lost your weapon because that would mean an ass-kicking of the highest order. Sean could make you wish you lost the fight. The gnaw of hunger came at the worst times, like creeping into a nest and praying to God you had put enough carbs in the tank.
“I remember.” She rubbed a thumb across her eye. “But I’d rather be a hungry, skinny kid again than live in that nice, new house with you, because I know how you got it.” Everything about it made her skin crawl. She took a breath. “One day he’ll be gone and Gran’ll be gone, and it’ll just be you and me, and you’ll have to figure out whether to keep going like this or get your head out of your goddamn ass.”
He made a face he knew she couldn’t see, picked up the can of soda he’d opened. “I love ya, Rhiannon,” he said, looking down at his shoes. “Head in my ass or not, whether you believe it or not. Maybe one day we’ll understand each other better. I’m sorry that isn’t today.”
It stood between them, and he refused to apologize for being happy to have a consistently full stomach, to not have to worry about coming home to a house with no electricity or running water because the bill was too far overdue. Whatever she thought of him, it wasn’t about getting rich, and he didn’t think it was about that for his father. It was just finally having enough to get by in something like comfort. “Did you want me to give Dad a message or anything? He should be home in a couple of hours.”
The word ‘love’ was a foreign language. It made her stomach sink like a stone in water. “I love you, too, Robby.” Rhiannon’s hold on her emotions broke and the tears came before she could choke them back. She took the phone away from her face so he wouldn’t hear it.
She reminded herself of everything that had been said, about what Rob, Sean, and the rest of them would be willing to do if they were in Searchlight now, if they knew who lived at Cottonwood Cove or who Rhiannon slept with at night. Hearing it straight out of her cousin’s mouth made it easier to do what she had to do. The sounds of the desert around her were a world away from that kitchen in Chicago.
She swiped at her face and brought the phone to her ear.
“Yeah. Tell Sean to keep his distance.”
She ended the call.