Re: Bus stop: Misha & Lou
Lou wasn't a complicated woman. Her wolf wasn't complicated either, it was a creature that lived simple. It ate, it ran, it slept. Given the opportunity, it fucked but it wasn't a driver, it was instinct. Lou was a lot of instincts and a lot of lessons learned packed in over the top until instinct was slow-burn ember, taking out what rose above until it charred and singed and left behind what was plain instinct. That the wolf was there was complicated enough; Lou didn't bother trying to reason it out, bargain with the wolf, find injuries in what was as simple as instinct and the fattening of a moon.
Her feelings weren't out and out on her face, because Lou's face was blank canvas, uninterested deadpan. Learned that early, walking around a town as obvious as a mutt in a pack of pedigrees. She smiled, when she felt like it and when she didn't, she didn't look like the kind of person who bothered with feeling small just because someone else felt like putting her there. But underneath, there was a roil of clear, uncomplicated feelings about this. The men, contempt and a touch of calculation, trying to measure out threat. Lou didn't worry about herself; the wolf loaned strength, and power and an impassive resistance to showing belly. She thought candidly about the precise level of give the human arm had in it before it snapped. Cold.
And then the kid wandered the length of the bus-stop and he was a three-ring circus for the men who were sloping, skulking in the shadows of the 'stop. "Yep." Lou said. Not clipped. Not lazy. A nothing sort of matter-of-fact that didn't ask questions and didn't answer any either. It was aimed at the men, and the hair on the back of her neck rose leisurely as one guy slid forwards, like melting butter. Wolf, not woman but the instinct was the same.
"Headed to Repose. You play?" She was watching the guy move, peripheral vision. Lou didn't actually look at the fiddle case; she'd seen it plenty on the kid's approach.