(The following story is taken from live play; converted and posted with permission.)


"I have a job for you later...."

"So what's this job you've got for me?"

"He's in the basement of Peccavi. I want you to train Sophie."

At first, he had refused, but he left room to be persuaded.

"Why do you want me to train her?"

"Because you know what you're doing and she's already halfway there anyway. She's familiar with you, respects you -- I think -- and most importantly, she won't try to kill you like the last one."

"You hired somebody else to train her?" The word 'idiot' might have been hidden in there somewhere.

"Well, I tried. It didn't go well. ...She ate him."

And then he said it. "Idiot."

Sinjin had persuaded him to take on the job in the end. Of course, there was very little he wouldn't do for the sinner. The next night, he had the pleasure of seeing Sophie out in the light of the public eye. Though eventually the crowd became too much, likely for the both of them. Sophie was the first to take her leave.

Slipping from her chair, the girl began to ease her way carefully toward the door. "We are going to Peccavi," she said quietly as she passed Salvador. What she was doing there was anyone's guess.

Sal grumbled out a sigh, and pushed up out of the chair. "I should probably go with her." He dipped a polite nod to Fury, and tipped Mer a wave -- two blasts from the past whose company he had been previously enjoying -- then heturned off the chair to head to the door himself.

Into the winter night she drifted, waiting for him at the porch. "You do not need to come."

He stepped out behind the Possum girl and grunted. "Sin gave me a job." So. Yes. He did need to come.

"We know. The god-touched told us."Marcus.

"Figures." Man had his nose in more business than Sal preferred. He sneered, sniffed, and then spat aside. That before gesturing for Sophie to lead on. He was following.

And she lead. "He knows too much." Into the alleys she crept, more at ease with each step.

Salvador's preferred position on any occasion was to act as a person's shadow. He didn't always take on this role with only Sin. "I don't like the fucker either," he commented, following in Sophie's wake.

"We do not know. He is god-touched..." And so she had her suspicions of him. Her path toward Peccavi was slow and convoluted, a making of her own through the least-walked paths and inevitably leading toward an old fire escape toward the roof tops.

"God-touched?" He and Sophie may have different interpretations of what precisely that means. He grabbed hold of the lowest rung of the ladder beneath and waited for her to head up before him. Forward, backward, up and down or sideways. Didn't matter which direction they went anywhere to him. He'd follow no matter the path.

She was comfortable on the rooftops and her movements seemed more at ease as she climbed up and into the cold night air. "God-touched. He has something. Don't know what. It Speaks." She saw it.

"Ah." Yes; he had seen it too. "That whispering shadow." Salvador never looked directly at the extra pattern his fae eyes saw. Not a white shadow as the ones he had known too intimately, but a shadow (a spirit) all the same. Up and over, still he followed.

"Yes. We hear it." She moved across the rooftops, most of which were connected except for those with an occasional gap of space that she had to leap. "We do not trust it."

Salvador kept pace with her on a mundane level. It was good to feel his muscles working, to feel marginally human, and to actually have to take the leap where necessary instead of simply stepping through the space Between. "I don't trust either of them." And he didn't only mean Marcus and his ghost. "What is it, exactly, Sin has you doing, Possum?" Better now than any time to figure out where he needed to begin with this so-called training.

"Kill for him, we assume. Pull things, words and whispers from the brain." She paused on the edge of a rooftop, glancing over her shoulder at him past a tangle of dark hair.

"You assume," he said dryly. She looked one way and he looked the other. Off into the distant horizon far beyond her unkempt hair. "Does he never tell you anything?" The question was somewhat rhetorical. He knew Sin too well; the sinner never gave direct orders. He left a lot for people to assume. That made him grumble out a sigh.

"He speaks; we do not hear him." She would work for him, but she still had a significant lack of respect for the sinner. She leapt across the gape between two roofs, skidding low in the ice and snow once she hit the brick top.

"Hmph." He was a pace or two behind her for that pause. Good traction on his boots and the way he landed in a crouch, hidden claws tearing up gouges in the ice, had him not skidding quite so much. "You should take a care to listen, Possum. He's all you got now." Rising, uncoling from his catlike sprawl, he flicked ice out from under his nails, paused to inspect them. "You called him a king once. Odd." He had a suspicion that she'd predicted such a thing, and he'd just never listened.

"He is a king. We are not his kingdom. We are no one's kingdom, and we do not have him." Sophie had a limited amount of people she remotely trusted: Salvador was the only name on that list. "His kingdom is beatless, writhing. Ours sings with pain until we silence it." She rose again, headed toward a hidden door tucked amongst the brick and snow; she pressed in and it collapsed inward, opening to a small spiral staircase.

"No, not his kingdom," he agreed, following along only after a minor hesitation. The secret entrance didn't surprise him all that much. If this were Peccavi, he'd likely heard the buzz and the beat blocks away already, and maybe now felt it under his feet. "An ally to his kingdom, though. Maybe." Something of a suggestion, that. Being so devoted to Sin, he'd try any ploy he could think of to get Sophie to trust him. "He sort of inherited you too, though, along with the rest of it." Putting that into perspective.

It was Peccavi: the loft apartment, though it was sound proofed from the chaotic kindred below. Her own space Sin left for her. Inside, the apartment was sparse and laid with bones -- bones that Sal delivered, in fact, now carved with ancient runes. "Perhaps." She looked back at him now as she settled on the floor. "Why should we trust him?"

"Why should you not?" he countered. Ducking into her private little sanctuary, he had to take pause and hide a vague little smile. Some small part of him had wondered what she'd done with those bones, though he told himself he'd never been curious. He'd also let other people believe that too. "Tell me, Possum. Other than sending me to deal with you, what has he ever done to harm you?" A pointed look around her apartment was meant to point out some evidence. Sin gave her this. Let her have this. Her own private sanctuary within his kingdom.

"It is not what he has done. It is what he has not done." Amongst the litter of bones, books, and odd treasures was a pile of furs and clothes she claimed as her bed; she moved in that direction to add some of her baggy layers to the pile. "He is weak. He is not the Old King. He will fall and no one will catch him."

"That's where you're wrong, cari?a." A distant, almost mournful quality invaded his tone and expression then. Salvador looked off into nothing, at and through a single bare wall. Old words and promises swallowed him for a moment, making him look quite blank, statuesque.

"We are not wrong. We Know." She looked back at him pointedly, dark eyes passive. "We hear, we see. He will fall." There was no question in her tone, no guess.

"Maybe," he agreed distantly. A slow blink bringing him back to himself. He turned his head and curved a sharp little smile. "But there will be someone to catch him, Possum." Salvador was unfailingly devoted to that cause. When had he last let the sinner down?

She had no comment. Salvador was stubborn and there was no point in arguing. Instead, she went toward one particular bone, beginning to curve into a self-carved point.

Let him think he'd won the argument. He was glad the subject dropped in any case. Turning on his heel, he took a better look around. So sparse, without even a proper bed. Likely no place to sit. He stepped over to a wall and turned to lean his shoulders into it, arms folding across his chest. "I hear you haven't taken a liking to any of your previous tutors." Rumors buzz and fly. At least he put it mildly.

"Fools and foul. Better food." She wrinkled her nose, picking up one of the homemade bone weapons to test the weight of it in her palm.

"And a pain in the ass to clean up your mess." Maybe his one small sympathy for Marcus, who he guessed had been put to task to deal with the complications killing an associate might bring. "Do you kill and eat everyone you don't like?" He unfolded one arm to inspect his nails.

"Only the ones who taste good." Flatly. Something of a joke, perhaps.

Maybe he took it for one, because Salvador chuckled breathily. "You really need to show more discretion, hermosa." Finding a hangnail, he bit it off and spat the bit aside.

"We don't see why we should." She brought the sharp point of the boneblade toward Salvador, though she was a good distance away from him.

"For your own sake." He pretended not to notice the angle of that self-made weapon. Best not to presume it was possibly a threat. "If you're so sure that Sin's going to fall one day, keep that in mind. He's been keeping you pretty well protected for a while now. Or haven't you noticed?" She was, after all, living above a regular vampire hangout.

She had no answer for him, testing the leather grip of the weapon before she abandoned it to the floor with the rest. "What do you suggest?" She asked, moving toward her makeshift bed to settle on the edge of it.

"A little patience." That suggestion, coming from him, was enough to even make him laugh. Though it was quick as a sharp breath exhaled through his nostrils. Done in a second. "A little thought. Not everyone he brings to you is an item of choice on the menu of the day, Sophie. You need to learn how to tell them apart."

"They treat me as a child -- as a girl." Not as a figher, a killer, or anything dangerous. So she felt the need to prove them wrong. It was just a.. very final way to do it.

"So show them that you're not." Lowering his hand to his shoulder, he drummed a thoughtful rhythm on the collar of his coat. "Nn. But it's not a lesson they're going to remember, or care to remember, if they're dead. They also aren't going to be any use to you anymore. Never know what you could learn."

"You are to.. train me." She seemed very disdainful of the term. The last time she was 'trained' it was a childhood of torture and rape. She watched him pointedly, frowning.

"That's the job he gave me," he confirmed casually. Don't think he missed the tone, though. Tilting his head, he slid down out of his lean and lowered into a crouch. Better to be eye level with her, on equal terms. Arms at rest on his knees and dangling between them. "But let me ask you something, Sophie." Gently. A pause inserted so that he could let the fact he used her name settle. "Is this really what you want to do?"

"We do not know what we want," she admitted honestly. "But this seems the best course." For now. Killing was what she knew, what she understood -- the only thing she knew as fact any more.

Some people are born to it, made for it, this he well knew. He took a moment to look in her eyes longer than he usually looked in anyone's, and then he nodded before looking away. "Then I'll help where I can. But if you're going to do this--" He pushed off his knees and uncoiled to stand back upright again. "--you're going to have to start listening to Sin. Only because ... he's the boss, Possum. You're working for him. You want to keep this...?" He looked around her sparse room, lifted a hand to vaguely encompass it in a gesture. "Remember he's the one letting you keep it. Wrong him, and I'll throw you to the wolves myself." By wolves, he meant the disgusting pile of gyrating vampire bodies packed onto Peccavi's dance floor, as an example.

She bared her teeth at him, feral little creature that she was, with that impending threat, her non-existent hackles rising. "We will.. try," she muttered, and moved to prowl the length of her small room restlessly, like a caged animal.

"Good." He grinned in his own savage way. Took a moment to admire her restless prowling, and then he moved toward the door. "Now let's go pay a visit to our friend downstairs." They still had a job to do.