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As the eagle sees it, cemeteries at night are blotches of shadow cast against the permanent city lights, and Cathedral Cemetery is no different tonight. The bitter December air whips about, seeking to dispel warmth and bite at vulnerable flesh. In the midst of the cemetery--in the old section, where the headstones are increasingly larger, and more lavish, as opposed to simple plates on the ground, Jano can be found partially perched on a stone bench with the likeness of an angel or a saint carved into the side of it, as if she were also reclining on the bench with him. His hair is tied back in a long ponytail tonight, and the wind dances with it eagerly as he gazes up at the cloud-filled sky--invisible save that they obscure the stars from view and leave only a faint white glow where the moon sleeps behind them.
God forbid that Sieghilde be permitted to come to a meeting with someone without food, especially when it's cold out. Sonja packed up hot food in an insulated backpack and a thermos of something. The smell of it arrives when Sigi does: a silhouette against that dark sky on one of the rowhouses which surround Cathedral Cemetary. There aren't tall buildings to climb here -- the Cathedral itself is by far the tallest of the structures surrounding the cemetary -- and so the lanky Rahu jumps down lightly from the end of the two-story row on N 52nd Street, landing on the porch overhang and rolling down to the street.
Before there's much opportunity for neighbors to hear noise or to think it's anything more than one of Philly's raccoons or foxes scavenging, she takes off through the scattered low snow toward the cemetery proper; it isn't until she's hopped the fence from the worn pavement pitted by disused tram tracks into the cemetery that she whistles once, high and sharp. A greeting, a warning of proximity.
Until the whistle, Jano appeared to be lost in thought--or deeply focused on the night sky--his features are rather severe, and in the bleached out darkness of night, he might be one of the statues littering the cemetery. But he cocks his head immediately toward the whistle and reaches without hesitation for a leather strap around his neck, untucking a tiny leather bag from his shirt which he reaches into and tosses something on the ground, too small to see in the dark.
He stands then, and despite his broad, chiseled features, he is surprisingly short at only 5'8". He turns to face Sieghilde and watch her approach. There is no wave or smile, just stern patience. But as she nears he steps forward to meet her, boots crunching in the snow. "Lëlëwàxën, sibling. I have a gift for you."
He wears a thick winter coat with fur around the neck and wrists, as well as fur-lined pockets. He reaches into one of them and offers a manila envelope over, folded on itself over and over again and wrapped with a thick industrial rubber band. "From my garden, and for yours."
And she's surprisingly tall for a woman, just over six feet tall (but still an inch shorter than Ludwig, as he endlessly reminds her). "Guten nacht, Herr," she agrees, with Austrian formality and accent firmly in place. She's been spending an inordinate amount of time around her pack, more even than usual, so the accent sits heavy on her words. "And I for you," she agrees, approaching with her gloved hands hanging on to the straps of her backpack until she shrugs one shoulder out of them and shifts the weight of it.
Sigi moves like--not quite like an Olympic athlete, someone whose movements are made for a very specific sport with a set of rules to be slavishly followed, but not too far away from that, either. She moves like someone who is fully aware, all the time, of where her body exists in relation to everything around her. "Danke schoen." The envelope is accepted, but not opened yet; instead she tucks it into her heavy coat. "My wife sent me with food and drink to eat together. She made small versions of gibanica, and sent hot chocolate. It is a... mm. Filo dough, little cheese pies. Serbian, like her." With the explanation comes an unzipping of the backpack, and a thermos and tupperware from within.
Jano's gaze carefully follows her movement, taking it in, thinking it over, and certainly coming to some kind of conclusions for the meaning. He also watches the bag and even offers a small trace of a smile, it looks somewhat forced due to his sharp features, but his voice is no less warm when he speaks. "Oswego. You will have to wait to plant it, but it is good for tea. Also beauty that is good for the spirit." He takes a step to the side and waves one arm toward the bench, which has enough room for two if one is willing to have a large angel loom over them.
"Please thank your wife for her graciousness, and offer mine. I am no cook, so I always appreciate it when someone does it well." His nostrils flare, as he appears to attempt to get a sniff of the tupperwared food--or maybe just of Sieghilde. "How are your borders? I hope that this place was convenient to you."
She leans her hip against one of the taller stones, a point of leverage. "I'm not either. She kicks me out of the kitchen. I'm allowed to open beers and eat cereal. I burnt ramen once." Her shrug rolls her shoulders lazily as she hands over the Tupperware and taking out a big metal thermos. "But, fortunately, she is a really good cook, and baker, and... all of it. And she cooks like the Russian army may at any point show up and want to be fed, so if you're hungry, there's always food." And Sonja is Serbian and nearly a century old, so maybe the Russian Army did show up at some point. You never can tell.
It's not an idle offer in any case, clearly. "So far, so good, I think the saying is?" Sieghilde asks, unscrewing the cap of the thermos. No cheap powdered stuff here: there's real chocolate in this, and maybe chili, too, from the smell of it. "It was a good excuse to run the northern border, so more than convenient. You and yours?"
Jano cocks one eybrow at the mention of a Russian army, but does not further question it, even if he let his curiosity show for a moment. He takes the offered tupperware and cracks the lid, sniffing again. "I have not met many people from that part of the world, and not had their food. I appreciate sharing foods. It is sharing heart and family, eh?"
Every word Jano speaks is crisp and precise, as if he carefully chose them years before he and Sieghilde ever met, but there is also a mild accent to them which is not at all the same as the local accent. "A good excuse to patrol the southern for me--though this is a few blocks further south then I would normally walk. However--" he pauses, turning to look up toward the sky again. He stares upward like that for a long time, perhaps slightly longer than is comfortable, but then again, Sieghilde knows how Ithaeur can be, "--tonight is a nice night."
It is bitterly cold.
He looks back to her, "Well enough, I suppose. I cannot speak for Orana, and will not, but where I come from our funerals were months-long periods of honoring and mourning, and I am always...disconcerted? That word is too strong, but uncomfortable. Yes. I am always uncomfortable with the hastiness that many seem to take in regards to the deaths of the fallen. The pups are howling for war."
There are about half a dozen little pies: they smell sort of sweet, but not dessert-sweet, just the sweet of fresh-made cottage cheese and sour cream, with the sharp edge of feta cheese on top of that. The gibanica are made by layering filo dough and a filling of the three cheeses, eggs, and butter. There's not much seasoning to them: the point of the gibanica is to let the high-quality cheese and dough speak for itself. "You'll have plenty of opportunity. I hadn't eaten much Serbian cooking before I met her, either. It's good stuff. At least, I think so, but. I married her." The muscles at corners of her eyes soften when she talks about Sonja directly; she doesn't emote an awful lot, but that's enough. "Yeah. That's certainly the way she looks at it." And so Sigi does, too.
"It's a beautiful night," Sigi agrees. "The air's so cold it hurts my lungs when I run. Makes me work." Hot chocolate poured, she offers the little metal cup that's also the lid of the thermos over to Jano.
"Mmm. Yes. There's a sort of--industrial quality--to modern mourning. Like everything else now. It's nothing like when my great-great-grandfather bought the first funeral home in Wien. Grief comes in waves." She pauses, considering how to say what she says next for a long moment before she says it. In the silence, a dark sedan turns from Girard onto N 52nd, and peels down the block, engine roaring for no damn good reason able to be discerned by anyone outside said car. Just weird Philly shit.
"When my sister Corinna was killed by The Thief, I only barely kept my face above the water for a year, maybe two." Maybe that's Austrian for 'sorry for your loss.'
"Wanishi, sibling," Jano says solemnly--it comes across halfway between a 'thank you' and 'God bless this meal' whatever it actually means. He takes the offered thermos cup and one of the little pies, breaking a piece of and chewing it thoughtfully, grunting quietly in appreciation, before he washes it down with some of the hot chocolate. All of this while he listens thoughtfully to Sieghilde and her brief but vulnerable acknowledgement of her own loss. He lowers and closes his eyes at that point and afterward, tears off a small corner of the pie he is eating and leans over to place it carefully on a drift of snow piled up against the corner of the bench. He then straightens and lifts his thermos lid of hot chocolate to Sieghilde. "Corinna," he says.
He takes a sip, but then repeats the process. One more small piece of the pie on another snowdrift, this time far enough away that he gets up and crouches to place it before returning to the stone bench. He lifts his cup again, "And uncle Askskathim. Good runnings. Good stories. Always family. Always."
The spice in the meal is in the hot chocolate -- creamy, with chili in it -- and it matches up with the little pies. Of course it does. Sigi is a spoiled butch. Sigi nods her head in response to the word he says, sort of making a little note of it in her head. Look that shit up later, don't ask now.
She leans over to take one of the pies from the Tupperware, bites it in half, and watches his ritual with the sort of everyday acknowledgement of it that comes from growing up in a multigenerational family of Bone Shadows, having been a Bone Shadow once herself, and so on. There's something small and somehow fragile in the tiny upturn of the corners of her mouth when he says her late sister's name -- there and gone again, like a cloud scudding across the face of the moon hanging overhead. "Always," she agrees, and lets the moment rest.
On the other side of the moment, however long it takes, she looks down at the vague steam rising from the warm little pie in her gloved hand and says, "You say the cubs call for war. For what do you call?"
Jano is more than comfortable to sit in the silence. It seems that either of them are past the wailing stage of grief, but the ease and seriousness with which he stays might easily be the same were it still the time for uncontrollable tears. When Sieghilde asks that question he responds at first only with a serious nod, after which he first eats the rest of the pie in his hand and then washes it down. He pauses to look at the thermos lid afterward, considering the flavours and experience, before he looks to the sky.
"War is not unreasonable. War without a chance to acknowledge grief will only feed our wounds, and...I think...feed the Wound. We are a born soldiers, and grief is our way. To forget it is to forget who we are. I am not opposed to what the cubs want--I am opposed to them burning out their own hearts until they are husks. That--" he pauses, looking back to Sieghilde from the sky, not quite meeting her gaze, but looking over her shoulder "--our sacred prey hold that in common, would you agree? Hollowed hearts yearn to be filled--by some false fanatacism, by mongrel hithim desperate for a host." He puts the cup in his lap, wrapping both hands around it, "I will howl for war after our dead have been honoured. I have no reason to turn from it."
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