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On the west side of the city, an imposing old stone house sits, surrounded by a modest green lawn. An arc-shaped driveway passes beneath a stately stone porte-cochère, and the large, heavy wooden doors look like something out of a Skyrim mod. Three stories tall, with a widow's walk on top.
The sign out front says Overbrook Memorial Home, though most of the paint is chipped and worn at this point, and in any case, there's a COMMERCIAL: SOLD sign sitting right next to it.
"Well," says the lanky blonde woman, standing on the sidewalk, looking up at the imposing edifice, as she ashes her cigarette and returns it to the corner of her mouth, "It isn't Vienna." German is easier for her, so that's what she speaks, because there's no one around for her to bother speaking English for, at the moment. "But... it'll do." Her opposite hand reaches up to tug her knit beanie back into place before she reaches over to absently fix an errant lock of Sonja's hair. "Look at this. I think I could barely jump to the next rooftop. Maybe we can find one better in the city, too."
"It's not?" asks the shorter blonde woman who's standing beside her. "You mean we didn't just get on a plane and fly around in circles for most of a day?" Her own German is, while better than her English, not perfect, and her accent is still pretty thick. At least her vocabulary and grammar are better, though. "That explains why you told me I would need my passport, and why everyone's speaking some strange language that thinks its other languages standing on each other's shoulders, wearing a trenchcoat."
She turns her head to smile up at Sigi for a moment, then nudges her in the side with an elbow and leans against her. "You could also just get better at jumping."
She takes a long drag of her cigarette, her mouth screwing to one side as she plucks it from her lips again and slowly blows the smoke out of her nose like a dragon. Sieghilde's green eyes slide toward Sonja, and she slides one hand's long fingers into the back of her hair and leans over to draw the shorter woman into a brief, sharp kiss. "Yes, that would explain all of that," she answers wryly. "No, I did not put you onto a plane and fly you in circles, but if you wanted me to do that, I suppose I could. It was very amusing to watch all the bougie women start to get grumpy with the flight attendants and then you would, like, look at them."
"I think the one wet her pants," she laughs a little bit, and slides her hand down Sonja's spine.
"Hmph. Are you saying I am not, in fact, the best of all possible traceuses?" Sigi ripostes, squinting up at the stone edifice.
Sonja is still smiling as she returns that brief kiss, and she puts one arm around Sigi's waist to pull herself closer during the course of it. "I'm not actually such a fan of flying," she says with a shrug. "Let's not just do it to go in circles, yes? I can find Karens on the ground to make squirm." She rests her head on Sigi's shoulder. "Are you going to say that you couldn't get better, so there's no reason to practice any more?"
Hmph. HMPH! Hmmphhhh! Sieghilde was about to say something else, but rather than speaking, she just harrumphs loudly three times, looping her arm around Sonja's shoulders. HMPH! Hmph.
"No," she finally admits. "I would not say that."
Sonja laughs at the hmphing, because she knows she's won this one. It's not an important victory, but who doesn't like to win. "See? In fact, I'm willing to bet you're thinking about how to train to get more distance in your jumps already, now that I've mentioned it."
She lets out a soft sigh of contentment, then she changes the topic of the conversation entirely. "It will be interesting to learn what the relationship between us and the other local societies is like, here. It seems like it's different in every place I've been, and Americans are very strange."
HMPH!!! Sieghilde hmphs once more, exaggeratedly, but yes, it's obvious that Sonja has, in fact, won. This round. And since she would absolutely accept a harrumphing surrender in their rounds of verbal jockeying from Sonja, now is the time when she can concede this round. Hmph. "I am not."
She is.
She turns her head to kiss the top of Sonja's head. "Americans are weird. We've had enough of them in our family over the years to know just how strange and familiar they are. But, I suppose we'll see how we get on with the society here."
A beat.
"Let's go check out the inside." Standing on the sidewalk for too long is... weird.
"It has an inside?" Sonja asks, feigning shock. "I thought it was just a... what's the word for the front of a building?" She gives Sigi a squeeze and slips away, taking her hand as she does. "Let's go and explore. Pee on the parts of it we want to claim as just ours, before anyone else does."
"A facade," Sigi answers -- a word which thankfully is the same in German and English, because both of them stole it from French. "Which," she does in fact clarify, "is the same in English." She knits her fingers into Sonja's, and then she drops her cigarette, scrubbing it out with the toe of her well-worn boot before bending down to pick it up. She carries it up toward the front door and drops it into the buttler (yeah, they're called that sometimes) on the way there. "... we don't have to actually pee on the house, my love."
"Oh, that's almost the same as it is in Serbian," Sonja says with a laugh. "Fasada." She shrugs, files the info away, and proceeds to the building with her wife. "And I know that we don't have to actually pee on the house. And I don't really want to. But you know what I mean." She pauses. "We could just have sex everywhere we want to claim, instead."
"It is," comes Sieghilde's agreement. She fishes her keys out, unlocks the massive front door, and then heaves it open with one arm, holding the door open for her like some sort of gallant butch or something.
The mixed-use business/residential space is so, so quiet, with deep, rich colors and a wide open foyer and doors leading off into small side rooms, and then a stairway that leads up to a balcony that encircles the entire second floor. "I liked the layout of this. It felt familiar."
And then she stops, turning her head to grin wolfily down at her wife. "Now that sounds like my sort of territory-claiming. And the sort that would deeply annoy Ludwig."
Sonja steps inside, glances around, and then turns her attention back to the front door, which she watches with anticipation. "I'm hoping that it makes a satisfying, booming thud when it closes. It looks like it should boom," she explains, in case Sigi's curious what the heck she's so interested in with the door.
"You're right that it is a bit familiar. It wouldn't feel like home if it didn't also smell faintly of embalming fluid and burnt things."
She flashes a grin then. "Oh, yes, the annoyance only makes it that much sweeter, too. 'Hey, if you don't want to know about us sexing, you could just not go in there."
She lets go of the door, and the two of them literally stand there watching the door close.
Weirdos.
Sadly, the door shuts with a gentle, soft thud, as is appropriate for a funeral home, and Sieghilde frowns mildly. "Well. I suppose we can fix that," she sighs, disappointed by something that she hadn't even thought about until Sonja brought it up. A soft huff, and she lets go of Sonja's hand so she can shuck off her coat and tug off her worn knit beanie.
"Mmm. That's true. Once it's back in business, it'll smell even more like home. Embalming fluid, burnt things, and wolf butts." Her green eyes glitter sharply, delightedly. "Mmm, yes."
"Possibly even burn wolf butts!" Sonja retorts with a laugh, like that would be hilarious. Sonja follows the lead and takes her own coat off, and hangs it beside Sigi's, who she turns to and says, "as is right and proper." This is about the coats, clearly, and not about the wolf butts. Side by side. Their things, hanging together.
"Is there a nice kitchen?" she asks as she sets off to explore, not knowing where she's even going. Sometimes Sonja really is a werewolf soccer mom, and the fact that she loves cooking is one of those areas. The fact that she would never call it soccer, however, is not.
And this is the moment where a kiss break is required, because Sonja's simple statement of the fact that her jacket belongs next to Sieghilde's makes her smile, and curl her arm around her wife, one hand resting at the small of her back. She murmurs, "Correct," and then leans down to brush her lips against Sonja's.
A second kiss stolen, and then she unwinds her arms from around the Irraka, letting her wander off to explore. Also, then she can watch Sonja's butt. "Mmm, you know, I'm not sure," Sieghilde answers with a lazy smile drifting across her face. "You should go look."
(The answer is yes.)
Sonja gladly accepts, and returns, the kisses, and gives Sigi's butt a squeeze before she breaks away. Like she knew that her own butt was going to get checked out as she walked away. It is a nice butt. "I will! If this is the right way. I guess if it's not, too, that just means it will be longer." She proceeds into the building opening every door to look at what's inside, no even really trying to be sure that it's the kitchen she finds as soon as possible. "I want to set up a hammock outside somewhere," she says, apropos of nothing.
Sieghilde pauses to dig her pack of cigarettes and her lighter out of her jacket pocket, tucking them both into the front pocket of the flannel shirt which hangs loosely around her, unbuttoned over her battered concert t-shirt. She doesn't light another one, though there's a moment where instinct and habit make her fingers twitch toward the top of the pack. "Yes, and that would be terrible. I would hate following you around the house, watching you explore," Sieghilde laughs, hooking her thumbs into the belt loops of her jeans. "We forgot one of the scents that makes these places home, and that's your cooking. Especially the stew and bread."
Sonja's a lot older than she looks, because she changed quite young and wolves age more slowly. Despite her age, she seems to be able to maintain a sense of curiosity and wonder about new things, sometimes. This is apparently one of those times. Going around the house and poking eagerly into every nook and cranny? Yep, that's fun! "I need to make a bunch of sarma, too. It's not home until you've eaten sarma there. I'll make some of the stew you love too, though. And we need cookies. Also required for a new home."
"Mmm. The chocolate chip and candied ginger ones?" Sigi asks, just... watching Sonja. She's already seen the house, after all, having flown over to tour it before agreeing that Altman Funerary Services, LLC, would buy it -- and so now, it's about watching Sonja learn their new home. "Sarma is delicious, but. Literally anything you make for me is delicious, though, so... you know."
"Do you want to go wander around the neighborhood later and see who's peed here recently, if anyone?"
Sonja comes to a stop at that question, only answering the prior comments with a smile and a nod of agreement about what cookies she'll make. "You did check for people's staked claims before we bought this place, right? We'd just be checking to be sure there's not something new, since the last time you were here?" She's pretty confident what the answer here is, but she asks anyway, because if they're likely to be having a turf war, she wants to know about it as soon as possible.
But if that's what Sigi had done, on purpose, Sonja would absolutely back the play without hesitation.
"Oh, yeah, of course. But that doesn't mean there isn't anyone wandering around, especially the kids who don't know what they're doing, and who the fuck knows what other sorts of weirdos are wandering around in the night since I came here to see the building and sign papers with the realtor and assure people that we weren't running some weird international funerary money-laundering scam," Sieghilde answers, raising a hand to absently scratch at her cheek.
"I mean, I probably would have bought it anyway, but I don't know if I would have made it our center of operations. Owning a funeral home with a crematorium on-site is just too fucking useful."
"Funerary money cremating?" Sonja asks with a smirk. Since she and Sigi are on the same page now, she nods and moves on with her inspection of the place. "It is," she agrees. "Useful. Back in my day we had to do it the hard way. Shovels and everything. Or just wage a guerilla war. Ah, the kitchen!" she proclaims as she bursts into it. "Oh, yes, this will do well." It doesn't really matter if it's a grand kitchen or not. She's fine with cooking in a tiny one, too. Not picky. But a nice kitchen, that does help!
"Exactly," Sigi answers, wandering after Sonja; her bootfalls are practicedly silent. It's hard to be with an Irraka for a decade and not learn how to be quiet, not roll it into your essential way of moving. Her eyebrows arch up in amusement, and her gaze trails over Sonja again. "Well, I'm glad to be here and make your life easier, my love."
The kitchen is big, bordering on industrial -- among the other functions of a building like this, being able to prepare food for mourners is one of them, and so, this is basically a giant Sonja playground. The appliances have been upgraded -- some of them are brand new. "What do you think?"
"I think it's going to feel kind of empty until we find new mouths to feed," Sonja says as she starts checking out cabinets and appliances. This could be a suggestion that they're going to need to grow the pack, or it could be more about the sorts of people they tend to take in, in general. "I don't know if anywhere will really feel like home if it's usually quiet, any more."
"We'll find some new queer babies to take in sooner rather than later, I am quite sure," Sigi answers Sonja, watching her with an utterly besotted expression as she checks out the kitchen, with all of its shiny new pieces. "And no, no it won't feel like home if it's just you, me and Ludwig. Whether we just grow Unbekannt again or ... whatever. It can't be quiet in our funeral home."
A few long-legged steps over toward Sonja, and Sieghilde sweeps her wife up off of her feet, draping her over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes. "Now that you've seen the kitchen," she offers, swatting Sonja on the butt, "there's something else I need to show you."
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