Lola Hawkes
There has been plenty to worry about at home these days. The wildfires popped up more numerous every time she checked the news, it seemed, and now there were two within the Roxborough State Park itself. Home! The Bawn! The Theurges did what they could with the water spirits, and kept the Caern itself protected. She was assured that her little house would be fine as well, but for safety's sake she had been evacuated and was put up in a motel off some freeway exit just outside of Denver proper.
She had been watching the news sullenly from the foot of her motel bed when her cellphone rang. It took her a second to recall the voice on the end-- Hector. The Galliard from her sister's pack. He had explained that he would be in the city the next day, and could really use a ride back out to the Caern. She agreed, but explained that he would likely be put immediately to work helping to make sure the fires didn't devour too much of their land.
They would meet at the Amtrak station around 9:00pm that night. She said that she would see him there.
----------------------------
The sun had dipped down past the high ridges of the Rocky Mountains, but that didn't change the color of the day by very much. The air was thick and acrid with soot and ash from all of the fires. It gathered on your shoulders if you stood still for too long, and would make you cough and scrub your teeth with your tongue after breathing unfiltered air outside for too long.
The train station was an open platform with shelters and benches here and there. There was a parking lot, and a single indoor building where you could use restrooms, wait in a lobby, and buy tickets. Lola sat outside, half-slouched on a bench with her arms crossed over her chest. She was wearing a white tank-top and a pair of jeans whose cuffs were left overtop of a pair of boots, despite the heat. Her hair was down, the top of her head gathering a fine film of ash.
A bottle of water sat beside her, half-empty. She seems to have been waiting there a while, given the middle-distance stare she was giving to the train tracks to the north.
And the train comes in with the flickering of the red-eyed announcement board shuffling the arrival time to DUE, the rattling of tons of metal against immobile yet deadly rails. It gleams beneath the sun and its brakes keen beneath the force of so much mass asked to stop so soon and the faces in the windows form a long smear of shadows until they start to stutter into focus. Almost all of them aimed forward.
The train sits at the platform for nearly five minutes before the doors slide open and the half-steps come down and the first few pulses of what threatens to become hemorrhage leak out the portals.
He is one of the last to leave the train and she can tell when he is near the doorway when the people coming down the steps wear wide eyes set into strained expressions. For the lightness of his demeanor, her sister's packmate frightens other people.
Without the rest of his pack he looks adrift, a piece of flotsam from a boat that's dashed itself into the rocks. Holds a duffel bag in his left hand and steps out of the way of the door to look around the platform. Like his tribeswoman he wears boots and jeans and a white shirt though his is short-sleeved cotton. An unbuttoned flannel work shirt flutters away from his frame as his boots hit the platform.
The ash in the air coughs back out his lungs again and then he starts towards her.
The train rolling into the station was impossible not to notice, even if she hadn't been watching for it. Every time a train rolled into the station the rails would tremble, then the station would shudder as well. The keening brakes were heard through the rails first, and then from the train itself when it grew nearer. Lola straightened her posture, moved her hands to rest on top of her thighs, and waited.
When the doors opened, Lola stood.
When Hector stepped off the train, she lifted her chin, waited until their eyes had met, and then walked to meet him as he walked to meet her.
When she grew near she extended her right hand to shake his in greeting. "Hector. How was the trip? I hope you managed to get some sleep."
They'd known each other over the course of the last three years, but hadn't spent quite enough collective time with one another for her to rush up and greet him with a hug. Besides, that wasn't so much Lola's style. She did tend to behave gruffly, like she was always a just a little bit pissed that she missed out on The Gift.
In the way of the full-blooded who answer rather than fight their primal urges, do does Hector carry himself. He lopes rather than strolls, as if his body wishes it were lower to the ground, and he is unblinking in his knowledge of his surroundings even when he aims to walk directly to the girl whose number he still has after nearly a year gone from this place.
When he met her years ago it was no surprise that her sister took to friendship with him easily. Despite the brightness of the moon that burned the night of his birth the male was quick to laugh and quicker to crack jokes. His stories were worded so as to elicit laughter but he does not look as if he feels like laughing today.
Hector takes Lola's hand in his own, takes care not to squeeze too tightly. That was something he appreciated about her, she might have overheard him telling Maria once before they left. That she always seemed a little pissed off.
"My seat wasn't far enough away from the toilet," he says. "Other than that it was pretty quiet."
Maria and Lola were quite similar in looks. Lola's features were a bit more wide set, though. She took after her mother a little more, while Maria's curlier hair and bigger eyes came from their father's side of the gene pool. Where Maria was quick to smile and joke and nudge, Lola would smile and joke too, but it would typically be with a half-threatening witty retort more than anything else. She was rough around the edges and very self assured. This, perhaps, was why it was decided that she would stay and protect the homestead while other Kin within the family worked in their cities and routed money back to the homestead.
Typically the grounds would be guarded by a True Born, but this generation's only Blooded was Maria, and Maria longed to wander. This was part of why she had joined up with the pack that she had-- it got her out of state and on the road.
That was just fine, though. When she left Lola had been one-hundred percent supportive, and seemed proud to be bestowed the responsibility of guarding the land and working with the Caern to ensure that the Bawn was protected-- especially during Moots, when the Garou were required to gather.
"I hope you heard at least one person fall in," she answered with a bit of a sideways grin when he mentioned that he was sitting too close to the toilet for comfort. "Come on," she followed up with a wave of her hand, and started walking toward the parking lot. "Unfortunately we can't go back to the house just yet. I can take you as far as the Bawn if you like, but due to the fires I've been evacuated from home. You might get wrangled in to help keep the fires at bay. I'm not sure how much the spiritual ones have the situation handled."
A lot of full-bloods can't handle being in urban environments like this. Even though he doesn't proclaim to have any great affinity for crowded noisy metal deathtraps at least at the right angle, in the right direction, Hector can look out and see the mountains sat on the horizon and know that the wilderness is beyond the Weaver's reach.
But he takes to the wilderness far faster than he takes to the city. If he thought he'd had all the time in the world he would have just trotted on back to Denver but something about the call out of nowhere in the middle of the night spoke of lack of time, or else a shortened fuse, an itch to tell someone somewhere what had happened.
(She could almost imagine him pushed into a phone booth or hunkered down someplace with a cell phone that didn't belong to him. Those kind of conversations are sequestered in another age.
Phone booths still exist but they're falling into disrepair. Direct a stranger towards a phone booth when they ask to borrow your mobile and hostility comes in the place of gratitude.)
"If they'll take me," he says, "I'll stay and help, sure."
The weight of what he did not say on the phone threatens to bend his shoulders now. The rest of the pack isn't with him. He hasn't said their names yet and he did not say them on the phone. All he said was he was catching the next train out of Grant Forks could she meet him there. Hasn't shaved his face in close to three days and now that they're close enough she can almost smell the journey on him, that stark salt smell on his skin and other people's cigarette smoke in his hair.
He smelled like dust and the salt of skin. Like he needed a shower and some fresh clothes. Of course, none of this dampened Hector's good looks. The three-day shadow only added definition to that jawline and chin. He was always the prettiest packmate-- Maria used to tease him over it.
"Dale, Hector!" Maria would exclaim to her Tribemate. "We could make real money off of you. Calvin Klein would throw stacks at you to walk the stage in those tighty whities."
Lola did not joke with him in such a way. She didn't know him well enough, did not travel with him or sleep fur to fur with him before. He was her sister's packmate, which made him family in the same way that brothers-in-law or step-siblings are family. They were strangers you welcomed because someone in your home called them their own.
Instead she walked with him to the parking lot, and from there to a slightly beat-up white pick-up truck. A little rusted along the bed with only one bench seat in the cab, but it ran reliably despite the high number of miles on it. Keys jangled their way out of her pocket as she walked.
"So, what brings you back into town anyways? Are the rest coming later?"
They come to the part of the conversation that is best had away from other people. He rolls up to the back of the truck and hoists his duffel bag into the bed. Though the muscles in his arms pop with the motion he does not have to strain to lift it. His height is not impressive. He is idling at average where when she first met him several years ago he was only a few inches taller than she. His father's people are Bengali and not inclined to tower.
They don't know much about about his mother's side. Half Irish and the other half a mix of things and they used to tease him about how goddamn handsome he is and he'd just sigh and flip his hair back off his shoulders and strut a bit before they got back to work.
But he isn't joking now. Maybe he's just grateful that Maria and Lola were not so alike in their physical appearance that he sees the older Hawkes sister when he talks to the one left behind. And maybe the fact that he sees a bit of her in Lola is evident enough in the Moon Dancer's eyes that she can guess what he's about to say. He pauses before he gets to it. Stands with his hands braced on the truck's tailgate and rests his gaze steady on her.
He always looks young for the softness of his face and eyes but never so young as he does right now in the seconds before he gives voice to the silver-heavy truth he's kept his back to all this time. Pain turns his gaze to lightning but his Rage does not crash down to meet it.
"I should have said something when I called," he says. "I'm so sorry."
Lola Hawkes
When we grow up, I'm going to be a mighty warrior.
Nuh uh.
Yuh-huh! The soothsayer said so.
Well, what if she's wrong? What if she made a mistake and you never get to be a warrior?
Shut up, Maria! I'll fight you.
You're so little, it doesn't matter if you fight me. You can't beat me, I'm the biggest.
Only for now! I eat all my meat. I'm gonna be bigger and stronger than you ever will. Just you watch.
The sisters bickered back and forth like that often-- usually while sitting on a hillside not far from the family house-- one girl weaving flower crowns and the other hitting a stubby tree with a branch she tore from it, like she was practicing how to use a sword.
One thought she would be an Ahroun. The other knew she would be a Ragabash. When puberty came and went, the eldest sister was indoctrined as a Scout into their family tribe, and the other girl was left behind. At first she seethed, envious and feeling nothing but injustice and discontent. Then when her sister grew more seldom and only came back long enough to visit, both girls were adults and caught up on the hillside again, but instead of weaving flower crowns and fighting false enemies, the girls had a beer and watched the stars while packmates and parents shared stories.
We're going up past the Northern Border this time. I'm going to find myself a Mountie.
Bring me back some of that legal green, won't you?
It's legal here too, now.
Yeah, but the Canadians have had more time to develop in the open. I'll bet their shit is as advanced as an MRI machine.
Heh! Yeah.
...Will you guys be coming back?
The Hawkes don't leave this land for long, Lala. You ask Papa, he'll tell you that this wanderlust is just a phase and I'll be home where I belong in a couple of years.
He'll tell me, but what about you?
Ahhh, but isn't that the just the question?
------------------------------
He said that he should have said something earlier, and gave his regrets from the back of the truck. Lola tipped sideways and leaned her weight against the driver's door of the truck through her shoulder and hip, but rolled after a second so she leaned against her back instead.
Deep brown eyes focused on the middle distance, somewhere several feet past Hector's shoulder. She was quiet for a moment, then licked her lips that had suddenly gone dry and asked in a harsh breath: "How?"
Hector Ghosh
He was maybe 18, 19 years old when Lola met him, still raw from his Rite of Passage and gangly, incapable of growing the peach fuzz he calls facial hair now, hyperactive and curious and angry. Had trouble sitting still and shutting up.
And he was a child then and it's hard to look at him and say he isn't still a child but she can read the tempered poise and the churning Rage beneath the veneer of responsibility in him. He aged up after going off and coming back with her sister the first time. They'd lost someone then.
Words are what he does, words and the memories dredged up by them. However long ago her sister went back to the Homelands wasn't long enough. Lola doesn't look at him so she does not see the way he turns his hands to vices on the edge of the truck's bed, knuckles gone white and nostrils flared for the fury and the guilt inside of him.
"Banes," he says. "Two of them, five of us. Glen First-Light fell first, and he just..."
No point telling her how his head cracked like a melon. Hector lets out a breath like his chest does the same thing just thinking about it.
"You know how she used to talk. Like she knew something the rest of us didn't. We were up drinking a couple nights before and she looked at me all sharp out of nowhere. Lola, she made me promise if something ever happened I would come back to this place. And I didn't make anything of it because that's just how she..."
Is, he almost says. It chokes him but he swallows it down.
"That's how she thought. She knew loss better than some of us know Gaia. And I was just like 'Yeah okay Maria whatever' but I promised her. You know?"
Lola Hawkes
Hector spoke vaguely. There were banes, two of them and five of the pack. He explained that Glen was the first to fall, but left the details there. He instead shifted the story to several nights earlier, when Maria got oddly intense in that way she did from time to time-- not angry or baleful, not in the way her sister got, but very severe instead. When Maria meant business her lips would purse and her eyes would bore deep. She would mean every word she said, and you would know that for certain.
Maria, who was wise.
The Kinfolk, a couple of chronological years behind her elder sister, barely blinked while she listened. When Hector spoke of what Maria had said, about letting Lola know and coming back to this place, his hands clenched to fists. His Rage throbbed through his bones like an electric current, building and building to some great force that would snap and unleash someday. It will probably be in less than a week, when the moon's belly is swollen and curved, just shy of Full in the sky. He would probably tear about the wilds breathing the acrid smoke and letting it burn because it matched and balanced the Rage in his heart. He would probably howl and snarl and lose parts of the night.
Hector, who was passionate.
Straight black eyebrows pressed low over similarly dark eyes, completely free of mascara or shadow or any other hint of make-up. The bridge of the woman's nose crinkled slowly, but she did not blink. Only once Hector's words had finished did she speak again. Her voice did not waver or shake, and tears did not touch her eyes. She sounded impatient and frustrated, her words lashing at the Galliard in retribution for his news.
"I asked how. You're the Talesinger, it's your story to share. I asked how she went-- I need to know. I need to know how a pack of five, who more than twice outnumbered their enemy, lost their Scout. Hector, tell me straight."
Lola, who was impotent.
Hector Ghosh
"We fucked up, Lola, alright?"
But he had to have told himself the entire way from Grand Forks to Denver that he would be patient, he would be kind, he would do what he told Maria he would do. He would come back to this place and he would look after her sister. Of all the strays she's taken in over the years he was not the nicest (that would be Glen) or the calmest (that would be Willow) but for the hotness of his Rage and the abysmal depths of the places he's been and the lingering wrongness of the things he's seen the young wolf has not degenerated into cruelty.
But he had to have told himself the entire way from Grand Forks to Denver that he would be patient, he would be kind, he would do what he told Maria he would do. He would come back to this place and he would look after her sister. Of all the strays she's taken in over the years he was not the nicest (that would be Glen) or the calmest (that would be Willow) but for the hotness of his Rage and the abysmal depths of the places he's been and the lingering wrongness of the things he's seen the young wolf has not degenerated into cruelty.
Fresh as his grief is he feels it in a way that goes beyond human. No point telling her death isn't an end. Kinfolk do not follow Garou into the Homelands and besides: there is no glory in a hard and painful death. Garou don't go down easy and they don't go down quiet.
"We were tracking a deserter and we found him but he wasn't... he changed. He used to be Gaian. A Bane strong enough to get inside and take over a Gaian got inside of him and there were two more just... we fucked up, Corey wanted to go across the veil and track down the thing, he wouldn't listen, your sister and I kept telling him and you know how he is, he just wants to go, so we went, and after Glen and Maria went down he fucking lost it..."
He's breathing fast for the lack of breath he gave himself while telling and he still isn't telling. Pushes both his hands into his hairline and the rings on them flash in the dirty sunlight as he holds the thick black curtain back off his face a moment. Lifts his eyebrows and lets them settle again. An exhausted huff of air out through his mouth, a shake of his head. Daylight obscene to him, like they ought to be having this conversation by pyrelight.
"If he hadn't lost it Tam and I would be dead too but he wouldn't have lost it if we hadn't gone across in the first place. And I told him that afterwards. I've never felt him so angry. We fought, you know, like trying-to-break-each-other fighting, and then he broke it off with Fog and went away. I don't know where he is right now."
And his voice doesn't break anymore than the two males broke each other but he sounds as alone as one calling up from the bottom of a pit.
Lola Hawkes
Perhaps she ought to feel more pity for this young man. He was clearly distraught. Werewolves lived by their packs-- packs were their household, their family, their Heart. To lose so many packmates-- two dead and one showing you his back as he hits the road-- had to be terrible. It must have felt like a natural disaster to the Galliard. Like a twister just came down from the sky and ripped through his neighborhood and collapsed his house, and only two of five were not crushed under the wreckage.
She was a Kinfolk, after all, and they were designed to be the anchors for their Garou cousins. She was supposed to be the bracing shoulder, the beacon of hope, and the reason to continue on. Maria asked him to come and care for her.
"She's all alone," the Ragabash would have reminded him. Of course, Hector already knew this. Their mother, a mystic of a Theurge, had been consumed by some vast abyss on The Other Side, and the news broke their father's heart. The man passed a few months after the news of his wife hit. Lola had been alone at the Homestead for three full years now, diligently guarding the property and patrolling the borders of the Sept of Forgotten Questions's Bawn as though she were a Guardian of the Sept herself. Maria had urged him to make sure that she had someone-- anyone. She didn't want her sister to be so vastly lonesome.
But despite the sorrowful mood, the dull light hanging in the air, dirty with ash and smoke, Lola appeared more aggrevated than she did mournful. She didn't grasp the truck to keep upright, she didn't sink to the ground and cry.
Instead, she swallowed the news that she was the last member of the Hawkes family left with a shake of her head and a mumble: "Fucked up, like some goddamn teenagers." Then, she spoke in a louder and more direct voice. "Come on." And with a stoney face she turned about and unlocked the driver's door of the truck. Unless otherwise halted, she climbed on in.
Hector Ghosh
"What do you want me to say? Huh?"
This, tossed over the top of the truck just before she shuts the door, just before he yanks open the passenger side and then reminds himself this isn't his Kin, this isn't his truck, this isn't anything of his other than by virtue of its connection to a sister-wolf who died fighting.
"You want me to tell you the same bullshit story I told the warders after we scooped up what was left of them and hauled them back across the veil? What, you want me to tell you how fearless she was? How she didn't even blink before she threw herself at those Banes? I'm not gonna stand here and play it up like that, Lola, they didn't know her!"
Another of those hard exhales, only one hand in his hair now. The other holds the door open. Waits for the fire to stop burning in his gut. It's running out of oxygen now and she can see it but it's a slow thing. Easier to say that they fucked up and broke something because fucking up and breaking something you can fix. There isn't any fixing this and he's young but he's not that young.
"Fuck," he says, and climbs into the passenger seat.
Lola Hawkes
Lola and Hector weren't very unfamiliar with each other. She knew that he was normally a lot more mellow than this. She understood that the Rage that sat in his belly like a hot stone was fired up now, but only due to circumstance. He was coping with loss in his own way, in the way of the Garou, by having the flames of their supernatural heat and power stoked high. All things considered, he was probably keeping it in check better than others would.
He knew that Lola was a proud creature. He knew that she was supposed to be an Ahroun but never changed, but despite the lack of Change and Rage she still walked with a certain swagger and held herself to a higher standard of strength than what Kinswomen really ought to. He knew that she probably wouldn't break down in front of him, and that she likely had her own barriers set up against loss, having lost both parents within a few months of one another only a few years ago.
But, at the same time, they weren't as familiar with one another as real friends or family would be. They'd met several times before, spent a week or two at a time during each visit. While this was plenty of time to get a decent feel for one another's personalities, they really didn't know much beyond that. Lola did not know exactly how much shit Hector could take before he found his snapping point. She didn't know his triggers, or how he coped with tragedy. She didn't know if he needed to be comforted or to have somebody be stern and shake him back into place again.
So there was a quiet, sullen moment where Hector spoke harshly, asking if she wanted the same bullshit story that he fed strangers. She just buckled her seatbelt and gripped the thin hard steering wheel of the old truck tightly. Her jaw was jutted forward, molars clenched. She half-growled at him once he'd climbed into the passenger seat and closed the door. "You know that I don't want whatever public service announcement you'd made for your Warders up north. I just feel like I have a right to know precisely how she fell."
The gear shift, one of those tall knobbly sticks that stuck out of the floor centrally located between driver and passenger seat. It was one of those shift sticks that needed to be straddled if someone had to sit in the middle of the bench seat. She wrapped one arm along the back of the seat as she twisted to back up out of her parking space, and as she did so she finished her thought without looking at the Galliard in the truck cab with her. "I'll just ask Tamsin."
It was spoken almost like a sharp thumb jab to the ribs. Borderline goading him into telling her what she wanted to hear-- although it was hard to figure out exactly what it was she was trying to pry out of him, and why she seemed to need to hear the gruesome details of her sister's demise.
Hector Ghosh
Not so long ago they sat around the fire at night and talked about the dead. His dead were not so near to her own. He packed a small blown-glass pipe that may or may not have belonged to him and they smoked it and he listened to her. She listened to him. Three years gone from his First Change and he was the sort of young man who rambled and didn't understand things like exposition and rising action, sure as shit didn't know about denouement, but the last time they saw each other she could see he was learning.
If you're going to tell a story you have to divorce yourself from it. Only speak if you have something to say. Avoid simile and metaphor. Speak plain. Bloodletting has no place in their world and what he did just now has no place in their world either.
After he settles in the seat beside her he leaves the door gaping open, not like a wound or a mouth but just like a door. He controls himself and once he has controlled himself he drags his right boot into the cab and claps the door shut. Even if he didn't buckle his seatbelt and they collided with another car and he went flying through the windshield he'd be fine but Hector isn't suicidal and he's never been suicidal.
He's been happy and he's been loud and he's been affectionate after a few drinks or a few hits or a few hours of conversation but for all he's seen and what little he's spoken of seeing he does not want to join the ones who've gone ahead of him. He buckles his seatbelt.
And then the dig about asking his surviving sister instead.
He groans.
"Come on," he says, all give me a break.
Lola Hawkes
Come on, the Galliard implored for her to give it a rest. Lola's only answer was a stern glare out the front windshield and to drive the 30+ year old truck toward the main road, and from there to the freeway to get them out of the city. The Kinfolk had been in the city plenty of times, but typically out of necessity. She didn't like leaving the Homestead unguarded for very long. It's safe to say that having been evacuated from her home for the past week has had her on edge.
They go for about five minutes in silence that was only interspersed with the rumble of the engine and the occasional groan and clank when they had to lurch into motion again after stopping for a light.
Finally, when the quiet had gone on long enough that they each had plenty of opportunity to go down paths in their own mind and find their way back again, the Kinfolk broke the silence.
"Am I taking you to the Bawn's edge, or back to the motel to find a place to sleep first?" The edge that had been accompanying her voice since the news about Maria broke had softened, but not by much. Her eyebrows were still furrowed, face still a hard mask of a frown, but at least her voice showed an effort to be more understanding. She could never know what the spirit of a pack felt like, and would never fully understand the bonds that are forged within one. She couldn't know fully how Maria's death impacted Hector, or how that compounded with their other Fianna being stolen that night as well, and how the abandonment of his alpha was just salt in the wound.
She knew coping with the disintegration of his pack was hard, but that was overshadowed tenfold in her mind by her own loss of a sister. The edges of her brain felt numb, and her shoulders already ached with the weight of the news. Maria-- gone. The Hawkes family, ending with this surly Kinfolk in the high desert landscape of the Western United States.
Hector Ghosh
Five minutes was more than enough time for the Cliath to pull himself together. The silence gave him time to stare out the window and watch the patchwork of the city fade into highway and he found the rushing-past of the wires and the guardrails and the land beyond man's tracks sedating. If Lola hadn't spoken he might have just sat like this the entire way back, slouched down in the seat with his elbow on the scant armrest on the passenger door's interior and his thumbnail between his teeth.
That's how he is when she pierces the nothing between them. His fingers curl over his nose and he looks over at her slow like he doesn't recognize the softer edge to her voice.
And they don't tell each other the things they tell themselves. No room for it and no point. He has no right to tell the Questioner's orphaned sister that he loved Maria like she was his own blood, that he doesn't really understand what it's like to lose his own blood. Life was kind to him before he discovered what he truly is. Not many of them can say that.
"No," he says when he takes his nail out of his mouth, "take me to the Bawn's edge. I want to tell them what happened."
Which means he's going to have to sing the tale of how Hornet's Nest and First Light laid down their lives protecting a Caern, tell it like a story and not like an apology. Not like earlier. The irony hits him before she can respond and Hector snorts, sounding disgusted with himself.
"And I'll tell it to you the way I'm going to tell it to them, unless you really want to hear it from Tamsin. Her version's going to suck, though. She got knocked out early on and missed half of it."
Lola Hawkes
Patience, Lola. You need to have patience with him.
-- He has no patience with me, Papa. Why would I share any for him, huh?
Because he carry's Mother's Rage in his heart. Because he cannot keep his mind straight and tempered always, not with that much passion.
-- As though I don't know what anger is! I can't --
Because, Lola. Because he is not built to sway. You are.
-- That is what you and the Shaman say. But how can you, or the rest, expect me to change what I've been taught for so long?
It is in your blood. You will learn, as have the rest.
-----------------------------
It is only with controlled breaths that Lola had kept quiet and still for that time, and that she had reached out with a question-- what he needed of her-- when she broke the silence. She had not continued to press for details, as she couldn't know how much more stress he would take before his teeth would begin to sharpen and his Rage would lash against her violently.
It had been enough time for him to calm himself as well, by losing his mind in the middle distance between car window and horizon. Now he could address the sullen Kinfolk more patiently, telling her that his story would be better due to his consciousness throughout the ordeal, and that he would be as frank with her as he would be with those at the Sept's Bawn.
This did not elicit a smile, or any relaxing to her expression at all. What he would notice, though, is the slow breath that slid out between her lips and how her typically squared shoulders rested down some.
"Good," she answered. "I will hear it."
And that was all the more she said unless Hector picked the conversation up and drove it the rest of the way. Otherwise the pair were left to their own thoughts, their own internal mechanisms for dealing with loss. The drive is long, but the radio has three clear stations and sometimes the silence is nice when they're not too clear.
Lola would take the Galliard so far as the Roxborough State Park's trailhead. He would remember where to go from there. If he asked if she wanted to come to hear, she would agree and kill the engine and walk with him up the trail to meet the welcome committee. Otherwise she would state simply that she expected to hear from him sooner than later and leave him to his People.
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