Hector
Just past nine o'clock Monday morning. He'd
gone up to the city Saturday night and hadn't come back and hadn't sent
word that he would or would not come back. This isn't abhorrent if one
looks further back into their scattered history than two weeks ago but
for the last two weeks he has peppered her phone with non sequiturs and
grainy image files at least once a day.
All Sunday he was silent and then came this:
Remind me never to go to 2-for-1 steak night ever again. Face still hurts. Storytime when I get there.
Doesn't
say when exactly he's coming. Only that he is. Knowing him he'll take
the light rail as far as it will go and then hoof it the sixteen miles
the rest of the way. Even in his wolf form the trek takes over three
hours unless he sprints in bursts. No one ever stops to pick him up when
he tries to hitchhike because even looking as harmless as he does at a
distance, up close he frightens people.
Someone gives him a lift today.
Not
even three hours after he messages her - high noon - he comes ambles
down the driveway leading up to The Homestead. Hair is down and he's
flapping the hem of his t-shirt to try and get a breeze up under the
cotton. Looks sleep deprived and vaguely shell-shocked but he isn't
limping or holding his insides inside himself so who even knows what
that text was supposed to mean.
Lola Hawkes
Saturday
there had been no reason to worry, really. Though Lola had become
accustomed to receiving some sort of communication from Hector on a
daily basis, he'd never really said that it was his plan to continue
doing so. It might have been his way of letting her know he was still
alive, or just reaching out for communication for the sake of hearing
from her, for the companionship. However, it wasn't a guarantee, so
when Saturday rounded to a close Lola didn't think too much of it. She
just concluded her day and went to bed.
Despite her sentiments on
Saturday, on Sunday morning her phone was met with a scowl when it had
no messages to deliver to her. She had half-convinced herself that
there would be a text there marked 4:30am or some other ungodly
wee-hours timestamp. When it wasn't she opted to bring her phone with
her out on her patrols, tucking it into her satchel to carry with on her
motorbike.
Sunday afternoon she'd sent a text:
Hey what have you been up to? i havent heard from you in a while.
When
there was no answer she'd tried to call from the front porch of the
property just past midnight. Again, no answer, and Lola spent another
hour out there on the front porch alternating between standing leaned
against a beam of the awning built over the porch and sitting in one of
the chairs against the front wall. Finally she would retire to bed and
fall asleep worried and unhappy.
Monday morning, 8:00am, and Lola
woke later than she usually would and was bothered with herself over the
fact. Another night had passed with no answer, and Lola took a quick
shower and set about her morning routine with every intention of driving
into the city to begin asking around at that Spire-Sept for her
unresponsive kinsman. She was just about to pour coffee in a to-go
thermos when she received his text.
The phone was stared at for a
second, the first sentence read over an extra time to try and make sense
of what he was talking about. Then she texted back: OK, see you soon.
By
noon Hector would come to find Lola sitting on one of the two rocking
chairs on the front porch, set off to the left of the front door with a
table in between them. The Kinswoman was dressed in a simple thin
wrap-around sundress that was a touch clingy, but more than that it was
airy and comfortable and stretched for movement. She was barefoot and
rocking herself gently. There was a glass of ice water on the table,
and she peered at Hector from the shadow cast on the upper half of her
face by the broad brim of her straw hat as he approached.
When he
reached the porch she held the water out to him, but didn't get up. She
didn't seem pissed off or scolding, but instead she seemed the kind of
calm that comes from talking yourself back down again. "Sounds like you
had one fuck of a weekend."
Hector
"I thought my uncle Arjun was bad when he got drunk."
Now
he sounds as tired as he looks. Hector doesn't adopt a pallor when he's
exhausted but the skin beneath his eyes does darken and he stands up
even straighter than he normally does like to combat the desire to
slouch into his somnolence. He about trips coming up the porch to join
her and once he's at the top of the steps and stood over her for a brief
moment she can see the lingering traces of an injury healed through
spiritual means.
He has a healed-over hole the size of a man's
fist on the bottom of his jaw. It will be gone by tomorrow but right now
that's the only visible physical evidence of the fact that he could
have died yesterday.
The Galliard flops into the rocking chair
beside her and drops his duffel bag between them. Knees splay as far as
the confines of the chair will allow them to and he rolls his head on
his neck to look at her. Sweat sheens on his skin.
"A bunch of us
got in a bar fight with a Dancer. Almost killed the shit out of--" Here
he rolls his gaze away to look out over the lawn. "Okay, not us,
Erich was kind of alright, more like he was about to blow balefire on me
when something stopped him." Clarification over he looks back at her:
"Cold Crescent's got one of the Dancers' Kinfolk in custody and they're
trying to figure out what to do with her and this newborn we found."
Lola Hawkes
If
Hector took the water that was offered, she leaves it in his charge and
didn't take it back. If he missed the offer or bypassed it for the
moment, it was placed on the side of the table closer to the chair
Hector was sprawling back into. It was clear that the water was for
him. She knew the trip out here on foot was a rough one, and would
greet anyone she knew was coming in the hot months with the glass of
water she would know that they needed.
Of course the very first
place that her eyes linger is on his throat. The skin there is
discolored, pink and shiny and stretched looking. It's still healing,
she can see that much. It wasn't necessarily a scar, and it probably
wouldn't leave as severe of a mark as it seemed it might now.
Kinfolk
though Lola may be, she knew enough about wars and anatomy both that
less than an inch probably saved his life. She didn't yelp at him or
reach out to touch for reassurance. All that she did was eye his throat
with sharp eyes while he stretched and settled and left his legs to
fall open. Only when he rolled his neck to face her did Lola's eyes hop
up a degree to meet Hector's.
She listened attentively, like a
pack leader gathering intel with which she would plan their next move.
She had a vested interest in these attacks, and an entirely different
spin of perspective on it than most people on the sidelines. The
information was soaked up, and Lola leaned herself back in her chair and
resumed rocking.
"Tell me about the Kinfolk and the baby," she asked finally.
Hector
"Oh, man, you're the best."
This
to the water pushed closer to him. He must have thought he interrupted
her, that she was out here with the water for herself and wasn't
expecting company. A hand laden with rings and bracelets picks up the
glass and he bolts it down. Even walking down the driveway in this heat
is enough to soak a man through his clothes and he had to have traveled
much further than that by foot even if someone did give him a lift.
Once
the dust is gone from his throat Hector plunks down the glass and seems
to see her for the first time. Given that they're talking about a
damaged woman and her orgy-born offspring he at least makes the attempt
to keep his eyes on her face but the fabric of her dress clings to her
figure and Hector still has a pulse.
"Not much to tell. Sam Evans,
one of Cockroach's Kin, made off with the baby while we were fighting
the Dancer. Dancer blew fire out his mouth after he decided not to kill
all of us and lit up the bar. The woman would have just stood there and
burned if Thomas--you remember Thomas, right, met him at the Gardens? I
guess he's the one who got her out. Erich made off with the bartender,
but the bartender's human. He just dropped her off somewhere else. I was
really messed up, I was--"
And this is the part he hasn't
admitted out loud to anyone else yet. Thomas was the only one who saw
him stare through the flames at the dead-eyed woman for several seconds
and do nothing. He's conveniently left out details of his injuries and
the position the Dancer had him in at the time the bar was lit up.
"I
was just gonna leave her there." He clears his throat. "They've got her
in custody now. The Den Father at Cold Crescent has the baby."
Lola Hawkes
The
story had Lola's attention. She had her head rested on the chair back,
her toes rocked her gently, and she sat with her elbows hooked up on
the arms of the chair and her own arms turned back inward so her fingers
curled in the air above her lap. She looked at rest, but she was
listening raptly.
"So now we've got one of their Cubs, one of their Kinfolk, and one of their Spawn."
Her
tone was one of musing. She clearly felt there was a signifigance to
this pattern but hadn't quite worked out what yet. She didn't seem sure
if she should be able to predict what comes next, or if she should find
a meaning behind what's happened to explain intent, or perhaps even
warning.
Next she was struggling to summon an exact inventory of
the Garou that the Spire-Sept had lost. A few quick blinks brought Lola
back out of her own mind, and she turned her head to direct her gaze
back upon Hector. She was eyeing the mark along his throat and jaw
again, but not so intently this time.
She wanted to ask about the
fight, to find more details and see what else there was to learn about
this war in her neighboring city. But the tone that Hector had used to
tell her about the Kinfolk woman, specifically, had her pausing. She
leaned to the side, across the table, and put her hand on his shoulder
so her fingertips were on top and the heel of her hand pressed to the
top of his upper arm. "You wouldn't have been wrong to. If she's a
Spiral Kinfolk then she's not our Kinfolk. There's no redeeming that--
can't make her a Gaian any more than you could make me a Kin of
Unicorn."
Hector
Whatever other feelings he has on
the matter aren't anything he's going to lance up this afternoon.
Thoughts he has plenty of. Hector sucks at articulating himself when it
comes to talking about heavy things like love and fear and anger. He's
young and went through his First Change without his family for his
mother's side being Lost and one could imagine it's hard enough sorting
out one's role knowing what's expected.
Look at Lola. She prepared her entire life for the role of a warrior and it turned out the forecast was wrong.
So
his eyes flick back from whatever dark place they went off to when he
remembered the woman who would burn not because of the fire but because
of her apathy. He looks down at Lola's hand on his shoulder. Nods his
agreement and reaches across his torso to gather up and squeeze it.
"They don't know any better," he says of the city Garou. "They're all going at it like what if it was one of ours. Or what if it was me. Might be a chance for the spawn but I won't hold my breath waiting for it to grow up and not have something wrong with it."
Lola Hawkes
"The
Kinfolk is an easy judgment to make," the other Kinfolk proclaimed. He
reached an arm across his chest to place his hand on top of hers and
give it a squeeze. She sympathetically tangled her fingers into his and
squeezed back for a few moments. Then she disengaged his hand so that
she could sit back in her chair again-- leaning sideways across the
table like that was a mite uncomfortable after a while.
"The
infant, though..." Lola huffed a breath of air out through her nostrils
and laced her fingers together to rest over the flat terrain of her
abdomen.
"It depends on how it was born. How it was conceived.
It depends on how powerful a cleansing it can receive without it being
killed, and if anything we could do would redeem its birthright.
"It
comes down to if we can afford to take the risk of having a time bomb
at our sides, or if we can afford to lose any new lives in a world of a
People that keeps growing smaller." This was, clearly, the kind of shit
that Lola ate up. She wanted to lead great battles, to have a war pack
all her own and enough Glory to wear the bones of her conquests as a
necklace. But she couldn't, so instead she learned and listened and
experienced from the sidelines. If she made herself smart enough at it
then she could be sought out for advice even if she couldn't Change
herself.
This seemed a good opportunity to ask: "Hector, what
happened to the Spiral that was there? You didn't mention its death at
all. Leads me to assume there wasn't one."
Hector
Were
not for the fact that she hooked her fingers through his he would have
let her go sooner. For the seconds that they squeeze each others' hand
the Galliard glances first down at their fingers and then over at her
face, shaded as it is by the brim of her hat. When her spine protests
the position he releases her fingers. His Rage is all but drained and in
its place is the disconnected spaciness come from having such a strong
connection to the Umbra as he does. He could have been wolf-born or a
spirit-talker.
The Athro responsible for his fostering thought the
speed with which the Cub learned of the spirit world and the other
realms and the secrets of things others had no interest in knowing meant
he had some sort of fate his mother's people hoped to hide. Hector has
only spoken of his mentor when he's had too much to drink and only then
in riddles only Willow or Maria seemed to be able to decipher.
Lola
asks what happened to the Dancer and Hector snorts. The ice in the
glass has melted some. He takes a shot of water and scratches at the
bottom of his jaw.
"He was the size of a bus. Had horns and hide
so thick I couldn't cut through it even with my claws. Broke one of his
off in Thomas's chest and it didn't even faze him. He could puke
balefire at us. Must be packed under Green Dragon." Fuck, says
his tone. "After I got up--he got me under the chin with his horn and
threw me across the room. Just about took my jaw off. So after I got up
we went after him again and that was when he got Thomas, threw him
across the room. Tried to puke on Erich but Erich got out of the way.
Dancer grabbed me and held me up over his head and I don't know what
stopped him but he was about to spit fire at me when he was just like Nah. Erich's mouth got all burnt up from biting him, turns out he had acid boils in his hide."
He pauses here.
"He
got away and the only reason we aren't dead is because he couldn't be
bothered finishing us off. We didn't even scratch him."
Lola Hawkes
Again, she listened raptly. This time she looked grim when Hector fell quiet again.
There's
a moment of silence while Lola thought about this freakish Spiral
Dancer that Hector had gone up against. She visualized the attack,
where Hector had been gorged through his lower jaw by that rhino-like
horn and tossed away. She imagined the squirming, writing, snarling and
fighting figure of a big lean black Crinos with baubles and rings
adorning him, held up by the giant of a Wolf-Beast, vulnerable and about
to be finished off. She wondered what would possess the Spiral Dancer
to stop.
Just like the last attack.
"Just like the last
attack," she muttered aloud. She rocked her chair back until it touched
the house wall, the motion long and drawn out so the chair squeaked
quietly on the end. Then, with a resigned sort of sigh, she leaned down
to the side and tapped a wicker basket out from underneath the table
between the two chairs. A mason jar was taken from under a magazine and
a hand cloth and set on the table, then opened.
Out came a small
fire-orange glass pipe, a ziplock bag of the drugs that Hector had
brought as a gift a dozen days ago, and a small steel grinder. She
would pause to glance up at him, and deliver a grim-speckled smirk when
eye contact was found.
"I feel like you wouldn't oppose," she said
simply and set to work grinding and loading. While her fingers were
busy, she distractedly mused aloud: "They did that last time, isn't
that how the story goes? When they were moving that Cub from Denver out
here? They got ambushed, were getting their trash kicked. We lost
three, I believe. Nearly lost one more. And that Fianna Guardian at
the Cold Crescent Sept was stolen away.
"They killed an Adren--
big tough motherfucker too. But a couple of Cliaths, a scared Cub, and a
Fostern managed to survive. I guess the calvalry showed up, but the
Spirals fled-- they didn't fight. It seems like they're not trying to
wipe us-- you guys-- out. They're just stirring the pot.
"But why?"
Hector
I feel like you wouldn't oppose.
He
who ran with tricksters his entire tenure as a Cliath and has a
reputation for being a hyperactive goofball hasn't so much as smiled
this entire time. The longer Hector goes without smiling the darker his
gaze gets. Not until Lola cracks a joke does the life come back into
him.
At this he doesn't just half-heartedly smile but bursts out
laughing. It flashes white teeth and clears some of the clouds from his
eyes.
"You feel right," he says before giving her room to speak.
As
for why: he's already told a Child of Gaia he doesn't want to think
about the Wyrm's motivation any more than is necessary but he was also
in the company of those who don't truly understand darkness. Lola knows
Hector has been dragged along to some of the more fucked-up of the
Umbra's Realms because it's come up glib in conversation.
"Because
they can do more damage if we band together to throw ourselves at them
than if they pluck us off one by one. I heard their alpha stopped a car
with his hand in his human skin. They're probably hoping they'll piss us
off enough that we attack their Hive."
Lola Hawkes
"But
they'll grow impatient when we don't." Lola said this flatly, like she
were commenting on a known fact. The sky is usually blue. Black
clouds bring rain. Cats have whiskers, and Septs these days do not lay
siege on Hives.
She was so sure of this that she wouldn't entertain any notion otherwise.
"Neither
of the Septs can front such an attack. To try would leave the Caern
too vulnerable, and that would of course be the plan all along. That
would be too obvious. They would wind up stuck picking us off one by
one, or charging us themselves."
Ground up greens were transferred
from grinder to palm, from palm to pipe. The baggie and grinder were
put back in the mason jar for now, and a plain BIC lighter and the pipe
were offered up to Hector first. Hospitality and all that.
"...I'm
not confident that one actually is a Black Spiral Dancer. The one that
you said stopped a car with his bare human hand? That doesn't make any
sense. What if he's.... shit, what's the word. A Jaggling come
across, or some merge of the Totem Itself with their Alpha? I know we
can all do some crazy unexpected shit, but that sounds more intense than
anything I've heard outside of tales."
Hector
Hector
takes the pipe with a closed-lipped smile of gratitude and lights the
first hit while watching her face. A thick white ghost escapes his lips
and he sucks the hit back up through his nostrils before passing the
pipe over to her. Seasoned smoker that he is the pipe is still oozing
and he keeps his thumb over the vent so Lola can catch the tail end of
his hit before lighting up again.
By the time he lets go his first lungful he's on his way to feeling no pain. Son of a bitch doesn't even cough.
"Thanks,"
he says to the green, and then goes on: "Now that we're talking about
it I don't know a whole lot about their alpha. The elder Galliards at
Cold Crescent weren't in a huge hurry to talk about it the first time.
Maybe I can get more out of the elders here since, you know. I've got
this--well I guess it's not gonna net me a Battle Scar, I can't brag
about surviving too hard."
He has never had to use his Rage to
keep himself alive in combat before. He knows it isn't anything worth
bragging about at all but he's been grievously injured enough times that
the thought exists in his mind that he could just flat-out die in
combat. Jokes keep him from dwelling on it.
Lola Hawkes
"Of
course," is the response to his thanks. She watched as he took his
hit, and grinned at him when their eyes met as he breathed the smoke
cloud back in through his nose. She wagged her eyebrows at him and
leaned forward to accept the pipe as it passed, her thumb replacing his
over the vent so she could catch the last, as the gesture allowed. She
breathed the small hit out on words that were mostly made of jest:
"Well I'll be. You smoke like a rock star. Is that how you've picked
up your Kinfolk along the road?"
She'd been smoking since she was
introduced by a Cub at the Sept not long after she'd found that she
would never Change. Her tolerance for the aggravation on her lungs had
gone up with time, but she wasn't a very heavy user-- she didn't want
too much smoke to damage her lungs and dwindle her stamina, after all.
So
she took her hit, held it for an extended time after passing the pipe
back, and let the dense white smoke roll from between her lips for a few
seconds before blowing the rest from her lungs and waving her hand in
front of her face while she got three or four good coughs in to clear
the sensation in her throat and chest.
"Not a bad idea, though.
Couldn't hurt to ask. I would myself, but... Well, Cold Crescent
doesn't regard me the same way as some of Forgotten Questions still
does. Besides, I don't much like their gathering point. It's the
furthest goddamn cry from what a Caern ought to be, in my opinion. Not
just in the middle of a city, but in a skyscraper? Pfft."
Hector
At the question of how he's picked up Kinfolk in the past he grimaces and makes an ehhhhh
noise low in his throat. It doesn't reach his eyes. It's a similar
noise to the one he made when he abruptly backpedaled while trying to
explain why he came bearing gifts the day he brought her the grass
they're now smoking.
And he manages not to laugh at her for not
coughing. Her lungs won't regenerate like his will. If hers gather too
much tar she won't be able to sprint for the truck the next time she
needs her sidearm. If she caught a warped shifter's horn through the
bottom of her jaw she would bleed out without medical attention but
Hector's already told half the people he knows about how dead he would
be right now if Lola couldn't shoot as fast as she can, if she couldn't
turn around to see a spine-wracked yet human-looking Fomor and not
hesitate before firing.
Lola already knows how he feels about her.
The fact that she waggles her brows only cements what's been laid down
already. His second hit is taken without the theatrics of the first one
but no lesser amount of skill. At the end of her confession of her
feelings towards Cold Crescent he passes back the pipe, the vent still
locked by his thumb.
"I hate skyscrapers," he says in a voice that's gone gooey from two huge hits off the pipe and looking at her for too long.
Lola Hawkes
Hector
agreed with her sentiment about skyscrapers. He hated them, she
thought they were a terribly unfit place for a heart of Gaia to throb
and prosper. If one were born, as was the debate not so long ago, then
it would be weak and withered and it would take all of the Garou within
the City to nurture it and keep it alive. That would divert resources
away from Forgotten Questions, and without Forgotten Questions then what
would the Hawkes family be?
Lola was quiet when she accepted the
pipe back, and held it for a few moments while looking out to the
horizon beyond the front yard, and after remembering herself came to
take a second hit. She would call it done there, but set the pipe back
on the table nearer to Hector's side for him to continue if he wanted.
Different people had different tolerances, and she knew that a Garou's
metabolism was a hell of a thing. They processed intoxicants
differently than she could, so she wouldn't try to make assumptions
about what they could or could not handle.
It had only been noon
when Hector arrived, but they wound up spending about an hour and a half
out there on that porch, letting the time get away from them and
talking like they had done in days gone past. This time, though, they
were adults without a pack surrounding them. And Lola had at some point
in their meandering conversation reached across the table and held out
her hand for his. She would've held on to it for a little while, rested
on the table as a support, until he let go or they found reason to get
up and move otherwise.
At some point later that afternoon Lola
would insist on going out for another patrol around the eastern edge of
the Bawn. She'd bring a side-arm strapped to her waist and a satchel
and set out on her dirt bike. Hector would, of course, be welcome to
stay and rest if he wanted. He could join if he wanted as well, and if
that were the case she'd set him up with the four-wheeler to ride.
Either
way the rest of the day looped back into normalcy for the Kinfolk. It
was easy to rediscover the rhythm within her territory now that the
element that was Hector, who had found a way to begin factoring into her
life as strongly as he did, was back and confirmed to be in good
health.
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