Hector Ghosh
Hector seemed in good spirits as they walked back from the Rock With No Name tonight. Lola knew he sensed her tiredness and her wanting to sit down by the way he took from her things she would let him carry and draped an arm around her shoulders once Tamsin had quit them. As they completed the journey he told her a story about Glen and Maria.
And he hasn't spoken of them without a block rising up in his throat the entire time he's been back. This story he told with laughter: they had been staying in a good-sized house with several of Corey's Kinfolk in a Houston suburb and one of the kinsmen awakened three mornings in a row bitching about how Corey hadn't moved his car after the pack had come home from whatever it was they were doing. Recovering from losing Willow in the Umbra, feeling her snap away from Fog. Drinking a lot.
With the Galliards watching to make sure they had no witnesses Glen and Maria both shifted into Crinos and picked up the kinsman's car and moved it into the backyard where it was surrounded on four sides by the fence or the back of the house with no way to drive off the lot. The kinsman had to borrow Corey's car to get to work.
"I thought I was going to die," he said. "From laughing. There might be pictures upstairs in the loft somewhere. It was so funny, Lola."
Whereupon he left the apple thrown by the faceless figure on the counter in the kitchen and stripped out of wet clothes to duck half-frozen into the shower. He did not stay in there any longer than he needed to wash his hair and convince his brain his body had not frozen off below the waist. He dressed warmly but not in his dedicated clothing. Pulled back his hair because it is wet and he does not want it to freeze if they go outside again.
Their evening continues on as close to a normal night as they could hope but this is the first gibbous moon that has come to them since they learned of the pregnancy and now that they are home Hector twangs with energy owing nothing to his Rage. He burnt it off fighting his sister but Luna still calls to him.
On other nights as bright as this he has gone to her as a magnet to another. They've sat by the fire and they've eaten and they're preparing to bed down. Lola may be thinking he's going to lean into her any moment now. His gaze smolders when he looks at her and he has been touching her hair and her face and her shoulders, kissing her face and her neck and her hands all night. Came up behind her a few moments ago to hold her and rest his palms over her belly. Started kissing her neck in that idle way of his, without heat.
But he isn't gearing himself up to lie with her. Lola feels none of the uncertain hesitation that marred his earliest attempts at courting her. This is something new and she can feel it humming in his bones because he cannot lie to her when he's this close to her. Hector is scared.
Lola Hawkes
While Tamsin walked with them, Lola participated in the stories that were told, the banter that was kept up between the two packmates, and the pace at which all three of them walked. They were both chock full of energy, pulled tight by the moon above, but the woman wouldn't lag with exhaustion trying to keep their pace in all senses. Hell, she was even happy for the company, to see Tamsin there and to know that she was (probably) joining them later that evening after she'd burnt herself out at the Sept. Assuming, of course, she didn't wind up curled up in her fur sleeping elsewhere tonight for the simple sake of convenience and fresh air.
After she parted, Hector offered to carry things for her. She only carried her pack, and she tended to pack light and practical so she had no reason to protest when he held out a hand to offer to carry it. She'd hand it over, but only after producing a small drawstring pouch about the size of a sandwich bag that was half-full of salted almonds. She'd share these with him while they walked.
They get back home and the hour is late, but not enough so to warrant turning in right away. Hector had gone in to shower and Lola had gone to change into clothes that are not stiff with cold and sweat and dust, that are more comfortable and better for resting. They eat whatever was fast but substantial to prepare and sit around the fire to warm their toes. They paw through the loft when they get bored enough, chuckle over some new box of vinyl albums that was uncovered--
Who the hell likes Bobby Darin?
My mom had a thing for crooners. Can you blame her, really?
-- and when the hour has grown late enough Lola announces that she's going to bed and rises from the spot on the floor near the wood burning furnace in the living room. She was folding up the blanket that she'd had absently draped over her lap and putting it back where it belongs when Hector had come up behind her to show his affection, as he'd been doing all night. She straightened up and let the weight of her shoulders rest to his chest, returning the gesture thusly. His hands had settled over her stomach, as they liked to these days, and he nuzzled his face past her hair and into her neck to pepper with kisses.
But this, much like the other touches and kisses that have transpired this evening, was different and hesitant and maybe distracted? but she wasn't sure. She did know it was different, though. On nights like this, when the moon was on the fuller half of its cycle, she expected him to be insistent and hungry and careful but not gentle, not cautious, not like this. With him as close as he was, with her feeling how his heart shifted its pace against her back and how his breathing shifted and how his hands pause before settling, she gets a better feel for it. This isn't the spirit-dizzy distracted that she had experienced before.
He'll feel her go still and stand upright so she isn't leaning any weight to him, and know the words are coming a half a second before they do:
"You're acting off, Hector. I ain't porcelain, what's going on?"
Hector Ghosh
He flinches with the realization that she's seen through him even though they aren't facing each other and he doesn't try to keep her flush against his front. That flinch turns into a knee-jerk flare of agitation wont to come when the moon is this bright and he draws a breath to steel himself for the question he can hear in his head before Lola even looses it.
By now she knows he cannot lie for shit and she may have begun to rely on this. It's a punchline to a joke few people tell. Easy enough for him to hide behind his ambiguous ethnicity and his perpetual movement and know that folks assume he is hiding his thoughts or his motivation or something because what would he be doing with the Uktena if he weren't hiding something.
When Tamsin runs out of insults she attacks Hector's boyishness. The leanness of his still-growing body or the lack of hair on his chest or the lustrousness of the hair on his head. His questionable hygiene or his awkwardness around girls he likes or the fact that he can come across as a jerk sometimes because 'feelings' aren't really in his repertoire of mysteries he's committed to memory.
He's acting off. She isn't porcelain. What's going on.
Hector looks confused at first and then he tries to brush aside the consternation by laughing that in-close quiet laugh of his. The one that crinkles his eyes and shows his teeth.
"I'm not..."
He lays the 'confused' on a bit too thick when the laughter sublimates into a frown but he might actually have no clue what she's talking about. This is the guy who took two moons to figure out he was mad at Corey not for making a bad call or even for beating his ass when he was insolent but for abandoning him and Tamsin.
"Nothing. Nothing's going on." He lays his naked hand at the side of her face and traces her cheekbone with his thumb. Practically trembles with wanting and fear at the same time. It's in his eyes and there's nothing he can do about that. His voice stays level though and he amplifies if he doesn't outright affect an air of understanding. "Are you tired? I can go out again if you don't want me--"
If Lola doesn't cut him off he trails off on his own, at a loss for how to end that sentence.
Lola Hawkes
She knows the difference between genuinely confused and putting on an act-- she knows this in general, but with Hector it's easier for her to pick up on the smaller signs. She knows him well enough, has been close and spent enough time with him especially recently that she can tell the subtle differences in tone, posture, and behavior. So when he laughs quietly and puts on a confused face, Lola disengages herself from the arms that had been around her waist and turns around to face him instead. She doesn't back away from him any more than what's needed to be comfortably face-to-face without simultaneously being all up in his space. She prefers to stand with enough distance at least that she doesn't need to angle her chin too much to maintain eye contact with him.
He touched her face, ran the edge of his thumb along the edge of her cheekbone, and insists that nothing is going on. Even ask he's asking if she's tired, if he should leave, she's clearly more focused on what she sees than what she hears. He can't lie at the best of times, so it's virtually impossible for him to mask what his eyes are telling her. There's desire there, which she's comfortable with seeing because she knows it's there, because it flashes on her face just as frequently when there aren't people around to not want to share it with. It's the clear, honest fear that has her furrowing her eyebrows and reaching up to put her fingers around his wrist and move his hand away from her face.
He might feel a pang of rejection, but she doesn't follow up by shaking her head or walking away from him. This may be the point where he trails off, because Lola doesn't interrupt him right away. Instead she stays put where she stands, frowning at him in a way that seems borderline impatient but isn't quite there yet.
"Come on," she says at last, the tone urging instead of soothing or harrying. "You ask me what's wrong and I tell you. I figure that should be going both ways.
"Besides, you're a shit liar. What's in your head, Hector?"
Hector Ghosh
The hand that brushes his away from her face is caught up when Hector rotates his wrist towards her thumb. Not hard enough to break an iron grip but it's warrior instinct that has him loosening her fingers that he might grip it. Desire for her never really goes away but he doesn't want to leave even as he offers to go.
If she'll let him Hector holds onto her hand as she urges him. Even as she sees through him he tries to maintain that bemusement. It doesn't work. He looks a bit moon-mad fixing a stare on her that he might sort out what she's talking about.
But she's right. He starts to flag when she reminds him that she will cough up what's choking her up when he asks. Lets go of her hand so he can step back from her. Palms flat against his thighs. His jewelry is in the bathroom and his feet is bare. Arms bare where the t-shirt does not cover them. Still no scars on his body.
None of them would have made it out of that pit last month were not for the fact that he and Erich and Javed fought the Horror straight-on while the spirit-talkers called on the incarnae. He didn't tell her how many times Charlotte or Sophia broke a healing gourd on him but Lola is not shy and she is not stupid. She has heard from other people what went on down there, how Echoes of the Lost took hits like a full-moon, how the rest of Celduin fought with the passion and the fearlessness of the moon they share.
So she asks what's in his head. He trusts her enough to just blurt it out. That's what he does only after he makes a hesitant sound low in his throat like a long-shut door creaking open.
"IIII... am having a real hard time not just throwing you on the bed right now but I don't want to hurt the baby--" His voice doesn't crack but his hands start to shake. "--and I'm trying to tell myself that's stupid, you know, you're right, you're not porcelain, but I think about it, you know, not just when we're together but just... ever since Winnipeg it's harder to not get so mad that I want to flip out and tear everything around me apart and I don't mean to think about it all the time but it's--"
One of his nervous hand indicates his temple like that's the epicenter of everything and he grimaces like okay now he's imagining it so he plants that hand onto his forehead and scrubs his face with it.
Lola Hawkes
It takes an effort for Hector to kick that creaking door open and tell her what is on his mind, what's got him trying to hold and touch and love her but locking his muscles up and doubling back and hesitating and simply staying leaned up against the proverbial gate instead of coming on in up the pathway like he did before. He holds her hand, and she doesn't try to pull away from his doing so, and his voice creaks and drags while that door swings open to let the truth out.
It says something that Lola's patient for him, that she listens to his words and lets him finish rather than cutting him off to scold him for his hesitation and worries. She's empathetic to the poor guy's plight, really she is. They had perhaps a month total to develop the relationship that they had before Hector had to come fetch her from a hospital after not coming home from a mission one night and found out at the front desk that she was pregnant. That they knew one another previously helped, but they were still navigating what it was to be together, getting comfortable. Couples could be together for five or ten years before making a child together, and issues like this would still arise.
Well, sort of. Most people don't need to worry about clamping down on so blind and devastating a fit of anger and rage and violence that it could literally kill your entire family in one short minute.
She kept holding his hand as long as his grip stayed about her fingers, but that wasn't where her focus was. She was staring at him with hard, wide eyes that were in this precise moment nigh impossible to get a read off of, her expression was so flat.
"Okay, first off,"
Oh good, here we go.
"No amount of bed-throwing is gonna hurt this baby. It will be just fine, alright? It survived me getting my leg cleaved into, it'll survive all the things that you do to me." There's a brief moment where she runs her fingers past his hand, up over his wrist to his forearm, prompted by a passing thought through her mind of all the things that he does do to her. But she doesn't lose her focus or actually jump off track.
"I don't mean to state the obvious, but that's just what Rage is and does, and it sure as hell isn't gonna stop or change."
The sentence was structured in a way that suggested there should be something that comes next-- a reassurance that follows, or a good piece of advice. But let's remember: this is Lola who's talking, and she's never really been all that great with words.
Hector Ghosh
She's getting better at this.
In the beginning Hector tried to tamp down on his wolf nature because he knew from previous experience that Lola was not good at dealing with emotions at all let alone the extremes of them. Every time the pack blew through their spirits were high and all anyone wanted to do was roll around in the dirt and drink by the fireside and play music and break things.
They did not weather many losses because they kept to the outskirts of the Nation. They visited Septs but did not join them. Were more like a band of Road Wardens than a proper pack but Willow and Maria and Tamsin had wandering souls. Glen was a poet and a musician. Fancied himself a rambling man. Corey would go wherever the fight was and he looked at the pack as a learning experience. Like an 18-year-old doing a stint in the Peace Corps before he commits himself to law school.
Hector was just a kid. They were both just kids when they met and neither of them was happy with where they'd ended up at that point in their lives. She had been running with heavy-hitting Cubs in preparation for a First Change that never came and he had been ditching class to make out with girls and pissing off his father focusing more on his music and theatre classes than math and science. Neither of them understood each other but they could sit by the fire and pass a joint back and forth and enjoy the solace of shutting the fuck up while the others gallivanted around a short distance away.
Just as she's learning how to be as patient and supportive as she is strong and wise Hector is learning how to ride his Rage like a wave instead of fighting it and lean on his Kinfolk when he cannot keep his head above water.
He doesn't let go of Lola's hand and when it travels up his forearm he draws a breath that shivers because he was not lying. Love burns in his eyes even underneath the fear. Love for her and fear of himself. He can't reconcile that on his own.
His eyes mist up like she's only seen them do when he's been talking about what happened in Winnipeg but his voice doesn't break and he doesn't shed saltwater from them. He does make a clicking noise in his throat as he struggles with the first syllable of his next outburst but it isn't an outburst at all. He's still blurting things out because she asked.
"No I know but I've never heard... this is the problem, I keep thinking of everything I know about babies and the only stories I can think of are the ones where the baby's metis and... you know how those stories end. Or the one where the mate comes home and he tears the place up. Shit like that. And I've seen..." He laughs that self-conscious this-isn't-funny laugh as he looks across the room to gather up his recollection before he looks back to her. "You remember how I was telling Anthony I was afraid you're gonna go off one day and come back? That's not... that's not really true. I meant what I said in the kitchen before we went over there, how I trust you to stay safe when you're out on patrols. Just... augh."
A frustrated noise from someone who ought to be able to articulate better than that. He blinks away the sheen in his eyes.
"I've never frenzied before. Ever. But I could snap on you one day."
Lola Hawkes
There are plenty of people in the world-- plenty of Kinfolk specifically, that would have a better approach to providing comfort and support to their mate than what Lola does.
If she were different somehow, softer or slower or more patient, then she would have been careful in her motions and she would have reached out for him, touched his face or his hair or his chest, someplace to show affection and trust in a gentle and loving way. She would explain calmly that she wasn't worried, and that she didn't feel like he had to be. She'd explain that she knew for a full on fact that she didn't have anything to fear from him, and that she couldn't think of anyplace safer than wherever he was.
That's what a Good Old Gal would do.
Lola, chock full of Gall instead, does this:
She sees Hector's misty eyes and heat rises in her chest and up her neck, but it's a sensation full of energy and fire instead of soft cool sympathy. She feels protective, somehow, defensive in a way that she can't explain-- not defensive of herself, not protective of the life that she cultivated, but instead all of it was aimed to the man in front of her. She hated his fear, but she couldn't deny it or tell him not to feel it. She resolves to find a way to break it instead.
He knows she can take care of herself, but worries that he'll frenzy on her, and this is confessed after rambling about the stories he's heard about babies and how they're all negative and he grates out a noise of frustration somewhere in between. As soon as Hector says that he could snap on her one day, the moment that sentence ends, Lola's chin jerks up and her eyes flash. It's a look of challenge that she gives him, wild-eyed and defiant and proving a point.
The hand that she'd been holding, that had been holding on to her, gets seized by the wrist-- well, seized may not be the best word, but it wasn't a slow and gentle way in which she switched from holding his hand to directing it. She's firm, and unless he actually jerks his hand out of her grasp (it would take effort, too, she's apparently determined on this), she tips her chin up and puts his hand around her throat. Keeps holding his wrist, tries to keep him there, and hopefully is able to ride enough of a wave of shocked 'holy shit what is she doing' that she succeeds at least long enough to tell him what she does next.
"You could," she tells him flatly, with her nose wrinkled and her teeth showing maybe a little more than necessary when she speaks. "You could squeeze this life outta me, you could give me your fucking claws and tear me to shreds and I wouldn't be able to do anything but hope to God that I get to the gun quick enough to keep you off me.
"But you ain't gonna. I've seen you with your eyes rolled back and froth at your mouth, seized and sliced open and shaking and already trying to Change, and I put myself in front of you then and nothing happened. You're worried you're gonna kill me? Well here's me prone and unprotected-- look who ain't dead yet?"
Hector Ghosh
Comforting him would have only smoothed away a wrinkle in him that would pop up again. She knows this about him. He doesn't want comfort and he doesn't know how to respond to it when he gets it. The only person who has ever been able to comfort him was Willow and that was because she could lay hands on those wrecked and weary and ease the suffering in them. Willow is dead now.
He gets himself into miserable places for the depth of everything behind him spilling out to fill the much larger expanse of the rest of his life. One day he will take a step forward and the imprint he leaves on the ground will not blare up blood-black with everything he'd trekked through as a Cub.
More often than he imagines frenzying and killing his woman and the baby in her belly he imagines the baby alive and black-haired in Lola's arms. This is the first she's heard him speak of this but close to every morning that they awaken slow and easy Lola hears him talking to her stomach. He doesn't care that the book says the baby won't be able to hear him until the sixteenth week. Plants don't even have ears and they think it's badass when you sing to them, was his rationale.
Lola felt contrition after behaving in an unreasonable manner mere days ago. Hector had not chided her. This is different. Hector knows how to deal with Cubs and younger Cliaths. They're still learning how to deal with each other.
So his eyes do go wide when she grabs him by the wrist and forces his hand against her throat. He jerks against her grasp but cannot extricate himself. His fingers curl not around her windpipe but up on themselves. Like a dead insect. His breathing comes fast and upset and his nostrils flare with the effort and she can see helplessness in his eyes but he doesn't lose his mind.
It was a baseless fear. He never said it wasn't.
And he stands and he listens to her as she tells him the truth cold and hard. His breaths barely make the journey into his lungs before he blows them back out again but he's listening. It scares the shit out of him but he listens. His eyes don't well up again but Lola can see pain where she lanced that boil in the center of him that fed off of his anxiety.
"I'm sorry," he says and his voice cracks like he is going to cry but he does not cry.
His fingers uncurl from themselves to rest not full on her throat but at the side of her neck. Tenderness in it where before there had been warring animal emotions. His free hand comes up to her brow to smooth hair back from it. Like they're in bed and she's the one who's come up from a bad dream. He's pulling himself back together.
"I'm sorry. Let go of my wrist, I'm not..."
Lola Hawkes
He struggles against her, and this is where many other Garou and Kinfolk would be baffled were they on the outside looking in. It's madness that Lola takes the hand of a wolf when his moon hangs heavy and dangerous overhead and place that hand around her throat. It's even worse that she does it without him wanting it, that she pushes this on him and tests his Rage in the same moment when he says he fears losing grasp on it. What may boggle some minds more than others (although there's probably a pair of Black Furies in a fever pitch of pride somewhere), is that she's actually able to make it happen.
Sure, if he were to shift he could out-muscle her with no problem. He wouldn't even need to don fur, the Near Man form would be plenty enough to overpower her. But here, both of them wearing the bones and bodies of men and women, they're quite even. He jerks his arm to pull his hand loose, but Lola's grip is like iron because she's held down writhing wolves and pummeled them with her shoulders and knees and skull. His fingers curl back, refusing to fall around her throat like she wanted them to, and there was nothing she could do to correct that bit of resistance.
But he still was tested, and Lola remained there trying to prove that his Rage could lick and spit and hiss all it wanted and that she would be fine against it.
He apologizes twice, his voice cracking like it wants to break, but he won't let it. The second apology is followed by a request for her to let go of him, and she looks at him suspiciously from under the wrist and forearm of his other limb while he pet her hair back from her forehead and temple. She doesn't comply immediately, for a second her grip even tightens on him. She considers pushing it further in that moment. She wants to provoke his Rage, to make him yell and lash out and swing his arms and stomp his feet and shake the rafters with his roaring. She wanted to push him there, to demonstrate in real time that he wouldn't lash at her even under that kind of pressure.
But....
He's standing there, holding her neck instead of grabbing her throat like she tried to make him do, smoothing her hair and trying to comfort her despite the fact that it was her time to do so for him. His voice cracks, his eyes have misted already, and he summons in her something so powerful that it bends even her bravado and makes her chest ache for how full it feels.
So she lets go.
Arms hover in the air, not immediately sure of where to be, but they fall to her sides and her palms press flat to the outsides of her thighs. Her head ducks, but only because she was lowering her chin back to something more comfortable. Though she felt damn near overwhelmed with how strong of a sense of empathy and love that he could set within her, she stayed level when she spoke.
"You're not a danger to me, is what you're not. But I think this.... hesitation, this trouble you're having? Goes past that. I think I'm just the best application for that worry of yours, the best way of expressing it, but I don't think that's only it. I think that it's your Heat and Fire and Rage in general. Like you haven't got the grasp on it that you want and it feels like somethin' different and maybe even stronger living inside of you. And it worries you, doesn't it?"
Somewhere in there she sounds like she's pulling words from her memory that she's heard before. She was going to be an Ahroun, remember. She's probably been coached on what to expect from her promised Rage plenty of times before, and these words probably came from one of those teachers from just shy of a decade ago.
Hector Ghosh
For the moment that her grip around his wrist tightens Hector's eyes harden and his fingers still in her hair. It isn't a calcification that he might frighten her. He trusts her. He knows she's going to let go. He doesn't have any previous proof that she will let go though and if Lola had a mind to keep provoking him she might have stirred up his Rage and not her own love for him.
She doesn't make him beg and she doesn't make him swallow back the frenzy that would have taken him over. Lola lets him go and loses purpose in her hands.
No dramatic release of tension from him. The Galliard's lips form a tight line and he draws a cleansing breath in through his nostrils. It comes out again hard and with it an expression of deep pain clouds his expression. As everything else passes so too does this.
But instead of putting her hands on him Lola puts them against her thighs. Hector smoothes back her hair one last time and he is about to put his lips to her forehead when she picks up his sentence where he dropped it.
Restlessness comes in now and Hector picks up the blanket she had been folding when he came up behind her. It gives him something to do with his hands and it gets him to focus on something other than the flame dancing in the pit of him not yet sated even though he has run beneath the moon and hunted and cavorted with his packsister. He doesn't feel like beating a drum and telling tales to his brethren tonight. He wanted to be with his woman.
Circumstances being different he already would have pulled her down onto the couch and wrested off their clothing and they would be in each others' arms right now. He has not been afraid to set his teeth into her shoulder or grab tight to her hips when the moon has been so fierce outside before. She's already said the things he does to her would not harm her or the baby. Now he's trying to keep himself occupied so he doesn't get it into his bones that Lola wants him just because he saw love in her eyes.
And it worries him, doesn't it.
"What," he asks with a grim laugh as he tosses the folded blanket over the back of the couch and turns toward her, eyebrows lifting before settling into a frown, "are you gonna head-shrink me now?"
Lola Hawkes
Hands part from her face and hair, and Hector instead moves around her, picks up the blanket that she'd been folding and resumes the task where she had left off. The way his shoulders were set, how his eyes had searched the room and focused themselves on their task at hand upon finding one, the very fact that he needed something to do with his hands all spoke of the tension that still lay throughout him. Lola's hands had been at her sides, palms flat against her skin, because she too wasn't exactly sure what to be doing with them. The only impulses running through her tendons was to reach to him, although she wasn't sure if it was supposed to be to hold or to shake him.
Prior to this relationship (outside of her immediate family, of course), she only really knew to interact with people in a rough-around-the-edges manner. Snapping someone out of something was done with fists or smacks or shoves. To talk them down or up wasn't easy for her. That was a hurdle she would've needed to cross if she had been True Born, in order to learn to be an effective leader.
But here and now, instead, she tries to use her words-- says to Hector what her concern is for him, what she thinks might really be the case for how his Rage crawls through him, and how the panic edged into his voice and pulled it tight when he spoke of being scared of losing control.
His answer, though, was to scowl and ask if she was going to analyze him. He could probably have anticipated her reaction-- Lola's eyebrows hopped up on her face, somewhere between surprised, slightly confused, and the tiniest bit stung. Then just as quick the expression locked down into a scowl to mirror his. Lola's arms folded over the loose fabric of the night clothes she wore (a pale gray set of cotton blend capris and a matching tank-top that was loose on her shoulders and frame) and cocked her weight so it rested on one leg more dominantly than the other. It was one way of standing your ground and planting your weight, except this method was so much more 'Excuse me?' than simply digging heels in.
"Well, 'head shrink' wasn't the choice of words I'd use. More like 'try to help you get past this'. But hey, we could run with that instead."
Hector Ghosh
As he's grown both in body and in station a dangerous edge has come into Hector's being. His eyes have always burned with Rage but he has shot up half-a-foot in height since his Rite of Passage and where before he was a meatless meandering thing he has taken on a straightness in his spine and a certainty in his eyes. Those in the Nation respect him in spite of his hyperactive joking nature because he is brave and honest and has moments of wisdom beyond his rank.
Beyond growing from a wild boy into a werewolf has had to adjust the way he talks and the way he thinks to accommodate his status as a pack alpha. Up until now it was the most difficult thing he has had to do since recognition came to him in the form of the first rank. This, here and now: learning to be open and vulnerable instead of stolid and solitary. To rely on someone.
Corey has been gone from them five moons now and the abandonment still gnaws at him. When last they spoke of it he said he would have still followed him if he had come back but that cannot still be true. The pack moved on without him and Hector is stronger now than he was following anyone else. Roots taken into the earth instead of tumbling along as the wind bids him. Doesn't mean he's forgotten that he trusted Corey with everything he had and the Glass Walker turned on him.
That used to be a joke the two boys had between them. My therapist says was the setup to more than a few of their punchlines. The Fianna and Maria didn't think it was as funny as the urrah and the Lost Cub did. They had a lot of inside jokes that didn't make sense on the outside. Head-shrinking was one of them.
The words leave his mouth before he can stop them but Hector is not blind. Lola's face betrays her shock and he flinches like he would have if he had struck her. His scowl fades in light of hers and contrition stains his features.
His hands are empty now. His mind still races and Lola can see he isn't past whatever it is that's bothering him. Identifying what it is is not coming easy and she gets the sense as Hector draws a breath through his mouth that if she keeps pushing before he's worn himself out enough to talk the sarcasm is going to quicken.
Must be his body knows the same denied impulse as hers. He gives in first. No apology this time but he lets that breath go without words and rests warm hands on her shoulders and looks down into her face. His breathing is steady but heavy as he holds her gaze a moment and then he runs his palms from her shoulders to her elbows up to the sides of her neck.
"You are helping me," he says with the force and the volume gone out of his voice. If she'll let him Hector's hands go down her sides to find her hips. "You are. It's..."
He kneads the flesh hid beneath the cotton and flinches again at a thought that goes unvoiced. Lets out another hard breath and leans against her that she might either put her arms around him or push him away.
Lola Hawkes
This was getting to be the way that they ebbed and flowed: Hector would rise, Lola would along with him (or vice versa), and then someone would have to come back down first. Once before it's been Lola, but more often than not, as was the case now, it was Hector.
He saw the flicker-flash expression on her face before the scowl settled in to take over, and he answered it by breathing deep (through the nose, out past lips) and setting his hands on her shoulders, then sliding them down (elbows), up (neck), and down further still (ribs, waist, hips). She doesn't shoo his hands away or close herself off to him, though she was still far from content for his hesitation. She was watching him carefully, focused singularly on where he was and how he was doing. She had unfolded her arms when his fingers had curled under her elbows, so that they would be loose and resting at her sides once more. When he squeezed and rubbed at the moderate padding over her hips she touched her right hand up to his upper arm and rubbed up under his shirt sleeve, the touch simple and bracing.
You are helping me, you are. It's....
And he trailed off again, and flinched a little at something that she didn't see or hear or understand entirely.
Her lips had parted to say something, to protest at him, but he leaned toward her like he needed a place to rest and think. Her brows stitched together some, the expression more concerned than frustrated but a little bit of both none the less. All the same, she doesn't push him away. She doesn't quite exactly put her arms around him either, though. Instead, she takes his face between both of her hands and guides it down near to hers. Her head tips forward, and her forehead touches to his, her nose nearly touching his but her mouth not hunting for his just now.
She stays this way, holds him here for some undocumented number of ticks of the clock's second hand. Her eyes had closed, and are still that way when her voice breaks through the quiet again. At least this time it's a lower and quieter tone, which was her effort to be gentle and could only be recognized as such by those closest to her.
"All I've known for helping people is ripping the bandage off so the sting goes past quick. I can't tell if that's what I'm supposed to do here, though. I can tell you're unsettled, though-- Hector, you just cringed. It can't just be that you're worried about hurting me, can it? 'Cause I feel like there's something you ain't said yet."
Hector Ghosh
With her hands on his face Lola can feel the Galliard shaking with the effort of breathing instead of pushing her to the nearest flat surface like he'd said he'd wanted to a chunk of an hour ago. His breath smells like the toothpaste he'd scrubbed around his mouth earlier and washes over her lips though their lips don't touch and she can feel him gentling with her near like this but gentling and calming are two different things.
All her life she had prepared herself not to deal with beasts made mad by the moon but for dealing with her own beast. The one a well-meaning but wrong seer claimed would come for her one day. Not only with her beast but with the battle that the Rage would fuel. She's left with the muscle memory and the combat prowess of a true-born raised for war but she doesn't know how to help her mate.
He doesn't know what's going to help either. That's how they keep ending up like this. Circling each other and hoping one of them won't back away this time. Both of their eyes are closed and as her tone comes down soft she feels Hector take another deep breath and let it back out heavy. Like she's soothing a horse that hasn't been broke yet all muscle and heart and ventless heat beneath the skin.
She feels like there's something he ain't said yet.
He nods and he makes a formless noise low in his throat.
Lots of things he hasn't said yet but it's going to have to wait. He opens his eyes now and slides his hands around the curve of her waist, grasps the small of her back, leans his hips against hers. Exhales sharp with the contact.
She loses her grip on his face when he ducks his head to press his mouth to hers. Quick at first like he's still expecting her to push him back but then it deepens and she can taste the urgency and need in him.
His hands go to the hem of her shirt but just so he can feel her skin beneath it. Run his hands over her lower back and up her ribs and around to touch her stomach. Her, not the baby. They slide underneath the waistband of her pants a moment later and if Lola doesn't stop him she ends up on her knees before the couch so fast the journey blurs.
Lola Hawkes
She may have wanted to coax words from him, but it seemed that would have to wait. The Gibbous moon was fat and heavy outside, and Hector hadn't so much worn himself out tussling and racing with his packmate, but instead had amped his energy up, worked his muscles and warmed them up. It was exercise, it was play and fun and good, but it wasn't release. That's what the Kinswoman is there for, in many senses of the word.
Instead of getting any articulated answer, she gets a sort of grunt from in his throat before his mouth claims hers, quick and rushing and tasting of the clean mint toothpaste that she buys at the store. He's moving his hands over her, sliding them under her clothes to touch the warm skin beneath the cloth. She's taken only a little by surprise, but it isn't a negative thing. Along with the numerous changes that she was undergoing on a physical and chemical level, desire was amped up as a consequence of shifting hormones. He kisses her deep and hard and she's more than happy to give it right back. His hips press into hers and she's hiking her leg up his, the inside of her thigh pressed to the outside of his.
But then pants are inconsequential and he's pushed at her shoulders to encourage her down onto her knees and... well. She knows what to do from there.
They don't always make it to the bedroom, and tonight is one of those nights. Apparently they weren't worried about Tamsin making her way across the threshold of The Homestead anytime soon.
------------------
Some time later they finally come to a still rest, muscles trembling and breath hot and panted. Hector's on the couch, and Lola's in his lap facing him, hair hanging about her face and shoulders and down her back, with her forehead touching his shoulder and her breaths gradually slowing under his chin. It takes some urging to disengage her, but she'll remember that they were expecting someone else tonight and lean over to reach for where her shirt and pants were crumpled up in the corner between the back and arm of the furniture that they were on.
She'll swing her legs away from his and try to stand to dress. If he tries to keep her, she'll kiss his face and brush his hair from it and use that to help transition the separation instead of just abruptly abandoning him there on the couch.
Somewhere between the snap of her waistband back about her hips and belly and her reaching for her shirt, she asks: "Feeling better?" There's humor to the question, but sincerity also.
Hector Ghosh
It is Lola's remembrance and not Hector's that allows her to slip away from him. He is slower to catch his breath than she is and he holds tight to her but not so tight that he can keep her here. Animal brain engaged as it is nothing Hector can do in his human skin can keep Lola from doing as Lola will do and he wouldn't seek to try.
Advise, sure. He can advise her and support her and tell her what he thinks. He's done it before. It's because he supports her and tells her why he does and how he feels about her, tells the entire Sept why he supports her and how he feels about her, that Lola is bolstered and not burdened by her status as a battle-minded kinswoman.
He holds her on his lap for as long as she will rest with him and then he makes a dramatic groaning noise when she looses herself from him. Smiles with the lips to his face and the fingers against his hair. But he doesn't get off the couch just yet. He takes a hint and pulls his boxers back on but then he lies down instead of sitting with his sweat-slick back against the cushions.
"The book didn't say hormones would do that," he says when she asks if he's feeling better. "You're right, I ought to be more afraid of you breaking me."
And he scrubs his face because a joke isn't a proper answer. The arm near the back of the couch holds itself up like its emptiness is because of her absence. His fingers beckon. If they have to put on clothes because Tamsin might come in at any moment he doesn't want to concede total defeat just yet.
Whether or not Lola climbs back over him to lie in the hollow between the couch and his body, let him haul the blanket over them, he steers the conversation back towards the one he'd abandoned in favor of cleaving himself to her.
"How do you put up with it?-- how we lose our minds when our moon's up?"
Lola Hawkes
He groans to be disengaged from her, but it's something that happens each time. Almost always she will be the one to remind him that they need to move sometime, and she will need to gentle herself out of his arms, away from his grasp, and put on clothes or settle into the bed for the night or go add more wood to the furnace so that the house stays warm through the night. She's getting better at this, it's why she's quick and easy to lay affection on him with her hands and face while pulling the rest of her body away.
He says he ought to be afraid of her breaking him, and she laughed-- the sound healthy and genuine and far less uptight than she had been earlier in the hour. The tank top that is the second half of this set of pajamas is pulled on over her head. When he stretches himself out on the couch and motions with curling fingers for her to come join him, Lola doesn't protest. She was concerned with Tamsin having to suffer the image of them naked and entangled, but the pair of them lounging on the couch together in their clothes was a non-issue. Tamsin was well in the know about them, a packmate, a forever guest in their home, so Lola didn't feel a need to hide from her.
She does indeed settle herself into the space between Hector's side and the back of the couch, but to do so half of her needs to be on top of him. So she hooks her leg over his hips and stomach and settles her arm across his chest and lays her head on his shoulder. He'll pull the blanket over them, and she'll adjust it so that it's about her jaw and ears instead of trying to cover her head.
How do you put up with it?
Lola hefted a content sigh against his bare skin before answering.
"Because it's what you are, and a part of what I am too. I didn't grow up with humans, remember? This is what I know."
Hector Ghosh
Quiet settles into him now that they're lain close together and he isn't struggling with need atop everything else he carries on nights like this. Lola fits herself between the couch and his body as he covers them with the blanket. Overtop of it his free hand rests on the bend of her hip where it hooks to his waist. The fingers of his other hand find their way into her hair as his arm cradles her shoulder.
Only in moments like this when he is stripped of his clothing does Hector look or feel as if he has some strength to his form. He was a scrawny meatless boy but he's solid and warm beneath her now.
His breaths are even and easy. He kisses her forehead when she exhales against his chest and as they talk he only takes his lips from her skin to speak. Even then he does not go far. The volume of his voice is low for how close they are but Lola knows now there is little she could ask him now that he would not answer.
"Yeah," he says. He remembers. He's heard stories not just from her but from those who were here when she was a child. From her sister. His fingers move through her hair as he gathers up an unprovoked admission: "I don't know what got into me earlier."
Lola Hawkes
There's usually calm to follow the storm. Or, at least, that's what these two have been experiencing and growing accustomed to. Following tiffs or disagreements, or the whirlwind that they make when leaving clothes on floors and in corners, there's a sedated kind of still that settles afterwards. Sometimes it doesn't last long, for it will be the middle of the day or Hector will start to jangle with energy and need to go work on a project until he's exhausted enough to sleep. Other times they will simply sink into unconsciousness afterward.
Lola now seems content to start walking the latter path. She's still and content, and Hector can feel her breathing slowing, her limbs going still and heavy and happy to rest their weight upon him. He speaks quiet and low near her forehead and hair, expressing that he doesn't quite know what got into him earlier.
Lola's answer comes in a voice that is sedate. It would seem gruff to most ears, as that's just the way she tends to sound, but Hector knows better than to take that to heart.
"Worry and jangled nerves," she explains in that low, brief, somewhat lazy voice. "It's fair to worry. I mean, you could tear me to ribbons." Her cheek nuzzles to him, the rest of her follows suit before she stills again, more comfortable now. "Like I said, though, it's an empty fear. Nothing's gonna happen 'cause you're so wired to care and protect that even on that deep down subconscious level you won't put your claws or teeth to me. You didn't out in that field when you were losing it, you haven't in the middle of combat. You won't anywhere else either."
Hector Ghosh
As they lie beneath the blanket the heat of their bodies combine to form a cocoon around them. Night is well settled on the world outside the cabin and even if Tamsin were to walk through the door right now she would be bound for bed.
They know her though. His appetites run the same as his packsister's do and were not for the fact that he has a bed to warm and a woman with whom to share it Lola knows Hector would be in the city right now. When he first came back from Winnipeg her phone would vibrate with new messages from him at least once a day, often more, as he felt the urge to reach out to her as he trespassed and loitered and generally behaved as a public menace.
He can run through the woods in his wolf skin now and he can tear at prey and Wyrmlings until he can ignore the persistent fury that lives in him. When he is around Lola he is not at war with both his nature and his want of her.
They might have afforded themselves a few more months of time to grow accustomed to cohabitation were not for the incident last month that led to Hector rushing her out of a hospital and beating up one of his brethren. The shock of Lola's acceptance had just begun to wear off when they affixed the ultrasound of the embryo they'd made to the refrigerator.
This isn't in the books Anthony gave them.
"Did you ever have to take home ec in, I dunno... we were in eighth grade. Thirteen-fourteen years old. They made us pair up and carry bags of flour around for a week. I think that was supposed to make us not want to have sex, they made us watch the childbirth video the year before. It was this whole curriculum they had planned out, I think. Scare the little bastards celibate!
"Anyway, my flour baby survived until the last day and then it broke open in a horrific skateboarding accident. You don't even want to hear about it. It was brutal. My girlfriend at the time... Tasha Yang, she's in law school or something now, we were paired up and she broke up with me because we failed the hell out of that project. Maybe that's where this comes from. Childhood trauma. I'm conditioned to think I'm a baby killer."
He's joking. The story is true but he doesn't actually think an eighth-grade home economics project is the root of his fear. But there is the fear in as close to plain language as he's willing to get as they're drifting towards sleep: Hector is afraid he's going to be the thing that kills their unborn baby. Not Lola getting hurt.
Lola Hawkes
The story of teenaged Hector, all baby-faced with a standard skater boy shaggy haircut, dropping and bursting his flour bag baby and losing a girlfriend over the ordeal, had Lola grinning and chuckling. Childhood stories were fun, specifically for the sake of pointing and laughing at how they used to be. It was also entertaining observing the juxtaposition between how Hector's stories tended to go (very human life, very human activities), and how Lola's went (remember that story about how she headbutted a wolf in a fight and it broke her arm with its jaws?).
"Well," she says sleepily, "I don't think you're going to burst this one like a bag of flour." This is punctuated with a yawn that stretches her jaws.
"I don't think you're going to tear it up or gnaw on it like a bone either. I think...," and her voice trails off here for a moment. Sleep came to Lola quickly these nights, like a freight train slamming into the doors of her consciousness until they gave way. Hey, you work on building an extra organ and human body all day long, and see how you fair at the end of the night, huh? Though her sentence had flickered out like a light, she managed to pick it back up in low murmured tones in the space between his collarbone and jawline.
"I think you'll tear anything else up that gets near it. And that you'll coddle it and rock it to sleep at night and be more proud than you thought you knew how to. More proud than when you get that first scar, even."
Another yawn, and she asks:
"Can we just sleep right here?"
Hector Ghosh
With his arm around her shoulders he holds Lola close after the admission and the absolution but he does not buzz with unspent energy. Outside the moon blazes. She will never feel the maddening call that beckons so many of their people but she can feel the moment when Hector hears her.
That she is not afraid of him takes much of the fear out of his own mind. Insulated as they are from the rest of the Nation Lola has not witnessed how most people react to him. It's most obvious when they have to travel into the city but between the dark coloration of their skin and the wild energy coming out of not just Hector but out of the woman who shares many of the trips these days they're usually afforded a wide berth when they go out in public.
Folks who run the local businesses are used to Lola and they share her brusque if not casually inappropriate manner of speaking. Laconic out here where the fields start to ramble on for miles and the mountains stand tall and proud in the distance and a body can smell fresh water and air instead of urine and sewer gas.
But the cashiers at the market and the clerks at the record store and the librarians in Littleton all go tense as drawn bows when Hector talks to them. Doesn't matter how charming and friendly he is. They see a glint of violence in his eyes and know him for the monster he is and they stay as far away from him as they can.
A sense of warmth comes over him independent of that they've made beneath the blanket and Hector lets out the last of the pent-up breath in his lungs to smooth her hair back from her temple and nuzzle his face to hers. She asks if they can sleep right there and Lola can feel him smile against her forehead though he looses no noise.
His hand leaves her hip to reach up over his head and flick off the lamp on the end table. Once darkness takes the place of low yellow light he slides the arm beneath the blanket and cradles her about the waist.
"Thank you," he says.
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