Lola Hawkes
On Tuesday night Lola had every reason to be tense. She was worked up all day, but Hector was gone until late in the night and Lola was asleep by the time he came in. There wasn't a chance for him to know that anything was amiss.
On Wednesday they each had their own agenda. Hector had something going on with his pack, and that would keep him away possibly all night, he wasn't sure yet. That was okay with Lola, she had something that she need to go check on anyways, and for some reason an inkling in her mind and something about the words on the letter had her refraining from sharing what her plans for the night were. He had gone by foot, and Lola took off with the truck an hour and a half later. She didn't get back in until midnight, and had a difficult time sleeping for all that was on her mind.
Don't bring any of Them, was the advice. The Shadow Lord woman suggested they bring a shaman despite the cautions that their Author had given them, and frankly Lola just wasn't sure what to do.
That uncertainty combined with the sense of general unease that the entire situation had settled about her shoulders left the Kinswoman tense and restless. Hector will have picked up on this, even if he didn't get back until very late Wednesday night or possibly even a day or two after that. His woman has been out hunting, and that's kept her away from the house for the better part of the last few days. She'd gone off with a modest little peashooter, and if asked why she'd explain simply that she didn't like to pick buckshot out of her meat before eating it, and it was better for practicing targets anyways. She came home with something each night-- one night with a trio of rabbits, another night with a snake that she'd dug up from its burrow and two ducks looped at the neck with a length of rope she'd brought with explicitly for that reason.
It isn't until Saturday night, for whatever reason, that this tension reaches a point that Hector apparently feels the need to address it.
The sun had started to set an hour and a half ago, and by now all that was left of the day was the lingering warmth that was unseasonable but welcomed none the less, and only the barest dash of dusky violet on the western horizon. Lola's been outside for most of the day, and she's out there now in a hoodie that she's got zipped up only halfway, with the hood up over her ears and the sleeves pushed up past her elbows. She's wearing jeans, but has to keep tugging them up every so often because they had to be left unbuttoned-- this particular pair wasn't as forgiving as others that she owned, and she was realizing that she'd have to shelf them for a while after tonight.
In her quest for distractions, and as an excuse to stay posted outside and keep an eye on the property (hoping to catch that Nina woman snooping where she shouldn't, so that way she had an excuse to go slice her trachea out of her throat), Lola had set up a dummy that she used to practice with using fists and feet a few years ago. Now, though, she's procured a pair of hunting knives not too unlike the one that Hector owns, and she's practicing double-wielding these things against the dummy.
Were it twenty degrees colder outside she would be steaming from the top of her head and her shoulders, for how warm the workout was making her.
She's been at it for the past seventy minutes.
Hector Ghosh
Though he isn't the most perceptive person on the planet he is attuned to deviations in Lola's demeanor and since he returned home Friday he has been noticing and writing off the tension and irritability that have been slowly seeping out of her all week.
Her sleep has been shallow and disturbed. Her attention has drifted out the window when he has spoken to her. She has laid a hand on his chest to stop him from leaning into her more than once.
For all the hiccups and near-frenzies they have endured since Lola began sharing her bed with him during September's waxing gibbous moon this recent spate of minor aggravations has not even scratched the surface. This morning rather than risk arguing with her over her mood Hector excavated an old vinyl record player in the loft and dragged it down and made a project out of cleaning it up and finding a place for it in the den. He went into town to barter replacement parts for the speakers and blow the money he's earned busking on beefing up the Homestead's vinyl collection. That kept him out of her hair for the majority of the day.
And she knows he is chalking her aggressiveness on hormones. They do not have an exact number upon which to base their expectations of their unborn baby's arrival but they are both intelligent individuals. Her morning sickness peaked and ebbed and now her brassieres are becoming uncomfortably snug. Her pants don't fit anymore. They're guessing they're going into the third month of pregnancy and that's been reason enough for Hector to give her her space.
Night is falling though. He's been making a meal out of one of the animals she's killed and once he'd finished with that he'd stood at the window watching her for a time and he hasn't been timing her but he was keeping track of how long his domestic project took. He'd flipped over The Velvet Underground & Nico and put on White Light/White Heat and "I Heard Her Call My Name" has just finished playing.
Behind her the door squeaks open. The porch light flicks on. Hector stands still to watch her a moment and then comes down the steps to stand within normal-speaking-voice distance of her. He can project his voice a great distance but he doesn't want to. He wants to talk to her.
When he speaks to grab her attention it has no sharp quality to it. She cannot glean anything from Hector's emotional state from his voice when he says:
"Lola?"
Lola Hawkes
With how in tune to her surroundings Lola has been the past few days in particular, she knows immediately when the back door opens and Hector exits onto the porch that her father had built behind the house about a dozen years ago or so. She knew because the door was opening and closing with a casual kind of ease that it was Hector coming to join her in the mildly cool evening, and not some unknown. So she doesn't break her own focus to address him, not just yet.
By the time he has walked from the back door to stand on the dying grass nearby, Lola has embedded one of the knives in the upper belly, between the bottoms of the rib cage on this rubbery dummy torso, and is still holding the other like she's prepared to stab with it, but had instead just finished dragging it across the dummy's neck. He'd caught her, in peeking through the window a quarter of an hour earlier, holding the dummy by it's chin and jaw and throat and pressing the knife up to its face, standing close like she was laying threats onto it that she would have preferred to lay on a living soul-- probably whoever or whatever it was that had her in a mood these past few days.
She's done, though, and by the time he reaches near enough distance to speak her name in a way that isn't easy to read Lola's standing still. Her shoulders and back move with faster breaths for she's been up to physical activity out here, working out and drawing a sweat to her brow. The knife she was holding goes in a sheathe strapped to her right thigh. She glances over her shoulder, briefly, before looking back to the task at hand. When she answers, she's wriggling the remaining knife to pull it loose from the dummy without mangling it too much.
"Yeah?"
A few more wriggles, and with a small grunt the knife pops free. This, too, goes in a sheathe (this sheathe on the other thigh, of course), before she turns to face Hector fully. Her hair has been hastily tied back into a ponytail at the back of her head, but there are loose bits that hang about her face and down the back of her neck. At least he can read that the muscles in her face are a little more relaxed-- her tone and her eyes aren't as tight and terse as they have been. She was able to work some of that anxiousness out of her system after all, though Hector's pretty sure that it's only temporary.
Hector Ghosh
By the time she's turned back around Hector has not spoken again.
The Galliard's silences are not rare. He has to sleep sometimes. He pauses running off at the mouth to put food into it. When he's playing his guitar he doesn't sing unless he's putting lyrics to the melody he's already written. Lola will hear the same melody half a hundred times before she starts to hear words. In the beginning the words are mumbled nonsense, like he can't find them until he gets his tongue working.
When they're in each others' arms he isn't silent at all. No theatrics in his vocalizations but unless his face is buried in her neck or her mouth is against his he's making some sort of noise in those moments.
Right now he has his arms crossed over his chest. Though his boots are still laced he was not wearing a sweatshirt or a coat indoors and he didn't don one before he came outside. He's wearing a pair of corduroy pants he found upstairs in the loft and a Metallica t-shirt and he's got all of his jewelry on because he had to go into town earlier. His hair is pulled back. He stands in the coming darkness and he watches her and he doesn't say anything.
Her anxiousness is gone. She worked it out. All Hector has is what he can observe of her and that doesn't tell him why she's working out her anger on inanimate objects. He stands and she can feel that he knows something is wrong but he does not know what.
Once he opens his mouth to ask but then he realizes he doesn't know where to start and a look of bewilderment comes across his honest face and Hector laughs a laugh that is just as soft and bewildered as his expression. He comes up with:
"What's going on?"
Lola Hawkes
She'd been waiting for the question, and frankly she was a little surprised (and torn: part of her relieved, the other part cautious and unsure and antsy) that he didn't ask sooner.
She takes her time, really looking at him before providing her answer. He's got a tee shirt on, and though it's not quite cold enough for him to shiver immediately upon coming outside in just that and his trousers they both know that it will become uncomfortable if he's just out here holding still for more than a handful of minutes. Lola's got her sweater sleeves pushed up, and underneath that hoodie she's wearing a threadbare A-shirt. She's warm from exertion, but that will fade in a similar amount of time and she'll be chilled from the sweat on her head and back and chest.
Her expression is suspended and flat-- she's clearly trying to think of what her next move should be. She's teetering on the fence of telling him what's going on or trying to lie to him. He can see the wheels turning while she thinks: No, we shouldn't be sharing, he'll want to become involved and that could make things just that much worse and I don't want this bitch around him anyways. But I don't know what to tell him otherwise-- he'll know it's a lie, and it doesn't feel right to lie anyways. Okay, so you'll tell him. Now you just need to brace yourself to talk him out of coming with when you leave next week to find this 'sister' and probably put her out of her misery.
Or bring her back to the Sept, another voice in her mind chimed.
Hah, yeah, we'll see, was how she silenced it.
Finally she huffs out a breath, and her shoulders relax to round just a little more when she breaks from that stalemate. Her lips are pressed into a grim line (Oh, Hector, this can't be that good, can it?), and she gestured for him to follow her and walked inside. "I'll show ya," is what she tells him.
His first instinct may be to worry that this has something to do with the baby, but that should be quashed just as quickly because clearly the tiny fetus is still intact and Lola feels well enough to move around as much as she has been. He has enough time to let his wild imagination go through all of the horrible possibilities, because when inside Lola goes to an end table in the living room and opens the drawer within it. Notepads and pens are shuffled aside, and an envelope that was ripped open at the top was pulled free. Within the envelope, yellow legal pad paper that was crumpled up but then smoothed out and re-folded.
She turns and hands this over to him, and as she does she explains:
"This was on our porch on Tuesday."
Hector Ghosh
They took to cohabitation as quickly as two creatures unused to the concept could have but they both lived solitary lives before they found each other. Lola had been out here by herself the entire time her sister's pack had traveled from one Sept to the next and Hector had fancied himself a free sort of spirit even before he Changed.
Ignore the fact that he was born to upper-middle-class parents and wanted for nothing as a child and lived in the same house his entire life. His eldest sister was the one who was born when their parents were still scrambling for purchase. Hector can remember Cassandra's engagement and her marriage and the birth of her first and only child, the only cousin he can claim. All of these things happened before he disappeared. She had embarked on an oncology residency before he disappeared. Eight years and an ocean of experience separated the eldest child from the youngest. If and when he reaches out to his family he will not reach first for Cassandra.
But his feet have not started to itch. Hector is happy here and happiness is not scaring him into self-destructive behavior that he might dash the only stability he has known since he was a boy. His mind doesn't work like that. He had threatened to spiral into darkness in the months following Maria and Glen's deaths but his reaction was reactionary and acute. Part of him is starting to worry about Tamsin but he doesn't have the insight into human motivation and emotion to think to worry, or how.
He barely knows what to do with Lola right now. He came out without a jacket and the negligence was not premeditated but it serves a purpose. Lola guides him back inside and once they're there he locks the back door behind them. The kitchen smells like cooked rabbit and potatoes. A sick guitar solo scratches out of the speakers in the living room. As Lola rifles through the drawer and pulls out the letter that was waiting for her when she came home on Tuesday Hector leans against the island and wears a look of dark concentration.
No idea what's coming but he takes the paper anyway and unfolds it. No change comes to his countenance when she calls it our porch but a feeling of warmth bubbles up in him anyway. His metal-choked hands don't shake as he reads.
"'Decent,'" he says in a dry and unamused tone.
She can tell when his eyes pass over baby's father because his nostrils flare with the intake of breath but his Rage does not awaken. His eyes reach the end and go back to the beginning and then he clears his throat and folds up the letter again.
"That's cute. Did you…?"
Lola Hawkes
While reading the letter, Hector doesn't seem to have much of a reaction at all. This is precisely the opposite of what Lola had done when she'd read the letter for the first time. She'd grown flush in the face and neck and her head, she'd felt her chest go tight and her throat go tight and her stomach burn as rage (not Rage) bubbled within it. She'd crumpled the letter up in a fist whose knuckles had turned white and she'd slammed her way through the house hunting for-- well, she didn't know. Anything out of place, any evidence that someone had been in her home, in her life, perhaps bugging the nightstand or gluing spirits into her rafters. She just plumb didn't know, but she hadn't been able to rest properly since.
That Hector reads it with an even, smooth, unamused response has Lola looking a little confused and put off. She stays standing in the open space between living room and kitchen, fidgeting her fingers with the hem of her sweater before deciding she was too warm to be wearing that in the stove-heated house and peeling it away. Without the sweater on and zipped up her A-shirt becomes more revealing for how thin it is-- the color and cut of her bra underneath is distinct (plum toned, too small anymore, uncomfortable with a strap that liked to hang out just on the verge of falling off her shoulder). The sweater was tossed back on the arm of the couch and her hands punched into her jeans pockets to keep them from being too restless.
"Of course I did." She almost snaps at him, but appears reflexively apologetic for it. Another breath huffs quickly out her nostrils and she moves on past it.
"Apparently this cabrona did the same thing to other Kinfolk, not just myself. Wrote letters and distributed them, and I'm guessing they must've been personal to the others too. Three others were there. Then this woman-- called herself Nina-- rolled up packing heat but acting like a fucking robot. Says she has a sister and that she's been bitten and is turning. Wants us to check it out and help, but says it's really goddamn important that no actual Werewolves come along."
She sniffs hard, scowls even harder, and continues.
"I don't trust a piece of it, Hector. I refuse to believe she's out of the loop enough to think that a bite would turn her sister, but at the same time knows enough to know that I'm pregnant by you, knows where we live, and was able to make it up onto the fucking front porch without anyone noticing. The whole thing stinks like a trap, and Hector I wanted to fucking kill her for her trespass."
Hector Ghosh
This encroachment upon their territory does infuriate him. That his woman came home to find this on their porch and got herself worked into a lather because a stranger managed to glean from some source not only her name but her status as an expectant mother to a child whose father is a werewolf and her address and her affiliation with a network of werewolves bigger than even the author can fathom -
That's why he laughs. What this person could hope to accomplish other than raining down the wrath of a couple hundred traditionalist true-born he neither knows nor appears to care.
Times like this are when his travels and the abysses into which he has gazed come racing in to remind Lola that Hector has seen and experienced and lived through things she cannot even imagine. That his frenzies and his thrown fits tend to happen when he feels as if he cannot handle the situation. When he found her in the hospital and had to process not only that the woman in whose strength he has the utmost faith was not only felled but almost killed and that she was carrying his child he had nearly lost his shit more than once. Not once has Lola seen him stave off a fury out here.
The only time she has seen him grapple with the Eater-of-Souls happened after he was dropped to his knees by the worst pain he as a male can even fathom feeling this far outside the Deep Umbra and then eviscerated by a monster that then turned on his mate.
In none of the instances that Hector has grown inhumanly incensed has it been because of something harmless. The author of this letter is not harmless. But Hector used the word 'cute.'
When Lola starts to get fired up again his eyes take on a worried cast they do not often carry and he sets down the letter.
"Let me get this straight: four of you got letters like this one, and you went to check it out, and the lady who wrote it said her sister got bit and she thinks she's turning and now she wants you guys to meet up with her again?" That doesn't make any sense, he doesn't say. "Did she say it was a werewolf that bit her sister, or something else?"
Lola Hawkes
The way that Hector laid down facts had Lola's patience trimmed down like fat off a cut of meat. She was clearly uncomfortable, and he could tell by how she kept shifting her weight between the balls of her feet, how her fingers squiggled after bits of lint and stray strings in her pockets that there was an electric buzz of energy in her bones and a swelling of discomfort in her heart, all caused by this stupid little letter and the supposedly clueless woman who wrote it. Her teeth were locked together, jaw tight and tense when she wasn't speaking. She kept glancing away from Hector and looking out the dark window instead-- not actively hunting, she didn't think she would find a freckled face peeking in, but because she didn't want her aggravation lashing out unjustly at one of the few people left on this planet that were patient enough to weather the storm that was Lola when she got this way.
"She said 'one of your friends' bit her sister. She didn't specify. She also said she couldn't discern the difference 'tween one of 'our friends' and what you all fight, so there's a chance that this mystery sister's infected from a Fomor or a Bane that found its way on over. Maybe she's twisting into a Fomor now-- the woman, Nina, said that her sister's turning and she's waiting to be unable to recognize her before killing her."
But the way that Lola speaks, she sounds suspicious of the whole thing. The good thing is she's not reluctant to express or clarify this. The way that strength and insistence pushes her tone when she starts up again suggests that her focus isn't this sister, but the woman herself.
"I don't really care about the sister. I'll meet up with her again, I'll go to the place she wants us to go, and I'll put a goddamn bullet between both of their eyes. What I'm worried about is how she knows about us, why she knows that we're having a baby, why she knows who and what you are, why she knows so much about the other Kinfolk. I don't care how ignorant she is or isn't to the Nation-- fuck, I don't even care what she is. I just want to know how she got her information so I can make sure she and anyone else can't do the same fucking thing again."
As she spoke she became progressively more passionate about what she had to say, until her teeth are showing (lips curled back, the expression feral, probably learned from her many years of lessons at the sides and fronts of Werewolves on how to challenge and intimidate and win) and her words are flavored more strongly with an accent dropped onto her tongue by growing up in a very bilingual household.
Hector Ghosh
Stillness and soft words aren't doing a thing for Lola's peace of mind right now but that is all Hector has to give her. In the other room the song has reached a fever pitch. It's a filthy formless landmark achievement in early rock and roll recording but it adds a backdrop of lunacy bordering on unreality to their conversation.
And she knows that Hector is primed to challenge for higher rank and the trappings that come with it. He carries himself with a bit more dignity and confidence than he came back with. The burden of enlightenment had left him unsteady on his feet for a long time and now that he knows how to keep his wits about him having survived things that would have crippled if not killed a less certain wolf he has to learn how to offer sound guidance. To give advice or solace to those who do not know the way themselves.
Lola is not his packsister. She holds a more permanent position in his life. Yet she conducts herself as if she is a warrior and that is how he has always treated her. One of the first bits of praise he heaped upon her was a comparison to one of the strongest characters in the entirety of Tolkien's Middle Earth: Éowyn, the shield maiden of Rohan. Bitch didn't want to stay home and raise babies and keep the fires burning. She picked up her sword and rode in with the rest of them and killed the Witch King.
It's his child in her womb, though. For as much as he trusts her and knows she will survive whatever comes of this that does nothing to slake the helpless fear that lashes at him. It isn't enough to cause him to lose his mind but neither can Hector stop himself from glancing at her belly, no longer capable of fitting within the waistband of the pants she wears. But it is only a glance. He drags his hand down his face and he lifts his eyes to hers again and he gets over it.
When the new spell of silence passes he says, "I don't know. But it doesn't sound like she's looking to hurt anyone. If she knows as much as she knows… I've heard stories of wolf hunters who breed their kids into it. Could be they've been keeping tabs on this place for a while. You know? The ancestor-spirits can do a lot around the Caern but they can't undo everything. We probably have left a trail. If she's telling you not to get us involved, maybe something really is wrong with her sister. Love makes people do stupid things, khaleesi."
Lola Hawkes
Earlier this morning Hector would have caught a glimpse of his woman through the ajar door of their bedroom. She was standing in her bra and jeans, realizing that this pair wouldn't fit anymore because she couldn't wrap the button around to its slot. There was a floor length mirror on one of the walls, near her dresser, and she was standing in front of it turned to the side. He'd have caught sight of her as she was standing up straight, trying not to arch her back, and touching lightly at the oh-so-tiny swell to her abdomen. Seeing the changes physically within herself, and having several thoughts fly rapid-fire through her mind while she evaluated her gradual, budding change in appearance.
One of the thoughts was that she would need to be cautious of who could see. Not for any sense of shame, far from as a matter of fact. Rather, she didn't want people to know because she didn't want them to think her any less capable for it. This made her very aware of how people looked at her. So, of course, she immediately noticed when Hector's eyes dropped to her unbuttoned waistband and back up again. She doesn't snap at him for it, though. She understands his concerns and respects his right to have them, and is just grateful that he doesn't lay them so heavily upon her that he becomes restrictive.
He's trying to help her calm down, to understand the situation from a different light, to consider another focus, another possibility. Maybe this woman came from a long line of wolf hunters, and maybe she was just born into it but didn't quite understand what she was hunting or even necessarily mean them any harm. Lola had stood still long enough to listen, the rocking of her weight back and forth had ceased, but then--
Could be they've been keeping tabs on this place for a while.
Lola didn't like that idea one little bit.
Her eyes flash, her body goes tense, and her muscles snap for she doesn't have anything else to do for a reaction. If Hector were someone else, if that sentence was spun in a way that sounded even the tiniest bit like a veiled threat she would have thrown an arm out, clenched a fist, and socked him in his jaw. She would have sent him reeling and followed up with a volley of demands for information and for truth. But that was desperately inappropriate a reaction, and she very much didn't want to strike this Galliard that has been so loving to her, that she herself loved so dear. So, instead, she twisted and threw her arm out toward nothingness and caught the end table beside the sofa and toppled that over instead.
There's a loud cluttering crash, and this seems to halt Lola more than anything else. She stares down at the overturned furniture, then hisses out a curse in Spanish before crouching down and immediately setting to picking up the papers that had spilled from the drawer and righting the furniture again. As she does this, she grinds out through teeth clenched hard enough that it's affecting how some of her words are forming.
"Then we need to clear the house and make god damn sure that isn't the case. I will not have anyone seeing into my home, my family, my life."
Hector Ghosh
The irony of a Galliard carelessly choosing his words reveals itself when his mate lashes out because he says place instead of Sept.
This place. This Sept. They mean the same thing in his head because he is not so married to the land that he would never leave it if the city did not bid him to. Because Hector thinks of reality not just in a global sense but in a universal one. His scope and his interpretations differ from his woman's and when he does not think of how she will swallow the words he lays out this is what happens.
He doesn't flinch and he doesn't leap out to stop her. Everything he's read so far of the books Anthony gave them during their visit last week stresses the importance of wellness and emotional health during the baby's development. Those books were not written with war machines in mind and sometimes Hector scoffs while lain on the couch reading them because it's like why don't you come over here and try telling Lola she needs to stop eating fish and she can stick to her normal routine as long as it is challenging and not punishing if you think it's so easy to tell Lola what to do, Book.
Once Lola vents the energy and starts to pick up her mess Hector lets out a long slow breath and rakes his fingers through the loose hunks of hair and just lets her. Like if she's got enough energy to knock over the table she has enough energy to pick it back up again. When she looks back at him she may or may not see that he looks at a loss. Not for lack of confidence but for the newness of their partnership butted up against the fact that they've only got about six months before she gives birth to their child.
"I didn't mean…"
Hold it together, Ghosh. He lets go his hair and goes across the room to the record player.
"Look. This is how much I love you. I have never turned off 'Sister Ray' before the end of the song before."
The record scratches as he yanks the pin off the vinyl and he winces with the sound. In its place comes crashing silence and Hector stares at her. This time of month his eyes gain a heat and a sharpness that threaten violence the brighter Luna shines. Tonight Lola is more volatile than he is. He rakes his hair back again, one hand tasked with the motion this time.
"Lola… it's not just us. You said this lady reached out to three other people. You're gonna talk to her again, right? Figure out what she wants and deal with her? There's nothing we can do about it right now. This is just something that happens. Humans've been hunting us since the Impergium. They're weak, though. And they never know half as much as they think they do. They're not a threat, okay? Neither is she. Just…"
Lola Hawkes
Although Lola had finished cleaning up and righting the table, she hasn't bothered to stand yet. Instead she stays knelt down on the floor, knees on the rug that breaks up the hardwood in the open living space of the first floor. Her limbs seem heavy, how her arms just hang at her sides, how her head is hung and the hairs that escaped the ponytail are floating in front of her eyes and tickling at her nose. Hector expresses that a sign of how much he loves her is played out in his next actions-- he's going to cut off a song before it ends for her. Typically this would earn a low huff of a chuckle and a half smirk of amusement at the expression of endearment, but not tonight.
With a heavy sigh, while the record scratches and Hector rakes away at his hair, Lola holds the arm of the couch and rises to her feet again. When she does, she holds her hands out in front of herself with her palms up, fingers splayed. The motion is clear: What do I do? How can I help it? Please don't be cross with me, I'm honestly trying over here.
"That's assuming that she ain't dangerous, though. Hector, how can I not get hung up on the fact that she knows that you're Garou, that she knows where we live, and that she knows that we're having a child? I don't know about you, but the only person I've told is Anthony. How she'd get that information in the first place bothers me. That she was able to get whatever information she did on the other people bothers me too.
"It's not that I think she's gonna come and attack us personally or leave a bomb on the porch. It's that I'm worried what else she could be seeing, hearing, knowing if she's already got that. More than that, it's what she could do with that information that upsets me."
She looks down at the toes of her shoes, lowers her hands to her sides, and sounds burdened instead of proud when she confesses:
"I'm going to kill her. I don't want to leave the loose end hanging."
Hector Ghosh
"Lola, human doctors admitted you to a hospital and I barged in there and threatened a bunch of human nurses when they wouldn't give me your stuff and we had to pass by more than one security camera on the way out of the building and we used the same vehicle to get from the hospital to the highway."
Now really isn't the time to use reason and straight talk but just as Lola doesn't know how to keep herself calm in the face of a threat to her tiny yet growing family Hector doesn't know what to do to keep her blood from boiling.
"I mean, kill her if you have to, but you don't know who else she's working with or what's going to happen to the information she's gathered after she's dead. Cities are nightmares, love. There's no hiding in them. Talk about loose ends… maybe try to gather up whatever she's got on us before you put a bullet in her head, huh?"
Lola Hawkes
Bless his heart, Hector tries.
Lola's thinking back to a conversation she had with her father, in the stunted period of time between when she found out she was actually a Kinfolk and before he passed away. She was feuding with one of her Trueborn friends-- Ivan, to be on point-- and her father had warned her that she needed to be patient. This was the burden of a Kinfolk, because Garou were fueled by the fire of their Rage and the momentum of their Spirits, and sometimes that would make them strange and difficult to follow and borderline unbearable.
And yet here Hector stood, calmly speaking to her, explaining sides of the situation that she didn't see herself because she was blinded by defensiveness and set on a single-minded path of destroying evidence and punishing the one who gathered it in the first place. He was being patient, and she had flipped over a piece of furniture like a petulant child because she couldn't just hold the frustration and outrage and insult within her skin any longer. It was a seldom thing, but Lola actually looked a little ashamed of herself.
She worried away at her lower lip between her front teeth while listening to what Hector had to say, her eyes cast somewhere at the floor near his feet but not up at him directly. She doesn't look submissive, but rather like she's processing and calming down. Her muscles aren't so tight and her voice isn't as tense when she speaks again either.
And when she does speak, it's softer, more calm. She's relinquishing some of that outrage because Hector had urged her to. Because it was important that it be done.
"Alright. I'll go along with it, and I'll stay my hand long enough to actually understand what she and her sister are, how they know what they know, what they know in the first place, and what the situation is." Her bra strap had slipped down off her shoulder. Distractedly, she tugged it back up into place.
"Thanks for talking me through," she tells him.
I'm sorry for being unbearable, her body language tells him instead.
Hector Ghosh
His expression of surprise is muted and subtle but it's still present when Lola looks back up at him. It's the same expression that comes across the faces of Cliaths who successfully call upon a spirit's gift for the first time. That first time an Ahroun knocks someone down without touching him or the first time a Theurge lays hands on the wounded and smooths away the damage.
The first time he threw back his head and whatever Wyrmling his pack had sought to fight went tearing in the other direction for the terror lanced through them with Hector's howl.
It's less to do with Lola and her capacity for fury than it is he still finds it novel that people listen to and respond to him. All his life he's been the kid brother or the Cub or the obnoxious packbrother. Alpha is sitting easier with him these days. Mate is taking some work but they came to be together not because of tribal arrangements or convenience. Somehow they understand each other even if they don't always know how they manage to pull that off. Emotionally illiterate beasts that they are.
She thanks him with her words and apologizes with her posture and Hector goes from triumphant to crestfallen as quickly as the record player had gone from loud to silent. When he speaks again he sounds wistful.
"Of course."
And Hector blows out the breath he'd let sit in his chest and comes forward and eases hair back from her brow with his fingertips. After they've secured the shock behind an air he rests his hand against the back of her neck and kneads not to seduce her but to ease the tension in her muscles. His eyes search hers to gauge where to find his next foothold and she finds his warm but not blazing.
Lola Hawkes
It may be a while before Hector stops being surprised by the fact that people listen to him. It might take him coming up against whatever challenge he is presented with to earn his rank of Fostern (that time was coming soon-- it could very well be before their child arrives that this happens at this rate) to come to terms with it, but Lola's been seeing leadership within him for a while now. She'd watched him struggle when he first came to the area, his pack decimated and scattered to the winds through Death and Abandonment. She'd seen his eyes go dark, she'd fought with him, she'd listened to him flounder for purchase and hunt for direction.
She also saw him find that direction, and she heard depth and command develop in his voice when he unflinchingly doled out orders on a mission. She's seen him take the lead in a battle and rip into an enemy with no show of mercy or hesitation. She sees how Thomas looks up to him, how others of greater rank will hear his words and consider them. She's learning more of his history, of his experience. She knows for a fact that he's seen and survived things that she would need to be told about because she can't dream them up on her own, and she knows that he carries knowledge passed upon him by a Garou significantly more his elder in every way, deep and dark truths and knowledges about their enemy that have been known to drive the more feeble minded and weaker willed to madness and confusion.
So, when he looks surprised that she'd listened, and then a little sad somehow when apology shows in her frame, Lola's own brows knit in bother. She doesn't look away from him, though, and evens her chin out to the floor once more. He reaches around to rub at the back of her neck, and she closed her eyes and tipped her forehead forward some as a sign of appreciation and that feels nice, please feel free to continue.
Before long her hand will lay on his forearm, not to halt him as often that signal means, but instead to show affection. It's a simple touch, really, and shouldn't be able to relay as much as she makes it. But between the small squeeze of her fingers against his muscle and how she glances back up at him, her expression steeled and more even now than it has been in a few days, it's clearly more than she'd be giving just anyone.
"You cooked," she announces, leading the transition with the obvious. "Let's have dinner, alright?"
And so they do. And the night is just nice enough outside (and Lola cautions Hector, this is probably the last night they'll see like this until March [but she's said that once before, mind you]) that she convinces him to spend it on the porch with her, sipping some hot cider drink and talking about things less stressful.
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