All they could do last night was turn away from the punishments doled out and walk back to the Homestead. Not a far walk at all but the air was heavy and they did not speak the entire way. His arm stayed around Lola's shoulders for as long as she would have it there, crept up when holding hands would not suffice as support once the blood started flowing from their elders' pelts. Tamsin knew she was invited to stay with them. Thomas's house was not far. No one has seen Jack in some time but they still feel him out there.
He wasn't concerned with his pack after that display. The cries of a half-orphaned infant rang in his ears.
Hector made toast and poured orange juice down his throat straight out of the carton while he waited for the bread to become toast. He's not the one gestating a child but he knows better than to go to bed on an empty stomach after something like that. Eat, he'd said to her. Hadn't said please and if she'd gone straight to bed without humoring him he didn't push it. Just banked the furnace and brought a glass of juice to bed with him and stripped out of his clothes to climb in beside her.
And through the night Hector held her like he himself could keep the nightmare tendrils from slinking their way out of the Caern and into the quiet house. Flush against her backside with their legs tangled, an arm across her midsection and the other across her chest, four hands locked over her heart. She could feel his breath against her neck grow cooler as his heart slowed. Rage like a third entity in the bed with them.
A fourth, technically.
He fell asleep before she did and they stayed like that. He did not rouse completely with her nightmare but when Lola did she felt a ring-heavy hand at her forehead smoothing back the hair and the sweat and the worry, murmured reassurance in her ear. Not quite words for the words coming up out of a dreamless sleep to bury themselves in her skin.
In the morning Hector's body comes awake before he does. Before the sun has even thought about showing its face. She knows when he's conscious these days because his mouth starts running before his eyes are even open.
Lola Hawkes
Both Kin and Garou were summoned last night. Lola knew that she was to go to the Caern because of a message delivered while she was out in a dense clump of trees along the Bawn's edge, completing her patrol. Wind had kicked up, though the leaves on the treetops didn't shift and the wind kicked at the ends of her hair but didn't touch the top of her head. Leaves swirled about and lay, yellow over brown and orange, in a message:
JUDGMENT CAERN NOW GO
She'd stopped and stared at the message, shifted the rifle she was carrying on her back, supported by a strap across her chest, and was about to start headed toward the Caern, presuming Hector would be there, but he'd intercepted her-- a tawny colored wolf with a streak of steel-gone-rust along the spine, come to escort her there.Lola refuses to stay back in the house with the cluster of other Kinfolk. Even after three hours worth of dolling out insults and punishments to one Theurge, when many others decided that things couldn't get much better and by now it's the wee hours of the morning. She stands tall and proud at Hector's side, among him and his pack.
Even when a wolf is banished, with his mate's back turned and his infant bleating unhappily from the doorway of the house whose meadow they were congregated in-- Lola watched, eyes hard and heavy and full of the judgment that these city wolves deserved.
Then a wolf is seized by his throat, lifted, and flayed along his side. Lola's face goes ashen and she sways, just a little. Not by the sight of the skin being stripped from meat, but the dark dreadful sensation that the opened box caused, and the knowledge of what had happened to the man-- stripped of his Wolf, for Gaia knows how long. Hector's arm goes around her shoulders here, and she does nothing to shrug him away, willingly accepting the comfort and shelter and leaning into his flank.
When Crescent Sky's terrible, terrifying punishment is doled out, Lola's eyes darken with recognition and she glances up to Hector's face to see what she finds. She finds it hard and grim, confirming what she suspected, and exhausting her resolve all the more.
When they get home, she eats but only because she knows Hector is right to recommend it. She sleeps, glad to be wrapped up in his arms. Nightmares shake her in the dreamscape, and she wakes when her dream-self has been impaled by a silver spike of earth intended for a Grand Elder who had fallen on her shoulders for mercy and aid. The sweat is smoothed from her brow and back into her hair by a half-stirred Galliard, murmuring nonsense that soothed none the less into her skin. Eventually, she sleeps again.
In the morning they're unfortunately awake before the sun has had the chance to crest the horizon to the east. Hector's stirring, muttering, and Lola's still got her back flush with his chest and stomach, her right leg stuck between his and left leg stretched out below. When his voice and her own tingling restless discomfort with what was witnessed the night before had pulled her fully from sleep, she twisted about in his arms so that she could lay on her back instead and turn her head and press her lips to his brow, one hand moved to hold the back of his head while she did this.
They were both sweaty and unwashed, they smelled like the blood-filled air of the punishment grounds, but she breathed him in anyways.
"Can't sleep either, huh?"
Hector Ghosh
When a Garou commits such an egregious act as warrants punishment by Gaia's Vengeful Teeth none other may speak his name or talk of him as though he was ever anything other than a traitor. All the detail Hector gave her of the Garou who consorted with a Black Spiral Dancer and nearly brought the end of the world to a Caern out there in the desert where he had his fostering was just that: he was a Charach and a traitor.
He couldn't make Lola see what the rite looked like. Couldn't tell her what he felt watching his alpha scream and bleed onto a creature he'd loved once while the ground rejected him. Left out that Broken Dawn had to hold Hector up by the neck just about because the blood threatened to rush out of his head. Didn't tell her that after the body fell to be consumed by the earth that took its spirit that Blood on the Leaves had gathered up the rest of his pack the Cub included and told them they were going on a quest.
Years later that was the only time he had seen the rite. Has to feel somewhat prophetic that he'd told Lola that story while they were sat out on the porch last month smoking pot and talking about what was going to happen to the Guardians. Hector is not a prophet. He's just seen enough in his short life that he can suss out patterns.
Lola turns not away from him but onto her back and Hector loosens his grip on her to give her space. He hisses in a breath when their bodies brush against each other and despite the horror of the night before he's still reaching for her. When he hand finds the back of her head, her lips his brow, Hector's eyes fall shut again.
His hand slides across the space where her ribs meet her belly and anchors his arm over her. As she breathes him in Hector turns his face towards her. His hair smells of judgment smoke and he hasn't shaved his face in so long the hair on his jaws has gone soft. A hand slides the hair back off her face, comes back to trace the bones in her face. He kisses the space between her ear and the curve of her jaw. Scents her there. No sun yet and Hector's eyes are still foggy from sleep but he's looking at her like he might not have another chance after this.
They just woke up and she can already sense a need in him, words jangling around seeking purchase.
"I don't know why," he says as he leans over her. "All we did was sit around yesterday."
Lola Hawkes
There had been horror last night at what she was seeing. Lola hadn't quite come close to passing out, but she did loop an arm around Hector's lower back and hold the back of his coat gripped tightly in her fist while the other hand stayed firmly at her side. She refused to look weak in front of the Garou present, even though cubs and Cliaths alike were turning their heads, two or three even retching at what they were seeing. Lola wouldn't lower herself to that, but she did tremble to watch the woman whose name had been smeared with ash and tar and bitterness onto her tongue flee on ground that killed her, chased by a pack of powerful beasts that would ensure that it did.
Hector would have had to give her enough of a nudge that her weight would rock in order to start her feet moving toward home. If Tamsin or Thomas looked like they needed the support, Lola would offer what she had-- a hug for Tamsin, or a clap of the hand to the neck and jaw and behind the ear for Thomas. She wasn't a part of their pack-- she heard rumor that there was a pack running around with a Black Fury Kinfolk bound to them through their Totem, but she had no idea how that happened or if she would even ask for it. She wasn't a part of Celduin, but she braced and supported them like family none the less. That's what a pack was at the end of the day, after all.
Here in the cool of the morning, when the furnace hasn't been stoked in several hours and the cold of the transitioning night between October and November had begun to seep through the walls, the Uktena could sleep no more even though they'd only gotten a few hours out of the night so far. Even though their eyes were still half-open with sleep still being shaken off, Hector stirred differently than Lola and moved to lean his body over hers after having touched her face and hair and breathed her in as well.
His comment earned a half-bitter chuckle and the Kinswoman shook her head, then moved her arms away from him and into the space between her pillow and the headboard so that she could flex them and curve her spine and stretch. She yawns and turns her head so she doesn't breathe morning breath into her man's face before settling and reaching up to touch Hector's chest. Her fingertips speak of affection in how gentle they are, but the firmness behind them that rests in the iron wire of her forearm and wrist is a silent statement-- don't get too affectionate, friend, that's a no-go right now.
"Hardly at all. I'm pretty sure I sat down twice yesterday."
Hector Ghosh
All it takes is hardness in her touch for him to draw a breath to calm himself and Hector is lying back down beside her rather than climbing overtop of her. He rests not with his head on her shoulder but with his arm working itself underneath hers, where it had been before he roused to her. His fingers thread through her hair again and consciousness brings with it coalescence and everything that passed the day before starts to form as events and not a tide rushing them forward.
The hand that had been holding up the rest of him traipses back from the opposite side of her body but it doesn't stroke her leg or trace her bones like to seduce her. It lies in the space between her hips, well above the space where he would have gone if she felt the same stir he did. Where she's caught him aiming his speech on the mornings he's gotten up before she has.
They're going to have a child and the wonder with which he broaches the subject when he broaches it at all is almost childlike on its own. Like he can't believe they're actually going to have a baby. A picture of it hangs on the refrigerator because they don't know what else to do with it and it's already two weeks gone from the day he broke her out of the hospital.
"You only sat down twice yesterday? I was outside chopping wood all morning. Not that I'm complaining," he says and indicates his biceps with a tick of his eyes. "Look at that. I'm getting huge."
He can only use humor to diffuse the horror of last night for so long and he knows it. Lola knows he knows it. She can see thoughtfulness lacing the edges of his jesting. Already he's starting to conduct himself more like a Fostern than a Cliath. Time would have been the thought of advancing would have scared the shit out of him. He's got to be more terrified of becoming a father than of becoming a Fostern but they aren't talking about that right now.
"So, uh... pretty intense phone call yesterday."
Lola Hawkes
Since she'd come home and stayed home, torn between unwilling to go back to the city and bored, longing for the adventure and excitement and danger of walking those streets to keep them clear of the wicked, Hector has picked up the habit of murmering to her abdomen. He approaches the matter of the creation of life with wonder and caution and curiosity and sparks of joy. Like a cat testing out the fish bowl that its owners brought home -- I'm not positive about this thing but I like it already.
They don't know how far along she is. They might have a better idea if Lola wasn't made of such firm musculature. Even against that, though, Hector's been able to notice over the past week that the lowest part of her belly, where his hand currently rested, was starting to grow. Not in any way that anybody outside of the two of them would notice-- Lola notices because it's her body, and Hector notices because he's been watching specifically. Anyone else would assume that's just a part of how strong the muscles of her stomach are, and couldn't guess it to be the start of something that would become a hinderance to her over the next four or five months.
He laid there, one arm under her again with his hand in her hair, the other hand over her abdomen, and he asks after the phone call he'd overheard her having yesterday. In the wake of being summoned to the Caern and witnessing what she did, Lola had pushed that memory to the side and hadn't recalled it just yet. Her eyebrows went up at the question and she looked over at Hector, expression somewhere between surprised, guilty, reluctant, and hindered. It passes quickly enough, and Lola's elbows catch the mattress under her so she can push herself into a sit.
"I'm gonna make us coffee before we start talking about that.
------------
And she did. Twenty minutes or so later they're sitting out in the kitchen, Lola up on one of the stools tucked against the outside of the kitchen counter. She's leaned forward with her elbows on the countertop and black coffee pouring steam into her face since she was holding her mug under and in front of her chin. She'd pulled on a pair of worn-in jeans since she was planning to shower in the next hour or so anyways, a form-fitted black camisole, and a green zip-up hoodie that was left unzipped. She'd wrapped her unwashed hair into a topknot and secured it with a pair of hairbands, and was sipping at her coffee.
He'd wanted to know about the phone call. He was always so honest with her, she figured there was no sense in being anything but direct when answering his question.
"That was my cousin, Anthony. I'd told him that I'm pregnant, and he got all condescending on me."
Hector Ghosh
Hector stumbled into the bathroom after letting her in first and when he came back out he looked no more or less put together than he has historically after getting little sleep. During the awkward aching months between coming back from Winnipeg and finding a place in her life he was sleeping in university library chairs and bathing in public restrooms. He smelled half the time but he was a boy. No one was surprised that he smelled.
Habits die hard though and he spent more time transient and without a sense of physical security than he has knowing he has access to hot running water whenever he wants it. He rinses sweat off of himself at the sink and he combs back his hair with his fingers and ties it at the nape of his neck. Wanders out of the bathroom again wearing the dedicated jeans he'd had on last night and a shirt he found on the floor.
For all she knows it isn't his shirt. It looks like something he stole from Glen for as large as it is. A faded t-shirt from a music festival that took place when Hector was still in middle school. He probably did steal it from Glen.
Before he came to join her in the kitchen Hector went off to reawaken the furnace. He comes back up with soot on his hands. Warm air blows out of the vents at least. His feet and arms are bare. It's too cold for his liking but his Rage helps him run hot. The chances of his frenzying are as low as they ever are with the moon dark but it's like having an Ahroun in her kitchen anyway.
Once he has his coffee Hector wraps his hands around it and leans against the island and rests his eyes on her face.
"Condescending how?"
Lola Hawkes
Her face is stitched into tired displeasure. She held the coffee mug with both hands, two fingers slipped through the petite handle that the ceramic thing has to offer her, and looked into Hector's face for a couple of seconds before slipping her gaze out the window above the kitchen sink. The curtains were pushed open, so she could watch the world grow light as dawn started to creep into the sky.
"He's sure that I'll screw something up just out of neglect and ignorance. Thinks I don't know how to take care of myself, or how to be pregnant. Cocky fucking ass, was insisting that he send some woman-- some midwife-- out here to look after me."
That doesn't sound like it was that offensive of a conversation. Hector may think that Lola might be defensive over nothing, overreacting. He's heard of Anthony here and there between Lola and Maria. Even though he's never met him, he knows this about the man: He's Lola and Maria's cousin through their father's side. A Uktena Kinfolk, and he lives in Denver and owns a trio of very successful tattoo parlors there. He makes money, even though he isn't even thirty years old yet, and it's that money that pays the bills at The Homestead and ensures that there are clothes to wear and food to eat.
He knows that Anthony doesn't come to visit much, he corresponds by phone calls instead. He's busy out there in the city, running a business requires a lot of his attention. Maria
It's hard to imagine him outright attacking Lola, she's the aggressor more often than not. He probably just wanted to send a midwife out to be helpful and Lola probably took it the wrong way.
But she elaborates to shed light on that:
"He didn't think I knew about buying vitamins and all that. Had the audacity to jump the gun and give me a damn-near-rehearsed speech about not flying into danger because 'you're not a fucking Garou, Lola, and if that baby's gonna make it you need to figure that out and act like it'."
Hector Ghosh
Imagining what other people are thinking and feeling is difficult for him because Hector has never had to sit down and empathize with another person. His sisters were forthright and his father was never one to withhold words if something was annoying him.
After the surreptitious group that taught him out what it was to be Uktena he was packed with three people, then five, who accepted him and loved him and ran with him and some of them were fine with speaking their minds and some of them still aren't. But Willow was so perceptive it scared him sometimes and Maria and Glen were wise and when they could not intuit what was wrong they could beat it out of other people if they had to. They knew when to prod and when to back off.
He never had to guess what Corey was thinking because Corey only really had two settings. Maybe three. He and Corey used to yell at each other all the time but then they'd wrestle and move on with their lives.
So standing here talking about something he can never understand because he will never be in Lola's position has him frowning like he's encountering the biggest puzzle of his life. Even through the concentration Lola can read love in his eyes. He and Anthony are both male but she doesn't see that flick-spark of agreement that she sees whenever Hector thinks someone is right.
Doesn't mean her back isn't up. Hormones make the most emotionally stable women feel as if they're losing their minds. His older sister had her first child when he was sixteen years old, the year his Rage started stirring and the sand in the glass counting down to his First Change started slipping away. On one of her last visits home before the baby came their mother lamented to their grandmother, the woman who adopted her when no one else wanted her, "Mama, I don't know which one is worse, the pregnant one or the teenager."
But Lola elaborates and Hector doesn't judge. He chews his lip. He tries something new: he doesn't just blurt out the first thing that comes into his head.
"Can I say something?"
Lola Hawkes
The request for permission to speak has Lola looking a bit surprised. Let's note here, by the way, that Lola is regularly a person of open emotions but muted ones. When she looked pleased with something in front of her it showed as only a shade of an upward curl to her mouth and a flash in her eyes. When she was angry it was a storm cloud over her air and rumbling in the air, and an electric hot flash of promise of violence. Not Rage, not so dense or potent or tangible, but present none the less.
When she was surprised, as she is now, it's a moderate incline of her eyebrows and a small widening of her eyes. Her mouth is set straight, blank, not showing judgment on what she thinks will come, simply because she doesn't know what it will be.
She looks at him like this, surprised and curious but subtly so because this is how Lola functions. Then she nods her head. "Of course." And sips her coffee.
Whatever it is that he has to say, she'll hear it. Because she respects him enough not to interrupt, and because the coffee is only just starting to settle in the creases of her brain and make her feel less groggy.
Hector Ghosh
And he stares into the surface of his coffee like a mystic would read tea leaves before casting out his vision into the air. The only movement for a handful of second comes as he uses the tips of his fingers to twist the cup one way and then back again. Steam twirling into patterns as he does so.
When Hector looks back up he brushes hair back behind his ears and draws a breath like no one knows he draws a breath just before he steps out of the shadows to tell a tale at Moots.
"You're not a fucking human, either. A human would've bleed to death from that bite you took, which... you've been out there just the same as the rest of us have the entire time I've been here, and I've gotten just as messed up as you got messed up that night, only it was more than once. You know? You've protected me so many times. I'd be dead right now if you didn't see danger and know that's where you need to be. You killed a Fomor with a hunting knife, love. Maybe that doesn't mean anything to him, but it does to me."
Which means it means something to the rest of the Nation, coming from a Galliard who wouldn't shut up about her even after it made him look foolish.
Lola Hawkes
He takes a few moments to gather his words and put them in order, and Lola waits patiently. If he takes more than five seconds she stops staring expectantly at his face and glimpses the clock on the wall instead, lets her gaze slide out the window. When he does start speaking, though, her attention is firmly back on him.
He holds her in such high regard, and it fills the Kinswoman with pride and love and flint. He can see it in how her spine straightens, back and shoulders holding themselves stronger and more confident instead of slumped and rested and tired. Her eyes light up with that pride, and she inhales so her chest puffs out more-- which is ridiculous in a shirt that she was starting to outgrow as the changes of pregnancy had exaggerated her bust considerably over the past few weeks.
She switched the coffee cup into one hand and used the hand now freed to reach out and grasp Hector's, holding his fingers tightly with her wrist resting on the countertop.
"Baby," yes, she drops that pet name on him, "I can't tell you how fucking much it helps that you see it that way."
She doesn't say the rest, but what she really means is that his confidence in her helped keep the wind in her sails to keep her chin up and shoulders squared and to stand beside the Garou like she belonged there. This is translated through with a lengthier hold of his gaze and a small squeeze of his fingers before she releases his hand and sits up straight in her stool.
The conversation turns a little because she turns it. Back to the phone call that she had with Anthony, because there was a point he made that bothered her a little.
"Hector, we don't know how far along I am. He pointed that out. That's part of what got my hackles up at the stupid dickhole-- he made a point."
Hector Ghosh
He would have brought her fingers to his lips and coaxed her back to bed but for the fact that he sensed more to the conversation than what he'd interrupted just to beat back the doubt Anthony harbored. When Lola holds his gaze she finds his eyes on hers and when she lets go his hand he takes a deep-deep swallow of coffee.
That she uses his name to steer the conversation back to yesterday catches his attention. His eyebrows flick up and he puts down the mug.
They don't know anything because they did not stay in the hospital long enough for Hector to do anything other than retrieve her truck keys and commandeer a wheelchair. If he could have he would have just picked her up and carried her out of there. Let her run on her own if we're truly committed to the idea of an alternate reality where no one would have tried to stop them. As it was the young man had nearly frenzied at least once for how sterile and smelly and loud the place was, how alien and wrong it was for her to be there in the first place let alone stay there.
Neither of them can read the ultrasound printout. They see nothing unless they squint and even then they can't tell what they're looking at. Anthony made a point.
"How dare he," Hector says in as close to a deadpan as someone who only ever uses sarcasm as a last ditch defense mechanism can get. "Well... I dunno, it's somewhere between two weeks and two months, right?" He glances over at the refrigerator. "That's not a huge..."
He doesn't sound like he thinks he's being funny. He sounds like he has no clue what sort of advice to give her.
So he clears his throat: "So what's he think, you need another ultrasound?"
Lola Hawkes
The 'how dare he' gets Hector a flat stare. She's not pissed at him, not going to turn all of that anger and spite and venom that she'd unleashed on her cousin (who, frankly, should just be able to take that by now-- Lola's been snapping at her family members and loved ones since she was a teenager) onto her Gibbous-Mooned lover. But she is a prideful creature none the less, so he gets that look before she sniffs and takes another drink from her mug.
Hector turns to glance back at the printout on the fridge, held up by a magnet that's shaped like a chess piece, black and gray and fuzzy-- it looks like a blob with a little black blob inside of it, with a tiny white looking blob within that one. That tiny white blob was a baby, but it was impossible for either of them to know how developed the thing was.
Hector was right-- it could be anywhere from two weeks (at that time) to two months old.
Lola rose from her stool and circled around into the kitchen proper, standing in front of the sink and reaching for the coffee maker beside it. She turned to lean back against the counter while she poured hot coffee on top of the dredges of lukewarm that were left in her mug. As she does this, she looks toward the ultrasound as well. Lola's got a mind for medicine, but only in the most practical ways. She knew enough to make a tourniquet for her own leg when it was bitten, because she knew about the artery there and how quickly she could bleed out. She could (and has) stitch closed open wounds, can (and has) dug out bullets, can (and has) managed a seizure brought on by the mad influence of a Wyrmling foe.
She knows absolutely nothing about pregnancy, though, besides the basic concepts of delivery, and only because any emergency medicine manual or book will go over that.
Hector asked if she needed another ultrasound, and Lola scrubbed the heel of her hand to her forehead and for a split second looked like a worn out, stressed out average human being. But then she lifts her chin and has that uncanny resolve to her bones once more and that impression is cast to the wayside.
"I don't know. Is it very relevant?"
Hector Ghosh
Bless his heart he actually sits and thinks about it.
And as he sits and thinks about it Lola can see his eyes are on that blob within a blog. He can't make out arms or a heart because at the time the picture was taken the arms and heart had not differentiated themselves and he wouldn't know what he was looking for anyway. His second-oldest sister was the one who went to college to become a doctor and the one who the Internet tells him has started a residency in pediatrics at Duke. If anyone could help him it would be Helen.
So far as the San Jose Police Department and the FBI and, at last, the Ghosh family themselves are concerned their youngest child and only son is either dead or so far gone he will never come back. They can only speculate what happened to him. His personality warped in the year or so before he disappeared. He was always a happy if hyperactive child. They can speculate but they can't imagine. It's better to imagine him dead.
No discernible humanoid features on the printout but that doesn't matter. He'd already asked her if he could say something. As he looks at the printout Hector cashes in that permission a second time.
"The night I started staying here, I loved you the most I'd ever loved you. I'd kind of loved you for a while... I mean I didn't know, but... I did. That's why I went looking for you. And the next morning I loved you more than I did the night before. It's been like that the entire time. It doesn't matter if the baby happened the first time or right before you got hurt. Whenever it was, I loved you."
That doesn't answer the question or have anything to do with anything. He clears his throat and turns back to her. The sleep-deprived daydreaming tone goes out of his voice then.
"If it's anything like either of us, the baby's gonna show up when it feels like showing up. Our people have been having babies without machines for thousands of years. Wolves, like actual wolf wolves, don't have midwives. As long as you're taking care of yourself, I think we're just supposed to wait and be ready for it."
Lola Hawkes
She'd been sipping at her second cup of coffee (Anthony's midwife on call would frown, but fuck that bitch anyways) when Hector started speaking with a touch of Spirit and Daydream to his voice. She looked toward him while he talked, her lips on the edge of her mug which was being supported by both hands again.
It doesn't happen often, but Hector coaxes these moments out of Lola with relative frequency. Her normally hard, bright, alive gaze softens and the tense wind goes out of her so that her shoulders and back and knees releax and she's leaned more heavily up against the counter. When the daydream clears from his eyes and he goes back on track and looks at her again, he sees a clearly loving, admiring look on her face.
He declares that they've been doing this since before machines, and he and Lola could handle this process just like their ancestors did.
She doesn't reach out for him or walk over to press herself to his front and kiss him deeply to share the romance. This isn't her way. Hector knows, or he should know, without a doubt that Lola loves him. These moments, these looks and clear hours out of the day without tension where they can just be with one another and let it be that simple-- they happen more and more, and it's clear that this is because Lola loves him more and more each day. He loved her first, so he had a headstart, but she was catching up quickly.
She may remain at the kitchen sink, leaned back against it and nursing a cup of coffee that a doctor wouldn't recommend because she knows she isn't human, not entirely, and because she was operating on approximately three and a half hours of sleep. This doesn't change the clear-cut honesty and openess to what she answers him with, though.
"I'm lucky that you shed the city off your back so easily. I'm lucky for pretty much everything else about you, too."
So it's agreed. It's settled. She won't seek a midwife or a hospital again, not if it can be helped. It didn't matter how many weeks along she was or was not-- they would know when it was time, just like many generations before them stretching on 'till the dawn has before.
This allows Lola to bring something up that was chewing on a corner of her mind since last night, because now she has a chance to recognize the budding concept by voicing it and testing it on Hector.
"...So. Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't they say that Forge of Nótt has to accept any pupil now?"
Hector Ghosh
This is what the rest of the Nation does not see when they're out in public and Hector is jumping around like he's been sucking down coffee since the night before and can only quell the itch beneath his skin by running off at the mouth. When Lola is all tight smiles if she smiles at all. Stone-faced and humorless and, as of late, inclined to snap at other people more than she was normally inclined to snap at people.
It is enough that that bundle of cells hung on their refrigerator will come into the world and the Nation will want to know what it is right away. Male or female doesn't matter so much as Kinfolk or Garou. Tamsin has already cursed Hector to have nothing but girls but it doesn't matter to him, really. Whatever their firstborn is, whatever the ones that follow are, he trusts Lola to keep them safe until they can fight on their own.
But it is none of anyone else's business what they discuss or what they do when they are safe in their home. It's taking him some time to think of this place as his home and not just Lola's home but here they sit now.
He doesn't pull her to him in the wake of that confession or her own answering feeling of luck. Lola rests against the counter and Hector turns away from the island to face her. He was standing to begin with. Now he drains his cup that he might free his hands.
"They did," he says. "Everything she knows, she has to pass onto others." A beat. "Why?"
Lola Hawkes
He asks why, and her lips curl into a smirk of wit and cunning and 'oh I beat you to the idea, that's delightful'. It's the same way that she smirked when she was told that her cleansing bomb idea was a good one. The same smile was cranked up four times more intesne when she was informed it was this same idea that ruined Beloved Horror and tore them from their Totem.
He asks why, and she sets her coffee mug down on the counter to her left, then settles the heels of her hands on the counter's edge behind her.
"She's a high-ranking Theurge, and a Get of Fenris on top of that." Lola has a deep respect for that Tribe, though she doesn't get along with them more often than not. It's a curious relationship she has with that lot. Hector knows that one of her very good friends from childhood and still to this day is a Get of Fenris Galliard that she just calls 'Eddie'. She meets up with him on her patrols from time to time, as she always has.
"She can help me find a spirit to teach me to be better." Mightier. More powerful. So much more than what I am now.
Hector Ghosh
Hector's eyebrows lift at the answer but not in a bewildered or uncertain way. More in a show of surprise and then amusement at not having been able to guess what she was thinking. Last month would have exhausted a less capable Garou. That isn't to say he isn't tired. He is tired. But that has more to do with the fact that he slept for three hours before the shifting of the light and the nearness of his woman tugged him up out of what was already shallow sleep.
"Yeah..."
So much time running with tricksters has left others with no wonder as to the ease with which Hector finds problems in plans. It isn't pessimism. After all he's seen and lived through he does not think the War is pointless or that they have no reason to hope for anything. Lola was alone after news of the last of her immediate family falling rode in on the back of a young man tormented after half his pack died and his alpha abandoned them. They're recovering though. And Hector frowns as he thinks.
"I mean, she has to, if she wants to atone. I don't know if getting a spirit to bless you counts? The spirits get pretty irked if Garou teach each other things spirits teach them and the sentence was she has to teach everything she knows to others." He drums his fingers on the edge of the island and flicks his eyebrows again. "It can't hurt to ask."
Lola Hawkes
Hector thinks out loud. The Godi is required to teach any who ask, anything that she knows. That might piss off a spirit, because they didn't much care for others sharing the knowledge that they share, but hey-- it never hurts to ask, right?
Lola already looks victorious. She's sure that this plan will work. And she's already aware of which power-- which spirit's gift she wants to seek. She learned about ones that are best suited to people born as she was-- in her skin, under her moon, to her Tribe. There was one that the Ahrouns know that she wanted-- to be able to send a creature or man of any size flying back to the ground with just a tap of her fingers. She could get high on power like that.
"I'm gonna fuckin' ask."
There's a pause, a thought, and a surprisingly thoughtful side of the Kinswoman shines through like there's a rare break in the north pacific clouds. "I'll wait. Give her time to level out, a couple days, a week maybe." Long enough for the shamed Godi to accept her voice, her punishment, her duty. Then Lola would demand that the duty be carried out to its fullest. She would give the woman time to recover, then take full advantage of her when the time was right.
So like a predator.
Hector Ghosh
Fate must slap its knee and howl with laughter when it sees the two of them.
Anyone with enough distance and a grasp of the passage of time can watch them settle into roles that did not fit then at the beginning of the summer but the irony of their assignments will never fade. Of the two of them Hector is more comfortable serving as a support and a sounding board. It is not in his nature to lead. He has a natural magnetism that only grows stronger as he grows more confident but he doesn't have Lola's sense of inner strength or her instinctive prowess in battle. Everything he knows about being Garou he's had to scramble to learn.
They're better together than they are separate. This much even they can admit. Lola may never shed herself of her conditioning but Hector is all but rid of the trappings of his mortal life by now. The idea of cashing in on a punished Garou does not disgust him.
He still laughs, loud and surprised, when she says she'll give the Godi time to level out.
"Holy shit," he says as the laughter trails off. Pushes himself off of the island. Forward momentum being what it is she knows where his trajectory is taking him. "You're like a shark."
All she hears in his tone beneath the amusement is pride and love.
Lola Hawkes
It's absolutely true, were it not for the fact that their Tribe tied them together and matched them up by default, it would make little to no sense to the Garou and Kinfolk of their community why Hector and Lola were together. Hector was pleasant, likable, full of energy and life, even if he was chock full of Rage and Loss. Lola, on the other hand, had a reputation for chasing the unwanted from her property with a shotgun. She was hard and unbending. She'd shot a teenager in his face without flinching and then interrogated a sobbing, half-possessed girl by putting the gun, still hot from the discharged bullet, against her skull and demanding information.
Yet Hector evens Lola out, and Lola gives Hector something to strive to survive for. He gives Lola someone to talk to, to share her thoughts with, to advise her and temper her. Without him she had been alone and unsmiling, committed to her duty and her land and her own prowess and not much else. She's been known in the past to act downright feral sometimes, and it raised concern in her cousin's heart once that she had gone mad with the news that she would never Change. There was one particular occasion where she'd fought hard alongside the Guardians against something they had found, and when all was said and done and wounds were being nursed she stood tall with blood on her face and chest and arms, with a terrible gash down her left leg that she wouldn't let hinder her. She'd stood, thrown her head back, and yelled to the sky like she could howl. In that same battle she'd snapped her teeth into the face of an enemy before jamming the nose of her rifle into its mouth and pulling the trigger.
Without someone to remind her to talk, to interract, to be social, she may have continued down a path of hermit madness.
Instead, though, he loves her and stays. He calls her a shark and walks toward her, and she just smirks pridefully at him and accepts him when he comes.
They won't end up back in bed. But when they are finished with one another in the kitchen they will set about their day and treat it as something new and bright and clear. The Spire Sept has fallen, those that errected the monstrosity had been punished, and there were new hunts on the horizon to be had.
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