Lola Hawkes
Two nights. 48 hours. That's how long
that's passed since every Garou and Kinfolk was summoned out to
Forgotton Questions to see the punishments doled out upon the Elders of
the Sept of Cold Crescent. Everyone handled what they saw in their own
way. Some were horrified, others were howling and snarling and cheering
with the sense of justice served and things made right. Others still
were stock still and grim.
Time had passed to allow packs to come
together and adjust to the change in the setting around them. No more
City Sept, only the one that surrounded Forgotton Questions would
remain. The threat of Beloved Horror still existed, but wasn't nearly
so heavy as it had been before. Mothers hugged their children and
carried them home that night, and many suffered nightmares from the hard
things they saw and the terrible noises they heard.
Tonight,
though, things seemed better. The sky was clear, even through the
ever-present lights of the city you could see stars in the sky (though
they were more plentiful out away from the skyscrapers and freeway
onramps). It was chill enough to warrant a jacket or heavy sweater, but
it was so nice for November that the streets were choked with people
here in the Santa Fe Arts District.
Lola and Hector were out of
place here. Not necessarily because of how they looked, but because
they were both accustomed to the wide open land that they resided on--
Lola because that's where she's lived her life, Hector because he's been
avoiding the cities as much as he can these days. They step one after
the other out of a simple four-story tall brown brick building, offices
at one point converted into apartments. Lola stepped out first and held
the door behind her for Hector to follow, talking as she went,
continuing a conversation from down the stairs: "...we were young-- I
was like thirteen still and he'd just turned eighteen and I caught him
laying ink down on his own thigh in his mom's bathroom. It looks like
such shit, but he's pretty proud of it anyways."
Lola had her hair
wrapped up into a bun at the back of her head tonight, and was dressed
in jeans tucked into calf-high brown boots with a dense cream-colored
wool sweater on with double-buttons that kept it closed in the front.
There was a gray scarf around her neck, and her hands kept falling back
into the pockets of her jeans when she wasn't using them.
"Year
and a half later he opened his first parlor with two assholes he met at a
convention or some such shit. The rest is history."
She was telling Hector about how Anthony's (her Kinfolk cousin who they were visiting) tattoo parlors (yes, plural) came to be.
Hector Ghosh
By
northern standards the evening is warm but to the dark-skinned Galliard
the temperature is so low he has to put on extra layers just to think
about leaving the house.
The pair that come out onto the street
both look as if they stumbled off of a ranch but they don't gawk up at
the high-rise buildings and point around at the crossroads like they
don't know how to conduct themselves in this milieu. Hector stands close
to a head taller than the kinswoman and clothed he looks skinny and
meatless. His jeans hang off his bones and he wears an army jacket over a
sweatshirt. His hair is tied back and as they breach the doorway of the
apartment building he pulls a black knit cap out of a pocket and down
onto his head.
And away they go.
"Maybe I should get a tattoo," he says. "What do you think? A skull with flames coming out of it or something."
He's got to be joking. Hard to tell when he's trying to act like he isn't freezing.
Thomas Delacroix
Thomas
comes out of a gallery, because of course he does. He doesn't seem to
care about the cold, doesn't pull the hood of his pale silvery-grey
sweatshirt up, doesn't curl into himself. He's confident enough on the
street, the people ease away from him without any real thought are of no
real concern to him.
He drifts half a block and stops, looking
in the window of another gallery. His head tilts one way, then the
other. Some people would have a knowing expression, a thoughtful one,
but Thomas looks at abstract paintings with a confused little frown. He
wants to understand them, but the shapes are just shapes to him,
tumbled onto paper with no more meaning than little piles of windblown
leaves. He'd be as prone to calling a crow's nest with bits of colorful
fabric art as the painting in front of him.
After half a minute,
he moves to the window on the other side of the doorway. There is
another painting. Lines and shifting colors on canvas, as meaningless
to him as all the others. He still stares at it like maybe he'll
understand it if he just looks at it long enough.
Lola Hawkes
The
Hawkes kinswoman was notorious around the Sept of Forgotten Questions.
She was known for being a hardass, a badass, and for thinking herself
to be bigger and tougher than some people believe she actually is. With
that said, some people haven't seen her interrogate possessed humans at
gunpoint, or slice through a Fomori with a hunting knife when her gun
jammed, or tourniquet her own leg to stop from bleeding out in a
battle-frenzied office building.
She isn't known for smiling or
laughing a lot. But she grins and chuckles when Hector suggests he get
himself a flame-engulfed skull tattoo and pulls a knit cap down over his
head. Hector's from California, he isn't accustomed to the kind of
cold that you can get up in the mountains, out at this altitude. He's
bundled up in his coat and layers against the fifty degree night, but
Lola on the other hand seems plenty warm in her thick sweater and jeans
and scarf, with nothing covering her ears. She hated the sounds of the
city, but she trusted the place so little that she didn't want to not be
able to hear what was behind her.
"Yeah, put it right on the side
of your neck," she suggested, and paused at a crosswalk. There's a
glance in either direction, and she starts to cross the cramped street.
A car beeps and has to stop short to keep from hitting her in the
knees-- it had been trying to make a turn around the corner that the
Uktena stood on and didn't pay mind to the pedestrians trying to cross.
The car had beeped, and Lola answered by all-at-once dropping a fist
heavily onto the hood of the car and glaring hard at the driver.
She'd
wait for the man behind the steering wheel of the car look between her
and Hector and decide that the dent in his hood isn't worth getting out
of the car and picking a fight with these two. Only once his eyes are
averted is Lola content to continue walking, but only after she'd had
enough time to cause a minor attention-nabbing ruckus at that
intersection.
"Fucker," is what she calls to the man's window when she starts walking again.
Hector Ghosh
[for the lulz]
Dice: 5 d10 TN8 (2, 5, 7, 10, 10) ( success x 2 )
Hector Ghosh
One
second they're busting each others' balls about something as
insubstantial as permanent body art, of which Hector has none so far, of
which Hector has never thought nor given more than passing attention so
that he could make a joke about it. They are not wolf-born and the city
does not do anything to their senses that it would not do to any other
human's.
Hector was born in a city. His parents settled in San
Jose long before their oldest child was born and that was where he went
to school and where he learned to skateboard and not cough when he took a
huge rip off of a joint and run from the cops. How to use his skinny
build and dark pigmentation to evade capture.
How to cross a fucking street without almost getting run down by an inattentive motorist.
It
isn't either of their faults. The little white man on the opposite side
of the street is aglow and Hector spies his packbrother ogling
something through a gallery window and that car comes out of nowhere. It
doesn't hit them but the driver honks at them and even before Lola
reacts she can feel Hector's Rage flare up like a beast dwelling in
darkness roused by the sound of an intruder slinking across the hoard of
treasure and desiccated bones upon which it slumbers.
She hits
the hood of the car and the man stood beside her rankles. Everyone
within eyesight stops what they're doing at the screech of the brakes
and the collision between fist and metal and the widened eyes and
stiffened spine of the young man. He looks like he's about to walk
around to the driver's side and haul the guy out of the car but Lola
keeps walking.
Lola starts walking. Hector is going to take some coaxing.
"HEY!" he says to the driver. That may be the first that Thomas is aware of him.
Thomas Delacroix
He
turns his head at the shout, sees Lola and Hector in a standoff with a
car, and shakes his head a little. He heads out toward the corner at
first, to meet them. And Lola is coming so that works until Hector
stays there, ready to go fight everything and Thomas checks the way is
clear and slips into the street.
Not that he has any idea what he
is going to do when he gets there. Thomas has, in all the time they've
known each other, actually tried to get Hector to do anything only
once. You don't control oceans. You live with them. With their
terrible beauty and their deadly storms and everything they are. You
don't complain when they swallow you whole.
But, he heads that way regardless. Perhaps...perhaps it will come to him.
Lola Hawkes
Well,
Lola had been ready to keep walking, but she was caused to stop when
she realized that Hector wasn't following along. No, instead the Uktena
was left standing squared in front of the car, Rage whipped up around
him despite the dampening effect of the moonless sky. He shouted at the
driver, a simple vocalization with no real message behind it. It was
hard to tell if Hector was going to try and get the man to come out of
the car and... fight? Apologize? It was hard to say.
Lola
stopped and turned to look back at him, and now was simply standing in
the road, still and watching the stand off like the other pedestrians
did. One car that was stuck behind the stopped vehicle that Hector
prevented from moving forward beeped its horn impatiently and went
around, but aside from that not much stirred in that intersection.
When
Thomas stepped off the curb and onto the crosswalk Lola glanced toward
him, quick and sharp, as though expecting that he was going to be a
threat. But she immediately recognizes who he is and her eyebrows fly
up, surprised to see him here but not bothered by it. Instead she met
his gaze, held it significantly for a second, then turned and joined
Hector's side again. Her hand went up to his chest and splayed across
the center of it, over his heart and where his Rage tried to storm and
swirl when it wasn't resting in his belly.
"Hector." She says his
name, and her tone is firm without being severe. It's an odd balance
that Kinfolk manage to find when they start sharing their lives with
Garou. "What do you think you'll do, huh? C'mon, let's keep on. I
found Thomas, look."
And this, likely, is about when Thomas makes it within easy proximity of his Alpha.
Hector Ghosh
That
fire in the center of him hasn't flared up to consume his faculties or
his sense of reason but it has pulsed up enough that the driver of the
car immediately behind the one that almost knee-capped Lola is too
scared to hit his horn and everyone else backing up or backed up behind
them can see the tall dark-skinned man in clothing that practically
screams his status as either disenfranchised or emotionally disturbed
and see that he looks fucking pissed.
Nobody is going to honk at
them. That would be like poking a dog with a stick while it's deciding
whether it wants to bite someone at whom it's been growling for several
seconds.
And he does growl when Lola says his name but it's
vented-loose frustration and anger and not a warning. With her hand on
his chest she can feel he's furious but not impotent with it. His heart
races beneath his bones and his head whips around towards her when she
appeals to his reason.
She found Thomas.
Thomas has never
seen Hector angry like this before. His nostrils flare for breath and
his eyes are wide like he was about to tear the door off the hinges. If
this were a fatter moon, his moon, he would have had to swallow it down
and then they would have really been in trouble.
"Heyyyy!" he says
and his voice shakes with how angry he just was. He takes up Lola's
hand in his own and he starts walking towards Thomas. Wrangles an arm
around Lola's shoulder and holds her in tight against him so if anybody
else comes flying around a corner he can whip around and protect her
better.
Once the three of them are on the opposite sidewalk he
grabs Thomas by the crown of his head with his free hand and carries on.
They saw each other last night at the punishment and even then Hector
had not rankled so much as he does now. If anything he was one of the
calmest ones there. That was nothing he hadn't seen before and this
isn't the last time they're going to be in the city and someone is going
to drive like they have their head up their ass.
"What're you doing out here, brother-man?"
Thomas Delacroix
Thomas
falls into place at Hector's side easily enough, whether or not Hector
just looked ready to kill someone for driving like an idiot. And even
now, on a street where under only slightly different circumstances there
might be blood on the pavement right now, Thomas relaxes when Hector
grabs the top of his head. There is a little huff at it, amused.
"Trying
to figure out abstract art. It...remains mysterious. I guess
mysterious is good. Sometimes. So...at least we're not somewhere
entirely terrible." He looks past Hector to smile at Lola.
"How are the two of you?"
Lola Hawkes
The
moon is absent, they're in that period of the month where the whole
pack of Celduin isn't rippling with Rage and anxious to let it be
unleashed someplace. For this reason Hector is easier to deter from his
warpath tonight than he would be two and a half weeks from now. He
takes her hand and starts to finish crossing the street, then slings his
arms over Lola's shoulders instead.
Normally she would shake him
off after a moment because she's uncomfortable with other people seeing
her affection for him. It's not a matter of shame, far from truth be
told. It's more a sense of privacy-- this is mine, not for any of you to see or know or feel or have.
For the situation and flash of Rage and moment where things could have
turned wrong (if that man didn't know to keep his eyes down and his ass
in the car) she does nothing to stop from being dragged into Hector's
side and walked across the street.
Thomas is pulled along with,
and he expresses that he was looking at art when asked what he was
doing. The smile he flashed for Lola is answered with an upward incline
of her head. Thomas knows by now not to be bothered when flashing
friendly teeth aren't returned.
"We're alright," she answers the
question for both of them, the response boring and uninspired as can
be. "Just finishing an errand. I'm ready to get the fuck back out of
this hellhole."
Hector Ghosh
Hector is shackled
with the fire of at least five suns even on a good day and he carries
with him an introduction to their world that involves aggravated
kidnapping and separation from his birth family and indoctrination into
one of the most secretive and insulated tribes int he Nation on the
grounds that one of his ancestors was touched by fate and fractiously
insane.
None of this is anything he hides from anyone. The young
man was born beneath a moon that glutted itself on light and he is open
and free with his past with those who deserve to hear it. He doesn't
have a lot of beliefs but one of the ones he embodies is that the past
is important only so long as it serves as a light and not as an anchor.
Poor
Thomas is young and quiet by comparison. The anger of the
near-collision on the other corner melts away as Lola leads him off and
Thomas greets them. Now that they're out of the crosswalk Hector lets go
of his woman's shoulder and turns his attention to his packbrother.
Poor, poor Thomas.
"WHY
would anyone ever want to live here?" he asks. Throws an arm over
Thomas's shoulders and wheels him around so they're facing the stretch
of the street as it yawns towards the mountains. "What, so you can just
look--" He holds his free hand out at the Rockies barely visible through
the light pollution and the darkness of falling night. Humans cast the
two of them wary glances and tuck themselves deeper into their coats and
shuffle along faster. "--and be like oh my gawd it's so beauuutiful Marcia I'm so glad we didn't decide to move in Boullllder."
Hector
normally speaks with a Cascadian accent. A mutable dialect that has
people guessing he's from Canada as often as they peg him as a
California transplant. When he imitates other Americans he flattens out
his vowels and pushes his voice up higher into his pharynx so it just
about comes out his nose. He drops it to hammer home his point.
"I'm telling you, man. Waste of resources."
Thomas Delacroix
And
Thomas, by comparison, is just barely back with the world enough to
care enough about anything for it to get a rise out of him. But Hector
hasn't seen that, yet. Maybe won't see that, because Thomas tends to be
so much calmer around him that he might not bristle so easily.
And
that calm is why Thomas only laughs as he's swung around to face the
mountains, leaning into Hector for only a second here on the street.
He's more relaxed than he was sure, but he's not about to melt into
actually relaxed anywhere this open. It's hard enough to get him to do
that in his own space.
"Well," Thomas says. "They sort of are
abominations, but...Thai food?" He smiles. "I don't know. I wouldn't
move here for the food. Not for much of anything, really." But, that
is not a complete 'I would never move here,' statement. "Maybe they
could be less horrible, one day."
Lola Hawkes
"I
highly doubt that," is Lola's commentary to the two Garou standing
shoulder to shoulder, Alpha with his arm wrapped around his packmate's
shoulder, both turned west to look to the Rocky Mountains where they
appear through the poor polluted air and the dim night sky.
The
Kinswoman stood with her arms folded over her stomach, looking not
towards the mountains but up and down the sidewalk. She appeared
forever ready here in the city, not on edge necessarily because she was
too confident to really be worried. At the same time, though, she
seemed ready for some jackass to try and pick a fight with them
(although no one would be foolish to approach the trio with Thomas and
Hector's very combined presence to drive them away), or to see a flash
of too-sharp teeth on a face in the crowd.
Matter of fact, she
wanted and itched for it. The chance to lay carnage across some idiot's
skull would make her night that much sweeter.
But it didn't come,
and so Lola instead was sullen and her hunger for violence went
unslaked. Dark eyes cast back around to the pair of Galliards, and she
jerked a thumb over her shoulder, up the sidewalk. "I'll go and fetch
the truck, I think. You two should grab us some food. We can find
somewhere with air that's worth breathing to eat it."
Hector Ghosh
"Food? You want to eat this darkness-laden slop?"
Jokes.
All he has to beat back the claustrophobia born of being outside in a
place with tall-tall buildings and everybody in a hurry even when
they're in vehicles meant to expedite the amount of time traveling from
one place to the other are jokes.
That's all it is though, is a
joke. It's easier to joke than to lose his shit on the humans around
them. With great power comes great responsibility and all that. He
doesn't know how that goes. He wasn't much into comics as a kid. Tolkien
was his jam.
"You sticking around, or you want a lift back with us?"
Hector asks this even though he knows Thomas drives and has his own place to stay.
Thomas Delacroix
"Mmmmm...I
think, as much as I love you both, I have places to get back to
tonight. It was good to see you though. Sometime I should come out to
see you though. Maybe...." His voice trails off and he blinks.
Whatever the hell he almost said, he alters to, "Maybe sometime closer
to sooner than later."
Hector Ghosh
Ready for
this? Ready? This is why you don't want to let things drop around
someone who can remember conversations from four years ago:
Hector
tries to contain a big-ass grin and not to waggle his eyebrows but he
doesn't try that hard. He does both of those things and then grabs at
Lola's ribs and says, "Ohhh, he's gonna go hang out with Reeeeese. We'd better get going, we're holding him up."
Lola Hawkes
Jokes
are made about food, and the brief meeting winds down. This was just
an encounter, after all. They were on their ways places-- Hector and
Lola going home, and Thomas off to do whatever it is he was up to in the
first place.
The offer is made for Thomas to join them, but he
declines, saying instead that he will come out to visit them sometime
sooner than later. Lola nods her head to the Shadow Lord and reaches
out to pat his shoulder. She'd reached for him before, after the
punishments had been delivered. She knew that the Shadow Lord was fresh
to the world that she grew up in, that Hector had become calloused to
through his fostering. She'd put her hand to Thomas's face and neck and
held his eyes, even though her own looked hollow from what they'd all
witnessed. She was a Kinfolk, but she would brace and be strong for the
pack that kept her.
Hector teased about going to see Reese, and
Lola didn't crack a smile or joke along with. Rather, she bade Thomas
farewell, advising: "You're part of the pack. That means you're
welcome at The Homestead. We'll see you around."
And with that said, the couple would part from the solo, and they would head their separate ways.
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