Lola Hawkes
When Hector had taken off across the green-yellow half-dying-because-it's-November grass in the City Park, Lola hadn't been very far behind. She'd torn herself away from the confrontation with a burst of a curse and a panicked look back at Thomas and had gone after Hector, sneakers finding pace some two dozen or so feet behind him.
It's easy to assume and understand why the Uktena wouldn't want to stay in the city after that. Clearly it was a poor choice to begin with-- they didn't like the place, and disagreed with the effort to keep the Spire Sept open and alive and running. Hector could hold his tongue even if he couldn't lie very well, and for Lola the problem was quite the opposite. She could lie, but it was seldom that she did, and she did a horrible job of just keeping her tongue to her cheek and letting things slide. Sure, she could, but again, she very seldom did.
She won't launch into a discussion about what happened. She won't go after him, grab him by the shoulder, try to touch his arm or hand or get him to stop. Instead, simply, she'd tail along after him, and soon enough they'd find themselves back where the beat up white pick-up truck was parked. It was time to get the hell out of here before Lola found someone else to pick fights with that she really shouldn't.
She'll drive, as she usually does, and the quiet between them is thick and dense and uncomfortable. Lola's able to tolerate it for as long as it takes for her to find the interstate and get them on the path southbound once more, but after they've been coasting along at the same speed for a good ten minutes or so she breaks the quiet.
"What did you expect? He wasn't letting it go."
She's tense, but not angry or worked up. That had been stamped out on the paths at the park, and by the time they'd reached their vehicle she was stressed and nervous and uncomfortable, but not pissed off or seeking a fight any longer. Now she was just trying to put them back on level ground once more.
If someone didn't talk, silence would follow them home and god knows how long it would survive out there.
Hector Ghosh
For more than a few seconds Hector had walked as if he intended to plunge blindly into the city proper and look for something he could destroy. His hands itched the way they would have itched had claws begun to grow from them but he could do nothing for it as he walked past joggers and dog-walkers all terrified of the cluster he'd left.
Lola had his back for a distance and she could see the anger and the confusion and the worry wound up through his spine. He is not a thin male. He does not boast much body fat but the body he has is solid and strong. It, like Hector himself, cannot lie. She had his back and she could see the negative emotions in it and she knew it came out of the center of him. His mind chucked on fuel as he stormed off.
Walking away did nothing to calm him. Not until he heard her footsteps behind him did Hector start to breathe. He thrust his hands into his pockets when he had control over himself again. Instead of pushing across the Gauntlet or punching a stranger in the throat he aimed himself towards the truck and stood at the passenger side with a dark expression on his young face.
He got into the car without making a scene but once they were shut inside the air turned thick and hot with his anger. It isn't just his Rage though. As soon as they started driving he started twisting the rings on one hand and then they got on the highway and he started biting his cuticles.
Hector does not often cut his nails. He needs them to play the guitar without wrecking his fingers. But he also bites them when he feels anxiety or anger creeping into him. The crescent-moon of white on the end of his left ring finger tears off as Lola asks what he expected and he spits it onto the carpet before he whips his head around to face her.
"FUCK, Lola!" he says. His seatbelt isn't buckled. He sits up straighter than he had been and buries his face in his hands so he can cinch himself together. Draws a deep breath and lets it go in a hard voiceless snarl. When he drops them he goes on, "What did YOU expect? Take how strong you feel about not being here and double that and that's probably about how strong they feel about staying here. This matters to them and you couldn't even talk about it without raising your voice and intentionally insulting everyone!"
Lola Hawkes
The quiet was broken by a strong burst of sound, anger and outburst from the Galliard in the passenger seat, her answer coming in the form of a shout and vented frustrations and scoldings. Lola's hands had previously been relaxed on the steering wheel, but her shoulders jumped up and her chest tightened and her pulse quickened in involuntary response to the sudden sound and the bite behind it. Hector's Rage swirled in the closed-up truck like a whirlpool in a pond, and that had the Kinswoman driving the thing on a sharp sharp edge.
Her hands clenched on the steering wheel, and for a moment or two she held it like she was steadying herself. Somehow she managed not to jerk the wheel when she'd startled, so the truck's drive remained a smooth thing. Her face set into a scowl instead of a cringe, because that's how Lola reacted to things (as we've just seen in a vibrant display of aggression), and while Hector was still talking she glanced to her left and released the steering wheel with her left hand so that she could drop her shoulder and crank the manual window control down. The window was brought to halfway down, not enough for her to comfortably stick her arm out, but enough that cool autumn air was hitting her face. It whipped her hair about, but it was better to feel like there was some open air. She was beginning to feel claustrophobic on top of being stressed out in general.
She's gnawing at the inside of her cheek with her incisors for a verse and a half on the song on the radio that's forgotten and overwhelmed by other things, and then a snap decision is made. She puts her blinker on, glances over her shoulder (she's careful about driving, at least), and switches into the far right lane (just one lane over from where she was already). The next exit, one that's just outside of the city limits, is what she takes. They've never gotten off on this exit before, and she doesn't explain why she does. Either he'll ask or he'll figure it out soon enough.
Her voice is just as strained and tight as the rest of her is, but she doesn't raise it when she answers him.
"Alright, first of all, he raised his voice first. I don't know if you missed him shouting across half the fuckin' park about someone getting jabbed with silver, but I sure didn't. Second of all, I regret it if Javed got insulted-- I'll need to apologize to him another day. But fuck that Erich guy. That asshole didn't have enough of a spine to stay on his goddamn feet during the punishment ceremony, and that is what we were arguing about anyways. I ain't sorry about insulting him-- he needs to hear it, obviously."
Hector Ghosh
They're both pent-up and angry. Some of the reasons coalesce in an ill-defined center but they are largely divergent and he cannot chalk up her tension and anger to either the full moon or her pregnancy. This is a new and exciting mood she's been in the last couple of days and he hasn't though to ask her not because he hasn't noticed but because when he has noticed Lola has been quick to correct her own course.
He hasn't raised his voice like this since Lola cornered him in the bathroom to tell him she'd talked to Corey. That correlation is lost on him and so is the fact that she gets off an exit just outside the city instead of carrying on towards home.
If anything he's thinking if they're going to holler at each other it's smart that she's pulling off the interstate.
... he raised his voice first.
"No, Lola, he didn't!"
But he lets her finish her opening argument. Grits his teeth when Lola implies he missed Erich shouting about silver and insults Erich again. Rubs the palms of his hands on his pant legs to cleanse them of nerve-sweat and hooks them onto his knees so he doesn't start fidgeting again.
"Dude, it wasn't a birthday party, he lost his shit in front of the entire Sept! Nobody within four states didn't hear about it! And there were plenty of other people who couldn't stomach watching it either! They were just quiet about it! You have no idea--"
He makes an animal noise, a chuff like something burst into his face, and he shakes his head to rid himself of whatever he was about to say.
Lola Hawkes
He figured, if anything, she's pulling off so that they're not yelling at each other while going 70MPH down the interstate in a metal deathtrap of a truck.
He's right.
When she's off the exit she bothers to turn onto the long stretch of relatively barren paved road that stretches out to semi-distant towns in either direction but offers only a gas station this close to the interstate. She takes them about a football field's distance up the road from the gas station before she actually pulls the truck over, and when she does she's parked on the gravel shoulder of the road. She jams at the gear shift angrily and kills the engine before twisting about in the bench seat to face him directly. Past the frustrated noise that he made at her there was quiet again. Lola had swallowed a similar noise herself in favor of getting them still before they went all out.
When she is parked, when she has undone her seatbelt and twisted about, she hooks her elbow on the steering wheel and stares cooly at him.
"I have no idea what, Hector? What kind of beast I was dickin' around with? How Rage works, feels, how hard it is to control? No, I haven't felt it, but that doesn't make me ignorant. I was coached to it half my fucking life."
But that's not the point.
"He made a fuckin' mess out of himself. Embarrassed himself and his pack with his behavior, but no one cares to call him out on his fucking shenanigans? His pack coddled him afterward. He's a motherfucking Ahroun of the Shadow Lord tribe, and what is he... A Fostern by now? If not, he's been a Cliath and a part of this Nation long enough to know how the fuck he's expected to conduct himself. That he bleats weakly about torture and punishment is a goddamn shame on his Moon and his Tribe, and now I'm getting the goddamn drilling for being the one person to snap teeth at him for it?
"Why the hell are you mad, anyways? Did I embarrass you or something?"
Hector Ghosh
Because she stays behind the wheel he does not get out of the truck.
On a good day if he isn't sticking his arm or his head or his feet out the window he's messing around with the stereo and playing air drums and singing in a purposefully off-key voice. Like he can't carry a tune to save his life. Like he and Tamsin don't make out like bandits when they play at competitive open mics between her soulful old-country croon and whatever Hector's primal-madman style is supposed to be. Lola hasn't seen them play in a bar yet.
That's probably for the best. Hector likes not being kicked out of bars because the mother of his child broke a bottle over some bitch's head for eyeballing him too long.
They're not fighting over something so mundane tonight. They can't even really tell why it is they're fighting yet. They had been in agreement about both topics tonight, before, but Hector was more objective and fair in his assessment of the situations. He's already spoken to Anubis-Sight about this twice.
He doesn't give half a shit who stays where. Hector isn't going to hold down any vigils and he doesn't want anything to do with the Spire Sept until they clear out the tunnels until the airport and kill the rest of Beloved Horror.
As for Erich and why the hell Hector is mad, anyways...
"NO, you didn't FUCKING EMBARRASS ME!"
On a good day Hector has enough energy and volume to keep up with a sea change of faces in a social setting. He'd called to one person earlier and two others had come in heed of his holler. The man Lola has chosen is fucking loud. When he gets loud out of anger though it sounds like a portent. Like the earth trembling before a volcano erupts. His voice sounds raw when it comes out of his throat so loud, like it hurts him to yell at her like that but he can't dial it back fast enough.
Yet he has enough self-awareness to hear the blowback of his outburst. He hauls in a breath and turns towards the door, hooks the handle in his fingers and pushes it out. Throws himself out of the truck and rakes both hands through his hair hard enough to rattle it loose from its already-tenuous bindings and stalk off far enough that Lola has enough distance between them if she decides to step out of the truck.
If he snaps on her like he was afraid he was going to not even a week ago when she assured him he would never do that.
He doesn't feel like he's going to snap. Some part of him is reacting to the tension he'd felt in her the last two days and she has to know this on some level. Hector has no idea why she's tense or that he's even reacting to it. Such is the depth of his emotional ignorance.
When she gets out he's gone far enough and breathed enough times slow that he can turn back and address her:
"You don't get to sit there all pissed off and indignant because I almost said you don't know shit about how Rage feels when not even half an hour ago you were goading Erich into fighting you..."
He throws his arms out and an honestly baffled expression comes over his features.
"... for what? What was that supposed to accomplish? Huh?" He drops his arms and the bafflement turns to badgering. "What, so you could prove how tough you are? Yeah, you'd look real fuckin' tough with Thomas and me scooping you into a garbage bag at the end of the night because Erich hit the 'puree' button when he frenzied on you."
Lola Hawkes
Hector didn't so much shout as he did roar, but this stood true with many Garou. They were beasts, after all, and when such anger and emotion and frustration welled up within them it had to burst forth. Humans would even make grinding, grated noises of frustration in such situations. They may even bellow. But Hector? He roars, and it's not unlike the yawning of a volcano prior to eruption. Lola tries so hard all of the god damn time to keep her chin up and her demeanor tough, but there's no denying the flinching that happens with his voice bouncing about the metal and glass and rough carpet interior of the truck that they sat in. It ached in her ears and her chest both, and her head ducked just a little, chin trying to sink to her chest. Her eyes shifted away from his, but to the side and not down. She was looking out the windshield instead of at him, and her expression was infuriatingly close to sullen in that moment.
But Hector has to escape the truck and give himself some air. Lola had a feeling in the core of her that he would need out, that they wouldn't survive the truck ride home without getting this out in the air, without him stretching his legs and escaping the confines of the vehicle that carried them. When he threw the door open and launched himself out of the truck, Lola did not immediately follow. Instead she turned back toward the steering wheel, but only so she could brace her elbows against it while knitting her hands into her hair and resting her forehead against her palms.
He's walked a good distance away from the truck, out into the rough scrubby grass that would scratch at your ankles and bite through your socks if you weren't wearing tough jeans. He's done the same, pulled his hair from what confines the elastic band had it in before. It takes a minute for both of them, but Lola eventually slides across the bench of the truck and gets out the passenger door after Hector. By this point he's turned about and he's talking to her again-- to and at both, because his questions flicker back and forth between bewildered honesty (seriously, what were you thinking?) and borderline berating (are you trying to be tough? you're not too tough when you're dead).
Lola pushed the passenger door of the truck closed and leaned back against it. Her arms cross over her chest, but it's different from how she'd folded them at Erich. She's not posturing or cocking her hip or scoffing, but rather she's squeezing her arms against her ribs like she can keep them from bursting that way. This doesn't keep her eyes from blazing or her voice from being a scalding, half-skulking thing.
"I'm not--..." Fuck it, the Rage wasn't the point.
"It's his place to know how to settle shit with fists without laying killing blows. We were at a disagreement and we weren't backing off. I expected him to either use his words like a fuckin' adult, like you're doing, or to throw down the gloves and fuckin' go at it. But as an Ahroun-- shit, as a Garou, it's his place to know how to establish his dominance when he has to without slayin' his allies. I wasn't trying to prove shit, I was having a disagreement."
Hector Ghosh
Even furious the love he feels for her does not go out of his eyes. It doesn't excuse his hollering at her the way he is but he isn't trying to manipulate her into conceding the argument. He isn't trying to shame her or push her into a position of submission.
This is the guy who routinely stands up in front of the Sept and regales the others with stories about the badassery that took place during the last moon. Who raises up his peers and has not once in five moons told a tale that lowered anyone in the eyes of the Nation. The only person who weathered a blow from the stories he's told is Echoes of the Lost himself. Because he was foolish to gush about some trigger-happy hermitic kinswoman with everything else going on in their world.
Right now their world is fraught with betrayal and negligence and Black Spiral Dancers. They need a unified front. They're stretched thin and Hector like many of the other Cliaths and several Fosterns has taken it upon himself to beat back the threat of invasion and unending darkness fallen in the event of Beloved Horror's victory. He also just found out a month ago that he's going to be a father.
Neither of them are in particularly fine form tonight. They're not human but even supernatural nightmare creatures have off days.
So: he's staring through the darkness at her with wild eyes and when she starts to argue with him his eyebrows lift like he can't believe she's actually keeping this up. He loves the fact that she's stubborn but most of the time she's in the right on top of being stubborn. Hector rests his hands on his hips as that bafflement comes back to his features and he's breathing with parted lips and a visibly heaving chest. Trying to stay calm and failing.
She can see he loses that battle about the time she says <i>it's his place</i>. His hands come off his hips and he opens his mouth to interrupt more than once but he lets her finish her sentence. Then another one. By the time she gets to the end of her rebuttal Hector has gotten himself all worked up again. This time when he responds his voice isn't trapped inside the cab of his woman's truck but it amputates the last word at its last syllable.
"WITH A FUCKING AHROUN ON THE FULL MOON!"
This isn't sinking in for him.
"You know what part I liked the most? Remember when you said his soul couldn't handle the burden. That was real productive. Maybe next we could talk about how you're an orphan with a shitty temper. Or how Javed's metis. Or how Thomas is gay. Or how my great-grandfather was a fucking drunk who may or may not have raped a white woman and four generations later here I am not knowing what the fuck I'm doing. In the middle of the park. Just--" Theatric shrug of both his shoulders and his face. "--you know. If we're gonna call people out on obvious defects they've got no control over. HE'S AN AHROUN, LOLA. I'M A GALLIARD. I'M SUPPOSED TO USE MY FUCKING WORDS."
People a mile away could hear him using his fucking words if it weren't so cold most normal folks have gone inside for the night.
Lola Hawkes
If there's one thing that years of training to be an Ahroun taught her, it was how to stand up to being screamed and roared at. That was how a lot of Ahrouns liked to teach cubs to be tough, to test their tempers and try to callous them up against them. Lola had been a preteen still when she was learning how to throw her punches properly and where to hit people to hurt them. She'd been snarled and snapped at when she got out of line or wouldn't listen or was slow and dense in picking up on the first few lessons. Later on, when she was becoming more of a hard-faced teenager with a terrible chip on her shoulder, when she wouldn't tear up or rock on her feet when cuffed at the head or shoved into the dirt, yelling replaced that. Her teachers knew that her temper got the best of her, so that's what they worked to test and temper.
They got far enough to teach her how to stick her chin out and glare hard and quiet while others blew hard into her sails, but that required shutting out the person who was confronting her. She had no desire to shut Hector out, and was scared half to death of what would happen if she tried. The last thing she wanted to see was his hands in the air and his back turned after his tone had dropped and he'd simply given up on her. She'd so much rather have to barricade herself in the cement-walled outdoor bathroom at the gas station just up the road against a Crinos-bodied Hector than she wanted to watch him leave.
So he bellowed and roared and yelled at her loud enough that the one person who was pumping gas into their car had gone stiff in the spine and perked their head up to look out toward the parked truck up the road. They were keeping an eye on them now, because something about the way that the man was yelling had him worried that he was about to hear a gunshot and see a murder follow close after.
Lola could have let the words fly over her head and off her shoulders like so much water off an oily duck's back, but instead she hears and takes them. It's not what he says that impacts her really-- pretty much all of it is simple fact, nothing she would disagree with, nothing she didn't know already. The problem was when his last word echoed off the hills that would become mountains to the west of them, and when she didn't have anything to retort with.
Her mouth twisted to the side, expression tense and uncomfortable. Her arms squeezed more tightly to her torso, and her teeth went to work on the inside of her cheek again. She didn't chew her nails or her cuticles, that was one habit she never picked up on. But soon enough she tasted the copper tang of her own blood on her tongue and realized that she was chewing because she couldn't come up with anything to say back. She wasn't going to apologize because doing so would be insincere, and she'd be wrong for caving and playing defeat and submission for the sake of ending an argument. She couldn't keep the argument going either because she had no more fuel to add to her own fire.
She had been in the wrong, she'd acted foolishly, but she didn't regret any of it.
What she did regret was not going with Hector when he'd pushed at her shoulder and tried to spin her around. She hated the last words that she'd thrown back at Erich when he had, in astonishment, said that he would kill her if they fought. She hated how Hector had stormed away, how that pack-bound Kinfolk's face had fallen just a little and the respect that she was sure that had been there diminished. She hated that she couldn't just calm herself down, find the words to bring things back level and explain herself better.
She hated the worry and awful, gnawing guilt that wasted away at her fortitude and comfort worse than any acid she's known.
Her silence draws on, and Hector will soon realize that she's not going to say anything, that she's run out of words and was operating on fumes in the first place. It takes about ten seconds of her looking at him, uncomfortable and lost and simply at a loss, but not angry at him and not hurt like he struck at her, not insulted, because he was right. Those ten seconds pass and she turns her face away, gives him her cheek, and sniffs hard to deny the tears that pricked her eyes and clenched her throat.
Hector Ghosh
The last time this happened it happened because Hector decided he didn't want to argue with her in a hallway anymore. He'd told her the truth about what happened in Winnipeg and she had thrown it back at him. At the time she had been angry and hurt herself. It hadn't dented him. It hadn't even drawn blood. He'd known he was right and he abandoned his ground to hold up his hands and walk out into an incoming storm.
That was the last time Lola let him have the last word on anything and even then he had still heard her angry footsteps and the kitchen door banging shut as she slammed out into the property's soon-to-be-flooded back 40.
Tonight his words carry and they hang in the air like a guillotine winched up. Instead of sunlight and the breaths of spectators it catches moonlight and the attention of a traveler not yet set out on his journey. Lola is the only one who can hear him breathing heavy. He has to keep reeling in his own anger and his grip is slackening the longer he keeps it up.
Would be one thing if he could say he'd stay out here all night hollering at her if it meant they'd go home together but he would not last all night. It isn't his moon overhead but nights like this it may as well be everyone's. Lunacy shines in his eyes from the first night of the waxing gibbous to the last night of the waning gibbous but he's kept it reined in the last two moons.
Her silence stretches on though and as his breathing tapers off he licks his lips for the panting and the screaming has left him parched. Overhead the moon screams back. The only things left for him tonight are carnal things and yet he's out here trying to be civil with her.
In the moonlight her eyes glint too but not with Rage. She can't see his face fall or his shoulders slump. She can hear him sigh but it's a self-reproachful sigh.
"I--shit. D--" He flinches at his own ignorance and comes forward a few steps before stopping. All the anger has gone out of his voice. He tries again: "If you want me to stay back now's the time to tell me."
Lola Hawkes
To prove her correct in her prediction earlier, the sky is clear and the moon above is bright and full. It sits on the eastern horizon, climbing its way quick and steady, but where it was now it was fat and yellow and astonishingly large. It wouldn't shrink to normal size, a bulb amid a blanket of black, for another hour or so. It screeched down at Hector, echoing the heat in his words back down onto his head. Luna was bright enough that they cast shadows on the ground. Bright enough that Hector could see the glimmer-glint in his woman's eyes when she turned her face and glared daggers and knives up the empty road ahead.
The man watching couldn't make much out, but he knew the yelling had ceased and the figure that was distant from the truck was moving closer. He, too, glanced to the moon and though the night was moderate a chill went up his spine. He decided that he didn't want to run the risk of meeting a monster behind that terrible voice he'd heard yelling and started the engine of his car so he could reasonably deny hearing anything else. He'd drive the opposite direction because, thankfully, he needed to get back on the interstate and didn't have to drive past the truck parked up the opposite direction on the road.
Hector's feet carried him a few steps forward, but he hesitated. He tried to talk, but his words failed him. The heat and force had sucked from his voice like a vacuum in space pulled it into the void. At least he was able to make words the second time he tried. Lola had to work harder to get her tongue and teeth to cooperate. For how heavy and thick her voice was, and for the fact that she wouldn't turn her face directly toward him still, it was clear that the stress and strange new vibe of aggravation that crawled under her skin was bubbling to the surface.
She didn't uncross her arms, but she did hike a shoulder up and duck her head to swipe her nose and left eye at he fabric of her T-shirt. Oh, tears hadn't fallen yet, they weren't streaking trails down her cheeks, but her eyes were red and so watery they shimmered and threatened to spill because she just wouldn't let them.
"No, I don't wanna reject you."
If I tell you to stay away then god knows how long and how far that away will be.
Hector Ghosh
One day he won't hesitate before he goes to her and takes her into his arms.
They could guess he had harbored longing for her from the moment their paths crossed. Glen had started teasing him when they'd left Colorado after the young Cliath's first introduction to what was left of Maria's family and he'd scowled and hit out at the male Ragabash but Glen was bigger than he was then. Built like a bear but possessing the disposition of one stuffed with cotton and not fury. All Glen had to do was put the floppy-haired little shit into a headlock and wait until he calmed down.
But he was not entirely correct. It wasn't love at first sight. It wasn't even love at second or third or fourth sight. It wasn't love after the first time he came by to see her after he'd climbed out of the truck with his knapsack and his newly-heavy Rage and ambled down the dirt path to find the Caern. He hesitated because he didn't know if he ought to comfort his packsister's orphaned baby sister and if he ought to in what capacity he ought to comfort her.
Didn't know if he had pushed her against the counter in her kitchen instead of stammering about how he didn't just like her as a friend that one afternoon they could have gotten a jump on burying their grief together.
Hector doesn't think of her or anyone else in strategic terms. He didn't plan this out. Screaming at her off the interstate so she would break down and admit something was bothering her wasn't a brilliant maneuver he'd thought up while they were sitting in the park recovering from meeting with Anthony.
He's never seen her cry before, or try not to cry. He doesn't know what to do.
She gives him a compound answer and Hector lets out what's left of his breath and crosses what's left of the distance and grabs her up in his arms. Not like he'd tried to convince her to leave with him earlier. His arms go around her shoulders and he holds her against his torso and he's warm and solid underneath his sweatshirt. Warm and solid and suffering from an elevated heart rate.
Instead of speaking he rests his chin on her crown and waits.
Lola Hawkes
When Hector was first introduced to Lola, he was still fairly baby-faced and rocking short, shaggy hair. Lola was more of a hair trigger then than she was now. In the period of time that the pack was visiting and had first brought Hector along, Lola had been in two verbal spats with her sister and Glen had held an ice pack to a swollen shut eye when she came back to the house after what turned out to be a fist fight with her at-the-time favorite Shadow Lord, prevented from going worse or further by her still-favorite Skald. She was ferocious and as unsavory as a cat that scratches your arms and spits at you each time that you try to pet it.
He didn't love her immediately, but she grew up, and that helped.
Now they're both older, wiser, different-but-the-same. She doesn't give him the most direct answer, but he gets what she's saying and closes distance between them anyways. His arms go about her shoulders and pull her close to his chest, and his chin settles onto the top of her head. His heart hammers in his chest still, but his breath is far more even in her hair than hers was against the collar of his shirt.
It says something, at least, that she doesn't hesitate to grab hold of him when he reaches for her. Lola's arms looped under his, her hands settled onto his shoulders, and she pulled him close against him so he was back against the truck along with her. His chin would have to lift some to avoid grinding on her skull because she pressed her face to his collarbone and scrubbed the tears out of her right eye against his sweatshirt. Much to her chagrin they were replaced instantly, because it's a guarantee that if you hug and hold someone who's struggling not to cry they'll get pushed over that edge they were trying so hard to balance.
Her tears are hot and bitter and her back and shoulders shake, her breath trembles when she pulls it in and rasps it out past parted lips and teeth because crying does nothing fun to your nose. She tightened her grasp on his blazer, fists gathering up what loose fabric they find, and she chokes out: "I'm sorry," somewhere into the top of his chest.
It's difficult to place how or why, but he knows she's not apologizing for her behavior. She wouldn't be this upset over getting into a fight with an Ahroun and someone getting mad at her for it. She was sorry for something else-- her behavior overall? How insufferable she's been? Or for whatever it was she did that's had her acting off and touchy and sensitive the past two days?
Hector Ghosh
Half a dozen explanation for the tears bubble up in Hector's mind but none of them come from the source.
He holds her to comfort her. Doesn't feel wound tight and suspicious as she leans into him. As time passes he is having an easier time of accepting that she loves him and she wants him around and she is not just with him because she was lonely out there by herself. Solitude and loneliness are two different breeds of beast. He has no idea why she's crying.
Unless her mind fractures Lola will never know what it is to brush shoulders with frenzy but neither will any of the rest of them know what it is she went through, thinking she would find her true form and run with her tribe only to find out later she could only ever serve Gaia as kin to her werewolves.
Calden tried to tell her her disappointment could be a blessing. Talked her into a game of poker with people who harbor no Rage in their bodies just for shits and giggles. Lola told Hector some of the story of her visit to the ranch and Hector had joked about how if he ever couldn't find her he'd just head out to the horse pasture to confirm his suspicions. He'd leave her there too. Horses are badass.
No anniversaries loom and her hormones are leveling out and she's eaten recently. They were yelling at each other but he hadn't said anything out of intent to hurt her. Could be she's upset that he was right. She would have said he was right though. Crying and clinging to him and choking out an apology doesn't make any sense.
Hector makes a quiet noise between his teeth and wraps his arms more tightly around her. One goes to the small of her back and the other massages a pattern between her shoulder blades before it finds the back of her neck and kneads her there. He turns his head so he can rest his cheek against her hair. She's wiping her eyes into his shirt like she can staunch their flow against him.
"Hey..." He has no idea why she's crying and he has no idea what he's saying. "Hey, shh, it's alright."
Lola Hawkes
Only once before had Lola come close to crying in front of Hector. That had been the day that he 'rescued' her from the hospital. When they reached the Homestead they'd sat on the truck bench and held hands, and Hector had pointed out that they were going to have a baby. She'd made a half-laugh half-sobbing noise, but that was as far as that outburst had gotten. When you were raised up with your face aimed at the full moon and your throat practicing howls and victory screams that would never reach their full potential, you learned to put that shit on lock.
The problem with that is after a while, as is the way with most physics, pressure will build to a point that it needs to be relieved somewhere. Just as oppressed postal workers will eventually shoot a random asshole in the face for abusing them one day, Lola's stress and guilt and worry had to be relieved somewhere. Typically she would be able to satisfy that need by going somewhere private out where only the birds and bugs will hear and letting loose. With other things she's able to lay her weight on Eddie Luske's shoulders, as she had done when she heard that her sister would never come home again. This, though-- what she'd been fighting and processing and eating herself alive over wasn't something she could share. She'd cried when she got off the phone with Corey on Saturday, but past that she'd been bottling it up and trying hard not to let Hector notice that something was wrong.
She'd told Corey it wouldn't last, that she couldn't lie to him for long. She told him that Hector would know something was amiss.
Sure enough, Hector was confused as to why his Kinswoman was crying, but he'd stay and hold and comfort her anyways. His hands were at her back and her head, and he shushes her and tells her softly that it's okay, the words bubbling out of his mouth without thought. He said it was alright without knowing what it was, but rather than correcting him and insisting that no, it isn't alright, Lola's just quiet and trying to find the balance between letting enough of this pressure go and regaining her composure.
So, they'll stand like that for a little while. They're not watching the clock, but the moon rises and shrinks just a touch and the truck would tell them that it takes some point between three and four minutes before Lola's breathing steadies itself and the shaking of her shoulders stops. Her arms aren't clinched so tightly to his shoulders anymore, but her head is still against his chest when she's clamped down on herself enough to breathe and speak once more.
"I'm sorry," she clarifies again, but apologizing for something else now. For her outburst, for leaning on him when it was the Full Moon and she should be supporting him instead. She wasn't lifting her face to his yet, though, and instead she turned so that her forehead was touched to his collarbone, eyes out of focus in the brief space between her face and his chest. She licked at dry lips, hated a sense of cotton mouth that hasn't come over her without intoxicants helping in such a long time, and continued.
"I... think I have to... share--" she's not pausing because she's searching for breath or shaky from crying still, but rather because she's blindly groping in the dark for what she's trying to say even while she's saying it. "--something. I'm so fucking worried how it'll hit you, and I'm worried about the moon, but it's a long ways 'till it's past half full...."
Hector Ghosh
The three or four minutes it takes Lola to stop crying enough to find words for him are among the longest minutes of his life. They will not be the final longest minutes of his life. Like most males Hector struggles with situations over which he has no control. Helplessness does not sit well with Garou.
Close as they are she can feel his heartbeat strong behind his ribs and he can feel her shuddering tear-stained breaths and he stops shushing her and just holds her. The longer she cries without talking the more his mind races. His hand doesn't stop kneading her neck until he decides to stroke her hair. When he tightens his arm about her waist she can feel him loosen his knees and plant his feet as if to batten down for a long spell of nasty weather.
Whatever is making her cry has nothing to do with the fight. They've talked about the pregnancy and the baby. They were just up at Anthony's and she didn't cry. Like as not his mind is replaying the last several days looking for some sort of a warning sign as to what it is that's eating at her.
She can feel a suspicion come into his body when his heart starts to beat faster. When she finally speaks again it is another apology and Hector swallows down a surge of panic. Doesn't let go of her yet. His fingers are still in her hair as Lola dampens her lips and cobbles together a sentence.
A halting and vague sentence. He's not shaking because it isn't adrenaline that's flooding through him. It's Rage. He's so worked up after supporting her wordless crying for so long that he could have lost his shit just imagining what could be so wrong that it would make Lola cry.
He pulls back from her not so he can leave her but so he can look her in the eye. Lets out a hard-hard breath and runs his hand down his face. A cloud of self-reproach comes over him. Like it's his fault they can't have a conversation like a normal couple without Lola worrying about the same thing he was worried about several nights ago. When she told him she knew he would never do anything to hurt her.
"Is something wrong with the baby?"
Lola Hawkes
Without anything to gauge the time going by, it feels way too long for someone as solid as Lola to be standing there crying like that. It's reasonable that it worries Hector, but it's uniquely him that he combs through all possible scenarios and comes up with the worst ones possible. It's even more true to his character that he keeps it to himself, rolling around in his head while he rubs her neck and pets her hair and gives her the time she needs to pull herself together on her own.
Finally, though, she's knitting sentences together like she's somehow forgotten how to and breathing level enough that it's safe to move his hands and break the space between their torsos. He doesn't take his arms from around her entirely, but loosens them enough so that he can lean back and look down into her face. His Rage is ever present, pushing hard and scorching the air around them, but he doesn't let it bite into his words or lash out to fight. He's worried and grave and, of course, the question is:
Is something wrong with the baby?
Lola makes the same sound she did a month ago in the truck-- that half-choked sob mingled with a dry ironic laugh. She didn't smile along with the sound, though, and just shook her head a little. She let go of his jacket and dropped her arms from his shoulders. Her weight shifted back so she was leaned more steadily against the truck, and now that her hands were free she used them to swipe her cheeks and eyes dry of the tears that had gone until they ran dry. She wished she could say she felt better after crying, but now she felt hollow and worried instead.
There wasn't time to recover from crying before she put herself back up onto a ledge, except this one felt more like standing on a cliff face.
"No, holy shit, I hope not."
Corey told her that she shouldn't be so worried, that the chances were slim as hell, but how could she not? With how much Hector clearly, plainly, obviously loved her, how couldn't she quake at the thought of breaking that bond?
Just take a breath, stupid, and spit it out. Rip it off like a bandage.
"....You remember last month when I said I talked to Corey?"
Hector Ghosh
If that was the worst scenario Hector could conjure up when he was left alone with his woman crying in his arms for almost four minutes then one could argue anything else Lola could have told him tonight wouldn't provoke a murderous rampage.
She steps back from him after making a noise reminiscent of that uncontrolled sob in the truck the afternoon they sat in the driveway at the Homestead with what they'd learned at the hospital sinking into their spirits. Happy news gone electric with the terror and the threat of frenzy. Not only had she almost lost her leg if she wouldn't have died outright but she was pregnant and they'd had no idea.
That negation of his worry has Hector taking and releasing a breath that brings with it no relief. He runs a hand through his hair to rake it back off of his face and he stares at her but he does not leans against the truck to stand beside her. Doesn't brush away her tears for her. Whatever tenderness he is ordinarily capable of is at a distance now.
Lola hopes nothing is wrong with the baby. Hector's eyes narrow.
Then she asks if he remembers last month when she said she talked to Corey and he lets out an aggrieved breath. Lets go of his hair. Steps back from the truck.
"That was two months ago," he says. His voice is cautious now and slow. Like he's even less sure of what's wrong now than he was when she started crying. "Lola, what's going on? Should I--?"
Before she tells him whatever it is she has to tell him. Whatever it is they both know now is going to make him lose his shit even if one of them still hasn't puzzled out the source of her anguish. Nothing is lining up in his head. All he knows is that Corey's name still makes him want to spit blood and his hands do start to shake as he considers this.
"No, you know what? I'm gonna go kill something before we have this conversation. Get in the truck and lock the doors. Don't get out until I come back. Whatever it is, I..."
He starts to speak thoughtless and true. Stops himself before he can say something he might take back later. The Galliard steps forward and puts his hands on either side of the kinswoman's face and kisses her on the forehead. If it turns out this is going to be the last time he sees her he doesn't want that to be the end of it though. So he kisses her full on the mouth and keeps his hips back from her so he does not start another argument by making her fend him off.
It isn't as if he won't come back. But he kisses her hard anyway and then steps back from her and walks out into the scrub grass that had served as an oasis of silence for a time. Reaches into his pocket for the piece of mirror he keeps in his pocket. A moment later a great POP rends that silence and he pushes across the Gauntlet to go hunt.
So much for the bandage approach.
Lola Hawkes
Narrowed eyes and steps back confirm, in part, what Lola already knew.
She hadn't tried to bring Corey up at all since they'd fought about him last. She had been worried for him and for that hatchet not-yet buried between himself and his old alpha, which was why she'd harassed her cousin for help buying a last minute plane ticket and promised that she'd work it back toward him because it was important, damnit. But when she came back that stress and dizzying spiral-stumble descent that the Galliard had been making toward self destructive depression had come to a screeching halt. He'd flourished in the past few months, so she hadn't thought to say anything or bothered to stir the pot any more than needed.
But she had a gut feeling that this would be his reaction. Though he was doing fine, that didn't mean that the wound of what his pack used to be was close to healed at all. She mentions Corey, and Hector takes a step back and rakes his hands through his hair and struggles to make connections in understanding why she would hope the baby is fine but not know for sure, why she'd be driven to tears when she was a thing made of rock and iron and violence herself, and what the hell that had to do with that Glass Walker scumbag that had abandoned him this past summer.
He wanted to know what was going on, but stopped himself and decided for them both that he wasn't ready for this yet. He was too wound up, too full of anger and Rage and energy that had to be worked out first. Though they'd spoken and she had reassured him, the concern that he may not hold his Rage as steady as he always does is still there. It's a difficult worry to shake when you're painfully aware of how easily your claws could cut through the flesh and bone of the person you love.
He says that he's going to go kill something and work it out, and half-asks half-tells her to stay in the truck and wait. Lola didn't look like she was going to argue. She'd already pressed on Garou's Rage up to its cusp and tried to make it boil harder, she wasn't going to repeat the error again. She did intend to see him off, though, so she hadn't moved from her spot when he'd walked away, and was still there when he came back to kiss her -- first on the forehead, then on the mouth. She'll kiss him back, of course, and touch his chest and face bracingly when doing so.
Then, Pop! He's gone.
Lola will not immediately go to the truck and lock the doors. Instead, she walks the distance up the road to the gas station and uses the bathroom, buys herself a bottle of water and package of peanuts, then walks back. Uses the time spent stretching her legs and breathing cool air to regain her composure as completely as possible. Then some fifteen minutes later she climbs into the truck and closes and locks the doors. She's not worried about beasts tapping at her window, scratching circles in the glass pane menacingly with claws. She has a rifle under the bench seat for that.
She will stay, though, and wait, however long it takes Hector to come back.
No matter how long that time is, though, she doesn't doze. When he returns he'll find her with her head against the driver's window, staring out blankly at the moon in the sky like she's having a silent conversation with it.
Hector Ghosh
Whatever happened in the Umbra does not come back across with him.
Not in any form that human eyes can see. In the amount of time it takes for Lola to make her journey to the gas station and tenuous calm and back she has not managed to convince herself that everything will be alright in the end. Fifteen minutes is not so long for a hunt but he didn't have to go far. Flayed senses with Uktena's blessing and his wolf form take him five minutes' trot out.
He comes back on foot on this side of the Gauntlet and Lola cannot see him with her eyes aimed up like Luna herself can give her guidance this night. If Luna could not give to her her birthright the night she was born maybe She can tell Lola what it is she's supposed to do to right her own course. Fifteen minutes, thirty. If Luna talks to her she cannot hear Her.
And then Hector is at the passenger's side of the truck. Thick tracks of blood from his eyes and ears and nose but it is old blood and it does not still flow. He does not seem to feel it. He raps a knuckle against the window to let her know he's there and there's no fire in his eyes anymore.
She's seen that dazed look in true-born warriors back from the other side before. Not the Gauntlet. Death.
While he waits for her he wipes the back of his hand across his cheeks and jaws. No blood stains his sweatshirt or his jeans. All of the blood is his. She cannot scent him the way he can her but spirits do not bleed. Does not speak until she's out here with him.
"Alright," he says in a voice that rasps for the roaring and the blood. Ambles around the back of the truck and lets down the tailgate and boosts himself onto it. Legs dangle. He sits like his insides hurt but not enough to warrant fussing over. Spits a wad of his own blood into the dirt. "You talked to Corey."
Continue.
Lola Hawkes
Hector wasn't gone quite as long as Lola had figured he might be. When he said he'd go kill something, she imagined there would be time put into stalking and hunting and finding. She also knew that the Other Side warped time, so she was settled in and prepared for the long haul (hence the water and peanuts). But, no more than thirty minutes pass before there's the rapping of knuckles against the passenger window. Lola startles, but only by what reflex nature grants, and her head snap-turns to look out the window at him.
There's blood coming from his nose-eyes-ears and streaking his face, and color washes briefly from her tanned face to create an odd pallor and her eyes widen in shock, something akin to horror but not entirely there because she's seen what horror really is.
All the same, she unhooks the latch on the driver's side door and swings the heavy metal thing open so she can hop on out. This time she brings her hoodie with her and pulls it on as she walks around to join him at the back of the truck. He's got the tailgate down and hopped up to sit on it, feet dangling over the gravel on the road's shoulder and legs swinging freely as they please. Blood is spat onto the dirt, and he picks up where they left off some thirty-odd minutes ago. Lola heard him, but didn't quite acknowledge what he'd said. She was busy looking at the dark blood smears on his face and the even darker, dazed, somewhat faded half-light to his eyes.
In the time that he was gone, relieving the burden of his Rage and spending himself into the night, Lola was able to bring herself back to what appears to be complete sorts. Her silent conversation with Luna must have evened her out (though, let's be honest, the crying really helped too). He tried to pick the conversation back up, because he was ready for it, but she was more focused on him in this exact moment.
"Yeah I did, but... Jesus Christ, Hector, what did you find?"
Hector Ghosh
Some injuries will effectively cripple a Gaian when he has to claw his way back from the other side. Hector doesn't look as if he had to claw. He isn't limping and winded. He left his hunting knife and his medicine bag on the floor on the passenger side of the truck when they got out to meet up with Anthony because he didn't want to draw any more attention to himself than he already does. Loping down the sidewalk like an animal imitating a human in its new stolen skin doesn't help his cause as it is.
His intestines are not spilling out from beneath his sweatshirt and she cannot hear him fighting for air. His faculties all seem present. His limbs and all of their fingers are all accounted for. Both of his eyes are in his head underneath all of the blood and both of his ears still live beneath his hair. Even the piercing in his upper right ear is still where it's supposed to be.
What did he find is what she wants to know and Hector rubs at his flank with his left hand but does not lift his layers to figure out if he needs a healing gourd. A healing gourd won't do anything for him.
"A punk-ass Bane," he says. "Not a very old one either. It didn't take me that long to send it running in fear."
He'd only succeeded at smearing the blood around his face. He needs to wash his clothes anyway. Hector shrugs out of his blazer and pulls his sweatshirt over his head. Underneath the sweatshirt he wears a t-shirt that he found in a thrift store recently. It's turquoise and advertises a Bay to Breakers race from 1987. He's been to San Francisco before but he wasn't even thought of in 1987.
That t-shirt climbs up on his torso as he hauls the hoodie over his head. Luna even this bright does not offer much light but Hector's skin is brown and fresh scar tissue is pink. The injury that killed him caught him under his ribcage on the right side of his body. Later she'll find the exit wound where something punched through his back. She can see where he hit the ground from the thing flinging him from the blood leaking out of his skull.
He's lucky he doesn't have brain damage. On any other night he would be crowing about what a freaking badass he is but his mind was on other things as he hunted. He walked away from Lola so he would not kill her and he ended up dying himself. Make of that what you will.
Unaware of the scar as he is Hector lets the t-shirt fall back in place and does not shiver as he goes for his blazer. Adrenaline numbs him to the snap of late autumn. He shoves his arms back through the sleeves and uses the sweatshirt to wipe off his face and hands.
"Don't change the subject." He thrusts the soiled sweatshirt away from him. Looks back at her with tired yet alive eyes and starts cracking jokes in an exhausted deadpan. They lost their forward momentum. He doesn't know how to get them moving again. "Or make me guess what's wrong. I just ruined some Bane's night, love, if we're not going to have wild the-end-times-are-near sex in the grass to celebrate my triumphant blood-soaked return the honorable thing for you to do would be to tell me why you were crying."
Lola Hawkes
There's concern written onto her face, but it's the kind that he's more accustomed to seeing. Not the raw, hurt, exposed kind of worry and fretting that she displayed earlier in the hour when she'd leaned against the truck and clinched her arms to her chest like it would stop the hurt and anxiety from spilling forward. This is back to the Lola that people are familiar with-- her concern is there, certainly, but she looks almost pissed about it. Her eyes fell to his stomach, catching the bright flash of pink against brown skin when his shirt pulled up along with the sweater while it was being removed. Her eyebrows hopped up-- she knew that a wicked wound like that would have meant that something took a literal slice out of him, or ran him through, or split him nigh in twain, or something like that.
If it were any other day she would have slapped his belly (where the scar wasn't touching, of course) and congratulated him on finally marring his pretty hide.
Tonight, though, she scowled and felt a hot surge of anger and panic that she had to swallow down with some serious effort. This shows clear on her face, but the fact that she puts it on lock and prevents herself from hollering at him about nearly dying shows just as well. She looked from his stomach, where his shirt now covered the wound up to his still blood-tinged face where the sweater hadn't managed to wipe everything away in its entirety, and her brows furrowed with worry.
She doesn't get on his case for almost dying when going off to fight a Bane, but she can't stop herself from reaching out to him and reassuring herself in this manner that Yes, he did nearly die, but he's here now speaking and breathing and living and that's what mattered. Her hands go to either side of his head and urge it to come forward just enough for her to get up onto the toes of her shoes and press her lips into his hairline and breathe in his smell, even if a lot of it is sharp blood scented, and confirm his survival in a more animal way than just accepting it with her mind.
She swallows hard the emotions trying to nudge their way into her still-raw throat before letting go and standing back once more. He wanted to know what she was going to say before, why she was crying, if she wasn't going to take him into the grass and celebrate life and victory in a tumble of shuffled clothing and hopes that headlights don't pass over them (Or do, let the assholes look, I dare them to do anything about it). So she hefted a breath and hopped up with the guidance of one hand onto the tailgate to sit beside him.
Her legs didn't swing, she instead leaned forward (her pants were worn unbuttoned these days, hence the long-hemmed shirt that she chose for her outfit today, so the waistband didn't strain at her belly when she did so) and anchored her elbows to the tops of her thighs. Her hands clasped together between her knees and she looked down past them to the ground. She has to take another breath, but this one less strained, less visible in her back and shoulders, before she starts.
"When I told you I talked to Corey, the part that I left out was that I talked to him in person."
She pauses only long enough for that to register, to sink in, to be accepted. Not quite long enough for him to think she's giving him the floor, though, because she's picking her story back up soon enough.
"You were just having such a hard time, and I was so worried for you. You were depressed, torn up, and there was a lot about what happened up north when Maria and Glen died that was unresolved and just killing you and dragging you down-- I could see it happening. I felt like if I knew what happened I could better... I don't know, try to help you, guide you back or make things better somehow. So I called Corey and told him that I needed to hear what happened because you and Tamsin didn't talk about it and were all clouded with Rage and hate and hurt.
"He agreed to talk, but only if we did so in person. I don't fuckin' know why he couldn't just tell me a story over the phone like a normal goddamn person, but I was willing to oblige. He said he was going to be in Las Vegas the next day and that I could meet him there, on account of it being closer than Houston. So I talked to Anthony, got myself a ticket, and was out there the next day to meet him.
I got the story out of him over lunch, but I hated it there so fucking much and he hated that we had to talk about this and that I was there making him talk about everything that happened so fucking much that the conversation had to be lubricated."
Hector probably sees where this is going, but Lola's on a roll. She needs to get the whole thing out, so she keeps on.
"We spent the day trolling around and the only time we stopped drinking was when we went back to the hotel room to take a nap. We found some vampires, killed 'em with our hands and whatever we found lying around. By the end of the night we'd killed off two fuckin' bottles of tequila between the two of us and didn't slow down once. We staggered back to the hotel room somehow but I don't remember a whole hell of a lot, really. We were blackout drunk, Hector, literally."
Her hands squeeze tightly together and her voice lowers and her head is down, eyes unfocused but aimed toward the weeks-old greasy smear of road kill that existed some dozen or so feet away from the back tires of the truck. There's something about her posture there, with her head canted down and her fingers all interlaced, that made it seem like she may be in a confessional booth instead of perched on the tailgate of a rusty old truck.
"...we woke up sharing a bed, and I think you can figure why. That was two days before you and I got into it, before the flood, before the night we came together and you started being with me."
There aren't tears in her eyes, but if she hadn't cried herself out earlier there would be. Her voice is little more than a hoarse whisper when she leans forward and presses her thumbs and forefingers all four to her brow ridge. "Two months ago...."
Where she leaves off, how her words hang in the air after that, it feels like there was more that she wanted to say but she just plain ran out of words and lost the ability to structure sentences again. She wasn't brought up a Galliard after all, and Hector himself said that Ahrouns aren't expected to use their words like Galliards are.
Hector Ghosh
And he wants the reassurance near as much as Lola does. To fall and rise again in battle and emerge with the enemy defeated is a noble and glorious task but for as many stories as Hector has told of others accomplishing the same feat he has never experienced it himself. That this is the first time he has ever allowed himself to frenzy is irrelevant.
He does not place his hands on her but lets her pull him down and feel that he is still alive. Flesh is warm despite the diminished Rage and underneath the blood his hair smells of that metallic-cold ringing born from sweating outside in winter.
Before he can pull her to him Lola releases the sides of his head and boosts herself up on the tailgate to sit beside him. The arm closest to her comes out to support his weight by planting itself behind her back and he leans into it. Dark and languid eyes rest on her face as she finds the strength to speak and though he wants to he does not harry her or bid her speak faster.
In all the time she has known him Lola has never seen him so exhausted and alive at once. He spoke of their wasting an opportunity to lie with each other but she knows if they were to do so even here he would want to sleep right away. Shucking aside the curtain of permanent death is hard work and the frenzy that follows is enough to leave Garou stronger and more battle-hardened than he drained.
Listening to her explain why it is she had taken a plane out to Las Vegas of all places threatens to drain him. Listening to what took place down there and the fact that she does not remember a good chunk of the night has him drawing and releasing a breath that washes warm over her for how close he is.
At the end of it comes that half-completed thought. Lola runs out of words and curls into herself. Hector heaves another large sigh and pinches the bridge of his nose. Not even a spark of Rage flecks inside him but she can hear the absorption of this information and the wry huff that comes out of his throat when he has decided not to take his hand from its place behind her and push down from the tailgate and walk off.
"You could've talked to me, you know. I know I didn't tell you everything but if you'd asked me to, I would've told you. I just thought--"
It doesn't matter. He cuts himself off to try a different tactic. His voice lacks the brimstone it had earlier. Now he just sounds resigned.
"Do you love him?"
Lola Hawkes
Had he not gone out and drained his body of Rage and exhausted it with fight, Lola expected his reaction would have been much different. If they'd had this conversation against the side of the truck still, without Hector going off into the night on the Other Side first, he would not have simply sighed and spoken and sounded oh so tired when he did. He may have dented the truck door and fractured his knuckles striking it because of a need to lash out at something, he may have tensed and trembled until he could restrain himself no more and flipped the truck onto its cab. He could have simply burst into that long-coming Frenzy on the spot.
But he was too tired, too dazed from his encounter with Death (and Lola may have to ask him what She looks like, later), and too spent overall to do anything but pinch his finger and thumb to the bridge of his nose and let out a heavy, burdened sigh.
When he did not jump down off the truck to distance himself from her or whip around to yell or push or hit, Lola's head turned and the eye nearer to him opened to see how he was reacting, if at all. What she found him doing, sighing and holding secure the space between his eyes like the stress and exhaustion were threatening to make a headache blossom, made him look older. She suspected that he looked much like his father in this moment, but had nothing to base that thought on.
He told her that she could have talked to him and that eye closed once more, the knuckle joints of her thumbs scrubbing just above either eyebrow in small concentrated circles. The question that followed it was what had her taking her hands away from her face. Her hands were placed on the tops of her thighs and she pushed herself to sit up more straight. His exhaustion wore on her, and she felt spent and worn out in her nerves, so her answer was a low-toned and even thing.
"No. No more than I loved Glen, or what I love Tamsin or Thomas." His hand was behind her, supporting his weight. She wanted to reach for it, but worry that he didn't want it had her hesitating. Just as he'd stopped and wanted to be sure that she would not push him away when he came to comfort her approximately an hour ago, she needed to gauge whether or not he would recoil if she tried to touch him in this moment. Rejection wouldn't break her, but she didn't want to see in which ways it would scald her heart all the same.
"I didn't trust that I'd get all sides of the story from you or Tamsin. I figured there was a lot of bias there. I wasn't asking after whether you were there or not, that's just something I found out. I wanted to know about the fight, about what caused it... wanted to hear both sides." Lola was no Philodox, but she'd felt that it was important to know what happened to Celduin in its entirety before placing judgment.
Her head shakes. She decides that this wasn't what she was trying to talk about-- she didn't want to defend why she was out there in the first place. She'd hesitated before, but now her hand nearest to him reached out. She moved slow enough for him to stop her if he wanted, but if uninhibited she'd rest her hand on top of his thigh and swallow hard.
"W-..." She almost said we, but stopped herself and started over. "The chances that the baby isn't yours are so slim. There was a condom on the night stand. But I have no fucking idea what I would've done if I hadn't told you this and that one-in-a-million happened...."
Hector Ghosh
She didn't trust that he would give her an objective account of what happened up north. That bit of the confession makes him cough out a laugh that does nothing to conceal the lash of insult as it strikes his skin. Though she does not look at him when he makes that sound Lola would find ignoring the hurt blossomed up before it difficult.
But he doesn't interrupt. Hector takes his hand off the truck bed and uses both his hands to comb his hair with his fingers and stares out into the darkness like that offers him more understanding than his woman's words.
Both sides, she wanted.
"Fuck," he says with another misleading huff of laughter. Lets go of his hair and is about to jump down from the bed like now that the thrill of a survived brush with Death has worn off he can't sit still. Exhaustion still drapes itself close and heavy across his shoulders but he doesn't go away from her.
Her hand reaches out for his thigh and finds the muscle beneath tensed. He breathes out hard like this conversation is more painful than the still-healing wound in his torso but he doesn't shrug her off.
Normally he'd put his hand over hers but Hector is still angry. It's a simmering thing.
On she goes though. Tries to use reason with a creature who only fares well with the stuff when he's the one dispensing it. Hector is at a strange crossroads in his life. Learning to wield responsibility and tolerate others looking to him for guidance chafed at first but what he said earlier in the midst of his outburst was still true: he does not know what he's doing. He knows the stories and he's learning their laws but most of what Hector does comes from experience and not instinct.
There was a condom on the night stand.
A grimace appears like the image jumped into his brain fully formed and he does not recoil from her but the expression on his face is a clear Jesus Christ, Lola. She has no fucking idea what she would've done.
He lets her finish.
"It still could!" he says when he gets his wits back about him. "Why didn't you tell me you were off hooking up with him that weekend? I didn't even know you were gone! I just thought you didn't want to see me because I flipped out on you the last time we were alone together, I had no--"
Either he cuts himself off or she does it for him.
Lola Hawkes
He'd been about to jump down when her hand landed on his leg. His muscles were tight, his temper was a simmering and angry thing but in no danger of bursting. All the same, she didn't take long to remove her hand. His body language and tone and tension all had her convinced that he didn't want the contact. So soon enough her hands were back in her lap and she was averting her eyes once more. This was an uncomfortable, shameful position to be in and there was nothing about her that didn't say so.
Her hands were wringing in her lap. Unlike Hector she didn't have any rings or jewelry to twist or play with, so she gripped at her own fingers and knuckles instead. Her shoulders were hunched, which made her look smaller than Hector's probably ever seen her, even back when she was 19 and actually smaller than she was now. She always held such confidence and always seemed so unflappable that to see her this way was downright foreign.
She was trying to reassure him, explain that there was protection at least, but-- again, that whole using words thing. Hector flinched and looked at her like she'd screamed about how Jesus was a Jew in the middle of a Catholic sermon, but he didn't interrupt her. Instead, he waited until her sentence petered out on its own before snapping that the baby still could very well be something of Corey's doing and not his own. It was Lola's turn to flinch, and all at once she decided that the proximity to Hector was smothering. She couldn't defend herself, she was flayed too raw and left too exposed and it was unfamiliar and she despised it. Shame was something she had pretty much always ignored up until this point, and the feeling it gave her was a burning and suffocating and anxious thing.
She doesn't cut him off, she feels like she has no ground to stand on. He cuts himself off, and Lola's standing closer to the road kill now than she is to Hector. Her arms were left to swing in wide motions at her sides a couple of times as she paced her way out on the gravel. When she stopped and turned about she jammed her hands roughly into the pockets of her sweater and looked back to Hector, her expression dark, sour, and twisted up.
"Jesus, Hector, do you think I planned on anything happening? My leaving had everything to do with you, but nothing to do with not wanting to see you. God damnit, I was worried about you! I did what I thought was right and best and I'm fucking sorry okay? What the hell do you want me to say or do, huh?"
There we go, Lola, get defensive. That'll help everything.
Hector Ghosh
Standing in front of him now Lola has plenty of distance from Hector. Garou do not suffer from blood loss or go into shock. Not unless they've been infected by something particularly nasty. But he looks as if he feels sick to his stomach now. It's a different shade of wan than the pain behind his scar was causing him.
It's vertigo, of a sort. Whatever solid ground he'd thought he'd had when they set out for the city this morning lurched out from under him when Lola started trying to pick a fight with an Ahroun and now there's a minuscule chance the child growing inside of her isn't his and his anger is sublimating into something like panic. This isn't a situation he'd prepared for.
Of course she didn't plan it. If she'd planned to meet Corey in Las Vegas then she wouldn't have taken Hector into her arms and let him start sharing her bed. In his eyes Lola can read rational thought but splattered overtop of it is hurt and anger and he pushes himself off the tailgate as she tells him she's fucking sorry.
"I DON'T WANT YOU TO SAY ANYTHING!"
They're back to defensive on one side and hollering on the other. He doesn't come towards her. His sweatshirt is in the back of the truck still and he's walking backwards down the dirt path.
"So you fucked up! Fantastic! I don't need you to keep telling me details about how you fucked up! Alright? How about you try not saying anything! That's been working out so well the last TWO FUCKING MONTHS!"
He puts a hand to his forehead and tries to reel it in. Drops the hand. Huffs out a breath that's stained not with laughter but with the glistening she can see in his eyes. He's never actually cried in front of her. His eyes sheen when he's overwhelmed. When he blinks the glistening stops but it's there for a moment and it catches the moonlight before it goes.
That burst of violence she'd expected at the outset never comes but he does turn away from her to shove his hands into the pockets of his blazer and start walking with long strides towards the highway.
Lola Hawkes
The moment that she'd changed her tone was the moment that he shifted his. She'd snapped at him, under the stress of the situation as a whole she'd become defensive. Typically being on the offense was her default, but in this situation she had nothing to attack with. She'd tossed the ball into Hector's court and now there was no way for her to get it back, not in this matter. She could only stay quiet with her head hanging for so long, and when met with continued negativity and spite her hackles had gone back up and she'd become defensive.
She demanded to know what he wanted her to say, to do, and he roared back his answer.
I don't want you to say anything.
It's been working so well for the last two months.
His words lashed like a whip, but if the metaphor were to be a literal Lola was the kind of person to grit her teeth and spit in the face of her tormentor and ask if his grandmother was around to do a better job of kicking her ass. Hector turned around and found a long-legged stride to carry him away from her and the truck and back up the road toward the highway. Heat burst like a firework in her chest and her stomach twisted itself into a knot, threatening to be sick. That heat rose up her throat and into her face, and while the bile followed into her throat she was able to at least swallow that done. The fire of hurt and panic and injustice, though, could not be quelled.
Lola stooped down, gathered up a fistful of gravel, and flung it up the road after him. It would spray, clattering off the ground and the highway surrounding him. One or two small rocks may thump off his shoulders and back, but her intent wasn't to hit him. She didn't have much intent at all, she just needed him to stop walking away and turn around. Him standing there yelling at her was better than this.
Regardless of whether he turns around or not she's got her fists clenched tight and shaking at her sides and is yelling back at him. His eyes had glistened earlier, and hers had gone all bleary now due to the same culprit.
"So you're just gonna walk away?! You asshole, you're so fuckin' twisted up! I didn't even fuckin' know I was pregnant 'till you did, and even after that I didn't stop to pay half of a thought to him! It didn't even fuckin' occur to me until yesterday that this could be a problem! Don't you act like I was keepin' shit from you!"
Hector Ghosh
As she fights with the gorge risen up in her throat Hector pants like something inside of him has done as she is soon to accuse him of being. His scar is not completely healed and so long as he does not overexert himself the ghost of the impalement does not flare up as cold fire underneath his ribs.
Roaring at his mate and storming off before he dents the side of her antiquated truck with his fist does not quite count as overexertion but he's injured and refusing to clutch his side or hunch over it in a subconscious protective measure. Hector keeps his shoulders up and his hands in the pockets of his blazer and in exchange for his posturing he breathes heavy.
The last time he'd walked away from her Lola had wheeled around in the opposite direction and burst through the kitchen door and stormed off just as fast as he had. She hadn't come back though. He'd had to go to her.
Now she ducks to the ground and when she rises up again she pitches a handful of gravel at him. It doesn't hit but he hears she scuffing of her feet and the wind-up of her arm and he stops walking. Maybe he wants to let her make contact. Mostly he didn't want to walk away in the first place but he's still after all this time scared that he's going to snap and hit her.
The only women Hector has ever hit have been other Garou. Somehow in his training and his realignment he has learned that gender doesn't mean jack shit to true-born. Kinfolk are another matter. He's never hit a kinsman either.
Tiny bits of rock skitter on the ground around him and his nostrils flare unseen before he turns to face her again. Enough distance between them that he does not fear the wrath roiling under his breastbone. His brow is knit in pain at first but it turns to anguish when he sees the clouded cast to Lola's eyes.
He lets her hurl words at him and she can see the steam leaving his spirit when he has to blink again. He doesn't even want to know what happened yesterday. Doesn't care anymore what brought this on. It's as if he stopped listening to everything she said after she stabs the first barb of their relationship into him.
Instead of putting a hand to the spot on his body that irks him Hector stands still for several seconds weathering and knitting up the blow and the damage done and then he closes his eyes. Whatever happens inside his head while his eyes are shut stays inside his head.
Sometimes he likes to pretend he's a white-bearded sage giving advice to a 21-year-old idiot who doesn't know what he's supposed to be doing. It helps when no one is around to tell him what he's supposed to be doing. No Fosterns grace Celduin anymore and he doesn't have Javed or Phoebe on speed-dial.
When he opens his eyes again Hector comes back towards her slower than he'd retreated and he doesn't hit the truck when he passes by it again. As he draws nearer his hands come out of his pockets. He's all but humming with a weird energy that isn't Rage and isn't Gnosis. His will is sapped from fighting and frenzying back to life.
He puts his arms around her shoulders and hauls her into an embrace. If she struggles against him he tightens his grip. She could break free. He's still injured. But he does try to keep her against him.
"I don't know how I'm supposed to be acting right now," he says and he sounds almost as terrified as he did the other night.
And he does as he's wont to do when he's upset and his insides are more akin to a stormed sea than to a mountain's face. He blurts out what's bothering him. It's a two-part question. She can all but taste the pause in it.
"Do you want to have this baby?"
Lola Hawkes
He'd stopped walking before her fingers had let loose the fistful of gravel within them, but she had her momentum already and needed that release so the rocks peppered the earth around him. When the rocks finished raining down, Hector turned around and walked back. His approach was slower, and through the dark and her bleary eyes Lola wasn't sure of his intent. He didn't have Rage left for her to gauge him off of, so she didn't know if he was going to go for her throat when he got back or if he was going to get in the truck and hold his silence or if he was going to slap her or just talk to her or what. But she's braced for a fight still, and looks more like her old self now than she did when she was sitting curled into herself on the tailgate.
Her shoulders were square again, but rolled forward to accommodate for how her arms were hands were aimed slightly backward. Her fingers were partially curled, and moving slightly as though she could feel the weight of claws at their tips and was able to click them together menacingly. Her feet were anchored to the earth, like she would have to defend the very ground that she stood on.
This was more like the Lola that Hector has always known than the woman who was curled into herself on the tailgate shortly before this. She was prepared for a challenge, and standing ready to face it. You wanted a fight? everything about her said. Well here it is, come and get it.
When Hector was within six feet of her, Lola straightened up to stand as tall as she could. Her chin leveled with the ground and her jaw jutted out defiantly. She'd stay this way even when he came near enough for their chests to graze, but didn't make a sound or say a word and instead waited for him to make his move even in this proximity.
His arms went around her shoulders then, but not to slam her into the truck or squeeze the breath out of her lungs. Instead, he embraced her. Lola's shoulders rolled about under his arms, trying to buck them loose, and she leaned her weight back away from him and her forearms went to press into his chest to try and put distance between them. But Hector merely tightened his grasp and dragged her into his chest. When he spoke, there was a reedy kind of terror threaded into his words, and that stilled Lola's attempts to shake him loose for a moment.
His next words half-stunned the woman.
Do you want to have this baby?
That stun was replaced by a sudden burst of violence and insult. Lola bashed her forehead into Hector's chin and teeth-- she probably cut her forehead on his tooth but didn't stop to care. At the same time she shoved against his chest with her forearms, again making an effort to send him stumbling back from her now that she'd knocked his teeth with her skull. Regardless of whether he stumbles away, lets go and backs off on his own, or stays right there and keeps hold of her, she still spits fire at him with how she answers.
"Did you damage your god damned brain? 'Do you want to have this baby', are you fucking kidding? Why the hell wouldn't I? You saying I'd do something to lose it?!"
Hector Ghosh
Not that anyone has asked him. Every time he has broached the subject of why it is he's settled down with her her temerity and her refusal to back down even when the cost of continuing forward looms over the benefit of standing down. Were not for the minor matter of what had aggrieved her so two days ago she might not have fought so hard with the two other Full Moons tonight. Like as not she would have.
But if Hector had to say what it was he loves most about her it is that stubbornness and that spine. Right now it isn't doing him any favors. He's in even poorer form than he was when Lola pulled them off the road. Blood from his near-lost fight still stains his neck and the land beneath his eyes. He's feeling a good amount of pain. This is his first battle scar and instead of celebrating it he's fighting with her.
If he really wanted to be somewhere else right now he'd have kept right on walking. The only reason he walked away in the first place was he wanted to be calmer than he was when they had this talk.
They can both imagine how the conversation would have gone if he had not walked away. More roaring and more blood and more destruction. It would have ended quick as Lola could have blinked. The thought of it makes him want to dig a hole and bury himself in it. Instead he puts his arms around her and lets her fight him.
Lola has an edge on him in that she is not already injured. She would have knocked a lesser wolf to the ground. But Hector steels up his spine despite his hurt and absorbs the blow.
He doesn't let her go. Most times he would. Now is not that time. He only gives her enough slack that she can look up at his face if she so chooses and he lets her rage at him. Doesn't react. If she's hurling insults that means she's going to run out of verve sooner than he will.
"No," he says. Takes his right hand off her shoulder with the intent to smooth back her hair but he'll just as soon catch her fist if that's what comes at him. He'll be favoring his right side for the rest of the night. "You want to have it with me, right?" Before she can cut him off: "Fuck, Lola, just... I'm not going anywhere. Okay? I love you. Stop hitting me."
Lola Hawkes
Despite the fact that she was hitting him now, Hector stayed put.
In a few hours she may or may not apologize for laying physical violence down against him, but she will respect the fact that he stood still though he was still healing from whatever it was that the Bane had done to blink him briefly off this plane and make him crawl back to it with his teeth claws and Rage driving the way. Lola was not a light hitter by any means, and though she could have wailed his face more severely with her head than she did, it still was not a pleasant sensation to have her fighting you in any way. She was strong as most fit and able-bodied men were, and meaner than many of them stacked together into one.
He corrected himself, expressed that he wasn't insinuating that she'd try to get rid of the baby now, and let go of one of her shoulders. That hand intended to smooth her hair, and she positively seethed up at him with that impotent Rage now boiling and rolling under her skin, but without nearly enough force to break free and fizzle itself out into the night air. He'd gotten to spend his Rage against an enemy, and all Lola had done was cry and break and hold a conference with the moon. Her aggression was built up over the past several hours and had noplace to go, so when summoned forth as it was now all it could do was writhe and make her pulse pound in her ears.
He smoothed loose hairs out of her face and back to lay with the rest, and she shook her head to shake his hand off her head once her fingers had gone too close to the back of her skull. The clarifying question as to whether she wanted to have it with him or not was met with another spurt of violence. She'd thrown an arm out from under the one that he'd let loose from her shoulders and was aiming to swing what would best be qualified as an open-palmed punch toward his head, but he was prepared and caught her fist this time.
I love you, I'm not going anywhere, stop hitting me.
"Quit insulting me, then!"
She wedges her arms up between them and puts her hands on either of his shoulders, grips hard, and pushes back with as much force as she can muster. She gets close to accomplishing what she set out to do when something about Hector's face or body language reminds her that he wasn't healed up yet, that this wasn't a fair fight, and that his continued efforts to contain her were probably just hurting him more. It's only with that realization that she stops trying to push him away, but her lips are still parted to show clenched teeth.
"Holy shit you idiot. If I didn't want to be with you and... and..." The hand that he'd caught her fist with is switched about some-- she jerked her hand out of his grasp and instead seized a hold of his wrist, only so she could drag his hand down and roughly press it against the minor swell of her lower abdomen-- something that they both could see and notice and understand but no one else really could since they didn't get the opportunity or have the same familiarity with her body. "And have this child with you, then your ass wouldn't be snuggling up to mine in bed each night. I just laid myself out for you, bared my fuckin' soul, and you still doubt that I wanna be here with you? God damn!"
Hector Ghosh
By the time they're done fending off each other's blows Hector is trying and failing to conceal the fact that he's breathing heavy again. He is not perspiring as she has seen him perspire when he was in the worst pain of his entire life and he is not screaming or writhing on the ground but he lifts his right hand to grab her wrist and holds it tight enough she would have to fight to release herself.
And she does. If he can count on nothing else he can count on the fact that Lola will fight him even when he's right.
She yells at him and wriggles loose her fist and drives her arms between them. Hector has to put a foot back to brace himself against staggering and he's panting hard by the time he's got his equilibrium back. Between the frown and the flared nostrils she has enough of an idea that he's not all the way healed yet. It's not grievous but he will not survive another incapacitating wound this night.
That shove has him putting his empty left hand over the scar on his abdomen. Maybe not tonight but one day Lola will catch him wandering around without a shirt or fresh from a shower and see the larger scar on his flank where the Bane punched clean through him. He'll tell her he doesn't remember what happened after that and it will be true. He was dead when the thing whipped him into the ground and dashed his brains into its soil.
It wasn't expecting him to get back up but Banes don't have much of a grasp between cause and effect and now this Bane was gone. Harvested for Gnosis and never to stalk the Umbra again. Suffice to say her accusation that Hector is acting like an idiot because he has a head injury isn't entirely unfounded but it also won't leave any lasting damage.
So she struggles against his grip and he fights her only until he realizes her intent. The rings on his fingers are never cold because his flesh is never cold and when she presses his palm against her belly Hector does not jerk back from her. If this were not his child some part of him would have begun to suspect before now. Call it animal instinct or the fact that he has a wolf's senses. When she puts his hand there he opens his palm to cover more of her and swallows down a bitterness risen up in his throat.
Touching his scar and her belly at the same time he looks as if his pain is only doubling on itself the longer she keeps railing at him.
He didn't doubt. Maybe she can see that in his face since he doesn't have the words for it. He didn't doubt. He just needed to hear it.
In all their time together he hasn't done much apologizing. Right now he does not apologize but takes his hand off his scar and slides his hand off of her belly. Kneels in front of her with no grace in his bones and laces his arms around her hips and rests one side of his face against the swell of her stomach. Almost like he does in the morning before he starts talking to the unborn baby but it's cold as hell and the gravel digs into his knees and her knees aren't parted for him.
Doesn't just not apologize. His breath is hot and fast against one hip though he does not shake. Other than the panting he doesn't make any noise at all.
Lola Hawkes
By the time the night is over the both of them will fall exhausted into bed and likely be asleep before their heads settle on their pillows. Hector fought for his life, lost, but came back and won the game in overtime anyways. Lola's been tired consistently for the past month and a half or so, but today was long and emotionally draining, and she wasn't familiar with the concept because she didn't cry often but a good hard cry will sap the strength out of anyone. She'd sleep hard tonight as well.
For now, though, they stubbornly scrape the bottoms of their fuel tanks for the energy to keep fighting. Lola had to yank hard to get her hand free from his grasp, and he had fought to prevent her from doing so but lost because he wasn't at his finest physical condition. He was holding his side with his free hand, favoring it, all but panting with pain of different sorts and the effort that it took to stay standing and keep her contained like he did.
But he stills and he listens when she holds his hand against her stomach and insists that it's so obvious she wanted to be with him that she manages to (unknowingly) call him out on the fact that his brains had been bounced about in his skull during his battle with the Bane not too long ago.
He didn't have any words to argue with her about. He didn't have any to reassure her with either. The Galliard had been sapped of all that he had to say, and so instead he got down onto his knees in front of her, sinking low past her shoulders and chest. Lola released the hold she had on his wrist when he did this, put her arms at her sides instead, but wound up lifting and moving them out of his way and holding them above him when he wrapped his arms around her pelvis and rested his face to her stomach and panted hot breath through the thin fabric of her shirt.
Lola was a creature made of stone and iron will, but she was still flesh and blood beneath that, and it was impossible to have a pulse and not feel a softening toward him in that moment. Her anger abated, and was replaced instead by exhausted frustration that he would hear in the form of a vocal sigh mingled with sounds of that last-dying bit of a rage growl issued out into the quiet sky above them. Her arms lowered after a few seconds, the right hand finding his upper back, mostly behind his shoulder, and rubbing comfortingly. The left hand laced fingers into his hair and cradled his head there against her once-flat abdomen. Her face wasn't pointed down toward him, but up toward the moon instead. Standing like this she closed her eyes and relaxed her shoulders and breathed.
She'd be still and quiet for as long as he needed, but if he didn't move after two full minutes had ticked by on the clock she would still her hand on his shoulder and move her left hand to the cheek that wasn't pressed against her, fingers curling under his jaw and chin to urge his face upward. She'd be looking down at him when this happens.
"Baby," she calls him by the term of endearment that she used infrequently tonight, "I love you so fucking much. Can we just go home now?"
Hector Ghosh
Some days he likes to imagine their firstborn is going to live long enough and both of them are going to live long enough for their child to ask after the early days of their relationship. Children have a tendency to do that when their parents stay together long enough. Cassandra had asked their mother this question just before her wedding to Vijay, the kind internist who Hector did not like. Their father pronounced his name 'Bijay' because of his Bengali accent and Hector who was 14 years old at the time of Cassandra and Vijay's wedding thought that was fucking hilarious.
Point is: their mother had smiled and told the three of them they met when they were in college and she had found their father funny and smart and charming and Hector had started to wrinkle his nose even that early on in the story. But she had thought because his family was so traditional and he had not come to America until he was 18 years old that their relationship would never transpire. Turns out she was wrong. By the time Cassandra and Vijay bound themselves to each other the Ghosh kids' parents had been married for nearly a quarter of a century.
Hector isn't optimistic enough to think he and Lola will last that long. They've barely made it two months without killing each other. But he imagines the fetus in her belly as a child. Sometimes he imagines it's a boy but most times he imagines it's a girl. He doesn't have an explanation for this.
When Lola does not push him away some errant thought pushes from him a noise that's either a snorting laugh or a relieved sob and he tightens his hold on her. Probably he won't tell their children about the time Mom met Dad's old alpha in Las Vegas and had sex with him in a blacked out haze and was brave enough to tell Dad about it when she realized the timing was close enough that the baby could be Dad's old alpha and Dad had gone off to fight off his Rage and come back with a scar and they ended up fighting more and then he fell on his knees in front of her and wouldn't let her go.
Two minutes pass and Luna bleeds down on them and not until Lola touches his face does he open and lift his eyes. He lifts the rest of his face and finds her eyes.
"Thank you," he says in a dazed voice and gets to his feet. Links his fingers with hers and walks back to the truck with her. He forgets his sweatshirt is in the back and if he had to run right now he could only move half as fast as he could on an ordinary night.
Not until they're in the truck does a thought occur to him. He sinks back against the seat and a sigh deflates him further.
"Do you really want to drive all the way back home?" he asks. Doesn't give her time to answer. "Proposal: we get off the highway again at 285 and find a hotel to break into for the night." He drums the dashboard in lieu of raising his voice. "Adventure. Let's go."
Lola Hawkes
Lola hasn't thought far enough ahead yet to imagine the baby as a child, or that child as a teenager, or even that teenager as an adult. She's occasionally thought about an infant wrapped up in her arms, or asleep and drooling a puddle into the center of Hector's chest while he too is asleep on a couch or in the bed or something like that. But, more than anything, she thinks about all that needs to be done and is grim while weighing chances and figuring statistics for survival. She wonders if it will be a Kinfolk or a True Born, but has not yet once given a thought or concern toward gender. Mostly, though, she contemplates how the overall rhythm of her life will change in the next few months, and how it will be forever altered by the end of next year.
Largely it's daunting to look forward to-- Corey said it himself: Hector would be a great dad, he had the disposition for it even if he doubted his control of his Rage. Lola was built hard and tough, though. She knew how to love but she'd never even held a child's hand before, let alone raised one up.
You'll figure it out, she'd assure herself when finally chasing those worries away after getting inside her head too much on patrol. We've been doing it for centuries, and you will too.
He thanks her, and she looks a little puzzled for a moment but doesn't think too hard about what he would be thanking her for. She finds it easiest to assume he's just happy to go home like she is, and is willing to take his hand and walk back to the truck with him. She'll climb in on the driver's side because that was her place in the truck, and the keys are fished from her hoodie pocket when the realization of exactly how far they are from home hits her. She's about to groan, resolve herself, and make the drive anyway when the same thought occurs to Hector but a solution follows with.
He suggests they break into a motel along the highway and sleep there for the night rather than driving all the way back to the Homestead. Lola's eyes touched the clock on the dashboard, then Hector's face. He declares that it will be an adventure and bids her to go. For the first time in nearly half of a goddamn day Lola's mouth curved to reflect a smirk.
"Some adventure," she answered, but was quite clearly down with the idea. She'd turn the keys in the ignition, the truck would roar to life, and with a crunch of gravel they left that patch of road and the fighting that transpired there behind.
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