If I said I was going to go find my family... - 12.4.2013 [Hector]

Lola Hawkes

On Sunday Hector had made some comment about how nice the weather was for December being one setting of the sun away.
On Monday, the news that Lola listened to when she did her kitchen chores in the morning spoke of being prepared for dangerously low temperatures and ice and snow.

Thanks, Hector.

Monday was fine, but there was an electric kind of tension to the air to speak to the storm that was coming in from the northwest, pressed all the way down from Alaska to rain its fury upon them.

On Tuesday when they woke, it was to winds howling at the log walls of the house and frozen window panes.  Thankfully, Lola didn't keep any livestock to worry about gathering and moving into the barn.  They had already moved plenty of wood into the house, stacked up near the wood burning stove that warmed their home, so they wouldn't need to go out to chop and to fetch.  The snow fell heavily, the winds whistled and howled, and they were content to weather out the storm inside.  Lola tried to teach Hector some more Spanish, while he taught her a few chords on an acoustic guitar before switching to coaching her on some effective 'dirty fighting' maneuvers in the open space of the loft upstairs.  They made love at some point as well.  Though they were creatures that required movement and action and exercise, they fared just fine being snowed in as well.

Wednesday morning Lola woke and bundled herself up, went outside with a heavy bristled push broom and knocked the half a foot of snow off the front and back porches.  The snow was still falling, but it drifted down casually, not with the same force that it had been over the past twenty-four hours. It's about 9:30 a.m. when she comes back inside, knocking the snow off her boots, and strips down out of the layers that she'd put on to go complete that task.  Though the winds had calmed and the snow had slowed, it was absolutely frigid outside-- we're talking single digits.

So, Lola sat in the kitchen at the counter, on the stool that she liked occupying, having a cup of coffee.  She'd poured one for Hector as well.  Her fingers were curled around the ceramic of the mug, warming themselves from her time outside.  Her cheeks and nose were still bright pink and flushed, but she was healthy and bright and content.  Hector may hate the cold weather, but Lola was accustomed to it.  It was just as much a part of life in Colorado, up against the Rocky Mountains, as anything else.

"After storms like this my dad'd try and take me and Maria ice fishing," she was telling him.  "Because the ponds are frozen over but the water underneath is still warm enough that the fish are awake and active.  Once Maria lost her rod through the ice hole and got pissed and stamped her foot-- put a big crack in the ice and my dad acted like it was going to be the end of us all.  She didn't go much after that."

It didn't have a punchline or a plot.  She was just reminiscing.  Remember, she'd make a terrible Galliard.

"I'll bet you've never even seen ice fishing."


Hector Ghosh

They occupied an unsteady span of time after the incident out in the foothills of the Rockies. After they returned home and Hector showered his own blood from his body all either of them wanted to do was rest. The day outside was bright and did not forewarn of the weather that was coming for them.

The radio did that. But Hector was gone most of the day on Monday. He had assigned himself some task that took him away from the Homestead. Had nothing to do with the fact that Lola still quailed inwardly at his presence even if she tolerated his Rage easier than she did the day before. Their lives moved on despite the horror of the day before and when he came home at the end of the day he knew a nasty storm was coming without having been home to hear the radio.

Something like normalcy has returned to their routine even with the piles of snow and the brutal temperatures. Hector does not stir until the sun has begun to rise and even then he is slow to leave the bed because the bed is warm and his woman is with him and wolves do not hibernate the way bears do but winter makes everything slower and more somnolent.

Lola rises first as she tends to do. When she got up to brush the snow from the porches Hector had groaned and rolled over onto his stomach with his arm stretched out over the warm space she left behind. If she was going to be outside brushing off the porches he might as well get his ass up on the roof and shovel the snow off of it. That task needed to happen before the next heavy fall or the next thaw came.

So Hector put on his insubstantial outerwear and dragged the ladder and the shovel out from the shed and shoveled off the roof while Lola brushed. Huge loads of snow fell to the ground around them and she finished before he did. Once he nearly fell off the goddamn roof and for the time she was outside she could hear him grousing about the cold but he came back down using the ladder.

Now they're sat around the counter in the kitchen. Hector looks completely frozen though Garou do not suffer from cold exposure until the cold has dropped into negative temperatures. He'd shaved his face on Sunday that Lola might not find him so terrifying but it wasn't as if the hair he grew provided much protection. If he lives to be a hundred years old Hector will never be able to grow a full beard.

The story of Maria getting pissed off losing her fishing rod in the frozen lake makes Hector laugh a sharp and unexpected laugh. He can imagine the scene with some vividness and no sting of pain comes for him afterwards. Talking about the dead is growing easier for him. Distance helps. They're nearly six months gone from what happened in Winnipeg and the only one Hector still can't stand to talk about is the one who's gone but still alive.

"Sure I have," he says. "... in books. That I read. In elementary school. Nah, I'd never even seen snow until I was... I must've been fifteen, Ma took me and Helen out to see Cassandra. Cass was having a baby shower, she and Vijay were both starting medical school and they figured if they were going to ever have kids they'd better do it then. They live in New York City like a couple of big shots, Ma thought it was just so great--"

His voice takes on a singsong quality as he imitates his mother.

"--oh look they put up decorations in the windows and my gosh look at the lights it's just so pretty with the snow on the ground, everything's all lit up, this is so nice, look Heck there's a snowman--"


He rolls his eyes in begrudging amusement at the memory and takes a long drink of his coffee.


Lola Hawkes

Hector had decided to go up on the roof before Lola had a chance to take the task on herself.  It was probably better that way-- they were equally sure of foot, and though Lola had more practice keeping her traction on slick icy surfaces, Hector carried a lot less risk overall if he actually did fall off the two-story tall roof.  If he snapped his back from landing wrong he could just heal, and they wouldn't be losing an extra life in the process, after all.  Lola swept off the front and back porches both to the melody of Hector's grumbles, half-shouts, and curses up above, and was little more than amused and appreciative of the antics.

Back inside, warming up with coffee, they spoke of winter and snow and memories overall.  Hector spoke of the first time he recalls seeing snow and how his mother had crooned about it while they were out hosting a baby shower for his... what?  Nephew?  Niece?  The imitation that he made of how his mother spoke had Lola grinning over the rim of her mug-- a tall and narrow matte black thing that looked inappropriately delicate in her hands, as they were far more accustomed to being seen around the handle of a gun or a tool of some sort.  She kept the house in order well enough, but in a functional way.  Lola wasn't especially domestic, after all.

The most domestic thing that she really kept up in the house was the dual walls of pictures that made up the living room.  Frames of all shapes and sizes could be found, many of them placed there from generations before her.  Hector's had plenty of time to examine, but these two walls at the front and sides of the house were a mural dedicated to the history of the Hawkes family.  Thanks to these pictures he's aware of the fact that Lola had a boyishly short haircut in the middle of her teenage years, and her father had a big black mustache, and that there are Lupus relatives in the mix somewhere as there's one picture of a young girl-- presumably Lola or Maria, around age 3 with their arms latched along the neck of an adolescent looking wolf that appears to be barely tolerating the toddler at best.

Hector takes a long drink of his coffee, and Lola takes a smaller sip of hers.  While she would drink coffee in all different ways, she used to default to black with only a bit of sugar every so often.  Today, though, it was laden with cream that she'd picked up from the store.


"I haven't put up lights or a tree since my folks passed away."  She cast a distracted glance back to a corner in the living room, no doubt where the tree always went up before.  "Didn't see the point, with it just being me here."


Hector Ghosh

At mention of the empty space where the Christmas tree used to live Hector moves closer to Lola under the pretense of wanting to get a better view. He rarely sits at the island counter even when he's eating. The male she's chosen has an abundance of energy that could just as easily have been mistaken as attention-deficit disorder when he was a child were not for the fact that his father didn't believe in medicating young children who functioned just fine otherwise. During this conversation he had been standing. Now he leans in against her as he follows her glance.

She didn't see the point decorating if she was the only one living here.

Hector keeps his hands around his own mug as he rests his chin on her shoulder. She can just about feel him thinking. Their parents' holidays don't have much overlap and the Garou as a whole are an animistic and spiritual people. Their gods are not gods at all but spirits. Their holidays are the passage of seasons. The solstices and the equinoxes.

Diwali came and went without Hector doing anything other than joking about it.

"We could put up lights," he says. "We gotta start doing something around the holidays. Don't want our kids being the only ones in school--"

Oh shit. Then there's that.


"Did you go to school, when you were a kid?"


Lola Hawkes

An excuse is found and nabbed for Hector to come up close to Lola's side, although she hasn't required him to provide excuses in the past few months.  He settled against her side, chin on her shoulder, to survey the empty corner that would have been filled up with a tree several years earlier.  Popcorn ropes and pine cones were always more commonly used in this house than fragile ornaments and tinsel-- chances were that the rambunctious daughters would have shattered more of the bulbs than a house pet would've accomplished anyways.  Lola tipped her head to touch her temple to Hector's and left it there for a moment before straightening up to take another sip of her coffee.

He suggested that they put up lights, and Lola shrugged.  She was about to inform him that there were tubs of old Christmas lights and decorations stashed away somewhere up in the loft, and if not there then out in the shed no doubt.  Before she had the chance to share this information, though, Hector interrupted himself and asked if she went to school or not.  Lola's eyebrows hopped up on her face in moderate surprise, flavored with just a touch of suspicion.

"Yeah.  Maria and I went to Littleton for school."

Littleton was also where the majority of needed shopping was done, because it was the nearest 'city' to Roxborough State Park.

"Maria got to end classes early after her Change.  I wanted to do the same, but since I never Changed my parents kept me going.  Dad was real big on getting that high school degree, even though we both knew I'd never use it for anything."  One hand left her mug to rub at the corner of her right eye-- an errant eyelash or something like that was bothering her.  A moment of thought passed, then she set her coffee mug down on the counter and rolled her shoulder gently under Hector's chin to get him to move.  Once he did, she'd stand up and head to the wood burning stove that was pressed up against the wall in the space between living and dining rooms.

"Why?  You worried about if our kid'll be going too or not?  Or is there something about 10th grade geography that I have to remember all of a sudden?"


There's only a fleck of sarcasm to the last question, but not directed at Hector so much as her own still-lingering belief that her finishing high school was a huge waste of her time.  While she waited for his clarification, she pulled open the stove door and tossed another few chopped wood-blocks into it.


Hector Ghosh

"It's not something I'm really worried about, you know? It's not like the baby's five and we're going Oh shit we'd better get her enrolled if we don't want her going to a ghetto preschool. I'm--"

A thought crosses his mind and for what is not but certainly feels like the first time in their conjoined history Hector flinches and does not let it past his teeth.

She knows he is not a reticent young man. More often than not he blurts out whatever he happens to be thinking. Even nearly three months into their partnership he finds himself embarrassed and near to blushing when the thought he blurts out has to do with Lola. His role within the Nation is to act as a storyteller and a historian but he is not constantly overflowing with praise and flowery language. He is less of a balladeer and more of a raconteur. Where his skill lies in is engaging his audience and making sure they're listening to him.

They have spent more time with each other in the last three months than they had in the three years prior. Much of Hector's change in demeanor has to do with the fact that he was, mentally, still very much in the courtship stage of their relationship when an ultrasound revealed Lola's pregnancy. Trying to act like a gentleman when at his core he was a barbarian. Like Lola has never seen him without clothes on tearing into another living thing with his teeth before.

He lets her move to the stove without shadowing her and doesn't blurt out that he's not entirely sure he'll survive until their firstborn is school-age anyway.


"I mean, I don't know how this is supposed to work. I went to school because my parents didn't know any better, I wasn't sure what normal people do. I was just wondering."


Lola Hawkes

The sentence that Hector cuts himself off from saying isn't predicted-- Lola knows him well, but she cannot assume what he's trying to say unless he leads into it strongly enough.  They were talking about their child, whom Hector insisted on referring to as female even though they didn't know the gender for certain.  Even if they did, the either of them, want to go back near an ultrasound machine again (and trust that they don't), it would be too early for a technician to tell as well.  They were discussing preschool and kindergarten, which would be several years out anyways.

All the same, Lola cuts a glance over her shoulder at him.  Her eyebrows lift, but she doesn't press him to come out and say what he was going to say.  He corrected himself and continued with his thought process soon enough rather than clamming up and going silent.

It was a legitimate concern that Hector might not live long enough to see his daughter put on her first backpack and go to school with her classmates to begin a long career of wreaking havoc and being a thorn in the sides of her teachers.  Truthfully, the cards weren't exactly stacked in their favor on that matter.  Garou didn't have a very long lifespan, given the nature of their lives.  But this was a concern that Lola shared as well.  She didn't think about it often, but she knew that with the duties she took upon herself, the role she'd claimed in the Nation, that the risks were high for her as well.

After all, she'd already nearly died within the past few months.  If the doctors weren't quick enough, if Milton wasn't fast enough getting her to the emergency room, she would be gone right now.

When he continues with his thought, Lola looks back to what she was doing.  A metal poker was used to stir up the coals a bit, to lodge the new pieces of wood appropriately amid the embers.  Then the stove door closed, the poker was hung up on its place to the side of the old metal stove, and Lola straightened up, pushing her hands into her lower back as she did so.  This stretch helped with the mild discomfort that she would get in her back every now and again, and it poked her stomach out against the loose chunky sweatshirt that she was wearing today.  When she was standing straight, though, the only noticeable sign of change was the changed size of bust.

"Well, everyone that I came up with at the Caern went to school, too.  At least up to a point.  I know that they took Eddie out of class before his Change, but that's only because they knew it was coming soon, and the Get of Fenris are a more... militant sort than my parents were.  Ivan, though?  I'm pretty sure that he kept up home school material even after his Change.

"But that's a hell of a ways out from now, anyways."  She pulled her lips into a grin, closed-lipped and tinged with teasing humor.  For once she was working to lift the mood instead.


"How come you're so convinced it'll be a girl, anyways?  You don't actually know and you're not telling me so, do you?"


Hector Ghosh

When she turns away from the stove Lola finds that Hector is leaning easy against the island countertop with their mugs at either of his elbows and his eyes locked on her. Nothing weighs on his mind at all let alone heavy as things tend to do when the moon shines fat in the sky or some unresolved dilemma hangs over him. He is not agitated and aside from the upcoming moot and the mental preparations Lola knows him to be making before seeking out his sisters he has no reason to be agitated.

It's a minor paradox that he seems calmer and happier after their fight on the side of the highway the night Lola spurred on Erich Storm's-Teeth. That night could have ended more than just his life. That he went off on his own to fight something, anything, he hadn't had a Bane in mind when he went to rally himself against a conversation involving his departed alpha but he had gone off on his own and that was enough to spark concern in those within the Nation who learned of the specifics and cared for his well-being.

But those within the Nation consider the Cliath to possess the sagacity of a higher-ranked Garou. Though it seems his strength as a leader grows with each passing night he doesn't boast the battle-hardened mien of one who is expected to boost the morale of other leaders.

If he had died in combat in the midst of summer Hector would walk around shirtless so the world could see the deep scar on his torso. Thus far the only person to see it clearly have been his pack and his woman and the ritesmistress who rubbed the ashes into it when it was still a wound. He does not crow about how badass the scar is and even Lola only has to remember that it exists when her hands find one of its halves.

It aches when the weather changes. If the ache is an actual pain Hector does not bitch about it. Lola catches him frowning and rubbing his ribs or his flank but of all the things he complains about throughout the day his scar is not one of them. That scar means he lived through something that ought to have killed him.

Anyway: Hector smiles when she smiles and pushes back from the countertop when she asks how he's so convinced it's a girl.

"I know the Rite of Heritage and that's about as far as my mystical what-the-hell-are-you senses go. The book says it's not anything yet. You know." He gestures to his crotch with a vague motion. "Plumbing-wise. Blueprint-wise it's whatever, but all babies have the same junk in the first trimester. Even with that, I didn't wanna call it an 'it' the whole time."


Since the last he understood neither of them wanted another ultrasound. They hadn't exactly wanted the first one but they hadn't had a choice. An ultrasound was part of the trip to the hospital that kept Lola alive.


Lola Hawkes

Garou and Kinfolk live lives wrought with war, tragedy, death and hardship.  This is a simple fact of life, so basic and true that even Anthony understood it despite his distance from his family.  That was a huge part of why he kept at bay, truth be told.  He didn't want to try and settle into a life where everyone he knew was going to cycle out and be replaced by new faces after three years had passed.  He knew already that his heart wouldn't handle the burden, so he settled down with human women instead.

Hector bore his scar, and it ached to remind him that he's alive and how lucky he is to be that way.  When he favored his side and scrubbed it while the storm raged yesterday, it wasn't with bitterness or resentment.  He knew that it was a mark of survival, of being stronger than death.  Lola boasted no scars to compare.  Hell, she didn't have any large or impressive ones to mar her brown skin.  But they were there peppered here or there from wounds that healing gourds couldn't be bothered to wash over, or that they weren't powerful enough on their own to heal in their entirety.  On her upper right arm is a medium sized scar that Hector's aware of but is easy enough to forget about.  It's a mark of when a wolf snapped the bone while she fought it like a fool.  There are scrape scars on her knees and elbows from many, many instances of hitting the ground hard.  But she's tough, and her bones and joints don't ache for the fast, hard life that she lives.  She won't favor any part of her body for old war wounds.

But anyway.

The coffee mugs are back at Hector's elbows, and Lola returns to him to retrieve hers and take a drink of the cream-laden beverage that's rapidly descending to room temperature.  She used to be able to better tolerate cool coffee, but that was something that her stomach and sensibilities wouldn't abide by these days.  That could change in a few weeks, or it could be a quirk that lingers with her forever.  They'll find out in time.

I don't wanna call it an 'it'.

Lola shrugged her shoulders in answer.  Clearly she didn't feel so strongly about giving identity to the baby yet.  She's read the books too, she knew that it had done quite a lot of its developing by now and looked very much human, but it was still incredibly small and didn't entirely register as its own entity for Lola just yet.  She didn't think hard about when that would change, but that would probably come when it was strong enough for her to actually feel it.  In the meantime, though, she behaved as usual and dressed in loose clothing rather than showing off the growth that she's accomplished thus far.  She glanced thoughtfully out one of the windows in the dining room at the world of white outside and surveyed the treeline out of old territorial habit while she spoke next.  Her split focus made her tone sound distracted.

"Fair enough.  We'll see, though."

Beat.

"...We've got a lot to do to prepare still.  Gotta make the room across the hall--" she meant across the hall from where they slept, of course, "into a baby room.  Gotta save up for the shit we're actually gonna need too.  We're not gonna need a stroller or shit ton of toys or anything like that, no need for half the shit that they want you to buy up.  ...But a car seat's gonna be on that list, too."


She pursed her lips together and looked moderately worried, or bothered, or some mix in between, and lifted her mug up for another sip while still staring half-focused out the window.  "....at least medical bills ain't gonna be a worry."


Hector Ghosh

With her back to him all Hector has to gauge her mood is the language used to write her posture. Tension in her muscles or a bracing presentation of her bones.

No one ever has to wonder what Hector might be thinking because Hector has little disconnect between his thoughts and his words. Even when he is not speaking he bristles with energy if he is not calm. For as long as they've lived together Hector has struggled to learn the nuances of his woman's personality.

It's been like loving an Ahroun but for the fact that... well. She isn't an Ahroun. She was born under a full moon and raised up as a full moon and fights as fierce and feral as an Ahroun Cub. But she cannot wear an Ahroun's skin and she cannot regenerate the damage she takes the way an Ahroun could. She has more to fear from life than an Ahroun would but fear is nothing Hector had ever really seen in her before this past weekend.

She wasn't afraid of the Wyrm this weekend. It was an unknown entity that descended upon them and then it was his Rage that kept her tense afterwards.

And Hector can remember how angry he was when he first changed. How he didn't know how to articulate what was bothering him and so he lashed out at people who tried to help him. His Rage overwhelmed him when he was a teenager and no one expected it wouldn't. Of course the whelp didn't know what was going on. His great-grandfather had made well sure that his line would wither away and perish by lying with one of the Wyrmbringer's women and leaving that child to fend for itself. Gaia has an awful sense of humor. Hector was fostered by a proud and insular people and then thrown out into a melting pot. He had to learn to trust Willow and Maria and Glen, to accept and love Tamsin and Corey, when everything he had learned during his fostering taught him not to trust at all.

It's no wonder he sucks at identifying his own emotions or the emotions in other people. He can't identify them and he can't do anything with them. They're just there.

So: she's staring out the window, distracted by a watchfulness bred of not being able to get out there and patrol when it's -8 degrees and the wind is threatening to bury them in what's already fallen. They're talking about their first child and the birth is not a fixed point in time but the closer it comes the more they begin to realize they really don't have much time. That's a fair enough reason to be worried or bothered or something of both.

Hector braces himself on the countertop, heels of his hand by either of his hips, and chews his lower lip before he speaks.


"You don't sound like they're not."


Lola Hawkes

Pictures of wolves hung on the walls alongside frames filled with human faces ranging all through the decades.  A couple of the pictures were even in the sepia print of old cameras that were carted across the Western United States before it could even be called 'territories'.  The fact that she was related directly by blood to creatures born as wolves couldn't come as too strong a surprise to the Garou that know Lola, for certain mannerisms and habits engrained in her are far more wolf than they will ever be human.

Her territorial tendencies top that list.  Yesterday she couldn't go out on her patrols because of the snow storm that had blown in.  Today the below freezing temperatures and sharp winds that stabbed like ice picks kept her patrols postponed as well.  She would be fine in the house, sure, while Hector was on the roof and she was down on the porches she was gauging the conditions and contemplating if she could make at least one round, how far out she could go, what she would need to bundle herself up in to travel reasonably comfortable and protected from frostbite.  That her cheeks and nose and lips were red and starting to chap from the wind in just the time that it took to clear the decks confirmed that it wouldn't be worth the return to go out away from the house, not today.

The fact that she couldn't walk her territory had her displeased, but she pressed through it well enough.  She was cheery (for Lola) while making the coffee, relaxed enough while drinking it.  Even now as she stood looking out the window, clearly wanting to be out there instead of in here, she isn't stiff or tense.  Just displeased, is all.

Still, Hector senses reluctance in her and chews on his lower lip before addressing it.  He's picked up on more than just the desire to be outside, somehow, and pulled forward concerns about upcoming preparations and expenses that Lola had simply been keeping at bay and pushing to the back of her mind.  It's too soon to worry about that anyways, she'd keep telling herself, but for all she knew they were already halfway through this pregnancy.  It was becoming more difficult to just ignore the details like she'd been doing.

He speaks up, and Lola's eyebrows hop up in surprise when she glances back to him.  There's a bolt of tension that cuts into her frame, like she was caught doing something that she didn't want to be seen doing.  She stared into Hector's face, reading it for information, then after a second she rolled one shoulder in a shrug, and that motion released the tension that had appeared-- gone just as quick as it had come.  She turned to face him more directly but didn't cross the dining room to join him at the kitchen island yet.

"Well, not the medical bills.  There's no reason for hospitals or doctors or any of that-- we've got this on lock.  There's no need for modern medicine with the healing of our people, right?"

But...


"But I'm not sure what to do about everything else.  I suppose I'll have to start talking to the Guardians, see if they or their families have anything they can donate."


Hector Ghosh

A small consolation Hector offered to Lola regarding the temperature and the snow that came with it was if it was too cold for their squishy human bodies to stand for longer than a few minutes then it was too cold for most other creatures they would need to keep off the property. The only living things that would serve as a concern would be the things that could come right up to their door and knock.

The weather and the stillness isn't all that's concerning her. For the last two months the concept of a pregnancy had still been nebulous for them. They had an ultrasound printout and small physical changes and that was all they had to go on. For two people who had given little more thought to becoming parents than the conversation that took place the night Hector rescued Lola from the mudslide that wasn't much to go on at all.

Neither of them work. Lola walks the Bawn eight hours a day and she volunteers for patrols and reconnaissance missions and she responds when there is a present danger to those she holds dear and Hector has devoted himself to his auspice. But neither of them perform services in exchange for money.

Hector has never held a human job at all. The occasional open mic doesn't count.

At mention of not needing modern medicine when they have their people's healing Hector nods. Of course he is not convinced that they have this on lock. This whole thing is a question mark in his mind and he has approached it with the thought that they only have to get through this one great uncertainty together. This was nothing that their people haven't been doing for thousands of years.

Their people have also for thousands of years been doing this with ample support from their parents and their siblings and their community. They haven't had to go to the Sept to ask for handouts.

He switches from chewing his lip to chewing the thumbnail on his right hand before he takes what sounds like one of his patented hard conversational lefts.

"If I said I was going to go find my family after the next moot, would you want to stay here or come with me? I don't think flying is such a hot idea, and I don't want to make you sit in a car for that long. But if you wanted to fly and I took moon-bridges between places. You know. That could work. If you even want to. I just--I don't know how my sisters or my parents are even going to react but I was thinking best case scenario, you know, at least one of my sisters wants to stay in touch and my parents haven't gone completely bankrupt in the four years since I went away, they'd be able to help. Cassandra's got to have a ton of baby stuff from when she--"


Nervous talk mode: engaged.


Lola Hawkes

When he'd first expressed doubt in what Lola was saying, that he didn't feel like she wasn't as worried as she tried to make herself out to be, Lola had turned herself to face him more fully.  It was a slower motion, more relaxed than typical.  Often times when Lola felt a need to present someone with the whole of her front, she also drew herself up as tall as she could be and made her shoulders and chest larger and more imposing-- which was something she was surprisingly good at.

Hector hadn't been there, hadn't seen it, but he's no doubt heard Thomas share the story by now of when he and Lola and a few others had found some teenagers out in one of the suburbs, enchanted to violence by some angry old spirit trapped in a necklace.  They're both Galliards, so Thomas is good enough at sharing and Hector's imagination is vivid enough that he can see Lola answering a young man trying to punch her in the face by lifting her cannon and blowing the cheek, ear, and bits of skull fragment and brain matter from his.  He can picture the solid, heavy, dreadfully controlled stride that she would have taken to go to the girl that once was the ringleader, reduced to tears by the fact that someone she loved was bleeding from a head wound onto the parking lot.  It's an easy and terrible (and, in some circles, impressive) picture to paint of Lola seizing the girl by the hair, jerking her head back, and pressing a still-warm gun barrel to her temple while snarling for information.

Interrogation was a skill more traditionally cultivated by dark tribes and their waning-moon Philodoxes.  Lola was a natural.

None of this applies today, though.  Her shoulders are relaxed, form made less imposing.  She looked less hard and tough this way, and when not trying actively to appear intimidating she looked sturdy and healthy instead.  So, it is to a woman who is calm, albeit contemplative, that he presents his word-vomit of a thought process.  When his words came out like an avalanche, doing nothing but gaining momentum along the way, Lola knew it was because he was nervous, and often because what he was talking about was something that's been plaguing his mind as well.  Usually it would make her grim-faced.

This time, though, her expression brightened and shifted first to surprised, and from there softened into something far more pleased.

Cassandra's got to have a ton of baby stuff...

She could tell he wasn't going to stop on his own, and that if he was left to just keep going and going he could very well get himself all wound up-- yes, that happens even under the new moon, she knows.  So she moves slow-not-swift across the space of the dining room, past the modest square table and chairs to meet Hector where he stands at the kitchen island.  She doesn't shush him or put a hand to his lips to stop the stem of words.  Instead, she lays a hand gentle but firm on the top left side of his chest.  She aimed to still his nerves, but not necessarily to silence him.  No doubt, he realizes that he's rambling and takes a break and a breath all the same.  In that moment of quiet Lola took up speech instead.

"I'm glad you came around to deciding to seek them out.  And if you'd have me there with ya, then I'll go."  She didn't say as much, but her reasons for going spanned just a bit beyond her own curiosity to know what his family is like and her own sense of wanting to know more about him.  She wanted, in some base animal way, to be sure that this family knew who she was since it was her life that his was twining so closely with now.

Even more than that, though, she knew that the stress of this reunion could put great and terrible strain on Hector-- more to the point, on his control over the beastial Rage.  Kinfolk served greater purpose than just financial support and reproductive agents.  They could withstand the Rage that Garou carried because they were meant to ease the burden of it.  She could already foresee a tense moment where Hector's father has a snapping, stressed and emotional moment while Hector tries to lie about where he's been.


"....I'll talk to Anthony.  He's got a car that he could probably let me borrow.  It'd be better than asking for money for plane tickets anyways."


Hector Ghosh

Normally when he gets himself this wound up it's over something that's bothering him. During brighter moons his imagination starts to get away from him and the threat of a frenzy lingers underneath his energy but this time of month he's calmer. He's almost chill most days. Cracking jokes and playing the guitar and haranguing whichever of his friends and compatriots happens to be nearest to him.

He's not a difficult person to get along with. Lola doesn't turn towards him with the intent to shut him down or intimidate him into changing the track of his thoughts.

And she used to intimidate him. He came into her life as a skinny teenage boy with no idea what he was supposed to be doing. He had to have thought she was Garou from the way she acted at first. Back then she was still raw and angry and jilted.

Hector hadn't been there any more than he had been there the night the group of teenagers found a necklace whose spirit rider filled their minds with dark urges. Even based on scant details given to him by people who do not consider themselves storytellers he can imagine it. He is not intimidated by her anymore.

More like he's grateful she's showing a trend of calming down as she grows older and matures. Whatever rare bad dreams wake him up out of sleep at night he keeps to himself but it wouldn't take a psychic to posit that he's dreamt of something terrible happening to her.

Their conversation is not about dark things. Uncertain and stressful things but not dark things.

A hand on his chest reminds him to take a breath and so he does. Draws it in slow and lets it out and reaches up to cover her hand in his own.

And if you'd have me there with ya, then I'll go.

He takes her hand off of his chest to press a kiss to the backs of her knuckles and her palm and her wrist as she finishes her thought. Nods at mention of a car trumping a monetary loan and kisses her wrist one two three more times before releasing her.


"You're okay with leaving after the moot, then?"


Lola Hawkes

The affection that he lays onto her hand is watched with fondness etched into her face.  This was something that Hector got to see, but no one else really knew was possible.  Before this last month, really, the only expression that seemed to lay on Lola's face was one of hard readiness, or moderate negativity in some way shape or form.  Even in the first month or so of Lola sharing her bed with Hector, while she would still be close to him and tuck herself under his arm or press kisses to his face and hair and shoulder, there was still something warrior-like about her the whole time, like the war was forever there in the back of her mind, like she had something to prove even to him.

This was still the case with almost everyone else.  Hell, even around Tamsin Lola was brusque in mannerisms and a bit rigid in the muscles.  She needed to be tall and impressive and prove that she was capable of standing among the Garou that she fought alongside as though she were their equal.

She has little more to prove to Hector, though, when it comes to her own strength.  He's likely the reason that the Sept speaks of her as it does, that they know her prowess in battle now.  She's killed things that would have killed him, and suffered no scars or wounds or poor health to show for it.  She killed a Fomori with a hunting knife that she stole away from the seizing body of her lover.  For him, she doesn't need to be hard anymore.  So instead her expression is relaxed and pleased still while he asks when she'll be okay to leave.  He kissed at her wrist and palm and she curled her fingers to the line of his jaw and nodded.


"Where will we go?  San Jose?  And shouldn't we wait long enough that the moon is thin and dark while we're out there?"


Hector Ghosh

"Yeah, I mean, we should?"

He's thought about this enough that he can talk about distances and moon phases. As much as he's traveled in the last four years Hector has come to have a clear enough sense of what the moon is like to be doing after a certain number of miles but that doesn't mean he has an innate sense like some of their ilk possess.

His right hand comes up to comb hair back from her brow. Rare as her moments of softness are they do not surprise him. Might be they never did. Though his awkwardness and his blurted-out bits of affection this summer hinted at a depth of feeling she did not then possess Lola was the first one to tell the other with words that they were loved. Shocked as she was to feel and say it she did say it and Hector still grapples with an overwhelming sense of contentment when she touches him or murmurs something true without provocation.

In public they act as if they are both soldiers in the same battalion. Humans are not kept at so far a distance but at the Sept or when their people are near the closest they get to displaying their bond came at the warmoot: Hector had put his arm around the back of his chair and sat splay-legged without touching her while waiting for the proceedings to start. He has not stood up at any moot to declare her to be off limits and he does not hold her hand or put his arm around her waist around other Garou.

Sometimes he sets his teeth into the meat of her shoulder when they're lying with each other but that is not to mark her that others might know he was there. He doesn't break her skin or hurt her. If it's not his teeth he buries his face in her shoulder. Hector is not a shy lover but everyone in earshot doesn't need to hear him.

Right now he is not trying to seduce her. That may very well change knowing as she does how a young man's mind works but right now he just wants to touch her. He feels his own surge of fondness when Lola the proud strong no-shit-taking warrior woman relaxes when he strokes her hair.


"But I figure: I want to see my sister in person. So she can... I dunno. I don't really look like I did when I disappeared. The last picture any of them have of me I was sixteen. Plus if she can see me in person and know I'm not tied up in a basement somewhere with a gun to my head she might call ahead for us? Warn my parents we're coming? And then I can swing back through and we'll jump in the car and go to San Jose. The moon should be pretty thin by then."


Lola Hawkes

By way of conversations that she has with Wolves about the Sept, and simply because Hector hasn't said anything about it yet, Lola knew that he hasn't stood up to claim her officially before the Nation.  Some more staunch traditionalists would cry danger in this scenario.  She was carrying his child, after all.  The Uktena tribe was a very old one, twisted up in ancient and dark ways.  They weren't the most progressive-minded bunch of people-- not like the Children of Gaia or the Glass Walkers or Bone Gnawers.  A good number of them still thought of pairing and mating in stark and matter of fact ways.  At any point a higher ranked Uktena could roll through, see the breeding riding Lola's bones and the evidence of her fertility and set forward a challenge to claim her.  Since there was no official claim on her already, Hector would have to rise to fight.  If he lost, the consequences could be heartbreaking.  The child would be left with Hector, at best, while Lola was taken away.

But even in this terrible scenario, Lola would see no trouble with killing the unwanted Garou while he slept and returning to Hector.  It would just be preferable if the situation didn't rise in the first place, was all.

However, Lola said nothing on the matter.  Not once has she mentioned the subject to Hector or pressed him to make his move and lay claim.  This was a ball she would leave firmly in his court.  When he was ready, then he would bring it up.  Until then, they would rely on one another's faithfulness and the respect of the Sept they lived in to keep that problem at bay.

He said he wanted to see his sister in person, and Lola's brow furrowed only the tiniest bit when she realized the distance and the amount of driving that he was talking about.  When she asks for clarification, it wasn't with a tone of reluctance.  It was more like bracing for something that she was already willing to do.  "So....  We're going to New York?"


Jesus, she sure hoped not.


Hector Ghosh

"Do you want to get arrested for punching a cab driver in the face?"

It's rare that one of his smiles shows his teeth. Usually it's only when he laughs and when he laughs it's because he can't convince himself it's a bad idea. His smile affects his entire face. Just about closes his eyes. More often he smiles and it's a lopsided thing.

Times like this he just lifts his eyebrows and lets the smile show in his eyes. He thinks he's being funny. His hand pauses in its travels through her hair to brace the back of her neck.

"Nah, I found a mailing address and a phone number for Helen. The Internet says she's in North Carolina doing a residency in pediatrics at Duke or something. So I figure if I start there I can find her. If we can avoid going to New York that'd be great. My older sister's kind of..."

He wrinkles his nose and glances up at the ceiling like that's going to help him find a nicer way of phrasing this.


"Maybe she's gotten better now that she's a doctor and has a kid and all that. But when I was in high school she was like my dad, only without the accent and the gray hair. And more uptight. Somehow."


Lola Hawkes

The comment about asking if she wanted to get arrested was met with a laugh and a shake of her head.  Lola's laughs weren't typically boisterous things, and that held true today.  She didn't throw her head back and laugh from her stomach, but a grin did split her face and crinkle the edges of her eyes, and a sound that was more than a chuckle by a few degrees bubbled out of her throat.  Hector's hand brushed through her hair, which was left down for the sake of warmth and ease, and found the back of her neck.  She was dressed in what was becoming more common for her, and probably was going to continue to be throughout the winter and spring.  A simple black floor-length dress with three-quarter sleeves that she pushed up past her elbows anyways, with a wide and low neckline (because a girl has to show some skin, she wasn't a nun for chrissakes).  The waistline of the garment was cut high, so it allowed plenty of space for her stomach to be comfortable.  Over the top of this was that chunky knit sweater for the sake of warmth.  She was in stocking feet, boots abandoned to dry at the door.

Her hand moved from his chest to touch the outside of his arm, the forearm to be precise, but not to guide him away-- quite the opposite, in fact.  Standing there, held like he was prepared to pull her in and kiss her, they continued their conversation about reconnecting with his family.

North Carolina, he clarified, and Lola breathed relief.

"Good.  I only managed Las Vegas because I was shitfaced."  She somehow manages to mention that trip without letting any sort of hesitancy or caution into her voice, and feels no pang of guilt that he can see either.  She glazes right over that and continues on.  Fingers stroked his forearm through his shirt, and her tone took on a more searching quality, slightly more matter-of-fact.  She was information gathering in a way that wasn't ferociously unlike how she did when trying to help with concepts for battle plans.


"Is... your dad gonna be a problem we're gonna have to worry about?"


Hector Ghosh

Aside from traveling out to Houston and reenacting the stunt he'd pulled when he found out Milton had nearly taken Lola's body out of that building instead of bringing her to the hospital nothing Hector can do can give him a sense of resolution over what happened in Las Vegas beyond his own refusal to give a shit. They were not together when she went to the Weaver-congested city and even if he had thought it an infuriating reason at the time the fact that she had gone down there to try and fix him was as noble a reason as any.

She says she was shit-faced and that's why she managed the city. Hector snorts an unamused but forgiving snort. When she starts to run her fingers along the arm beneath the flannel shirt he'd swapped for his sweat-sodden hoodie when they came back inside he draws a breath like that's going to be the transition away from the conversation he was looking for.

But Lola is approaching this like a battle. She's right. Hector's middle sister is a potential commodity and beyond that her life is in danger if something else catches wind of what she is and pulls her out of her normal life. His mother deserves to know what she is and what became of her family. And his father--

Hector is just leaning in closer to her to tip their faces together when Lola asks if his father is going to be a problem.

The Galliard groans like she just asked the worst question in the entire world and wilts onto the kitchen stool behind him. Such agony! Much woe! Oh the humanity! He takes his hand off her face to put both arms around her waist and haul her in so he can bury his face against her sternum and groan more.


"YES," he says like he hadn't thought that far ahead.


Lola Hawkes

If Lola weren't so resolved and semi-stoic a thing by nature, she would have laughed outright at the dramatics that Hector threw himself into.

He'd been leaning forward to kiss her, and if she didn't feel the need to express these concerns and be prepared for what was to come while they were on the topic, she would have leaned forward to meet him partway in that kiss.  For the sake of warmth and killing time and simply being with him, she would have coerced him to the couch or the bed-- hell, she might even have let him get carried away and put her up against the counter in here.  But instead, when his nose was coming near to hers, she asked about his father.

Hector let go of her head, sank onto the stool, and wrapped his arms around her middle so that he could press his face into her shirt, just below her chest.  She blinked, moderately surprised at his reaction moreso than his answer itself, and placed both of her hands on his head.  Fingers combed through his hair, pushing it back from his brow and behind his ears, smoothing it slow and distracted and comforting.  But that's not to say that she lets the subject die, or that her tone changes in any way at all when she continues.

"Well," she states at first, "it's a good thing we're timing it so we get out there when the moon's thinning."  It's almost painful how matter-of-fact she is about the fact that Hector's Rage could snap and cause him to wreck the family that he was trying to reconnect with.


"What kind of 'problem'?  Because Hector, I'll do my fuckin' best to sit on my hands, but it'll be hard as hell not making him swallow his goddamn words if he gets real fuckin' lippy."


Hector Ghosh

At least Hector gets some sort of release out of acting like a diva during moments like this. It helps him recenter himself when Lola does not laugh at him or call him names the way Tamsin would have. Maria would have goaded him. Maybe climbed over top of him like she was going to be able to calm him down by forcing the air out of his lungs.

Maria didn't have time for theatrics. She was a woman on a mission nearly every waking moment. If they weren't getting into trouble they were wasting time.

Yet he does soothe at the presence of her fingers in his hair. Lola can feel him haul in a breath through his nostrils and turn his head so his cheek is against her ribs instead of burying his entire face between her breasts and muffling his words. When he exhales again he secures his arms around her waist and grazes the small of her back with his fingers in a thoughtless pattern.

Could be almost painful but Hector needs that in his life. He's at a strange place right now where he doesn't know how to act when he has to be out in public. In a few nights' time he will stand with two Fosterns and a Ragabash and the Fosterns will treat his opinion as they would have an equal and he will not know what to do with himself.

It's almost as if he's trying to stay a Cliath as long as he possibly can and no one is going to indulge him. Straighten up and fly right, kid.


"I haven't told you much about my father," he asks without looking up at her, "have I?"


Lola Hawkes

There's something mutually calming about soothing a person.  While Lola straightened errant hairs into line and gentled out any tangles that she could locate, she was less concerned about the trees outside that were going unwatched.  The weight of Hector's head against her ribs, his arms about her middle and fingers at her back, up under the hem of her sweater so they could trace wandering, thoughtless paths through the thinner material of her dress, all soothed the need to be out, to be dutiful.  It focused her in on what was inside the house instead and put her at rest.

His face turned so his cheek pressed against her now, the option to bury his face a bit higher between breasts ptassed up for the time being.  Down from below her chest Hector asks about how much he's mentioned about his father.  Lola glanced up, eyes finding the window, but only to look at the snow whipping along on the wind, not to seek anything past it.  She was thinking, trying to recover information shared.  Her memory was good in ways, but it was nothing compared to what Hector could boast.

She tries anyways, and relays what she's able to summon.

"Not specifics, no.  He moved here from India and is stern as fuck.  Physicist or surgeon or something like that.  I'm just guessing since you'd mentioned how hardassed he is that he'll be..."  She trails off, and her fingers still in his hair for a second.  Her brow furrowed as she tried to sort out how to word what it was she was trying to say.  She expected that he would yell, or maybe slam the door in Hector's face, or maybe give them hell over the pregnancy, or possibly even react to the Rage with violence as she knew a few humans would do.


What she landed on was:  "...difficult."


Hector Ghosh

"They never found out what happened to me."

It's hard to tell a story that hasn't got a proper ending. It isn't a story then. It's an episode out of his life. He tends to compartmentalize stories born out of his early life because he knows the people in the story went on without him. That's what people do when someone they love dies or vanishes or runs away. They wait for the wound to turn to scar tissue and to fade and then they move on with their lives.

"My grades started tanking the year before Lara and Naima found me. The cub hunters. My grades were never super hot, but my father's really smart. Like, people ask him to come speak at international conferences about some surgical technique he invented smart. And my sisters were good in school and got into awesome colleges and he expected I was going to do the same thing. But he started getting on my ass in middle school, you know? How I wasn't applying myself, all I wanted to do was screw around and chase girls. My mother isn't Indian. She converted to Hinduism for him. It's not like he's super traditional and would really give two shits about--"

He takes and releases another deep breath.


"He's not an asshole. He's just human. And I don't know what I'm going to tell him or how he's going to react. It's not like I can shift in front of him and be like Sup, Dad? This is why I vanished junior year. Sorry I haven't written or called. You're gonna be a grandpa again, isn't that awesome?"


Lola Hawkes

He tells the story of his father's intellect and how his sisters followed in his footsteps by performing in school and getting into colleges.  Lola knew both of his sisters were doctors-- or, well, one was a doctor, the other was studying to become one.  She wrinkled her nose a little as the story went on, but wasn't surprised to hear that Hector didn't quite perform academically like his father and sisters did, and that his parents got on his ass about it.  These were normal human complaints that Lola didn't connect with, but she understood.

You see, Lola's grades weren't very good either.  She barely got her diploma, and had a ferociously bad grade point average.  Her attendance was so poorly that she almost didn't graduate.  But her parents didn't care about her grades as much as Hector's father probably did about his.  They knew what to expect, their daughter was supposed to be an Ahroun after all.  And even when that changed, Lola was sixteen and it was too late to change habits like that.  Her father was just happy that she graduated at all.  In some photo album tucked away in the loft somewhere is a picture of Lola in her graduation gown, hair at approximately shoulder length, looking surly as usual.  But in that picture her father is smiling hard enough that his crows feet almost replace his eyes and his big black mustache is twisted up to show the face-splitting smile underneath.  He was happy about it, at least.  Lola only walked with her peers to please him.

"Well, no, you're not gonna shift in front of him.  He's human," she repeats this, stressing the word like there's more meaning to it than the simple fact that he can't know about his son being a werewolf.  Like she expects that his brain works differently and that he wouldn't be able to make certain conclusions and leaps of logic and faith like those who have seen and interacted with the Spirits have.

"....You could tell him that you went out to the world  It's stupid, but it would work.  Kids did it all the time in the seventies.."  She paused, then went on.  "That would explain how you found a woman in a cabin out in the Rocky Mountains. And why you're so different.  I mean, if you found your way to other countries and lived there that would give you a different vibe.  They don't know what Rage or Spiritual Essence is, can't define it."


She's just spit-balling ideas here.  Lola isn't a story weaver, but she's sharp at least.


Hector Ghosh

"Yeah..."

He's soothed but he isn't a font of wisdom or knowledge at the moment. Hard as he's thinking he has several other hurdles to jump over before they even get to his parents' house. They have to make it from the Rocky Mountains to the east coast without either of them getting into a roadside brawl or mouthing off to the wrong person offering them refuge.

Among the photos of her lupine relations and her smiling living parents he has seen the ones of Lola that look as though she could be on her way to school. The one of her in her cape and gown has yet to come across his eyes. If he had ever seen it he would not have needed to ask if she went to high school. That conversation seems distant though it only took place a few minutes ago.

This conversation is immediate and necessary. But he's leaning heavy on her now. Not physically. This isn't anything he could have done alone and he was told her true just now. He doesn't know how to approach this. His sisters and mother he can handle but his father he can't.


"Maybe I can convince them I didn't join a suicide-bomber extremist youth cult or have some sort of psychopathic mass-murdering tendencies they never found out about if I sit up straight at the dinner table."


Lola Hawkes

Lola chuckled at what Hector had to say, and the sound was reassuring more than anything else.  She patted his head again, then put her hands down to his arms, reaching behind her to find his wrists.  As she did this, she spoke.

"Look.  You don't need to come up with your story on the spot.  We've got until the Moot has passed, and that's nearly half a moon cycle away, right?  Give your sister a call after you've got your story-- and I know you'll come up with one.  It's what you're made to do-- stories, right?"

With her fingers about his wrists she dissuades his hands from where they gathered at the small of her back, redirects them to hold her hips instead.  Fingers splay on top of his hands and encourage him to grip.  Assuming this gets him to look up at her, he'll find her looking down at him with her eyebrows lifted and a small, half-wry grin at her lips.  She leans down just enough to touch her lips to where the hairline starts on his forehead, and moves her hands from laying overtop his to his shoulders instead.


"In the meantime, I'm pretty sure you were gonna kiss me before you threw yourself down in despair."

Stand The Fuck Up - 12.1.2013 [ST'd by jamie][Hector]

Lola Hawkes

Even though it was the first day of the month of December, which is supposed to be the doorway into a long, cold, dark winter, the Uktena pair had awoken that morning to bright blue skies, fluffy clouds, and enough sun to make the top of your head and shoulders warm.  It was in the fifties, and sweaters would suffice.  No need for that big winter cape that Lola wears when it's frigid.

Over the past week or so the number of naps that Lola's found herself falling into has decreased.  Though she still smells everything with the similar sensitivity of a wolf (but only in obnoxious ways), the queasiness has since quelled as well.  She was out chopping up wood with Hector when he suggested that they get away from the house and the typical patrol paths.  They could go out for a hike along one of the beaten down trails, like a normal Colorado couple.  Lola was bemused, and found herself not only unable to argue with the idea, but actually pleased with it.

So, about two hours later it's close to noon and the big rusty white truck that Lola drives is parked in a small dirt lot at the bottom of a trailhead.  Lola's been running warmer than typical, thanks to the way your body works while pregnant, so she's left her canvas jacket in the car.  Instead she's dressed in the one pair of maternity jeans that she has procured, for over the past two weeks her stomach has swollen enough that even her loose jeans don't want to button anymore.  Over this she wears a comfortable brown sweatshirt with an almost scarf-like bunching of fabric around the neck rather than a hood.  The sweater isn't loose, but fits comfortably.  Over the past week or so her stomach has gotten to a point where it's impossible to mistake that she's pregnant if she's wearing fitted clothes, but in this sweater it's still possible that she's just rocking a little extra weight about the middle.

She has a backpack on her back, both straps about her shoulders, and is wearing a ball cap with her ponytail looped through the back.  The trail that she'd selected for them is out in the woods, so that their path is surrounded by trees and rocks.  It's approximately two miles deep into the woods, and after about half of a mile it curves and starts to hug a shallow, rocky stream.

At this point in time, they're just getting to the place where the trail curves and meets the stream.  Lola suggests that they pause here, not to sit, but so that she can turn the backpack to Hector and ask:  "Would'ja get the water bottle out?"

While he's probably complying and digging about through a backpack stuffed with rags, a first aid kit, a hunting knife in its sheathe, and a secured thermos of soup, Lola stands with her hands on the straps and watches a couple not too different from them (aside from birthright and skin tone) hesitating further up the trail, not particularly wanting to come down close to the man that feels like he may snap and stab them.

"I told'ja that I made up with Erich, didn't I?"  She'd neglected to mention it to him directly, but Hector may have heard this through the rumor mill by now.


Hector Ghosh

"Gee, I dunno, did you?"

Like Hector can't remember something someone told him yesterday. Or five years ago. The male has been gifted the ability to recall anything he wants from whenever he wants and to recall it perfectly. He knows that she didn't tell him. That he had to hear about it from someone who was hanging around the Caern and feeling in a gossiping mood that day.

But he is always in a gossiping mood. He wants to know what's going on because it's his job to know what's going on. Someone did tell him. She can almost hear him smiling that smile that says he thinks he's hilarious as he zips up her pack again and hands the water bottle to her over her shoulder.

He leans over the pack to press his lips to her temple. Puts his hands on her hips. It's somewhat awkward with the pack pressed between them. The pack he has been carrying isn't even his. He found it up in the loft.

If they linger here long enough the skittish humans will continue on their way and stop looking back at them.

"Erich's a good Ahroun. I mean, he's completely insane, but I've followed him into some nasty situations and come out okay. You know? I'm glad you guys made up."


Lola Hawkes

He fires back with a 'gee I dunno did you?', and Lola responds by rolling one shoulder in a shrug and reaching back for the water bottle when she hears him zipping the pack back up.  Truth be told she didn't quite remember.  She was just trying to make conversation, was all.

The water bottle gets its lid screwed off and Lola was about to take a drink, but paused as Hector had leaned in from behind to kiss at her temple under the fabric of the cap she wore and place his hands at her hips.  This was awkward with the backpack in the way-- typically if she was feeling like reciprocating the affection she would lean back into him and hold her face to the side of his and be still with him for a minute.  Since the backpack prevented that she instead just tipped her head toward his mouth some and shifted her hips enough that one could press further into his palm.

She tends to avoid sharing their relationship with strangers, but that seems to apply more when they're around other Garou and Kinfolk.  Humans don't much seem to register on her radar.  So the couple that are uncomfortably shifting up the trail from them are ignored utterly, and eventually they decide to go off the trail, cross the creek, and move along the other side of it to get past them.  Lola turned to face Hector again, moving away from his hands in doing so, and watched the couple with a half-amused smirk before she drank from the water bottle.

A quarter of its contents are gone before she finishes, and with a swipe of her mouth with the back of one hand she offers the bottle to Hector next.

"Well, I thought about it and figured that I'd said shit that didn't need saying.  I mean, he's still a fuckin' bitch for losing his shit at the ceremony, but there's no sense in telling him that.  Truthfully, I didn't know how well it would go.  I figured I'd try and say sorry and if he wouldn't accept it then fuck him, and I'd leave it there.  But he was alright-- said he was impressed that I bothered to come apologize in the first place.  So we're back on good grounds.

"Went and saw Javed and met his packmate, that Silver Fang, too.  Eddie told me they claimed turf just north of the Bawn, so I checked it out."

Look at you, Lola, being a regular socialite.


Hector Ghosh

Figures Hector wouldn't want to take his hands off her once he put them there. If one can call it a problem he has had this problem since they began sharing a bed. That he loves her and desires her wasn't ever anything anyone doubted. Even the Skald could tell.

So she turns to him and since they're standing still and talking of positive things he's watching her face with eyes that are stupid with the love he has for her and he's petting her hair off her brow. Though the day is warm Hector has only admitted it by virtue of leaving his gloves and hat in the car. Leaving his outerwear in the car and wearing his sweatshirt with the hood down.

He's acclimating to the shitty weather.

"Look at you," he says, "cavorting with the upper crust. What was it like? Is everything blinged out?"
The forecast isn't calling for snow until Tuesday but the sky overhead is beginning to darken and rapidly. As if night is falling.


Lola Hawkes

As is the case whenever someone with long hair wears a ball cap, strands like to fall loose and dangle around the face anyways.  Hector's looking at her with the puppy-dog stupid-in-love stare that he keeps when they're just being together-- not out around people, not talking business or politics, just existing simultaneously.  Lola's face defaults to a hard setting of strength and stone, but in times like this it's softer, warmer, more alight.  She smiles her small (but not shy, never shy) smile back when he tucks some loose black hair back up under the brim of her cap and chuckles at his comment.

"Yes and no.  It was all sleek and clean in there, but it's a new house.  You wouldn't believe the spread, though.  She invited me in to have food and conversation, and goes to the fridge and pulls out these pre-prepared trays of, like..... snacks, I guess.  Meat spread and cheeses on crackers and cut up vegetables and shit.  Like one of those fancy parties where people in suits carry trays of this stuff to you."

She means to say hors d'oeuvres, but doesn't have the word for it.  For some reason that one never made it into her vocabulary.

She might have been about to say something else, but Hector's face casts a shadow all of a sudden.  Lola blinked and tipped her head back up to check the sky through the trees above.  The weather on the radio she keeps in the kitchen said that there would be clear skies and warm weather, but that would change in the middle of the week.  When they'd gotten out of the car the only clouds in sight were fluffy white ones scattered here or there.

When she looked up, she saw that it wasn't cloud cover blocking out the sun, but rather the sky itself was darkening as though the sun had gone behind the mountain ridge already.  Her brow furrowed, and she reached into her pants pocket to check the time on the front screen of her outdated little flip-phone.

"....The hell...?"  She asks this outloud, cautiously, and with a frown on her face she shows the front of the phone to Hector, who has no doubt noticed the change of light by now too.  The time on the phone reads 12:28pm.


Hector Ghosh

Correction: the time on the phone read 12:28pm when she looked at it the first time but then the minutes began to rocket upward from 28 to 35 to 52. The hour dropped from 12 to 11 to 10. As Hector looks at it the numbers keep on dropping.

And he had started to say something about the spread Avery had prepared for them but then a frown claimed his words as the darkness deepened. Now his eyes lift from the phone's face that he might stare around at the world around them. His nostrils flare. Lola cannot tell exactly when his senses sharpen themselves but she can see his posture change. He holds himself more like an upright monster than a hyperactive young man.

"I don't know," he says. "Hold onto my hand, I don't wanna lose you."

[perc + occult: sense wyrm? -2 diff because heightened senses.]
Dice: 6 d10 TN4 (3, 3, 7, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 4 )


Lola Hawkes

The expression on Lola's face while she watches the numbers on the phone shift and change is difficult to put into words.  Her brow knits heavily, her eyes widen, and her lips part like she's going to vocalize her confusion and concern but she doesn't quite know how to.  It takes Hector's telling her to hold onto his hand for her to pull her eyes away from the screen of her phone, and when she looks at him her expression is worried and confused, but not scared.  Lola hasn't shown fear easily before, and she sure isn't going to start now, even though she's never seen time flip itself around like this before.

Her lips press together and she nods sternly.  Quick as a lick she slips the phone back into her pocket, no longer wanting to lose herself in watching to see where the numbers go.  She tosses the pack off her back and drops it on the ground in front of her.  One hand wraps itself up in Hector's, fingers interlacing and locking with his.  Her grip is firm without being crushing, and he can feel the tension going all the way up her arm from her hand alone.

She leans forward, though, the other hand working to grope about in the back pocket of the backpack, pulling loose the handgun that she'd stashed away.  She never leaves home without some sort of way to defend herself, and this is what she opts for now.

Gun in hand, she straightens up and looks around, standing near to Hector, scoping the landscape around them rather than the skies now, trying to spy anything that may come slinking out of the trees toward them.

[Perception 3 + Alertness 2]
Dice: 5 d10 TN7 (3, 4, 4, 5, 6) ( fail )


Lola Hawkes

[Reroll, that was pitiful.]
Dice: 5 d10 TN8 (1, 7, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )


Hector Ghosh

[ignore this]
Dice: 8 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 7, 8, 8) ( success x 5 )


Hector Ghosh

[ahaha. ahaha. hah.]
Dice: 5 d10 TN10 (2, 3, 7, 7, 7) ( fail )


Hector Ghosh

In the darkness they find each others' hands. Hector's is warm and calloused and strong and it clasps to hers instead of knitting them together. Not as if he's dragging her along but to give her guidance and strength as they continue onward.

His intention appears to be to lead them back down to the truck and to get the hell out of here.
Somewhere in the distance not so far from where the other two hikers once were although it's hard to tell now because the clouds have covered up the sliver-thin moon and the stars but somewhere off behind them Lola can hear the sound of something hitting something else.

And then the sound of someone falling.
And then the sound of something chewing.
And then a scream. A high-pitched pain-drenched end-of-the-world scream.

"It doesn't feel corrupt," Hector says. He sounds worried. More than that he sounds if his insides feel as if they've turned to water. Ice-sweat doesn't slick his palms but for someone who has seen some dark corners of the Umbra it is rare that Hector does not recognize something when he encounters it. "I don't think it's Grandfather Serpent. It reeks, though, do you--"

Just before he cuts off Lola feels the vertigo of someone grabbing her by the back of the neck and forcing her over a chasm though no one grabs her and the ground is still solid beneath her feet. That internal yawning sensation though. If this were a film it would make a sound.

All she has right now is sound because the dark around them is so complete and when the sensation starts to fade something hits Hector. He grunts as the impact knocks the air from his lungs and the impact goes through him so hard Lola feels it jolt his arm. His hand lets go of her hand and he falls to the ground.


Lola Hawkes

They begin making their way back down the trail, down the way they came, and Lola snatches her backpack up and tosses it onto her back again, this time with only one strap securing it.  She wasn't going to release Hector's hand to get the other strap on, and he probably wasn't going to let go of her even if she wanted to anyways.  Security of a first aid kit and knife wasn't worth that risk, not in circumstances like this.

While the world goes dark, noises reach her ears even though she can't see much.  There's a falling and crunch-crunch chewing, and her hand grasps Hector's more firmly.  Then the scream, and her muscles spasm tight, but she doesn't startle or yelp or look afraid as much as she just looks more serious, storm-cloudy, and worried.

Hector says that it doesn't feel corrupt, and Lola growls out between clenched teeth:  "It doesn't have to be of the Wyrm to mean us harm."  This is a fact that he knows just as well as she does, and that's why they keep going.  He's in the middle of telling her that it smells terrible when the world goes dark and feels like it's going to tip, even though nothing has touched her and she's still holding Hector's hand.

Her feet stumble to a stop and she stands bolt upright, muscles locked and still and struggling to maintain reality though her head swims and dizziness threatens to spill her sideways, backwards, or maybe even completely updside-down.  She's never been to a halloween amusement house, but the sensation is not unlike walking through those tunnels that spin black-light splashes around you.  It's like that, but ten times worse.

The sensation fades, and Lola shakes her head and pushes the wrist of the hand holding the gun against her forehead to try and clear it.  Then there's a 'whump!' noise and Hector tenses, then goes limp to the ground beside her like a rag doll.  Lola's stomach twists uncomfortably and she blinks hard and rapidly to clear her mind and eyes.  "Hector!  Shit!"

When she's able, she crouches down beside him and inspects him for damage.  Did something hit his head?  Was he bleeding?  What the hell happened to him?  This analysis is something that she only allots a few seconds for before she's flipping the safety off her gun and looking around with wide, wild eyes for the culprit.  Her lips are peeled back from her teeth, and she positively snarls into the darkness around her.

"Stand the fuck up and show yourself!"

Lola Hawkes

[Perception 3 + Investigation 1:  Spending WP, this is important]
Dice: 4 d10 TN8 (4, 6, 8, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]


Hector Ghosh

As close as she is Lola does not have to wrack her brain to draw a connection between the impact and the fall. Her imagination may do as it will. But before she crouches down beside Hector she hears a small wet writhing sound near where he landed and then she hears that crunching chewing sound faint earlier for the distance between them and the other two hikers.

Her hands find him prone in the grass and as they grope to find an explanation for what happened the sound abates. Unlike the human Hector does not shriek as it does to him whatever it is it's doing. Lola finds a long thick tubular thing attached to the back of his neck.

Though she no doubt snatches it from his body Lola feels it deflate if she tightens her grip on it. It leaves its skin in her hand. Her mate was right. It does reek.

Stand the fuck up and show yourself!

Hector makes a strangled noise where he lies on the ground and then he starts to laugh. The thing hijacking his body has a voice thicker than his and if Lola is willing to stretch her imagination she can convince herself that it makes him sound as if he's been gargling with gravel but that would imply that it sounds like him at all. This does not sound like her mate.

It starts to stand the fuck up.


Lola Hawkes

Her inspection of Hector had to be done mostly with hands-- all she could see was Hector's shape prone in the grass, crumpled where he fell.  She'd felt his chest and pressed fingers to his throat.  Lola was surprisingly well trained when it came to first aid.  If she had a better way with people and any desire to leave The Homestead and start earning a living, she'd make one hell of an EMT.  But she didn't want to go save people that had choked on chicken bones or stopped breathing under the weights of their own obese chests.  She learned this to be of use on the battle field, to know what to do when someone gets part of their belly blown open or takes shrapnel to the neck.

Still, the basics are there, and she knows he's alive because he's breathing and his pulse is there.  While she was inspecting his neck she found something slimy, like an oversized leach, attached to the back of it, under his hair.  Her eyes widened, her jaw clenched, but she said nothing about it.  No one was listening anyways.  She instead wrapped her bare hand around the slimy thing, biting her short fingernails into it to keep her grip, and yanked it free.  It deflated, and she tossed it on the ground and adjusted her position to crush it under her boot.

When she'd turned and yelled for whatever it was that was doing this to show itself, the only response she got came from the man on the ground beside her.  He started to laugh... if you could call it that.  The noise was wet and rocky and deep and unlike anything she'd heard from him before-- even the strangled noises of Rage boiling over and trying to seize control.

Lola blinked, surprised, and felt her heart seize in her chest.  There's a cold dread that wraps over her like a damp quilt in the middle of winter.

I can't kill this enemy, she realizes.

Hector's body begins to stand up, and Lola tosses the backpack off her back and is quick to climb on top of Hector before whatever's controling him manages to find his feet completely.  She's going to try and pin him to the ground and keep him down there.  The gun is left on the ground, within a few inches of the discarded pack.


Lola Hawkes

[Strength 3 + Athletics 3]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 8, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 4 )


Hector Ghosh

[monster!hector's str + athletics]
Dice: 8 d10 TN10 (1, 1, 3, 5, 6, 6, 9, 10) ( success x 1 )


Hector Ghosh

The yawning sensation comes for her again. Off in the distance comes the sound of splintering bones and splattering blood. Another shriek follows it but this one is grief-warped. This is the closest Lola will ever come to blindness without permanently losing her eyesight. That alone is explanation enough for the vertigo.

That and the fact that she climbs onto the back of someone four inches taller than her in his human skin. It's a minor blessing that he stays in that skin. Lola has seen him when he takes on his war form. Even his dire wolf form would be impossible to kill.

It isn't impossible to kill him in his human skin but homid Garou can shrug off bullets. This is what gave birth to the myth that werewolves cannot be destroyed with anything other than silver bullets. They are not immortal. They're just tough.

And Lola cannot bring herself to shoot the thing out of him because it's wearing her man's skin. So she pins it to the ground. It goes down with another grunt of lost air that sounds nothing like Hector's voice and then it lies still a moment. She can hear it working Hector's jaws and gnashing Hector's teeth. Tasting Hector's blood.

Beneath her Lola can feel the thing move Hector's hand towards where she left the gun.


Lola Hawkes

Lola managed to knock the legs out from under Hector's body and caused him to topple onto the ground again.  She was virtually blind, the darkness was so thick and palpable, but her hands groped and managed to find his rib cage, his shoulders.  From there she was familiar enough with his body to know his proportions and where she would need to be to keep him down.  So she clambered on top of him, swung a leg over his waist and set her weight down square on his stomach.  He tried to struggle, to dislodge her, but Lola was strong and capable and he was kept firm to the ground.

She put her forearm on his collarbone and leaned her weight forward to keep his chest and shoulders down.  She can hear the clack-clash of teeth coming from his head, but for a moment she's distracted when another scream cuts through the night-dense air around her.  She twisted her head, trying in vain to see what was happening even though she already knew that her eyes could find nothing, no matter how they struggled.

Panic tried to squeeze at her heart, tried to force a noise that was small and wretched from her throat, but Lola was a proud thing and wouldn't let whatever was out there causing this have the satisfaction, especially not if it could hear her through Hector's ears.

His arm moved, hand groping off to the side where her gun had been discarded.  "Oh, no you don't," she growled and moved the arm that wasn't pinning his chest down to snatch at his arm, to try and drag it back.  If she's successful in this struggle she'll have his arm down at his side, clamped there and held in place with her knee.

While she's struggling, she's trying to reach Hector through whatever it is that's possessing him.
"Hector, Jesus fuck, snap out of it.  Please, come on, push through!  I don't wanna bash your head open, come on!"


Hector Ghosh

[come on heck]
Dice: 5 d10 TN9 (1, 2, 5, 7, 8) ( fail )


Hector Ghosh

For a moment it feels as if Hector hears her. Doesn't sound like it. It sounds as if the thing inside of him is enjoying this. The violence and the threat of violence and the weight of her healthy hot-blooded fertile body atop this meat sack it's inhabiting.

But the body stills. She cannot see his face in the dark to know what his eyes look like right now. No light to glint off of the corneas and let her know if they're open or closed. If they're rolled back in his head or bloodshot. It stills and it listens to her and a ripple courses through her mate's spine. Like he is fighting it.

Then a laugh comes out of his throat thicker than before. She can smell blood on his breath and the metal smack of it is louder than anything she's heard tonight. With her hand on his wrist she can feel the heat as it leeches out of his body into the ground. With her forearm on his chest she can feel that he isn't breathing like a normal person would be breathing.

She can't feel a heartbeat in his chest.

Do it, says the voice. She can feel it in her mind more than hear it.


Lola Hawkes

For a moment, and only that, the writhing and thrashing under her stills.  She's still trying in vain to see, her eyes are aimed where she knows his face would be and the pupils are as wide as they can go without chemical influence, trying desperately to take in light that she already knows isn't there.  There's a chew-chew in the distance, floating in the air like spider webs, and she's certain that whatever it was that hit Hector has already found the hikers that were out enjoying the day along with them.  She's tense, worried that they're going to spring on her.

Well, not too worried, really.  Those people she's not afraid to kill.  It's Hector's well being that she's invested in.

That stillness passes quick enough, though, and the wet-gravel laugh comes again.  Lola lets out a shuddering breath, something between frustration and the budding beginning of despair, and she leans forward on his body.  Her weight doesn't shift off of him by any means, she's still able to hold him down, but the small round firmness of her stomach presses into his and she touches her forehead to her own forearm.  The cap had come off during the struggle, was on the ground not too far from everything else she's discarded.

His skin is growing cold, his heartbeat isn't thumping in his chest anymore although she's certain it should be like a jackhammer.  And there's a voice in her head that's urging her, trying to pull her toward violence.  She grinds her teeth against it and shakes her head, forehead still against her arm.  She wished desperately that there was a Theurge there with her, to peel back the layers and find this thing and chase it off, but there's no one else but them and the other fallen hikers out there in the trees.
What do I do?  What do I do? Get a fucking grip, that's what you do.

"I ain't doing shit," she mutters to the voice in her head, to the thing in Hector's.  Just holding him here is accomplishing nothing, so she takes a chance and removes her arm from his chest.  Her hands seek the sides of his face instead and upon finding it hold it firm, fingers avoiding clamping teeth.  She shifts her weight on top of him, stretches her body up his further and touches her brow to his now instead.  His breath is metallic like blood, he's probably bitten up his tongue and cheeks, but she tries anyways.

"This is your chance, Hector.  You push through or I'm knockin' ya out and dragging your ass back to the truck.  Come on, help me."


Hector Ghosh

[hectorrrrr?]
Dice: 5 d10 TN8 (1, 5, 7, 9, 9) ( success x 2 )


Hector Ghosh

[ignore this]
Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 3, 4, 8, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 4 )


Lola Hawkes

[Stamina 4]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (4, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )


Hector Ghosh

[rage check, +1 because reasons]
Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (2, 4, 4, 4, 4, 8) ( success x 1 )


Hector Ghosh

If Hector were gone she would know it. She would not know it as fierce and fast as Tamsin and Thomas and Jack would know it. They would feel it like a bullet to the gut. Like something burst inside of them. When he dropped to the ground in the Umbra and lay still for a few seconds while his spirit railed against the trip back to the Homelands Tamsin and Thomas felt it. They panicked. They did not know what to do. They were far away and did not know where he was. Tamsin thought he was with Lola. He wouldn't do anything stupid if he was with Lola.

Something has blotted the sun out of their eyes. Made them think it was night. That time had ceased to be a relevant thing. Something plucked off two hikers and took over Hector's body faster than it took Lola to realize she could not bring herself to shoot him.

Their baby is not big enough for them to feel her yet. They do not know if she is even a she. Hector calls her a she. Neither do they know if she is Kin or True. If she will scream to be so near his Rage or if his heartbeat will calm her.

Lola's belly presses against his. His teeth show themselves in the dark and that rank blood smell comes out of his throat again. A sigh without breath. Her anguish could nourish it. It wants to hear her scream the way the hiker screamed when her lover burst apart in front of her.

It gets nothing from her steeling herself against the impossible and grabbing her mate's cold face. Small solace that it is his face she finds and not the face of an unfamiliar or a monster. No warmth in it though. This is what his face would feel like if he were dead. The blood oozing out of his mouth, over her thumbs, is still warm.

She begs him. The thing pushes that awful dead-breath at her again. Then Hector twitches underneath her. Snuffles and exhales through his nose. Hits her with blood-spray as it catches the breath and rides it out of his airway. He arches his back not to get her off of him but like to get this thing out of him and she can hear him grit his teeth so he won't scream but there's only so much he can do.

It went in through the back of his neck.

Lola recognizes the sound it makes as it leaves: cracking bones and splattering viscera. He doesn't have time to scream and he's still alive she knows he is his blood is hot when it sprays her in the face and it spurts out of him with every beat of his heart after that but that sound is the sound that killed the hiker in the distance.

The thing doesn't feel like a leech when it rushes away through the space between their bodies. It feels like smoke. Huge and hot and hungry still.

That yawning sensation hits her again and she feels it acute and hard this time. Feels it in her stomach. She weathers it like she has weathered so many other things but she has to steel herself against it.

Beneath her Hector trembles from the stun of what happened and he chokes and coughs around his blood and his hands grab hold of her elbows. She can see the outline of his body. The sky is lightening but everything is blue-black for the slowness of its lightening

Footsteps in the sodden dead leaves. Something is behind her and Hector is trying to speak but he can't. She can feel the tension in him though. The panic and the flare-up of his Rage. He wants to get up. He wants to kill this goddamned thing. If he takes another hit he's going to walk out of here with another battle scar if he walks out of here at all.


Lola Hawkes

The struggle that takes place is a vicious one, and contained within the non-existant space between their two bodies.  Lola stayed on top of Hector, legs on either side of his waist, belly and chest pressed to his and her face up beside his.  This is very similar to a position they'll take in bed when tossing about sweat-slicked between the sheets, but there's nothing heated or lusty about this.  It's wanting, but not wanton.  She wants Hector, but only because she wants him back.

He coughs and he struggles and there's a crunching noise of bones snapping and grinding.  His spine arches, presses him nearer against her, and blood sprays from his mouth and hits her face.  It gets in wide-searching eyes that were unprepared so she has to squeeze them closed, and coats her lips, but she doesn't care.  She's not worried for poisons that may lay there, she's just trying to brace him and get him through this, encouraging him to come forward with low urging whispers against the side of his face, with hands that move from his cheeks into his hair and tremble there, wanting to feel the warmth rush back into his scalp.

Then there's a burst of dense heat that comes from his face, not the slug that had burrowed through his neck but some tangible smokey substance instead.  Then he's holding onto her arms and trembling and snarling, but his body is worn and half-broken.  Lola makes a noise of relief, animal sounding and a cousin of a sob but not quite there yet.

Then, crunching behind her.  Lola's nerves are strung tight like an over-tuned piano wire waiting to snap, and the sound of something approaching behind her triggers a response that is as beastial as the man that lay beneath her.  The sky was lightening, her head was still dizzy and muscles still sore from that vertigo sensation that tried to rattle her bones and burst her skull, but had failed for this Kinfolk is wrought from iron and blood.

Whatever it was that came up behind her was sprung upon without a second thought.  She didn't even stop to sweep the blood from her stinging eyes and register the fact that she could see properly again.  She'd ask questions only after this thing was no longer a threat.

[Init!  Dex 3 + Wits 3 + ....]
Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (5) ( fail )


Hector Ghosh

So: Lola springs to her feet the moment she realizes something she can actually attack has coalesced out of the darkness. The sky continues to lighten as the creature's hold lessens but as it lessens its hold it gains its own body.

Hector left his medicine bag in the truck. Sometimes Hector does not make intelligent decisions. In this instance it proves to have been an unintentionally intelligent decision. It would have smashed when he hit the ground earlier and then he would really be in a world of hurt. But it means he has to lie there and let Lola kill this creature on her own.

His ego is going to be more bruised by the end of this than he is now.

The sky is dawn-bright when the creature appears to her as a sexless pale thing. Bloodless pale. Pink eyes and white hair pale. Big enough it could take on a wolf without quailing. When Lola runs at it it bares teeth like razors and hisses at her.

If it can't get her to scream it'll find another way to feed from her.

[+7]


Hector Ghosh

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (7) ( success x 1 )


Lola Hawkes

[Oh hell it's going first.  Gonna try something new and go on the defense!
Splitting Actions:  Dodge, go for gun]


Hector Ghosh

[action: chomp lola!]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 4, 6, 7, 8) ( success x 3 )


Lola Hawkes

[Dodge:  Dexterity 3 + Athletics 3, -2 dice for split, spending WP last minute!]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (5, 7, 7, 10) ( success x 4 ) [WP]


Hector Ghosh

The creature launches itself at her as Lola launches herself at it. Its teeth would have caught her neck if she had not woven out of its way. Pregnancy has not yet proven to be a terrible burden to her and it does not start today. She shoots away from it and goes back for the gun.

On the ground Hector gives up trying to stand. It isn't that he thinks she's got this and doesn't need help but that will be a way to save face later when he tells the story. As she runs back away from the thing he knows she's going for the gun and not for him.

The Galliard grimaces and pushes the gun across the dirt closer to her. She nabs it up and whirls to face the creature.

It's right behind her.


Lola Hawkes

[Round Two:  Fight!]
Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (9) ( success x 1 )


Hector Ghosh

+7!
Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (5) ( fail )


Lola Hawkes

Lola had burst forward before registering what it was that she was attacking.  The figure was a bit blurred, but impossible to mistake as anything but inhuman.  She sees a wash of bloodless pale skin on a humanoid being that would be large enough to grapple with a wolf with bare hands-- probably hovering somewhere between six and seven feet tall.  There are pink eyes and sharp teeth that flash, and Lola's weight hasn't changed enough that it makes it difficult for her to move quickly and maneuver as she's so used to doing.

That thing opens its mouth and lunges at her teeth first, its face flying quickly toward her own.  Lola's heels dig into the dirt and she bends at the waist, dipping and ducking under the leech-looking thing's extended torso.  With her boots still ground into the dirt she launched herself back, back to where she left Hector, back to her pack, to the gun that has saved her life and the lives of others many times before.

Hector was struggling to get up, and Lola's eyes flashed at him.  She wanted to yell at him to stay down, but this wasn't the time, and she had other things to worry about.  She was thankful when he found the gun for her and slid it toward her, so she wouldn't have to fumble and hunt on her own.  She stooped down to snatch up the gun, and was thankful that the safety was already off.

The woman wouldn't fall to her knees to gather it up, or twist herself prone on her back to get a better shot.  She kept her feet on the ground and lifted the gun, lining up a shot with center mass and pulling the trigger twice-- blam blam.

[Spltting Actions:  Two Shots.  WP on second shot
Shot 1: Dexterity 3 + Firearms 3, -1 dice for split Diff 4 for Close Range]
Dice: 4 d10 TN4 (2, 3, 6, 8) ( success x 2 )


Lola Hawkes

[Damage 1: Base 6 for Heavy Revolver, +1 Suxx]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 5, 5, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )


Hector Ghosh

[yeah okay you can soak lethal i guess]
Dice: 2 d10 TN8 (1, 5) ( fail )


Hector Ghosh

[Gaia is like "bitch no you can't"]


Lola Hawkes

[Second Shot:  Dexterity 3 + Firearms 3, -3 split, Diff 4 for Close Range, spending WP]
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (7, 7, 10) ( success x 4 ) [WP]


Lola Hawkes

[Damage 2: Base 6 + 3 Suxx]
Dice: 9 d10 TN6 (3, 7, 7, 7, 7, 8, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 8 )


Hector Ghosh

[lolllll]
Dice: 2 d10 TN8 (9, 9) ( success x 2 )


Hector Ghosh

Two shots ring out at the edge of the woods. This close to a hiking trail the person caught discharging the weapon would be in all sorts of legal hot water if the park ranger weren't missing. If the two hikers who were around earlier hadn't gone missing too.

They don't have time to investigate the ranger base or the hikers' fates whether or not they'd want to. The sky is bright as it was the segment of an hour ago before talk of buried grudges and amnesty between tribes was occluded by darkness.

The creature rises up before her. Lola cocks back the hammer and blasts a round into its chest. Wisps of smoke not born of the barrel leave out its front and back and it leaks tendrils of darkness out through its milk-white shell. She cocks the hammer again and when she shoots it a second time its head does not blast brain and blood onto the trees behind it.

The entire body sublimates into smoke that moves up through the air like ink and a chorus of hell-fettered screams bursts underneath the gunfire. That swell of vertigo comes at her one last time weaker than its first lashing. It's gone.

One bird chirps. Then another.

"Fuck!" Hector says from his place on the ground.


Lola Hawkes

BLAM

The first bullet drove through what would be a left pectoral muscle on a creature more developed, less sexless and sleek and amphibious looking.  Smoke drifted from the wound instead of blood, and Lola didn't take time to stop and ask questions.  She cocked the hammer back and fired again.

BLAM

This time the bullet flies true, strikes the thing in the head, and it would be the kind of shot that sent the back of a skull flying in pieces into the creek nearby, that splashed blood in a wide and gruesome arc across the land behind.  Rather than blood and gristle flying free, though, the entire body dissolves before it even has a chance to fall to the ground from the force of the killing blow.  Screams and smoke waft up into the air, and then the sky is blue and the air is clear and warm once more.

From the ground where Hector had fallen, a curse is let loose.

A bird chirps tentatively, and its partner answers it back.

All clear?  they ask.
All clear, they confirm.

Lola's hands don't shake often, but today they do when the revolver is lowered.  They shake badly enough that the gun slips and hits the ground, but thankfully does not discharge upon doing so.  She stares in a semi-stunned state at the place where the thing had been standing, and her bronze-brown face takes on an ashen cast.  Her feet move, finally, shuffling at first, but then a quick three-four steps are taken to move her off the side of the trail.  One hand grasps the trunk of a tree as she leans forward and empties the contents of her stomach, lunch that they'd had before leaving, onto the black dirt between some bushes.


Hector Ghosh

The beauty of the swear he chose is that most of its power is in the lips and teeth. He only needs his throat to end the word. The concussive force of its last phoneme is swallowed up by the wound where Hector's throat was a few moments ago.

Whatever it was that took him over burst out beneath his Adam's apple. Looks like something went at his throat with a chainsaw. No artistry in its escape. He evicted it by force of will alone and as he lies on the ground struggling to breathe and process what just happened to them the birds are singing and the sun is shining and the stream is trickling in the distance.

His woman does not come back to him but rushes off to vomit into the bushes instead. She glared at him so he would not get up as she fired shots into the corporeal nightmare. As he lies there he hears her empty her stomach and the sound of it hurts him near as bad as the wound does.

Lola can hear him snuffling wet through his mouth and coughing to clear his throat. Blood has pumped down the front of his sweatshirt so that the gray material has turned rust-red. He is not shaking or shivering anymore but he's in a fair amount of pain. If he had to run right now he would be slowed by the force of it. Staggering instead of running.

And it occurs to him that he doesn't remember what happened between the darkness falling and coming to with Lola sitting astride him like they'd been making love instead of fighting a monster out of him. He knows something was inside of him and it came out through his neck.

That's what sends a shiver through him. Not the injury itself or the pain but the thought of what caused it. He doesn't want to lie here anymore. Hector rolls onto his stomach and pushes himself to his hands and knees. Blood splashes the ground. He coughs. Everything fucking hurts, not just his throat.


"L--" The beauty of his woman's name. He has to spit his own blood to clear his throat. If he has never needed her before he does right now. "Lola?"


Lola Hawkes

At least she didn't have to hit her knees.  Lola reassured herself with that, the one handle of pride that she's still able to cling to, much as she grasps the bark of the tree trunk with her left hatnd while bracing her right hand on her knee.  There's a sickening splatting noise that comes with throwing up, and Hector has to listen to her retching and dry heaving for a dozen seconds longer before her panting breathing starts to even our, with one little gasp for air tucked in somewhere in the middle.

Behind her, Hector rolls himself off his back and onto his knee and coughs and splatters blood from his throat with his struggle.  She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, which in turn is wiped onto her pant leg, and twists to look under her left arm.  That she finds Hector half-gargling her name behind her creases a scowl of concern and strain and rage, livid and hot and terrible across her face.

She's exhausted, spent, burnt out emotionally from the ordeal they just went through.  She couldn't quite wrap her mind around what just happened.  It wasn't a Fomori, and Hector had already told her that it wasn't of the Wyrm so she knew that this wasn't a Bane or anything of that sort.  She didn't know of any spirits that were able to force their way through skin and possess a Garou.  She knew how difficult it was to fix a Bane into a Garou, and that those created Abominations.  There was a reason that Abominations were as rare as they were-- she knew that something shouldn't be able to take Hector over, and by transferring physically into him through a leech no less.

That the sky had gone black and time had folded in upon itself couldn't even be considered yet.  She had to push that to the side or she may break right then and there.

Lola turned away from the tree and the edge of the trail and walked back to Hector.  Her steps are slow and deliberate, and her face is still ashen as she comes to kneel beside him.  He can clearly see how her hands shake, for it is so abnormal, they are always so steady and sure after all.  She braces one hand on his flank at first, as she would were he wearing his Wolf skin instead of his Man body, and as she pats him there she tells him, simply:  "Shut up.  Stop talking."  Her voice is a thin, strained thing, but at least she still means exactly what she says and says exactly what she means.

The hand that isn't touching him goes to the pack again, and this time it pulls out two of the rags that she'd packed along with her.  These are shaken out, then folded together to create a dense rectangular mass of fabric.  She turns back to Hector and guides his body to move as she needs it to.  She takes his left hand from the ground, dusts the debris of dirt and crushed leaves from it, and places the rags in his hand.  She then guides his hand to his throat and places it there, puts her hand over his and forces firm pressure-- not enough to choke, but as much as is needed for a wound like that.  Her eyes are hard, even though the hand over his trembles, and she ducks her head to enforce eye contact when she tells him:  "Hold it, and hold it tight.  I'm getting you to the truck.  Stand up."


She'll then swing the pack up over one shoulder and position herself to tuck a shoulder under his and guide him up to his feet.


Hector Ghosh

It is a good thing no spirit ever blessed him with the gift of ignoring his injuries. The pain of his wound means he does not argue with her when Lola comes to his side and kneels with him in the dirt and tells him to shut up. Brusque but he doesn't flinch with the harshness of her speech.

If she did not love him and he did not love her they would not be here right now. They are tore-up and spent and terrified but at least they're alive. At least she can put a hand on his back and shaking though they both are Lola knows that the touch settles him. His Rage is hot and high now but he's stronger than he used to be. It does not overwhelm him.

So he leans back into her hand and ends up falling on his ass in the dirt. Tries to tuck himself in against her side to seek and give comfort but they need to get the hell out of here. Lola finds clean cloth to press to his gushing neck and Hector lets her move his hand to hold it there.

Up they go. Hector does not have to lean on her but they want to move and they want to move fast. That shoulder latches onto her and he starts to snarl but the noise hurts him. It turns into a sharp whine high in his throat.

It takes them fifteen minutes to make it back down the trail to where they parked the car. Maybe longer. He shakes with the same uncertain anger that makes her shake but his is tinged with Rage and the void where his experience ought to be. And he's staggering like a drunk. Like he's dizzy off of something potent. These days he cannot drink at all because his scar runs deep. His tolerance is shot. He would get drunk off of one shot of alcohol.

He holds it together until they get to the truck and then he stumbles and nearly falls. That's the thing that makes him make this godawful noise like he's fighting something off. Given what they just went through it could mean the thing got him again. It's nothing physical or mystical. He's overwhelmed. He's bleeding everywhere. Something happened and he doesn't remember most of it. This sucks. But he does not fall apart or throw a tantrum or burst into a frenzy.


With one hand on his throat and one hand on Lola's shoulder the kinswoman has to be the one to get the truck door open. At least Hector is still here with her. He does what he can to help but he knows better by now than to get in her way when she's set on a path.


Lola Hawkes

Not too long ago Hector probably thought that the only type of person that would be able to take Lola as a mate would be someone whose strength and experience could double or triple her own.  She seemed the kind of Kinfolk that could only be tamed by an Adren Ahroun, or something similar.  Were it not for the purity of her blood and how deep her family line runs with the Water Serpent, it would make perfect sense if she were traded off to the Get of Fenris tribe.  She was made of the sort of iron that they needed, and showed no fear and balked at no challenge.

But it's a fortunate thing that she's found Hector.  His youth and inexperience in comparison with that unknown, imaginary contender was what helped her grow.  That they tested one another's patience, that they leaned so heavily on each other, that's what made them stronger.  He was overtaken where an Adren would have no doubt batted the challenge away and left no work for Lola to do.  That Hector was fallen meant that Lola had instead stepped up and fought.  She would be stronger for this.  That Hector was able to push the entity from his bones by sheer force of will, forceful enough that it burst through the very flesh of his throat, would make him stronger as well.

They were stronger for one another.

But it sure doesn't hurt that she's physically strong in body already, and this is what is important in her helping him down that trail at double-pace compared to how they'd come up.  He's hurt seriously, and the blood that stains the front of his shirt is unmistakable.  It's beginning to seep through the rag at his throat as well.  He doesn't make her carry him, but she still keeps a shoulder against him, her flank to his, and supports what weight he gives her while ushering him back to the truck.

To his credit, he keeps up well.  To hers, she doesn't show him that the force of his Rage is unlike anything she's ever experienced from him.  She's never left a situation by his side as drained as she is now, and though his Rage is like standing and staring an unfamiliar beast with hunger and rot on its breath right in the open maw, she does not quake or shy from him.  There's no time for that, and this is certainly not the place.  The Rage conflicted with what her heart and mind told her-- that Hector was where comfort was, and this would bother her deeply if she had time to contemplate it.  But instead she maintains grim quiet save for the occasional urgent couple of words when he lags or stumbles.

They get down to the trail head, the truck parked a few spaces from another car that won't be driven by the same people that brought it there ever again, and it's here that Hector almost collapses.  Lola has to stop and bend her knees and flex the dense muscles in her thighs and calves to keep him supported, but she manages to keep him on his feet and mutter:  "We're here.  We're gonna get you healed.  Hector, come on, get in."  Her voice is still thin and strained, but all the same she pulls open the heavy metal door on the passenger side and helps support Hector on his way up into the passenger seat.  When he's there, she stands in the doorway looking like she may be sick again.  But rather than throwing up she grasps the door and truck frame in either hand and stares up at him with a haggard look on her face.  She's worried, clearly, about the blood loss.


"You need to shift.  Regenerate what you're still losing.  I'll drive us to a Theurge."


Hector Ghosh

"No--"

That word sounds like it comes out the wound in his throat instead of making it to his mouth. Blood makes it to his mouth. She can hear the wetness of his speech as it burbles against the dressing and see the pain lash at him as it vibrates through his vocal cords.

Hector flinches at his own lapse in judgment and tamps down on the urge to growl though he does end up banging the back of his head against the truck's rear window as tenses up with pain. Doesn't shout fuck! again but it's in his muscles and in the harshness of his breathing when the tension goes out of him again.

No Theurge. No driving. No idea what the 'no' is for but Hector retrieves his little medicine bag from where he left it on the floor of the passenger side of the truck and fumbles out a healing gourd with one hand. Leaves his hand pressed hard against the dressing as he crushes the gourd with his hand.

Huge gasp when the water-spirit leaves its binding and wraps itself around him. Takes away the hurt and the injury causing the hurt and seals up his throat so he can breathe again and talk again. He gulps air like he's had his head held under water all this time and it's a whooping desperate noise he makes for several seconds afterwards.


"That SUCKED!" he says. Still breathless as he stares at her from across the bench seat. She's standing outside the truck and he's never seen her wear that expression. Even when she was in the hospital. The exhaustion in her sobers him. "I'm... are you okay?"


Lola Hawkes

He says no and blood bubbles and drips from his lips when he does so.  Her jaw clenches again, to the point that it will no doubt ache when she remembers to feel pain, but she's stationary and solid in the doorway of the truck.  She'll watch as he hits his head against the glass pane of the back window that hugs the truck bench, as he growls and seizes his muscles while dealing with the pain, but she doesn't move or cast her eyes away because it's too awful to watch.  The only time she breaks her gaze from him is to glance through the windshield and behind her to make sure that no one is coming to see what the fuss is.  As she was born believing she would be, Lola is a sentry, a line of defense that refuses to be passed.

When he leans forward her attention is drawn to him again, and some of the tension written into her shoulders changes-- it doesn't go away, she doesn't relax, but there is relief there none the less.  At least Hector would be okay.

She'll watch while the gourd crushes to his throat and water joins the blood in dousing the rag and front of his shirt.  That gasp of air, to her, sounds like a breath of life confirming that someone you thought was dead is alive after all.  She swallows hard and eases up her grip on the truck frame and door.

Are you okay?

Lola doesn't say anything to confirm whether she's alright or not.  She doesn't like being in the habit of lying to him, so she won't tell him that she's just fine.  She isn't.  She's shaken beyond anything she's felt before-- even when she's had Crinos hands wrapped about her throat and body and maws snarling hot breath into her face.  Even when Hector had come back with blood coming from his eyes and nose and ears because he had actually died.  She's not had her world tipped around like this since she was told she would be Kinfolk and not Garou-- and even that was based in reality, it was just a difficult pill to swallow.

So, instead of lying, she moves her hands from the metal of the truck and instead places her left hand on the rough fabric of the truck seat that Hector sat at, about where the lumbar would be.  Her right hand holds onto his knee that is closest to her, and she lays her head on his thigh.  For the height that the lift places the truck at, she doesn't need to bend down to accomplish this-- it's an easy position that doesn't require stooping or bending.  Here, he'll feel her shudder hard and hear it in her exhaled breath.


"What was that?"  She asks him after a few seconds of just being still like this with her eyes left unfocused on the glove box.


Hector Ghosh

He doesn't remember that he fell down hard in the darkness and left Lola standing on the path without any idea what was happening. That when he fell and that thing overtook him it swallowed up his mind as well as his body. If he had stayed in control of himself he could have told her what he thought was going on.

And he doesn't remember how she had to wrestle him to the ground to keep him from fighting her. If the creature that took him over knew his body came with different settings it had not availed itself of them. That it had to share space with Gaia's fury must have bought them some time.

If their positions were reversed Hector would not have known what to do either. As much as he cherishes and uses the advice she gives him and the perspective she adds when he's considering problems plaguing the Nation Lola and he are equals in his mind. They have held their roles for the same amount of time and in their human skins they fight just as hard in combat. She's a certain shot even when she's so rattled she's barely staving off emptying her stomach.

Even though he could have survived a gunshot to blast the thing out of him Lola could not bring herself to do it. She felt the rumbling of another consciousness in her man's body and felt him grow cold as he tried and failed to fight it. Her voice was the anchor that kept him from going away from her forever.

And he doesn't remember.

She stands firm and immovable outside the truck as he recovers. In time his gasping slows to panting and he starts to wipe his skin clean of the blood and the dirt. So much blood he looks as if he bathed in it. Most of it caught in his sweatshirt.

Lola rests her head on his thigh. It quiets the last of his jangling energy. Hector looks down at her and the chasm between parts he remembers crows up at him as he gazes into it. His right hand is clean. He rests it on her head where she lost the baseball cap and eases his fingers through her hair.

"I don't know," he says. Does not sound worried by it now that the darkness has gone. "It didn't have a scent. I could smell death on it, but I couldn't smell <i>it</i>, you know? Might've been a vengeful Wyldling. They can mess with how you see things sometimes."

Or something the Garou have not encountered before that tore a hole between its part of the Deep Umbra and the Realm and let itself through. Lola is shaking though. Drained like he's never seen her drained. He doesn't want to scare her so he keeps that supposition to himself.

"Babe, the last thing I remember is I was holding your hand and... telling you the same thing I just told you. When I came to--"

He came to with her atop him. Her voice pleading him back up into the darkness. Something inside of him tearing its way out again. That wasn't when he came to his senses. That was when he came back from wherever that thing had buried him.


"--it was light out again. How long was I out?"


Lola Hawkes

How long was I out?

The question hangs unanswered for a moment, and Lola is still with her head rested on her mate's leg.  Her cap was snatched up and shoved hastily into the back of her jeans (that stretchy waistband came in handy for something, at least).  The gun was picked up and shoved into her back pocket, where it still was, covered only by the length of the sweatshirt that she wore.  She had the forethought to put the safety back on, at least.  She's heard too many stories about idiots shooting themselves in the hip, leg, groin, or ass because they tried to pocket a gun without remembering the safety.

The shaking hands had stilled for they could now rest and had no tasks ahead of them.  Hector's throat wasn't a fountain of blood any longer.  The gourd had done its job in mending the tear in his flesh and, one assumed, replenishing his supply of lost blood.  His fingers threaded through her hair-- her ponytail had largely fallen out from the struggle and the elastic had hastily been jerked out of her hair when she found it to be more of an inconvenience than help on their way down the trail.  She considered the question, recapped the mayhem in her mind, and finally provided him with the best guess she could provide.

"Probably about seven to ten minutes, I think.  It felt fast, but time was doing what it pleased."

Her voice is still thin and tired, but it was at least more calmed, steadier than it was previously.

"You'd said that you smelled something bad and everything went dark.  I felt like someone was trying to throw me off a building-- gravity flipped itself around in my head, and you dropped like a sack of bricks.  I found this... slug thing attached to the back of your neck and yanked it off, but I guess it already deposited that thing in you.  You--..." she struggled for a second trying to separate Hector from that thing that inhabited his body in her mind.  This was the reason she wouldn't use the gun on him.  "--it started to take you over, started to laugh and stand up.  So I pinned it down-- it tried to make you reach for my gun but I kept ya down.  It wanted me to hurt you, but we fought and we won.  You banished that thing-- it burst outta your throat in this gush of hot air and blood, and I guess found a physical body for me to fight it in instead, since you weren't letting it use yours anymore."

She's no Galliard, but she tells the story as she remembers it.  More details will likely come when time has passed.  Tomorrow she'll be able to tell a better story, when she isn't still shaken from the experience.  For now, though, she moves her hand from his knee and settles it overtop of his own.  She's still like this for a second, and hefts a deep sigh before saying in a low, quiet voice.


"We should go."


Hector Ghosh

Hearing Lola fill in the dead space where his recollection cuts out is akin to listening to details of a blackout. Though he remembers nothing and cannot force himself to remember anything a slow trickling of shame comes into him at the thought that he had tried to attack her.

It. It used his body to try and attack her.
A hard shiver goes through his body.

Later they can talk about what happened and speculate on what the thing actually might have been. With the portal in the basement of Cold Crescent and his own knowledge of the fact that some things in the universe do not actually belong to the Triat there is room for them to learn from this. But as Hector calms after that long trek back to the truck and the healing he so rarely endures because he so rarely weathers such bad injuries he starts to realize Lola is not full of swagger and celebration as she tends to be after they survive a hunt.

The thing left no body. It turned to smoke and vanished. Lola's hand rests overtop his and she cannot see him frown and cant his head at her. They should go.

Now that the danger has passed the park is peaceful again. Birds chirp around them. Nothing of civilization but the rush of traffic in the distance. Hector slides his hand from beneath hers and hooks it beneath her chin to lift her face from his leg. Slides himself down out of the truck so they're standing together beside the truck.

He'd asked if she was okay already. She isn't injured. He still has streaks of blood on the palm of his left hand and his face and neck are splattered in gore. All he wants to do before he takes her home is look at her.

It doesn't occur to him that his Rage is impacting her as it would not on another day. No cognizance of how drained she is or how hot it burns in him.

"I'm so glad you were here," he says.

That bloody hand rests on her hip while the clean right hand moves over her face. Fingertips graze her brow and cheek, thumb smooths dirt and tears she never shed from her cheekbone. It travels down her neck and across her collarbone. As he reads the beat of her heart through her breastbone and clothing Hector draws a deep breath. His eyes shadow the trail paved by his hand already.

Hector rests his temple against hers and slides the pack off her shoulder and onto the floorboard behind her. His arm wraps around her lower back and guides her in against him. A sigh leaves his unscarred throat when the top of her belly meets the base of his and he locks his other arm around her upper back, wrist to her shoulder blade so he does not smear his blood across her back.


"I'll drive. You should rest."


Lola Hawkes

It's been witnessed before by both of them throughout their lives in the Nation-- when a Kinfolk cannot withstand the brunt of a Garou nearby.  They all react differently, in their own ways, but the sum of the response is always to either try and put distance or to tremble and grow ill if they refuse to space themselves from the Rage that beats against them.

Lola is no normal Kinfolk, though.  She withstands Rage like other Kinfolk cannot and do not.  She doesn't bend or break to anything-- hell, he saw it while he was still trying to push his way out of the bleary red-with-pain-and-Rage state that he awoke in.  His woman didn't stop to question the beast behind her, but upon hearing steps on the ground she'd spun about and thrown herself into the fray anyways.  She hadn't even bothered to make a grab for the gun first-- that had been a second thought at best, and one that had saved her life, possibly both of theirs tonight.

So even though his Rage threatens to burn the air from her lungs before she has a chance to pull the oxygen from it into her bloodstream, she doesn't pull away from him.  When he lifts her head from his leg and slides out of the truck to join her, she doesn't back away to give him space.  When he touches her face she doesn't cringe, and when he wraps her into a hug she doesn't whimper in fear.  Lola's too proud a creature for any of that, and trusts Hector too much to let the force of him terrify her (or to let that show, at least).  She'd promised him that she didn't worry that he would do her harm, and she intended to make that abundantly clear even here and now.

All the same, though, when he wraps her up in his arms and holds her close, a shudder wracks through her body, caused by a suppressed urge to rip herself away from him and find air to breathe once more.  In defiance of her own instinct she pushes her face into the front of his shoulder and nods it there when he says that he will drive, and she should rest.

"Good," she tells him.  "I want sleep more now than ever."


His blood has dried onto her face, she didn't bother to wipe it away apart from what was needed to clear her eyes, nostrils, and mouth.  Some of it flakes onto his sweater during her time wrapped up in him.  When he releases her, Lola slips around him and climbs into the passenger side of the truck.  She'll be quiet all the way home, and nod off with her head against the passenger window.  It will take her until later that evening to find a shaky confidence once more.  By tomorrow morning, though, she'll be right as rain.


Hector Ghosh

If Hector were a more ignorant creature he would have made nothing of the stiffness in her form when he presses himself to her. That Rage grown up in him is not driving him to horrible violent thing. The moon is thin enough to cut through that. It gives him a violence though. Appetites he is still learning how to control.

He grows stronger with each month he fights along side her. Each month he shares his life with her and wakes up in bed next to her and sets about the task of readying their home for their child both of them grow stronger. Lola holds esteem in the Nation that she did not have before the summer. Hector is almost ready to call himself a Fostern.

As he grows into his experience and his stature Hector has learned to stop and read a situation before he barrels into it. This will help him to read people as well as he reads history. It helps him tell that Lola is wary of that monstrousness in him. That she's exhausted.

That it scares her when he realizes she does not want him near her and a shudder of suppressed anger courses through him. He lets go of her and his nostrils flare when she climbs into the passenger seat. Alone in the sunlight and the clear air with his blood sticky and pungent on him Hector decides he doesn't want to wear it anymore. He peels it inside out and over his head. Wipes his face and hands with it. Pitches it hard into the back of the truck like the thing itself has offended him.

Lola hears the impact through the frame of the truck's bed. He burned his excess Rage to throw it but that won't help them on the ride home. The Rage Luna gives him on bright nights burns at her. She sleeps but she sleeps curled up against the door. Hector buckles his seatbelt so the human lawgivers will not pull them over and he drives with the radio off and his mouth shut.

He keeps his hands to himself the entire way home.

When they reach the end of the drive he kills the engine but does not get out of the truck. The journey back to the Homestead forced him shut off his mind so he could focus on not speeding or colliding with anyone else. As the engine ticks in the cold he gnaws a thumbnail and stares through the windshield and lets the weight of what just happened settle on him. Then he gets over it. Takes the keys out of the ignition and lets himself out of the truck.


"I'm gonna get in the shower," he says over the top of the truck as he shuts the door. His boots crunch the gravel as he walks towards the front door. "Are you super freaked out, or can I... I mean I can sleep on the couch if you are. I won't take it personal."


Lola Hawkes

What sleep she caught in the truck was restless and intermittent.  When Hector glances to check on her, the seldom moments that he might, he'll find her knees turned toward the door, shoulder tucked against it and arms curled around her torso and chin tucked down.  There's a soft frown creased on her face when she's actually unconscious, and a harder one when she's half-awake but keeping her eyes closed anyways.

Thankfully, the trip from the hiking trails outside of Boulder back to the Homestead is a shorter one than driving all the way from Denver proper.  Time slips by, and Lola comes to with the truck rocking on its squeaking suspension over dirt ruts carved into the earth to make a haphazard 'driveway' up to the shed that sits beside/behind the house.  By the time Hector jerks the gears and pushes the parking break into place so that he may kill the engine, Lola is already upright.  While the engine ticked quietly, settling from running for so long, Lola dragged her fingers through her hair and scrubbed at her forehead and worked to pull herself together.

She'd hoped that dozing during the drive would help replenish her, but she felt just as worn as before.

Her head turns like she's going to say something, but the keys jangle and Hector is climbing down out of the truck.  The Kinswoman grasped at the fabric of her pants, just above the knees, squeezing nad wringing the denim for a moment in a fleeting second of frustration.  What the hell is wrong with you?, she was asking herself.  This was an unfamiliar situation to be in.  Hector's Rage has never burned her before, even while he was bellowing with it under the light of the full moon.

The moment passes, she hefts a sigh, and Lola climbs down out of the truck as well.  She's trailing about seven feet behind Hector or so when he called over his shoulder, asking if he should sleep on the couch.  Lola's steps paused and a spasm of guilt crossed over her face, gone just as fast as it had arrived.  It was replaced by a worn resolve, like rock that has been half-eroded by centuries of river water and rains.  She'll double the pace to catch up to him, though her motions are stiff and she can't do anything to change that.

"Don't encourage this bullshit by catering to it.  I've... I don't know what the fuck's going on, I know you're pickin' up on it.  But there's no fuckin' reason for it.  You're not going to anything to me, I know that for a damn fact, so don't hide away and shelter me from somethin' I've got no reason to be tense about.  I'm just.... worn.  I guess."


She doesn't reach out to stop him, doesn't put a hand on his arm or shirt to pull him back and stop him from walking away.  But she does catch up to his side to walk by his elbow, even though her heart hops once-twice-thrice before finding its rhythm once more.


Hector Ghosh

"Yeah, well, I don't know about you..."

When they reach the front door Hector opens it and holds it for her but he can do little about the fact that an unpleasantness comes into his stomach when he sees the way she keeps a sort of distance from him. How she doesn't want to have her hands on him now.

And she's seen him do impersonations of human girls before. Glen and Corey were fond of hitting the bars when they would roll into town. Boulder was full of vacationing young co-eds with morals made looser by alcohol and they would go there all the time to hit the bars. The party scene in Littleton wasn't anything to write home about and they avoided Denver because Corey and Hector started too many bar fights when they went out in cities.

But Corey and Hector scared a certain caliber of human. He liked to bare his teeth and tense up like he'd been hit by a downed electric wire when imitating what the average girl was like.

Lola is not at all like those empty-headed high-voiced tittering stupid college girls that Corey liked to push Hector towards when they would go out. If Hector wanted to get laid he went to a library. That's where all the smart girls went. That's how Corey met his mate. They were in the goddamn library. Just so happened she was Kinfolk.

Anyway. Hector lets her go in ahead of him. Stripped out of his sweatshirt she can see the low halo of blood oozed into his undershirt and smell the sweat dried on his arms. The muscles in his upper body. She's right to be afraid of him but they'd been over this before. How she trusts him.

As he walks from the front door to the bathroom he continues ranting. It's clear he's going straight for the bathroom.

"... but I'm not a huge fan of forcing myself on people when they don't want me around. I just... I'm freaked out."

If she does not follow him his voice grows distant but he does not close the door. It bounces off the walls once he reaches it and she can hear him lean against the sink and start to undo his laces.

"Alright? I'm the one..." A boot hits the tile. "You know what? Never mind. In here talking to myself like some kind of freaking lunatic..."


Thunk.


Lola Hawkes

The tension that rides on her mate's shoulders, the edge and grind that she can feel to his teeth without needing to see them or watch him actually clench his jaw has Lola uncomfortable and bothered, and the sensation mingled unpleasantly with the stiff-spine cold-sweat discomfort that the Rage that lives in his bones was causing her as well.  Still, she won't hold her breath when she passes by him as he holds the door open, and she is very conscious of her body language when she passes him as well.  She doesn't touch at her stomach, because she knows that the gesture might come across as protective and sting at his heart.  She doesn't shift her stride to give him a wider berth while he holds the door open, but she doesn't brush familiarly against him either.

She's stooped down near the door, unlacing her boots, when Hector strides past and into the bathroom.  Lola's got one hand on the wall to help with balance, the other working the laces, and she looks up at his back while he walks past, still talking as he goes.

She's been frowning since he came back too, and the expression didn't seem close to relaxing any time soon.  That she was getting his back and a solid understanding of how her discomfort with his presence was impacting him did anything but help soften the scowl.  But it isn't an angry look near so much as it's pained-- guilty, bothered, unsure, tired.

He's thumping about and talking to himself and the bathroom tiles, thumping boots onto the floor.  As he trails off accusing himself of sounding like a lunatic, Lola appears standing in the hall, just outside the doorway.  A shoulder brushes against the door frame, but she doesn't stand solidly in the doorway like she's going to make a door of herself, not as she usually does if she's going to trap him there and make conversations happen.  Her arms are wrapped about her lower rip cage and her expression is inwardly disgusted now.  Apologetic without understanding how to be with her words.

"I...,"  She starts, and fails.  She doesn't understand completely what is different about today from other days that they come back from battle, bloodied and exhausted.  She'll blame it on the fact that they couldn't call this thing the Wyrm, on the fact that she was up against an opponent that she couldn't actually hurt, on the fact that Hector's throat had burst and tried to bleed him out while she half-staggered half-carried him down a hiking trail to the truck.

"I want you around, Hector.  I don't know what's happening here...," and she makes a tight circular motion in front of her chest before folding her arms again.  "But...,"  and, again, words fail.

So she settles for a sigh and hanging her head a little, just for a minute, before saying in a low voice.

"I love you."
It sounds like surrender.

"I'm laying back down."


Hector Ghosh

Of all the things he struggles with the most these days the thing that causes him the most grief is the fact that he does not know how to internalize the good things that he's done in his short time in the Nation. Doesn't mean he dwells on all the bad things he's done or that have happened. Just means he doesn't feel like he's earned anything.

It's basic psychology and the young man is still young by human standards. By Garou standards he has learned his way around and he knows right from wrong and he knows his auspice role and he knows it well. His cohorts know when he hears about something he will craft an entertaining if not stirring tale exalting those who took part in the story.

They see him with Lola and some folks can't figure out how on earth that happened. Lola is so wild and rough. An untamed creature that did not want to be tamed. Some folks see them together and they think it makes sense. Most folks don't. Hector is not with her because he worries about what folks think.

His mess of a head is what kept him from being with her sooner but they had to learn this on their own. They have to learn a lot of things on their own. How to deal with the discomfort of his Rage butted up against her exhaustion is one of those things because he will have to deal with the discomfort of his Rage butting up against their children's fragile and untempered spines.

Hector doesn't know how to be a parent any more than he knows how to be a lover or a life-mate. Any more than he knew how to be a Galliard or a Cub. He doesn't know shit but he's stronger and smarter than he gives himself credit for being.

It does lash at him that Lola was not comforted by his presence. In the past she has held him when he was moments earlier bleeding and screaming and moments from frenzying. In the past she has not had to fight so hard to protect him or herself.

He's trying to cut her some slack. Look: he does not turn on the shower so he will have something to do besides stand and bear witness to her uncertainty. With his feet bare and his shirt off and his hair down Hector stands blood-stained and dark-eyed but alive. He listens to her.

And then he shows off the fact that one of the first things he learned how to do during their conjoined guitar-and-Spanish lessons was roll his r's. Even in the midst of this he's trying to keep them from spiraling into despair.

"Mi amor, mi amor, I'm not angry at you," he says. His voice is soft but not saccharine and a flicker of what wants to be a reassuring smile comes across his face but Hector does not want to show her his teeth. "It's okay. We're okay. You saved both of our asses today and you're pregnant as hell. If you weren't worn out I'd be scared of you."

He wants to go to her more than he wants anything else right now but Hector makes himself stay where he is.


"I'll be in in a few minutes."


Lola Hawkes

Look at him, trying.
Look at them, trying together.

Hector doesn't lash his anger at her for not knowing how to handle it.  He's better able to break down the reasons behind his fury than he used to be, to segment them and make reason of them to some degree and prevent himself from shouting and pushing away until he's better able to understand it.  And even when he doesn't completely understand what has him riled up, or why Lola is being the way she is that gets him there in the first place, he's still much better about setting that aside, taking a breath, and giving the leeway that they need from time to time.

Lola, in return, does not snap her teeth at her own frustration and vent it at Hector.  A year ago if she were in this same exact position she would be pacing angrily and yelling that she can't help how tight her chest feels and that she hates it precisely as much as he probably does but there's nothing that they can do so he should just get the hell over it.  She doesn't remove herself from the house to wait for that temper to pass and her resolve to build itself up again.  Another lesson in being a good Kinfolk is knowing to weather the storm:  when and how both.

So Hector stands with his lengthy hair down about his face, with blood on his bare chest and sweat salting his skin.  He smiles without flashing teeth that seem so much more dangerous and worrisome to her today and reassures her that he's not angry.  He brushes his words up with humor, and even if it the jokes themselves don't lighten the mood automatically the fact that he's making the effort and showing that he won't be holding a grudge against her helps immensely.

So it's Lola's turn to help.

He wants very much to go to her, she can see it in how his weight shifts forward but his shoulders and chest stay back anyways, how his hands stay at his sides instead of reaching toward her but are disciplined in doing so.  Lola helps by bridging that gap for him.  She has to take a breath and square her shoulders, steel herself for what she's about to do, but her motions are smooth and certain and her steps are slow, but they do not hesitate when she walks into the bathroom and reaches up.  Perhaps it's how weary she is, but her smile is softer than it's been when she looks up at him.  There's no doubt that there's pride there when she reaches up to touch the side of his face, hand cupping his jaw and cheek.  She could have physically blasted the thing within him out of its host, but he had forced it out himself and not put that burden upon her.

She leans up and kisses his mouth, and while her lips are soft they're still and not opening to encourage heat or passion.  It's a gesture of love, plain and simple.

"Alright," she says after leaning back again.

She doesn't have to tell him that she loves him a second time, she doesn't have to bid him any kind of farewell.  She steps backwards for a few short slides of her stocking feet on the tile floor, but remembers what point she's trying to make and deliberately gives him her back (see?  i trust you) when she exits the bathroom.


He'll find her on top of the bed's quilt and comforter with the hoodie discarded but the rest of her clothes still on when he's done with his shower.


Hector Ghosh

Once in their lives has he yelled at her the way his Rage stokes him to yell at everyone all of the time. If it stokes at him now his intelligence and his love for her tamp it down but it is never an easy thing. Only something that becomes easier with time and practice. Even the tricksters among them feel that raw-nerve tension in them when it comes for them the first time. The tricksters among them are blessed with the least of it that they may test the rest of them and walk among the humans and be teachers in way even the oral traditions do not paint them as teachers.

The ghosts of his dead packmates do not haunt him or visit him at times like this. When he thinks of them it is a subconscious thing. Nearly six moons have gone since Glen and Maria fell in Winnipeg and Corey walked away from him and Tamsin. Twelve almost, a full year, since something grabbed up Willow in the Umbra and the kind-faced gentle-souled creature so strange and so much like a spirit herself disappeared. It would be an easy bit of recovery if they could tell themselves Willow had just gone to be with her brethren. That she was never really body at all.

No point thinking of what life would be like if Glen and Maria were still alive and Corey still leading. He knows because he lived three years with them that they would be traveling and screwing around and solving problems at each Sept they visited before leaving again. That he may have grown himself or grown distant from them. But Glen and Maria were wanderers and wanderers do not gain renown in the Nation's eyes. Their people value loyalty as much as they value valor and wisdom.

Yet he knows what Maria would think if she could see this. How her pride would glow knowing her sister was finding her strength not in the Change but in being the daughter and the sister and the mate of monsters.

It's the same pride that lights Hector when she comes toward him and brings her shaky hand to his face. Hard to separate the Rage from the male but she cannot do that any more than she could separate that thing from her man by leveling a weapon at him. She had to call out to him that he would know she was still there. Help me, she had to say.

His eyes close with the comfort of her hand on him and he bows his head to meet her mouth when it finds his. Their throats are raw from acid and blood both but that is not why he does not seek to deepen the kiss.

As he told her, as he promised, Hector showers. He brushes his teeth under the rushing water and he shampoos his hair. Shaves off his beard for the first time in three moons. Goes down to tend to the furnace. They need it glowing but not roaring. The weather will soon turn on them again.

When he comes to her twenty minutes after she leaves the bathroom he comes to her quietly and wearing a t-shirt and a pair of boxers that he grabbed down from a shelf over the washing machine.

He does not stare at her as he crosses to the bed to climb on behind her. She feels him hesitate before he lies down and molds himself to her. An arm cradles her shoulders and locks a pair of their hands together over her heart. The other comes overtop her hip that his hand may find the swell of her belly.

His Rage is hot at her back and it is no easy thing to sleep with a monster's arms around her. Few things in their lives are easy. But they rest together and he breathes slow and easy. If anything came through the door to attack them they would end it together.

The fighting is done this day and Hector holds Lola until she falls asleep.