Hector Ghosh
The driving would have been less stressful with two people. Lola doesn't have a second person making the drive from Manhattan to San Jose though. She has a tightly-wound Galliard who isn't looking forward to what is going to happen when they get from Manhattan to San Jose and has difficulty with most of the concepts related to driving.
They made it through Pennsylvania and across Ohio on the first day but Hector had the second driving shift and for some reason or another refused to stop in Ohio. Something to do with the poor-lit roads or the snow. Something kept him going until they were in Indiana and only then did he concede to stop at a gas station and load up on food they could cook in the dark on the side of the road. They slept in the back of the Subaru and Hector kept his arm around her the entire night.
The second day they pushed through Indiana and Illinois and into Iowa before Hector switched spots with her. Took them the rest of his shift to get through Iowa and it felt as though they were never going to leave Nebraska. Hector started bitching loud about Nebraska after about two hours but with nothing to be done for it he just drove. Kept driving until Wyoming welcomed them and exhaustion threatened to swallow him.
On the third day the plains turned to desert and the city skylines turned to mountain ranges. Both of them without realizing relaxed with the rarity of passing another vehicle on the road. Seeing nothing on either side of the car but wildlife and rock formations. They enjoyed it long enough for Hector to relax before taking over to finish driving through Utah and Nevada. He didn't want to linger too long in Nevada.
Signs kept pointing out the distance of the vehicle to Las Vegas and Hector kept saying "Yep, I know!" or "Nope, still not interested!" like the signs had any sort of interest in their patronage. They crossed the California border late and they could have kept going all the way to his parents' house. Nearly four days had passed since he told his mother they would be there.
Since that phone call upset both siblings but the newly-claimed kinswoman hugged her little brother anyway and made him linger in the corridor long enough to make sure they had entered their phone numbers proper into each others' phones.
("Don't give Mom this number," he had told her. "I mean it, it's a prepaid phone, she'll eat up all my minutes and think aliens abducted me mid-conversation or something and we'll have to start this whole thing over again.")
Hector steered the car into a state park and they bedded down there that night. He was tense and but fell asleep almost as soon as Lola laid her head on his shoulder. It was warmer near Lake Tahoe than it was near any of the Great Lakes they passed. When they woke in the morning Hector kissed her light at first and then deeper. Fingers in her hair and warm hand holding onto her hip.
They ate breakfast in the forest the morning of the 28th. They were 220 miles from San Jose and Hector was nervous but he ate anyway. He wasn't exactly wasting away but neither did he have extra padding either. His clavicles and ribs were beginning to show through his skin and the knobs of his wrists were sharper. He was burning off too much energy worrying about what was going to happen.
It had become a topic they just avoided because the stress of driving was enough to contend with without getting Hector needlessly riled up talking about his parents. Nothing they'd been able to come up with yet had felt proper to him. Hector is an honorable wolf. Lying doesn't come easy to him but they both know as real as they know anything else right now: he cannot reveal himself to his father.
"What am I gonna tell my dad?" he asked as they walked the woods after breaking their fast. "Why did I tell Helen about Lara and Naima? I should've lied. I can't tell him I ran off to go 'find myself' or whatever if she told Cassandra and Cassandra told them someone kidnapped me."
Lola Hawkes
The journey was long and arduous, and involved a lot of time spent cramped up in the Subaru. When Lola was driving she switched between listening to music and talking with Hector and convening with her own thoughts if she was tired of the music and Hector was asleep. When it was Hector's turn to drive Lola would switch between keeping him company in the passenger seat and resting laid down across the back. When they stopped she would make a point of using the facilities and stocking up on plenty of water and some caffeine to help the both through the darker hours when they were more accustomed to sleeping.
When the Rocky Mountains greeted them, some of the tension written in Lola's displeased face had ebbed away. She was more comfortable with the desert than she was with all of the trees and grass and fields. When they finally found California (which she swears to god took forever, and has promised herself never to visit Nebraska or Iowa again), they got far enough to find a state park that they could bunk down in. That night, in their blanket nest in the back of the Forester, she rested more comfortably than she had since she first reunited with Hector out in North Carolina.
The next morning, after their stress and energy was temporarily ebbed by activities in the back of the car, they prepared to drive the rest of the way into San Jose and finally reunite Hector with his parents. Lola was astounded by how warm the weather was-- the radio told her it was going to be up close to the 70s. She'd dressed herself in a navy blue dress that was a nicer cut than the simpler ones she defaulted to-- clingy and wrapped with a sash tied in a bow off to the left, just an inch or two below her bust line. Knee-length hem, and three quarters sleeves meant she could be cool without feeling too exposed to the cool but pleasant morning air. She was walking on the same sneakers that she'd brought along with her for more comfortable wear, but planned to switch to the sandals when they hit San Jose.
As they walked, Lola was combing her fingers through her long, dense hair and trying to work it into a ponytail more attractive than the functional knot she usually had it in at the base of her skull. He struggled to think of what to tell his dad, even still, and Lola offered what thoughts she had on the matter.
"Call Helen and see what she's told anyone. Go from there."
Her tone of voice was matter of fact, like she was presenting him with a simple solution to a problem he was over-complicating (you don't need to find a bottle opener, this is a screw top bottle).
"If she didn't say anything about it, stick with 'finding yourself'. If she did, find out how much she said and then work from there. They could have gotten in an accident that you survived, or you could have escaped a compound, or you could've just finally overpowered them and fought them off." She cut a glance over to Hector and flashed him a toothy smirk. "They'll believe that you could fight your captors off. Look at you."
Hector Ghosh
"Yeah, I know. I'm pretty ripped."
The ease with which she smirks and hits him with a joke keeps him from getting too wound up. The warmth and the denseness of the trees helps. This is the closest he's been to home since those two cub finders picked him up in the parking lot and knocked him out in the back of their car.
Barely staving off panic and fits of anger is making this journey more difficult than it would have been if Hector were assured of this path and knew exactly what he was going to say. Not only is he returning from virtual death to reclaim his family but he's introducing Lola to them. They can survive without help from his parents or his sisters but they can survive without a lot of things. Doesn't mean they ought to.
They tromp on for a few mecore seconds as Hector focuses on just breathing instead of letting his heart race and take his wits with it. He looks over at her and the dress she's worn and reaches out to take her hand.
Hector still talks to her belly in the morning. Even with all of the stress coursing through him he has talked to her belly. This morning he told the baby they were going to meet her grandparents.
I'm really sorry, but Grandpa gets a little loud when he talks to your father. It doesn't mean he's an asshole. He just doesn't know how to talk to people he cares about without yelling. Besides, Baby, your father is a pain in the ass. Ask your mom one day. You know. When you have ears. And can speak English. That might be the first thing we need to worry about, I don't think you have ears yet.
His free hand rests on Lola's belly now in the moment when he decides to listen to her and just call his sister. Then it takes out the phone and finds Helen's number and dials it.
Turns out Helen didn't tell Cassandra much of anything. Only that he was on his way out to California and Mom and Dad were all worked up but it was going to be fine. She didn't want to involve Cassandra more than she had to be and Cassandra didn't want to be more involved than she had to be.
"She didn't say anything to Cass about me being a werewolf," he says to Lola after he claps shut the phone. "Weird. I would've thought that'd be the first thing out of her mouth."
And then he figures he'd better call his mother before they head her way. This time his father doesn't answer the phone. He's in surgery today. Hector keeps the conversation short anyway. Listening to his mother cry puts him in a foul mood.
---
Although Hector drove the second shift last night he is the one who climbs into the driver's seat when it's time to leave the lake. It's three hours and change to San Jose and traffic is getting thick with everyone back to work. They've missed rush hour for not getting on the road until after ten o'clock in the morning. It will be well into the 70s by the time they make it to his parents'.
Hector follows the speed limit. He's really not in a hurry to get out there and she can see him reminding himself to relax and not strangle the steering wheel. No music on the stereo. Music gets him too wound up.
Three hours pass and then they're traveling through the eastern limits of San Jose and Hector is frowning at the scenery. Most of it he recognizes for nothing much has changed in four years and once they get into the suburbs and the tract housing Lola may have no difficulty imagining Hector trying to grow up in a place like this. He may very well have wound up running away even if he wasn't destined to become a Gaian warrior.
"Please don't let my dad be home," he starts chanting as they turn onto his parents' street. "Please don't let my dad be home. Please don't let my dad be--"
The driveway in front of the huge stucco house is empty save for a small station wagon. An instant weight leaves Hector's body and he nearly runs up onto the lawn for taking his hands off the steering wheel before he's aimed the Subaru in behind it.
"HE'S NOT HOME." He rests his hands on his head. "Holy shit I almost had a stroke..."
Let's get the car in the driveway before we start celebrating too hard, there, Ghosh.
Lola Hawkes
Earlier in the morning, when the pair had walked through the dense trees of a California state park, they'd paused and stood together. Hector was holding a phone to his ear, and his other hand had rested on the swell of her stomach. Lola listened in on the conversation but let her eyes roam. She was looking at the trees and enjoying the warmer climate, even if all of the green was strangely unseasonable for her. She left one hand to rest with fingers interlaced with his and waited. When he was done and they both had enough of the fresh air to tide them over, the pair loaded into the car and made their way on west.
She was quiet along with him for the most part, particularly when the traffic started to crowd the road. Lola simply looked out the window and sipped water every so often. At least three times she anxiously checked her reflection in the visor mirror and two of those times she fussed with her hair, scowling the whole while like she hated the notion of vanity itself. She stared out the windows with more intent when they found their way off the freeway and into the streets, as though she could glean something more about Hector's origins from the street signs and window art.
As they'd come into the neighborhood and Hector seemed ready to strangle the material right off the steering wheel, Lola was sitting bolt upright in her seat with her knees together and hands wrung together like fists mating, rested (if you could call it that) in her lap. When he started repeating to himself a plea that his father not be there, Lola gritted her teeth and wrinkled her nose in some closed-lipped and silent snarl, like she was preparing for a battle or bracing herself for a storm.
Then rejoice cut the air and the Subaru parked itself in a driveway, but not before almost veering onto the lawn first-- something that had Lola pressing a foot into the floor and grabbing the frame of her door and frowning at him.
But they were safe, and Hector had his hands on his head and looked relieved but at the same time wild-eyed and facing some new hurdle in this journey. So Lola took a breath for calming herself and leaned across the center console to wrap one hand around the left side of his head (as she was coming to him from his right) and rest her brow to his temple. She'd hold him there like that, for a moment, then kiss near his cheekbone and lean back away. If he tried to seize a kiss that was deeper she would break away quickly for concern that his mother was going to rush the car or be watching them intently from the window.
Once she's leaned back, Lola lifted her chin and looked at Hector for a second before asking: "How do I look?"
If it weren't for the fact that she'd asked with such a scowl on her face... The dress is nice and passed as dressy enough, thanks to the sash and how neatly it tied. Bare faced, with her hair in a ponytail that sat more dominantly to the left than centered. The house seemed nice, but she was thankful that it wasn't some impressive sprawling estate like what Thomas or Calden lived in. Lola didn't quite understand how much money doctors and surgeons actually earned, nor did she entirely care to grasp the cost of living difference out in California. Needless to say, she nearly had a fit over the cost of a bottle of milk at a gas station.
Hector Ghosh
It's moments like this when Hector is soothed by her presence instead of aroused by it. If she ever had doubts about the longevity of their relationship the quickness and ease with which he transitioned from a honeymoon phase to a nesting phase might be some consolation. He had answered the matter of her not using birth control with a joke but it's like he'd told her: he loved her that night. It's only natural that he loved the baby the second he knew it was there because he loved Lola.
So he lets her kiss his face without turning and setting upon her. As many times as he tried to remove the dress while they were out in the woods earlier he kept his hands to himself the entire way here and now he's looking through the windshield at the two-story house in front of them.
The yard is small and dying. The flowerbeds have not been touched in years and the garage windows are dusty. The curtains in the front windows don't move while Hector stares at them and when Lola leans back he allows himself to look at her. Really look at her. His expression softens even before she asks but when she does ask he barks out a surprised laugh.
At the base of this entire trip is the fact that she has to meet his parents. That Hector trusts that once they get through this he will have his family back and they will still love and support him and they will love and want to support Lola.
That laugh isn't mocking or stalling. He's just never known her to care about her appearance. That she wants to look nice in front of his parents -
"You're beautiful," he says as he picks up her left hand. The one that would bear a cheap engagement ring if they were human. "You're glowing, baby. You look amazing."
He kisses a trail up the back of her hand until he flips it over to anoint her wrist. By then he's calmed himself down enough to open the door. As soon as their doors clap shut again it's going to alert his mother to their presence. He isn't ready but he's never going to be ready.
"C'mon," he says right before he gets out. "Let's go scare the shit out of my mom."
The curtain tugs back as their hands part and Hector steps out of the Forester. A brief flash of a short dark-haired woman in black-rimmed glasses. They only have about five seconds before the front door opens and she appears in the frame of the glass storm door.
Hector's mother is 5'2" in her bare feet. She wears jeans and a sweatshirt despite the heat. Her hair is tied up in a topknot. Clearly she was both expecting them and didn't have the energy or attention to get herself dolled up for company. Her frame is small to begin with but fighting off grief while hunting for answers has whittled her down to just about nothing.
And now here's the son she last saw when he was seventeen years old standing in her driveway. Gone through puberty and Hell both from the looks of him. Hasn't cut his mane and has facial hair he never used to be able to grow. She must be on some heavy goddamn anxiolytics. The sight of him has her dark eyes welling up again and she steps out through the storm door like she's stepping out into blinding lights.
"Hector?" she asks.
"Hi Mom," he says.
"Hector?"
"Mom, please don't cry."
"I can't help it..."
Hector has to clamp down his own jaws to keep his Rage from flaring at the sound of her voice gone tight and keening. He steps forward towards her slow like he expects her to quail the way his sister quailed. But his mother teaches English in a public middle school. She isn't afraid of anything anymore.
"It's okay," he says.
When she bursts into tears he holds her up. Rests his chin atop her head when she latches her hands onto the fabric covering his back and rocks her like that's going to do anything to calm her. The Rage doesn't even seem to touch her. She's got too many other concerns right now.
"Mom, stop, it's okay."
She stops. Eventually. But for nearly two minutes Hector holds her up and after two minutes he starts to look around at the street with wide eyes. Like he's expecting an FBI van to roll up any second.
Lola Hawkes
While Hector laughed, Lola looked momentarily flustered. She cared how she was first presented to Hector's parents, more than she did when she first met Helen even. Siblings were incredibly different from parents in how you're introduced to them and how you're expected to behave around them, after all. She wasn't known to care about her appearance, but she'd asked all the same. She might have even known the answer he was going to give before she asked, she'd just wanted the reassurance. Sure, later she'd give an excuse that might stand-- Hector was reappearing and they were going to need to convince them that there was nothing wrong, and if Lola looked like she lived in the sticks and killed beasts all her life then that'd be all the more difficult.
The sourpuss expression faded off her face when Hector assured her that she was wonderful and kissed first at the back of her hand and then at her wrist. Then he bade them exit the vehicle, and Lola smiled small and hollow and bracing. "Well, we're here after all," was her answer, and then they got out of the car.
Lola straightened up and held onto the car door while she stretched her back after the long sit in the car. The dual smack-smack! of the car doors both closing caused motion in the curtain in the front window. Lola had come around to Hector's side of the car and glanced at the dead flowerbeds and dusty windows. She touched Hector's back, a last brief bout of affection before Hector made his way up the walkway and onto the slab of concrete that was the porch.
Hector's mother was a petite woman, moreso than Lola had expected, especially since she was the one who carried Ashkii's blood. She looked worn out and worn thin, and treated the light of day as high beam headlights in the night. She stepped out past the screen door and then crumpled into Hector's arms in tears.
This is the second time Lola has stood aside and waited for Hector to soothe a crying family member.
Lola stayed back, at least seven or eight feet, up the walkway. She didn't shift or sway awkwardly or uncomfortably, but she did adjust the skirt of her dress once. Aside from that she stood with her hands behind her back and her sandal-covered feet set evenly apart. Instead of watching the woman weep into her grown son's arms, Lola looked up and down the street instead. Hector had glanced for FBI surveillance, but he could see if there was anything worth spying Lola would have seen and confronted it by now. She had the look of a sentry about her.
Hector Ghosh
Later Hector will thank her for being so vigilant and patient. He cannot imagine how difficult this must be to stand back while his family reacts to his stomping back into their lives without warning. Without his or Lola's knowing if law enforcement would be waiting for him. So far it does not appear as though they are.
They don't have much of a contingency plan in the event that the FBI does show up wanting to talk to him. Run like hell is about the extent of it. If the FBI shows up wanting to talk to Hector he won't have any warning. There is no way in hell he'd ever talk to them but they don't have much of a choice now. The best they can hope for is that his mother will swallow the truth of his nature and the source of it within her own heritage and she will manage to convince his father that they don't need to involve the government any more than they already have.
He did not think this through well at all.
They can both tell his mother is coming back to her senses when she smooths her hands down his back and pushes him back to get a better look at him.
"You're so thin," she says. Runs her hands over his chest like she's in a dream. Looking at her face she is both serene and sad at once. She is afraid to move too fast lest she disturb the fabric that thrusts her awake again.
"Mom, let's go inside, the neighbors are going to start talking."
"Oh, the neighbors always talk. It's okay. I don't listen."
"Yeah, well, they suck."
Purposeful vulgarity. She would have come down on him like a sack of bricks for swearing as a child. Now she doesn't even react. Hector puts his arm around her shoulders and steers her towards the front door.
"I knew you'd come home," she says as they walk. "I've been telling people for years you were alive. Nobody believed me."
"People are assholes, Mom."
Once he's got her over the threshold Hector tosses Lola a look like he's not going any further without her. He keeps a hand on his mother's shoulder to keep her within sight and props open the storm door with the other.
"Hey," he says, "listen, I need you to meet Lola."
"Okay..."
"She's right here, Mom. She came out from Denver with me. Helen met her already and they didn't hate each other."
His mother's glasses are stained with brine and her nose and cheeks are red and her eyes still leak but underneath the physical signs of the nightmare her life has been the last four years, the aging and the anxiety, Hector's mother is still a beautiful woman. It's easy to see Hector and Helen in her even if she is so short.
"Lola," she says in a paper-thin voice. Holds out her bony right hand before it registers that she's looking at a pregnant woman. A tremulous smile touches her lips. Her hand shakes in Lola's and then the left comes in to cover it. "Oh, Lola, sweetheart, thank you so much."
She thinks Lola is the reason Hector's resurfaced.
Lola Hawkes
Vigilance was something that Lola'd been good at for a long time. It was one quality that her mentors and teachers have always been able to honestly praise about her. For as temperamental, head-strong, and downright mean she could be as a child and adolescent alike, at least she was always vigilant. Patience was something she'd only learned recently, and still didn't practice regularly. She tried, though, for Hector's sake. Today she did well by it, and made no further signs of discomfort or potential impatience after that initial tug of her dress.
There were no suspicious vehicles lining the street or hanging out in neighboring driveways. She didn't notice anybody pausing on the sidewalks or coming out of homes to stare, though Hector insisted to his mother that the neighbors would talk. Lola was content, and showed no signs of aggression or confrontation while standing and waiting.
When the two started to move inside, Lola followed a few steps after them, but paused and watched for a second instead. It's at this point that Hector looked back and urged her to join him, so the Kinswoman walked quietly up the walkway and up onto the front patio to catch the door and enter the home along with them. Hector'd held the door open for her, so Lola passed by him, but stopped within the entryway to wait for him to flank and introduce her.
Lola looked uncomfortable as soon as she'd abandoned her post at watch, and this was true for the first time Rina looked upon Lola. She looked uncomfortable, but not wracked with anxiety. It was more of a fish-out-of-water thing. All the same, when the pregnancy was recognized for what it was and conclusions were drawn, Hector's mother approached her and took her hand first with one, then the other. She thanked her, and Lola blinked down at the woman. Even in the flat sandals that she wore, Lola had a good five inches on the woman. She saw the tears still welling and spilling behind glasses, felt the tremble to her voice and how downright frail her hands feel.
Lola's expression didn't crumble and she didn't choke up any herself, but she did swallow clearly before taking her hand out of the woman's. She placed hands first on, then about her shoulders and pulled her in for a hug. It's a stiff and protective thing, like she was worried about breaking the woman herself or something from the outside trying for it otherwise. "Ah, of course..."
There'd be a brief pause before Lola let go of her and cleared her throat and looked to Hector to take over.
Hector Ghosh
His mother has been a teacher since before Cassandra was born. Short as she was and even when she was pregnant enough that her surgeon husband looked at her sidelong when she would get ready to go in to work in the morning she could strike fear into the hearts of her students for how little shit she took.
Frail as she looks and feels the fact that she is still standing despite the amount of pharmaceuticals in her system is a testament to the strength she doesn't credit herself with having. Never met the Nation but Hector can sense the breeding on her. Can tell just from looking at her that she's Kinfolk. He stands out of the way as his mother accepts and latches onto the embrace.
"I was worried," she says to Lola in that stretched-thin voice that nearly sent Hector into a frenzy a few minutes earlier. Her hands are like talons on her back. "I was so worried he was out there by himself." She snuffles to keep her tears from running out of her nose. "I'm so glad he's not alone..."
He can't stand this. He can't bail out now. Plenty of things in life Hector thinks he can't stand and he persists anyway. This isn't going to be the last one. He's breathing heavy by the time Lola and his mother part from each other.
"What time's Dad coming home?" he asks.
And his voice is taut with his Rage. He doesn't succumb to it and his mother doesn't react to it.
"Oh, I don't know..."
"Do you still have that calendar in the kitchen?"
"Oh, honey, not since you got in that car. If I didn't know where you were there wasn't much point in keeping it."
"Well what time's he usually get home?"
"I don't know..."
"Mom."
"Why are you asking?"
"It'd be nice to know how much longer I've got before he starts yelling at me."
"He won't yell, honey. Your father doesn't yell."
Hector laughs like that's the funniest fucking thing he's ever heard in his life. Lola's heard that laugh once before. They were in an elevator. Lola was wearing a hospital gown and holding onto her coat and a picture of their embryo. He laughs again and scrubs his face and turns to walk into the living room. Leaves Lola in charge of her while he pulls himself together.
Lola Hawkes
Having neither confirmed nor denied how alone Hector was alone or otherwise, Lola had disengaged from the embrace that she'd wrapped the smaller, older Kinfolk into earlier. When Hector had watched his mate wrap up and hug his mother, it looked like Lola was making some effort to protect her for how her shoulders blocked out and angled in, how her arms stayed braced on either side, and how her head had tucked. Like she was planning to take any blows that may fall for both of them, except there was nothing about her that suggested she actually expected any kind of an attack. After all, Lola only ever met those teeth first.
His heavy breathing and tight, strained voice drew and held Lola's attention. She watched him through the back-and-forth that occurred debating when they should expect the patriarch Ghosh to be home, and frowned heavily when his shoulders shook and that wild laugh bubbled up and out of him. When he rubbed his face and stalked into the house and took a right into the living room, Lola watched after him for the first several steps. Then her frown gentled-- it was still there, have no doubt, she was a very severe looking young woman in times like this. But it wasn't so heavy now, and seemed more like she felt for him than like she worried or disapproved.
Hector needed a minute to pull his shit together, so Lola focused her attention on his mother. She glanced about at the small couch beside the front door, closed her hands together in front of her, somewhere under her stomach without holding them against it, and cleared her throat.
"Mrs. Ghosh, we're not here for the reasons you probably think we are. Hector's got somethin' that he needs to tell ya, but it's a story." She paused, slow and cautious at first about how to continue with the woman. She seemed afraid of making her cry again somehow. Lola wasn't the most socially graceful thing. She stood like a soldier and hugged like she thought she was actually a six foot tall bodybuilder.
Thus far the grandmother of her child hasn't swooned or fainted, so Lola continued.
"The story'll explain why he left and where he's been. We, ah...."
She paused and frowned, not sure of how to press on exactly, but made an effort anyways. Words weren't her strongest suit, but she'd give it her best.
"It'll be strange. We'll need ya to listen with an open mind...."
Hector Ghosh
This doesn't make any sense to her mate's mother but she doesn't have Helen's distance and mental clarity to hold onto in times like this. She hasn't had to work all week and she won't have to return to work for at least another week. Aside from grading papers and honing lesson plans Mrs. Ghosh doesn't have a lot to do besides take her medication and try to relax.
As she grows used to the new environment and their place in it Lola will notice that the place is spotless. Helen's place was spotless. Like as not even without the assistance of the maid Cassandra and Vijay doubtless employ their place would be spotless. Though Hector doesn't seem to have inherited an obsession with cleanliness he does pick up after himself when he makes a mess and if he has nothing else to do he goes out and looks for projects to keep himself busy.
Mrs. Ghosh seems to have dealt with her mounting neuroses and the return of her youngest child by cleaning the hell out of the house. The scent of cleaning products is present but not overwhelming. Incense burns in the living room. Everything is modern and bright. This is the same furniture they had four years ago when he disappeared. Nothing has been renovated or redone.
It doesn't help his sense of unreality to see that not only is his mother losing her mind but this house hasn't changed at all. Dealing with Helen was easier. She could form coherent sentences and ask questions. Grapple with what was happening. Even if she was younger than their mother he only doubted for a few seconds that Helen could handle seeing him in his war form.
His mother won't succumb to the Delirium but he already told Lola this days ago: he doesn't want to do to her what he did to Helen. Between Helen screaming and his mother crying on the phone the next morning he was numb a good part of the drive up to D.C.
"Oh," she says. In the absence of tears her voice has an airy quality to it. Like she's not entirely rooted in place. "Maybe we should wait for his father to come home. So you don't have to tell the story so many times."
Hector makes a sharp noise from the other room. It sounds like caustic laughter to anyone who doesn't know the nuances of the Galliard's voice. Lola knows it's a reflexive thing. The moon is a thinning crescent moon. More than furious anger in his voice Lola hears helplessness.
"Mom," he says, "how many fucking drugs are you on?"
"Not a lot."
"Were you always on this many fucking drugs?"
Like he hasn't said anything his mother puts a hand on Lola's elbow to guide her into the living room.
"Here, sweetheart, come in and have a seat. Make yourselves at home."
"We've been in the fucking car all morning. I haven't been able to feel my ass since we passed Sacramento."
"That's okay."
"Jesus Christ..."
When the two women come into the living room they find Hector standing in the corner like having his back to a wall is going to keep him from moving any further into the house. Whether Lola chooses to remain standing or not Mrs. Ghosh sits herself down on the faux-leather couch facing her son.
"No," he says, "it's not okay. None of this is okay. We should've stayed in fucking Colorado. I'm going to tell you what I came out here to tell you and you're not going to believe me."
"Honey, of course I'll believe you."
"NO, you WON'T. You're going to think I'm making shit up."
His mother smiles a nervous smile. Even in her drug haze she can recognize the futility of arguing with Hector.
"What?" he asks.
"You were such a sweet little boy. And then you got to high school. I used to pray, in the beginning. Before you'd been gone so long. I prayed to every god I could think of. If you'd just come back, I'd never get mad at you again. Part of me thought that's why you'd left. Because we were so hard on you."
"Mom..."
"But then you were gone so long. Something had to have happened. Still, I thought for the longest time, in the beginning, that that was why you left. Because I didn't know what to do with you."
"Mom, that's not what happened."
"Oh, but even if it was, I'm not mad at you. I was never mad at you. I was just--"
"Mom, I didn't run away. Alright? I'm a fucking werewolf."
That's one way to start a story.
Lola Hawkes
When the older woman suggested that they wait for her husband, Hector's father, of whom Lola had only ever heard things about that had her cautious and tense and ready for a fight, Lola shook her head and started to explain that it wasn't a good idea, but was quieted by Hector's harsh single-bark laugh.
How many fucking drugs are you on?
The question had Lola looking confused for a second, eyes out through the house to where Hector's voice had come from. Then she looked back down at his mother and pressed her lips together some. She felt like she should have been able to recognize that the woman was on some kind of mood relaxer or anti-depressant or anti-anxiety medication, perhaps a cocktail thereof, but that wasn't really the type of medicine that she was familiar with. Gashes and burns and bullet wounds and broken bones were more her speed-- the kind of shit you saw on a battlefield, you know?
But she didn't comment or ask for clarification or press the subject any at all. Lola accepted the hand at her elbow and let herself be steered into the living room. She wouldn't sit, though, and instead hovered near the arm of the couch that the airy-voiced school teacher sat upon. When Hector started talking and said they should have stayed in Colorado, Lola looked sharply over at him and her brows flexed down. She knew it was the Rage and the tension and the terrible bile-sick in his stomach that he was probably feeling for the situation as a whole. Still, she couldn't quite stamp out the sharp glance that flew his way at that comment in particular.
The conversation pressed on regardless, this back and forth between Hector and his mother. He was trying to wrap around to what happened, and she kept explaining that she was sure he ran away for how hard she and his father were on him. Lola had gradually been moving back away from the couch and to the edge of the living room. She stopped when she was in a place where she could stand, arms loosely wrapped over her chest, and see the front door easily to her right.
Then the I'm a fucking werewolf bomb dropped, and Lola's attention was rapt upon the mother and son once more.
Hector Ghosh
Blurting out truisms rooted in his head has gotten Hector as far in his life as anything else has. Today he doesn't do much to buck that trend. Whether it sunk in or his mother isn't registering much Hector stands looking at her for several seconds after he makes that statement because she isn't answering.
From where she stands Lola can imagine the discord that must be ringing in Rina Ghosh's head as she looks at her youngest child. Used to be he was no taller than his father. Skinny and meatless with shaggy hair and a sweet disposition that the camera lens picked up. He stands before her grown now and though Rina cannot imagine war has hardened him like this she can see that he is hardened. His hands are a working man's hands and his body is lean and strong and something in his eyes wasn't there when he left.
It makes it easier for her mind to accept an explanation for what happened to that sweet little boy she thought would come back but Lola cannot see her face to gauge whether she is or is not accepting it. All she has is that fierceness on her mate's face. The sharpening of his gaze as his blunted mother doesn't react.
"See," he says. Scoffs.
"Hector..."
"No, just--don't. Alright? I'm not making this up. You said you'd believe me."
She doesn't answer. He scrubs his face and looks out the window. It's early afternoon but if his father has been in surgery since seven o'clock this morning and he knows his son is coming home today it stands to reason he didn't lock into an all-day transplant surgery.
"Your grandfather was a medicine man," he goes on. "He was Navajo, but he also belonged to a tribe of werewolves called the Uktena that've been in this country for centuries. Long before white people showed up. And he was a werewolf. And he was kind of a big deal when he was alive, because his mother, your great-grandmother, she was a big deal too but he was really powerful. He's what we call a spirit-talker. It's what it sounds like. But he never settled down with a woman properly, he just... he had a baby out of wedlock, a boy, and that was your dad."
If she wasn't listening Hector would be growing angry or frantic. The back of Rina's head doesn't give much indication to her attentiveness but her son isn't losing his patience yet.
"Your dad wasn't a werewolf. Neither are you. But you... you're still special, Mom. You... other werewolves can tell you've got Uktena blood in you. They can tell Lola's got Uktena blood in her. You guys couldn't pick each other out of a lineup but I can. Helen... it's gotten really diluted. Because of all the breeding with humans. It's really rare for a werewolf to have a werewolf baby with a human. I can't even tell you how rare it is for--"
Now she draws a breath. Takes her glasses off her face as if she's just now realizing they're clouded with dried tears.
"Hector..."
"Look, if you don't believe me, it's fine. Just don't call the Feds. I--"
"Oh, honey, it's not that I don't believe you, it's just so much to take in all at once."
Hector leaves the corner with a jerky sort of uncertainty. Like even now he isn't convinced his mother can tolerate being next to him. He slinks across the space between them and then sits down on the couch next to her to take her glasses from her. He frowns at the eyeglasses like he can't figure out what to do with them. He ends up licking the hem of his t-shirt and using that to try and clear her glasses.
"Your uncle Arjun says he saw a weretiger, once."
"Yeah, well," Hector says as he works, "Uncle Arjun is a werefish. Instead of the full moon it's a full booze bottle he's got to worry about."
His mother makes a soft noise that might have been laughter or admonition or both.
"Honey, that's not very nice."
Lola Hawkes
Through the whole of the exchange, Lola had slid back into the role of silent sentry. She stood still several feet behind the couch, feet planted apart on the tile floor with her arms wrapped loosely about her chest. It helped cover some of the low neckline, but she wasn't concerned about potential immodesty. She might become a little more aware later after Hector's father inevitably joined them, but for now she was watching Hector's face, gauging his stress levels, and glancing to the back of his mother's head, visible just above the back of the couch, to see her reaction as well.
Quiet, observant, and steady. She only shifted about enough to turn her head and look to the door.
"Weretigers are real," Lola added after Hector joined his mother on the couch and the tension ebbed enough for him to make jokes at a relative's expense. She didn't carry the tone of someone about to argue the authenticity of the Bastet, though. Her comment was more like a segue, and that showed if either of them glanced back. She'd been looking distractedly toward the door when she'd spoken up, but her tone and resolve were clearer when she switched her focus back to the mother-son pair. She didn't move from where she stood or make any motion to join them.
"You actually believe him?" The question was, of course, directed to Rina Ghosh. Lola had been careful with her up to this point, and still was to an extent. But there's hard determination in the Kinfolk's gaze that needs some kind of an answer and demands that she be given nothing else. Even if it comes as a nod of the head or a shake of it or a slump of the shoulders or a tired sigh, Lola pushed on with whatever she got.
"Because we need you to understand that Hector's dad cannot know about any of this. It's part of why he stayed away so long-- the balance between letting you know the truth and hiding it from his dad will be tough. It's just..." She furrowed her brow, again pausing long enough to show that she's nowhere near as comfortable with words as her mate was. Even strangers could pick up on this. She was more comfortable to just let him do all of the talking in places like this.
"..It's not okay to lean on what's easier over what's right. What's right is letting you know the truth."
She doesn't say anything about how what's right is not to let them worry any more. Once Rina had a firmer understanding of what being a werewolf entailed, including the terrible war that they've been fighting for many generations, she would have more to worry about still.
Hector Ghosh
The question is directed at his mother but Hector is the one who looks up from his task to turn and hook an arm over the back of the couch. When he looks at her none of the sharpness or the heat that has passed between them thus far comes at her. Despite the fatigue riding him he looks grateful. His shoulders have not started to bow yet. He wouldn't be out here in the first place if it weren't for her.
So Lola speaks to his mother and even if Rina doesn't turn around to look at her while she speaks someone is listening to her.
"Thank you, sweetheart," she says at the end of all that. Hector hands her back her glasses once he's cleared the tears from them. She takes them but does not put them back on yet. "I'm not quite sure what to tell Narendra. He'll have plenty of questions when he gets home."
Hector snorts. Of course he will.
His mother takes her eyeglasses back from him then and slides them onto her face. The light come in through the windows gives her a drawn appearance. All of the darkness of a thousand sleepless nights illuminated now. Once her glasses are in place again she puts a hand between Hector's shoulder blades and makes a low discontent noise at the thinness she feels there.
"Are you going to stay?" she asks.
"If Dad doesn't call the cops on us, yeah."
"He won't. He won't."
"Then we'll stay."
"I'd like that."
She runs her hand over Hector's hair and a ghost of a smile comes across her lips. He looks over at her eyes first before turning his face. Light catches the gold band on her finger. Fire flickers through him and he grits his teeth at some strong emotion riding it. His mother doesn't flinch away.
"Cassandra said Helen said you were meaner than you used to be," she says. Still in that dreamlike tone. He cringes as her thumb reads his cheekbone, her palm his forehead. "I don't think you are."
"I think you're drugged out of your skull."
"It's been hard. It's been so hard. I pray you never know how hard it is. Four years is a long time not to know where your child is."
"Okay, Mom. I think you should lie down before you start crying again."
"You're a good boy, Hector."
He shoots his mate a pained expression before he gets his mother under the arm and helps her stand.
"Lola, I'll bring all our crap in in a minute," he says. "You should eat something while I'm--"
While he's dealing with his mother. He doesn't say that. He just leads her out of the living room and up the stairs. As they move Lola can hear the murmuring of their voices but not the words themselves. There's no sign of his father yet. The digital clocks on the kitchen appliances claim it's after two o'clock.
It's after two thirty by the time Hector comes back downstairs again. Even pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes like to crush out this new reality of his Hector's feet remember the way through this place. Problem is he's about six inches taller than he used to be. He bumps his elbow into a closet door as he passes from the stairs to the kitchen and that's where he decides to rest for a moment.
"You should see the medicine cabinet," he says with his hands still ground into his orbits. "Holy crap. We could probably start a college fund for the baby selling Rina's meds on the street."
Lola Hawkes
The thanks that Lola received for her efforts was as airy as many other things the woman has said tonight, and accompanied by 'sweetheart' again. She wasn't especially uncomfortable with pet names, but she wasn't particularly used to them anymore. Hector would call her 'baby', but that was another story. Outside of their relationship, the last regular term of endearment she would get was from her father, when he would call her fiera.
To be fair, she hadn't been around many parents since her mother and father passed so near to one another. Maybe this was just something that people did one generation down. She doubted she would find herself referring to her child's friends as 'sweeties' or anything of that like personally, but she also figured she wasn't the best example for normal parenting behavior even before she got started on the job.
While Rina felt at her son's face and back and observed that he didn't seem mean at all in her faraway manner, Lola watched on with an expression of mild discomfort-- only because she was now aware of the reason behind the behavior. Hector opted to take her upstairs, and told Lola to go and fetch them something to eat while he did. He'd be right back down after all.
------
Thirty minutes go by before Hector comes back down the stairs. In the time that he'd spent on the upper floor of the house, Lola had been busy. She brought in their duffle and whatever else seemed appropriate to carry in. She didn't want to go upstairs, it felt invasive to venture through the house unguided and while normally she wouldn't care this was different-- this was Hector's parents' home and where he spent childhood, after all. So the belongings were left out of the way, tucked close to the foot of the stairs.
Hector would find Lola in the kitchen, having fixed a pair of sandwiches because she didn't want to dirty dishes or dig too deeply into the cupboards or make herself seem too terribly at home. She stood hovering near the kitchen counter and had already consumed all but two final bites of what was on her plate.
As Hector entered, Lola glanced back at him, then nodded her head to indicate the plate and sandwich that she'd intended to be for him. It was on the counter nearby, closer to the entrance of the kitchen rather than tucked into the back. She still wanted to see and hear the front door easily.
His comment was met with a light frown and a wrinkled nose and a shake of her head.
"She found a way to cope. Not everyone has monsters to kill to take their stress out on."
Hector Ghosh
"Yeah, well," he says as he takes his hands from his eyes and moves to the counter, "I'd hate to see how she's coping without them."
Hector takes a huge bite out of his sandwich and barely chews it before bolting it down. Even if the stress of this trip has impacted his perception of having an appetite it hasn't reduced his capacity to pack away food quickly. Not much food lurks in the cabinets and Lola had to make sandwiches out of what she could scrounge up. His parents have pitas in place of sliced bread and she had the option of peanut butter, hummus, wilting vegetables, and leftover chicken curry that is Gaia knows how old. It didn't reek of rot if she decided to sniff it.
As he shoves whatever Lola managed to put together into his mouth Hector wanders over to the refrigerator to take stock of his parents' grocery shopping. He encounters a small carton of organic eggs and the container of leftover curry and a six-pack of beer with four of the bottles missing. He scowls but doesn't say anything about the beer. For all he knows they had a party recently and their guests didn't drink as much as they were expecting they would.
Even if his father is drinking now that doesn't stop Hector from grabbing one out of the cardboard sleeve. It isn't a twist-off. He goes looking for a bottle opener and gets distracted digging through all of the other cabinets in the process.
"Keep an eye out for a piece of computer paper with Stanford... Vascular Care or something on the letterhead, Dad used to have his surgery schedule for the week floating around." A thought occurs to him as he finds the bottle opener and he snorts. "Dude. What is wrong with me. Let's just go sit on the porch until he gets home, huh?" The bottle cap clatters to the countertop and he finishes off his sandwich. "Or go for a walk or something. Mom's out cold."
Lola Hawkes
Stress is a well known appetite reducer. Lola's pangs of hunger have come and gone through this whole trip, but she, much like Hector, was still able to talk herself into eating. Just as she had done at Helen's house, she had done here while Hector was upstairs convincing his mom to lay down and nap off the drugs. She wasn't feeling particularly hungry, was more concerned with the storm that she felt coming up over the horizon with the return of Mr. Ghosh, but she ate the pita-hummus-vegetable sandwiches that she'd put together anyways.
She watched Hector wolf down his food, eating like he was on a schedule. His comment went unanswered-- Lola didn't want to speculate on what his mother did for her stress when she wasn't taking pills to help aleviate it. Instead she ate the last two bites of the food from her plate, then sought a sink or dishwasher (if it wasn't chock full of clean dishes at least) to abandon her plate into.
Before much time had passed at all Hector was taking a break from his sandwich and scoping out the fridge instead. He frowned at the beer, but seized one for himself anyways. Lola watched, but didn't lecture him about his liver. She wouldn't fault the man a beer or a drink or a toke while they were out on this mission together, but she would keep eye on him none the less.
When he asked her to start looking around for her father's calendar, Lola just folded her arms under her bust and cocked her weight onto one leg and watched him with an expression on her face that, clear as day, told him she was going to do no such thing. Her lips were parted and she was about to talk when he corrected himself and suggested they go wait for his dad instead. To this, Lola shook her head and crossed the space between them. One hand found and retrieved the bottle cap from the counter, set it on his plate's edge instead. The other brushed his hair back from his face before bracing on the front of his chest and shoulder.
"A walk sounds good." She stated this sagely, patted and rubbed his shoulder for a lingering handful of moments. She was going to wait up for him, let him set the flow of what they did and where they went while they waited. So she didn't head for the door just yet, but waited for Hector to start there first.
"Stretch our legs...," she continued distractedly, and couldn't managed to shake the mild frown that's been on her face for the better part of the day. "Though we probably shouldn't go too far."
She didn't want to come back to panic about them having disappeared again.
Hector Ghosh
All it takes is that bracing hand on his shoulder to vent some of the nervous energy from his frame. He reaches up to rest his hand on her wrist before rubbing her forearm where the dress sleeve doesn't cover it
"This is a cul-de-sac, we couldn't go anywhere if we tried."
That settles it at least. They'll be able to see his father coming and Hector is convinced they won't be hearing from their mother for at least another several hours. So the bottle cap goes into the trash and the plates go into the dishwasher and the beer stays in Hector's left hand.
He runs his right hand over the side ponytail to adjust the way it falls over her shoulder and then holds the back of her head to press his lips to her forehead. Rubs her neck while his hand is there and then finds her hand to lead her out the front door.
---
They take several laps walking on the left side of the street. The cul-de-sac winds nearly a quarter-mile deep before ending in a loop and swinging them back towards the street that served as a vein back to the main road. As they walked Hector pointed to various houses with his beer bottle and told her stories about the people who used to live there.
One of them he skips over but has to fess up on the second go around that he got caught skipping freshman biology class to make out with the girl whose parents used to live here. They ended up moving away the summer before sophomore year because her older brother hung himself in the bedroom closet.
"So really," he says, around a pull off his beer bottle, "my family's not the most screwed-up one in the subdivision."
On the third lap back towards home a moonlight-blue Audi hybrid pulls onto the cul-de-sac and slowly makes its way around the winding street. The driver is a middle-aged man with the same dark complexion as Hector. Other details are occluded by the glare of the sun but it's obvious when he slows that he would normally pull into the driveway where the Subaru is.
He parallel parks on the street instead.
"There he is," Hector says. He has been nursing the beer he stole so it doesn't go straight to his skull. Now he takes a huge pull off of it and belches. "I don't suppose you want to just get back in the car and pretend this never happened."
Lola Hawkes
The walk is nice. It's not as pleasant as their stroll through the national forest earlier this morning had been-- they are walking on cement and not dirt, they're surrounded by houses and manicured lawns, not by trees that reached to try and tickle the bellies of low-hanging clouds. The air isn't as polluted as she thought it might be, but it doesn't smell of tree sap and running water like the state park did.
But it is nice, and Lola walked alongside Hector as they took their laps around the cul-de-sac and the street that fed into it. She looked at the houses, at the cars, and stared perhaps a little too hard if little faces were spotted leering through windows or crowding fenced yards to watch them pass. She listened to his stories, and after ten minutes of walking she'd unwound enough that she was chuckling and grinning when appropriate while he regaled her with tales of the street that he went through much of his young life on.
They were enjoying a pocket of quiet when a car approached and parked in front of the house. Hector drank deep from the beer bottle and let loose trapped air from his stomach and announced that the car that had parked in front of his house was his father. Lola glanced sideways at him, her expression tinged with the color of scolding that went unspoken. It's hard to say if she's frowning for the beer in his hand or for his suggestion that they just leave.
"That'd do more damage than good," she told him with her expression wrinkled up with negativity. She was standing straight-backed beside him and her shoulders had squared and chin had gone to a 90-degree angle from the ground. Hector knew this as Lola's Stand Your Ground stance. She was watching the car and waiting for the man to step out from it.
"They'd call the FBI to come looking for you. They'd know you're in Colorado, and they'd probably start looking for me too. And your mom..."
She trailed off there with a shake of her head and looked up at him again, then took his free hand to squeeze it before quickly letting go and touching pressure to the middle of his back with her fingers to urge him forward.
"Come on."
Ordinarily she'd just walk forward herself and expect that to be enough motivation for him to come join her. For this, though, it was Hector's face that was being sought, not hers. He needed to lead the way.
Hector Ghosh
Her fingers get him moving forward again. He eyes the bottle and takes another big swallow before tossing it into the grass by the neighbors' mailbox. It will still be there when they come home. According to a story he told several laps ago both of them work in computer engineering and are hardly ever around.
Hector thought the wife was screwing around but he wouldn't know. He's been gone four years. For all he knows she left his ass by now. No kids were in the equation so he didn't care what they were doing when he lived here.
After the bottle is gone Hector holds onto Lola's hand and walks with her to meet his father.
He opens the driver's side door and climbs out. This is the first time Lola is seeing him. He stands five-foot-six in his orthopedic shoes and wears khaki pants with a white button-down shirt. Black has gone gray and white along the hairline and he is in need of a trim but not near as bad as his son was when Hector disappeared. The older man closes the door and turns towards them.
All three of the kids look more like their mother than they do their father. He gave them their swarthy skin and straight spines. His features are strong and masculine, his eyes small and sharp. They're more of a whiskey color than the dark brown of his wife's. They flash with pain when he sees his son walking towards him and then something like relief floods his features as that dam breaks.
When he speaks his accent is thick but his grammar is perfect. He has been speaking English since he was a boy but decades in this country have failed to take West Bengal out of his voice.
"Hector," he says.
"Hi, Dad."
"When did you get in?"
"A couple hours ago."
"This is your car?"
"It's Lola's."
"This is Lola?"
Hector releases her hand in favor of letting his rest in the small of her back. He hiccups as they come within arm's reach of his father and muffles another small belch.
"Lola," he says, "this is my dad. Dad, Lola."
Narendra sighs deep from his gut and reaches out to shake Lola's hand. It lasts as long as Lola dictates it will last and then he turns towards his son. Time was he and the boy could stand at eye level with each other though Hector would never meet his gaze unless they were locked into a shouting match. Now he has to look up at his youngest child. Unlike his youngest daughter and his wife Narendra does not dissolve into hysterics at the sight of him. His eyes are clear and his hands don't shake.
"My boy," is all he says before he embraces Hector. "My boy, where on earth have you been?"
"I'm sorry..."
"Don't be sorry."
"Dad, I--"
All of his strength and spine goes out of him now. Hector coughs up a long-buried sob and that's what triggers the tears.
"It's alright," his father says. Lola can see the fear creeping up Narendra's spine and tensing his arms as his son grabs onto his shirt and makes a godawful noise trying and failing to tamp down another sob. He doesn't push him away or try to put distance between them though. He starts rubbing Hector's back. "It's alright. You're alright."
Lola Hawkes
Hand in hand, the pair walked up the sidewalk to meet Hector's father as he stepped out of the car. Normally Lola wasn't keen on public affection. She seldom held onto Hector's hand while they were out simply walking about, especially around members of either Sept (because there were two of them once again, apparently). When spending time together at the city park Lola had laid on her back in the grass apart from Hector instead of leaning against him or utilizing his legs for pillows. But she was here to be supportive, to help moderate, to be a control for the experiment that was Hector's reintroduction to his family. So she laced her fingers with Hector's and gave his hand a squeeze and held it firmly as they approached.
The first words passed, and Lola felt relief that while thick with accent, the man's words were understandable. No such relief showed on her, though. Narendra would only be able to glean that the young woman was hard and stern and stiff looking. When Hector released her hand to guide her forward by her back, Lola stepped forward strong and stout, but something about that itself seemed shaky-- like a practiced front. But she gripped his hand firmly and looked him level in the eyes-- for on flat sandals she was the same height (if not half an inch taller) than the grown man in his shoes. He said nothing while they shook, so Lola did the same. She didn't say how nice it was to meet him or try to make a great first impression for him then and there. Clearly, with the heavy sigh and how his body language angled him more toward Hector, that was where all of his focus needed to be.
So, again, Lola swept her hands behind her back and stepped out of the way and let Hector have his space to reconnect.
When the elder Ghosh man grasped his son close and Hector sobbed into his shoulder, Lola cleared her throat silently (working free the tickle of emotion and threat of empathetic choking up) and looked away. Up the street, then down it, then back to the front of the house.
Hector's father rubbed his back and assured him it was okay, despite the ratcheting tension working its way into his arms and forcing him to stand straighter and more tense than usual. Lola took that opportunity to slide another foot or so away and cleared her throat again, this time quietly into one fist, before she gestured to the front door and murmured in a low voice: "I'll give you two time."
Unless prompted otherwise, she'd move toward the front of the house, but with limbs made leaden with hesitancy.
It was tough to choose between watching over and giving space.
Hector Ghosh
Until Lola moves away Hector keeps choking down the overflowing anxiety and anguish he's been ignoring ever since they started out on this journey. He's talked about the events surrounding his abduction and assimilation into the Garou Nation but he hasn't allowed himself to admit that it was more than a little traumatic to be yanked away from his family and drummed through his fostering without even being able to call home and tell his parents he was alive.
She's met the ancestor responsible for his drifting so far out. All he has been able to do is what he's done so far. What his parents did with him and what they've had to do together learning how to be a couple, what they're going to have to do when they themselves become parents. The best he could.
But it isn't until Lola is far enough away that he can't feel her presence that Hector actually stops fighting and lets his father hold him up. The older man has to plant his feet but it is no burden for him. She can hear her mate fighting to breathe and her mate's father talking to him in low Bengali. Can feel the rumbling of Rage that never turns into a frenzy for Hector to swallow. This is humiliating for him but Narendra weathers the threat he can't identify and like everything else in life it passes.
"Stop," Narendra says firm when Hector starts hyperventilating. "You've done nothing to get so worked up. Breathe through your nose. Hector, breathe through your nose. Good boy. Good boy, calm down, it's alright. Come inside so I can meet my daughter-in-law without so many tears, huh?"
"Mom started it," Hector says against his shirt.
"Sure. Sure she did."
They talk again in Bengali now and Narendra parts from his son and plants his hands on his hips to join Lola. Despite the weight of what just happened his own eyes do not shine. Hector stands out on the lawn wiping his face and staring off into the distance. His father wears a shell-shocked expression that is slow to dissipate even as he starts talking.
"It was good of you to drive him," he says and opens the front door for her. "Tell me your name again."
Lola Hawkes
Hector's harsh sobs and ragged breathing had Lola pausing, one foot on the paved walkway to the front door, the other on the front patio slab. She'd turned at the waist and shoulders at first, then with the rest of her body to look back. The low thrum of Hector's Rage reached her even from here, and between that and how he slumped against his father and struggled to catch his breath in the fit of anguish he suffered, Lola was watchful for his control, mindful that it did not slip. If she saw any indicator that it might she would wedge herself between the two and drag Hector into the house to calm himself. Thankfully, it did not come to that, for Narendra had the situation in admirable control.
When he straightened his son up and told him to calm himself and stepped back, Lola's attention was on the doctor instead of the Garou. She'd been fretful about meeting him, worried that this would be the hardest hurdle to pass. She'd expected there to be yelling and clenched fists and flaring tempers. She was sure that Hector would stomp off to cool down and that Lola would be left with an aftermath to worry about. That Narendra was not only calm, but was stable and patient and held his son to let him cry without quaking against the force of his Rage had earned a heavy dollop of Lola's respect.
When they parted Hector stayed in the lawn scrubbing the tears from his face and pulling himself back together. Lola's eyes kept hopping between him and his father, but finally landed on the father when he approached and addressed her. She moved out of his path and nodded gratefully to his gesture of holding the door open for her to pass through first. A last glance was cast over her shoulder to Hector before she focused her attention on his father again and stepped past the threshold back into the house.
"Lola Hawkes." Her name was offered first, and it was carried on a voice that was low and confident without being gruff or mean. It certainly wasn't as feminine in pitch or cadence as her ponytail and nice dress might have had him expecting.
"I didn't drive so much as encourage. It was his decision to come back." She paused, blinked once, then added: "We took turns actually driving, though."
Smooth, Lola. Didn't Hector say that this man's one of the smartest doctors in the country or something? That's a very astute, impressive first statement to make.
Her tongue passed over her lips, for the felt dry, and Lola glanced into the house, back out the window, then to Narendra again at last.
"Your wife is sleeping upstairs, she wasn't in the best state." She figured he'd already understand what she meant-- he did live with the woman, after all.
Hector Ghosh
"No," says Hector's father, "I wouldn't imagine she would be. The last few days have been a hardship for her."
It's a bit of an understatement but if Lola hasn't yet gotten the impression that Hector's parents are optimists or at least skilled at the art of understatement then now is probably the time she will start to glean that from them. Even drugged to the gills Hector's mother managed to get out of bed and function. His father has been going to work as if nothing was wrong.
The storm door closes behind them but Narendra keeps the heavy wooden door open so they can see Hector through the glass. For being one of the top cardiovascular surgeons in the country the man has chosen to live very well within his means. This house is paid for. If one of their children ever needed to come home or, God forbid, their grandson was left an orphan, they would have the room and the finances to accommodate them.
Whatever he thinks about Hector taking turns driving the Forester he keeps to himself. Word through the grapevine has them living in Denver but driving from Durham after dropping in on Helen out of nowhere. They have to be tired.
He has no idea.
"When he comes back inside," he goes on, "you should rest. Both of you. I'm going to cook dinner and wake up my wife. We'll talk tonight, after we eat. Good?"
Whether or not it strikes her as 'good' the storm door opens and Hector comes back inside. Aside from a transient glassiness to his eyes he looks no worse for wear. His boots thump on the wooden floor as he walks to find them in the kitchen. Now Lola can watch them attempting to settle back into a relationship that no longer fits. Probably didn't fit four years ago. The only reason Dr. Ghosh is home so early is he offloaded a consultation he was supposed to take this afternoon. The way Hector tells it his father worked twelve hours a day on average.
So Hector lingers near the stairwell like he's sneaking in from being somewhere he oughtn't be and his father looks at him as though he can't quite comprehend how they ended up in this position.
"I'm--"
His father lifts his eyebrows in passive warning and the rest of Hector's apology dies in his throat. He lets his mouth hang open a moment before looking at Lola.
"... going to go lie down. For a few minutes."
"Alright," says his father. "You know where to find your room."
"Dad?"
"Yes."
"I know the FBI's been looking for me. And you're supposed to call if you heard anything. I was just hoping you would give me a chance to explain to you and mom what happened before you call them."
Narendra nods a noncommittal nod.
"I can explain," Hector goes on. His voice takes on an electric quality Lola knows is a forewarning of nervous rambling. "I can. I just... I started telling mom, earlier, and she was so spaced out, I wanted to tell you both at the same time, and the thought of the cops showing up before I can talk to you, it's--"
"Hector," says his father. "Go lie down."
"I will, I'm just--"
He doesn't move until his father lifts his eyebrows in pointed silence. Then Hector grabs up the duffel bag and holds out his hand for Lola to come with him and bolts up the stairs. His room is the furthest down the hall across from what appears to be a bathroom and he hesitates before pushing open the ajar door.
It hasn't changed since he disappeared if the astonished stillness come over Hector is any indication.
Lola Hawkes
She was grateful for the fact that he minded leaving the front door open, save for its screen counterpart. Lola would also lean and glance occasionally toward the front of the house to check on Hector-- or, she would have wanted to if he took very long, at least. He was explaining that they should rest before dinner to her, while they stood with him in the kitchen and Lola hovering in the space between kitchen and living room so she can see the door quite clearly and be nearer to Hector when he came in. He said they should rest, then come down to eat and they could sit and talk after everyone was fed and rested.
Lola's brow was knitted and she was looking Narendra directly in the eyes while he spoke. If he's an intuitive man, he can see that she needs to pay careful mind to what he's saying to understand his accent, neat and perfect though his English itself may be. If he's a kind man, he politely lets that fall to the wayside. She's clearly just trying here.
"Good," she'd started to agree, but her word was eaten by the sound of Hector opening the screen door and stepping inside interrupted whatever else she may have said after that. When a presence like his entered the room Lola and Narendra paid mind, albeit for incredibly different reasons. Whatever else Lola might have said was left for silence instead. She made her hands be still at her sides consciously and waited for the exchange to take place.
By the time that Hector had started to try and explain -- I started telling mom, earlier... that Lola spoke up as well, interjecting before Hector's father did to quiet them both:
"Hector, pro el amor de Dios, just let it alone!"
She didn't get the opportunity to push that fight further, and instead the good doctor employed an apparently well-executed, well-imprinted stare that got Hector to fall quiet. Then, the Galliard stuck his hand out and bade her to follow before running up the stairs himself. Lola hesitated, staring at Hector's dad like she didn't really know what to do with him. Chances were she was experiencing an urge to wrap her arms around the human man's shoulders and hug him like she had his wife. If he kept going down the right track at this pace, he would soon find himself to be regarded by Lola as something of an ambassador to the human race.
However, after sternly squashing that urge, Lola decided against hugging him for any number of reasons and instead turned away with a small nod of her head and a low thanks--
"We, I mean, I appreciate it. Thank you."
--and followed after Hector up the stairs to the second floor of the house.
There she found Hector standing in the hallway, before an open door with the duffle bag under his arm. He looked taken aback in a way she couldn't quite place a word or full understanding to. She didn't know nostalgia or memory quite like this. So she walked to join him and touched her hand to the outside of his shoulder and looked into the room as well. She respected the quiet for about four or five seconds before urging him-- verbally, not physically. "Let's get a little settled."
Hector Ghosh
He barely heard her. His father was wearing that patient expression that rarely remained so when he was growing up and as Lola watched that patience turned to aggravation. No wonder most of Hector's expectations insofar as his interactions with his father went involved anticipation of raised voices.
But Lola already knows how he is. He's grown more stubborn and capable of standing his ground in the last six months by virtue of his growing more comfortable with his station and his responsibilities but holy shit. Even Narendra reaches up to rub a temple between his son quitting the kitchen and Lola turning to follow him.
They've only just arrived. Now that they've got the hugging out of the way and exorcised the ghosts of their past relationship the father and son have plenty of time to get into a righteous shouting match over something inconsequential. Not a person under this roof right now has intact nerves. They're all coping in different ways.
When Lola rejoins him he has what passes for calm back about him. Still looks drained after that meltdown in the driveway but they drove across the country in three days and have been sleeping in the back of a Subaru Forester and subsisting off of canned food. Bathing in truck stops and pissing on the side of the road. The fact that they can even conduct themselves like civilized people right now is a minor miracle.
"Yeah," he says to the suggestion. "Okay."
---
He moves around the room like he's afraid to disturb some long-buried memory as he finds a spot at the end of the bed to rest their bag and once he's assured himself that the space is just a space Hector leans against the wall to unlace his boots and eases the door shut. The tie comes out of his hair and he strips out of his socks and t-shirt to sleep because it's warm in here and warmer still with Lola so near.
If she does not plummet down into sleep as quick as her mate does Lola has plenty of time to lie in the twin bed in the crook of his arm and look around at Hector's high school bedroom. Like as not it's cleaner than it was when he was a boy but she can get the gist: a writing desk without homework on it. A bookcase crammed full of comic books and nonfiction books about history and sports. Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings and a slew of other speculative fiction series. He has two different maps of the world framed and hung up over his desk and plastered to the wall of his closet are Polaroid pictures of what appear to be his friends and classmates. He's in a fraction of them but between the poor quality film and the passage of time he's hard to pick out from a distance.
And she knows how it goes when one life ends and another moves on. When her sister went off still known to be living but grown and with her own life and when her parents died one after the other things either stayed where they sat during their owner's life or they went into boxes and migrated into the loft.
Not the same principle. Hector is here with her and sleeping hard beneath her. But for four years his parents lived in two worlds at once. One where he was dead and one where he could come home any moment. Like Schrödinger's cat.
Just before sundown he draws a deep breath and blinks against the mounting darkness and turns his face into her hair. Idle intimacy that isn't meant to seduce her. They can both hear his father climb the stairs and knock on the first door at the top before going into the master bedroom. Distance and the thickness of the walls muffles the married couple's talk.
Though he appears calm Hector's heart starts to clam against his ribs as soon as he's awake. When his father goes back downstairs again Hector tightens his arm around Lola's shoulders and drifts back off to sleep.
---
Dr. Ghosh hollered up the stairs that dinner was ready sometime around six o'clock. It was not an extravagant affair. He made a pot of butter chicken and a pot of rice and mango lassi. Apparently he ignored the stove while everything cooked. A laptop computer and a slew of papers that were not there this afternoon have taken up residence on the kitchen island. They'll have to eat at the glass table by the window.
Whether the third and fourth chairs have always been there or whether they're new is anybody's guess.
When they come back downstairs Hector is barefoot and wearing black jeans and a t-shirt. His hair is a mess and only by virtue of his mother's presence does he not look as if he's only half awake. It's worth mentioning that Hector does not swear in his mother's presence as he did earlier. He does help her put together a plate. Whatever medication she took earlier is still clinging to her.
"Mom, come on, that's like, a chipmunk-sized amount of food. Here."
"It's fine, dear. I don't need so much."
"Yeah, well, you're gonna break your hip if you lose any more weight. Do you want to be the youngest person on the I-broke-my-hip ward at the hospital? That'd be embarrassing."
For some reason that makes her laugh. It's a dusty laugh but a laugh all the same. Dr. Ghosh shakes his head and takes a bite of his food despite the nonsense going on behind him.
Lola Hawkes
It took longer for Lola to settle than it did Hector. She wanted very much to lay down and stretch and rest properly. The intermittent sleep that she got while they drove from New York City to California hadn't been nearly enough for a normal person. For her, with so much of her energy going to growing the baby by default, Lola should be haggard and ready to pass out for those skimpy meals they'd been eating did her blood and iron wonders. It was perhaps by grace of her stubborn tenacity alone that she kept going.
Yet even still, when they'd laid down and Lola had pulled the dress off and draped it over the desk's chair back so as not to wrinkle it, when she'd laid down in the bed with Hector and tucked herself near to his side, she could not sleep right away. She was a territorial creature by nature, and being so far displaced from home that even the season seemed different had her uncomfortable and restless on a very basic level. She fussed and looked about the room and read the spines of books from where she could see them, but after a while the sound of Hector's breathing and the quiet through the rest of the house lulled her to sleep.
Little noises would wake her, though. A pot clanged not-very-loud downstairs and she woke up for five minutes. The knocking on a neighboring door woke her for even longer, especially since Hector's heart started to thump-thunder in his chest and his arm had tightened around her. After he'd drifted back to sleep Lola had slipped out from the bed, wrapped her dress around herself, and went to find a bathroom. When she came back into the room she laid down again but did not sleep.
------------
Downstairs, Hector made his way into the kitchen with his hair messed and tossed about from sleep and a yawn at his lips that he kept repressed for his mother's sake more than anyone's. Lola had tamed her own hair back down with her fingers and returned it to the same ponytail it had been in before. She felt a pang of uncertainty in her stomach for the rice for some reason that she couldn't wrap her mind about, but the smell of the chicken overturned that quickly. The body craved what the body needed, and hot cooked animal flesh was a must.
It seemed that Rina hadn't been able to sleep off all of the drugs that she'd taken, but she was functioning alright. Hector piled more food onto the plate she was fixing for herself. Lola was already set up at the table with Narendra and had already taken a few bites from her plate to tide herself over while waiting for Hector and his mom to join them. She was quiet, but she had been since they'd arrived so the Ghosh parents probably thought by now that it was just her default. They would be awful close to the truth on that, at least.
She'd taken particular liking to the lassi drink and was nursing that while waiting for the other chairs to be filled or the doctor to try and start a conversation. Whichever happened first.
Hector Ghosh
Quiet was a trait the Ghosh parents could appreciate. Their older two children were not exactly fans of attention or the limelight but Lola had only spent a night and part of the morning at Helen's place and hadn't met Cassandra at all. Had only accompanied Hector as he executed a flyby of her house to make sure she was somewhat safe before deciding he didn't want to deal with the brother-in-law and the nephew just to figure out if his oldest sister was or was not Kinfolk.
None of the children bore purity of breeding. Nothing that would attract lecherous creatures to them. That made leaving Cassandra's fate to the Sept of the Green somewhat easier. If she had made it to 29 without problems it was a fair assumption that she could survive another 29. That her son had next to no chance of turning out to be even Kinfolk let alone Garou went without saying.
But Narendra and Rina are fine with quiet. Only problem is they've never met Lola before and the early visibility of her pregnancy is an indication that she is now a permanent fixture in Hector's life.
Hector, who they haven't seen since he was a teenager. Who does not even pick up his own empty plate until his mate is settled at the table and his mother has put more than a few spoonfuls of rice on hers.
His father asks the standard litany of questions as they sit at the table drinking their lassi and picking at their chicken. Where she's from and what she does and how old she is. All of the questions asked with some hesitation. They have only had a few hours to acclimate to the physical changes in him and a few days to wrap their heads around the fact that he is still alive. That he's come back with a pregnant girlfriend has barely registered.
As he forces more food onto her plate Hector's mother gazes at him with a persistent combination of sadness and peace. Like even as the drugs wear off and make room for physical and emotional exhaustion she cannot believe he won't turn to smoke when her fingers find his flesh.
Eventually she takes her plate and her drink to the table. Hector lingers in the kitchen. It seems his father is content to let him stay there for now.
In spite of the ease with which he took him into his arms earlier Lola may be noticing Narendra is not entirely sure how to broach the topic of the elephant in the room. He is an intelligent and strong-willed man but the Curse affects him the same as it affects everyone else. Not near as bad as it affected Helen but he can still see a wildness in his son's eyes that he had ignored when the boy was younger. Easy enough to chalk it up to puberty and hormones back then but now Narendra isn't entirely sure the son that came back to him isn't mentally ill.
He's the age when bipolar disorder and schizophrenia begin to rear their heads in young men and if he was kidnapped and abused there are plenty of other problems that could be waiting for them as well. He'd always been a charming child. Maybe this is a personality disorder come back to them. Their son could be a religious extremist or a serial killer. How the hell would they know?
So Narendra aims at that elephant.
"How did you meet Hector?" he asks.
Hector, who is standing in the kitchen eating grains of rice one at a time with his fingers because he's too wound up to go sit down. Who neither of his parents are going to tell to come sit down because it isn't worth the hassle.
Lola Hawkes
Truth be told, Lola was relieved by the fact that Hector's parents were still reeling too much from his reappearance and the Rage that he brought home with his taller, stronger, leaner body. Too much to pay any special attention or dig too deep into the fact that she was pregnant. She could talk about it, have a discussion about the baby that would be there by summer, but she vehemently did not want to spend any time trying to defend herself or Hector or their decisions. She was grateful that they didn't ask for a due date yet, or about her doctor or if they'd found out what they're having yet. She didn't want to talk about the fact that she and Hector weren't seeing any doctors or hospitals, or defend their decision to have their child away from modern medicine and the invasive eye of humanity.
For this, she was perfectly content to answer the questions that came her way.
Where are you from?
"A little town south of Denver. I've never cared much for the big city, so I never moved north."
What do you do?
"I do grounds work for the Forest Services."
Hopefully they believed that one.
How old are you?
"Nearly twenty-three."
They might notice that all of her answers are non-specific. She didn't provide details, only simple answers in a voice that didn't stop edging up against cautious. She seemed like she was walking a wire with most of the things that she said. By the time the head of the household asked her how she'd met Hector and what their story together was, Lola had finished all of her mango lassi and had nearly cleared her plate, save for a final bite of chicken and a small heap of rice that she'd decided to be finished with. She blinked once and looked up from her plate, across the table to where Narendra was seated. Then she looked over to Hector, who had been hovering in the kitchen this whole while. At first his parents may (correctly) feel like she's looking to him for cues, hints on what was or was not appropriate to say, but that faded away rapid as water in a hot skillet and instead she seemed to simply be looking at him. Like someone who loves a person very much will before telling a story about them.
She didn't stare at Hector the whole time she spoke, though. That was just for a handful of seconds. Soon she was looking back from one parent to the next while she spoke.
"He was friends with my sister first. They came and hung around the house a lot, and that's how he and I met." Her fork pushed a piece of chicken onto the rice bed before she put the utensil down and folded her hands into her lap to still them instead.
"Maria, my sister, died over the summer. Bad accident, before her time. Hector'd told her that he'd look out for me if anything happened-- my parents have been gone for a few years now. He came back to see me and started spending time and... Well. What happens happened, I suppose."
Hector Ghosh
That was the plan: eat dinner and then figure out what happened and what the next step is. Narendra and Lola finish their meals before Rina has even started pushing her food around her plate but Rina isn't the one whose behavior and disposition can knock everyone else out of balance. That honor rests on the shoulders of the young man standing in the kitchen.
He looks as if he both wants to jump in to rescue her and wants to let her handle this. If she can set down some parameters with his father early then maybe Lola won't feel the need to jack him into the wall when their tempers get away from them. Despite the time gone between his seventeenth and his twenty-first year it's obvious his father still loves him.
But this doesn't make sense. Helen has been saying that since he first showed up. He can't expect Lola and her rusty social skills to do the bulk of the explaining but he lets her field his father's first pointed question> Keeps his eyes on her for so long as she sustains the contact and then watches the exchange. Trust in his gaze. Trust in her and wariness in the situation. She can only feel the wariness as an electricity in the air as Hector goes from neutral to mildly uncomfortable.
"He came back." Now Narendra pushes the chair back from the table and turns to Hector. "Came back from where?"
"Uh..."
They're off to a great start.
"Hector," Narendra says. Mild still. Patient. "Listen to me. You are my son. Whatever happened, all we have wanted all this time is to know you were alive. One day--" He gestures to Lola. The baby growing inside of her still just a concept though they're one-third of the way through its gestation. "--you'll understand. I pray you never go through what your mother and I have gone through. The police, the local police, they called in the FBI when forty-eight hours went by with no sign of you. Understand this: for forty-eight hours your mother and I did not sleep. We couldn't. And then the FBI started looking for you outside of the city."
Rina closes her eyes to find the strength to drink her lassi.
"We don't need details," Narendra goes on. "If you want to tell us everything, we'll listen. But until they see you, Hector. Until they talk to you, the officers, the agents, everyone who's been looking for you--"
"Dad--"
"Hector, let me finish."
Hector takes a deep breath and shoots Lola a look that is hard to decipher in its brevity. It's pleading and contrition and bravery and helpless anger all at once. But he lets his father talk on.
"They can't close the case until they talk to you."
"The case didn't do shit. The people who grabbed me got me all the way to Arizona before the police were like 'Oh gee maybe we ought to call in some professionals.' I don't give a fuck if their case stays open."
This is a time to choose his battles. Narendra chooses not to call Hector out on his language.
"Where are you living right now?" he asks.
"With Lola."
"I suppose you aren't working."
"I am. It's under the table."
"Oh, is it. Are you using your name?"
"Yeah."
"Your real name?"
Hector frowns.
"Hector..."
"Look, I'm not gonna ask you guys for money. That's not why we're here. I just thought--"
"Did you?"
"Did I what?"
"Think."
"No," Hector says with an exaggerated expression that Lola knows from experience is his sarcastic face, "no no, of course not, why would I do that?"
"What did you think."
"That I'd been in the same spot longer than five minutes for the first time, uh, ever, and I want to put this behind me and do everything I can to not be a completely shitty father--"
Narendra pinches the bridge of his nose. That only makes Hector raise his voice.
"--and I thought you guys might want to know I'm alive. That's what I thought."
"You didn't think we'd want to know you were alive earlier?"
"JESUS, Dad, you don't have any fucking idea--"
"How would I? How would I have any idea."
It's rare that Hector can't think of a comeback quickly. He's breathing hard and fast now trying to keep his shit together. Runs his hand through his hair and stares at his father with a wounded edge to his gaze. At least he doesn't storm out of the kitchen.
Lola Hawkes
The question was about to be fielded by Lola, as several before had been. Narendra asked where Hector had come back from, and even though he had twisted in his chair to pointedly look back at Hector in the kitchen, Lola had air in her lungs and an answer at her lips. She was going to explain that Hector and her sister had gone on a trip up north. She hadn't yet thought of her excuse for their being up there, she was going to come up with that on the fly. Maybe they were running an errand or delivering something expensive that they'd sold online for some extra cash. Who knew. Her lie didn't get a chance to develop that far anyways. Hector and his father were going back and forth with each other and Lola knew enough to just let them for now.
She glanced briefly over to Rina to see how she was shouldering the raising tensions in the air. It seemed the woman was worn out, she appeared almost as tired if not more than prior to her laying down in her bedroom. For a moment Lola wondered about the drugs in her system and how long they would take to cycle through. She wondered if she didn't take another pill or two before coming back down for dinner.
The heat in the conversation between dining room and kitchen drew Lola's attention back in, so any contemplation or assumption that she'd had left for Hector's mother was left alone.
By the time the two men had found a pause, momentary though it may be, in their argument, Lola's jaw was tight and molars clenched. She looked down at the plate on the table, then stood up all at once. Her movement was sudden and unannounced, but she was fast to pick up her plate and glass to make it clear she was excusing herself from the table, since she was finished with her meal. Narendra had started eating around the same time she did, his plate had to be similarly clear. She'd offer to take his dishes as well with a gesture and a lift to her eyebrows. If he accepted, then his plate and glass were gathered up. If not, they were abandoned.
Either way, Lola tucked the chair back under the table with a hip and walked into the kitchen. It was difficult to believe that Hector ever needed to look out for her. Their son was a far stronger presence than they remember him ever being as a teenager, but Lola's could contend with that. Not on the same under-your-skin and in-your-spine level that Hector's did, but all the same. She was strong of frame, on the taller end of average, and where her forearms and calves were bare it was apparent that she used her muscles with regularity to keep them strong. It helped to make her story about doing grounds work in the forests more believable.
It was here that she lifted her voice to the air, taking the opportunity to cut in and try and do some mediation, or some laying to rest.
"It's been a very long, very difficult couple of years for Hector. It's been for you, too." She's addressing both parents, but since the father was the one that had been speaking she would defer her glance to him when she looked back at the table before rinsing her dishes and putting them in the dishwasher. "There are reasons, good ones, that he hasn't come back before now. There's plenty of good reason for him to have stayed missing, truthfully. It would've been easier that way. We wouldn't have to worry about the feds getting involved if we'd just stayed quiet and precisely where we'd been before."
She cleared her throat and moved away from the sink, back closer to the kitchen island where Hector had been picking at his food. She'd use this as something of a podium to stand before while presenting to the parents. When she passed Hector, she touched her hand to his back and rubbed. The motion was quick and heavy and steadying-- if he'd been in another one of his skins she would have ended it with a solid thump-thump-thump to the flank before moving on.
"Like he said-- it wasn't right to let you keep worrying. It was time to reach back out. It's later than you'd like, yeah, but it's better than never."
Hector Ghosh
Would have been easier for them if they had stayed in Colorado. Hector's mother though looks exhausted. Probably started looking exhausted the first night after his disappearance. She was the one who had to talk to the police. She was the one who had to tell them that he never came home that night nor did he come home the next night. She was the one who broke down in tears first because when the FBI agents showed up on their front door it was a concession.
If they were going to find Hector alive they would have found him within the first 48 hours. But they never found him at all.
Now she isn't crying anymore but she sits like a husk at the table and she watches her husband and her only son argue. Watches the woman her only son chose clear the table and load the dishwasher. Watches as some of the tension goes out of him when Lola rubs his back. It reminds him to breathe.
And for his part Hector's father does give Lola his attention while she speaks. He doesn't interrupt or try to shout her down even when it's clear he disagrees with her or something she's said has stricken a nerve.
"My son was never very concerned with financial security," says Narendra. "Or thinking about his future." He addresses Hector now. "How are you going to support your family if all you are doing is working under the table?"
"What, you think they're giving me Monopoly money?"
"You're living like an illegal alien, Hector, you're--"
"No, I'm NOT. I'm living like someone who got fucking abducted and had to fend for himself the last four fucking years and doesn't want the government knocking on his door!"
"Alright."
"JESUS."
"Hector, you don't need to shout. I'm listening to you."
"Are you?"
"Yes."
"Well the feds aren't going to listen to me."
"It's not their job to listen to you. If someone abducted you--"
"Someone DID abduct me!"
"--then it's their job to find the people who did this and prosecute them."
"Well I don't want that!"
"Hector, please. Why are you shouting?"
"I'M NOT SHOUTING!"
Lola, help.
Lola Hawkes
At first Lola was relieved when she spoke her small piece. She felt some of the tension in the muscles of Hector's back go out when she rubbed them, and his father was looking at her and seemed to be listening to her, at least. That was a good start. She thought they were off to a good start.
Then Narendra's face turned to more of a frown, like she'd said something terribly wrong. So she concluded what she was saying to yield him the floor. What he had to say first, though, struck a nerve in Lola as well. Her face flexed into a defensive scowl and her hand left Hector's back so that she could brace both of her palms on the counter in front of her and lean her weight forward some. Doing this flexed her shoulders forward, bowed her arms out, and flexed the muscles through all her upper body. It was the pose of someone trying to contain and simultaneously ride along with the anger that they felt, and was not unlike someone ready to pounce.
But she did none of this, and instead just stood still and watched Narendra for a few moments, then watched Rina, then just hung her head and closed her eyes and listened while looking at nothing. When tempers raised and Hector's voice started to ratchet louder and louder, the Kinswoman by his side breathed slow, deep breaths through her nose and consciously forced some of her own tension out of her joints and bones. When Hector yelled loudly to express that he wasn't shouting, Lola straightened up from how she'd been leaning against the counter and turned to Hector.
Specifically, she stepped in front of him and put her back to his parents, her front to his. Hector's Kinswoman reached up and spread her hands onto his chest, rubbed them up over his shoulders. The right hand stayed there, the left went further until she was cupping his jaw and behind his ear into his hair. Her fingers wouldn't force him to look down, but she hoped that she'd have brought his attention to herself enough to encourage it anyways. Either way, she speaks in a low, quiet voice to him.
"Hector. Por favor. It's fine. Respira. Okay?"
She's not the most gentle or soothing of Kinfolk. There are a number within the community of Denver alone that were much better suited to calming and soothing Garou, to diffusing situations like this. Lola was built for war, not for negotiation. She wasn't raised to compromise, she was taught to be unforgiving and ruthless. If there was something to be done or gained, then Lola simply did or took it.
But, here and now, Hector can plainly and clearly see that she's trying.
When she was satisfied that Hector wasn't going to choke on his own Rage and tear the sink out of the counter or break his hand on an appliance, she turned away from him, stepped off to his side, and faced Narendra and Rina once more. She looked stern, but she appeared to be level. Perhaps she was, in this moment, uncharacteristically the most level one here.
"It needs to be accepted that there are some questions that just can't be answered. We're tired, in bodies and hearts. We don't want to fight. But we're... Not traditional. We don't want our lives looked into. We only want to let you know-- Hector's okay. He's alive. You don't need to hold out on nothing anymore. But outside of that, we just want to be able to go back after this. Nothing else."
Hector Ghosh
Respira.
Narendra at least is aware that his son is under an extraordinary amount of stress and is trying not to wind him up so that he loses his temper. Part of that has to do with the breakdown he'd already weathered in the driveway but most of it is the older man's temperament and sense of self-preservation. His son is taller and stronger than he is and underneath the boy's skin a storm is roiling.
He isn't a boy anymore. He hasn't been a boy since he got into that car with those women he's still trying to protect. No way to explain to his father that if those women hadn't grabbed him things would be much worse than they actually are.
Someone would be dead, for starters. Possibly one of his parents.
So Lola puts herself between Hector and his father and puts her hands on him and Hector breathes like he'd forgotten how. Inhales so hard his parents can hear it across the room. Can hear the fear in it. He's scared. Lola knows how he gets when he's scared. He gets angry and violent.
She staves it off. Hector presses his face into her palm and lets that sucked-in breath go. Gratitude mingling with the fear. He couldn't have done this without her. Would have had no reason to do this without her. Without her he had been spiraling towards Harano.
Once he's calmed enough that he can stand back and find his footing again Lola turns back towards his parents. Finds Rina wearing a pained yet stoic expression and Narendra sitting with his arms crossed over his midsection. Hard to live so long not knowing if their son was alive and harder still to see him struggling with something they can't see or fix.
They just want to be able to go back after this. That's all anyone wants.
"Alright," his father says.
Hector makes a noise like so much stress leaving him all at once and grits his teeth against the saltwater staining his eyes. His mother pushes back from the table like she's unsure of her footing but finds it anyway and his father watches her go. She's so much shorter than Hector is but when she hugs him this time it is not she who is the one held inside the embrace. She puts her arms around him and he lets her. Chokes like he choked this afternoon and Rina smoothes his hair and makes small susurrations but no words.
So his father stands from the table and takes his wife's barely-touched plate into the kitchen with him. It is a large kitchen but with Rina consoling Hector and Hector coughing and crying it seems smaller. Narendra meets Lola's gaze and inclines his chin towards the living room.
Once they're there he sighs and plants his hands on his hips and looks at her level.
"Thank you," he says. "For bringing him back."
Lola Hawkes
There was concession from the serious looking father, and it cut relief through Hector so suddenly and completely that he seemed to actually stumble from it. Lola heard him make a distressed sound, so she reached back to hold onto his wrist, just above his hand. To brace him, as she's been trying (and succeeding, thus far) to do. Lola herself did not sag with shared relief, though. She stayed standing tall with her chin up and her nostrils flared. She wasn't afraid of confrontation or conflict any longer, but she seemed to still be ready for choppy waters. That readiness wasn't aimed at the parents anymore, though. Instead it was turned back on to Hector.
She's seen Wolves lose their shit due to emotions beyond anger. She's grown up in this world, she's seen a lot. She knew that Rage affected much more than just anger and hate alone. Once Eddie Luske had yanked out a chunk of his curly red hair and screamed and taken off as a wolf into the woods due to extreme grief. Another time, when she and Ivan were having their teenaged affair and they'd been engaged in some heavy petting, Lola had told him to stop for fear of discovery fooling around in her room. He'd snapped one of the posters off her four-poster bed and they were found out anyways.
There was no guarantee that Hector wouldn't snap if relief and sadness came clashing together all at once.
Mercifully, when Rina comes and wraps her son up in her small arms and guides his head nearer to his, there is no snap or fizzle of Rage in the air. Lola had let go of his wrist when Rina had approached him, surrendering her mate to his mother for the time being. Hector made that same choked noise that he had earlier today in the driveway, the noise that indicated that he was swallowing his tears and gagging back his sobs. Lola frowned empathetically at him, her expression a little pained through the otherwise stoic cast to her face.
When gestured to follow Hector's father into the living room, Lola didn't give much pause. She inclined her head just a little to indicate understanding, then followed along after the man until he'd stopped. She stopped to stand a couple of feet from him and let her hands rest consciously still at her sides. She kept her voice low, not wanting her own conversation to take away from the soothing going on in the kitchen.
"Like I said, I didn't bring him. That was his choice to make. I just encouraged him to get there, and supported him when he did."
She pressed her lips together, scowling harshly, then looked at Narendra like this was the most serious thing she could think to say to him.
"I know you're a smart man. I know we're not pulling any wool over your eyes. So I'll say this outright-- I'm sorry that we can't give you the details and explanations you deserve. And thank you for accepting that." She paused, swallowed like she was taking a plunge, then continued. "Thank you for not calling anyone when we leave, too."
The statement was placed on the table like a hand at poker, laid by someone who wasn't confident that they were playing the game by the rules, and needed confirmation that the hand itself was good. She's stern, but earnest when looking at the man and waiting for his answer.
Hector Ghosh
Like an orphan Hector had learned how to live without his parents. It had not been an issue the entire time he's known Lola because he had just moved on with his life. No point dwelling on what had happened because as far as he was concerned he was not the boy who got into that car with those two Uktena women in 2009.
They will survive this. All this is is regrowth. It's going to be painful. Rina does not join her son in crying. She has been crying the last four years. She just keeps smoothing back his hair while he tries to apologize. When Narendra and Lola go into the living room he stops trying to swallow it all back. Rage flares up in him but does not find root. He snarls anyway. It isn't an entirely human sound but it doesn't drive Rina back from him.
"Ohh, Hector," Rina says and the quiet tone of her voice quiets him too. "Hector, honey, shh, it's alright, everything's alright now..."
Whatever he says is muffled by her shoulder and cut off by damp coughing. Narendra isn't listening to them. He is aware of them and he is aware that Hector needs his mother right now. He listens to Lola as she repeats that she had nothing to do with bringing Hector back. Listens still as she appeals to his intelligence and his reason. Talks of his accepting the lack of detail and respecting their wishes as if it has already happened.
Though the expression on his face is briefly beleaguered and Lola has difficulty reading people sometimes it appears as though she read him right this time. If the only two options are to keep his son's return from the government or call the FBI and never see his son again those aren't options at all. Four years passed with no word from him. They're not going to do anything that would send him away again.
"When you leave," he says, "you keep in touch. You ask for help." He points to the kitchen. Not to what's going on right this second but to earlier. The long absence and the lying and the yelling. "No more of that. You come to us if you need help. And we won't call anyone. Yes?"
Lola Hawkes
As though slow to understand that there was no real fight to be found in the first place, relief finally swept over Lola and it showed. Up until this point whenever she faced Narendra she stood square and solid and tall. The same as she always did when facing people outside of her home, outside of her mate's Pack. For the first time since she'd arrived that afternoon the defensiveness melted from her bones. Her shoulders rounded, her weight settled more comfortably on her feet, and the heavy scowl on her face relaxed away.
She almost sighed, nearly laughed, but did neither. The urges were written on her face-- the relief evident, and the twitch of a grin trying to take over her mouth but failing.
Some jaded part of her wanted to laugh wildly at the idea of them helping in situations where they might call for it. Like when Hector was having the life sucked out of him from the inside, or when he was flayed open in the grass, or when a Bane had punched a hole through his midsection and sent him flying through the air for Death to catch, but fumble.
But that's not what they meant-- there's no way they could have any idea about the savage fights and the war that waged. They hadn't even seen the scars to get suspicious. And they would no doubt be able to use help outside of the battlefield anyways. So Lola nodded and swallowed hard and rubbed her hand against her brow and forehead like she all at once wanted to sit down but wouldn't.
"I can agree to that." She moved her hand from her forehead like she was going to rake her fingers through her hair, but remembered that it wasn't down and loose so she dropped her hand to her side instead. The edges of her expression are softer. Even if she isn't smiling she at least looks a lot more relaxed and amicable. Less like a guard and more like a young woman.
"Yes. Of course."
Hector Ghosh
That settles it. There's nothing more any of them can do tonight. Everyone is exhausted and wrung out. Narendra looks at her with that same level gaze he's worn with her all night and then reaches out to grasp her shoulder. Doesn't haul her into an embrace but it has the same sentiment behind it as a hug would have.
They weren't big on hugging when Hector was growing up. It keeps throwing him off his stride when it happens.
"Mom," Hector says, "you're smooshing me."
With the present danger passed Narendra and Rina disengage themselves from the kitchen. Although Rina doesn't have to teach in the morning her husband has work to do before he goes to bed and he has to leave early tomorrow. Paperwork and laptop are gathered up while dinner stays on the stove. Hector hasn't eaten yet. His parents say their goodnights and Rina gives Lola a hug and then they drift up the stairs.
Silence settles itself over the kitchen. Hector looks at Lola from where he stands and then leans heavy against the counter and gives her an apologetic smile. For the first time all night his body language is open and he doesn't look as if he's grappling with his Rage.
"That sucked," he says.
Lola Hawkes
The hand on her shoulder wasn't rolled away. Lola didn't seek to make it anything more, either. She just looked at Narendra with a thankful expression and he'd feel the tight, knotted up muscles of her shoulder easing up some for what all context clues pointed to being the first time in quite a while. One can only wonder what stress like that does to a fetus, but if anyone was able to shoulder it and keep going and still grow a healthy baby, it was Lola. She looked well suited to surviving the apocalypse. It was easy to imagine her in rough clothes with a wide-brimmed hat on her head to save her eyes from dust storms, walking across a barren world and surviving easily on whatever was left over.
The Apocalypse was probably something his parents didn't believe in. Lola and Hector had equal knowledge to the fact that it was probably on the horizon. They could just hope that it could be kept at bay long enough for their child to grow up to defend itself.
But, in the here and now, the world was not ending. Hector's parents went upstairs with their goodnights, and Lola and Hector were left downstairs alone.
Lola turned from where she'd been standing, again in that ambiguous space between living room and kitchen and staircase, and looked over to Hector. She watched him lean on the counter, and when he smiled at her she quirked a small grin in response. It was a fleeting thing, but presented and meant none the less. She walked to join him and leaned herself heavily against his curved back. One arm looked behind him, near his lower back, and her head came to rest on his shoulder. Her free hand rubbed the outside of his upper arm a few times before simply resting there.
"It could have been so much worse," she told him, and closed her eyes to just stand there with him for a minute. "No one went for the phone, you didn't Shift, I didn't hit anyone. I'd call this a success."
Hector Ghosh
Every time she smiles Hector looks as if he's been out in the wind and the rain for hours run into days and just seen the sun come out. Like it's washing over him and giving him warmth where before he was cold and damp and shivering. He is inside and warm and dry. She tells it true like she tells everything true. Given everything stacked against them this was the best they could have hoped for.
So Lola grins at him and comes in against his side. Hector takes his hand off the counter so he can wrap his arm around her. Hold her in tight as she molds herself against him. Rests his hand against her head and lowers his face to her hair and breathes her in.
She'd call this a success.
He laughs.
"God," he says, "I love you so much."
Like he can sense the weariness in her Hector shores up his spine to take her weight and envelopes her in both of his arms now. Rests his cheek against her crown and doesn't speak right away. They are both content to simply stand and recover from the stress of the night.
This entire month has been one test after another. They have met and conquered all of these tests. It isn't ever going to end but they are Gaian. Lola was born and bred for War and Hector has thrown himself into it despite coming from what may as well have been human origins. Because they did not crumple beneath the pressure they are thriving in it.
"The Children of Gaia have a Caern across the bay from San Francisco, in Muir Woods," he says after a spell of quiet. "It's about an hour or two from here. Whenever you're ready in the morning, we should head out. I wanna tell them what's going on back home." Another kiss to her forehead. "We could spend a couple nights up there. I don't want you driving home by yourself on your birthday."
That memory of his comes in handy sometimes.
Lola Hawkes
Hector straightened up so that he could wrap both of his arms around her and better support her weight. He told her how much he loved her, and relieved, she let her weight rest against his stomach and chest. Her head rested near his shoulder, and she breathed in the smell of him through his shirt just as he rested his head against her and breathed the smell of her hair. "I love you," she answered back, and was content to be quiet for a time.
Then Hector spoke of their plans. They'd go up close to San Francisco and stop at the Child of Gaia Caern there. They'd stay there through Monday so that way she wouldn't have to drive home by herself on her birthday. Initially, she's a bit charmed. She grinned and hugged him close and chuckled. "I could live with that." From the sound of it, this would be someplace forested instead of within a city. She preferred that immensely, and figured it was as good a place as any to just relax before going home.
But then the 'by yourself' caught up with her, and with one eyebrow raised she pulled herself back from him, far enough that she could look up into his face questioningly.
"You've got another stop to make after that?"
Hector Ghosh
This was about as far in the planning process as he'd gotten before they'd left the house. Everything after this was a nebulous blur that he couldn't discern because he had had no idea how his parents would react. Like as not he was expecting things were going to grow difficult stopping in to see his sister. They were. But they were not near as difficult as this had been.
So the fact that the journey doesn't end with a brief stopover outside San Francisco grabs Lola's attention. He flinches when she takes her head off his shoulder and looks up at him. Smooths a few stray hairs back from her brow with his left hand.
And then clenches and relaxes that hand. The entire arm still tingles sometimes this far gone from his last true brush with death. Most of the time he can ignore it.
Of all the places he wants to stop after this no one would blame Lola if this was the last one she could have imagined:
"Great Caern," he says. "I've gotta go to Vancouver."
Lola Hawkes
The month that passed them by had crushed them with tremendous stress and confronted them with many challenges. Because Hector, despite the reason his heritage was tarnished and his parentage so removed from its original source, was still from an old and great line of Uktena, and made of greater stuff than many. Because Lola was hard and stubborn and tough, and from an old-rooted family as well. Because the both of them learned how to hold one another up, they prospered.
Where Lola was a quick-tempered Kinfolk with a terrible chip on her shoulder less than a year ago, she had since learned to be understanding.
Hector told her he was going to Vancouver, and rather than insisting she be provided a reason or arguing that it wasn't necessary and they had to get home, Lola simply nodded with acceptance and understanding and looked down at an arm that she knew sometimes went numb, sometimes tingled, sometimes ached. She watched him flex and relax his hand and took his forearm between her hands and rubbed the muscles to help get the feeling back into them. As she did this, she spoke. It gave her the appearance of a woman at work-- unwilling to just be still and inactive for long.
"Alright. I'll touch in with Thomas and see if Tamsin's made it home yet when I get back. I'll tell them where you went." Sometimes she forgot about the way that packs could communicate through their Totem. This was one such moment, where she was offering to carry a message across great distance back home because she forgot he could just deliver the information instantly. "How long will you be?"
She asked because she knew how it was when her mother would go away from home, away from the Caern. It wasn't very irregular that she would go missing in the Umbra for months at a time before returning, eyes bright and full of stars and movements and touch light and distant and barely there at all.
Whatever his answer is, she'll follow up with a nod, accepting the length of time as it's explained regardless of what it may be.
"Well, we can clean up for them, I guess. If you're not ready to sleep we can go out walking again?"
Hector Ghosh
This early in the pregnancy Hector does not have a preoccupation with staying near to home. They do not know how far along she is and they are not concerned with learning a precise number but they know she is nowhere near close to delivering. As time passes and they have a better gauge for whether she was a few days or several weeks pregnant at the time of her injury Hector will start sticking closer to the Homestead.
He knows this is the longest she has been away from home possibly ever. Her mother was the one who would slip off into the Umbra for incalculable periods of time. Her sister was the one who completed her Rite of Passage and went off on adventure after adventure. That last adventure killed her. Sent Hector back to a place that wasn't his home because he'd promised her he'd look after her sister.
Both of them want to get back but his work isn't done. He doesn't know the Skald he met in Houston has taken moon bridge after moon bridge to visit Caerns he had had no intention of visiting himself. He does know his packsister ran a route mirroring his and like as not she too has gone further north. May have gone to Europe for all he knows. They have not seen her since they left Manhattan.
It's quicker to travel by moon bridge than by car. At least Lola will not have to wait days upon days for him to reach home again after he visits this last Caern. All the same he can feel the energy and the need for movement in Lola's body when she starts to massage his arm.
The touch closes his eyes and quells the Rage that never really goes out in him.
"I'll come home as soon as I'm done there. I shouldn't be more than a day or two after you."
As they stand here he has no idea that the rest of the Nation finds a discrepancy between his renown and his rank. He has been so preoccupied the last several weeks that it won't hit him that until he opens his mouth and introduces himself others perceive him to be a Fostern.
Uncanny as his observations are at times he cannot predict that he'll be held up in Vancouver. Right now he's catching one of his mate's hands in his and kissing her knuckles as she suggests they clean up dinner for his parents and go out for a walk.
"There's a park about half a mile from here, you can see the whole city all lit up." A thought makes him laugh against the back of her hand and kiss her there again. "Hardly anybody's there after dark." And again. He grins an impish troublemaker's grin before he releases her hand to hustle through cleaning up. "Let's scare off the high schoolers and make out on the overlook."
Lola Hawkes
It wasn't that Lola was worried about being away from home for the sake of the baby. She knew full well that if she tried to 'deliver' anytime soon, the baby would be stillborn or would survive the world for maybe a minute or two before passing away. She didn't worry for this happening. She knew the strength of her own body and has seen Hector and his siblings, and is confident in their health as well.
She was eager to get home for herself. She missed her own bed and the smell of it. She missed her space and the quiet of the land she grew up on and being so close to the Bawn. She missed her long patrols and how good it always felt to come home feeling physically worn and accomplished. Hector was correct in that this was the longest and furthest she's been away from home. Overall, she was handling it fine. She would take a while to fall asleep and wake easily. He'd notice her up and down a couple of times at night on the excuse of needing to pee but sometimes just to stand up and rub at her eyes and coach herself to lay back down and relax and close her eyes.
She wanted to get back to normal. They would be there soon-- she'd drive out on New Year's Eve and if she was diligent she could do that in one day. Normal would come when Hector returned a day or two after her. She could hold out that long, she supposed.
Then, when her mate caught her hand and kissed at her knuckles and fingers and suggested they go make out on an overlook, Lola's face split into a grin and she laughed quietly and lifted his hand, wrapped up in hers, to return the affection with a kiss to his wrist before letting him go. "I'm game," she said, so she worked with him to clean up quickly after dinner.
-------------
Approximately forty minutes later the Uktena couple would come upon the overlook on foot. There was a car parked off to the side with bodies moving around in the backseat. True to a promise, Hector scared them off by looming too close to the window and tapping on it and leering. Pants were still on, he'd notice, but the couple was jarred and thrown off and uncomfortable with the wild-eyed long-haired brown kid tapping on their windows, so they climbed up front and drove away.
With the car chased off, they had the space to themselves for the time being. Lola stood near the barrier, even though it did only come up barely above her knees, and looked down at the view. Begrudgingly admitted that it was a nice view, even if it was of a sprawling city. So long as I don't have to stay down there, she'd conceded.
At some point, several minutes in, Lola would lean heavily back against Hector's front when he was standing behind her with arms loose about her shoulders and chest. A curve of the spine, a husk to the voice and breath, and she'd convinced him to find someplace that headlights wouldn't hit to get a little hot and heavy. It wouldn't last for very long before another two cars pulled up onto the overlook and sounds of young adults piling out of cars filled the air. Lola had to wrap her dress back closed and Hector, grinding teeth, was convinced to zip his pants back up. They could make up for it after leaving his parents.
Perhaps they'd walk about a little more, cutting through yards and parks and neighborhoods in the night. They'd both slept for a while prior to dinnertime, so they couldn't go to sleep straight away. Lola was more comfortable killing time outside rather than hanging out in his old bedroom or his parents living room. At some point, though, before his parents could have a chance to worry that he'd just gone and vanished again, they came back into the house through the front door.
They'd settle together in the twin bed at the end of that night, close and overlapped for both of them to fit on the mattress.
There was plenty worth sleeping for that night, and it was the closest to sound that Lola had slept since leaving home.
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