Hector Ghosh
When they got home from the bar Sunday night Hector did not just launch himself out of the Forester or launch himself at Lola like he had no idea what had happened in there. His Rage shimmered like too much heat rolling off of summer asphalt. If Lola's nerves were frayed it would have sent her back from him. He hasn't seen her like that since the afternoon a monster they could not identify took out his throat.
That isn't what happened when they got home from the bar.
He did step out of the Forester but not as if the passenger-side door had offended him. Not as if he intended to hurt it or anything else that got in his way. It was an effort to control himself but it was an effort that he made. He shut the door gentle as he could and he waited for Lola to get out too. Waited as long as he had to and when she was out in the night air with him Hector came around the side of the car.
Her behavior wasn't a mystery and it never has been. When he held her that night he held her tight against him. Like he wasn't assured of their safety even now. Though he hadn't spoken in the car on the way home Lola knew if he was angry at her he would not be able to keep it to himself for long. One arm around the small of her back and the other around her shoulders. A hand at the back of her head.
Nothing said about the fight. Nothing to say. All he did was hold her and the way he held her and the way he stroked her hair: Lola had known him long enough to know he was trying to comfort her. Like she was the one who near frenzied tonight and needed soothing.
---
That was three nights ago.
Lola Hawkes
Sunday night Lola had been quiet. Granted, she often was, but this was different. She behaved like she didn't quite trust Hector's calm-- not as though she was afraid that he would snap and hurt her, but as though she didn't believe he wasn't upset with her. She kept waiting for a sudden sound-- a slap of hands on a flat surface or a fist against a wall or piece of furniture. She kept waiting for him to yell, to bellow at her that she didn't need to fight women at the bar because they were looking at him. She didn't want any of it, but she kept waiting for the night to turn into a fight about loyalty and trust and territorial habits.
But it didn't. Eventually they'd gone to bed, and only when sleep overtook her did the tightness finally go out of her muscles.
----------
Monday and Tuesday came and went, the same as any. The days had been warm, and Lola had been taking advantage of this. Much of the snow had melted, brown-tan-green grass showed in the bare patches burnt away by the sun. She'd been outside often, breaking away from the house not for the sake of avoiding Hector, but specifically to breathe cool air and feel the sun and breeze and to walk her land.
Wednesday afternoon she could be found outside, but near to the house this time at least. It was two in the afternoon and she had just stepped out of the standing shed/garage that she kept all terrain vehicles and 'disposal equipment' holed away in. She wasn't wearing a coat, but a flannel shirt instead. The sleeves had been rolled up to her elbows so that her forearms were bare to the elements. She had jeans on, but the button had to be held with a rubber band for she couldn't do her pants up properly any more. Typically, she would wear loose clothes, but when those ran out and needed to be washed she'd default to things that don't quite fit anymore-- such as the thermal shirt that she was wearing under the flannel.
Thick hair was done up in a ponytail, and licks of it stuck to her face, glued by a thin sheen of sweat on her brow and neck. She'd been practicing with a machete and a post of wood that she'd marked with the height of an average man -- paint lines indicating where head, neck, chest, belly, groin, and knees would be. These days she was alternating between that and the bow that Hector'd made.
As the snows projected to come weren't supposed to be there until later that evening, Lola had left a thermos and a book out on the table between the two chairs on the front porch. This was where she was circling to now, wiping her hand on the back of her neck before adjusting her sleeves so they were rolled back down to her wrists.
Hector Ghosh
By now Lola knows Hector falls into habits based on what the moon is doing. Unpredictable as he was Sunday night she could predict this: he would either snap at her eventually or he would peel himself away from her and go out into the night once she was asleep and he would not come back until he had slaked that blood-thirst that never really goes away.
Monday morning he did not crawl into bed until nearly seven o'clock in the morning and Tuesday he fell asleep in his coat and boots on the couch instead of coming to bed. She knows he's been around because she saw the lump beneath the covers that his body made yesterday. But when he rose Monday and Tuesday afternoons Hector went out of the house without showering or scavenging in the kitchen or saying a word to her before he left. Unless Lola moved it his guitar still lies where he chucked it in the backseat of the Forester.
Last night he didn't come home at all. His army jacket was draped over the washing machine this morning but his sweatshirt and his blazer were gone.
If she had to guess Lola could hit near enough to the meat of things. He is more perceptive than others give him credit for being and loving Lola has honed an ability to read people that was dull as ore when he first came back from Winnipeg. When that dancing-flame Rage inside him has stoked itself into an uncontrolled blaze or when Lola is too drained to tolerate the way he is normally it's her tension that upsets him, not anything she may or may not have done to have caused a flaring-up of his Rage in the first place. He can handle Lola when she yells or hits him but not when she flinches away from him or starts to cry.
Sunday night she went to bed unassured of his steadiness.
Hector Echoes-of-the-Lost is not a complicated creature.
When she circles around the side of the house to return to her drink and her reading Lola finds her mate sitting in one of the chairs. He's wearing his boots and his jeans, sweatshirt hood up and hands plunged into the pockets of his blazer. He's staring out at the driveway when her footsteps crunch the gravel and she can feel the weight of his eyes when they shift from their staring to watch her approach.
Hector looks tired to the point of sadness. He doesn't rise to greet her.
Lola Hawkes
As she came around the side of the house into Hector's view, head down and eyes focused on re-buttoning the cuffs of her flannel at her wrists, the Galliard would be able to see that for every bit tired he probably felt, Lola was precisely as healthy and full of life. This was the point of the pregnancy where she seemed to glow health, for there was extra blood in her system and the baby was not yet large enough within her to be so much a toll on her body. Her stomach was larger each passing couple of days, and seemed exaggerated more so by the fact that her thermal shirt under the open flannel was stretched tight across it.
At least she was carrying maternity well. Lola could be thankful for that in lieu of everything it (was supposed to have) prevented her from doing.
She felt Hector before she saw him, his presence something that niggled at her mind and nerves and heart. After getting high and thinking about it for a long while with Ivan, she'd finally managed to explain that she could pick people who were Garou out of the crowd-- not something that many Kinfolk can do, or hell, even a lot of Garou.
"I can just feel them. It's the Rage, I think, and the Beast," she'd explained to him with smoke curling away from her lips, carrying words along with. "Think of stepping into a dark unfamiliar room, and then you get the sensation that something's standing behind you, and your heart jumps up and your hackles do too and you spin around but nothing's there. That paranoia-- that feeling of being hunted. That's what it feels like when you all are around, and that's how I know one of you when I see you."
Ivan had suggested she become a Cub Finder with that talent. She'd scoffed and proclaimed that the Sept would burn down if she wasn't there to keep it safe.
So, Lola knew Hector was there before she saw him, and she knew to expect him when she rounded to the porch stairs and walked up onto the wood planks. She paused for a moment when she saw her mate, looking exhausted and sad and like he could fall asleep in the chair. He looked like his limbs were filled with lead. Her brow creased, and she paused mid-stride, but only for a second so that she could appraise him.
When she passed in front of him to sit in the chair to his left, Lola touched her fingers to the top of Hector's head in a brief, welcome-home show of affection. She didn't flop as casually into these chairs as she did in the summer. Accommodating to the extra ten or twelve pounds she's gained and the stomach out front she sat into the rocking chair with more control.
"You alright...?"
Hector Ghosh
His mindset during the waning gibbous moon is harder to gauge than it is possibly any other time of the month. Coming off the full as they are Hector is not as melancholy or introspective as his brethren born beneath such a moon but it still impacts him in a way he's learning how to weather being in close proximity to someone who can't just wrestle him into the ground when his mood swings.
Some would argue Hector is only really himself when the moon is thin but that's not really the case. All the time Hector is himself. He's getting better at being himself the older he gets. Hector is wild and passionate and strong. He's also used to being in a big pack where he was not the alpha. He's used to being a Cliath without a woman. He wasn't used to his Rage until recently.
Hector spent more time wild during the time between one gibbous moon and its bookend than he's been an alpha and a mate. Lola forged ahead through her formative years thinking claws and renown awaited her on the other side and all she had to show for it were two dead parents and her only sister cremated in another country where strangers had to howl for her. Their losses have twined into each other. Without each other both their lines were doomed.
They remember this without talking about it.
When her hand finds his head Hector's eyes slip shut and he nearly slides down in the chair. Before she can go too far from him one ring-heavy hand grasps her fingers in a loose hold. He puts the backs of Lola's fingers against his lips and opens his eyes again at the question.
First he thinks about it. Then he nods and ducks his head to press his brow against Lola's knuckles. His Rage is drained but she knows it will swell up hot again when the moon rises tonight. The scent of old blood clings to the beard growing back in on his jaws but he doesn't hold himself like he's injured. That's all the answer that question sires.
Lola Hawkes
The Kinswoman didn't get so far as to sit after all, and instead wound up standing to the side of Hector's chair, her hand caught up in his and fingers being kissed. She turned her hand to show him her wrist and palm, where the skin was thinner and scent and sensation both more strong. Hector was still Hector from one Gibbous moon to the next, but Lola had become well atuned to how his behaviors shifted through the moon phases. When the moon was thin and dark, Hector was more a man with an animal riding his bones. When the moon was plump and bright, he was a beast barely contained within the skin of a man. How she behaved with him would shift subtley with the moon and his temperments as well.
When he'd ducked his head and rested his forehead to the back of her hand, Lola trailed her hand back around his head, touching with fingertips across his face as she went. Her hand would settle at the back of is neck and shoulders, where thumb and fingers started to rub and massage.
No one was around to witness this. Again, no one may believe him if he tried to explain how she was when they weren't around.
"You look like you fought a mountain," she said, second hand coming to touch his beard and rub some of the dry blood loose from it. That blood was rubbed between her fingertips and flaked away, examined. She figured it belonged to a deer or something of that like. "Did something happen?"
Hector Ghosh
Though the hand at the back of his neck kneads the tension out of the muscles Hector looks up at Lola like they're stood across a field from each other. Like maybe he actually is fighting an mountain. Like maybe they're never going to figure out what that pit is and they're never going to be able to take down Beloved Horror and all they're going to spend the rest of their lives doing is fighting one threat after another until one side or the other runs out of bodies and the only side running out of bodies so far is theirs.
This is a hard reality for young Garou to accept. This particular young Garou has spent the last six months rallying his peers to run onward into greatness and glory. Don't fear the darkness united we're stronger than them what you do here now will ring on after you're dead. Rah rah rah. Don't lose hope you sons of bitches we're going after them.
"No," he says. "Nothing. I let He Who Waits For Dawn hijack my body and ran all over the country visiting other Septs and spend more time staring at that goddamned pit than I do doing just about anything else and I still had to stand up at the moot and say 'Yup. No fucking clue what it is, friends. We're working on it even though the elders who haven't all been punished don't have a fucking clue what it is. Here's what I did over winter vacation though!'"
He leans his forehead against her ribs. She can hear him exhale hard when the realization that he's resting his face alongside her belly hits him. Tension starts to crackle through him and Lola can tell he's about five seconds from standing up and seeking out solitude again.
"I don't think I can do this."
Lola Hawkes
Collective stress that had gathered over the past several weeks was summarized while Lola rubbed at his neck and shoulders. The frown on her face creased to something more sympathetic. The air was warm for January, but still cool-- hovering in the mid-forties. The sweat that had beaded on her brow has since dried and her hair fell in wisps free from its ponytail to hang about her temples and ears, along the back of her neck. She didn't know exactly what he did at the Sept of Cold Crescent when he went there, she didn't ask him the standard 'How was your day?' upon greeting him after they both have come home. She could see the toll of the pit on him, though, that he struggled against it and sought the answers but thus far could find none.
When he pressed his head to her ribs and lay his cheek to her stomach, Lola's hand stilled. She felt the crackle of Rage and tension, and he felt her stiffen just a little beside him. Not as though bracing herself, but rather with notice and readiness. She didn't want him to lean back away from her, so her hand left his neck and instead cradled his jaw and cheek, kept his head close against her stomach.
He said he didn't think he could do this, continue as he was. Lola's frown turned to a bit more of a scowl, as though she was offended by what she'd heard, but she didn't move away from him or make firm her hand against his skin.
"Of course you can. Just because there's no traction now doesn't mean there ain't gonna be. Let the ices thaw and it'll be easier to dig, you know? Don't stop watching for the chance to move, by any means, but if it ain't workin' now-- if that pit ain't moving or doing anything, then ya gotta wait."
Hector Ghosh
With her hand on his face Lola can feel Hector flinch with the quick-sharp pain of accepting love. It's the easiest thing in the world for him to take himself away from her and his pack and the rest of the Nation when he has a task to complete or a misery to ride out. He's done it the last three nights. Gone away from her because he was scared and nearly frenzied for being scared and she didn't trust him when he played at stillness afterwards.
It's hard for him to put himself in her shoes. He'd never known werewolves existed when he was still fragile. By the time Lara and Naima found him he was hours away from his First Change. The Garou who would drag him through his fostering were there when he shifted and lost control for the first time.
He was alone when Rage dragged him away from Death the first time. To hear Thomas tell the tale he shuddered and breathed wet red breath in the snow but did not rise again the second time.
Though she scowls at his words Hector cannot see her face. All he has are her words and the strong hand against his face. He rests like this as she rebukes his uncertainty. At the metaphor a smile twitches against her stomach. It wants to be a laugh and a warm one but all Lola gets is a rush of warm air and his hands leaving his pockets that his arms might link around her hips.
He nods vigorous and accepting against her ribs. His right hand slides around her back to feel its way around to her belly. If the baby has given any signs of movement he hasn't been around much the last few weeks to witness them. Splayed palm rests there anyway. His left arm doesn't leave its place around the small of her back.
"Willow never doubted herself," he says, "And Corey, you know. If he stops fucking up he'll be Grand Alpha of Unending Horizon one day."
That's the first time he's talked of his former best friend in the present tense. Up until now it's always been the past. Like he hoped he would stay there.
"He would just bitch, you know, or straight-up ask for advice. He'd ask me for advice all the time but not because he really didn't know what he was doing. I never heard either of them say they really didn't know what they're doing and if they did, you know, not know what they were doing. They didn't say it in front of me."
Get to the point, Hector.
"It was alright, at first, when it was just me and Tamsin and we were the same rank." The cadence of his speech slows down now. He runs his thumb up and down the midline of Lola's belly. Throat and mouth near as they are their baby can hear his voice. "I know we're going to get through it. We've gotten through everything else. It just... I really, right now, don't know what I'm doing. About anything."
His thumb keeps moving. He presses a kiss to the apex of her belly.
"I also... really appreciate you. How strong you are and how little shit you take. Even if it means you--"
A genuine laugh now.
"I cannot believe you flipped that chick's chair over." His eyes lift now and he tilts his head to try and find her face. "Are we going to keep on pretending that didn't happen or are you going to tell me what she did?"
Lola Hawkes
The first time Lola's felt the baby move was in the past twenty four hours. She was laying down to sleep last night, while Hector was away still. She wasn't sure of what she was feeling at first, not for sure, but after pressing flat palms against the firm extended points of her stomach she'd verified that it was the baby, stretching and moving about. Babies are more active at the point in the night when their mothers lay down, according to the baby book.
All the same, while Hector tensed at first, he relaxed and let his head stay there against her ribs and stomach. An arm was behind her back and hips, and his other hand splayed on the opposite side of her stomach, touched and stroked. Lola's mouth pulled into a small smile that he wouldn't get to see, just as he didn't see the scowl that was just chased away. Hector's voice was deeper than Lola's, certainly and easily, and it resonated as such when he spoke. The baby stirred, faintly but undoubtedly.
Lola didn't interrupt the conversation to point it out, though. As far as she was concerned it was just another thing-- just like when she'd started showing and had to adjust her wardrobe. She wasn't one for making a fuss over landmarks, anyways. Instead, she smirked down at Hector when he turned his head to look up at her, laughing, asking about the woman at the bar that Lola had put on the ground. All that he'd said about the alphas before was left alone for now, though she would get back to that no doubt.
"That bitch," Lola started, and wrinkled her nose up in distaste. Apparently she was fine talking about it, now that Hector had approached the subject with a laugh. Back when Celduin was younger and Hector was too, Lola would tell stories of the brawls she got into, show off scrapes or healing wounds and exclaim proudly what the other guy looked like. Most of these stories were shared with cheering on from Glen and her sister frowning sourly but keeping her quiet. When given the pass, as she was now, Lola would talk.
"She and her friends were eye-fucking you, which was fine. But that one got it in her head to come up to ya after your time on stage, it seemed. So I warned her not to-- figured I'd save her the trouble and me the territorial scalding. But she took it as a challenge. She disrespected me, and I wasn't about to let her keep walking around with her nose in the air all night. Put her back in her place."
Hector Ghosh
This will probably be one of the last times Hector puts a conversation with Lola ahead of attending to their child.
They occupy an uncomfortable point in time now. No certainties in their lives at all but even fewer in the one they share. Her cousin's fears are all rooted in a world where women run a significant chance of miscarrying in the first trimester. Where women as active as Lola could take a hit or overexert themselves and lose the baby this far along. Hector had tried to tell Anthony he had the same fear that Lola would go off and he would lose both of them but before they'd gone out there and afterwards he had told her the contrary. That was bullshit. He trusts her.
Trust as they do each other this is their first time waiting out a pregnancy. They don't even have a guarantee that Hector will still be alive in the summertime when they get to meet their child, let alone that the child itself will survive. Or that they won't lose one in the future. If they know nothing else though Lola knows that Hector wants this baby. That he wants a big family. He hasn't come out and said it yet but he's hoping for Kinfolk. If they don't have a single trueborn child Hector will still be proud and happy.
Once the baby is in their arms and has a name things like this won't happen anymore. But his brain is slow to catch up with the rest of his senses. That fluttering beneath his palm has to wait.
He turns his face to her palm to press a kiss into her wrist and buries another quiet laugh in its flesh.
"Damn," he says, "and there I was hoping I'd get to shoot someone down just to show off for you."
His thumb stops moving but his hand doesn't leave her belly.
"Did...? Hang on."
With his forehead back against her ribs Hector clears his throat and speaks in the same tone at the same volume as he had been earlier.
"Did you feel that?" he asks Lola before his audience changes: "Are you eavesdropping? Huh? Cover your ears, you don't need to hear about Mom getting into a bar fight."
Lola Hawkes
The days today weren't quite what they had been one or two hundred years ago-- or, hell, even less than that. Lola observed that packs of wolves and entire Septs were more progressive now. With talk of the Apocalypse drawing nigh, focus shifted more on the here and now and the battle front and code cracking. Though others may not dwell on the thought of continuing the race, this was something that Lola had been aware of even before she found out she was a Kinfolk. She never necessarily planned or thought hard about children in terms of when or how many, but she always planned to continue the line. When news of Maria's passing reached her this summer, it occurred to her that she was the last member of her family left. Just as was the case for Hector, Lola needed this baby to continue her line. She needed Hector to help-- they needed each other. This bound them as many other things did, and would no doubt continue to do until one or both of them laughed their last laugh into Death's face before being taken away from this life.
Hector's comment about showing off kept that small smirk on her face, but didn't get any real answer. He had noticed the flutter as she had, and started speaking to a baby that, according to the chapter in the baby book that Lola was about to read, could actually hear now.
Her hand shifted from cradling his jaw to resting at the back of his head and brushing lightly at his hair.
"That started up last night, while you were away. There'll be plenty more to come, I'm sure." Her head then nodded to the book that's been patiently waiting for her to come back to it on the table. "According to that, I'm probably anywhere from eighteen to twenty weeks if we're feeling things now."
Hector Ghosh
With the conversation shifting away from what had him looking so defeated and onto what brightness they had to look forward to Hector draws a deep breath and presses another kiss to the top of her stomach. It jars him how he can go away for a few days and come back and she's grown even more.
He takes his hands off of her to brace himself on the chair that he will not use her to get himself to his feet. Once on his feet Hector can see right into her face. The dried sweat curling her hair against her brow and the lingering sheen on her skin. She does not literally glow these days but her body is producing more of everything. When he looks at her sometimes a daze comes over him.
Stood up now Hector brushes some hair back from her face and seeks out her eyes before he presses his lips to her mouth.
He'd rinsed his face and mouth in the creek after he'd fought whatever he'd fought and Lola can taste the metal tang of how long he's been outside in the cold clung to his breath. His Rage down to the dregs, all he has left is his own adrenaline. Hunger deepens the kiss but he does not set upon her as if to devour her.
His fingers bury themselves in the hair at the nape of her neck and he pulls away long enough to say, "Let's go inside, huh?"
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