Lola Hawkes
For all of the concern that Lola was
going to find a way to get herself and the baby killed, she's been doing
a fine job of staying home and sticking to routine-- even with Hector
spending much of his time in the city. She was alone for quite a long
time, and fell back into the rhythms and motions of carrying out her day
solo without missing too heavy of a beat. She would remember when
climbing into an empty bed how used to the company she'd gotten, though,
and wrap her arms around pillows and roll about from one side to the
other before finding comfort and sleep.
The last two nights she
hasn't had to worry about it so much, though. The days were alone
again-- earlier in the morning on Wednesday Hector had returned to the
city, but he made it back late in the evening that night to sleep in the
bed that he could now call his and be with his mate.
This is
where we find the Uktena couple: in bed, asleep, having been that way
for a couple of hours already. An old alarm clock on the nightstand
glowed dim in the night, declaring the time to be in the wee hours of
the morning. Aside from the wind, all in the log house was quiet.
Lola
slept on her left side, facing out from the bed rather than in. She
had a pillow tucked between her legs to provide comfort to her hips and
back, but that had been pushed further under the covers toward the foot
of the bed some time ago. The Uktena Kinswoman did not snore, but
breathed soft and deep with sleep.
Quiet as it was, it wasn't bound to last.
Hector Ghosh
Most
nights when they start out trudging off towards sleep together Hector
molds himself to Lola's back. Before she'd begun to show he would wrap
an arm around her shoulders and tuck her in against his chest but she
moves around too frequently these nights.
He doesn't have one
position in which he's likely to fall asleep than any other but when
Hector does fall asleep he stays that way until morning. They had gone
to bed with him lain behind her stroking her hair. His hand was curled
up somewhere behind her up until about five minutes ago when he hauled
it in close to his chest and rolled over onto his back.
The
red-glow of the clock said it was 2:13 a.m. when Hector made a
protesting noise low in his throat and rolled onto his back. 2:14 a.m.
when he made the same noise higher in pitch and turned his head away
from the center of the bed. He was sweating and his heart was beating
fast but it seemed that would be the end of the outbursts for the night.
At 2:28 a.m. Hector awakens with a single violent convulsion and a:
"THOMAS!"
And
immediately begins panting for breath as he looks around at the
darkness surrounding him and realizes he was freaking out in his sleep.
Maybe Lola didn't hear that. Maybe he just yelled in his dream.
Lola Hawkes
Neither
a particularly heavy nor light sleeper, Lola kept her same state of
unconsciousness through the minutes leading up to Hector's outburst.
When his hand left where it had previously been resting on her pillow
she didn't notice. When he groaned and sweated, she neither heard nor
felt the change in her surroundings.
However, when the body beside
her jerked and erupted with a shout, Lola snapped to consciousness as
well. While Hector looked about, Lola twisted sharply in the sheets and
floundered for a moment with legs and arms alike. This wasn't
senseless movement, though, she wasn't convulsing as Hector had been.
Instead, she'd propped herself up with her left arm and elbow and was
reaching, slapping a hand about on her nightstand until she could find
the drawer. She was about to pull it open to touch fingers to the
familiar handle of a pistol, but she came to realization before the
weapon was actually drawn.
Nothing was in the room but her and Hector, and Hector was sweaty and panting and dazed beside her.
"Jesus Christ...,"
she muttered quietly to herself before resting her forehead on the
pillow and drawing her right arm back under the covers. The house grew
cool at night as the wood burning furnace ate through its fuel and
started to come down to embers. She turned onto her right side,
switched so she was propped up with her right arm instead of left, and
reached out to splay her hand over his breastbone. Like the motion
would settle and ground him and keep his heart from bursting out of his
chest with whatever it was that woke him.
"The hell happened...?"
She asked in a voice that was still cloudy with sleep, and peered
through eyes that were clouded with the same to find and watch him in
the dark.
Hector Ghosh
Despite the chill outside
and the vehemence with which he used to bitch about anything that wasn't
between 55 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit Hector has acclimated to living in
the mountains. He sleeps just about if not totally nude these days.
When Lola's hand finds his sternum she can feel his heart slamming away
beneath the bone and the slickness of fresh sweat not yet cooled.
His
panting slows with the touch. Like it does remind him to breathe slow
through his nose instead of letting air cycle fast and useless through
his lips. He hauls in one breath and releases it as Lola asks what
happened.
"Nothing," he says in a voice that crackles with recent
sleep. He reaches up to run a hand down his face and she can see him
turn his head in the dark to read the time. Eyes wide even now that he
knows he's awake. When he speaks again his voice is congested with
terror and self-reproach both. "Shit. Go back to sleep, it was just a
dream."
Like this happens all the time. They've been sharing a bed
for four turns of the moon and he's never even hinted at having bad
dreams.
Lola Hawkes
She wasn't the quickest thing
to wake. If this had been a real issue of home invasion or sudden
attack she would have continued to ride the adrenaline in her veins, and
that would have helped snap her awake that much faster. With this,
though, she was very quickly assured that she was startled, but not in
danger. Therefore, she didn't wake all at once as she would were they
being attacked.
All the same, the sleep starts to slip away from
her as she hears the horror in Hector's voice. He tried to hide it, but
that was like trying to cover neon lights with thin cotton in the
night. A gesture, but nothing more. It just made the metaphorical neon
sign more difficult to read. She frowned and rubbed the heel of her
hand on his chest, like she could help his heart rediscover its normal
rhythm and scrub whatever clenching terror ache that his chest might
still be carrying away. She didn't mind the sweat, she's had her hands
covered in much much worse.
"Jalada." Lola's used this
term enough that Hector knows what she means by it. She's never told
him what it translates more directly into, so he couldn't try to correct
her on it (How? You don't even have one!). Maybe Anthony would
explain it better one day.
She shook her head and moved her hand
off of his chest. It would instead come to rest on the mattress, but
fingertips still made contact with what was near-- wrist, forearm, the
side of a pinky finger, what have you. "That ain't how you dream. Came
out of it yelling and jerking, and now you acting like you've seen a
ghost?" She's stil tired, and scrubbed the corners of her eyes with
pads of fingers before she rested her hand back nearby her mate once
more.
"Ya... Ya yelled Thomas?"
Hector Ghosh
If
Hector took Spanish in school he was a poor student and hadn't retained
anything. He knows how to ask where the library is and tell her he has
whatever the day's vocabulary word is in his pants and that's about the
extent of what he brought to the table when she first started speaking
to him in her father's native tongue months ago.
"No jalada."
He's progressed to boasting the proficiency of a caveman.
Her
hand removes itself from his chest. As they lie here talking calm
descends upon him again. Nothing to fight but whatever was coiled up
inside his skull gnawing away at his sense of safety until it broke
through enough to strike in his sleep. He doesn't let her hand get far
once she's scrubbed at her eyes.
Before he goes to bed he takes
his rings off his fingers and tosses his bracelets and necklaces nearby. If he's planning on working outside or hunting they stay off. But most
of his jewelry is dedicated to his flesh because they mean something to
him. In the dark nothing holds to his flesh but the sheets and his own
panic-sweat.
As she prompts him with a reminder of what came out
of his mouth moments ago Hector takes up her hand in his own and presses
the fingers to his lips.
"You really don't want to know," he says but the adrenaline has gone out of his voice.
And he knows she's going to argue. So he just sucks in a breath and says Alright alright alright until she calms enough for him to have her attention.
"The
dove-spirit bound into the necklace I gave you came and got me. You can
probably guess why." That's a great start. "So, in the dream, I thought
it would be fun to use your blood as body wash and then kill Tamsin and
take her heart to the Beloved Horror. Their recruitment numbers must be
down because they were like Hey buddy what's up we've been saving a place for you!
And then I don't know what happened but one second Thomas was there and
the next I was like... doing... something... to his corpse. I don't
even know. It didn't make any sense."
Lola Hawkes
Jewelry
was something more that Hector had about him which Lola did not. She
didn't even wear a band on her left ring finger to show herself claimed
for when she walked among humans, or the more human-minded of their own
kind. She had studs in her ear lobes, but no other earrings. No
necklaces, no bracelets, no watches. She'd expected that she would need
to be ready for Change at a moment's notice through her teenage years,
and never much cared for them in the first place to pick up the habit
later.
She took the studs from her ears when she'd laid down,
though. She wasn't so nude as Hector, as she'd pulled a night shirt on
over her bare skin after they'd finished 'reuniting' before rejoining
him in bed. Her hair was tied into a braid, for it was long and would
get laid upon uncomfortably if not bound in some way. She pushed it off
her neck and back behind her before Hector had captured her hand and
kissed her fingers and assured her she didn't want to know.
She
didn't have to get far, another mumbled beginning to a sleepy flurry of
an argument in Spanish-English slurred together. The panic easing from
his bones and the affection he showed had calmed Lola enough to relax
back into the mattress, so she wasn't bothering to put together any real
attempt at her argument. Just as he knew she would argue, she sensed
that he knew it was easier to just relent. Plus, he didn't hold
information from her regularly when she pressed or pried.
What she
heard in return, though, had her expression growing grim and sad both.
Not sad for the travesties that Dream Hector had laid upon his pack, or
the traitorous turn that he took against his Sept, her Caern, and the
Nation as a whole. Rather, she looked sad for what sitting through a
show like that had to be like, and concerned for how terrible it was.
"Jesus
fucking Christ, Hector." Always Hector. Seldom to never 'Heck'.
"Were you too close to that pit today? Is it rubbing on your dreams?"
Although
the phrasing seemed metaphorical and lyrical in a sense, she was asking
literally-- could the Pit be tainting or influencing and implanting
upon his spirit and dreamscape?
Hector Ghosh
"No."
She knows humor to be one of his defense mechanisms. Deflecting deeper exploration of his psyche is easier than trying to put words to things he does not understand. His mind has whet itself on interpretation of riddles and ancient symbolism and honed itself on acquiring intelligence on their enemy without absorbing it such that he begins to think the Black Spiral Dancers have got the right idea.
And yet if anyone from Sept of the Cold Crescent was going to defect. If there were money riding on guessing who it would be first. Whoever put money on Echoes of the Lost jumping ship first would end up raking in quite a bit of scratch. It isn't as likely as it would be for some of the weaker wolves in their ilk but he has the most to lose of any of them right now.
Even if he wants to think he would be strong enough to keep on going if Lola were gone all he really knows for certain is that he would keep on living. His subconscious clearly does not trust he would keep on being good. That's a whole other ballgame.
"Tamsin was being a brat the other day. We had a gig, right, and it was <i>pretty good</i> considering we were yelling at each other right before we went on. I don't know. She said some stuff that pissed me off and then after we were done she said some more stuff that pissed me off and then she kneed me in the balls."
Hector never wondered what it would be like to have younger siblings. Soon as they picked up Corey and Tamsin he gained fucking two of them.
"I just have a lot on my mind, I guess. It doesn't mean anything."
Lola Hawkes
For what it's worth, Lola listens. It's seldom that listening alone is sufficient for curing what ails or providing solutions to problems. But listening is a vital first step to getting there, and she paid mind while Hector spoke. She looked up at him through the dark, head held up, propped in her hand and palm while her elbow dug into her pillow. Her lids were hooded-- they were both just pulled out of sleep and if there was one thing that Lola needed to get her through creating another living being it was plenty of rest. Her body demanded it, so it was harder to resist than before. But she stays awake none the less, even if she can't shake the drowsy haze entirely and has no plans of staying awake for much longer anyways. She's awake enough to process the story about him and Tamsin's fight.
Awake enough to scoff at his saying his dream doesn't mean anything.
"I don't think it's prophetic or nothin'. Your spirit's strong and built up, but you're still no Theurge. Premonitions shouldn't be happening to ya. Besides, Death has no place here. Ain't welcome." She frowned and turned her head in her palm to rub at her momentarily closed eyelids and her forehead both. Of course Death could still find them, of course she couldn't guarantee that it wouldn't, but she wasn't worried.
"The hell happened with Tamsin? What were you two fighting over?"
Hector Ghosh
This whole time he's held her hand captive but his grip has been loose and he has kept it near his mouth that he might punctuate sentences by bringing the knuckles to his lips. As she reassures him that it doesn't necessarily mean anything Hector presses her fist to the side of his face and peers through the thinning dark to find her face. His eyes have lost their wide-open panic but it's clear that he isn't going to fall right back asleep.
Then she asks what he and Tamsin were fighting over and he groans. Pushes her knuckles into his eye socket and runs his thumb back and forth across the pinky-side of her wrist.
"She's such an asshole. I don't even want to talk about it."
Of course he doesn't want to talk about it. It's going to cause a fight because he doesn't want to admit he's starting to agree with his packsister. Talk about the worst thing in the world.
"Did something happen while I was gone?"
Lola Hawkes
"What, with Tamsin?"
Lola's voice was soft in the dark. There weren't any babies in neighboring rooms to wake in the middle of the night just yet, but out of force of habit her voice was kept low anyways. This was probably from growing up sharing a bedroom with Maria and having whispered conversations, fights, stories, epics, and adventures in the dark of their bedroom and the rest of the house while growing up. It was good to practice anyways, for when the baby was in a crib instead of in utero.
While he kept the hand that wasn't supporting her head, she did nothing to resist or escape while he touched lips and eyelids and brows all alike to her fingers. Her own foggy face-scrubbing ceased and her cheek and chin rested in her palm once more.
"Not really, I didn't see her anyways. I'd called her that night I thought you were gone, when I had that vision. She'd called me back at like fuckin' three in the morning, and I think she was drunk? But nothing happened. She reassured me you were alright and that was about it. I think she tried to talk about something else-- worried about death coming after you and me, I think? I don't know. I was really fucking tired when we had that talk."
She didn't remember much about the conversation. She also possessed no psychic ability. But she was beginning to put two and two together, and sounded equal parts suspicious and exasperated, like she knew what this was going to be already, when she asked: "What makes you think something happened?"
Hector Ghosh
"I was just fucking asking."
With him holding her hand against his face like a protective talisman Lola can feel when Hector flinches at the edge and the anger in his own voice. Already she has seen the way he holds himself when he's in an argument. Seen how his father holds himself even when he's sitting down and in a vulnerable position. The elder Ghosh keeps his feet planted and his torso unobstructed by his arms. Standing he plants his hands on his hips. It does nothing to hide his middle-aged paunch or the weakness beginning to settle into his knees and back but it sends a message.
Lola did not hear Hector's father raise his voice. Hector was the one who raised his voice but Hector also remembers being sixteen years old and trying to make his thin gutless voice heard over that of a man who towered over him. It had escaped his imagination that his father would not still stand a head taller than him now that he is grown. That his father would be wary if not scared of him now that he is Changed.
But his father doesn't quail away from things that frighten him and now that she has seen the two in the same room Lola knows he argues like his father. Don't show hesitation. Don't apologize. Don't start something you can't finish.
It's almost three o'clock in the morning.
"If you two've already talked about this then she can just get over it."
Lola Hawkes
Lola's brow creased and lips turned with a scowl, but she never seemed to hold a grudge against snapped words and momentary flares in temper. The fact that he cringed at his own tone and kept her hand affectionately held near to his face seemed to smooth it over. So long as she could recognize that there was a thread of regret or apology there, which was typical if the Galliard's Rage hopped up to take his tongue and volume, she'd get past it.
Being ready to fall back asleep helped.
And yet, despite the clock reminding them of the time and despite the warm bed and flank that comforted her from the cool air in the room, Hector's unrest kept her conscious enough to remain engaged. The scowl softened into something less insulted and warning, more thoughtful and bothered.
"Get over... Man, what, she fought with you because she's worried we're gonna get ourselves killed? Did she fuckin' forget what we are? The goddamn world we live in and things we gotta defend ourselves against? I mean, the hell does she want us to do? Hide?" Lola's nose wrinkled, and with that she laid herself down on the mattress, tucked the arm that had been propping her up back under her pillow to better cradle her head and stretch her back. She remained on her right side, facing Hector, leaving him possession of her hand for now.
"I can talk to her again. Have a real talk, if she's still surly about it."
Hector Ghosh
If it requires any expenditure of energy to talk himself back down after he has started to get himself riled up Hector is at least calmed enough by her presence and her nearness that he does not show it.
He doesn't just want her hand. Just the surface of the dream he'd confessed to her was enough to send a cold skein across one's insides. He had done nothing to convey to her the vividness or the fear of it. How he could feel organs between his fingers and smell the metal tang of blood as it flowed over him. How he heard the screams of the comrades he killed and raped. Maybe not in that order.
His dried sweat will smell sour in the morning but right now the air is still taking it away.
As Lola expresses a plan of progress Hector releases her hand. She cannot see full-on his expression in the dark but she can see a tightening in the muscles as he fights off a wave of emotion and slinks his arm underneath her. He looks away towards the opposite wall and envelopes her in both his arms and she can hear the grief rattle in his lungs when he draws a breath and lets it go.
"I'm sorry," he says in a voice that threatens water but for the fact that he hears it and gasps in another breath to calm himself. Lets it out like a curse and smoothes back her hair with a hand. "She's just scared, baby, and angry. It's not her fault she's fuckin' Fianna." A beat. A bitter laugh. He presses a kiss against her forehead to keep his volume low. "Jesus... I love you. Alright? I love you more than I love anything else in the world and it would kill me if anything happened to you but I'm not going to tell you that every time you walk out the door. If I fell off the roof of a fucking ten-story building that'd kill me, too, but I don't spend my whole life afraid of falling off of roofs. I'd just like to have a few years and a couple kids with the roof before it kills me. You know?"
And she thinks her analogies are bad.
Lola Hawkes
Sleep is beginning to reclaim the Kinswoman. As far as she was concerned, at least on some subconscious level that was much louder in this state of drowsiness than usual, the matter was settled. Hector's dream was horrific and vivid, and she suspected that had something to do with how strong and vibrant his spiritual half had grown. Her mother had strong and fantastical dreams, so the logic seemed sound. However, none of that stuff had happened. If it was a premonition, she was already determined to prevent it from coming true. As for Tamsin, she's already expressed that she'll talk to her.
Hector pulled her into his arms, and she shifted to allow the arm room to slip underneath her. At first she was facing him, and she tucked her head near his for a moment to hear the emotion and tremble in his breathing before it was soon corrected. Then, when he'd found his voice and expressed his thoughts and kissed her brow and stroked her hair, Lola just smiled a quirky sleepy little grin and rolled in place. With her back facing him now, she wriggled and adjusted so she was close to him, back against his front, legs pressed close to his. Her eyes closed and she sighed a breath that had a sound of finality for how deep it was -- she was ready to go back to sleep.
Still, she muttered through the dark to him with a chuckle to her voice.
"Am I the roof in this analogy, since you're making kids with it? If that's the case, you saying you're afraid you're gonna fall off me and die?"
Another chuckle, to herself, at her own bad jokes at the expense of his poor analogy. Then:
"I love you."
It sounds like Goodnight.
Hector Ghosh
The next time Lola sees him her man will be covered in blood and hollow-eyed.
Come up from a nightmare this early in the morning he knows he will be traveling to the city with the intent to spend the night at the Broadway building. He does not know what the night's patrol will bring. But on the final night of the month he and four others will travel to Denver International Airport to investigate the claims that dark things lurk in the basement same as they do at Cold Crescent.
As he unleashes a metaphor that is as much a hopeless reassurance as anything else Lola settles back against him and he is glad for it. He wants to feel her pressed against him and he wants to hold her tight to him. To run his hand over her hair and breathe in her scent and lie quiet with her even as his mind refuses to settle.
Against her back his heart beats heavy and stubborn and full. Though he oftentimes speaks frivolous or facetious words he does not lie. He just does not always think before he talks. He's maturing but maturation is a slow and painful process and Hector's shoulders are chafing as he tries to sort out how a Fostern is supposed to act.
She loves him.
He kisses her jaw.
"Go to sleep," he says.
And he does not follow her tumbling back down into sleep. Though he breathes deep and easy Hector lies awake behind her for nearly an hour. On any other night he would have disentangled himself from her and found something else to occupy himself but the tone and the acuity of his dream has him wanting to stay near to Lola for as long as he can. An arm around her shoulders and a hand over her belly.
---
She will not know of his whereabouts again until very early Saturday morning. And then she will hear the shower running. He will not climb into bed like he climbed into bed after his last near-death. He will sit in there until she rises from sleep and goes into collect him.
What little she gets from him is that yes he's injured. No he wasn't scarred from it. Nobody else died but all of them were injured. They found out what's underneath the airport. It was waiting for them but they don't know what it is. It grabbed him by the ankle and hauled him down into the fog that felt so wrong.
"I could have gotten them all killed tonight," he will say. "I can't even lead a couple of Cliaths and a Cub, how am I supposed to--"
And then he will start crying. Not the grief-pained startled-loose sobbing she heard when he was in his parents arms. Just: leaking. Slow noiseless tears that end only when he's asleep. It will be days before he rises from bed to do anything other than empty his bladder. She knows how he gets.
He has never had to learn to cope with frustration without throwing a punch or walking away. Lying in bed too depressed to move is a start.
Javed will be by, at some point. Until then all Lola can do is wait for Hector to pull himself out of this.
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