Hector Ghosh
When Hector came home very early Saturday he came home without his Wolf.
Kinfolk know what this means even if they cannot feel it. If they cannot possibly imagine what it takes to drain their cousins so completely that they lose their will to move. That he got home at all was a miracle. A Garou who has lost his Wolf cannot function as a human would. As if he's simply misplaced it and must only walk into the other room and pick it up.
If he had had his spine torn out he would have to wait for it to regenerate on its own. At least his spine might grow back if something tore it out. The two of them have a fondness for terrible analogies. They are not technically proficient but they understand each others' fumbling attempts when they do make them. Crap analogies paint more vivid pictures of their beliefs in each others' strength and the endurance of their love.
So: that is the analogy for this episode. Something tore out Hector's spine the night he went to investigate the airport. Saturday he escaped the agony of it by sleeping. Lola could at least assure herself that he had made an attempt to shower when he got home so he was somewhat clean. Even if all he did was sit under the water. Even if she had to turn off the water herself and would have had to bodily lift him from the tub if not for the fact that Hector is still in there somewhere. She is nearly six months pregnant. Hector did not make her lift him to get out of the tub. As long as Lola talks to him she can be assured he'll hear her even if he does not act.
Help me has gotten him back to her before. Hearing Lola say those words seems to hit some sort of a button in his brain. He cannot ignore her if she says those two words but the only time she has ever said them to him, he was dying.
But she did have to coax him out of the shower. She had to shuffle him towards the bed because he tried to curl up on the floor in the bathroom after she tended to his injuries. Once he got into bed he tried to explain how he ended up like this and that's when the tears came instead of words. When all Lola could do was stroke Hector's hair or rub his back until he fell asleep.
All he did Saturday was sleep.
---
Sunday Lola would have risen before he did because she awakened before he did. For all she knew Hector would sleep away the weekend and then some. Maybe she recognized the condition he was in last night. That dead cast to his eyes like something was gone from him. They eliminated death or near-death or the End Times as culprits. Hector was just drained. He'd made a bad call but at least he had made a call. At least he tried. He can't see that yet.
The injuries he sustained cut to his spirit. They would not stabilize or heal without spiritual medicine. Lola's first aid early Saturday would have passed muster in the back of an ambulance or beneath a hospital tent.
If she tended to him during the day she would know that his injuries were not healing and his bandages needed changing. If she decided to stitch him up with sewing thread Saturday would have been the day to do it. He would not react to pain and he would not fight her. Neither did he heal.
A strong wolf would just grit his teeth and get up. Would shift to another form and spend the rest of the day in another form and life would go on. But Hector's Rage had gone from him and he could not shift in the state he was in and when he awakened he felt the pain of his injuries like he hasn't felt them since he was a Cub. Maybe not even then.
Sometime around eight o'clock in the morning he fluttered up from sleep. Fire roaring up from his calf and his chest where those things had had at him.
She could hear panic in his voice when he lifted it for the first time in over 24 hours.
"Lola?"
Normally he can bellow from across the house and she will hear him as if he's standing right behind her. Sunday morning he didn't have the guts to shout so loud.
"Lola?!"
When she went to him she knew he was panicking because he was injured and he couldn't do anything to make the injuries go away and he didn't know where Lola was.
He kept crying and saying he was sorry. Broke down and clung to her and sobbed at one point. Begged her not to leave. It's a goddamn flesh wound that would heal in a week if he had no other options. An hour feels like an eternity when one is in agony. The only thing he could do was sleep and he wouldn't fall asleep if he was alone.
No one would blame her for not letting anyone near the house that day.
---
By Monday Hector is weak as a kitten but he isn't screaming or sobbing or telling her he's sorry anymore. The horror of the day before comes to him like slideshow images out of a nightmare. He doesn't want to get out of bed. He doesn't think he's going to.
It's supposed to snow again tomorrow. Bitter cold and burying snow coming their way. If he were in his right mind he wouldn't be lying in bed letting Lola cart in wood from the shed and make sure they had enough water and candles in case they lost power.
This morning may be when Lola starts to realize whatever happened Friday night damaged more than just his body. It may take her longer. She has never seen him like this. No one will blame her for thinking he only needs a few days to recover.
He will not be able to shift forms until his Rage comes back to him. Luna is in her waxing crescent phase tonight. That will help. He can lie in his wolf skin for a couple of days instead of languishing for a week.
Conscious as he is now he isn't crying those silent cold tears he'd cried Saturday morning. He isn't hysterical like he was hysterical on Sunday. He hasn't eaten anything since Friday and the only time he drank anything yesterday was when Lola forced him to.
He's just staring at the wall today. Accepting the throbbing hot pain of his injuries instead of screaming about it. It isn't going to kill him.
Lola Hawkes
Saturday
For how territorial she was, Lola hadn't learned to sleep lightly enough to hear every sound that ticked abnormally through her home. So, in the small early hours of the morning far before dawn, Lola did not hear when the door opened and closed, or when the shower started. It was only by chance that Lola was awake before seven in the morning, which was approximately when she usually woke on her own accord. Hector had been sitting in the shower with the water running over him for about twenty minutes when Lola's bladder was what brought her out of bed.
With a light knock on the door that no doubt when unanswered, Lola let herself into the bathroom and squinted against the lights that were left on. She found Hector with blank dead eyes and no life in his bones or flesh aside from what basic functions his lungs and heart and brain kept going without him.
She didn't react strongly as most Kinfolk would. Lola was accustomed to battle, and after trying to talk to him for a couple of minutes recognition of what she was seeing lit in her mind. She'd seen Maria without her wolf twice before-- it was easier for her to do for herself, as her Rage was less boisterous a thing than Hector's. She remembered Maria sleeping and stirring for two days before ambling her way out one morning to share oatmeal with her sister as though nothing had happened. The difference there, though, Lola would realize after a few days but not quite yet, was that Maria had been able to joke weakly through the exhaustion and recovery. Hector would do no such thing, but that would come later. For now, she simply cut the water to the shower and draped a towel over Hector's head and shoulders and back and coerced him out of the shower. She could lift him if she had to, but when she'd reached of point of trying to gather his knees by hooking an arm under them he finally stirred-- even through this, he wasn't going to let her try that, not with their baby taking more and more of her strength and abdominal space with each passing week.
On the bathroom mat, where Lola tried to curl up, Lola cleaned his wounds and covered them with large gauze pads that she taped to his skin. She wanted to make sure that they were covered at least before she let the sheets get glued to them. She wouldn't bother with stitches, even though she knew how to do them and had the materials on hand in her first aid kit. In her experience, they were pushed from Werewolf skin before they had a chance to do much of their job anyways.
Again, it took coaxing and pulling, but Lola was diligent and now very fully awake. She got Hector to bed, and as she was pulling the sheets and quilt up over his shoulder he dissolved into quiet tears. Lola frowned sympathetically and laid down in the bed beside him. She'd brushed his wet hair from his eyes until it was all smooth and slicked back, rubbed comfortingly at his back and shoulder until the rhythm and his own exhaustion lulled him to sleep.
It was about 4:00am by the time Hector was asleep and Lola found quiet in the house. Realizing she couldn't rest after that, Lola slid from the bed and made herself busy.
Sunday
Throughout the day on Sunday, Lola is in overdrive. She walks the house with a new kind of fire in her bones and determination written into the fiber of her being. She would let Hector sleep and rest, because she understood that this was precisely what he needed. Garou had the habit of burning themselves out. They threw all fibers of their being-- Primal and Spiritual and Physical alike -- into the war that they waged. For all that they accomplished and survived, it made perfect sense that they'd need to reset from time to time to avoid actually burning themselves out.
It was as Lola was moving pans about to start breakfast that she heard her name from up the hallway-- not the searching healthy call that she was used to, but a weak sound that was wound tight with panic. She was there before he'd find need to cry out for her a third time, and when she had come to see what he needed she found herself with Hector holding onto her and sobbing and apologizing. He was suffering pain that was physical and something else as well. The moon was New, he couldn't bring his Wolf back and so was left handling his injury and pain with nothing to cut it-- like a Kinfolk would if no one were there to heal them. Lola scowled heavily, but she tucked her head near to Hector's and put her arms around him and comforted as well as she could. There was only so much that either of them could do, and after he'd eased to sleep once more Lola reluctantly left him to rest.
She didn't patrol-- she was unwilling to leave the house from her sights with Hector in this state. She made herself busy with cleaning and household chores, and when there was nothing more of that for her she set up space on the dining room table to dismantle and clean and reassemble her guns, one at a time.
If anyone came by to visit (and Hector, if he was asleep, may be none the wiser to this), Lola would bar the door and refuse to let them in. Hector may have callers after what happened on Friday night, but their business would need to go through his Kinswoman today. It would take an overpowering show of force for anyone to enter The Homestead today.
Monday
This was the third day of Hector's time recovering in bed. Lola was stressed and uncomfortable. That morning Eddie had come to visit, but she wouldn't let him in the house and wouldn't leave with him either. She did bring two coffee thermoses out of the house and had a conversation with him, brief as it may be, in the bitter cold of the morning air on the front porch. The Skald didn't get many details as to what was happening inside, but he did stick around long enough to help the Kinswoman chop wood and bring it to the back porch with her. The forecast promised snow tomorrow, and Lola wanted to be sure they were prepared if they needed to ride out a blizzard instead of a snow shower.
By the time Eddie Luske and Lola Hawkes were finished with that chore it was mid-morning. Lola sent the Skald on his way and went back inside. She showered the sweat of work from her skin but did not wash her hair, unwilling to deal with drying it as she still needed to bring the wood into the house from outside.
It was when she went into the room to get dressed in new clothes that she found Hector laying in the bed, staring blankly at the wall instead of sleeping. Lola looked at him with an expression of muted, cautious surprise on her face, and laid the towel she'd wrapped around herself on the foot of the bed before hunting for clothes to dress herself in. Nudity was hardly something to be concerned about between the two of them by now, anyways. As she pulled clothes from her dresser, she looked over to Hector and spoke as though she was worried about stepping on eggshells that had fuses attached.
"The moon comes back tonight. Just a sliver, but it'll be enough to recharge your batteries on." A pause, and as she put on undergarments she continued. "You're gonna need to eat something...."
Hector Ghosh
If the fuses are attached to anything they are attached to his sense of self-worth and that has already been thoroughly shredded. Though he has not suffered the same fate as Warning Threshold and he will recover now that his inner strength is coming back to him his Rage is a dampened thing now. She cannot hear it thrumming under his skin like electricity through a high-tension wire.
Hector hears her come into the bedroom and he does not roll to watch her dress. In his periphery though she may be he does not respond to the sight of her nude. His eyes trace over the swell of her belly and a new stab of pain goes through him.
He couldn't protect his family if something happened right now. He might be able to fight as well as a human would fight something trying to kill his unborn child but Hector could not swipe away a crafty Fomor picked through the front door's lock or tear through a pack of Black Spiral Dancers if they came in out of the Umbra.
This realization does not drive him to tears again but Hector sighs heavy and miserable before Lola reminds him of the moon's swinging towards brightness again. A necessary reminder. He hasn't been outside in nearly three days.
No tears or panic or anger or anything at all behind his words. Hector just sounds flat.
"I'm not hungry."
Lola Hawkes
There was no attempt to sway Hector from the misery and lethargy that he'd fallen to with seduction or romance. Lola did not make a show of dressing herself or try to climb onto the bed naked to coerce him back in more intimate ways. She had moved from bra and panties to the skirt that she'd pulled out-- one that she wore commonly these days for how easily and comfortably it rested low on her waist. It was a few inches from dragging on the floor and full rather than sleek. She'd pulled this on and was just securing the waistband when Hector sighed heavily and answered plainly. This caused her pause, and her fingers stilled on the garment while she looked back over at her mate.
Laid in the bed as he ways, unwilling to move, with the covers looking as though he's been living in them for how rumpled and warm they were. Lola's expression pressed into something that was conflicted and uncomfortable. Her nose wrinkled and her brow creased. When Maria had been like this, needing to sleep and rest and recover, she was at least willing to get up and move around after two days worth of hibernation. She wasn't back out at the Sept or with her Pack on their exploits for another few days, but at least she was herself, albeit a tired still-thin expression of what she usually was.
She was expecting this morning to start with Hector slumping out of bed to take a shower. She figured she would find him in the kitchen with a cup of something warm looking tired at the counter or maybe even on the couch. She'd hoped he would have at least moved.
With the shirt she'd selected to wear left abandoned on top of the dresser for now, Lola moved to the side of the bed that Hector was facing and crouched down. Her arms and head and shoulders and chest were all up on the bed with Hector. Arms reached out toward him, and though one lay a few inches away on the matress from actually touching, the other hand rubbed an arm and shoulder.
"I know that. But it doesn't mean that your body doesn't need food. You've been tryin' to heal with just your human skin. You've barely even had enough water. You're just gonna make yourself worse layin' around past this point."
She wasn't pleading with him, but speaking in what he was learning to be her I'm being patient, see? tone of voice. It was when her voice lowered and her words were spoken more clearly than she usually bothered to keep them. It was a velvety voice, like that was the closest thing she could think of as being soft and comforting and gentle. But it was like velvet draped over iron, because behind and under all of that she is firm and unmoving. She isn't here negotiating, she's explaining what she would call 'The Way Things Are'.
Hector Ghosh
At his most tired Hector will still argue if he thinks he's right or if he's got his mind hung on something. Even when he's wrong. Even when nobody else agrees with him and he wants to do it anyway. It would take something monumental to get Hector to not argue. His will is more akin to a sapling than an oak but he has the resiliency of youth that has thus far allowed him to bend without snapping.
Some would argue it was only a matter of time before he had a total nervous collapse. His fostering being what it was and his entire world being based upon his place within the pack. How devastated he was after Glen and Maria died and Corey left and how he went on anyway because he had to take care of Tamsin and he promised Maria he would look after her sister.
Good fucking job he's doing, there.
Her hand finds his bare shoulder as strong and sinewy as it ever is. Can feel the tack of two days' worth of sweat on his skin and the heat of his body without the Rage behind it. The lift of his clavicle as he draws a deep breath and grits his teeth to keep his composure as she soothed him.
As much as he never learned how to deal with frustration he never learned how to deal with people comforting him either. Sure as shit isn't used to Lola comforting him. Lola knows him. He doesn't like being comforted and when people who love him touch him when he's upset he tends to fall apart. He brings the opposite wrist up to his eyes to shield them from her. Like if she has to see him lain like a slug in her bed he's at least going to stop crying.
No God damn it Lola I'm fine I'm resting I'll eat later comes up from the muffled place made by his bent arm. No attempt made to haul her down to him that she might bring him up out of his inertia with affection. That's what he ought to be doing about now.
His eyes are glassy when he lowers his wrist but he isn't crying. His voice as weak as he is.
"Okay," he says.
Lola Hawkes
Hector's expression was hard for Lola to read in confidence. She wasn't sure if he was trying to hide his face to block her out or to hide coming tears or to cover his face up while he clamped down on something that he was trying to keep buried. As far as she could know, it was any of the above. Maybe something she hadn't thought of yet.
She stayed where she was and her hand stilled on his shoulder when he covered his face, but she didn't say anything just yet. Some set amount of time would have to pass before she pressed further for a reaction. His wrist moved before that time came, but the answer that he gave was lackluster at best.
Lola's lips pressed into a thin, bothered line. Her brow stayed heavy and furrowed, she was unable to smooth it for his sake. She'd never thought herself to be built for comfort before. But she was trying.
Her hand scrubbed his shoulder a little more and then retreated so she could tap lightly on the mattress about twelve inches from his head. It was a motion that seemed final, like a decision had been made, like a gavel made of fingertips instead of wood.
"Okay," she repeated, and rolled her shoulders and situated her hands like she would use them to push herself back up to her feet. But she didn't actually stand, and had no plans to rise with that motion until he showed he would move the covers and get up as well. When he didn't immediately move, she continued with: "I ain't bringing it to you in here, though. You gotta get up and move around a little, too."
Hector Ghosh
The lacerations are not keeping him in bed. Though she can see the gray-white of the tissue against his brown skin on the shoulder that she touches Lola knows his old death-scars are not crippling him either. Hector is made of stronger stuff than that.
And yet he lies on his side half curled up on himself right hand against his sternum as he averts his eyes from her. Not much hair there but where before Hector was a boy barely out of his teens over the last six months he's grown fur places a man tends to have it. With his ethnic heritage he will never grow to resemble the Mexican rancher Maria used to joke her little sister would always end up with but if Lola wanted a Mexican rancher she wouldn't be with him right now.
Three days before she was with him she was with Corey though. Up until He Who Waits For Dawn took over his body and called Lola stupid for goading him they weren't even sure it was Hector's baby. Maybe Lola still isn't sure. But the spirit that rode Hector's bones that day knew whose descendant grows inside of her. It isn't one of Cockroach's.
Lola doesn't need him. If he died Friday night she would have grieved for him and she would have screamed at the moon because she cannot shift to howl and she would have gone on. It's actually sort of a comfort knowing if something happened to him Corey and she are still talking.
Do not suffer thy people to tend thy sickness.
"I'm sorry," he says with a hollowness in his voice where the desperation screamed yesterday. A bone-tired realization riding the apology. She can hear the tone of them though he does not say it: something's wrong.
But he sniffles and shucks back the covers. Smell of old blood and sweat and something more cloying than that. Hopelessness. Like a tar he has to slog through just to sit up.
"Ugh. I'm up. I..."
He sits up. Dirty hair falls over his shoulders and into his face. He braces himself on both hands and stares down at his thighs like if he looks anywhere else he's going to see the abyss gaped out in front of him. Fall into it instead of stepping back from it. Though he is not looking at her Lola can see how he grits his teeth and clamps down on himself to keep from crying again.
It coughs out of him in a sob but he gets to his feet anyway. It's an effort but weak as he is and as close to tears as he is for no reason Hector does not lean on his woman.
Lola Hawkes
Though she has worked on it, and though it has improved greatly like a new muscle group being focused on over the past six months, Lola's patience wasn't a fully formed thing just yet. It didn't stretch near so far as it ought to for a Kinfolk. Patience was necessary when living with and loving and caring for the True Born-- her father had told her so from the very beginning. Situations like this were better dealt with by the type of Kinswomen who were gentler and more mild, better able to wait and care and tend.
But Lola has never been gentle or mild. She's terrible at waiting too. She will care and she will tend, but she will not coddle and when she decides that continued softness will cross the line into coddling she switches hard into 'tough love'.
This, for Hector, is Lola's easing into tough love instead of slamming gears as though it were a truck she was planning to abandon across state borders anyways. She encourages him out of bed rather than yelling at him and shoving him forward, as she probably would have done were he a packmate and not a lover. She's rewarded by his compliance, halfhearted and slow and painful as it looks. He peeled back the sheets, and she frowned when the smell reached her sensitive nostrils but did not recoil as though it offended her greatly. She did scowl to see his continued refusal to even look at her, though, much less make eye contact.
Just sitting up he seemed ready to cry again, and when he finally swung his feet off the bed and worked his way onto his feet Lola pushed herself up onto her feet as well and went to retrieve her shirt from the top of the shelf. It was simple, black, and long-sleeved, made from a material that stretched greatly. It fit comfortably over her stomach without riding up, this was another shirt she wore often. After she'd tugged the hem down where she wanted it, she looked over to see how far Hector had made it.
Not far at all.
With a small quiet sigh that was for the purpose of pushing irritation away, she approached the foot of the bed to meet him after he'd rounded it. Just watching him, she scowled and held out a hand for him to come towards. It's hard to gauge whether she's trying to offer her arm to support him or whether she's asking for him to hold her hand. Either way, she says: "You're not gonna tell me what's going on, are you..."
Hector Ghosh
"I don't know what's going on."
The first step to fixing the problem is admitting the problem. That's as close an approximation to the problem as he can get. Lola can observe that Hector is moving slow and he's tearful and he has no appetite. That he keeps apologizing even though he hasn't done anything wrong.
Could have chalked that up to losing his Wolf but it's been two days now. Even he knew the night that he came home that something was wrong but he'd hoped it would get better. It may still get better. Maybe he'll snap out of this.
Her hand is stretched out to him. Hector looks at it but he doesn't just stand there staring without comprehending. He doesn't want to keep her away from him right now. Maybe she could help him.
Instead of just holding her hand Hector comes forward and hauls her into an embrace. Buries his face in her neck. Does not start sobbing again but she can feel the pain in him bubble up and knows it when Hector tightens his grip on her.
"I don't know what's going on," he says again. "Nothing's wrong, I just don't know what's going on."
Lola Hawkes
The confession was met with raised eyebrows and a bland stare. The look that his woman gives him is one that tells Hector she is hardly going to accept that as an answer. She was expecting something more-- perhaps not a spot on explanation, but maybe something that she could pick apart and figure out. She would be happier with a hint than she was with nothing at all.
He looked at her hand, but thankfully had more within him than to just stare at it alone. She wanted to help him into the kitchen, to the bathroom. To encourage him to spend time out in the living space instead of the bedroom, so she could try and keep him active and talking until she could get his eyes on the moon. She knew that was significant. She was under the impression that the utter lack of Rage within him was doing this. It was a part of him as it was a part of any wolf, and she imagined losing it would be to lose a piece of yourself. That would explain the hollow exhausted behavior.
She couldn't guess that it was something different entirely, not yet. She only assumed he reacted to it differently than Maria ever had because they were different people, and he was far more dramatic by nature and birthright alike.
When he grabbed onto her and pulled her to him, Lola didn't dig in her heels to stop him. She did look a little surprised though, and paused only a moment before adjusting to how he held her. She rolled up to stand on her toes and give herself another few inches of height to work with. Her stomach and chest both pressed to his, because it was impossible for them not to now. She wrapped her arms up around his head and tucked her face to his hair despite how unwashed it was. For how tightly his arms gripped about her, she braced her arms around his head. She didn't squeeze his skull, no, but her arm muscles were tight like she was prepared to block and soak up an onslaught of blows.
"It's a funk," she explained somewhere behind his ear. "Ya spent yourself. Wiped yourself clean, completely. You need Gaia and Luna to get back up to your feet, and you won't find them in bed, baby. S'why you gotta get up. Go to them both."
Hector Ghosh
Tears flow as if he'd torn a scab off but he doesn't sob or fall apart. Lola can hear him breathing heavier for the congestion in his sinuses but Rage and grief are not driving him to choke on an outpouring. When he had fallen apart yesterday he had not seemed lighter afterwards. It's like the more he cries the thicker this funk gets.
That's the word she uses and he nods his head brisk against her shoulder. Yes. Okay. Good. It has a name. It's a funk. Blows out a shaky breath against her collarbone and smooths the hair at the back of her head. He is a goddamn mess. Trying to comfort her like even in the midst of this he knows what this is doing to her.
With her belly pressed against him he has a physical reminder of why he has to stay alive. One of his hands leaves the embrace to lay against her hip.
Nights past he would make her lie still so he could massage her muscles and ligaments. Hard as she pushes herself normally the added work is palpable now that she's pregnant. Hector has been devouring those books Anthony gave them because he wants to help her. He wants to be part of this baby's life and that has started as soon as he broke her out of the hospital.
God damn it Hawkes hold still I'm going to massage your stuff with my big manly hands and it's going to be awesome, he'd said once. Gentle even as he was berating her.
Now he's just touching her belly and breathing fast and repeating what she's said to him. He's drained. He has to get up. He has to get back with Gaia and Luna. By the time he speaks his voice is not damp. It's still flat but he's not crying anymore.
"Okay..." That hand still behind her clutches the back of her neck. "I'm okay. I'm up."
Lola Hawkes
For all of the time she spent enforcing strength and endurance, Lola wasn't one to judge a man for his tears. If the situation was appropriate and the stress was understandable, she'd never shame someone for the crying they did. When she'd held hard feelings and judgment against Storm's Teeth, it wasn't for his tears but for his outburst and how inappropriate she'd found it to be in general. So, as Hector cries into her neck and hair, quiet and without the harsh sobs of release, Lola just kept her arms up around his head and shoulders and stayed close.
She gave him time, but not much. The touch of his hand to her stomach probably earned him those few extra moments that he needed, truthfully. When he did that she understood he was dwelling or processing or chewing on a new set of thoughts entirely.
When he repeated 'okay, okay', but made no move to let go of her, Lola loosened her arms from around his head and neck. Switched her hands so that she was rubbing his shoulders first, then nudging his arms so they weren't wrapped around her anymore. She moved so she was standing rotated away from his front, trying to turn herself to his side instead. To guide and encourage, to catch if his legs stumbled after two days of lethargy. It was almost like a border collie getting ready to herd a particularly young sheep along after the herd.
"Yeah, Hector, I know. It is okay. Now come on. Into the kitchen."
Though she's still got the velvet-on-concrete tone of patience going, he can feel the edges of that velvet fraying. The concrete beneath this analogy was threatening to crack and buckle, and the fissure in her tone warned that this may not last for much longer if momentum wasn't gained.
Hector Ghosh
Luckily Hector is more perceptive than folks tend to give him credit for being. Even when he's bleeding from a wound he cannot fix and has spent the last two days in bed and feels as much like hell as he looks he can tell when his mate has had enough.
A truth he won't be able to tell until he actually does it is that Hector needs to talk to other Garou. He needs to talk to the Fosterns who understand what it is to make a bad choice and understand why it is he made the bad choice that he made and can help him sort out how not to do it again. If he could just talk to Lola about what happened he might be able to gain some perspective or closure or whatever it is that he doesn't have lying in bed but that isn't Lola's responsibility.
One could argue it isn't her responsibility to get him out of bed and make sure he's eating and not making things worse by staying lain down all day. They are bound by no law or code of honor. That baby grown in her belly is not a tether. They stay together because they love each other and difficult moments like this one are going to serve as a foundation for the millions of other difficult moments ahead of them.
They have no idea how much sleep they are going to lose once their baby is born. How frayed their nerves are going to be or how impossible the task of parenthood seems some days when they're fighting a war on top of it.
They don't spend much time thinking about the future because they have enough trouble getting through today, some days.
Lola puts an arm around him just to get him moving and Hector sniffs and goes into the kitchen.
---
The rest of the day goes by with similar difficulty. Hector has no appetite but he forces himself to cook anyway. Makes that soup his mother claims will cure anything and forces himself to sit down and eat and try to make conversation to keep his mind off the burning pain of the laceration and the yawning pit of despair opened up behind his breastbone.
At least he doesn't start crying again.
Sometime later in the afternoon he drags himself up into the loft and comes back down with a book. Crashes on the couch like that was a monumental effort. It was a monumental effort. He's still injured and the moon won't be up for another couple hours and he's so morose he's surprised the despair hasn't actually swallowed him up from the inside. He needs to distract himself.
When he sees Lola passing through he says "Baby?"
What, Hector. You incredible pain in the ass.
"I think my problem is I have to go through life knowing you've never read The Hobbit and it's slowly killing me. Come here."
Saturday, February 8, 2014
Premonitions - 1.29.2013 [Hector]
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.
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.
Uktena, Too - 1.28.2014 [Whina, Hector]
Hector Ghosh
Over a month has passed since the Grand Alpha of the Sept of the Forgotten Question gave a small group of Garou no higher ranked than Adren the leave to reopen a building previously closed. Some of the Galliards who traveled the septs of North America and Europe were willing to tell what happened to the Garou who opened the building in an urban place and some of them weren't. Word spread as word tends to do and folks as far as Berlin and BrasÃlia and Tokyo have heard of what is going on in Denver.
Earlier one of if not the only Uktena currently fighting to get this place back up on its feet held a sort of court up on the 43rd floor where unidentified Kinfolk are discouraged from going unaccompanied if they are not outright banned. Blood flows as free as word spreads up there and conversations are like as not to come to blows as they are to agreement.
It's later now and Hector is clanging around in the kitchen as he cobbles together dinner.
Whina Dawson
She looked out of place in the lobby, dressed for nuclear winter. Her olive drab coat was lined with matted fur, mid thigh on her tall frame, lots of pockets. A surplus store find. The 'distressed' jeans with holes on the knees, worn and used to softness instead of purchased for the 'don't-give-a-shit' aesthetic. She wore black tights underneath. Layers, man. Layers. Her hands were covered in nubby mittens that looked like they were knitted by someone's blind grandma, and her sun streaked hair hung in lank, tangled threads. A messanger bag, covered in ink and patches, was slung over her shoulders.
Whina wasn't from Berlin or Tokyo, so news didn't have far to travel to reach her. She'd heard of the audacity of this place and it's shaky times. Curious as her breeding demanded, she wanted to see it.
And more importantly, if she was going to stay here for any amount of time, she needed to contact family.
Hector Ghosh
The clanging stops when the creature down the corridor hears something.
Before she lays eyes on the closest thing she has to family in this city Whina can sense him moving around. Nothing so dramatic as feeling all the hairs on her arms stand up or having her insides quaver like the chill outside has burrowed inside her body. But beasts have a way of charging the air around them.
He pokes his head out of the kitchen when he hears the elevator and his lips are parted like he's about to shout down the hall but then he sees a stranger and he squints. Ducks his head back into the kitchen for a moment.
The Warders never leave this place. They had to verify that she is who she says she is before they let her up the elevator. Hector is not a Warder but he's been up here doing whatever it is he does all day for nearly a week now.
Before Whina can start to peel out of her cold weather survival gear a young man of average height and questionable fashion sense comes into the lobby to greet her. He's in his late teens or early twenties and walks with a loose-limbed stride as much the fault of his energy as his wiry build. His black hair is unrestrained and falls to his shoulders. He wears a metal hoop through the helix of his right ear and has a ring on nearly every finger. Work boots and black jeans and a flannel shirt over a band t-shirt.
"Hi!" he says with what would have been a perfectly friendly smile if he wasn't saddled with enough Rage to terrify the average person. He offers his right hand and frowns as she starts to shake his hand. "I don't think I've met you before. Sorry." He pronounces the word sorry like someone who's spent way too much time in the North Pacific area lately. "I'm Hector. Welcome to Thunderdome."
Lola Hawkes
Having slept in an empty bed last night, Lola was more willing to agree when Hector texted her earlier in the day to beckon her join him out at the Sept tonight. She'd just gotten back in from a short patrol (the temperatures were quite cold, and the snow from the night before made travel more inconvenient than it had been. So, she'd texted back:
I'll come to bring you home, at least.
And that was her plan when she'd come in to the city and parked her Subaru Forester in the parking lot near to the building. She had to knock on the door and harass the security guard to let her in, for she had no codes or special access cards and this was how she always got into the Sept anyways. She even recognized the fortunate Bone Gnawer Kinfolk woman with the sandy blonde ponytail that came to answer the door. This woman had figured out from her last encounter that it was easier all around to just be friendly with Lola. She let her in and walked and chatted with Lola on the way to the elevator bay. For her part, the Hawkes woman was pleasant in return.
She made her way up the first flight of elevators, got out when they reached their height, and walked until she found a warder.
This is where she would be for the next five minutes, behaving like a prickly bitch and giving lip to the Warder who was saying he didn't know any 'Hectors' when she used his birth name rather than his Proper Name.
She called him a jumped up little prick and told him he knew what she meant. He didn't much care for that.
Whina Dawson
It's a familiar sense. Like stepping in to a yard with an unfamiliar doberman, even if it looks perfectly friendly wagging it's tail. It's still an animal, teeth and claws.
Though Whina knew that comparing a Trueborn to a dog would get her smacked down.
She gripped her bag with one hand while offering the other in an enthusiastic handshake, postponing the use of her usual hug which people often found off putting, specially those touchy about their space. "Whina Dawson, good to meet you." She took a look around the lobby, all but vacant, "Yeah, I heard you guys had some heavy trouble." She consoled, her accent odd. Words drawn out, a little flat.
Hector Ghosh
One has to work up to hugging Americans. Even if Hector looks as if he could be from plenty of other places besides America he has all the mannerisms and accentuation of someone who was born and raised in this country. She can tell that straightaway same as he can tell she isn't from this neck of the woods.
"That's one way of putting it, yeah," he says. He sounds amused by the euphemism and that amusement tries to cut across his mouth but he's slow to show teeth around here. "You just passing through, or is someone expecting you? At some point."
Whina Dawson
"Just passing through. I'm a tattoo artist, been doing a tour of shops around the country, doing the guest thing, yeah. Trying to spread the word on menus nation wide and what not." She slipped off the gloves which were now making her hands sweat and shoved them into a deep pocket. Broad shouldered and long limbed, she was as tall as most men in decently heeled shoes.
Her eyes were heavy lidded, giving her a perpetually sleepy look, and combined with the slowness of her speech it gave an impression of supreme laid-backness. "Is it okay for me to be up here? I got hella lost." She jerked a thumb at the lift, "I met your uh...warder? And he gave me the six degrees. Wanted to know my grandmas-grandmas maiden name. Glad kuia made me recite that stuff now."
Lola Hawkes
After a few minutes of bristling feelings and sharp-tongued retorts at one another, Lola and the Ragabash Warder had reached an agreement-- she was indeed Echoes of the Lost's woman, she was of the Hawkes line of guardians of a 'real goddamn Caern', and she was allowed to be there. He, in turn, did not give a shit what family she belonged to, but understood that she could continue on. She wasn't unfamiliar, that much could be agreed.
So, soon later, the elevator doors open and Lola Hawkes stepped out.
Her canvas coat was worn, zipped down to the center of her chest to ventilate. A white T-shirt showed underneath. She had jeans, pressed and stiff and relatively new, and broken in brown boots were on her feet. She wore no make-up, and had her hair tied into a loose braid, and looked a little sour still as she stepped away from the elevator doors and glanced about to try and locate the man that had summoned her by text.
Hector Ghosh
Hector laughs and rubs the back of his neck. "Yeah, man, he does that to everybody. It just means he doesn't want Javed Anubis-Sight coming down on him like a sack of bricks for not keeping up the defenses around here. You know how Full Moons are."
She's passing through. It takes him a minute to rewind enough to remember something she'd said at the beginning of her introduction and then snaps his fingers all OH HEY at the recollection. Points at her like she's going to get a bang out of this.
"My mate's cousin. Anthony Tirado. He owns a shop near here. You should totally--speak of the devil."
He steps back from the conversation to cup his hands around his mouth like he needs any kind of help getting any louder.
"Yo, LOLA."
Whina Dawson
"I hear ya." She nodded sagely, knowing the ways of warders and ahrouns well.
Whina looked back as the elevator doors opened, brown eyes widening a touch. She gave an upward nod in greeting and a smile, "Heya." Barely even a word as she turned, including her in the conversational circle. Or was it a tripod? His mate, she was guessing.
Lola Hawkes
Overall, Lola was a perceptive creature. She'd spied Hector and the back of someone's head and shoulders just before the Galliard had leaned aside to call her name up the hallway. She didn't smile to greet him, but her eyebrows did raise and relax a little as she approached. Quickly, Lola's attention fell upon Whina.
To describe Lola, she was an imposing figure in ways beyond just physical stature. She was a mix of Hispanic and Native American heritage, and stood tall and square. Her shoulders were pulled back and broad and her chin was held high by default, as though she were reflexively posturing on some level, or fulfilling some need to be impressive. She looked healthy and strong, and gave the air of someone who's been in a fight or two. It was a certain kind of hardened that you'd find often on young Garou.
Though her presence was a heavy bearing and somewhat off-putting one, Lola still was quick to answer Whina's greeting by nodding her head upward as well. While she was looking at the Kinfolk directly, she didn't seem to be hostile or suspicious at least. She even went so far as to draw her right hand from her pocket and extend it for a shake.
Precisely as one would expect, her grip was firm and solid and her palms were calloused with work. She didn't squeeze to overcompensate, though-- not to say that she wouldn't if this were some burly Get of Fenris she were introducing herself to.
"Hey. Lola Hawkes. Evenin'."
And, then, to Hector: "There things you need to wrap up here?"
Hector Ghosh
Even if he doesn't attach himself to her like a magnet to its opposite Hector does wear a briefly gooey expression when Lola starts to walk towards them. Dopamine flooding his brain. It's nothing to be concerned about. By the time she comes near enough to shake Whina's hand the Galliard has parked himself back in the present and is standing out of the way to let the women introduce themselves.
"Yeah, I was just telling Whina here what the situation is," he says. "She's a traveling tattoo artist, I thought it might not be a terrible idea to introduce her to Anthony. Since they're. You know."
Hector has no idea what he's talking about.
"Networking is important." He coughs like to signal his impending and brief departure from the conversation and jerks a thumb back down the hall. "Let me go get my coat."
Off he goes. Like a long-haired gazelle.
Whina Dawson
There was a brief 'awwwwe' moment when she saw the look on Hectors face. Her inner chick-flick watcher nearly teared up.
But, back to present.
Whina took the offered hand, a firm shake. Little callous. She was an artist, after all, a fairly cushy job for the most part, though spending hours hunched over and trying to maintain a firm, even grip on a stick-and-chisel did ache after a bit. 'Whina Dawson." She supplied, glancing back to Hector as he spoke.
"He mentioned your cousin had a business?"
Lola Hawkes
When her hand retracted, it went back into her coat pocket, and Lola's eyes stayed on Hector's face while he expressed what information Whina had received already before stumbling on his departure and half-jogging his way back up the hallway to fetch his coat. Lola's face didn't go slack with happiness to see the Galliard after a night away, but there's a subtle softening about the eyes that doesn't carry over when her attention returns to the other Kinfolk.
"Huh?" As though she didn't quite catch the question, but it's followed up quickly by an expression of understanding and a nod.
"Yeah, he owns three tattoo shops here in Denver." She moved her hands from her pockets to unzip the coat she was wearing the rest of the way down. It was kept comfortably warm in this building, and the coat was making her sweat. With the front of the coat unzipped and pushed back, the fact that this woman is pregnant is made evident by the shape of her stomach through the loose fabric of her T-shirt.
"Anthony Tirado's his name. You could look him up. He might have a space open for rent if you're sticking around for a few months. I mean, I don't know what 'traveling' is for how long you'll be staying."
She glanced over Whina, not like she was sizing her up for competition, or at all really. She was interested in the survival winter coat-- impressed, really. It had her looking back up to Whina's face and guessing:
"You a Strider Kin or something?"
Whina Dawson
The rounded belly gave another reason for the look that had passed between mates. Whina suddenly felt a little gooey herself.
"That's awesome. I'll have to see if I have time in my schedule. I'm usually pretty booked, but i'll see if I can't move some things around." It always surprised her when she sounded all business-like. Schedules, booking. It was always a strange to her when people knew her name at trade shows or wanted her to sign things. Not like she was a household name, but she was known.
In a way she liked it better when she was anonymous and could sit and talk to people, take who ever walked in the door and write their story on their skin.
"Nah. I'm Uktena." The Islander said. " You?"
Lola Hawkes
Having grown up going through lessons with and taught by Garou, Lola had learned to recognize the Wolves for what they were-- even as strangers passed by on the street. This didn't work for Kinfolk, though, nor could she pick up on breeding in any way. She'd clued in on the traveling and assumed that the woman was of the Striders. To hear that she was Uktena, Lola's expressive eyebrows hopped up on her face, and she nodded her head once or twice before pushing her hands back into the pockets of her tan coat.
"Uktena." She rolled her head to indicate in Hector's direction. "He's Uktena too. Fostern Galliard."
Now Lola was looking at Whina more carefully, but her body language was more open. Less stiff, like were she the predator she thought she would grow up to be then she would have just gone from stiff-legged appraisal to pure palm-sniffing interest.
"Not a whole hell of a lot of us around here anymore, though. How long you planning on being around?"
Whina Dawson
Whina took a look around the corporate digs, steel and glass how many floors in the air? "Not our usual stomping grounds, yeah?" They weren't known for being as urban at Glass Walkers or 'Gnawers, but they got around, more than people gave them credit for. Unlike their Wendigo cousins, the Uktena took a more global outlook when it came to finding people to bring in to their flock.
"Glad I met you guys first then. Makes things easier." She said with an easy smile. "Couple months, maybe. I'm sorry to hear about your problems here, there anything I can do to help while i'm around?"
Lola Hawkes
Something about what Whina said when observing that this wasn't their typical stomping grounds had Lola scoffing. Sincerely. She tossed her head some and her nostrils flared with suppressed, mean laughter behind closed lips. Her hands came out of her pockets specifically so that she could fold her arms over her chest and look haughty.
"Ain't my stomping grounds," Lola said, and sounded as though she couldn't be more disdainful of the building in which she stood. She's not bothering to keep quiet for fear of offending anyone that may be nearby, and she lifted her head and nodded it toward the south, or where she was fairly sure the south was. She got turned around in big buildings like this.
"There's a real Caern south of here. My family's been keeping it protected and alive for generations-- since before the European tribes came out here. That's where I live." Then, again, she was nodding her head up the hall in indication of her mate. "I'm only here for his ass."
As for if there was anything she could help with, Lola again scoffed, but it wasn't a sound that was directed at the woman so much as it was directed at the situation she was swimming in itself.
"Dunno. We've just been trying to figure things out, really. Information gathering's what would probably come in most handy, I'd suppose, what with the pit here and out at the airport."
Hector Ghosh
A clanging rings out in the kitchen one last time. When Hector comes trotting back this time his pockets jingle with loose change and guitar picks and keys and who knows what else. His knapsack makes even more noise. He's wearing a hooded sweatshirt underneath an army jacket now and when he gets back he has a prepaid cell phone out and ready for number swapping. A hunting knife is strapped to one hip and a medicine bag to the other.
Conversation interruption: GO.
"Alright," he says. "I don't know if you have one of these newfangled gadgets but supposedly they let you communicate with people across really long distances with like, pictures and shit. If you have one you should put its number in this thing in case you need anything. Where are you staying?"
Whina Dawson
A traditionalist, from the sound of it. Something to keep in mind for future conversations. "I'll see what I can dig up, but i'm no Nancy Drew. I usually stick to the spiritual side of things. Maybe there's something far back I can find, or if there's any glyphs to be read I might can help, but that's about it." She shrugged, wishing she could do more.
Turning towards the disturbance in the force, Whina takes a moment to dig her cellphone out of her pocket. A clamshell several generations out of date, but it still worked. "Extended stay hotel not too far." It had a mini kitchen and a tiny oven, even an gym. Not that she'd ever use a tread climber when one could simply go outside and Do something.
Lola Hawkes
When Hector had reappeared, Lola was nodding to what Whina was telling her. As he'd taken out a cellphone number and interjected to exchange contact information, Lola simply dropped her chin and eyes so she could see to be able to zip her coat back up.
She gave the air of someone who was more comfortable letting others speak for her, but had no troubles speaking out for herself. As Hector had returned, Lola looked less open to conversation and more like she was observing than participating. She did stop to add, for Hector: "Whina here says she has some knowledge of spiritual goings on and glyph reading. You should get her some good pictures of The Pit to study." Lola was all for Kinfolk capability, but even she didn't want to venture too near to The Pit.
After that, though, while conversations closed, Lola would be quiet without being surly. When it was time to part ways, she'd bid Whina a very sincere sounding farewell and 'good to meet you'.
She didn't push with impatience, but only once Hector was ready to go would she leave by his side.
Over a month has passed since the Grand Alpha of the Sept of the Forgotten Question gave a small group of Garou no higher ranked than Adren the leave to reopen a building previously closed. Some of the Galliards who traveled the septs of North America and Europe were willing to tell what happened to the Garou who opened the building in an urban place and some of them weren't. Word spread as word tends to do and folks as far as Berlin and BrasÃlia and Tokyo have heard of what is going on in Denver.
Earlier one of if not the only Uktena currently fighting to get this place back up on its feet held a sort of court up on the 43rd floor where unidentified Kinfolk are discouraged from going unaccompanied if they are not outright banned. Blood flows as free as word spreads up there and conversations are like as not to come to blows as they are to agreement.
It's later now and Hector is clanging around in the kitchen as he cobbles together dinner.
Whina Dawson
She looked out of place in the lobby, dressed for nuclear winter. Her olive drab coat was lined with matted fur, mid thigh on her tall frame, lots of pockets. A surplus store find. The 'distressed' jeans with holes on the knees, worn and used to softness instead of purchased for the 'don't-give-a-shit' aesthetic. She wore black tights underneath. Layers, man. Layers. Her hands were covered in nubby mittens that looked like they were knitted by someone's blind grandma, and her sun streaked hair hung in lank, tangled threads. A messanger bag, covered in ink and patches, was slung over her shoulders.
Whina wasn't from Berlin or Tokyo, so news didn't have far to travel to reach her. She'd heard of the audacity of this place and it's shaky times. Curious as her breeding demanded, she wanted to see it.
And more importantly, if she was going to stay here for any amount of time, she needed to contact family.
Hector Ghosh
The clanging stops when the creature down the corridor hears something.
Before she lays eyes on the closest thing she has to family in this city Whina can sense him moving around. Nothing so dramatic as feeling all the hairs on her arms stand up or having her insides quaver like the chill outside has burrowed inside her body. But beasts have a way of charging the air around them.
He pokes his head out of the kitchen when he hears the elevator and his lips are parted like he's about to shout down the hall but then he sees a stranger and he squints. Ducks his head back into the kitchen for a moment.
The Warders never leave this place. They had to verify that she is who she says she is before they let her up the elevator. Hector is not a Warder but he's been up here doing whatever it is he does all day for nearly a week now.
Before Whina can start to peel out of her cold weather survival gear a young man of average height and questionable fashion sense comes into the lobby to greet her. He's in his late teens or early twenties and walks with a loose-limbed stride as much the fault of his energy as his wiry build. His black hair is unrestrained and falls to his shoulders. He wears a metal hoop through the helix of his right ear and has a ring on nearly every finger. Work boots and black jeans and a flannel shirt over a band t-shirt.
"Hi!" he says with what would have been a perfectly friendly smile if he wasn't saddled with enough Rage to terrify the average person. He offers his right hand and frowns as she starts to shake his hand. "I don't think I've met you before. Sorry." He pronounces the word sorry like someone who's spent way too much time in the North Pacific area lately. "I'm Hector. Welcome to Thunderdome."
Lola Hawkes
Having slept in an empty bed last night, Lola was more willing to agree when Hector texted her earlier in the day to beckon her join him out at the Sept tonight. She'd just gotten back in from a short patrol (the temperatures were quite cold, and the snow from the night before made travel more inconvenient than it had been. So, she'd texted back:
I'll come to bring you home, at least.
And that was her plan when she'd come in to the city and parked her Subaru Forester in the parking lot near to the building. She had to knock on the door and harass the security guard to let her in, for she had no codes or special access cards and this was how she always got into the Sept anyways. She even recognized the fortunate Bone Gnawer Kinfolk woman with the sandy blonde ponytail that came to answer the door. This woman had figured out from her last encounter that it was easier all around to just be friendly with Lola. She let her in and walked and chatted with Lola on the way to the elevator bay. For her part, the Hawkes woman was pleasant in return.
She made her way up the first flight of elevators, got out when they reached their height, and walked until she found a warder.
This is where she would be for the next five minutes, behaving like a prickly bitch and giving lip to the Warder who was saying he didn't know any 'Hectors' when she used his birth name rather than his Proper Name.
She called him a jumped up little prick and told him he knew what she meant. He didn't much care for that.
Whina Dawson
It's a familiar sense. Like stepping in to a yard with an unfamiliar doberman, even if it looks perfectly friendly wagging it's tail. It's still an animal, teeth and claws.
Though Whina knew that comparing a Trueborn to a dog would get her smacked down.
She gripped her bag with one hand while offering the other in an enthusiastic handshake, postponing the use of her usual hug which people often found off putting, specially those touchy about their space. "Whina Dawson, good to meet you." She took a look around the lobby, all but vacant, "Yeah, I heard you guys had some heavy trouble." She consoled, her accent odd. Words drawn out, a little flat.
Hector Ghosh
One has to work up to hugging Americans. Even if Hector looks as if he could be from plenty of other places besides America he has all the mannerisms and accentuation of someone who was born and raised in this country. She can tell that straightaway same as he can tell she isn't from this neck of the woods.
"That's one way of putting it, yeah," he says. He sounds amused by the euphemism and that amusement tries to cut across his mouth but he's slow to show teeth around here. "You just passing through, or is someone expecting you? At some point."
Whina Dawson
"Just passing through. I'm a tattoo artist, been doing a tour of shops around the country, doing the guest thing, yeah. Trying to spread the word on menus nation wide and what not." She slipped off the gloves which were now making her hands sweat and shoved them into a deep pocket. Broad shouldered and long limbed, she was as tall as most men in decently heeled shoes.
Her eyes were heavy lidded, giving her a perpetually sleepy look, and combined with the slowness of her speech it gave an impression of supreme laid-backness. "Is it okay for me to be up here? I got hella lost." She jerked a thumb at the lift, "I met your uh...warder? And he gave me the six degrees. Wanted to know my grandmas-grandmas maiden name. Glad kuia made me recite that stuff now."
Lola Hawkes
After a few minutes of bristling feelings and sharp-tongued retorts at one another, Lola and the Ragabash Warder had reached an agreement-- she was indeed Echoes of the Lost's woman, she was of the Hawkes line of guardians of a 'real goddamn Caern', and she was allowed to be there. He, in turn, did not give a shit what family she belonged to, but understood that she could continue on. She wasn't unfamiliar, that much could be agreed.
So, soon later, the elevator doors open and Lola Hawkes stepped out.
Her canvas coat was worn, zipped down to the center of her chest to ventilate. A white T-shirt showed underneath. She had jeans, pressed and stiff and relatively new, and broken in brown boots were on her feet. She wore no make-up, and had her hair tied into a loose braid, and looked a little sour still as she stepped away from the elevator doors and glanced about to try and locate the man that had summoned her by text.
Hector Ghosh
Hector laughs and rubs the back of his neck. "Yeah, man, he does that to everybody. It just means he doesn't want Javed Anubis-Sight coming down on him like a sack of bricks for not keeping up the defenses around here. You know how Full Moons are."
She's passing through. It takes him a minute to rewind enough to remember something she'd said at the beginning of her introduction and then snaps his fingers all OH HEY at the recollection. Points at her like she's going to get a bang out of this.
"My mate's cousin. Anthony Tirado. He owns a shop near here. You should totally--speak of the devil."
He steps back from the conversation to cup his hands around his mouth like he needs any kind of help getting any louder.
"Yo, LOLA."
Whina Dawson
"I hear ya." She nodded sagely, knowing the ways of warders and ahrouns well.
Whina looked back as the elevator doors opened, brown eyes widening a touch. She gave an upward nod in greeting and a smile, "Heya." Barely even a word as she turned, including her in the conversational circle. Or was it a tripod? His mate, she was guessing.
Lola Hawkes
Overall, Lola was a perceptive creature. She'd spied Hector and the back of someone's head and shoulders just before the Galliard had leaned aside to call her name up the hallway. She didn't smile to greet him, but her eyebrows did raise and relax a little as she approached. Quickly, Lola's attention fell upon Whina.
To describe Lola, she was an imposing figure in ways beyond just physical stature. She was a mix of Hispanic and Native American heritage, and stood tall and square. Her shoulders were pulled back and broad and her chin was held high by default, as though she were reflexively posturing on some level, or fulfilling some need to be impressive. She looked healthy and strong, and gave the air of someone who's been in a fight or two. It was a certain kind of hardened that you'd find often on young Garou.
Though her presence was a heavy bearing and somewhat off-putting one, Lola still was quick to answer Whina's greeting by nodding her head upward as well. While she was looking at the Kinfolk directly, she didn't seem to be hostile or suspicious at least. She even went so far as to draw her right hand from her pocket and extend it for a shake.
Precisely as one would expect, her grip was firm and solid and her palms were calloused with work. She didn't squeeze to overcompensate, though-- not to say that she wouldn't if this were some burly Get of Fenris she were introducing herself to.
"Hey. Lola Hawkes. Evenin'."
And, then, to Hector: "There things you need to wrap up here?"
Hector Ghosh
Even if he doesn't attach himself to her like a magnet to its opposite Hector does wear a briefly gooey expression when Lola starts to walk towards them. Dopamine flooding his brain. It's nothing to be concerned about. By the time she comes near enough to shake Whina's hand the Galliard has parked himself back in the present and is standing out of the way to let the women introduce themselves.
"Yeah, I was just telling Whina here what the situation is," he says. "She's a traveling tattoo artist, I thought it might not be a terrible idea to introduce her to Anthony. Since they're. You know."
Hector has no idea what he's talking about.
"Networking is important." He coughs like to signal his impending and brief departure from the conversation and jerks a thumb back down the hall. "Let me go get my coat."
Off he goes. Like a long-haired gazelle.
Whina Dawson
There was a brief 'awwwwe' moment when she saw the look on Hectors face. Her inner chick-flick watcher nearly teared up.
But, back to present.
Whina took the offered hand, a firm shake. Little callous. She was an artist, after all, a fairly cushy job for the most part, though spending hours hunched over and trying to maintain a firm, even grip on a stick-and-chisel did ache after a bit. 'Whina Dawson." She supplied, glancing back to Hector as he spoke.
"He mentioned your cousin had a business?"
Lola Hawkes
When her hand retracted, it went back into her coat pocket, and Lola's eyes stayed on Hector's face while he expressed what information Whina had received already before stumbling on his departure and half-jogging his way back up the hallway to fetch his coat. Lola's face didn't go slack with happiness to see the Galliard after a night away, but there's a subtle softening about the eyes that doesn't carry over when her attention returns to the other Kinfolk.
"Huh?" As though she didn't quite catch the question, but it's followed up quickly by an expression of understanding and a nod.
"Yeah, he owns three tattoo shops here in Denver." She moved her hands from her pockets to unzip the coat she was wearing the rest of the way down. It was kept comfortably warm in this building, and the coat was making her sweat. With the front of the coat unzipped and pushed back, the fact that this woman is pregnant is made evident by the shape of her stomach through the loose fabric of her T-shirt.
"Anthony Tirado's his name. You could look him up. He might have a space open for rent if you're sticking around for a few months. I mean, I don't know what 'traveling' is for how long you'll be staying."
She glanced over Whina, not like she was sizing her up for competition, or at all really. She was interested in the survival winter coat-- impressed, really. It had her looking back up to Whina's face and guessing:
"You a Strider Kin or something?"
Whina Dawson
The rounded belly gave another reason for the look that had passed between mates. Whina suddenly felt a little gooey herself.
"That's awesome. I'll have to see if I have time in my schedule. I'm usually pretty booked, but i'll see if I can't move some things around." It always surprised her when she sounded all business-like. Schedules, booking. It was always a strange to her when people knew her name at trade shows or wanted her to sign things. Not like she was a household name, but she was known.
In a way she liked it better when she was anonymous and could sit and talk to people, take who ever walked in the door and write their story on their skin.
"Nah. I'm Uktena." The Islander said. " You?"
Lola Hawkes
Having grown up going through lessons with and taught by Garou, Lola had learned to recognize the Wolves for what they were-- even as strangers passed by on the street. This didn't work for Kinfolk, though, nor could she pick up on breeding in any way. She'd clued in on the traveling and assumed that the woman was of the Striders. To hear that she was Uktena, Lola's expressive eyebrows hopped up on her face, and she nodded her head once or twice before pushing her hands back into the pockets of her tan coat.
"Uktena." She rolled her head to indicate in Hector's direction. "He's Uktena too. Fostern Galliard."
Now Lola was looking at Whina more carefully, but her body language was more open. Less stiff, like were she the predator she thought she would grow up to be then she would have just gone from stiff-legged appraisal to pure palm-sniffing interest.
"Not a whole hell of a lot of us around here anymore, though. How long you planning on being around?"
Whina Dawson
Whina took a look around the corporate digs, steel and glass how many floors in the air? "Not our usual stomping grounds, yeah?" They weren't known for being as urban at Glass Walkers or 'Gnawers, but they got around, more than people gave them credit for. Unlike their Wendigo cousins, the Uktena took a more global outlook when it came to finding people to bring in to their flock.
"Glad I met you guys first then. Makes things easier." She said with an easy smile. "Couple months, maybe. I'm sorry to hear about your problems here, there anything I can do to help while i'm around?"
Lola Hawkes
Something about what Whina said when observing that this wasn't their typical stomping grounds had Lola scoffing. Sincerely. She tossed her head some and her nostrils flared with suppressed, mean laughter behind closed lips. Her hands came out of her pockets specifically so that she could fold her arms over her chest and look haughty.
"Ain't my stomping grounds," Lola said, and sounded as though she couldn't be more disdainful of the building in which she stood. She's not bothering to keep quiet for fear of offending anyone that may be nearby, and she lifted her head and nodded it toward the south, or where she was fairly sure the south was. She got turned around in big buildings like this.
"There's a real Caern south of here. My family's been keeping it protected and alive for generations-- since before the European tribes came out here. That's where I live." Then, again, she was nodding her head up the hall in indication of her mate. "I'm only here for his ass."
As for if there was anything she could help with, Lola again scoffed, but it wasn't a sound that was directed at the woman so much as it was directed at the situation she was swimming in itself.
"Dunno. We've just been trying to figure things out, really. Information gathering's what would probably come in most handy, I'd suppose, what with the pit here and out at the airport."
Hector Ghosh
A clanging rings out in the kitchen one last time. When Hector comes trotting back this time his pockets jingle with loose change and guitar picks and keys and who knows what else. His knapsack makes even more noise. He's wearing a hooded sweatshirt underneath an army jacket now and when he gets back he has a prepaid cell phone out and ready for number swapping. A hunting knife is strapped to one hip and a medicine bag to the other.
Conversation interruption: GO.
"Alright," he says. "I don't know if you have one of these newfangled gadgets but supposedly they let you communicate with people across really long distances with like, pictures and shit. If you have one you should put its number in this thing in case you need anything. Where are you staying?"
Whina Dawson
A traditionalist, from the sound of it. Something to keep in mind for future conversations. "I'll see what I can dig up, but i'm no Nancy Drew. I usually stick to the spiritual side of things. Maybe there's something far back I can find, or if there's any glyphs to be read I might can help, but that's about it." She shrugged, wishing she could do more.
Turning towards the disturbance in the force, Whina takes a moment to dig her cellphone out of her pocket. A clamshell several generations out of date, but it still worked. "Extended stay hotel not too far." It had a mini kitchen and a tiny oven, even an gym. Not that she'd ever use a tread climber when one could simply go outside and Do something.
Lola Hawkes
When Hector had reappeared, Lola was nodding to what Whina was telling her. As he'd taken out a cellphone number and interjected to exchange contact information, Lola simply dropped her chin and eyes so she could see to be able to zip her coat back up.
She gave the air of someone who was more comfortable letting others speak for her, but had no troubles speaking out for herself. As Hector had returned, Lola looked less open to conversation and more like she was observing than participating. She did stop to add, for Hector: "Whina here says she has some knowledge of spiritual goings on and glyph reading. You should get her some good pictures of The Pit to study." Lola was all for Kinfolk capability, but even she didn't want to venture too near to The Pit.
After that, though, while conversations closed, Lola would be quiet without being surly. When it was time to part ways, she'd bid Whina a very sincere sounding farewell and 'good to meet you'.
She didn't push with impatience, but only once Hector was ready to go would she leave by his side.
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