Ornature

Since Erich's first tour of the Gray family home, some progress has been made in turning it back into the sort of place real people might live. The front parlor is still shrouded in dust covers, as is the front music room, but the den and library are entirely uncovered, as is the massive dining room and the cozy breakfast nook, both of which smell strongly of wood oil and lemon-polish.

There's no staff, not that he can see. Not the way he might expect in a home this size, inhabited by Silver Fangs proper enough to own a home like this one, which has changed hands a half-dozen times and no more since it was first built in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and then only through inheritence. Never sold. Still, someone keeps the place clean.

And that someone is not Charlotte.

Who still does not know how to wash clothes, but can tell him where the laundry area is (vaguely) if he wants to throw in a load of wash while crashing. Downstairs, in the basement, beside the wine cellar. Because of course there's a wine cellar.

There is a little bar cart in the den, too, with Scotch and soda and sherry and gin and a variety of liqueurs. Including Grand Marnier, which Charlotte urges him to try. It tastes like orange juice had a birthday party.

--

Most of the bedrooms (and there are an astonishing number of bedrooms full of antiques and plush feather beds and not a flatscreen to be seen) are still closed down, curtains closed, antique quilts covering bare mattresses, the faint twinned scents of mothballs and furniture polish hanging in the air. Charlotte gives Erich what seems to be a master bedroom. Or one of them, a huge room at the back of the house with an expansive view of the garden below, a huge, old-fashioned sleigh bed in the center of the room, oil paintings and watercolors on the walls, a fainting couch and dressing table littered artfully with a silver-handled mirror-and-brush set and a pair of antique perfume atomizers.

A bathroom ensuite, the massive clawfoot tub amply supplied by french-milled soaps and bathsalts arrayed in elegant profusion on a mirrored tray on the vanity top.

This is far from Erich's first time being a houseguest. One advantage of being a reasonably lovable nine foot monster of doom is that your friends tend to invite you to follow them home. Come to think of it, nearly everyone he's befriended in this city has extended him an invitation. Even Jake's having him over for dinner. The only glaring exception is, of course, Ingrid. Who's Ingrid. So one wouldn't really expect her to extend invitations of any sort.

However, the point is: this isn't Erich's first time being a houseguest, but it's certainly his first time being a guest in a house like this. The closest thing he can bring to mind is an old-fashioned haunted house, which of course isn't particularly flattering. But really, it's much nicer than a haunted house. It just has that same sense of mystery and age, stories stretching back across generations.

And he has a suite! He would have been quite happy with a broom closet downstairs, but Charlotte is a Silver Fang, a gracious hostess, and he gets what he thinks guiltily might actually be the master's bedroom. He'd asked while she showed him around last night:

wait, where do you sleep?

and was only satisfied to take the room he was offered after being assured -- with visual evidence -- that her room was as large and grand. Or, if it wasn't, then at least comfortable and cozy and to her liking. He didn't bring a lot of luggage: he has a backpack with a change of clothes and his toothbrush. Everything else is in the back of the Mustang parked incongruously in the driveway. Besides, the bathroom is stocked.

Erich orders pizza. He insists: she offers her home, he gets dinner. She makes him try the Grand Marnier, which he does, and it's quite good but he really thinks beer goes better with pizza. There's more sausage in the fridge, which they snack on later, and sometime rather late at night they retreat to their respective rooms to sleep.

He wonders, as he's falling asleep, if he's her first houseguest. This city seems full of lone, lonely wolves and their kin.

The next morning -- well; no. The next morning, he simply sleeps through. And then he gets up and soaks in the tub for a very long time. Afterward, to be polite, he strips the bed and wads the bedding up in a ball. His footsteps thump down the stairs at half past one in the afternoon. The front door slams a little later, and then again two minutes after that. He goes into the wine cellar and finds the laundry room and puts the sheets in the washer, along with a small load of laundry. Small because he doesn't have very many articles of clothing, to be truthful -- not because he's washed them very recently at all.

And he's brought his own detergent. It's the cheap powdered sort, a gigantic costco-sized box of it, which he measures out and dumps in. As the washer starts up, Erich heads upstairs to look for Charlotte.

Charlotte's room is not quite so grand, but so thoroughly littered with her things, which are arrayed in the sort of profusion with which a hurricane levels its bounty of flotsam and jetsam, that he cannot help but imagine her perfectly (entirely) comfortable in it. There is an empty hornet's nest on the rolltop desk and a snapshot taped up to the antique mirror and a mostly intact spine, all strange articulations, atop a shimmering, silvery dress that looks far too grown-up and adult for the young theurge, and a view of the garden, the fat trunk of the old oak that dominates the backyard front and center from her view.

So Erich can feel perfectly at ease that he has not displaced her. ("Oh that's Philip's room," she might have informed him, nose wrinkled with a faint distaste, if he inquired. And who was Philip? "Our mother." With a roll of her eyes. Her real name's Philippa, Charlotte explains if necessary, dislike palpable in her voice. "We just call her that.")

--

Erich finds last night's "We" in this morning's kitchen. This afternoon's kitchen, Charlotte in a t-shirt (red riding hood, wearing a wolfskin, uncovering a gun from her basket) and boxers that reveal the long lines of her legs. Her hair is mussed, more blond than pink now, she is seated atop the center island, legs swinging, fuzzy-pink slipper-socks hitting the cabinets beneath the island with every-other sweep of her legs. Either she, too, is just waking or she has been lounging around the house all day in her pajamas.

Charles, the much-talked about brother, is refilling a travel mug with Dartmouth insignia from the brewstation (Keurigs are wasteful, after all) on the countertop, chatting with Charlotte quietly enough that all Erich hears as he trudges up the basement steps in the murmur of voices.

Both turn as one as the basement door opens, and though she is fair and he is dark, the resemblance is striking and immediately, particularly to his lupine senses. The same blood. The same sharp profile, the same pale eyes. Such a startling sensation, so see the likeness overlaid from one to the other, when otherwise they are so different. Charles is dark-haired where Charlotte is blond, and rather tall, broad-shouldered, masculine in that Ivy-League-Lacrosse-Player way. In that Bobby Kennedy-flag-football way, and while she always seems to have a wreathing look of startlement lurking at the edges of her features, Charles has the direct bonhomie of a born politician, of a knight-king.

Already he's flashing an edge of teeth, white, shifting the travel mug to his off hand in order to extend the right to Erich with several strides across the kitchen.

"Erich, right?" Not quite looking him in the eyes, but familiar enough with the blast of rage, the weight of it that he does not show many physical signs of its assault. Charles' hand is calloused, but not heavily. His clothing easy, casual, expensive. "Charles, Charlotte was telling me we had a guest. Glad to meet you."

They both have something of the stature and air of college athletes, Erich and Charles. But where Charles is all Dartmouth Lacrosse, Yale Crew, Erich is ... Fightin' Irish football. He's Big Red. He's Michigan Blue. There's something big and solid and unrefined and hearty and cornfed about him. His coloring and chiseling is all upper-Midwest -- or, really, north Europe: very blond, very blue-eyed, very stark bones.

He's a little surprised to see Charles. He hadn't expected the man, and though it's ridiculous -- it's his house, after all, as much as it's Charlotte's -- some animal part of Erich tenses on instinct. Bristles a bit. It's a stranger! He's on a friend's territory! Detergent box still under one arm, he stands stiff in the doorway of the kitchen for just a beat, just a second or two.

Then he remembers his manners. And his humanity. Charles approaches, and he shifts the detergent box out of the way. The offered hand is taken readily, solidly, shaken but not exactly squeezed or clenched or anything silly like that. He'd never do that, of course not. "Hey," he says, feeling a little self-conscious now because everything here is so expensive, and then scolding himself for feeling like that. Visibly, he draws himself a little straighter.

"Yep," he adds. "I'm the stray pup Charlotte brought home. And I know who you are." He nods at Charlotte, smiling. "You guys look just like each other. Sort of. Plus she talks about you all the time.

"You're at Georgetown, right? Doing ... like ... post-graduate stuff?"

"We get that alot," another flash of his teeth, as Charles releases Erich's hand and stands back from the Shadow Lord. "From you folks, at least. The resemblance isn't quite as obvious to the rest of the world."

Which is also objectively true, though Erich can no more divorce himself from his wolf-senses than Charlotte can divide herself from whatever madness animates her mind in its darkest corners. Charles' pale blue eyes flick unconsciously back to Charlotte when Erich names himself a 'stray pup.' Something in the look, some crease of concern or even a vague sense of pity, suggests that Charlotte's brother sees her as the stray pup in any such interchange between the pair of Garou.

"You're welcome anytime. It's good to see her," and his eyes are still on Charlotte, who is comfortable enough with her brother that she either does not notice of has chosen to overlook entirely the still-vaguely patronizing air about him, when he speaks of her, to this big and solid stranger, with a detergent box under one arm, stiff in the basement doorway, the faint, musty odor of the cool below-ground air wafting up behind him. A glance back then, to Erich, this one far more direct than the first. " - making friends.

"I should warn you, we have a housekeeper of sorts, who lives in the carriage house at the moment. She's kin, but if you see the gardening crew, it's safe to assume they're not. And yeah, I'm working on a Master's in Public Policy at the moment. Interning on the Hill, too. Which reminds me,"
Charles turns back to Charlotte, and bends over, kissing her gently, even tenderly on the temple. "I have to run. Tell Mrs. H I won't be home for dinner, and I have a seminar tomorrow morning so brunch is off. But I'll free up some time soon."

Charlotte is mute throughout the exchange, but she leans into her brother's chaste kiss like a wolf pup, thoughtlessly physical, then sits back as Charles grabs his briefcase and laptop bag and refilled coffe and juggles it all while reaching out once more for Erich's hand. This time, not just a shake but a fairly heart slap.

"Sorry I've gotta run, but it's good to finally meet you, man." Says Charles, as if he and Erich were already old friends or maybe future golfing buddies, in the passing way of a practiced politician, already on his way down the hall and eventually out the door. "Seriously, come back any time."

Charlotte just keeps sitting there, legs swinging in a haphazard rhythm broken apart every time her heels hit the cabinets. When the front doors of the home have closed behind Charles, she looks back to Erich and tells him, solemnly,

"His real name's Dolphus."

with such a round-eyed look that it is difficult to read whether her intention is mocking or simply bemused and informative.

Then she stops her legs swinging and points to the detergent box Erich has been shifting around in his arms with one fuzzy-pink-sock-clad big toe.

"What's that!"

You folks, Charles says, and Erich's back goes right back up. He wants to be all you people? what do you mean YOU PEOPLE? -- but then he figures it out; Charles doesn't mean Shadow Lords or German-Americans or people not rich enough to be a part of my country club. He means Garou. Which he supposes is fair enough; they do sometimes call themselves the Nation, the People. Erich grins a slightly strained sort of grin.

He's welcomed to the house, then, and all but thanked for befriending Charles's poor, socially-inept, slightly dotty little sister. He's warned about the mundane servants, and then there's something about the schedule and the brunch and all that, and then Charles is zooming.

Erich sort of waves to Charles as Charles heads out the door to his very busy schedule and his very important day. Then he turns back to Charlotte. Ninety seconds with this big brother of hers that she talks about so much, that she sort of kind of follows around and worships, and he's starting to understand just why she thought she --

she, blood-heir (albeit very distant) to the Silver Crown, scion of wolf-kings, wolf-queen in her own right

-- thought she had to cross the street to avoid a group of teenage proto-thugs. His brow is a bit furrowed. He doesn't laugh at the name joke. He starts to say something, but then she points at his detergent and he's

just

gobsmacked.

"Are you serious?" He looks down at the box; maybe it's morphed into green cheese. "This is laundry detergent. I'm washing the sheets off your mom's bed, and I'm washing some t-shirts and a couple pairs of jeans too. And some socks and undies. And my

hoodie."

An ever-so-faint stiffening of her spine, the supple networking of a spreading and liminal defensiveness that curls like a taut hand around her spine when Erich does not laugh at her joke. Which is both a joke and implicitly true. Someone named them Eulalia and Dolphus and expected them to wander around through life with those names. To smile and shake hands and offer toasts and sign whatever documents their accountants prepared for them to sign with those names. No wonder they retreated to the inner provinces of their names, came up with Charles and Charlotte, close enough that she still thinks of him, sometimes, as her twin. Even if he is a half-dozen years older.

Even if something between them is broken enough that he handles her with distant care, an affectionate condescension clear enough that a stranger and an Ahroun and a Shadow Lord can see that Charlotte's brother thinks she is the sort of Garou who needs to be protected.

All of this is subtle and sublimated, a bracing sort of subdural awareness until Erich's shock over Charlotte's lack of - ah, knowledge of the ordinary domestic arts - stops him before he's begun.

"Oh!" Says Charlotte, sliding down from the island now, her feet nearly silent on the marble floor. "You didn't have to. Mrs. H would've done that. Your things, too. That's pretty much her job.

"She used to have the job of telling us what silverware to use when so hopefully they'll need her for that again soon and she'll go away. She has special stuff that gets blood out. You could ask her about it. I bet she'd tell you."

A furrowed brow, then, the girl's pale eyes dropping to the detergent box as she pads across the kitchen to the fridge.

"Why are you carrying it around, though?"

"Nah," Erich says with a small but emphatic shake of his head, "I'm a guest and I oughta clean up after myself. It's how I grew up. I'd feel weird leaving it there for your Mrs. H." A pause, a quirk, "Salt. You can make a thick paste out of salt and a little bit of water and use that to scrub a bloodstain out. But I don't have any to scrub out right now, so it's cool."

Another bewildering question falls out of her mouth. He blurts a laugh, which he's quick to swallow because he doesn't want to embarrass her.

"Because it's mine," he replies. "I brought it in from my car and I was gonna take it back out later, but I figured I'd come say hello first so you didn't think I was planning on sneaking out or something. Plus I heard voices."

This time the pause is a bit longer.

"So uh, your brother ... you should tell him about what happened last night." Almost offhand, that. He comes into the kitchen finally, setting the detergent box down on the ground beside the island. "Do you have any eggs? I'll make use omelettes."

That's how he was raised. That's how he grew up.

Charlotte cants her head at Erich as he explains that he would feel weird leaving dirt sheets behind for the help. The expectations of a guest. There is the suggestion of something shrewd behind her great round eyes, something about the gleam, the precision in the way she watches him as he shakes his head. Not his features, so much, the quirk of his brow, the quickening of the lines of his mouth as he swallows back a half-blurted laugh so as not to embarass Charlotte-of-the-bewildering-questions with his laughter.

She does not explain that that was not how she grew up. That where she grew up, guests were announced by a herald on formal dining occasions and children spent hours learning the complex place settings of all manner of formal dining traditions with neither value nor worth in anything like the real world, but enough seriousness that Mrs. H wielded a cane with a cracking aim and enough force to draw blood from the knuckles at those willful enough to ignore a runcible spoon in favor of a butter knife for the formal game of consuming grapefruit in the morning room on a Sunday during a hunting holiday, and only the servants, sometimes seen, rarely heard, cleaned up after anyone, ever.

What she says is, "Okay." A little half-smile on her mouth, that he'd feel weird leaving it to Mrs. H. The heart-breaker/heart-breaking sort that lingers in the curve of her cheeks long after the expression has drifted back into her native, strange solemnity. And, "I wouldn't think that, anyway. Even if you did sneak out, I'd think you were going out for a Meatzza.

"Eggs are in the fridge," she continues, lifting her chin in the direction of the appliance. "I'm glad you know how to make omelettes. I was gonna offer to make us bowls of cereal but you couldn't eat them. Not even the good ones like Reese's peanut butter puffs."

Charlotte rummages about the fridge for eggs and omelet fixings while Erich slams through the myriad kitchen cabinets for the omelet pan. Or the cast-iron frying pan, heavy and well-seasoned. The faintly companionable hum of employment as Erich sets about making omelets and Charlotte pours milk and juice and sets about watching the Ahroun make omelets. Long enough and quiet enough and comfortable enough that when Charlotte picks up his conversational thread and adds a few more stitches, the reference may be hard to place at first.

"About those guys?" The defensiveness has worked itself out. Her eyes are fixed on his big frame, his back and broad shoulders, as he cooks. She asks him, not because she thinks she should, but because she wants to know, "Why?"

Her voice is clear and low. Her eyes, were he to look back at her, the color of an unstuck sky.

Charlotte doesn't watch the Ahroun for long. Erich rummages about getting ingredients out -- eggs, half a dozen of them all white and oval on the countertop, unless of course Charlotte's fridge was stocked with organic brown eggs from cage-free chickens; Italian sausage, the real kind that you cut open and squeeze out in blebs; a chunk of ham; a few strips of bacon. And then, because he does remember what it was like to not eat just meat: colorful mini bell peppers, spinach, and a small block of cheddar cheese.

Also, an eggbeater. And a big bowl. And a cutting board, and the biggest knife in the kitchen, and a cheese grater.

"C'mere," he says, while she's asking him why. He grabs the block of cheese, swipes it twice down the grater to show her how it works, and then hands it over to her. "Grate about half the block. And," meanwhile, he starts dicing the ham and then the peppers, "because. He should know his baby sister's not just his baby sister anymore. You're a grown-ass Garou."

So she slides back down from the center island when summoned, Charlotte, head canted curiously as Erich instructs her in the art of cheese-grating. A narrow little line between her brows (which may merely mean that she is concentrating), narrow shoulders squared. When Erich hands over the grater and the block of cheese, she nods once, and so solidly it seems nearly comical in its good-little-soldier solemnity.

"I think he knows." Charlotte, quiet, the faint hint of a frown deepening as she concentrates on long sweeps of the cheese block over the grater. Only occasionally catching her knuckles on the sharp metal. There's an edge of tension in her, more felt than see. Peripheral to Erich, as he chops and she grates. "Sometimes he just forgets?

"But I guess I haven't done anything to, uh. Remind him lately."

Then she lifts up the grater, spilling the mound of grated cheese over the marble countertop. "Is that enough?"

"Okay," Erich says, agreeably enough, and leaves the matter there for Charlotte to ruminate over, act on or forget as she pleased. A glance at her small pile of grated cheese: "Yup. That's good. Help me finish chopping these peppers while I wash the spinach and whisk the eggs. Watch your fingers."

The ham's in a haphazard little pile at the edge of the big chopping board already. He's marked by his upbringing, and by the belief that a meal worked for tastes better, but there are little kindnesses here. Meat's harder to cut than peppers.

"So, this your first time making an omelette?"

[i]Okay[/i], says Erich, and leaves it there. Charlotte steals a sideglance at the Ahroun. A half-step back from the counter, so that his profile is cheated away from her and the cut of his cheekbone, and the line of his jaw dominate. It is a precise, flickering sort of look that ends at the knife in his hands as he hands it over to her and they trade places, the sink for the chopping board.

A small, faintly pleased smile on her face that is both thoughtful and far away. Which lingers as she takes up the knife, uh, in various two-handed variations, slowly cutting the pepper into pieces with a great deal of concentration and effort.

Is this her first time making an omelette?

"Uhm, yeah? The only time I ever went into the kitchens at Clingstone was when I was stealing cereal cookies or eggs to hollow out or something like that. Cook didn't like us underfoot," and Charlotte had more important things to learn, like the order in which one would seat titled guests, and which of the half-dozen goblets at a formal place setting was for white wine, and which for red. " - and uh, at the Sept and when I was in my pack I guess there was always someone else to do it."

She finishes with a sharp little shrug, a sweeping glance back at him as he cracks eggs into the stoneware bowl. "Where'd you learn to cook?"

"My mom taught me to make mac'n'cheese when I was about five." He can tell, just by the way the knife thunks against the board and by how uneven the rhythm is, that she's doing it all wrong over there. "I mean, it was just boxed Kraft mac'n'cheese, but I guess it counts. I think learning to make hardboiled and scrambled eggs came next.

"Omelettes I actually figured out myself after I hit the road. I ran out of money halfway through Iowa and stayed a couple days washing dishes at a diner. I watched the cook make omelettes and then tried it myself later on."

He scoops the loose spinach leaves into a strainer and lifts it out of the sink, sluicing water. The sink drains and he leaves the strainer-and-spinach atop a washcloth to catch the excess water. Coming back over, he takes the knife from her -- "Hold it like this," and cuts a few times in demonstration, "and cut like this, down and forward, down and forward. Don't pull when you cut, push. And if you can't get through whatever you're cutting in one clean slice, you need to stop and whet your knife. Don't ever saw at anything. That's the easiest way to slip and slice off a finger."

He hands the knife back. And then he starts breaking eggs, all six of them one after another.

"What happened with your pack?"

"That's cool," returns Charlotte, diffident, not envious, precisely. That would be wrong. Momentarily, acutely aware of the differences in their lives. She tries to imagine five-year-old Erich, Erich small, Erich miniaturized in a kitchen with his mother, and the eggs, but has no frame of reference for his midwestern mother and midwestern kitchen, and all that populates in her mind are the buzzing kitchens full of humming servants, Cook and her kitchen maids and polished copper pots.

The heat from the ovens, the sense that within each world she could see was a whole other world she never would. "I mean, with your mom and stuff? Philip never taught us anything. Did she teach you how to wash dishes too?" The last is lilting, quite nearly sly, as she steps back and surrenders her knife to him for instruction.

Charlotte watches the demonstration closely and seriously, and gives another one of those serious little nods she takes the chef's blade back and begins anew. More slowly, but following his instructions as closely as she can.

"Uhm, Lauren - " the chopping sounds abate as she glances up and over at Erich's profile again. Debating whether to tell him that he reminds her of Lauren, for no reason she can name. " - she was a full moon? Like you? Her name was Bright Evening Star, but we mostly just called her Bright Star. She was Alpha.

"But we went on this thing. I mean, they sent us as part of this mission?" Her voice is spare, just a bit remote. Charlotte is no Galliard, and she tells the story at an un-literary remove, as if she were laying out points of an outline that might help make sense of a chaotic smear of memories. As if she could order things with the sparest retelling, and make it make sense to a stranger. "It was just supposed to be easy or something. Not easy I mean, but - " a faint, helpless little shrug. " - there were more than we thought. And Lauren died. Came back and died again. Ryland too. And without her - "

Charlotte has stopped chopping now, the knife is still poised in her hand, tip on the cutting board, her free hand a sort of fulcrum above the blade.

"It wasn't really a pack. Merlin left. I guess some of the others made a new pack? But not me. I mean, I didn't blame them or anything. But it was a good pack for a couple years."

There's a pause, still. Then the chopping resumes again, just as deliberate as before.

"I really miss her."

This conversation would be painful if their hands weren't busy. That's the nice thing about work -- work with your hands, work with your body. It occupies you and redirects you, and you have an excuse not to look at your friend, not to stare at her and pry into her soul, as she stops working and tells you a very sad -- but increasingly commonplace, in these increasingly desperate days -- sort of story.

There's nothing mechanical or stiff about Erich, though. There's no sense that he's avoiding eye contact out of awkwardness. The rhythmic ting!ting!ting! of the metal whisk hitting the bowl continues at its leisurely, practiced rhythm; he's done this enough to know it's not necessary to actually whip the eggs in a frenzy. He's just watching his work because it's his work. And because this gives Charlotte a bit of privacy, a bit of space. When she's done his mouth moves a little, a wry sort of smile. He glances at her then and the smile becomes a real one.

"She's the one that said Ahrouns should clean up too, right? My mom would have liked her." He taps the whisk a few times against the side of the bowl, then sets it in the sink. "I'd miss her too."

And there it is again. Fenrir-born understatement, German-American pragmatism; whichever it is. Simple, plainspoken, honest compassion, stopping just shy of anything so florid as sympathy or -- god forbid -- pity. Erich doesn't hug Charlotte or anything, but he does nudge her with his elbow as he's heading for the stove.

"Come on. You can finish chopping the peppers while the first omelette cooks. I want you to see how to start it up." Because he's not just making her work, see. He's teaching her.

Erich glances at Charlotte; and she senses the movement and looks back up at him. Her own smile seems both tremulous and solid. Rooted somehow, and she affirms his question about Ahrouns cleaning up with a mute but vigorous nod. The sort that sends the cropped fragments of her pink sweeping around her face.

Her pale eyes are a clear gray in that moment. The color of a rainwashed sky, some sense of the sun, radiant behind the clouds.

Then her gaze flicks away, back down to the pepper strips. They are nearly finished, more peppers than she's likely to eat, but something about finishing this mundane and thoughtless task seems important to her in just that moment, so she bends over and rocks the blade through the remaining pieces, carefully and precisely and just as close to the way Erich showed her as she can. And it is close: Charlotte has nimble fingers. She's good with her hands. She was good with her hands the night they cleaned up the bodies; knew where they good separate a joint to make the grim work that much easier. Peeled back the grown-over flesh from the muted faces with a light little hand, frowning at the way the growth had otherwise invaded human anatomy, to make something grotesque and entirely Other.

Erich does not hug her. He nudges her as he passes by to the stove, and she is still in that moment, except for a little nudge back. She's glad that he does not hug her. She would hate it if he did; if he thought that she needed to be folded up like that, drawn in. If he thought that she could not bear her own pain.

But she is also perversely struck by the urge to hug him. To jump up and throat her arms around his neck from behind as he stands at the stove, the way his sister would if she ever had the chance to see him again. If he came walking up her driveway someday, changed by time but still tied to her by blood and home and memory.

It is an urge she swallows. One she physically swallows, sealing her mouth in a flattened line.

"Okay," nod-nod, just the two, and she puts down the knife and scoots over to the big gas stove, her chin lifted a she watches him make the first omelette.

She's quiet, then, watching with those wide, pale eyes, all silent at his elbow, attentive and, in her way, still. It's not until he goes to flip the omelet that she speaks up again, stealing another glance at Erich's profile. "Uhm, did you ever have a pack like that? I mean, that you liked or something?"

He's not silent as he cooks. He explains what he's doing: a little oil in the pan, first. Then the peppers and the sausage, because they take longest to cook. After that, the spinach, because it wilts fast, and the ham, because it's already done. Then the egg, and she has to jiggle the pan a little or else there might be parts where the toppings are stuck to the pan!

After that there's a bit of lag time. Now and then he shows her how to tilt the pan and raise the omelette to help everything gel faster. When the omelette's no longer stuck to the pan, goes to flip it, and she asks him --

what she asks him. Which makes him glance at her, a quick unguarded look.

"Nah. Not really. I've run in some temporary packs, but it was just for the sake of safety or convenience, or because war was at hand. I haven't really stayed in one place long enough to have a real pack. I guess I'm sort of a free agent too. I'm not much of a leader. But I'm not good at staying in line, either. I can fall in when necessary, but ... staying is the problem."

A flick of his wrist flips the omelette neatly. He grabs a handful of cheese, sprinkles it on, and then folds the omelette over before sliding it out onto a plate. And then he surrenders the pan to Charlotte, pulling up a stool to watch her cook (or try to).

"I mean, Ingrid and I -- you met her that night I think, the one with the sword? -- we kinda talked a bit about starting a pack a couple months ago, but it never really got off the ground. I think she's sort of the same. Drift-y. Plus I have no idea who between us would be Alpha. Neither of us are cut out for it."

"Hmm." Charlotte, she takes the omelette pan in hand and eyes the ingredients. The squat plastic bottle of oil, the blobs of Italian sausage, fennel and sage sharp enough notes in the porkfat that she can smell them from here, separate out the notes if she closes her eyes. The bits of pepper and spinach, all of it, with the sort of frowning skepticism that a chiropractor might apply to a tray full of surgical implements, told he must perform an appendectomy after watching one helpful video.

She takes up the sausage and squeezes it into the pan, in two big blobs. Which she stabs at rather vigorously with a wooden spoon, in some strange pantomime of Ahab trying to harpoon his white whale. The peppers following, sizzling in the heated pan.

A sweeping glance back at him, then, where he hunkers over his well-made omelette, tucked up to the marble counter on a leather stool.

"You fought like a pack," says Charlotte, guileless in her directness. Her features are not blank, not precisely. Instead they're still. A forest-pool stillness strange only as a counterpoint to her usual (aimless) chatter. The corner of her mouth lilts upward, curving her cheek as she turns back to her peppers and sausage, pouring the eggs in, forgetting the spinach until she is half-through the eggs, stuffing the spinch in anyway and beginning to shake the pan to keep it from sticking, so she thinks.

"You could drift together."

"You think you're being subtle with the pack-matchmaking," Erich replies with a smirk, "but you're not."

It bears noting he hasn't started eating his well-made omelette yet. He has a fork on the plate, but he's waiting, watching. Being polite.

"Maybe I'll talk to her about it again. Don't shake the pan so hard, you'll turn it into scrambled eggs. I should've probably started you on that, way easier. What about you?" He's on the previous subject again. "Any prospects for packs, or are you looking for someone to drift together with too?"

Oh, so Erich calls her out on her lack of subtlety. He will not be able to see the rather (self-)indulgent half-smile curving her little mouth as he does, as she can hear the smirk in her voice, but he will see that cut of her shoulder blades against her fitted cotton tee as she offers him a sort of Who, Me? shrug.

"I'd like to have a pack," she is facing away from him, over the stove, drawing her shoulders back as she forces herself to stop shaking the pan so hard. Charlotte finds it creepy the way the egg goes from liquid to solid, the transparent whites turning opaque with the heat. " - to drift together with?" The curve of her cheek against the white cabinets and gleaming silver range hood, her voice is quiet, though, and that stillness has returned a bit. "But it wouldn't be fair to them, I think.

"So no." Another glance back, this one a full glance. She meets his eyes briefly, directly. Nothing coy about her. "I don't think I have any prospects. Anyway, you guys are pretty much the only Garou I know here."

"Not fair to them?" There's a new one. "Why would you say that?"

This time Charlotte does not look back at him. There's a new tension in the articulation of her spine, sharply visible beneath her skin at her collar. She takes a deep breath, drops the wooden spoon, the spatula into the omelet pan, and balances her knuckles at the lip of the stove, away from the blue-white heat of the gas flame.

Another breath, this one more shallow. Bracing.

"I'm a charach." The word is appropriately envenomed. With a crawling, palpable disgust. Something catches her eye outside, in the window above the sink. The bare branches of that oak framed against a gray spring sky. "It's not an epithet that fades away. People remember that."

Now.

That.

Was unexpected.

And the word hangs in the air for a while. For once, Erich doesn't seem to know what to say. Can't seem to find the right words, simple and true, to make this okay, make it accepted, put it aside. It's not even that he's appalled and disgusted, the sinner! It's not like he's a perfect angel, he's never ever ever thought about a female Garou that way, he's totally never cracked a joke about having a puppy crush on Ingrid, nope.

But that's him. And this is her. And it's not a joke, at all. So he's shocked, genuinely surprised. There's a few ticks of silence. Then he clears his throat.

"Yikes. Well, that's about the last thing I would have guessed." A few more beats. A little lamely, he adds, "Thanks for telling me. I mean. Putting your trust in me like that?"

The eggs are starting do something in the pan. Steam or burn or curdle. Charlotte does not know the proper work for it, but she picks up the wooden spoon and pushes them around in the pan so that they will do Less of whatever-it-is. Picks up the spoon in order to have something to hold on to, some movement in which to be engaged while the word hangs in the air, and Erich sits, shocked.

She does not realize that she's been holding her breath until he speaks again, this deep, deep ache asserts itself in her chest.

Erich thanks her for putting her trust in him. Charlotte - frail, strange, child-like, charach Charlotte - just nods - assent, acceptance. Acknowledgement, perhaps, and no more than that.

Then she lifts the pan from the heat and begins scraping the half-scrambled 'omelet' eggs onto the plate when she remembers the cheese. So instead she grabs a handful and drops it onto the nearly cooked, never folded, mostly-scrambled omelet-thing.

Lifts the pan to show him without turning around, and asks, "Like this?"

"It's a pretty good first try," Erich says, which is the nicest way he can say nope. There's another moment of pause. Then --

"Hey."

There's a note in that. It's quiet, but it calls for attention. He waits for her attention: waits for her to turn and face him, even if she doesn't want to, even if there are, onoz, tears in her eyes or something. When she looks at him, he's still perched on the stool, his heels drawn up to the second rung, jeans stretched over his knees.

"So ... back to the question then. Why's that not fair to your pack? I mean. If they knew what they were getting, the good and the bad, that seems pretty fair to me."

Erich says that it is a pretty good first try which is the nicest way to say nope. Which under nearly any other circumstances Our Charlotte would probably take as a yes, or at least some sort of pleasing, implicit approval. Tonight she nods again and scrapes the mess onto a convenient plate, then reaches to turn off the gas. First, of course, accidentially turning it UP.

Before finally operating the dial properly, and turning it all the way to OFF.

Hey, he says, that note in his voice. And she does turn to face him. Charlotte is dry-eyed, though now her irises seem ever-so-slight mismatched. One more blue, and one more gray, than the other. A spare sort of clarity to her features, the hauntingly wide eyes, the neat little chin rising as she looks back at him.

At first, her only answer is a little twinge of her shoulders: a teenager's shallow sort of shrug. The sort parents despise.
"There's an Adren. An Adren Philodox, who hates me. They can fuck you are." Nostrils flare with a short, exhales breath. "I could only pack with someone I like. And I couldn't subject someone I like to - to all'a that.

"So. That's why."

Erich's eyebrows go right up. And he hasn't touched his omelette yet -- in fact, he's going to have to pick most of the veggies out of it because he really should have made a demonstration omelette with all-meat, but he wanted to show her how and when to put the veggies down -- so he hasn't touched his omelette yet, but he sets it aside altogether now. The plate doesn't quite bang down, but it makes a very vehement click.

"That," he pronounces, holding up his hand to count off his fingers, "somehow managed to be emo, paternalistic, and silly at the same time. Which I didn't think was possible up until now, but obviously it is.

"Listen, Charlotte. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone has skeletons in their closet. You think one Adren Philodox is bad? The entire Fenrir tribe, with a very few openminded exceptions, thinks I'm a traitor. Most of them prooobably wouldn't mind too much if I had an unfortunate accident at some point. So there's my own warning label. I don't think it makes me unfit to be anyone's packmate. I'm not on my own because I think nobody wants me or I don't deserve to be with anyone because I screwed up once. Because that's silly. And emo.

"And also: condescending and paternalistic to any future-packmates-to-be. Because you're basically telling every other wolf in the world that they don't get a say in any of this. They're too weak to defend themselves against your brand of ignominy and bone-to-be-picked, so you're just going to decide for them and turn them away on principle.

"So there you have it. I think your reasons are dumb. I think there's no reason at all you can't be in a pack. There's no reason at all you, me and Ingrid can't all pack up together -- other than the fact that we're all kinda drift-y noncommittal-y."

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (2, 4, 8) ( success x 1 )

There's a flash of something in her eyes, then. A stubborn silver flame, maybe. Her wolf bristling to attention to incandescent life. Charlotte listens to litany of all the things wrong with her (self-indulgent, self-pitying) 'noble' sacrifice, a growingly mulish look on her features, her lower lip curving into the suggestion of a silky pout. Knuckles getting whiter as her grip on the plate grows tighter.

"I think your reasons are dumber!" The girl returns, hotly, slamming her china down to the counter top with enough force that she appears to intend to break the plate. The plate does not shatter, but eggs, half-overcooked, half-under, slop off the plate in every direction.

Then she turns decisively away and starts to slop her eggs into the sink, declaring, "I'm having peanut butter puffs. I hate eggs. Which is not true, but feels good to say. To say with force and vehemence.

"Maybe," Erich says. And then again, thoughtful: "Maybe. But," and he is, against all odds, smiling now, very nearly smirking at her indignant back, "that implies your reasons are dumb. And I'm not the one that just dumped my very first cooking success down the drain because someone called me on my dumbness."

Erich gets up too. He goes over right beside her and starts flicking peppers, tomatoes, and bits of spinach into the drain. My, they're a wasteful bunch today; his mother would have had a fit.

"Anyway," he goes on, "you should think about it a bit. Mull it over. I'm going to too. And then maybe... maaaybe... we can think about packing up. Or not. Because honestly, it's nice to just be friends, too."

The 'dynamically evolving' Columbia Heights on a cool winter's evening, a bite of chill to the air unwelcome after the afternoon's warmth. More than a few of the Section 8 buildings and basement studios and walk-ups and squats and old rowhouses crammed with too many immigrants in too little space on the side streets had windows open, radios playing, children and parents sunning on stoops and the few little patches of brownish grass crammed building and street as the temperature crept up above 60 and the patchy sunlight scattered over the dirty streets, a spare wintry promise of the summer heat to come.

Now it is dark, a biting wind rises out of the northwest, cuts down the radial arteries of the city. Past the shuttered 'artistic venues' and the few local galleries still hanging on the wake of funding cutbacks and kickbacks. Still, the city's alive. Dealers on the corner, prostitutes walking the beat. Locals spilling out of the bars and restaurants to smoke on the corner and argue about the World Baseball Classic. Cuba's unexpected double-defeat by the Netherlands, or this prospect or that one.

There, in a threadbare park, more mud than grass, half the swings no more than chains now, a group of teenagers with weed and pills and maybe a bit of crack to sell hanging out on the spring-loaded horses on the playground right by the intersection have a new target to harass: she doesn't belong here. Slight and absolutely fair and blond beneath the fading pink of her cropped hair, Charlotte is cutting across the park. The hood of her jacket had been up over her head, half-shielding her features, but her quick pace and the sudden blast of the wind have blown it back, ruffled her haphazardly cropped hair into a spun-sugar sort of confection of pink and blond.

The kids are egging each other on, calling out to her in Spanish, English, Spanglish. Mami - says one of them, or more, the word like a chorus she does not really understand. And she's ignoring them, head tucked down, giving them side-eyed looks that are wary, but not feature. Keeping them in view. At least until one of them grabs his crotch. Which has her baring teeth in an animal fashion and speeding up, away from them. Shoulders set against catcalls as she gains the sidewalk and starts across the street.

So that's Erich's sign to swoop in and rescue the damsel, right? And he would. If she were kin. Well, if she were any kin but Celia de Luca, who would probably not only take care of herself but chew him out for trying to rescue her. But she's not kin -- she's not even kin of the Celia-de-Luca persuasion -- and so across the street, coming out of his favorite little cheapass Mexican-American greasy spoon diner with a doggie bag in his hand

(hold the jokes, please.)

and his car keys in the other hand, Erich just kind of quirks an eyebrow at Charlotte hurrying across the street. And then he moves to intercept her point of alighting on the sidewalk.

"Why don't you just make them piss their pants?" he queries. The bag in his hand smells heavily of food. Meaty, greasy food. Not much corn tortilla-smell, though. He's not much of a grain eater. "You could if you wanted to."

"Hey! - " that's from five or ten feet away, as Erich emerges from his favorite Mexican diner, the grease already staining the bag and staining the air with the scent of his steak fajitas, holding everything except the beef. There's a quirk to her mouth, a certain gleam of greeting in Charlotte's eyes that has her footsteps lighter somehow. The Silver Fang even gives Erich a little wave, pale fingertips dotted against the dark cotton of her hoodie.

That grin wavers a bit as Erich asks her why she doesn't just make the humans piss their pants; her nose wrinkles and then her expression disappears from all but his peripheral view as she cuts a look back across her shoulder at the park across the street, dark except where the headlights of some customer's rusted 1986 Buick flare across it, summoning the youngest of the small group for an exchange.

A steadiness to her study of the group of young men; framed and alert, before she turns back to Erich, pale eyes touching on his car keys, then his face. A skeptical lift to her brows, and a doubtful little shake of her head. "I'm not like you?" Wistful, perhaps a bit admiring, the tone. "I'm pretty sure no one except Dosia and Delia are scared of me."

That silly little wave of hers puts a smile on Erich's face. It, too, fades as hers does. They both look over her shoulder: the small, slight Silver Fang and the considerably larger Shadow Lord.

His eyes fall back on her. He shrugs one shoulder. "Don't sell yourself short. You're a werewolf. And most humans scare pretty easy."

He nods her back toward the group with a tip of his chin upward. "Go on," he says. "Go back there and tell 'em if they ever harass a girl on this block again, you'll find 'em where they sleep and carve their balls out. Or, I don't know, whatever you Fangs use as threats."

((room for another mebe?))

There's that doubtful look again; she casts it up at Erich, then draws her chin back and angles her body to draw a line of sight between the Ahroun and the young men in the park. Her brows are drawn together, but the frown is thoughtful rather than deliberate. Less an expression than something that takes its place as she considers things.

The flutter in her chest - no, lower, just below her solar plexus - has her drawing in a breath deep enough that it pushes back her shoulder blades and then her shoulders proper. Squaring them as she allows that little flutter to open up to the idea of being powerful like that. Of carrying herself like Dances-with-the-Hurricane, silently cleaning her blade as snow swirled down in the center of the alley. Of sailing through a crowd the way an Ahroun does, without an Ahroun at her side.

Charlotte's little grin returns, with a slightly more feral edge. Though she struggles to suppress it and shoot Erich only a frown as she turns back to him, pulling the strap of her cross-body messenger bag up over her head and thrusting it toward him to hold for her. With, "You don't get to tell me what to do," a silky, sulky edge to the words belied by the fact that she is, in fact, doing exactly what he told her to do. "you're not the boss of me. I'm a Silver Fang."

Then she turns smartly on her heel and begins marching back across the street. And, christ, she really is virtually marching, this determined, absurd little stride, crisp and clipped and fast as her legs can take her.

Well, this ought to be interesting at least. Keeping an eye on Charlotte -- just in case he really did have to rescue her, though if he does he's never going to let her hear the end of it -- Erich settles his shoulderblades against the chipped brick facade of that Mex-Am diner with its buzzing neon signs shouting

OPEN 24 HOURS!

and

MEXICAN AMERICAN DINER!

The streetlights only barely blanket this area. He's sort of a smudge in the uncertain light -- a large, undeniably intimidating smudge with big shoulders and big knuckles, which is odd because he's also white as a ghost and very blond and ... well, pretty affable, all things considered. While he waits, he unrolls the top of his doggie bag and opens up the styrofoam container inside to nom on the remnants of his fajitas. Everything except beef held. Well, and a bit of onion and bell pepper... but only for the flavor.

(Charisma + Intimidation! PLUS WILLPOWER.)

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (3, 7, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 5 ) [WP]

This is what Erich sees: that knot of young men turning the way a herd turns - a leading edge as someone notices the girl coming back, then the rest after in stages, a velvety movement seen from affair, the sort of crowd-elegance that seems choreographed but never can be.

One of them - the beta, Erich's wolf-mind can easily mark him, for the leader, the Alpha, is still hanging back, sitting in the spine of a park bench, his arms open wide, knees spread, hands braced against his thighs as his pack flares open around him. And the cat-calling starts, ricocheting like dice thrown wildly about a craps table. Like a pinball down a gutter. Laughter exchanged with encouragement as she gains the far sidewalk. Climbs up it with a little hop and walks determinedly forward, hands tucked into fists in the front pocket of her hoodie.

Only the two youngest - the runners, the look-outs - are anywhere close to Charlotte's size. She walks by them all, side-steps around the first couple of young men, then the group closes behind her in a way that shields her a bit from his view. The beta-dude is watching her. Saying something that is hard to hear across the street, a cascade of Spanish and English that merges with laughter from his audience as she steps around him and (she, too, is a wolf. She senses instinctively where leadership of this motley pack of humans lies.) marches (STOMP STOMP STOMP) right for the Alpha.

There's a bit of a decrescendo as the group resettles, one of the kids miming something crude, another claiming with a gesture that he wants popcorn, for the theater that comes next. Charlotte's leaning forward - speaking, rather quietly and very straightforwardly - to the Alpha with a sing-songy rhythm movement of her shoulders, and abruptly the mood of the group just changes. Goes from gleeful to uneasy and unsettled. The anticipatory quiet becomes something altogether, goes dead-still and a few of the hangers-on at the outer edges begin peeling away a bit.

This time, when Charlotte turns around, the beta steps out of her way, and the rest follow and Charlotte walks right back through the edge of the darkened playground and park, off the curb, across the street toward the diner. Marching for the first fifteen feet, because she does not want to run, her wide-eyed young face set in a slightly crazed but Very Very Serious expression.

Though once she crosses the double-yellow lines at the center of the street, she cannot help but skip (yes, fucking skip) every two or three steps the rest of the way back to Erich. Now barely suppressing the fact that she is grinning and giddy and squirming with victory as she hops back up on the curb in front of the Shadow Lord.

Pale eyes shining, reflective as a cracked mirror. "Did you see that!"

He saw that.

He saw how the pack -- or are they a herd? -- opens up to envelope her. A twinge of unease flickers through him when a few of them block his view, but he pushes it down. She's a wolf, and neither his pack nor his tribe. He has no right to protect and defend here. His shoulders relax, and that's when he realizes they'd tensed at all; he settles back to watch.

And watching, he sees how the mood abruptly changes. How the catcalling and the jeering and the excitement of prey within reach shifts entirely and silently to uneasiness. To dread. To outright fear.

He sees how they get out of her way. This little girl, this pale, odd-haired, frail little creature that skips across the street to gain the curb again. She looks so proud of herself. Erich's proud too; he has to refrain from sidehugging her and ruining the whole effect.

"I saw," he affirms, straightening up and falling in beside her. Some crowd-choreography there, too, easy and uncalculated. "That was a slam-dunk. What'd you say to them?"

Erich saw and Charlotte gives another little bounce, not quite a hop, as she falls into step beside him. Easily and thoughtlessly, matching Erich not stride-for-stride, but stride-and-a-half for stride, slipping her bag back over her shoulders and letting the familiar weight of her theurgey-stuff hit her comfortably in the thigh.

A side-grin, up at Erich, beaming all the more when she catches the responsive note of pride in his expression, and she launches into her explanation, "I told him that there were worms and larvae and caterpillars inside his brain and that I could smell them and that they were gross and that he'd ask them in and that if he kept doing that I would come back and make them start eating their way out and they would eat their way out of his frontal lobe and his brainpan and skull and gnaw out through his eyeballs in a great big mass and push out through his nose and burrow down into his tongue and gnaw on its root until everything fell off in a giant rotten mass with his eyeballs oozing down his cheeks like a candlewax and the worms falling off the tip of his nose like drip-drip-drop."

Here's a pause, if only because she has literally run down all the breath in her lungs and there's nothing left to power speech. Charlotte drags in a big deep breath all at a go, and appends,
"I mean, more or less. I don't remember exactly what I said, but that was mostly it."

A little nudge, physical. Her shoulder to his elbow. It would never have occurred to her that she could do something like that if he hadn't told (reminded?) her that she could.

"That is... so gross," Erich responds, swaying agreeably with the little nudge. "Not that cutting balls off isn't, but -- that's just really gross, Charlotte."

He sticks his hand out. Palm up, fingers together.

"Gimme five. Good job. Bet they'll think twice before harassing you or anyone else again. And bet you'll think twice before crossing the street to avoid the likes of 'em again."

"Mmmph." That little note of pleasure as Erich informs her that her threats were really gross. She agrees; she's pleased with them in hindsight, perhaps dwelling on a few of the choicer bits in a delightedly dreadful, dreadfully-delighted way, but only briefly. Because if she thinks about it took long then it will be really really and she might throw up on her shoes.

Erich puts out his hand, palm up. Gimme five - and Charlotte does not know what to do. A moment's hesitation, a stolen side-glance at Erich and she smacks her closed fist into his open palm, like a judge banging a gavel to bring a courtroom to order.

"I dunno," another little glance at Erich's face, before she looks away, a bit more shy now that the euphoria of her victory is ebbing. The faintest shrug, more sensed than seen, twists her narrow shoulders beneath the hooded jacket. "I was braver because you were watching me."

Not a compliment. Not a confession. Just a quiet little fact.

Erich looks mystified as she bangs her fist into his open palm. "Okay, when you give someone a five, you're supposed to have your hand open and slap them together. It's very satisfying when you do it right."

He quirks. The obvious conclusion to the leapt to is simple: because she had backup. He doesn't leap there, though. Instead he asks, "Why's that?"

So, Erich instructs Charlotte in the art of gimme five and Charlotte does it properly this time, enjoying the satisfying smack of their palms together, and goes, "Oh, because you have five fingers." Which is deeply and immediately obvious to virtually everyone not unmoored from popular culture and marooned instead in the traditions and expectations of a hidebound, rigid, hierarchical and regressive cult-of-a-tribe. Erich learned how to give five. Charlotte in theory knows which of the forks in a place setting is the crab fork.

And that she is not under any circumstances to attempt to use it to eat her clear soup.

--

Her head's down. She's in profile, her mouth curved faintly, thoughtfully, and she hitches a shoulder in another half-shrug. Not so much an I don't know gesture as an it's obvious gesture. Quiet but matter-of-fact, she returns, "I didn't wanna let you down."

That draws a curious glance from the Ahroun. "You thought I'd be disappointed in you or something? Or ... I don't know, think you were weak?"

He's about to say he'd never think that of her. But he stops. He gives it a moment's thought. And then he opts for a rather brutal honesty.

"I guess I might have," he says. "I mean, I probably would've told myself you were just having an off day, and plus you'd never practiced the fine art of scaring someone shitless and all, but ... yeah. Truth is if I'd seen you cross the street to avoid some troublemaking kids and then fall flat on your face when you went back to confront them, I might have ... well, I wouldn't have thought poorly of you or whatever. But I might have put you in the needs to be protected category.

"Which isn't really where a werewolf belongs," he adds with a sidelong glance.

Charlotte listens quietly; she is still in profile, not looking at him. Not directly. She takes a step and a half for every single step he takes and it makes her seem to bounce along, even when she's no longer hopping. Even when she's just keeping up. Her profile is delicate, the crisp sharp cut of her jawline, the hollow behind her earlobe, a few stray strands of fading pink hair tucked haphazardly behind. The sharp cut of her nose. The faintest little curve of her mouth. Half-visible to him in profile. Just kind of nodding as he works his way through the permutations, and does not offer her platitudes.

Which pleases her, in a very different, and deeper, way than her small victory against some street kids.

"Everybody needs to be protected, sometime," a sly look back, the edge of humor surfacing in the gleam of her gaze. " - unless you're the fabled Ragaguergeodoxiiardhroun?" The sly edge fades and flicks a glance up to meet his sidelong glance. "But no. That isn't where a werewolf belongs."

"Well, yeah," he concedes, prepared to explain his point further -- but what I meant was! -- but then she continues on herself. Reaches her point, which

(he's pleased to discover)

is his point as well. He smiles at her, sideways and downward. "Yeah," he says again, and then punches her gently on the shoulder. "So I'm glad that's not where you're putting yourself."

A winging glance - sideways and up - when he punches her shoulder.
A little shake of her head. No, that's not where she's putting herself. Charlotte's mouth widening into a smile that could be almost considered assured.

Whatever it is, it is shining right back at him for three or four spare heartbeats before she breaks it off.

"Hey - want to see what I made?" And she's pulling up the flap of her bag to dig into its contents, coming back with a handful of obsidian arrowheads, two of them shattered into pieces, three still whole.

Cue chatter, as Erich digs into his streak-strips and jingles the keys to his car-and-home. "You can have one if you want, but you might not want to take it across" in that significant way, which means Code, which means Umbra, "because sometimes things can sense them and they don't like them.

"That's why I was walking home? Except I'm not sure which way it is since I got here on the other side." (Given her sense of direction (or lack thereof) and lack of any apparent transportation other than her feet, this may be how she gets everywhere in the city.)

"Hey, do you know Celia? I saw her the night Philip took us to the Club and told Chas because I could smell her and then I saw her at this art gallery and I wondered what Lauren would do, you know, and - "

Et cetera, all the way home.

Saturday was warm, nearly spring-like. Bright sun and clear skies and temperatures in the 60s brought all of DC outside to revel in the weather and sun. The mall was packed with frisbee players and dog walkers, picnickers and protests, bureaucrats and lobbyists and baristas and street vendors. Joggers glutted Rock Creek Park and the Metro was bursting with folks from the suburbs taking a holiday in the city to check on the status of the budding cherry trees, or wander through their favorite Smithsonian museum. The chatter was still grim, of course. Who was furloughed and who was endanger of being cut entirely. How to make ends meet with 20% less pay.

The best paid civil servants are thinking about cutting back on cable. Maybe dropping HBO from the roster (with Game of Thrones about to start! What a sacrifice!). Those lower on the totem pole - the garbage collectors, the janitors, the toll-takers and park-keepers, the guys who fill the potholes. Well, they might be going without food, or heat, or lights, or running water.

There's little sign of the looming budget crisis and its many lesser spawn on U-Street tonight. The warmth of the day is rapidly disappearing from the streets, replaced by a brisk wind and a falling cold that feels more bitter than it is, after the taste of spring this afternoon. But the streets are crowded, the bars and restaurants packed. The galleries and shops open late and later, windows gleaming bright against the dark, cool, damp streets.

It's hard to tell when Celia gained her attendant tonight. Her handmaiden. Who follows her not so much like a shadow, knitted and sewn to her heels, but like a kite, drifting in her wake, loosely knotted to her wrist. Or like a moon, in some strange, eccentric orbit around a drifting planet. But gained one she has.

Celia has one job, and it isn't in civil service, but it is for the good of mankind. Celia is fighting a war. Celia walked into Washington this winter and carved out a trench, stored her provisions, and placed her battle lines.

That she does all this from the Hay-Adams hotel probably makes her seem like she isn't much of a soldier, but the faintest whiff of her breeding marks her as a creature from a long, long lineage of defiance, of ruthlessness, of dedication. Many things can be said about the Black Furies, and many things are said of Black Furies, and almost none of them are appreciative, but those things are still best said behind their backs.

Celia is one of them. Though her hair and eyelashes are curled, though her lips are glossed, though she all but lives in high heels, she's still borne of that ancient, devoted bloodline. She pays little mind to what is going on in this city. And she looks so confused when Jack talks about it, head tilted and mouth confused, til he gives it a rest and talks about something else. Some of them are things she can use. His complaints about the sequester aren't.

Tonight she's off duty, in a manner of speaking. Her leggings are still tight, though, and the heels on her riding boots are still high and sharp. The buckles around her calves are decorated with slicing silver crescent moons, brushed just enough to keep from glinting as she walks. A white lace-edged camisole hugs her hips, and the pale pink ballet sweater she has wrapped around her upper body lets the lace draw eyes to her cleavage. There's a new piece of jewelry resting there, a pendant of gold wrapped around an amethyst on a gold chain. She told him it was her birthstone.

For the coming chill she has a wool peacoat, heather gray with black wooden toggles, but it is currently folded over her arm. She was at a bookstore earlier, and a little cafe across the street where she treated herself to a salted caramel cupcake after a wedge salad with goat cheese and a bowl of fruit. She went shopping in a quirky but upscale furniture store briefly, but only window shopping, only browsing for later. Jack hasn't yet solidified the kernel of a thought in his mind yet, but he is going to get her an apartment. A little love nest. There he'll keep her, like a bird in a cage, taken out to sing for him and then covered with a shade again when he is done with her. The thought of it makes him salivate, but it's just a spark right now. He'll fully realize it soon enough.

After the bookstore and the cafe and window-shopping, she visited a small gallery showing the works of local artists who are starting to get attention. Some of them stood nervously near their work, not quite sure how to handle the clientele. Celia chatted with one, a skinny young man in a sagging beanie he refused to take off for the event, and gave him sweaty palms and nervous laughter. He was trying very hard to be angry and above all these sellouts, but he was charmed. He asked her for her number. She blushed and said she was seeing someone and excused herself.

Somewhere in there, someone started following her. And when Celia first noticed it, she did not so much ignore it as let it slide. Later on she wondered if it was Erich, but he wouldn't stay away for long. He'd barrel up like a gorilla, grunting and glaring at everyone, and start talking to her like that dog from Up, delighted to see her and be seen by her. So it's not him.

A little while after the gallery, Celia starts glancing back. The wind picks up and she unfolds her coat, swinging it around her body and onto her arms.

Charlotte has pink hair. When Celia sees her, she tips her head, lifting her eyebrows, and gives the werewolf a Look, as though to say: Really?

There are coincidences in this world. Strangers who meet in dark alleys where dark things lie in wait. Old acquaintances who run into each other at the Metro stop, at the 9:30 Club, in the toddler department at Macy's, in a coffee shop and say: oh my god, it's been years. There is probably another such pair on the street tonight, exclaiming and assessing and suffusing each other with questions that cannot be answered and answers that will not be remembered.

It's been so long! What have you been up to!

This is not a coincidence.

You see, Charlotte had a dream last night, about spring. About spring and about Celia, about the resonant memory of her blood. She did not remember this dream in the morning, when she woke up in a feather bed, with light streaming in striations through the 19th century glass windows onto the plush Persian rug hugging the old hardwood floors of the family's DC property.

But she could taste it, on the back of her tongue, all morning long. She could feel the way it cracked and curled in her marrow and she walked barefoot through the damp garden, the frigid soil squelching between her toes, amidst the daffodils and tulips and crocuses pushing green shoots upward through the mounded leaf mast piled over the brick-lined beds. Circling the old oak tree in the center, until the unmoored remnants of the dream broke free.

Then, she went searching.

So you see, this is not a coincidence. But Charlotte has not thought beyond the searching to the finding. The watching to the being seen, and Charlotte has pink hair and an abstracted manner. She has no friends with her, and no shopping bags, and no smartphone to occupy her hands with texting and tweeting and instagramming to update the world about her latest discoveries.

So when Celia spots her, tops her head and gives her that Look, Charlotte, (who is heel-to-toeing on the sidewalk in front of the gallery, furtively watching her reflection, which is still in the stolen moments of consideration, superimposed on the reflections of all the others in the street, who smear together like watercolors in the rain, and occasionally - glancing up at Celia. To find her again, assuredly. Even if she can't say why.) -

- Charlotte goes so-suddenly-still, a bit wide eyed, presses her lips together, sealing her mouth like every guilty girl working up a suitable lie to lie to her mother, ever.

Then swallows, and squares her narrow shoulders beneath her hoodie (DARTMOUTH, tonight. Her brother's alma mater), and jogs to catch up with Celia, a cross-body messenger bag bouncing at her hip.

Sliding, perhaps even sidling into place beside Celia. "Hi." Says Charlotte, right down to the period, pale gaze on Celia's profile, luminous and wary, both.

It's not hard to look at Celia and imagine spring, wet and verdant. Her skin is not sickly pale from wintertime, even in the chill and even under the clouds. Her eyes shift between blue and green, water and storm, blossom and sprout. When she smiles, which she does, it is hard not to think of sunlight breaking through, bring back all the warmth that has been missing for so long.

Easy enough to believe that losing her would bring winter right back down on their necks like cold iron. Easy enough to believe that a lord of death, of darkness, of Hell itself, would want to steal her for himself. That isn't far from what's happening, after all.

Charlotte dreamt of her this morning, and now it is evening, and here Charlotte is, looking at her. In the flesh.

As she bounds up, Celia turns a bit, as though to go on walking. It's an invitation of sorts: she doesn't storm off or demand an explanation, she just starts strolling along, this time with company. "Hello," she says, far more fluidly, flexibly, maybe even pleasantly. "Were you following me?" she asks, as though this would be perfectly acceptable and understandble, if a bit silly.

Charlotte takes that unspoken invitation to stroll. She understands the physical language of Celia's pivot and turn with the unspoken surety of a pack animal, and swings into step beside the kinswoman. Her own pace slowing, the slap of her sneakers on the pavement a quiet counterpoint to whatever pace Celia sets.

The (wolf)girl's surveillance of Celia's profile is open - Charlotte is staring, and takes darting glances away only when the shadow of as stranger looms ahead and she must adjust her own pace. - but still feels covert. Stolen.

It is in Charlotte to lie. She lies regularly and sometimes with gusto, though generally badly. Celia asks if she was following her and Charlotte takes in a breath, hesitates as if testing the lie in her head, working out its depths and contours. Sounding it out before casting it aside.

"I was." The creature returns, a bit breathless, and it cannot be from that quarter-block jog, which barely winded her. " - for a little bit," she appends, weasels really, the corners of her mouth quirking upward. "Since the bookstore."

Looking like she does, acting like she does, it's difficult to imagine Celia grasping why Erich behaves the way he does, why Charlotte reacts to her the way she does. They're animals and they are not animals. They're monsters and they are not monsters. They are creatures of unimaginable rage and unspeakable tenderness. They follow her around. They stare at her. They want to break necks, open bellies, feast on entrails, shadow her to her grave to keep her safe. They want to be friends, yes, and walk and talk and share their snacks, yes, and they want to be close and warm and yay.

She turns, she walks, and knows as if by instinct that Charlotte will understand the invitation (which she does). She feels Charlotte staring at her like anyone would and doesn't give her odd looks or glare at her, because there really is no point. It's not about feeling unnerved or feeling flattered; it's simply about understanding what she is. And she could only do that if she'd been around wolves a good long while.

Her head does tip, though, as she looks at the other girl. "Why didn't you come say hello?" she asks, a tiny furrow appearing between her brows.

"I didn't - " when Celia looks at her, head tipped, long dark hair catching on the cusp of the lifting breeze (which feels like winter, but smells like spring), a few fine hairs caught in the nap of her woolen peacoat, Charlotte meets the look.

Meets it, but only briefly.

In that moment, her own eyes are raw and sharp, all the blues bled out to a fractured but reflective gray. "I didn't know if you'd want me to come say hello. And I didn't know what to say after saying hello. Or what to say after that."

She is a finely made thing, still young, rather thin, as if she were underfed. The runt of the litter, perhaps. If her features skew younger full-on (the wide eyes, the high cheekbones, clear brow and tapered jaw. The scrubbed-clean lack of make-up that makes her seem... unfinished compared to nearly every other girl on the street. Half-drawn), her profile is keen, dominated by the high bridge of an aristocratic nose.

"Or if I'd get you - " in trouble, she swallows, with a lilting glance toward Celia here, winsome. "I mean, if I'd say something wrong, you know? I do that alot."

Celia listens, and as she listens her frown goes away, her features becoming placid with consideration rather than more wrinkled by it. She does up the toggles of her coat, thoughtful, and then gives a little shrug as her hands slip into her pockets. Like the rest of her, those hands are kept carefully, obsessively perfect. Manicured, moisturized, lovely and soft and seductive. That's the whole point.

"Thank you for being careful," she says, at least to start, as though she can read in Charlotte's eyes the words she doesn't say, "but you shouldn't worry so much about causing offense. If you think you say the wrong thing so much that you end up not saying anything at all, that's pretty messed up, you know?" She looks at Charlotte as she says this, then shrugs and looks away, still talking. Still thinking aloud. "Maybe what you're saying isn't what's wrong in the first place. And even if you do say something wrong or harmful or stupid, then it doesn't mean you're wrong or harmful or stupid.

"Our mistakes are only another enemy to face," she says after that, as though reciting something now. "Stand your ground as fiercely against them as against the Wyrm. Never cower."

Celia walks a few more steps, then smiles brightly at Charlotte. "It's okay if you don't have anything to say, too. We can just walk."

When Celia favors Charlotte with that bright smile, the Silver Fang breathes out, all at once. It is not a sigh, so much as a deep sort of release. Her own eyes are shining-gray, like a mirror, and Celia is caught within, a tiny twin reflections, like a pair of moving miniatures. She gives this curt, swallowed little half-nod, not so much an expression as a check of one, as Celia recites what must be a lesson learned. Some old koan a crone, a mother, a sister, a teacher gave her to remember.

And breathes out again, as the aphorism ends with the admonishment to never cower. Which has Charlotte wondering if she does cower. If this is cowering, standing outside everything as if she could slip history and blood as easily as she slips her human skin.

We can just walk, says Celia.

And so they do. For a half-block, past another small gallery, a famous chili stands stacked with patrons three-and-four deep at this hour on a Saturday. A street-vendor selling Rastafarian paraphanalia, Bob Marley t-shirts and tri-color knitted berets, pipes and hookas.

"I had a dream about you last night," Charlotte says at last, breaking the companionable silence. The words come out in a rush, like a confession, but is it buoyed by a certain subliminal confidence - which must surely have been steadied by Celia's encourangement. Her voice is quick, " - I don't know what it was about? I walked around the oak in the backyard until I remembered what was familiar. So I wanted to find you and see if you were okay.

"Or just see you, I think. It wasn't a scary dream. So I knew you were okay."

(brb!)

They can just walk. So: they do. Charlotte doesn't even answer that. As though relieved, she simply walks with Celia for a while. Celia stops frequently, to see if the line for the chili is too long to be worth standing in, to feel the edge of a pashmina between her fingers, to lean over and let a dog lick at her fingers as she smiles haphazardly, a wistful ache in her eyes.

It's gotten colder, the farther they've gone. She's walking eastward, toward 13th, when Charlotte pipes up again. Celia turns, blinking at her, as startled as she is curious. Usually when people tell her they've dreamt of her, they're running a hand up her thigh. Charlotte isn't doing anything of the kind, which means it must have been a different sort of dream than people usually tell Celia about.

That Charlotte walked around an oak tree until she remembered something that mattered to her, even if it doesn't translate well, seems to make sense to Celia. Perfect sense. The Furies are, after all, not just ball-busting, man-eating bulldykes as the Get of Fenris -- and plenty others -- would have them. They're protectors of the Wyld. Even their kin are pagans, howling at the moon.

She smiles, warm as a mug of cocoa held between the palms and as deeply comforting, a look of glee entering her eyes. "Would you like to be my friend?" she asks, and -- this is important -- she isn't teasing her. Not even remotely.

Charlotte does not mind the pauses; the stops, the little eddies in the walk, though she does stand by a bit awkwardly as Celia fingers the pashmina, or admires a dress in a shop window. And her attention drifts away from the line at the chili place or the Belgian-style frites stand to trace other trajectories. The skim of headlights across the street, the dark, dusken line of the sky. The pulsing light of a jet overhead, as it begins its descent into Dulles or Reagan National. The corners, the edges of things. Her own hands stay mostly in the kangaroo pockets of her hooded sweat shirt, emerging here and there to adjust or re-adjust the bag that bounces against her hip.

Oh, but as they drift away from this shop, or that one, the girl's fingers dart out to catch the edge of that pashmina as it falls from Celia's fingers, the action is very nearly furtive, and not remotely conscious.

--

They're standing on a corner now, the tick-tick-tick of the streetlight counting itself down, warning blind pedestrians "DON'T WALK, DON'T WALK" in a quiet, mechanized female voice. There is more foot traffic than cars out tonight, though a chain of taxis hover at the corner, waiting for the first wave of drinkers to begin spilling out of the bars.

When Celia asks if Charlotte would like to be her friend, Charlotte nods decisively, wordlessly, the reaction just spilling out of her before she has even turned to search out the expression on Celia's features. Again that wary edge to the girl, haunting the darker edges of her pale gaze, the tension in her neck and shoulders beneath the oversized hoodie, all knotted and then unknotted, raveled open as that expression - the warm, comforting smile, the look of glee gleaming in her gaze - registers on the girl's animal mind.

"I would." Eager, this. This sudden widening of her own smile, a lupine edge to it that transforms her girlish features into something both Other and familiar, at least to Celia. "I don't have any friends. I guess Chas but he's my brother, my full brother, I mean, so he has to be? Like he's required. And maybe Erich? I guess he could be. He gave me gyrosbeast and I showed him the ballroom at my house. It's big. It's on the third-floor.

"So I mean yeah," Charlotte nods again, eagerly, like a puppy stumbling over its too-large paws, cropped hair cotton-candy pink and ruffling. "That'd be really cool. I kinda made you something too? In case you wanted it, I mean."

Celia has exactly one friend. She has no idea that just a few mights ago, he fought alongside Charlotte, killed with her, has met her a few times before that as well. It wouldn't make a difference, most likely. But these are how connections are made in a world so much smaller than it feels sometimes: the quick bonds that are formed, the common enemies, the common interests, the need for each other that sometimes transcends all difficulties of surface difference.

She doesn't glance back as Charlotte catches the pashmina to feel it, but she notices.

Would you like to be my friend? asks one lonely girl to another.

yesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyes nods the other, sudden and fervent.

Even before Charlotte finds words to go along with that eager nodding, Celia is beaming. Even Charlotte admitting that she doesn't have any friends doesn't dim that smile. She has a brother -- a shot goes off behind Celia's eyes, to be dealt with later -- and then there's (maybe) Erich. Celia blinks, the smile startled off her mouth, her lips parting right around the time Charlotte gets to 'ballroom'.

"I know Erich!" she bursts in, amidst all of this. Then, calmer: "I know Erich, too, if we're talking about the same one. We probably are." They do, after all, live in a rather small subset of the population, a secret community of growling factions that like to pretend, at large, that they do not make quiet friendships along individual lines. "Erich's my friend," Celia says, firmly, as though planting him on that tier of people rather than staking some kind of a claim. The emphasis is on the last word, not the second.

The streetlight flicks and beeps at them, greenish-white and permissive. Celia steps off the curb to cross. At this point it's more evident that she's heading for the metro station, but still chatting with Charlotte. "What did you make?" she asks, peering nearer to Charlotte's shoulder as though she's hiding it somewhere.

There's this moment where they're talking over each other. Celia knows Erich, if they are talking about the same one. Celia's ready to seal the case that they are talking about the same one (wolves and kin, after all. With whom else could someone like Erich, or even Charlotte for that matter, ever hope to be something approximating friends?) but Charlotte requires more details before she is willing to concede the that the Erichs in question are the same.

A series of questions, half-on-top of Celia's affirmations, follow:

"Is he big?" illustrated with a sweep of her arms, and a kicky little jump that makes Erich Storm's Teeth out to be approximately six inches taller than he is. Though perhaps it approximates the sweep of an Ahroun's rage, haloing him like the corona of the sun. "And he likes meat and he has a car with stripes - " where a normal person, nearly any normal person, and most Garou would at least know the cultural resonance of the iconic Mustang, " - and he lives in it and he showers in high school locker rooms Erich?"

Which is a concise enough way of describing the Shadow Lord Ahroun.

Celia defines him as a friend, and firmly. The subtext - whatever there may be, the necessity of that firmness, that definition - is lost on Charlotte. "That's neat. He's the first - "

a pause, searching for a suitable Euphemism as they cross the street, the Metro station in sight. " - Person Like Him I ever met?" And she cannot mean Garou, and she cannot mean Ahroun, so perhaps she means, giant man living in a car, though in truth she means, Shadow Lord.

"I couldn't live in my car, though," she continues, confessional, with the naivetée of the utterly privileged. "I don't know how to drive."

--

Charlotte does not go digging for the present until they've crossed the street. The sweep of other pedestrians moves by them, as she shifts the messenger bag to the front of her hip and unloops its straps, peering inside and eventually pulling out, carefully, a small glass jar. Heavy and handblown, sealed with a waxed cork. There's a resonant gleam of water inside, though the vial is small enough that it could hold no more than six or seven ounces, it has a weight in the hand. A humming sort of warmth.

Palm open, she holds it out to Celia, pale eyes fast on the other girl's face.

Their hands both define Erich's height in mid-air, and meet at about the same place because as far as Celia is concerned anyone over 5'10" is a giant --

"And ice cream," she points out, when discussing his dietary preferences,

"--the Mustang!" Celia bursts out, laughing, clapping her hands lightly.

Yes, they're discussing the same Erich.

And Charlotte may very well be the only person on earth who could miss the subtext of Celia having to keep Erich neatly, tidily on the 'friend' tier. She's kin. She's lovely. The scent of her is positively dizzying. Many Garou would hear her call him that and begin asking if he's overstepped his bounds, if he's sniffed at her like a beast, if he's remembering his place, and a few would realize it's not really their business, but to not even notice, to not even bat an eyelash --

well. Charlotte just solidified herself as Celia's friend, even without the repeated nods of agreement that this is a good idea.

The euphemism, in kind, is lost on Celia. She only understands that Erich is different than a lot of people, and she shrugs, nodding. "He's pretty weird," she says, thinking she's agreeing with Charlotte, when in fact Charlotte means something else entirely. "I know how to drive," she goes on, stepping up onto the next curb, "but I don't have a car right now."

Hence: the metro station.

They pause, stepping out of the main flow of foot traffic, as Charlotte digs around in her bag. She pulls out a jar. Celia looks at it curiously, then takes it, holding it in her bare hand. She feels the warmth, which it would not have after being in the bag for more than a few minutes, and then looks at Charlotte with her eyes up in question.

"Is it a talen?" she asks, because if it is one, she does not recognize the sort.

"Yeah," Charlotte affirms, though there's a lilting sort of surprise etched into her brow that Celia knows the term. No one ever taught it to her before she changed and the world reoriented itself, entirely. "It's, uhm. For cleansing? It's not as good as a proper rite. It won't take something from tainted to clean. But it's pure and it will, like. Scrub the city off you, if it starts - clinging."

Once more, the Silver Fang presses her little mouth together, says nothing about him, the worm-and-snot-smelling Senator from whom Charlotte wanted to rescue Celia, who must surely have inspired the gift.

"You could drink it? But I would pour it over my head."

Like a baptism. Like a christening.

When Charlotte says it's for cleansing, Celia's eyes -- already quite round and accentuated by her makeup to only make her look more innocent -- get wide. She puts her other hand around the jar, as though she thinks she might drop it if she isn't careful. Those eyes, fit for a Disney Princess, go to Charlotte's face.

not as good as

but it's pure

scrub the city off you

Those eyes are gleaming, sparkling suddenly from a few quick-to-the-surface tears. She takes one hand off the jar, drawing it to her chest with the other, and wraps her free arm around Charlotte's shoulders, hugging her fiercely.

Celia's shampoo smells like sandalwood and roses.

"Thank you," she says, her voice tightened by the sincerity of her gratitude. The hug isn't quick, nor is it awkward. At least not for Celia. Celia doesn't hide from the hug, or from the sniff of moisture out of her sinus cavities. She squeezes Charlotte before she draws back, reaching up to daub at the wetness along her lower lashes, delicate as any movie star trying not to smear her makeup. She blinks a few times and smiles, overcome.

"Thank you so much," she repeats, and just as before, just as shockingly: she utterly means it.

Strangely, the hug is not awkward for Charlotte either. Oh, there's that moment of confusion where Charlotte is not sure what Celia's doing as she steps in and wraps that free arm around Charlotte's shoulders, but then quite suddenly and surely, Charlotte is hugging her back, both arms wrapped around Celia's neck, tight, the messenger bag digging into Celia's thigh with its assortment of lumps and bumps, talens and treasures, promissory notes and bribes, books and (to be fair) a single bagel.

With her nose so close to Celia's hair, Charlotte inhales deeply. Sandalwood and roses laid over warming earth, and the first shoots of new growth, the sweetness of pomegranites, and the bitterness of their pith. Sun on stone, and all the many memories buried in Celia's blood and bones.

"You're welcome," Charlotte returns as she lets go, suddenly a bit shy, ackward only in the aftermath of the hug; or perhaps it's just that dampness Celia's lash line that undoes her a bit. The girl's cheeks are pink with pleasure. "If you need another just let me know? I - uhm. I don't have a phone. Erich could tell you how to get to my house, though? Or if you said something to a sparrow, if it was a smart one, then Sparrow might find me and let me know."

From down in the depths of the Metro station, the rattle and hum of an approaching train. A few more pedestrians headed to the station begin to hurry, darting toward the escalators hurrying down them, two steps at a time.

Whereever she's going, Charlotte is not taking the Metro. Down underground, all that concrete and cables would feel like crawling into a spider's mouth. But she'll stand up here and keep vigil until Celia has safely disappeared behind a turnstile, and into the underground crowd.

This is how Celia makes friends. She asks, and then she hugs, and if presents or favors are exchanged in the process, it only seems to help smooth things along. The gift seems to have overwhelmed her in its thoughtfulness, in its understanding. What Celia does -- however much Charlotte is removed from it, however little she knows about the goal, the process at this point -- is certainly a part of the war, but she isn't opening up fomori and getting covered in their ichor. It's slow, and in many ways it's more insidious.

it's pure, Charlotte said, of her little talen. The same could be said of Celia, thought it often isn't. There are few who could do what she does and withstand being dragged down by it, poisoned by it, warped to the core. Celia seems okay, though. She hugs and cries and makes new friends and very carefully tucks that talen into her purse, wrapped in a glove.

"I have a phone," she says, "in case you ever want to hang out. I'm also at the Hay-Adams hotel, if you want to find me. Erich is going to be so happy we're friends now."

That makes her smile again. Her two friends -- she has two, now -- are friends with each other. And that means they're all friends. And this makes her inordinately happy about life. Before she goes, she gives Charlotte another hug, this one quick, then bounces down the steps to catch a train going south. She pauses at the bottom of those steps to wave, then into the crowd, where she only vanishes in the eyes of mortals.

These Garou -- the ones she calls friends, the ones she hasn't met yet -- could find her across the city if they wanted to. She stands out like a beacon.

Shops and boutiques are still open up and down King Street, lights gleaming through the historic windows of the historic homes turned chic little emporiums or bistros, but the usually crowded parking lots and metered parking slots are half to three-quarters empty. It is cold and dark, rain slants down from a bleak gray sky made starkly orange by the reflected lights of the DC metroplex, bleeds like ozone back into the charmingly cobblestoned and bricked streets and walkways of Old Town Alexandria.

There's an old chalkboard outside the Majestic Cafe, but the cold rain has washed the evening's specials into an imperfect smear of multicolored chalk on the gray slate. The bartender keeps checking Weather.com, watching the endless loop of storm warnings, all the precursor coverage, the mid-Atlantic panic squeezed in between discussions of the sequester and the impact on the local economic.

Down the street at Current Boutique, the store clerk lingers by the door, counting down the minutes until she can close. Frantically texting her boyfriend instructions about the supplies necessary to survive in case that big red blob predicting power outages all over the DC area comes true.

For now, though: it is just rain, cold and driving. The smear of headlights halo'd with refracted light, in chilly succession across the dark, reflective streets as someone else escapes into the private haven of their car and pulls out, headed toward one of the rings of ever-expanding suburbs and hopefully home before the snow begins to fall.

The roads are somewhat quiet tonight, the cold and the rain driving all the sane folks indoors. They stay in their homes with the heat cranked, watching movies or playing on computers or cooking family meals for family types.

Ingrid steps out from one of the quint little boutiques, no extra bags in hand, much to the shopowner's delight. It is never comfortable for the mortals to have one like Ingrid in among them. Her rage is noticeable, but it's more than that. On some level they all feel a shiver of fear when the woman enters the room, as though at any moment she would shed her mortal skin and lunge for their throats.

She pauses in the doorway, peering out into the rainy night before pushing an umbrella before her, opening it before leaving the shelter of the shop. The smells of what she's left behind cling to her skin and hair and long, black wool coat briefly before they melt away, leaving nothing in their wake.

In autumn a hurricane swept through this area. It didn't do to D.C. nearly what it did to Jersey and the like, but it was bad enough. Jake had never been in a storm like that before. He boarded up his windows and put sandbags down and over-prepared the way that any newcomer would, but the difference between Jake and most newcomers is that next time, he'll still over-prepare. He'll still do everything he can to make sure that his home could withstand any version of the apocalypse, whether fire or ice or zombies or what-have-you.

When that storm was coming their way, the gusts of wind and smatterings of rain that were its scouts came through Browntown and Jake sat out in front of his bakery, arms stretched out to either side on the back of a bench, head tilted back, accepting the cold and the wet and the thunder of it.

He looks like a goddamn Shadow Lord. He smells like one. In the subtlest of ways, lurking just beneath the opinions many have of his tribe, he acts like one. To his core all the way up to the most surface behaviors, Jake is every inch a grandson of Thunder. He does this -- is this -- without thinking. Without really even knowing what is common or what is expected. It's just who he is.

Which is why, on a night like tonight, instead of retreating indoors or even into his car, he sits on the hood of that car in the same suit he came to town in, and sips a paper cup of coffee. He is drenched.

[per + alert]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 6, 6, 6, 7, 7) ( success x 5 )

This is the way it begins. For Ingrid, this is the way it begins. A coil of scent, familiar and scarlet. The tickle of it against the back of her red and animal mind. Memorable but not discernable, not immediately, not sunk as it is beneath the cold, driving remnants of the rain that is getting colder by the minute, coalescing in the clouds above as the driving northern chill meets the swampish southern storm in some great convection billowing above the DC sprawl.

Rain sheets down over her umbrella, cold and driving. Not enough to cut the scent, though, which is no more than niggling at first, as if that girl down the block now struggling with the bulk of the blackboard in front of her near-empty bar had cut her finger on the metal teeth holding the A-frame open.

So she follows it; that curl in the air, like the faint and lingering residue of a woman's perfume an hour after she left the room, down the block until suddenly it blooms against her senses, with all the humid rot of a dying hothouse flower. Blood: viscous and copper and cloying waste, organ-deep. Down the long, dark walk / alley that is Muirs' Court, where it bisects the block and opens (eventually) onto a metered parking lot.

---

There's a streetlight above Jake. The light it casts is vaguely amber, but mostly a sickly white. Nevermind the gentrification. The winds, the scattering storms, these little prequel rain squalls (he can taste the storm, taste the layers of ice above, and snow to come, the electric, near kinetic potential swirling in the troposphere well above him) are violent enough to rattle the bulb in its cage. And, in one sudden arc of electricity, to blow it out. The streetlight explodes in an arc of reflective energy, a tracery of fire like the tail of a comet gleaming in the sky.

That's when he senses it, too. Not the thick curl of blood that wraps itself around Ingrid's lupine senses, but the shuffling of something that does not belong in the Muir's Court ahead. The back of the throat struggle of someone trying not to cry, and very very quietly. The wet, snuffling rip of someone tearing into a raw piece of meat. And the low hum of the radio playing storm warning after storm warning between snippets of Mexican hiphop, in what can only be the familiar tin-can rattle of a commerical kitchen.

He might also hear someone saying, "Let go, let go, let go," in a weak and rather sing-songy voice. And if he looks down the alley searchingly enough see what appears to be two homeless people crouching over the splayed body of a third in the shadow of a recycling bin, at the back door of a neighboring restaurant. Backs hunched against the rain, deep shadows cutting across them.

Roundabouts now, a slightly oddly-paintjobed Mustang comes rolling down the street. It's white. It has black racing stripes. It has a blond-and-blue Fenrir Modi in the driver's seat, except he's neither Fenrir nor Modi. He is leaning forward in his seat, the wipers going full-blast, which might be the only reason he sees his two friends on the street.

And seeing them! He pulls quickly to the side of the road. Parks. Hits the emergency blinkers, because he really has no idea if he's parked in front of a fire hydrant or a loading dock or what. It's pouring out there; visibility is shit. The driver's side door flies open. Erich tugs his hood up over his head as he jogs up on the sidewalk, under a friendly awning.

"HEY!" Both arms wave for attention. He has yet to register anything odd about the alley both his friends are headed toward, or into. He hasn't even stopped to think that maybe they're going in together because they want some privacy, though that would be totally awesome because they're his friends and he wants them to now-kiss. "INGRID! JAKE!"

Jake looks up. Not jumps, but he does lift his chin sharply to look up and over. His hand comes up as well, ready to shield his gaze against glass, a flash, whatever there might be. His attention was on the storm before, but that shattering light draws him out, opens his senses up. His nostrils flare.

Everyone who has skinned their knee or cut their thumb and stuck it instantly into their mouth knows the smell of blood, how even if it doesn't land on your tongue you can almost taste it in the air. That scent hasn't hit Jake yet. The sound does. A cold snake as thin as a rat's tail winds itself up his spine, slow and cruel, biting down with icy fangs into the nape of his neck.

He lifts his paper cup and takes another swig of the hot coffee. Glances around and over his shoulder as though looking for a place to toss it, which he is. But it's also to see where the sound it coming from, which is right over there. Jake's eyes narrow, and he looks away, sliding off the hood of the BMW to dump the cup into a nearby wastebin.

Thing is, if it weren't for what else he hears through the rain, he would just go home.

Jake comes around to the trunk of his car, popping it open. He hasn't seen Ingrid yet, or maybe he just hasn't recognized her from the all of two minutes he met her in a dark, crowded club. He shrugs out of his sodden suit jacket, unfolds a tarp in the back, and dumps the jacket onto the tarp. There's a duffel bag in there, but he yanks that aside as well.

There's a flap of carpet over the spare tire. He opens that.

There's another bag wedged in there. Not very long. He unzips it, shielding it from rain with the trunk hood and his own body, and slides the clip beside the pistol right in. Smooth as silk, solid as knives. He replaces everything, minus the pistol. He puts that in the inside pocket of his overcoat, which is still mostly dry, the wool wicking away the new rain that falls. Jake turns his collar up and closes the car. It beeps when he locks it from the key fob in his other pocket.

And with that, he walks up to the disposessed, the lonely, the cold and hungry.

"Let them go," he says, quite flatly, when he gets to about four feet from their backs.

[str + intimidation]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 4, 7, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 4 )

Even in her weakened birth form, Ingrid's sense of smell is strong. Even on two legs, she is a hunter, a tracker, a finder of things. She catches the scent, though faint, despite the rain and the smell of the cold and scents of the city at large. Her chin lifts and she sniffs the air, eyes closing slowly to block out the distractions of sight. When she opens them, her head tilts in an animal way. Adjusting her hold on her umbrella so that it rests on her shoulder, allowing the rain to travel a little further up her coat, she starts off in search of the source.

The scent draws her down the street. Leads her in the direction of the alley. Just before she reaches the entrance another scent meets her, fainter than the blood smell. She turns her head toward the black BMW, eyes narrowing at the sight of a man who looks and smells vaguely familiar, and not simply because the blood of her tribe flows through him.

She's close enough now to hear the shuffling. Reluctantly, she turns away from the man, her head turning, her eyes the last to leave his direction. Slowly, she lowers her umbrella, welcoming the rain on her face and hair as she carefully folds away her umbrella, slowly wrapping the strap around it to keep it tied down.

The man heads for the alley, and she stops, watching his progress. Behind her, a familiar white Mustang parks, but of course she can't see it. Ingrid is perceptive, but she doesn't have eyes in the back of her head. Once Jake has entered the alley, once she's heard his commanding tone, she follows.

And is all but struck a physical blow by the stench. She pauses in the opening, head rocking back. If she were human, the dainty, elegant, above-everyone woman she appears to be, she might pull out a handkerchief or bring her gloved hand to her nose, protecting it. She's not those things, though.

HEY! Turning, she sees Erich. And as though it hasn't been an age since they last saw each other, she tips her chin up in greeting, and jerks it once toward the alley.

Hey. Come on.

This is what Erich sees: the familiar BMW, and Jake's broad back as the kinsman tucks his weapon into the (relatively) dry shelter of his suit jacket, light streaming in odd rippling curtains down his back as the rain continues to fall, and the new onset of an odd, tinkling chorus as the rain begins to hit the ground as glazing bits of ice like tiny balls of hail, instead of just cold rain.

This is what Erich sees: the first skim of ice glazing the windshields of the few other parked cars on the street. The first few flakes of snow, falling from an acid sky.

Muir's Court is narrow enough, bricklined. Not open for anything but foot traffic and the occasional delivery truck. Plastic trash and recycleing bins are tucked beside the back doors of various cafes and shops.

This is what Ingrid sees: Jake, the broad bulk of his torso, four-feet, perhaps less, cast in shapely, oblique shadows by the dull glow of imperfect light from the half-opened door of the (nameless) cafe. The radio drones school closings, storm warnings, then cuts back through a haze of static to a low-beating bass line, hurried spoken word a nearly incomprehensible mix of English and Spanish almost sublingual in its gutteral complexities. More about the heart and fucking spleen than the mind.

This is what Jake sees:

Two young, rather slender homeless people. Kids - sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, that sort - the sort who haunt the edges of the city, with dreadlocks, beating makeshift drums in circles outside the Metro stations, playing their plastic buckets as if they were born to it. High or hoping to be as soon as the quarters acumulating in the guitarist's case measure up, hunched forward over the splayed body of a third.

A hurried glimpse of a startled face, round as the moon, just visible inside the kitchen, dusky cheeks drained pale, but smeared with blood, muttering the echoing beat of his instructions like a prayer. Like a decade of the rosary. Let them go, let them go.

Something slithering up behind her.

This is what Jake sees: a spleen, in the clawed hand of one of the kids, inert and glistening with fluid. The beat of fluorescent light behind the kids makes it pulse like a heart in the hand, or maybe it's the way the kid squeezes it, knuckling into a sort of bone-worming confusion as the authority in Jake's voice makes it stop and look up and back. There's something animal, or even vegetable in the cant of its head, nothing human remaining.

The eyes, the bridge of its nose are no more than a smooth expanse of new-grown skin, soft as a baby's ass. The mouth is double-hung, a deep-set and powerful underbite, the lower jaw dominated by two burgeoning tusks.

[b]Let them go[/b], says Jake.

And so the first one does. Dropping the spleen of its eviscerated victim with a sick, wet plop. Right at his feet, while the other one shrinks back into the shadows, snuffling tentatively at the air in front of him as if -

- as if - maybe the right of tribute belonged to him, after all.

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 7, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )

I was homeless for a while as a kid

That's what he said to Erich, who he has also met only once but who he spent considerably more time with. He doesn't know that the woman Erich talked about was Ingrid. He doesn't know that Ingrid is 'Ingrid'. He does hear his name, dimly, at the end of Erich's shouting. He does notice the woman, or someone, pausing by the alleyway.

He remembers hunger. And loneliness. And fear.

You learn what you need to.

Jake notices the interior of the kitchen but he sees the face of the 'kid' in front of him more immediately. One skitters off. Jake just stares. It isn't that he isn't reacting: his stomach is overturning, the need to retch is rising up, and that ice-cold whip-thin snake wrapped around his spine is making him want to shudder. He reacts. He just has other things on his mind that matter more at the moment.

With an exhale, and knowing that whoever is behind him will see but will have also seen the tusks and the lack-of-eyes and the cannibalism on this creature, Jake reaches into his interior pocket, takes out the .45, and goes to fire.

Jake -- ignores him. Or well; Jake is so focused on something else that he doesn't notice the large, enthusiastic Ahroun waving his arms at him. And Ingrid. Well, Ingrid looks at him, registers him, and gives him that sort of this way jerk of her head that might offend a more sensitive Garou. Set him to yelling about how he's not a lapdog, not her pet, she doesn't get to just jerk his chain and get him to follow.

Erich is not particularly sensitive. And frankly, he's not much of a leader either. He knows their roles. She's the sniffer, the scout, the finder-of-things-that-need-to-be-bashed. He's the muscle. He's the hammer. He's the basher-of-things-that-need-to-be-bashed. His head tilts; he knows that look she just gave him, the focus in her eyes, the tilt of her chin. He thinks briefly about getting the tire iron out of his car, but then

Ingrid usually finds trouble that a tire iron wouldn't put a dent in.

So he follows. And he takes his hands out of his pockets, folds his hood down after all. It's okay if he gets a little wet. At least he'll be able to see. He's several steps behind the others. When he moves, when he joins the fight in earnest, he will be the most savage beast in this zoo. But he won't be joining it for a handful of seconds yet, and seconds -- in situations like these -- are precious and few.

This is unfortunately not the first time Ingrid has seen a group of homeless acting outside the norm. Not so long ago, she was sent to find a lost Theurge and returned to Awakening with reports of something else instead. She agreed to help again if she's in the area, and a part of her hopes she won't be. She will, but that tale will come another night.

She enters the alley behind Jake, not going in fully but hanging back, just enough that she can snag Erich by the shoulder to keep him from wild exclamations as soon as he enters. The Ahroun's exuberance is usually good for distracting enemies. It's part of the appeal of hunting with him. But it doesn't work so well when he's bringing up the rear.

Oh, and with the pure bred kinsman in front of the pair of that is definitely a concern of Ingrid's, right at the top of the list.

Of course, once Ingrid has Erich, she holds him only so long as it takes for him to see what's in store before pushing him ahead of her. If she were in the mood to speak, to draw more attention to herself, she might say Ladies first.

She doesn't. With the men in the lead, she steps to the side. Jake fights the urge to retch, and sets her umbrella against the wall and begins to shift. Mucles shift, bones snap, and clothing tears. So, the usual for one of Ingrid's strolls through the city. At the rear of the group, she takes to her mottled dark Crinos form, trusting in the Delirium to keep gawkers and witnesses at bay. Tapping her chest with her huge handpaw, she withdraws a sword from her sternum.

[When?]

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (3, 4, 6, 6, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 6 ) [WP]

Thing 1 +5

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (3) ( success x 1 ) [WP]

Thing 2 +4

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (5) ( fail )

Thing 3 +7

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (2) ( fail )

[+7]

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (1) ( botch x 1 )

"Oh my god what is that sm--"

Midsentence, Erich sees what is in that alleyway and bursts into his direwolf form.

[+8!]

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (9) ( success x 1 )

[+9]

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (1) ( botch x 1 )

Charlotte +8!

Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (1) ( botch x 1 )

Erich: 17
Jake: 13
Ingrid: 10
Charlotte: should be 10! I forgot form modifier.
Thing 3 9
Thing 2 9
Thing 1 8

Thing 1: tackle Jake!

Thing 2: charge Ingrid!

Thing 3: Shout: reflexive: KILL IT to other two things

1. charge the crying bloodied girl in the kitchen

2. Bite her to bits!

Charlotte: uh, emerges from the gauntlet, bites thing 3.

[1a. Sidestep Thing 2 (dodge)
1b. Sword slice it from side/behind/whatever it would be then]

Jake raises the gun right at the thing in front of him. He's aware now: wolves, both of them. It doesn't matter if he recognizes them, heard the voice, knows them, trusts them. They are changing and coming at those things and the air is rippling nearby. For all he knows this is a pack and they've been hunting these creatures. Welp:

"Get the one in the kitchen!" he shouts, to whichever one of them is listening. The girl in there is alive. Out here there's only rot.

[3RB to Thing 1, should be within point blank range]

[-1R: poof! hispo.

1. barrel into kitchen!

R1. chomp thing 3.

R2. some more.

R3. one more time!]

[3RB to Thing 1. dex + firearms + 3 // diff 4 +1]

Dice: 10 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5, 7, 8, 8) ( success x 3 )

[damage: 5 + suxx -1]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 10) ( success x 4 )

Soak!

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (1, 9, 10) ( success x 1 )

inside the darkened kitchen: chaos as the gauntlet hazes and a silver-white direwolf pops into reality, shearing space and time, displacing a powerful gust of are. Claws scrabbling against pots and pans, smearing in the blood spattered on the tiled floor as she charges: the slithering interior shape lurching toward the crying girl.

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 5, 5, 6, 7, 7, 8) ( success x 5 )

Dmg

Dice: 10 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )

Thing 3 Soak!

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 5, 9, 10) ( success x 1 )

Thing 3: changing actions: Charge Charlotte!

Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (2, 4, 5, 5, 6, 7) ( success x 1 )

Damage

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 5 )

Soak!

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (5, 5, 6, 9) ( success x 2 )

Thing 2: charge Ingrid!

Dice: 5 d10 TN7 (5, 5, 6, 8, 10) ( success x 2 )

Damage!

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (3, 5, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 3 )

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 7, 9) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Thing 1: bite Jake!

-1 owies.

Dice: 4 d10 TN5 (1, 5, 5, 10) ( success x 2 )

Damage!

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (5, 6, 6, 8, 10) ( success x 4 )

[Shit! Soak!]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 5) ( botch x 1 )

[1b. Slice!: dex+melee -3, diff -1]

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 10) ( success x 4 ) Re-rolls: 2

[dam: 3+2+6][L]

Dice: 11 d10 TN5 (1, 1, 3, 4, 4, 4, 5, 5, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )

Thing 2: soak

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (5, 7, 10) ( success x 2 )

[CHOMP!]

Dice: 9 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 3 ) Re-rolls: 1

[dmg]

Dice: 11 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 4, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 4 )

Soak!

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 8, 9) ( success x 1 )

[CHOMP x2]

Dice: 9 d10 TN5 (1, 1, 1, 2, 3, 6, 6, 8, 9) ( success x 1 )

[dmg]

Dice: 9 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )

Soak

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (3, 6, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )

Thing 3: incap.

[I DON'T CARE IF YOU'RE INCAP, I'M TUNNELVISIONED DPS HERE.]

Dice: 9 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 10, 10, 10) ( success x 7 ) Re-rolls: 4

[dmg]

Dice: 15 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 2, 4, 4, 4, 5, 5, 6, 7, 9, 9, 10, 10, 10) ( success x 7 )

Thing 1: BITE JAKE MORE, HE IS TASTY.

Thing 2: WP roll

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 5, 7, 8) ( success x 2 )

Thing 2: I am feeling CONFIDENT. BITE INGRID.

Charlotte: Uh, split action. 1a. run toward jake/thing. 1b. shoulder in between them and take the blow in lieu of the still-homid person.

[1. Slice
R1. Slice
R2. Slice, all on Thing 2, moving to 1 if it goes down.]

Hard to tell if Storm's Teeth goes lunging into that bloodspattered kitchen because he's surging to the defense of the innocent, or if he's just responding to the only semblance of leadership there is in this brawl. Either way: he goes lunging into that bloodspattered kitchen. He barrels through the door, his shoulders shattering the jamb and cracking the wall. The soon-to-be-chewed girl is screaming, screaming.

There's a flash of white, something's in the Ahroun's way but he doesn't even slow. He closes: there's a flash of hot blood. Then his teeth doing what they do best, crashing shut once, breaking bone, glancing the next time, tearing skin open, the thing goes limp, he doesn't even notice. He tears into it again, all planted paws and bristling ruff, terrible gnashing jaws that rip and shake and rend and tear. They can hear him in there: the savage, joyful noise of his butchery.

[another 3RB, -2 for wtf ow, before someone gets in his way I won't say who but her hair is pink]

[That's to Thing 1 btw]

[1. Oh hey, it's dead. Move!

R1. BITE WHATEVER'S CLOSEST. PREFERABLY ONE OF THE THINGS.

R2. SECOND VERSE, SAME AS THE FIRST.

R3. HOW ABOUT ONE MORE.]

Can he honestly say he's had worse than tusk-like teeth digging into his side? He's certainly felt punctures and slashes, he's felt far too much blood all welling up at once and pouring out of him like this. He's felt the near-instantaneous lightheadedness from pain and from blood loss before. Figuring out if he's been chewed on before, bitten quite like this before, takes too much thought when there isn't much left in him but a sudden

and overpowering

and familiar

desire to destroy something.

[dex + firearms + 3 -2 (ow) // diff 4 +1]

Dice: 8 d10 TN5 (1, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 10, 10, 10) ( success x 7 ) Re-rolls: 4 [WP]

[damage: 5 + suxx -1]

Dice: 11 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 6, 7, 7, 7, 10, 10) ( success x 6 )

Soak!

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 5) ( botch x 1 )

Thing 1: x.x

[I have no words -_-: SLICIN' UP 2]

Dice: 9 d10 TN5 (1, 3, 4, 4, 6, 6, 6, 8, 9) ( success x 4 )

[dam: 3+2+6][L]

Dice: 11 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6, 6, 7, 8, 8) ( success x 5 )

Soak!

Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (1, 7, 9) ( success x 1 )

Thing 2: Bite Ingrid!

Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (2, 8, 9) ( success x 2 )

Damage

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (3, 6, 7, 7, 9) ( success x 4 )

[SOAK]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4, 4, 10) ( success x 1 )

What Charlotte sees is the wavering haze of the gauntlet, the sudden explosion of violence on the other side of the wormy (and wyrm-riddled) darkness, the gloss of blood on well-polished stainless steel. This kaleidescope whirl of sensation that merges with half-a-hundred memories of blood in the throat and beneath the paws. Most of them not her own. The singe of gunpowder as she churns through the kitchen, blood and slaver dripping from her jaw, barrelling through to intercept a blow that never falls because the creature falls in a sprawl like am empty marionette over the corpse of its victim / evening meal and she is still moving and there is one left and she remembers this (remembers this and remembers this) in an overwhelming echo that pushes through her senses, extrudes through the structures of her mind and there is one more and she is opening her jaws and -

Charlotte: changing action to bite Thing 2 @ +1 difficulty / -1 penalty

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 4, 4, 5, 10) ( fail )

[CHOMP! THIS IS FUN.]

Dice: 9 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 4, 5, 5, 6, 7, 7, 9) ( success x 5 )

[dmg]

Dice: 13 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 4, 4, 5, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 7 )

Thing 2: x.x

With identical savagery and speed, Storm's Teeth puts down a second -- and last -- creature. Not by himself, of course. His friends helped. He knows they did. But right now he's in a near-wolf form, his mind is near-wolf, he's feral and vicious and hair-triggered and happy, happy, he did good, yes he did.

It's a far cry from the first time he and Ingrid hunted together. That time he struck again and again, futilely, furiously, finally giving in to his overwhelming shame and frustration. He lost his grip on who he was, where he was, all of it; came out of it with no memory of the event, only a decimated corpse he'd nearly chewed all the way through. He was exhausted. Emptied out. He barely wanted to move.

Different, this time. This time he brings that second thing down -- it's not a clean kill, not some crisp snap of the neck but a great bloody sinking of teeth into the shoulder, a rip, bones and tendons coming loose from their moorings, a lung torn almost out of the chest cavity. Blood everywhere. But he's in control of himself. He has agency over the moment, the situation. He whips around, flings the mess against the wall, and then

he fairly dances a circle around Ingrid, bounding, his huge paws splattering pools of rainwater and blood and god knows what else onto the alley walls. When he comes to a standstill, blood drips slowly from the fur around his jaws, which loll open. His tongue drops out; he grins.

"That Jake. Kin. Jake-kin. You be take care of. Go." And he dips his head, bumps the flat of it against Ingrid, heavily, shoving her in the direction of the injured kinsman. Nevermind her own injuries: she's a grown-ass woman.

He shoots, he scores.

And the eyeless, tusked thing that used jaws soaked in someone else's blood to dig into Jake's own flesh thuds wetly to the asphalt. There's a flurry of activity around him and Jake steels himself, realigns his grip on his weapon, and starts to turn toward the last location of the next-nearest...thing.

Which is in pieces hanging from the maw of a black direwolf.

Jake looks over at the kitchen door and there's no monsters in there anymore -- none living, at least. Normally he would approach things, lay one last bullet in the skull of each, but he only has the two bullets left in this clip anyway and he's vaguely aware of the sensation of air moving over torn muscle, open wounds. He lets his right arm hang at his side, hand firm but thoughtless on the grip. He grabs his coat and hugs it tight to the wound, his left arm clamped down on it. He tries not to move too much, while he attempts to figure out just how bad it is. Hard to tell, right this moment. There's a lot of distractions.

He sighs, which sounds like a rattle. "Ah, fuck," he mutters, and decides to go ahead and move. He starts walking over to the kitchen door. At least the black wool overcoat mostly shields him. He does have blood splattered elsewhere -- god, his hands are a mess -- but at least he doesn't look like that bothers him.

Jake, all six-and-change of him, holding a black matte gun that is nearly as long as that woman's forearm, a gun still smoking from its last discharge, walks over to the terrified, wounded woman, and clenches his jaw. Lowers himself to one knee, so that he's very close. So that she can see the whites of his warm brown eyes. If he didn't smell like smoke and blood right now, he might smell like freshly baked bread and rain.

"Get up and run," he says, his voice as leaden and dull as the bullet casings on the ground. Everything he says after that falls just as heavy, just as flat. He never takes his eyes off of hers. "If you look back, I will shoot you in the head.

"If you scream, I will shoot you in your throat.

"If you breathe a word of this to anyone," he finishes, "I will find out. I'll kill them. And then I'll kill you."

There's a moment, and then a jerk of his head. "Get the fuck out of here."

[correction: grey, not black direwolf]

Outside, in the space of these three or four wretched heartbeats, he driving rain has changed to drifting snow. Great, fat flakes of it that drift like ash from a dying mountain, churning in lazy spirals toward the cold ground.

The radio is still humming, another warning. Snow accumulations, office closings, school cancellations. Church services and basketball games. The girl in the kitchen is still crying, crawling slowly through the gore left in the wake of the battle, head tucked down stiff with paralyzing fear, working and working and working to make herself small and small and smaller still.

Her fingers move in worrying, tactile motions. That rosary rhythm again, cycling through the sparking angles of her paralyzed subconcious.

Let them go. Let them go. Let them go.

The subvocal chant that underpinned Jake's first awareness of the gory scene.

--

The creature in the kitchen is so utterly eviscerated by Storm's Teeth's charge that it exists as nothing more than red pulp, bone fragments, a glistening stew of strewn, half-recognizeable viscera, with strange growths, membraces, carapaces shattered amidst the more usual and familiar organs of the human body.

The creatures in the alley, which were Smaller and Lesser and less destroyed are more human. Somehow, in death than they were in the last few minutes, hours, memories of their lives. Deflated, empty now. Like hollow suits of skin and bone, that were animated only by animus rather than viable physical structures. As if they had been shrugged on and worn out and ripped open and [b]abandoned[/b] all in the space of three lives and four deaths.

--

The girl stops her crawling, crawling, awkwardly crabbed movement backward when Jake comes close; human, that much she can tell, and she gives him a pained side-glance, the dark wetness of her gaze is stark with a rigid sort of terror, brittle as untempered iron. But she smiles, see - this aching edge of hope to it, as if he might scoop her up and pull her out of the swirling nightmare of the last few hours, days, nights, years, and back into the semblance of a world that is knitted together at the seems, where dark dreams do not come to terrifying, blood-red life. And he -

Get up and run.

- and she. She - there is a moment of heightened terror, the recursive shock that whips down her spine as he enumerates his threats, saring, his voice flat and heavy and absolutely assured. She just sits there, half-praying to a god she has not believed in since she was four years old and her father beat her mother to death in Tijuana at the side of the road.

Then, abruptly, she does move. Follows his instructions with a stiff awareness of the consequences of not following them. Gets up, a lurching, unsteady gait - and runs - back through the kitchen, head down and forward, scrabbling for the door handle and shaking with absolute fear, refusing, refusing, refusing to turn around.

Jake can hear her in the cafe proper, the clatter of the chairs as she runs into them. The crystal chime of the bell as she stumbles into the door, managed to undo the lock with shaking hands. Runs, keeps running.

And never looks back.

One of the creatures had the audacity to bite Ingrid in the side. Her lip curled in a snalr, but before she could lift her sword for one final strike, before she could even give voice to a growl, first an unfamiliar wolf, silvery grey white, rose up behind it, teeth snapping to no effect. Then beside that one a more familiar shape, snapping and snarling, and the thing goes down, dropping at Ingrid's feet like an offering.

She looks down to the corpse, then lifts her muzzle to face her friend, and her head tips to the side. If she were in her small puny homid form, Ingrid would give Erich one of her infamous sly, secretive smiles. It's the same for almost everyone, except it would maybe spark in her dark eyes a little more. In her other forms, of course, this isn't possible. Her golden eyes all but twinkle. Her tail swooshes back and forth. Her ears flick back briefly, then face forward. Before she can do anything, he's dancing all around her, knocking rain water and ice crystals and the first falls of flakes along with blood all over the place, splashing up to mingle with the blood that oozes down her own side.

When he finally comes to a stop in front of her, Ingrid tilts her head down at him. Reaching out with her free hand, she places that massive paw atop his head. No scritching, of course, no patting, no humanly ruffling of his fur. It just sits there atop his head until he ducks down, barking out the kin's name. In all this time, Ingrid hasn't spoken a word.

Erich urges her to go be help the kinman. Ingrid looks up, watching through the door as Jake-kin walks over to the terrifed girl who had very nearly been someone's dinner tonight. She is terrified at the horrors she's seen, but mostly, she's terrified of Ingrid. Standing there in Crinos, bloodied sword in hand. Ingrid cocks her head to the side at the girl. She can't much hear with the kinsman is saying, but she can guess. Her lip curls back in a snarl at the girl, emphasizing the threat of her. It's brief. Just as the kinsman has things to do, so does Ingrid.

Despite her friend's insistence, Ingrid takes her sword and swipes it once, twice, thrice over her fur. Fur can be cleaned. The metal could be rusted, a particularly horrifying fate considering the sword's sheath is Ingrid herself. While she works slowly, meticulously at cleaning her weapon, she looks over the newcomer. She lifts her chin once in casual greeting; they've fought together, have the aftermath and the clean up still to consider, the stranger, despite all of her intense breeding of kings, can wait.

As though he means very well to keep his promises to her, Jake watches the girl run until she's out of sight. It's just that he does so from his crouch. He waits til she's gone before he rises, and that's because he grabs a hold of the stainless steel counter to help himself up, clenching his jaw again on the groan that is trying to work itsef up out of him. It comes out like a grunt, and he feels quite dizzy indeed once he's on his feet, but

it's important that he's on his feet again.

Jake checks his weapon, then safeties it. He keeps the coat clamped against his side under his arm and looks over at the three wolves in their various shapes and varying degrees of sociopathy, though he doesn't exactly give himself a pass on the latter.

He remembers when a wound like this never lasted this long. She would never let it. She couldn't bear it.

It takes energy to do this, and not the sort of energy that is seeping out of him and soaking his coat. It's a whole other kind, deeper and more ingrained, just as hard -- harder -- to restore. Somehow easier to reach, when he digs his hand down in to pull it up. But all the same: Jake nods at the mouth of the alleyway and tells them: "Tarp's in the trunk. There's probably bleach and a few other things in the kitchen."

And with that, he pushes off the counter he's half leaning on, half clinging to, and starts to head out toward his car.

...not that Jake-kin seems to need much help.

As the kinsman goes to his grim business, Storm's Teeth pauses briefly to lift his head, turn it. The schism in the moment runs deep. He's so gleeful, so pleased with himself, so playful. He's also utterly monstrous. A huge, hulking creature ripped from some primitive nightmare. His teeth are several inches long. Ancient man might have wanted to use them for daggers, but woe to the foes who tried to hunt a beast like this. There's fresh blood on his jaws; blood on his chin and dripping down his throat. Even the swing of his head is brutish, a heavy gesture the riffles the thick fur on his neck, shifts the muscles in his shoulders. He sniffs in Jake's direction. His ears swivel, come upright, angle again.

He whuffs. He turns back to Ingrid. She's not smiling that sphinx's smile of hers, but that's all right. He knows she means it. She puts her hand on his head. He headbutts her again, right in the stomach, a heavy and affectionate gesture.

And then he's pushing forward, sliding past her and against her as he turns. Jake is coming back out of the kitchen. Storm's Teeth stands there, his tail wagging slow and low, forepaws planted apart. Tarp, Jake says. Bleach. The words ping dully on his animal mind. Tark? Bleek? His ears move again, and then his ice-pale eyes blink, move unhurriedly away. He inspects the third wolf in the alley. A small bitch, small and silvery-white. Silver Fang, yes, there's something familiar about her. He lolls his tongue at her, too.

In the alley, the Silver Fang (all the bearing, all that weight of expectation, all the centuries of heros half-remembered, the surety of kings in the height of her withers and the sweep of her bloodied muzzle and the lazy curl of her tongue as she laps away the blood) has gone from war-formed to girl-formed in something close to an eyeblink as Storm's Teeth approaches her. Lolls his tongue at her.

In a loose hoodie, her brother's oversized DARTMOUTH LACROSSE t-shirt, worn jeans and old, mismatched, doodled-on Converse sneakers, she looks maybe fifteen. Pale saucer eyes and a heart-shaped face, her hair layers of pink and platinum and dark, chopped in an asymmetrical and haphazard and mismatched fall. There's a strap cutting across her body, a canvas bag slung across her back that she readjusts to her hip. Fingers curling out from the ragged cuff of the dedicated jacket. (YALE CREW, it says on the back. She is probably related to Ezra Stiles or Jonathan Edwards, but if so she is a rather sorry little wide-eyed speciman.)

Blood of kings indeed.

She is stiff with a sort of sudden and simmering self-awareness, awkward and out-of-place. Not part of the familiarity the other Garou share, acutely conscious that she is not part of it.

A jerk of her head toward the kinsman. The gesture faint, her eyes remain on Storm's Teeth, and his compatriot. The Crinos. Ever so slightly downcast. Not a hint of challenge there.

"I could uhm. Heal him?" A darkling look toward Jake as he shoulders past them. "If you guys - " and back to the pair of Garou, strangers, " - wanted or whatever?"

"Who cares what they want?" Jake tosses over his shoulder, more offhand than annoyed.

By the time the girl takes off running, Ingrid is very nearly done with her work. By the time Jake pulls himself upright, she's sliding the blade home into her sternum, where it sinks into her fur and disappears. If she shifts they'll see it again, a dark tattoo that runs down her chest.

Jake makes his way outside, and Ingrid watches him a moment. Jake. Kin. Jake the baker, with a job and everything, ooooo. That was months ago and Ingrid had been less than interested in the affairs of a kin, even one of her own tribe. She watches him now, though, golden eyes narrowed on him, on the stiff movement. Blood scent fills Ingrid's lungs, hers, his, that of the creatures she had a small hand in killing.

The Silver Fang shifts suddenly, girl-shaped. Ingrid looks sharply at her, considering. She has a single Gaia's Breath, given to her by the Warder to aid in a hunt some time ago. In the end, it's just logic. She shakes her head once in Crinos, then snaps suddenly to her birth form. She is of average height, smeared with blood, her dark hair wild and loose over her shoulders. It's fairly obvious that she's wearing her coat and nothing else, her legs bare, what skin they can see of her chest also bare. This she doesn't mind. The lack of shoes she minds a little. The ground is cold and wet.

She winces, more aware of her own injury in this form. But that will heal, given time and rest, which she will have aplenty when they've finished. It's no concern of hers if he scars, but he does have a business to run, even if it is in Browntown.

Her eyes narrow slightly at the kinsman's back as he tosses that little bit over his shoulder, but she shrugs an elegant shoulder. "We take care of our own."

And with that she pads silently after the man, fishing the talen from her pocket. "Wait," she snaps from behind him.

And in an eyeblink the great hulking beast is a man again. Man-like, anyway. It's Erich! -- a very bloodstained, madcap Erich, red all over the bottom half of his face, red soaking through that beloved hoodie of his. Which is not the same hoodie he lost that night with Ingrid at the club. He just likes hoodies. This one's thicker: lined with faux shearling, fit for winter on the Potomac.

"Silver Fangs are supposed to give orders, not ask instructions," he says, teasing, a twinkle in his eye. And then to Jake: "Jeez, aren't you nice when you're hurt."

Poof! Ingrid's the next to shift. They make a rather handsome pair, Erich and Ingrid. Like mismatched but complementary twins. Neither of them are the picture of a Lord of Thunder. He's so big, so fair, so blue-eyed, so blond. She's -- well; in truth, racism aside, she actually is the picture of a Shadow Lord Ragabash. She's sleek and sly and abrupt, impatient; she talks like she expects to get what she wants.

And there she goes: talking like she expects to get what she wants. They only stand next to each other, juxtaposed and contrasted, for a moment. Erich turns as she stalks off; calls after her: "Just ask him if he wants to get healed, or you two are just gonna argue."

He turns back to Charlotte.

"Want a ride back to your place?"

It's in him to just keep walking. To tighten his shoulders and spit that he didn't ask them a damn thing, he doesn't need their charity, what do they think he is, weak? It's in him to keep walking just so he's not heeling as soon as he's called. But the truth of the matter is, it has been a very long time since Jake was fourteen years old, defensive to the point of savage, spitting in the face of anyone who dared look at him.

Ingrid snaps at him, and Jake goes ahead and turns around, eyebrows lifted in question.

Woman from the club wearing nothing but a coat. He wishes for a moment he'd just kept walking. And there's Erich, who is bloody and delighted and teasing the girl and teasing Jake and advising Ingrid on how to deal with Jake and Jake just takes his eyes off the guy, looking back at Ingrid,

because she's the one holding the gourd. Jake seems to know what's coming, and instead of saying anything, he just unclamps his arm, opens his coat, and shows her the wound. It's not as bad as the bite a Garou's jaws would leave, because of the pure, rage-fueled strength there. It's bad, though. Those tusks were long enough to dig in, slash him open like daggers. His eyes close a moment when he peels the coat back, then open. His pupils are, despite the darkness, constricted. At least his breathing isn't labored, shallow, uneven. Just controlled.

A sharp breath outward, the lilting cut of her gaze catches the ambient light, pale as the drifting snow swirling down around them. The edge of the look like the glint of blade, just glimpsed in the darkness, is briefly matched by the curl of her mouth. At the corner.

"Or if you - " the question is embedded, embroidered into the tone, but is never finished. Ingrid takes care of her own, so says she, and Charlotte just kind of shrugs, this narrow little gesture, ceding all to the strange Shadow Lord and the strange Shadow Lord kin. They are the Second and Third Shadows Lords she has ever met in her entire life, and seem much more properly Shadow-like than Erich Storm's Teeth.

All madcap and bloodstained and offering her a ride back to her place. Her eyes snap back to him as he shifts, pops back into human existence. She does not really respond to his needling about Silver Fangs and instructions, not with strangers about, but she does curl a little shrug at him when he offers her a ride home.

"Sure, okay." With a little grin at the end, "It's somewhere across the river I think?"

"We should help clean up, though," with a wary glance back at Ingrid, who is Scary and Naked. And Jake, all looming and gritty. " - don't you think?" Now rocking up to her toes, and back down to her heels. "Maybe I could get a water elemental to come help cleanse the residual - " and she just shivers, smelling it all over again, the inky blackness of it, the throat-sucking darkness. " - uhm, stuff."

"Ahrouns don't clean up," is Erich's oh-so-enlightened opinion. He doesn't seem to care about all the residual -- ... -- the residue. He's quite cavalier about it, really. "They make the mess."

Asshole comment or not, he does stick around. He kind of picks up a few pieces and tries to pile them together. If given proper direction, he's rather good at chopping things to manageable bits. Tearing them up. Breaking them down. But all things considered: he's pretty bad at cleanup.

Behind her, Erich tells her to ask first or they'll argue. They can only argue if they speak to each other. Which they might, eventually.

She snaps at Jake to wait, not sure if he will or not. If he doesn't, she'll catch him at the car. If he does -- well, what do you know, he does stop. Up close the familiarity finally locks in, and she remembers where she saw him. Her brow quirks as she looks up at him, looming and annoyed.

The last time Ingrid used a healing gourd in a kinsman, she had been less than civil about it. He had, after all, just shot her in the face, and she had taught him that that sort of behavior was Not Okay. He'd blacked out from pain before she'd even gotten the dust sprinkled over him.

She's not so rough with this one, though that doesn't mean she's gentle, not by a long shot. Jake unclamps his arm and exposes his side to Ingrid, who takes a moment to examine it, the blood seeping dark and wet through his clothes. She cracks the gourd a little in her hand, reaches forward, the dust sprinkling through her fingers, and rests it against his side, infusing it with a touch of her spiritual essence. It probably would have been better to accept the Silver Fang's offer of healing.

She watches Jake's face, her head tilted curiously as she waits for the telltale signs of ceased pain to relax his pupils and ease some of the tension in his face. When it happens, she removes her hand and stares at it, at the blood that's seeped onto her palm, before wiping it casually on her rather expensive coat.

"You were getting the tarp?" she asks, actually asks.

"Lauren did." Is Charlotte's counter argument to Erich's statement about Ahroun-ly duties. It will ever be her counter argument to any statement about Ahroun-ly duties, though it is not entirely sincerely. Usually, for such things, there were People One Called. Here, she does not have any such numbers and is not precisely clear on the next steps. But more than the corpses and bodies, what she does is poke through the contents of the kitchen, and pull out all the meat in the icebox and walk-in freezer, pile these up into the tarp with whatever dismembered body parts they eventually assemble.

When THAT is finished, she insists either that they wait for her to try summoning something that might cleanse the blight, or that they go someplace for a proper right of cleansing on all this stuff before it is ultimately disposed of.

Just for laffs: ancestors

Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (1, 6) ( success x 1 ) [WP]

Rite o' summoning:

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Gnosis!

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (3, 4, 5, 8, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 5 )

Ahrouns, Erich says, do not clean up.

Jake, it appears, does not pass out from pain or blood loss or otherwise. Whether that's because he's a Shadow Lord kinsman or a baker or just himself, he doesn't slump to the ground or swoon. And Ingrid, for whatever reason, doesn't just slap the gourd on his side and call it a day. She crushes it, holds it, and presses it to his side. He is cold and hot in the snow, soaked through to the skin, but for a moment there is a flare of heat at his side, spreading through his torso.

He can't help but sigh. His chest moves with it, and his abdomen against her palm. "Jesus," he mutters, like he's rolling onto his back in bed and staring at the ceiling and not standing in a bloodied alleyway. He closes his eyes, and opens them again, looking down at the newly reformed skin. It happens so quickly. It's like it never was, except

there's a scar there. Right above her hand. It was hard to see with the flesh torn apart, but the gourd doesn't heal it: it was there long before tonight's wound, and it will be there til the day he dies. Just a discolored shadow: not clean, not surgical, no signs of stitching. Nor was it ever a puncture. It was a slash and burn, the mottled look that really only comes from one kind of injury. No telling if Ingrid recognizes it. It's pale, though, flattened out against his side a bit. Kinfolk do heal easier than human beings, though not with the perfect regeneration of Garou. It was probably worse than it looks now.

It also could have killed him. Just a couple of inches over. Whoever shot him barely missed his heart.

Jake lets the tatters of his shirt fall, and she asks about the tarp. He nods. "Body parts go in my trunk," he says, the 'if' statement followed by 'then': "body parts go in a tarp."

And so they do. Piled in pieces. Jake helps, considerably strong now he's healed, and tireless about it. With the four of them, it's short work, even if Erich lacks Jake's... efficiency in this area. Charlotte adds all the meat in the freezer, which Jake doesn't argue with. His BMW is going to be heavy after this. Charlotte insists they wait, just as Jake is about to ask Ingrid if she needs a ride somewhere.

So Jake waits.

So they wait: body parts and frozen meat in the middle of the tarp in the middle of the alley that is slowly filling with snow. Swirling in melting arches from a leaden sky, orange-gray. The city falling silent and filling up; the radio playing in the background still, the quiet drumbeat of its urgent and insistent rhythms.

The ritual seems like nothing to the kinsman; less than nothing. They are in the city; they cannot howl their lungs out to luna to frighten away with wyrm without breaking the spirit and fact of the litany fifteen times over; and so it is this: Charlotte cross-legged, seated in the muck, snow melting from her body heat, snowflakes curling on her cheeks like paper caught by a lick of flame, pushing through the gauntlet. A handful of offers from her bag, at the corners of the tarp. The sense of something opening and closing; of something taken in hand and performed sotto voce. The push push push of appeal. The Garou can sense the ritual; the truth beneath its full shape, ages-old but folded back into itself under the circumstances. The dynamic connection it facilitates between that world and this. Then the alien sense of communication with an entirely Other entity on the other side.

And, in the crisp, cold air, the ice crystals dancing in their hair and eyelashes, the hauntingly sudden wash of something warm and cool and sweet and clear. A taste left behind in the back of the throat, behind the eyelids, down the spine: nothing more than fresh and clean, the taste of a spring rain lingering in the air in the midst of a winter's storm.

There is an inch of snow on the ground by the time they finish. It is falling fast enough that their tracks are filling up again once they've made them. Charlotte and Erich help Ingrid and Jake wrangle the tarp-o-cleansed taint into the back of Jake's BMW. The girl is probably the weak link in these muscled jobs, but she shoulders and tugs and pants away at it, blood be damned. And in the end she takes the Ahroun up on his offer of a rid home, leaving Ingrid and Jake and a trunk full of body parts in the middle of the winter's night.

She watches the lok that passes over Jake's face, seeing it, knowing it, though she doesn't really understand it. People are all such strange creatures to her. People being kinfolk, of course. Aside from Garou they're the only ones that matter, the only ones that are worth bothering with. The corner of her mouth quirks slightly at his statement, but she says nothing more. And she doesn't stay in this form, either, but shifts up just a little, just enough that her skin toughens against the cold and her metabolism spikes, her body going to work to heal the bite in her own side as quickly as it possibly can. If she stays like this, in a few days her body will be perfectly unmarred once more.

Well. Almost perfect. The Ragabash is not without her scars.

They do the clean up, Ingrid directing the other two Garou when it seems like they need direction, and only then. She's, perhaps surprisingly, good at this work that Garou usually have someone like Jake do for them.

At some point Ingrid makes her introduction with the Silver Fang girl, human and deed and rank and all the rest sounding so formal even from her more gutteral Glabro throat while they load pieces onto the tarp. When they've finished, Charlotte tells them to wait, so she waits with the others for the cleansing to be completed. The air lightens, freshens around them. Closing her eyes, Ingrid breathes deep the scent she can almost taste.

When it's over, Ingrid offers further assistance only if it seems necessary to the kinsman.

Jake Novak

When it's over, Erich taking Charlotte in the Mustang, Jake glance at Ingrid. Gives a nod. He hasn't asked them where they're going to put the body parts, or what they expect him to do. He hasn't explained it, either. He's just closing the trunk, wiping his hands with a towel, looking at the Ragabash who has a name in his head now. "Want a ride someplace?"

Ingrid Kim

For Ingrid, she doesn't ask because she doesn't feel the need. Jake seems more than capable in the area of disposal. Details are hardly necessary.

He asks if she wants a ride, and she shakes her head once, no. She could say more, could explain something, maybe offer a word of thanks.

Instead, she turns on her heel and moves carefully through the snow. In a matter of minutes her tracks disappear beneath fresh snowfall, and she disappears as though she was never there.