Ornature

DING DONG, says Charlotte's doorbell. And it's Erich, standing on her porch with his hands in the pockets of his jeans, looking eager or expectant or bored, depending on how long it takes her to answer.

Charlotte @ 9:53PM

Charlotte's door bell definitely does not go ding dong. Perhaps it plays Fur Elise, but more likely it chimes, deep and resonant like the carillon tucked away in the belltower of the chapel at Georgetown University.

An efficient thirty-some seconds later the front door swings open, a prim, fifty-something woman rescued from the dumpiness of a spinster governess only by the (rather faint, but still present) blaze of her blood is standing there, peering up at Erich over the crown of her feather duster.

This is Mrs. H, and she looks rather harried, a few strands of gray-streaked brown hair have come loose from the tight bun that crowns her head, and a streak of some sort of dirt stains her frilly white half-apron. Which looks like it was stolen from one of those sexy French maid costumes sold by the thousand at Halloween.

They exchange particulars and Mrs. H eventually directs Erich to the back garden, where Erich will find Charlotte clambering ("like a little monkey!" said Mrs. H, actually out loud and is the hearing of a Garou before she realized it, looked horrified, and clamped a rather rough and reddened hand over her mouth, apologizing profusely) down from the upper branches of the big old oak that dominates the yard.

She's just ten feet or so up by the time he is in reasonable conversation range, lowering herself carefully from the lowest of the substantial branches.

"Erich!" From a bit above him; she carefully extracts her right arm to give him a little wave, then reasserts her grip, readying herself to jump the last dozen or so feet to the ground. A little bit shy, the flicker of her pale eyes over his face. The pleased curl to her mouth. "Hi!"

Erich @ 10:10PM

Mrs. H probably has no idea that she's now ruined sexy French maid costumes for Erich forever. Then again, Celia would have probably disabused Erich of that particular fondness sooner or later, anyway. Drowned it in a tirade of feminist rhetoric: how degrading to women it is, how it draws the parallel between an alluring woman and a servant; between desirable and subservient. See, he's already thinking along those lines. She's in his head!

Regardless: he follows Mrs. H out back after the prerequisite pleasantries: hello, how are you, I'm Charlotte's friend, can she come out and play? Or something like that, anyway. She's climbing the tree like a little monkey, Mrs. H says, and then is promptly mortified. Erich laughs, though: white teeth aflash, genuinely mirthful.

"She does like climbing stuff." And, aw. Rather like a lonely girl with few friends, Charlotte looks so pleased to have a visitor. "Hi," Erich says back, craning his neck to look up at her. "If you don't wanna come down, I can climb up."

And so he does: jumping to grab the branch, drawing his knees up and wrapping his legs around in a quick smooth snap. He twists his way upright, then onto his feet -- and runs along the branch, light on his feet, balanced as a cat. Sits straddling the thick branch not too far away.

"I might have to leave town soon," he says. No hello-how-are-you, nothing like that at all. Just: this. "You should come with me. Get away from all this ... " he waves a hand at her house, the big tree, all of it. "All this privilege. It's awesome, and I wouldn't blame you at all for wanting to come back to it eventually, but you should get away from it for a while."

Charlotte @ 10:39PM

So Erich climbs up, with all that swinging, physical ease that is his birthright. Fucking runs along one branch until he finds another, huge and rough and older than the house or the streets around it or this swampy city at the heart of the nation, or the nation itself, or any other benchmark the Europeans might use to measure their presence on the continent. Older still.

While Erich climbs, Charlotte belays her descent and scoot-scoots back until she is situated with her spine against the massive central trunk, her head tipped fondly against the back, as if she and the oak were old, old friends. Fine strands of her pink hair are caught in the rough bark, pulled up to frame her pale face like a shock of static electricity.

She listens to him quietly, turning with a pursed mouth to peer over at the house, glimpsed easily through the still-bare branches of the old. A half-dozen chimneys visible from their location, the dull gleam of the myriad 19th century windows reflecting the cold gray light of a cold spring day.

Maybe he's ready with explanations and argument, or braced for the sort of wounded-bird look that always seems to haunt the edges of her countenance. But she doesn't object, or demand explanation, or ask him why.

The girl - Falcon's girl - just flattens her pursed lips. He has to leave town.

"I know," the girl returns, some hint of her native shyness tattooed into what is otherwise a direct look. "Melantha told me." Her pale gaze steady on him, reflective, the color of the swimming gray sky in the diffuse afternoon light. The girl continues, so solemnly, "I was probably going to make you take me even if you hadn't asked."

Which is a lie that even he can read without a second thought, though there's truth embedded in it. She knew that he would have to leave, soon. And she wants to go with him. And she's pleased that he wants her to go, too.

"Hey - I made you something," she continues, apropos of seemingly nothing, it seems at the moment, digging into her front pocket to pull the something out, bracing herself with her left hand against her own limb as she leans to hand/toss it to him with her right.

It weighs nothing: just a small clay bead in the shape of a bird, smaller than a quarter. Not finely carved, but shaped by hand into the symbol of the thing rather than its likely, strung through on a small bit of braided leather cord tied with sliding knots so it can be worn a the throat or the wrist.

Charlotte @ 10:41PM

Bead 1

Roll: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9) ( success x 3 ) VALID

Charlotte @ 10:42PM

Bead 2

Roll: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 3 ) VALID

Charlotte @ 10:42PM

Bead 3

Roll: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 6, 9) ( success x 1 ) VALID

Erich @ 10:56PM

Erich was, in fact, geared up for a bit of a struggle. Not really a fight. Charlotte never seems to quite have the gumption for a flat-out fight, which is of course part of why he wants her to get away from this privileged, sheltered house. And away from her brother, who loves her and worries about her and is a good brother and is not at all the sort of squicky monster other tribes sometimes think of when they think of Silver Fangs -- but is nonetheless, in Erich's opinion, perhaps not the best thing for her at the moment. And he was prepared to say that, just that, flat-out, if he had to.

But he doesn't. Charlotte gives him one of those oddly grave looks, and she says she knows. As though maybe she divined it from the winds -- but no. Celia told her.

Melantha told her.

Erich immediately flushes. The reason is not so immediately clear: but he's only heard the name a few times, spoken it a few times, and each time was intimate, close, private, a thing that is inextricably linked to his memories of that strange, poignant, passionate trip into the wilderness. To hear it coming out of Charlotte's mouth startles him, even shocks him a little.

"Oh," he says, his eyes dropping for a moment. He picks bark off the oak and flicks it aside. Recovering, "Oh, well, good. I'm glad I don't have to drag you kicking and screaming. She told you her real name too, huh?"

She gives him a gift. It is a small clay bead that looks like a bird. It's attached to a thin leather thong. It looks like the sort of thing you see sold on the sidewalks outside large liberal universities: costume jewelry and henna kits and the like laid out in glittering long rows on a backdrop of some colorful woven cloth. Erich looks at it for a moment, puzzled, and then ducks his head to slip it around his neck.

"Thanks," he says, pulling the sliding knots until the bead rests comfortably over his manubrium. He grins. "Are you claiming me in the name of Falcon?"

Charlotte @ 11:21PM

Erich flushes.

And oh god, Charlotte flushes scarlet (they are both pale-skinned creatures. He has his northern blood, and she was born to the castle, and blood flushes easily to the skin) in some strange, sympathetic, autonomic response. If she knew why he was flushing the awkward moment would be all the more awkward, strange and dissolvingly unpleasant.

So, he flushes; and she flushes, and drops her eyes from him, and even from his branch, down to the ground fifteen feet or more below them. Spring has pushed onward. There are daffodils in bloom. Yellow mini daffodils in a profuse array around the knotted roots of the old oak, cheerfully swaying in the wind kicking up from the northwest, and stately white ones in the shadow of the garden wall.

The leaves of the tulips are green and stuff, all sensual curves, but the buds are still furled tight against the cold. The crocus have come and gone, but the grass is greening, and the moss is the color of emeralds again rather than dry and dead and gray, and tiny white anemones dot the yard.

Erich asks Charlotte if Celia - Melantha told Charlotte her real name too. And receives by way of answer one of Charlotte's patented little nod-nods. She doesn't quite dare to look up at him as the color drains from her cheeks, at least not until he asks her if she's claming him for falcon.

The flash of a pleased smile as she darts a glance back up at him, girlish humor as she shakes her head. Very: no, silly. Then her eyes linger there, on Erich's, blue against blue.

"I - I made her one too. They homing pigeon spirits bound to them. So uhm. When it's okay for you to go looking for her, she'll break hers and the spirit will come find you. And when it finds you, you'll break yours and your spirit will lead you back to her.

"Which is why I have to go with you. 'Cause you don't speak pigeon."

Charlotte offers him a faint shrug, her pale gaze falling back to her hands braced on the back.

"I don't speak pigeon either, but I speak spirit. So."

Then her expression stills, just comes to a halt half-way into the curve of a bashful little grin.

"You do want me to come, right?" Which fades, slowly, dissolving into that half-haunted, uncertain, startled-animal look that fixes itself in her eyes and on her countenace both too often and too easily. "It's not just that you think I should, right?"

Erich @ 11:50PM

Erich gets this look on his face. This sort of dawning understanding, which rapidly flushes into this -- gratitude, this poignancy, this smile that spreads slow and aching across his face. He clasps the little bead in his big palm, holds it gently but tightly as he would a living thing. A living, fragile bird, all hollow bones and ruffle-able feathers.

"Charlotte," he says, quiet because he doesn't trust his voice to hold up if he speaks any louder than this, "this is probably the nicest thing anyone's ever done for me. Thank you."

He wants to hug her. He's straddling a tree branch, though, and she's sitting with her back to the trunk. It'd be all awkward, and not even his flawless balance would keep it from being weird and all elbows and knees and, and --

he doesn't hug her. He smiles at her. He wills Mrs. H to stop cutting onions in the kitchen, dammit, because that's the only explanation for his suddenly stinging eyes. But he's saved! Charlotte skips subjects like a stone on a pond. Pigeons, spirits ... he does want her to come, right?

And Erich looks startled again. Just for a second. Then he laughs.

"I think you should get away from all this privilege for a while," he says. "I want you to come with me. We'll just drive around for a while, until Melantha lets us know where she is. We'll bring a tent or something for you. 'Cause I don't think we'll fit into the back of my car, especially with your stuff on board. Unless you think you might get cold? You can sleep in the car then. I'll sleep in the tent."

Charlotte is sure (sure) that someone has done something nicer for him before, but she beams nevertheless, either deigning not to notice (or truly: not noticing) the suspicious gleam in Erich's eyes. She clicks her heels together, pleased, never quite coming unbalanced from the motion and hums her pleasure in the back of her throat.

"You're welcome."

--

She shoots him a shrewd look, her head just canted, her eyes gleam, when he tells her that she should get away from all this privilege. She likes the privilege. The house and sky and the big warm bed, and the light in the kitchen and the food that appears sometimes totally replenished in the fridge and the fact that she does not have to wash anything, ever. But feels it suffocating her, sometimes. Just a weight pulled onto her chest, and wants to know if that's what he means or if it's something else, or something other than that, but doesn't quite have the words or the self-awareness to ask.

There is still the spark of his laughter when he assures her that he wants her to come, and she nods, the back of her head scritching against the oakbark. Reassured, her little nods punctuate.

They'll drive around. They'll bring a tent (or something) unless she thinks she might get cold?

"I have fur," she murmurs back to him, solemn and reassuring, in response. "I won't get cold." Though he's right: she's likely to, sometimes. Maybe more often than sometimes.

"I'll bring my spine." Maybe he thinks she means it metaphorically. Though a beat later, he may remember the sight of her spine, the strange articulations of some monstrous beast stripped of flesh to the bone, sitting on the floor of her bedroom atop a glittering party dress when he demanded to see her room, and assure himself that he was not putting her out. "But not the hornet's nest."

Later, he will talk her out of that, too. Remind her about police and potentialities, the letter of the litany.

"We could stay at hotels sometimes, too. I like sleeping in a bed."

"Not the hornet's nest," Erich agrees. "Maybe not the spine either. At least not on the roadtrip. You can leave it boxed up and have someone mail it to you when we get where we're going. Or maybe drive it out to you themselves. It'd be safer like that. Don't they x-ray packages these days? That won't go over well."

He wants her to get away from privilege for a while. That doesn't mean he's going to make her pretend she isn't privileged, though, or take advantage of it when necessary. And so:

"Well, maybe once in a while. But roughing it is fun. You'll see." He smiles at her. "It builds character."

A small hesitation. Then: "You should tell your brother before we go. I mean, not that you need his permission? But you should tell him, and say anything important to him that you have to say. Because ... well, I know you'll plan to visit him for Memorial Day or July 4th or whatever, and maybe you guys will go home for Labor Day, but -- I don't have to tell you it's dangerous out there. Especially when you're just wandering. Just in case, just on the off chance that something happens before you see him again, you should make it a goodbye that leaves no regrets."

Just as Erich thought, Charlotte never seems to have much fight in her. The spine is sometimes her favorite thing in her room. Sometimes she likes the medallion on the ceiling, other times something else - a handful of gravel from the roadside, the husk of some seedpod plucked from the edge of the C&O Canal, the shell of a snail, coiling in on itself, pried out of the asphalt of the service driveway of a mid-level office building in Alexandria. The sort of things that only an eleven year old boy, or perhaps a theurge, could love with all the thoroughness and distractibility that comes from being one or the other.

She likes its pliability, the way it moves like a snake when she holds it from the topmost of the cervical vertebrae. The sacral end swinging laterally like a swishing tail.

Maybe not the spine, counsels Erich, and Charlotte inserts, "It's really neat though, it moves like this," undulating her arm to show him the sidewinder movement. Then she's quiet, though, listening, her profile sharp against the gray light of the spring afternoon.

"Oh. Okay. I guess it shouldn't be in your car in case police come." And she slides a glance back to him, all pale eyes and half-smile, remembering, suddenly, the first thing Erich ever said to her.

"I already have lots of character," Charlotte assures him next, with a needling and doubtful wrinkle as he promises that roughing it will build her more. "I don't know how to drive, though." Or cook. Or wash her own clothes. Or earn money of any sort. Or scrub the blood off her skin in a frigid highland stream so that she's presentable enough to buy one of those hot showers at a truck stop. Or buy a hot shower in a truck stop for five dollars, because it has been a lean few days and she's beginning to smell.

She's still looking at him as he continues on. Counsels her about saying the things she needs to say because he doesn't have to tell her that the world is dangerous. And Erich, she thinks, knows about the importance of saying goodbyes that leave no regrets if you can. Her eyes are suddenly shining. Charlotte sniffs abruptly and looks down at the ground again. There are not so high that the view is dizzying so much as it is reassuring, life returning to the cold dark ground.

She is thinking of so much in that spare moment that she couldn't ever say which part of it closed her throat, but she sniffs again to clear it and rubs the back of her knuckles against the rough bark, her pale brows beetled together.

"When you - when you left home - were you scared?"

Her voice is thin, not fully voiced. The tightness is not just from the emotion thickening her vocal cords, but from the - sudden surge of rage that flares through her veins when she thinks of him, nameless and Nameless and cast out and alone. Whatever she is, whereever she came from, they never cast her out. Even her exile (of sorts) is chosen, is self-imposed.

"Or were you just mad?"

Startlement flicks Erich's eyes to Charlotte. It's so obvious to the girl where the connection is, what subconscious history drove him to tell her to make sure she left no regrets with her brother -- but Erich, himself, hadn't been thinking of that at all. The question seems out of the blue. His brow furrows a moment later, and he frowns at the branch beneath him.

"I was scared," he admits quietly. "I was only sixteen, and after Fenrir boot camp you're pretty damn aware of your limits and shortcomings. I knew damn well there were things bigger and badder than me out there, and if they found me I wouldn't stand a chance. So the first few months, hell the first few years, I was just trying to lie low, don't stir up trouble I couldn't put back down.

"Plus," he hesitates a beat, "ever since I First Changed my rage was real close to me. The Fenrir would've called me a berserker. But sometimes, especially when I was young, I didn't really have much control over when I'd go into a fury. And then I'd black out and ... well, every time so far I've woken up in a pile of dead wyrmlings, totally exhausted. Just drained, to the point where I'd have to crawl into a hole somewhere and sleep it off. But it's scary to leave yourself behind like that not knowing if you'd ever wake up again. Especially when you're alone with no one to watch your back, you know?"

He scuffs his knuckles over the bark. Then he looks at Charlotte.

"But I was mad too. Don't get me wrong. I'm still mad, if I think about it too much. And I'm sad. Those people were the only family I ever knew. And growing up, I thought I was always being taught that family was everything. Turns out they were teaching me tribe was everything. I guess they must've been pretty disappointed in me, too."

There are a few spare, dry leaves in the upper branches of the huge old oak that rattle like dry husks when the wind rises again. The afternoon is still cold and gray, but the forecast promises something like spring tomorrow, or the day after that. Sunwarmed streets and cold, damp ground. The baking heat of solar radiation.

Charlotte's eyes are huge and round, her attention flashing up to Erich as he begins speaking. He was only sixteen. Charlotte draws in a breath and holds it in her mouth, in her throat, behind her teeth because the story he tells her makes her mad and scared all at once, it takes like hot metal in her mouth, the combination, which curdles into something sour at the back of her throat. Mad and scared for him, even though he's survived it all. The rage and the blackouts, the crawling feeling of coming back into your body. If he had died then, who would have known?

She wonders if there's another Erich out there, right now. Crawling into a hole, ragged and drained. She wonders if something's following him, not-quite-dead-yet, and then her eyes sting and she makes herself stop wondering all at once, arrests the impulse before it unravels itself altogether in her small heart.

Her mouth twists into one of her spare smiles. On someone older it might seem wry, but this afternoon it seems - sweet. Bitter and sweet, precisely at the border of the two. Compassion deep and old lanced through anger and sorrow.

"I'm scared for you and you already survived all that." Charlotte returns, in her quiet voice, low and confessional. "I never would have made it if they'd kicked me out."

Which is nothing more than the truth. The helplessness of privilige, rather common to the upper classes of the 19th century, which is rather how she's lived the whole of her life, feted and instructed in pointless and archaic arts, everything, but everything done for her.

"I get mad or - " a beat, her mouth pulling tight across her teeth, " - sick about some things if I think about them too much, too." A moment later, a faint little frown line appears between her brows. "You were sixteen then, how old are you now?"

"Sick?" Erich sounds incredulous, laughter surprised back into his tone. He's on the verge of making some joke, asking if she was some sort of neurotic ballerina or something, but --

-- he doesn't. He reins it in, just in time, and manages to see that she's never shown him anything but generosity and kindness, and therefore deserves the same from him. Not that he would have meant a joke in a bad way. Yet there's something quite fragile about Charlotte, sheltered, and Erich has the intuition to realize that that's a state she'll only come out of slowly, if at all.

So he doesn't laugh. The laughter simmers in his tone and his eyes, and then he just smiles, warm. He answers promptly: "I'm turning twenty-three in a few days. April tenth. What about you?"

There is a hint of stiffness to her - shoulders, to her spine, curved sharply against the trunk of the tree - when Erich says, sick, like that, the laughter simmering in his tone without finding voice. She wants to say: in her head, sometimes everything gets so crowded that it feels like she's being extruded through her eyes and nose and mouth. She wants to say, Melantha says it's not crazy to feel the way you feel because something made you feel it, but she is not entirely sure she believes it, and anywhere - there is Erich's smile, warm, the laughter, swallowed into his body and shining behind his eyes.

The stiffness eases with a long, exhaled breath that is attended by one of Charlotte's one-armed shrugs. "I'm 19, I guess. If not now, then next month? Philip was - she wasn't at home when she had me and she didn't write down when it was. Or know properly? But I'm pretty sure I'm 19 now."

Charlotte's gaze drops, and her mouth twists into a thoughtful little frown. "That's a really long time to be by yourself," Quietly, continuing, "I'm glad you made it, though. Because if you hadn't I wouldn't've met you and that would make me sad."

Her gaze goes far-off, unfocused through the bare branches, cutting away from him and rising toward the mid-point of the gray afternoon sky.

"Is Melantha the first girl you ever - " she pauses here again, another frown of contemplation as she searches for the proper words to say exactly what she thinks. She eventually finishes the thought with, " - wanted to follow across the country?"

The first girl you ever puts this look on Erich, like someone's put a small frog into his iced tea and it just got stuck in his throat. But no, she's not asking him what he thinks she might be asking him; she finishes the thought quite innocently, really, but by then Erich's lean cheeks -- too fair by half to hide such a thing -- are flushed again.

"Yeah." His answer comes readily; he hardly needs to think about it. "I haven't really known a lot of girls. I mean really gotten to know them. I move around a lot. Don't really stay in one place more than a few weeks, maybe a few months. This has been one of my longer stays, here in DC. 'Cause I met some good people, I guess.

"There was a girl out in Browntown," he adds after a moment, quieter. "I liked her a lot. We were good friends. And then we were friends with benefits. But I think maybe that was just because she was just lonely, 'cause she used to have a mate and then he died in a bad way. She's Fenrir kin, though, so ... when the local Fenrir found out about it that ended about as well as you'd imagine.

"Even that was different though. When that ended, neither of us fought too hard to keep it from ending." Erich's serious again, his eyes downcast. Even his lashes are golden. "I think I'd fight a lot harder if someone tried to tell me I couldn't see Melantha anymore. But it's different with her, too. She -- she's not my girlfriend. She doesn't want to be. I mean, she doesn't want to be anyone's anything. She wants to be free.

"But I guess if she breaks the bead, that means she doesn't mind if I follow her. And then, yeah. I'd follow her across the country." He looks up, quirks a smile. "With you in tow."

He thinks of something, suddenly: "Hey! -- that talen you made her? She really, really liked it. I mean, not just liked. I think she needed it."

Charlotte does not - cannot - miss the flush or the expression on Erich's face and there's a moment in there when he's flushing clearing his throat and she's looking at him, eyes wide, mouth opened in an 'O' of alarum (not merely alarm, but alarum), but ah - it passes. Erich's flush fades as he tells Charlotte about a girl in Browntown and Charlotte wonders what Erich means by friends with benefits and then, five or seven or a dozen words later it occurs to her and she looks - well, a little bit green, all told. Bilious.

By then the subject has changed back to Melantha, and by the end, when Erich is remembering and remarking on the talen she made, the little vial of rainwater, Charlotte's eyes are beaming again, though her smile is no more than small and still and pleased.

"I'm making her another one," returns Charlotte, still beaming. And pointing downward into the garden with the right toe of her left sneaker. "I have it down there to collect the fainwater. I should have enough if it rains again, soon.

"She likes you too," Charlotte assures Erich, then. "She told me that - " another pause, the girl's attention pulling inward, another narrow little frown tucking down the corners of her mouth. " - that it was important and she didn't want to say goodbye. And that's how she knew. Anyway, I don't see how you can't belong to someone and still be free. I can be Charlotte and Black Sheep and Miss Gray all at the same time.

"Are you going to ask Ingrid to come?"

Erich's face is like a mostly-clear sky today. The majority of the time he's smiling, but occasionally patchy clouds come through. Here comes another one now, drifting across those clear blue eyes. He frowns.

"I did," he says. "After what you said about maybe-packing, and after I realized I wasn't going to be in town much longer, I talked to Ingrid. I asked her if maybe we could all hang out, like the three of us, you me and her. Like... travel together, and maybe if things worked out, be a pack. Or not. I'd be fine with that too. It's nice just to have friends who'd watch your back, it doesn't have to be all official.

"She has to go back to New York though, she said. Apparently she's been a busy bee and she's almost a Fostern. So she's going home to challenge, and then she seems to expect they'll saddle her with duties and responsibilities. Said something about how her wandering days were over.

"It's not a hundred percent yet, though. Maybe she'll change her mind or be able to get away. I don't know. But for now it's just us. Unless there's someone you want to bring?"

[caveat: that scene w/ Ingrid is actually still in slow progress! so this info might change!]

The girl shakes her head no, chopped pink hair a wild halo around her, bright against the dark brown bark of the tree. "I don't know anyone else to ask." Which is true in its way. She has met and seen other Garou and other kinfolk. None of them consistently. None of them who felt right, to her. Like she belonged.

And - "Oh." quietly, for the news about Ingrid. Charlotte's eyes drift down from Erich's face, then, the cut of his frown against his rather open face. The spare syllable is quiet. Charlotte found Ingrid - scary, intimidating. Every inch a Shadow Lord, even, during their single meeting, but Erich's talked about her since she met him and they fought like a pack. The story feels wrong to her, like someone else's ending has been appended to a friend's life. "I'm sorry," she continues. "I hope she changes her mind."

Another of Charlotte's narrow little shrugs follows. Both thin shoulders this time, twisted forward and close, like surrender. She is no longer looking right up at Erich's features, but rather at his shadow in the pale afternoon light across the branch he has claimed for himself.

There's a certain vulnerability to her in that moment; not the fragility that always seems to haunt the edges of her gaze, but a vulnerability, quite as the movement of the stars through the great vast sky. "I don't - " a pause, here. She exhales something like a sigh. "I don't think it has to be official. With a spirit bond. "You are my pack, Erich. With or without Merlin or Eagle to make it official. I know that inside me."

And like that the cloud's gone again. Erich gets this goofy little smile on his face. Just: happy, in a way that's hard to contain in a composed and non-goofy package. He should have some nice words to say back to that, he thinks, something elegant and wellspoken or at least not dumb. But he doesn't. So he just balls up his righthand and holds it up for a fistbump.

"Cool," he says. "Let's just drive around and be a pack and not worry about spirits and making it official and all that. Unless it feels right, I mean. Like... unless one day we just meet a spirit and it's just right."

And just like that, the vulnerability vanishes. Charlotte flashes a look straight into Erich's eyes, then cuts a glance back down to his fish. Thus far, Erich has only taught Charlotte about the high five. And so, instead of balling up her own, rather smaller, fist, Charlotte opens her hand and fives Eric a five on the top of his fist.

"It sounds good to me."

Erich looks on, bemused, as Charlotte's much frailer hand fives his fist. Not quite what he intended, no, but he supposes it works. "Deal," he says, and he grins at her as their hands separate again, and then he does that thing again, that thing where he just suddenly starts moving, and moves like gravity doesn't really have the same hold over him that it does on everyone else.

Somehow he's swung himself around on the branch. And is dangling by his hands, feet and feet above to ground. And then is letting go, dropping, landing lightly on the ground below.

"Hey, Charlotte!" he calls back up to her, laughing: sunny again, carefree now. "Why don't we have ourselves a birthday party on the 10th? You and me, maybe Melantha and Chaz if they want to come. Since you're not sure when you were born, but you're pretty sure you're nineteen or turning nineteen."

sCharlotte admires Erich's display of physical prowess with a mute and shining look, that hint of wonder in her eyes. She likely weighs half of what he weighs, but never has felt that light in the whole of her life.

The sun is not so much emerging from behind the gray clouds, as it is shining through them, as if in answer to the sudden brightness in Erich's tone and gleaming in his eyes, and Charlotte hugs her limb, peering down at him from above, shy and pleased and diffident and excited, all at once.

"That sounds awesome," she tells him, scrabbling then, carefully, to find purchase enough to lower herself and eventually jump down onto the soft, moss-covered earth close to him. Scraping her fingers on the bark as she does so.

"I've never had a birthday party. We can have it here!"

Charlotte will get cater waiters and everything.

"Hey, come on and I'll make you an omelet! I haven't been practicing," she informs him, "but I remember things really well sometimes."

How reassuring.

Privately, Erich isn't sure how much partying can actually be done in a house like this. Or worse: how a house like this would withstand the effects of true partying. But then, they're a small party. Just the two of them, or four at most ... plus a handful of servants, if that's what Charlotte is thinking of. Privilege: he doesn't blame her for liking it, partaking of it, all that. Especially when it's her first birthday party ever.

Which makes Erich look at her with a sort of ache in his eyes that never quite crosses the line into pity. He's not even very surprised anymore. Not with her past, not with her unfortunate deedname, not with that rather shocking history of charachdom that he just can't... quite... fit with the rest of what he sees from her.

"I'll ask Melantha to come if I see her. Or you can, if you see her first."

And walking into the house, Erich bringing up the rear, Charlotte gets an idea. She wants to make him an omelette! Erich is understandably a little hesitant, but he obliges: "All right. But no veggies this time."