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."