this may be my last one.

Erich Reinhardt

Erich is technically homeless. Well, in all honesty, there isn't much technicality about it: he is homeless. He sleeps in his car. The rear seat is folded down, and a sleeping bag is laid out lengthwise over half the expanded trunkspace. The other half is cluttered with his daily paraphernalia: a duffle bag of clothes, some toiletries, a pot and a bowl and some silverware, the like. For a while he almost-sorta had a kinda-home here in Browntown, though. For a while, he was crashing at Drew Roscoe's pretty regular. Then things got complicated; then it became thoroughly inappropriate for him to continue crashing there.

This is the first time he's been in Browntown for some time now. He's not here looking for Drew. He's here looking for a friend he made in front of a toy shop, but traffic was bad, and the bakery's already shut down for the night. It looks nice inside, inviting and warm, with a touch of urban class that's rare around these parts. RiSE, says the sign. CLOSED, says the other sign. The display cases and racks are empty. Erich wonders what they do with all the leftovers. Maybe someone takes them home. Maybe someone takes them to the shelter. Jake didn't seem like the sort to dump it into the trash.

He thinks about calling Jake up, but then he doesn't really have much to say or propose. There's one restaurant in town, a greasy spoon diner that the locals go to when they don't feel like cooking. And anyway, he thinks maybe there's some sort of rule against inviting a guy to dinner twice in a row. Maybe it'd be untoward, even rude. Jake doesn't strike him as an idiot or a weakling; he wouldn't want to be rude.

So he stands in front of the bakery, looking in. He has a phone in hand, but he's not dialing. His car's parked a dozen yards or so down the street. Browntown's single bar is across the way. He could go there, he figures. A lot of Fenrir in the region. Made for shitty intertribal relations, but at least the hefeweizen was good.

Mind's made up. Erich turns away from the bakery. He crosses the streets. He does not look both ways first: what a rebel.

Celia de Luca

As if, out in Browntown and after dark, there is even the slightest chance that a car will come barreling down the road and run Erich over. The town's main drag is all but deserted at this time of night. All but: down the way, at the little gas station that could, a gleaming black CRV pulls up to the pump. It rumbles loud in the silence that seems so vast compared to the constant aural disturbances found in a city. It cuts off abruptly. The door opening and closing are like crashes of lightning, thunder, even though they are relatively quiet.

Celia has her hair up in a ponytail, her face framed by a few locks that are cut to curve around her but not reach the elastic that holds her hair back. Celia is wearing a long-sleeved thermal shirt (brown) underneath a flannel shirt in blue-and-white-and-gray plaid, the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. Her jeans, though stiff and hearty, are still stylish enough -- a deep indigo wash, boot-cut and fitted to her but not skin-tight. Her boots are only as new as it took to break them in around the hotel room. Lit by the gas station's pump lights, she's not wearing makeup, but it really doesn't make much of a difference with her.

She swipes her card and lifts the pump, puts it in the CRV, and then reaches into the car to pull out her coat. It's the puffy white one with the fur-lined hood. She flips that up over her head, huddling against the late-night cold as she watches the numbers flick upward on the pump.

Erich Reinhardt

Erich doesn't have a preternatural sense for his new sorta-nemesis. It's not like she gets within 500 yards of him and his spider sense starts tingling. He doesn't look her way because he knows it's her, but because the night is deep and very quiet and the slamming of her car door is, in comparison, very loud.

He does recognize her, though. By the coat, by the hair, and most of all: by the blood. Somewhere in the depths of his viscera, something roils and turns over. There must be some sort of conspiracy at play, he thinks. This goes way beyond coincidence.

The bar is still there: an option. He could just walk in and pretend he never saw her. Seems cowardly, though. And though he isn't a Get of Fenris, though he does not measure his entire life by what is and is not glorious or courageous, some stubborn sense of pride keeps him from simply slinking out of sight. He adjusts, and not by a lot. Browntown's main street is tiny. Everything's within a few degrees of heading.

This gas station isn't much bigger than the one he temped at earlier in the week. Two pumps on a single island, plus a diesel off to the side. The lights are still on, and they glint off his ripe-wheat hair. He has a smart remark in mind: are you stalking me? - but smart remarks have worked remarkably badly.

He ends up keeping his mouth shut. He just looks at her, mouth set, somewhat nonplussed by it all.

Celia de Luca

It's been long enough now that she's slept. She's spoken to Damaris and things are going well. Mr. Johnson gave her that necklace the other night. She doesn't look so pale, though the light she stands under right now isn't doing anything for her. She doesn't look so exhausted. She looks, if anything, like she's just cold and in a hurry because of the cold and -- eager, if anything else flickers through her eyes.

It takes her longer to notice him. She knows she isn't alone, and like any woman in the middle of nowhere after dark pumping her own gas, she's alert. She's watchful of her surroundings, listening for the odd footstep. When that sense of being watched becomes less of a night terror and more of a certainty, she turns. Her eyes are bright as ever around the edge of the fur on her hood, and find Erich standing there. Walking there.

Celia looks back at him. Her pupils are constricted against the harshness of the light she's in, and her slight shivering stills a bit. Her lips are together, but there's surprise in the way she looks at him all the same.

They stare at each other.

Erich Reinhardt

The silence goes on until it enters, and then surpasses, awkwardness. The longer it goes on the harder it is to find anything to say. The pump ticks, ticks, ticks, ticks off the gallons until it thumps to a stop. Then it is silent, or near-silent: the subtle hum of electricity and machinery continues.

Erich looks away at last. He looks about; his eyes return to Celia. The corner of his mouth moves a little, wan, not really a smile but an attempt in that direction nonetheless. A similar gesture -- similar in tone, in slightness -- affects his arm: a turn of his forearm, a minute gesture of the fingers.

"I used to spend a lotta time around here," he says. Perhaps it's an explanation for what he's doing here, a few hours past dusk, coming across her at a gas station. Perhaps it's a way to assure her he's not, in fact, stalking her. "Had a friend that lives around here." The verbs and the tenses are carefully chosen. "Now I sort of know the baker."

Disjointed little fragments that don't quite add up to a story. He moves a little, restless: a hand coming up, scratching at his breastbone. A turn of the head to the bar across the street. Back. A decision made, though never quite certain:

"I was gonna go have a beer, maybe. Buy you one? They've got coffee too if you're driving back to the city."

Celia de Luca

After last time, Celia has no idea what this guy is going to do. How he's going to act, what he's going to say to her, if she's going to wear herself down to the bone arguing with him for reasons she doesn't entirely comprehend, or if she'll just sigh and go quiet. She's surprised that he even walked over. She's wary. They are alone on the street, almost alone again entirely, and she doesn't know why he's here.

She expects him to ask her what the hell he's doing out here, though she could just as easily ask him the same -- more easily, in fact, given that he could very well be following her. She doesn't speak to him, though, and it's a little while before he speaks to her. The pump shuts off, the receipt starts printing. Celia still waits, filled to the brim with trepidation, watching him.

Used to. Had a friend. Sort of know.

"Oh," she says, and looks aside, taking the nozzle from the CRV, replacing it on the pump. She keeps him in the corner of her eyel. She doesn't entirely turn her back to him. She doesn't know quite what to say.

Her eyes flick to his hand when it moves, watching his rough fingers scratch over his chest. Looks at his face again, as he glances at the bar and back to her. Invites her to go get a beer or coffee or something.

"I'm on my way to go camping," she tells him. "I have wine," she adds. "And coffee."

Awkward. That's all it really is. She starts screwing the cap back onto the gas tank, the motions slow and uncertain, unfamiliar with the vehicle. She closes the door over the cap, turning to look at him fully for the first time since the pump shut off. Hair frames her face, fur frames her hair, her eyes peering out bright blue from the center. She's not sure how to ask this without just asking it, and is afraid it will just garner another insult and another cyclical argument. So she tries to ask it carefully, tries to keep any possible note of offense out of her tone, trying most of all to not sound like she already has an answer -- and a horrific, evil answer! -- in mind.

"Why are you offering?"

Erich Reinhardt

She's going camping. He didn't ask; she didn't have to tell him, but she did. It makes something spark in his eyes; he looks into the darkness, a touch of worry on his face, as though he expects some bogeyman to be lurking right there in the shadows.

Wine, she adds, and coffee. Erich's attention reorients. He's confused for a second; he thinks maybe she's inviting him for a drink. Out in the woods? Something? Then he gets it: it's a 'no', in not so many words. Doesn't really surprise him, but rejection always bruises the ego. His mouth twists, somewhere between sardonic and rueful. His eyes are sliding away again when her question calls them back.

She's not the only one with blue eyes. His fit his face, though, a perfect match to his nordic bones. They are shocking only in their clarity, not in the juxtaposition. He stares at her a moment. None of you are animals, she said, one of the last things she said to him the last and second time they meet. That doesn't seem true in this one singular instant, when something quite inhuman resides in his eyes. He looks at her the way an animal does, level and unflinching and unwary of social norms that dictate the length and quality and meaning of a stare.

"I don't know," he says then, and there's a light blink, the gaze becomes less unyielding. He seems human again, at least to some small degree. Thoughtful a moment; then more: "I really don't. It'd be way easier for us both if we just pretend we don't see each other. I almost did. But I'm ... curious about you." The corner of his mouth moves; it's never quite a smile. "I guess you made quite an entrance."

Celia de Luca

Celia notices that look. His eyes flicking to the dark, concern sparking in his eyes. She frowns a little, but ignores it. Not her problem unless -- until, she thinks -- he makes his anxiety her problem. So she slips her hands into her pockets, one holding the receipt, and he looks back to her.

They don't know each other's names. He knows her tribe just by the look of her, the smell of her, but Celia hasn't made any guesses about which spirit he belongs to. He looks at her, but it's not a gaze she associates with animalism. It's something else. It always is.

"I know how pure I am," she tells him, which is perhaps bolder than she should be. "The effect it can have. It's been explained." She gives a shiver; nothing but the cold. "I'm sure that's part of it."

It isn't dismissive, the way she says this to him. Just: he's curious, he doesn't know why he's asking. And if he's dodging it, if he's avoiding mentioning it to be polite or so she doesn't think he's sniffing up her skirt, then at least one of them has laid it out there. They don't have to pretend it isn't a factor, even if it isn't the only one.

"I really shouldn't be seen with other men, even this far out," she tells him after that, by way of explaining that... rejection, if that's what it was. "I have to think in terms of months and not moments."

Erich Reinhardt

The way she just says it -- puts it right out there -- makes Erich uncomfortable, as though she'd just mentioned some highly personal and thoroughly inappropriate bodily function. Which she sort of did: it's kind of like a spiritual erection. He grimaces; it's his immediate reflex to deny it, but he mops a hand down his face -- not quite a facepalm -- and then looks at her again, brow furrowed.

"Maybe that's part of it," he admits. "But if that was the only reason I'd run the other way. Not to imply you're a hag, but I'm learning it's best to steer clear of kin of other tribes."

She tells him no again. Or maybe she explains the no. He nods a little, and then he frowns again. "What's your game with Senator Wyrmington, anyway?"

Celia de Luca

She wasn't expecting that reaction. The grimace, the facepalm, the deep frown afterward. There's confusion in her eyes, which throws her expression back to that first night and those first moments: lost lamb, easy target, fragile and sheltered and delicate and Little and Red. Innocent.

Celia already knows he's not of her tribe -- he wouldn't be, couldn't be. He'd never be accepted by Pegasus, never be welcomed by the sisters. Not unless he was broken somehow. Not unless he were somehow a Crone at birth. No one ever asks why the totem of the Furies only accepts males if they are metis. Most just assume that makes them less than manly men, weaker and broken like all women and therefore taken under sheltering wings. Most miss the point entirely of the entire tribe.

She shrugs. "I didn't just mean that effect," she says, a bit uncomfortable herself now, since it's obvious what they're talking about without talking about it. She looks away a moment, scrunching her shoulders closer to her body.

And he asks about the man in the limo, who may or may not be a Senator, who may or may not be tainted. She honestly doesn't know. There's always a cleansing to be had in the aftermath; that's all she knows as far as the state of their souls goes. "Scandal," she tells him, because it's that simple. "Disgrace. Making him powerless."

Erich Reinhardt

Strange; part of him had expected her to deny it, blow it off. Not that anything he's seen of her would make him think so. Whatever their antagonism, she's always -- always being all three times he's met her -- been shockingly honest. Still; this seems like yet another one of those things that are both highly personal and thoroughly inappropriate. Strange how such taboos often surround things so pivotal to life: sex and power and competition and attraction and tenderness. Their species wouldn't propagate without these things.

She makes it sound so cold, so businesslike, but she's talking about -- he thinks she's talking about -- seduction, emotional manipulation, fucking. He thinks of the hand he saw reaching out of the limo, the expensive watch on the wrist, the wedding band on the finger, the hair on the back of the hand, the creases at the knuckles. He thinks of that hand on the inside of her elbow, which is the only part of her that he himself has touched.

"Why?" Well; the short answer is obvious. More so to Erich than to Celia herself. He's Senator Wyrmington, after all. Or maybe it's Representative Wyrmington, or maybe the man is more behind the scenes; a campaign manager, a chief of staff. It doesn't matter. Powerful. Corrupted. "I mean -- why him?"

A beat.

"Why you?"

Celia de Luca

Why. Her eyebrows quirk at that. The answer is obvious. Because he's in power. Because he's bad. Because he can be as easily undone as anyone else. Why him? Because:

"He's a keystone," she says, and leaves it at that. Why her? Because:

"We all have our uses," she tells him, like a recitation.

Erich Reinhardt

And now the frown is back, etching storms across his brow. He folds his arms, hands tucked under his biceps. "We do," he says. A muscle works in his jaw; he thinks a while. "I guess sometimes what we have to do isn't as glorious as in the stories. But if it's important enough, then it's worth it." Erich shrugs, but the frown doesn't go away. "That's what I think, anyway. For myself. Feels ... different though, looking at it from the outside.

"So what happens when the game plays out? What's next for you?"

Celia de Luca

She doesn't know why she's telling him anything. No reason not to, she knows that: he's Garou, he doesn't seem like he's going to run of and ruin it, though she knows he might. These aren't deep dark secrets in the Nation, though, not as far as she's concerned. You can sing songs and tell stories of glory and honor until you're hoarse, but victories are won in back rooms and blood-filled ditches. Wars are ended with knives to the back and lies in the ear and deals that are blacked out of official documents. Even humans know that.

"It is," she says, when he says it's worth it. He's frowning, almost scowling, but he doesn't flip out. He's male, and he's the sort of male who looks into the dark and worries about her all by her lonesome. She expected him to starting fighting with her. Why should a pure, pretty, young kinswoman be spreading her legs for evil like that? It's not right! Her tribe shouldn't do that to her! And he could save her!

And so on, and so on, the innocent idiocy of chivalry.

So now she looks at him sidelong, uncertain of him. That's what he thinks. For himself. It's just weird to him suddenly, looking at someone else doing it. She huffs a small breath out, and doesn't respond to that. Shrugs again.

"This may be my last one," Celia tells him. "If it goes well, there's a good chance my face will be known afterward, so I'll go somewhere else for a while. Probably with the sisters, maybe overseas. I may work with other girls someday. It helps to talk to someone else who has been there."

Erich Reinhardt

"Your last one," Erich repeats. The twist of his mouth could be just about any expression at all. "Jesus."

It's not that thoughts like that don't go through his head. They do. That's why he's frowning like that. He is, after all, the sort of man that thinks about her going camping by herself and instinctively looks into the night for imaginary monsters.

But he's also the sort of wolf who leaves the tribe of his ancestors because they don't get it. Because they would never let a purebred kinswoman spread her legs for evil like that. Because there are lines they would never cross, prices they would never pay, things they would never do, not even if it meant victory, not even if it meant everything.

So he understands. He does. The tension is there, furrowing his brow and tightening his shoulders, but he knows which side he stands on. It's not right that she does this, that this is not her first one but her last one. None of it is right, but what is it the hippies say?

War isn't about who's right. It's about who's left. It's about who survives. The battle scars, though: those linger, no matter what.

"Well, good luck." That's all he comes up with in the end. He could tell her everything else he thought about, but it seems foolish, standing at a gas station expounding on the philosophy of the low war. "Be careful." He thinks a moment. "What's your name?"

Celia de Luca

Last. Not first. She looks all of nineteen, all of twenty. Looks like Senator Wyrmbreath or whatever his name is might have to break the law just to get her drunk. That's how she looks. But she looks like a lot of things that Erich knows she isn't, now. Even so, even if she could be twenty-five years old and counting, it's not her first. God knows when she started. What else she's done.

Good luck, he wishes her. Celia huffs a laugh, her mouth quirking with it, awkward and not entirely amused. Then again, it's not an amusing thing to talk about. She hasn't exactly got coworkers she goes out with after a day at the office, complaining about the boss. She knows what she is. Why she's doing this. She understands it better than Erich does, or possibly ever could. And it's not really... funny.

Be careful, he tells her too, and she just ignores that one.

There's a pause after his question. She isn't sure she wants to tell him. She isn't sure she wants him to know. But she extends her hand to him, taking it from her pocket though it's still in her glove.

And if he takes it: "Celia," she tells him.

Erich Reinhardt

She has to take her hand from her pocket. He has to unfold his arms. His hand is warm because he's kept it between his bicep and his side, and because he runs so hot. Even through the glove, his heat is palpable.

As is the strength in his grip. The hard bones and firm flesh; a killing power in his veins.

"Erich," he says. He lets go and retucks his hand where it was. Nods amorphously at her car, at the gas pump that's gone quiescent. A step or two back and he gives her one more well-wishing: "Have fun camping."