ferris.

[Alexander] It's 3am, and the tenor snarl of a Buell engine revving up to the redline rings off the brick facades of buildings up and down the block. If this doesn't bring Liadan to the window to see what the fuck was going on down there, Alexander starts laying on the horn too.

[Liadan] It doesn't bring Líadan to the window. Lee's condo is on the top floor, facing a building across an alley on the opposite side of the building from the street. But luckily for Alex, the redhead was on her way out, anyway.

She's not dressed for a club. Alex has seen Lee dressed for a night on the town. She dresses in tight fitting skirts and high shoes and wears make-up. Though the grey wool coat looks nice enough, she's wearing jeans and Chucks. Her long red hair is loose around her shoulders and down her back. There's a scarf wrapped around her throat, a lovely cashmere number in autumn colors that almost blend into her hair.

The revving engine gets her attention, just as Alexander starts laying on the horn. The redhead frowns and walks across the sidewalk to where Alex waits at the curb. Out of his reach.

"What the hell, Alex, people live here."

[Alexander] "I know." He's blithe as hell: the unspoken addendum is and I don't give a fuck. For what it's worth, Alexander stops leaning on the horn when she shows up. The motorcycle helmet stays on, the visor down. He's muffled, but the helmet nods when he looks her over. "Where you going?"

[Liadan] "For a walk." Maybe it's the truth, maybe it's not. He can see that she's not wearing a bag, nor carrying a purse of any kind. What he can't see at that moment is her face, because as soon as the words are out of her mouth, she pivots on her heel and begins to walk.

[Alexander] "Now why are you mad?" He's laughing. She can hear it on his voice. He lets go the handlebars to sit back, twist at the waist, keep her in sight. "Come on, Lee. Hop on, we'll go for a ride."

[Liadan] He's laughing at her. Lee stops, turns and stares at him for a breath before stalking back toward him. There are words that she could say to him. She could show him what it means when she's really angry. Word around the campfire is she's made people cry.

But she's not really angry. She's not even mad. Maybe annoyed. And she doesn't want to make anyone cry right now. Not yet, anyway. When she's close but still out of his reach, she stops and stares at him, hands in the pockets of her coat. "Aren't there other people in this city you could be harassing?" There's another question, a real one underneath that.

[Alexander] When she starts coming back, he reaches to unhook his spare helmet. Unsnaps this latch, unhooks that. Then he's holding it out to her, turning forward against after she takes it.

"Sure." He's never shut the ignition off. After she's settled on, he pushes off the kickstand, straightening the bike between his knees. "But what are you really asking me?"

[Liadan] Her hair gets twisted up on top of her head and the helmet set over it, same as the last time she accepted a ride from Alexander Vaughn. She settles herself behind him, her feet finding the passenger foot pedals quickly. Her arms are sliding around his waist when he asks his question.

With the helmet on, and from behind, her answer is muffled. "I'll tell you when we get wherever."

[Alexander] The jacket he's wearing is the same, black, silver-trimmed, fitted to Alexander's compact, meticulously maintained, hard body. The helmet too: glossy, same color scheme. When she climbs on and wraps her arms around him, he drops one gloved hand over hers for a moment, as though to check her grip.

Then he twists the throttle and they're off. His right foot comes up off the ground first, then the left; the latter taps a few times, shifting easily from gear to gear, barely a hitch in the breathtaking acceleration. A motorcycle is nothing like a car. There's nothing between body and wind, skin and speed. The balance is mutable, dynamic. The roads are empty but this only means Alexander goes far, far too far, outright running red lights when he sees the intersections are clear.

It's not a long ride. They go south along the lakeshore the wind frigid cold, only ten degrees or so above freezing. Summer died a fast death; it's autumn now, with winter closing in fast. His jacket's warm, though, and even if hers isn't, his torso is broad across the shoulders, and his metabolism, amped up with the obscene amounts of exercise he puts in every day, keeps heat all but baking off his skin.

He takes her to the Navy Pier. How carnivalesque, except that the Navy Pier closes at 10pm in this season. Not that that deters him. He swerves right past the roadblocks, the closed gates marked

- CLOSED -
HOURS: 10am - 8pm WEEKDAYS
10am - 10pm WEEKENDS,

accelerates past darkened booths and kiosks, hot dog stands, cotton candy carts. The Navy Pier, abandoned as it never is during normal working hours, is strangely macabre in the night. Streetlights still glow. The Ferris wheel burns with light. The mirrors atop the carousel reflect them as they pass: both of them masked and faceless, Alexander leaning down low over his bright red beast of a motorcycle.

He stops a handful of yards from the end, where the light and glitter of the city ends and the black waters of the lake begin. The wind is strong here, whipping stiffly off the water. Heedless, he pulls his helmet off, hangs it open-visored over the handlebars. A gloved hand scuffs over his short hair. He looks out over the water for a while, and then pivots in his seat.

"Tell me."

[Liadan] He takes her to the Navy Pier. Lee has lived in Chicago since the tail end of March, and she's only been here once. And she doesn't live far enough away to warrant the single visit. But the pier is usually choked with crowds during the day. People and noise and pets, jostling her or getting in the way of her shots.

Alex stops near the end of the deserted pier. Lee leans back and looks around, and regrets. She really had been just going for a walk, so her bag had been left behind. Without it, she doesn't even have her simple PowerShot on her, not that it would do her much good in the darkness. So she looks to the water, and she tries to imprint it in her mind, tries to memorize the lights of the ferris wheel, everything.

Alex removes his helmet and pivots to look at her. Lee has already dismounted. The spare helmet is removed, letting her hair fall down around her shoulders and down her back in waves. In the low light of the closest lamp, it's difficult to make out how bright and coppery her hair is. It doesn't matter.

The helmet is tucked into the crook of her arm, and she looks at him.

"I threw a fucking laptop at you. Every time I see you I want to rip your face off and set it on fire." There's a pause, not quite long enough for him to think that this might be her full answer, the question beneath the question asked outside her condo. "Why were you waiting for me?"

[Alexander] Alexander, who's more perceptive than he pretends to be, and more capable of deep thought and higher intellect than most people are comfortable with assuming --

because it's easier to think of him as a brute, an idiot, a musclehead who's an asshole because it's the only choice available to him. Because it's easier not to consider that he's this way by choice; not because some terrible wrong was done unto him, or because he doesn't know better, but because he chooses to be.

-- notices Liadan looking around like her eyes want to take everything in, like she wishes she had her camera.

And he says, "Don't."

He kills the engine. A sudden hush falls. They can hear the water beat at the concrete beneath their feet.

"Stop trying to hold onto it all," he adds, and then lowers the kickstand with a click. Leans the red Buell carefully onto it. Dismounts. "Just enjoy what you can."

She explains, then. He holds his hand out; not for hers after all, but for the helmet which, if she hands it over, he straps back onto the back of the bike. It's only after this bit of housekeeping is done that he looks at her for a moment, startlingly serious.

"Because I wanted to fuck you." There it is, out in the open, a glaring truth, bright as the lights of the ferris wheel.

[Liadan] He tells her to stop trying to hold it in, to just enjoy what she can, and Lee doesn't have the words to correct him. What words are there to explain to another person the way the soul moves due to visual stimulus? It would be like explaining color to someone born blind. Or trying to describe a concerto to someone born deaf. No, it's more than that. It would be explaining painting to the blind, or playing the violin to the deaf. How does one explain to the sensory-deprived the act of creating beauty in the same moment one captures it?

No, Lee doesn't want to photograph the scenery because she wants to hold onto this moment.

He holds out his hands for his spare helmet. She doesn't confuse his outstretched hands as a gesture beckoning her to let him touch her. While he's strapping the helmet back onto the bike, Lee shoves gloved hands into the pockets of her coat and wanders toward the edge of the pier. She doesn't turn back to him until he tells her he wanted to fuck her. Past tense.

She doesn't ask Why again. That would be hypocritical of her. There was no Why to her fucking him in his hotel room, an eternity ago. Her reasons were as selfish then as they ever are for anything she does.

"Hm." Her feet carry her back across the pier, in his direction but not directly to him. He confuses her. She, who is so perceptive, knows his type. Arrogant and aggressive. Short tempered. Stubborn. An asshole. But there have been times when what he's done and who he appears to be don't quite sync up. She doesn't delude herself into thinking the exceptions make the man, but that the man makes the exceptions as he sees fit.

"I thought you were fucking Marrick?"

[Alexander] Alexander scoffs. He leaves the bike where it is, walking toward the pier's edge in the uncertain, multihued lights of the ferris wheels and the carousels and the game booths.

"I fucked her once. It was fun. It wasn't serious. Maybe she thought it was more than it was, but that little romance is over."

At the edge of the pier he sits down, hanging his feet off the end. The water is pitch-black, only the faintest highlights thrown back at him from the lights, silver crescents on the water. He unzips his motorcycle jacket, but he leaves it on.

Abruptly, "Aren't you insulted?"

[Liadan] Lee watches him walk to the edge of the pier and sit down on the edge. She hesitates before following, standing beside him and staring out at the dark void of the water. There are no lights out there, save the occasional boat in the distance. There is no light pollution against the cloud covered sky out there. Regardless, she almost imagines she can see the horizon line.

After a few moments, she sits beside him, letting her feet dangle. There are only a few inches of empty air between them, but Lee doesn't try to touch him, either on purpose or accidentally.

"Insulted by what?"

[Alexander] This makes him scoff again, disbelievingly.

"By my ulterior fuckin' motives, Liadan. What else?"

[Liadan] "It's Lee," she says, automatically. As soon as she says it, she realizes she doesn't care one way or the other what he calls her. Líadan. Lee. Babydoll. Frigid bitch. Bitch. None of them matter when uttered by this man.

"Why would that insult me?" She turns her head to look at his profile. "You just wanted to fuck me. Aw, I'm so heartbroken. I think I'll go home and cry myself to sleep."

[Alexander] Alexander, for once, doesn't rise to the bait. He cants Liadan a sidelong glance. Shakes his head.

"If you're not insulted by that," he says, "you're either really fucking confident, or really fucking broken."

And on that note he puts his palm on the concrete, all but vaults to his feet. There's a sort of crackling, restless energy in Alexander, as though all that aggression, all those chips on the shoulder can't possibly stay still for long. He holds his hand out to her to tug her back to her feet, where she'd stand an inch taller than him. More, if she was in heels.

"Come on." He smirks, suddenly. "I want to ride the Ferris wheel. Let's see if we can hotwire it."

[Liadan] She's either really confident, or really broken. Lee knows which one she is, but she doesn't voice it, doesn't make it solid in his mind which end of that spectrum she's firmly on.

He hauls her to her feet. The difference in their heights is negligible. However, this close, it's easy to tell the difference in their builds. Alex is stocky, built for power, aggression. Lee is slender, strong, and has trained herself for endurance.

He wants to ride the ferris wheel. Lee laughs, a low chuckle, like their previous conversation never happened. It's still there, still rattling inside her head, and likely will for many, many weeks and months to come.

"How hard can it be to hotwire a ferris wheel, really?" she asks, looking back the way they came toward the ferris wheel, down near the start of the shops and restaurants of the pier. "C'mon." She takes off, jogging down toward the big, brightly lit wheel.

[Alexander] Alex watches her go, taking off at a jog that, months ago when she came to Chicago, she might not have broken into. He's seen her at Tribull. Kickboxing. Not quite MMA, not quite so elite in his books, but respectable enough.

He doesn't follow immediately. He unzips his motorcycle jacket the rest of the way, pauses to strip his gloves off and stuff them in his helmet. Then he goes after her, breaking into an easy distance-eating run. Alexander isn't tall, and he isn't long-legged like a sprinter, but he has a sort of bottomless stamina, a sort of tenacious strength. He's not a wolf like her boyfriend. He's a fucking pitbull, small, stocky, mean as hell.

He catches up to her at the operator booth. It's locked, of course, which doesn't deter Alexander at all. After trying the door once or twice, the Glass Walker kinsman rears back and slams his elbow through the glass, sending shards tinkling in all over the controls, the floor. Then he reaches in, unlocks the door, and lets the two of them in.

A Ferris wheel isn't too hard to operate. There's a stop and a go; there's a forward or reverse. That's about it. They don't even have to hotwire it. The key is right in the ignition, waiting. Alex pushes the lever over to go, another into forward. Then he motions Liadan to the switchboard.

"Wanna do the honors?"

[Liadan] Lee doesn't run fast. Her purpose isn't to put on speed and put distance between herself and a pursuer immediately. She wants to outlast them. It was her lack of endurance that landed her in the arms of a Spiral. She hadn't been able to get away and keep going, she had been caught, and she had nearly died and worse.

The controls are easy enough to decipher. She grins at Alex, comrades in an act of breaking and entering, and...well, whatever crime turning on and riding a ferris wheel after hours falls under. She puts her hand on the key, and he can see that her gloves are the same color as her scarf. "If you're going first, get the hell up there."

[Alexander] The laugh Alex lets out is harsh and short. "Where's the challenge in that?" He nods at the key. "Go on, turn it."

When she does, there's a second where nothing happens. Then -- the whirr of enormous machinery cycling up. Liadan is Fianna, a tribe of songstresses and poet-warriors, but Alexander is of Cockroach's tribe. Glass and steel and silicon. Semiconductors and capacitors, circuit boards, the marvels of technology. He hates it when people look at him as an extension of his tribe, an adjunct to his stronger cousins, but the truth is the tribe is in his blood as much as it's in his twin brother's. The kinsman steps out of the booth as the Ferris wheel starts to turn -- as the humming machinery pushes all that mass, all that weight, into centripetal motion.

Alexander laughs aloud. He throws his head back and lets out a whoop of glee. No one else on this entire Navy Pier, this entire stretch of tourist heaven. "Come on!" He grabs her hand, his fingers hard and strong through her glove, pulling her toward the spinning wheel.

[Liadan] The wheel begins to turn, after an initial moment of hesitation. Alexander asks where the challenge is in getting on the ride before it starts, but Lee still doesn't see much of a challenge. It doesn't move very fast. No faster than a ski lift, at least, giving them plenty of time to rush the ride and dart into one of the hanging booths.

There's a bench around the inside, for people to sit and talk with their fellow riders. Lee untangles her hand from Alex's and kneels on the bench so she can watch as they rise into the air. She lets out a little laugh. "This is the craziest..." The craziest what, she doesn't finish.

[Alexander] These Ferris cars have doors that unlatch easily and a slow rate of rotation. They don't even have to run to keep up. Alex tugs it open, gentleman that he is, waving Liadan on ahead of him. "Go, go." He piles in after her, slams the door shut, and then the wheel is spinning them upward.

There are no other passengers at this hour. Obviously. Their ascent is pauseless, a smooth, slow swing along the wheel's circumference. Liadan kneels on the bench to look at the city dropping away beneath them -- the lake, the Sears Tower, the skyscrapers of downtown, the glitter and glow of the Navy Pier, totally deserted. Alexander doesn't crowd the window with her. He sits across from her, his knees wide apart, relaxed as their little car swings skyward.

Mostly, he watches her.

And he laughs when she speaks, without the jagged edge most of his laughter carries. "Craziest what?" he prompts.

[Liadan] His laughter snaps her back, but not as jarringly as it might have. She looks back over her shoulder at him, a corner of her mouth lifted in a crooked grin. They're alone in here, and she has no desire to impress Alexander Vaughn. Though she doesn't delude herself into thinking this, whatever has come over them that keeps them from tearing at each other's throats, will last beyond the ferris wheel ride.

"The craziest anything. I think this is my first real crime." When they reach the top and begin their descent, Lee crosses the small distance of the car to kneel on the bench beside Alexander. She takes off her gloves and shoves them into her pockets so that when she reaches for the handrail, she can feel the cold metal.

[Alexander] Alexander scoffs, disbelieving. "Are you shitting me?"

When she moves, the car rocks slightly, to and fro. It continues even after she's resettled. They've reached the apex. This is the descent now, the ground approaching them again, the distant horizon growing nearer.

"I figured a woman that'd fuck a stranger in his motel room would at least have a shoplifting or two under her belt."

[Liadan] Lee laughs. "No. I went to this incredibly expensive college, so I had stay out of trouble or I'd lose my scholarships."

She turns, slides onto the bench beside him. "I don't even think I started drinking until after I turned twenty-one."

[Alexander] "Heh. Full-ride scholarship at some Ivy League, huh? I should've figured." They're side by side; not quite touching. He looks out the window at the horizon lowering, the lake flattening out, the buildings rising. "So how'd Ms. Liadan Whelan go from that to sleeping around and herding stickfigures?"

[Liadan] "Hm. Not Ivy League, just a good art school." She lifts her feet, resting her heels on the edge of the bench. It's not an act of making herself smaller than she would otherwise appear. Judging by the relaxed posture, she looks...well, relaxed. Unthreatened by the questions being asked.

Questions that she wouldn't answer for most other people.

"My degree's in photography. I just met someone who steered me in the direction of something lucrative." She turns to look at him. "What about you? What do you even do?"

[Alexander] "Me? I'm a prizefighter." His smirk is crooked. Whereas Liadan draws her feet up on the bench, Alexander slouches lower until he can prop his boots up on the opposite bench. The Ferris wheel is nearly at the bottom of its rotation now, but Alex makes no move to get out.

"I used to have gigs with some local bands down in Miami too. Haven't found anyone worth banging on a drum for up here, though." His head back against the wall of the car, he turns to look out the window, lazy. "If I told you where I went for college and what I studied, you wouldn't believe me."

[Liadan] It doesn't surprise her that he's a prize fighter. As for the band, she just murmurs, "Ah, right, you're in 4."

He looks lazily out the window. Lee tugs a loose thread free of her right show and studies it closely.

"You know, before I moved to Chicago? I didn't think werewolves were real? And now I've killed Spirals and fomori and god knows what else. I fuck a werewolf on a semi-regular basis." She flicks away the strand, wipes her hand on her jeans.

"So I'll probably believe where you went to school and what you studied."

[Alexander] The aggressive, fierce kinsman -- flat-out vicious in a fight, the type to elbow faces and headbutt noses, the type to stomp insteps, break knees, smash teeth in with pool cues -- glances at Liadan once, then away.

"Russian literature," he says. "And astrophysics." Pause. "At Harvard." Another pause, and then he turns to her with a smirk. "Summa cum laude."

The Ferris wheel starts its upward swing again. With no one else on the machine, a rotation doesn't take very long.

[Liadan] Brows hop up at that, and Lee nods her head, two slow up and down motions, clearly impressed. And then she's grinning again.

"So did Mr. Vaughn go from that to prize fighting asshole?"

[Alexander] The smirk grows wider. "Liadan, come on. What the hell else am I going to do with a dual degree in Russian Lit and astrophysics? Not exactly hot careers."

[Liadan] "Why did you get degrees for those, then? So you can be the smartest brawler out there?"

She presses her cheek into her knee, watching him at an angle, genuinely curious.

[Alexander] "I liked 'em," he replies, simply enough. "By the time I got to college I knew it'd only be a matter of time before the Nation sucked me in, so ... instead of planning some sensible, high-achieving future that was going to get shot all to hell by the goddamn war and all, I figured I'd do what your high school counselor always tells you to do and study something that genuinely interested me."

The ground is dropping away beneath them again. Alexander points out the glassless window at the sky, mostly cloudy; at the stars peeking through a gap in the clouds.

"The light from those stars up there, those photons hitting your eyes right now, were created in a thermonuclear event at the heart of a glowing ball of plasma farther away than you can imagine. They've travelled hundred, thousands, maybe millions of years to get to earth. And the end result of all that is to hit something so insignificant as a human being's retinas, and make her go -- wow, the stars are pretty tonight." He sits back, dropping his hand to his lap with a light thump. "Now that's a trip."

The wind blows through the open windows. It rocks the little car slightly on its hinge.

"Let me ask you something," he says. "Why were you going for a walk at 3am?"

[Liadan] She lifts her head and leans, following the point of his finger. It takes her a moment to see the gap in the clouds, and she squints to see the stars peeking through.

"Especially since aren't a lot of them dead or super nova'd out of existence by the time the light reaches us?"

Why was she going for a walk at 3am? "I slept a lot after that bar fight." They're alone, she can talk about it here. "Which, by the way, is apparently not supposed to have happened. Which you would know if you hadn't run away," she adds blandly. "It threw off my sleep schedule. I thought a walk might make me tired."

[Liadan] [scratch out that 'ran away', replace with 'disappeared'?]

[Alexander] "Something like that." Whatever drove Alexander to share a part of his genuine appreciation for astrophysics, it's gone now. "It's been a long time since college."

She answers him. He lets out a short laugh. "And instead you got on motorcycle and rode out to break into a Ferris wheel. Feeling tired yet?"

[Liadan] She shrugs. "I thought wherever you were going was bound to be more interesting than my neighborhood. And no, actually. I think the adrenaline rush I had is actually going to make me stay awake longer. Thanks."

Líadan fixes him with that crooked smile for a beat, and then she's looking away again, out across the dark cityscape as they're pulled away from the sky.

[Alexander] Alexander laughs under his breath as she refers to an adrenaline rush from breaking and entering ... a Ferris wheel. Their second rotation is coming to its end. This time, Alexander sits up as the ground approaches.

"I should probably take you back before your Scottish wolf wonders where the hell you went." He pops the door open while they're still a good ten feet from the ground, watching it come closer. "Why'd you move out of the Brotherhood, anyway?"

[Liadan] Lee lowers her feet to the floor and rises, following him to the doorway. If this leap isn't timed just right, she could wind up stuck on the ride for at least another rotation. Unless Alexander is a gentleman and stops it for her.

She doesn't want to bank on that.

"Well." Hopping out of the ride is more like hopping off a ski lift, after all. When it's her turn to go, she stumbles a little, but still manages to get out of the way of the gondola. Once on solid ground, her hands go back into the pockets of her coat. "I was never really living there. But my regular guardian's not allowed around kinfolk, so the Scot has me for a while. He said I could stay at my place if I wanted, and my bed's better than what they have at The Brotherhood."

[Alexander] Alex is the first to jump out, which is probably no surprise. He leaps out when the floor's six or seven feet up still, landing in a sturdy, solid crouch on the concrete. Then he steps back to watch Liadan make the same hop, though by then the car has swung closer to the ground. He shuts the door just before it's out of reach. Then their car is swinging skyward again, indistinguishable from the others on the wheel.

Something about the words she chooses, or maybe just what she says, makes Alexander grimace.

"He said? Liadan, do you actually like having ... 'guardians'? A bunch of Garou telling you what you can and can't do?"

There's broken glass all over the floor of the operator's booth. Alexander doesn't bother going in -- just reaches through the window to turn the key off, flip the switches down. Then he extracts his arm, brushing a sliver of glass off his sleeve.

[Liadan] "They don't really tell me what to do, though. Not yet, anyway."

She watches him shut down the ferris wheel, watches the wheel itself grind to a halt. They're lucky no one apparently saw that, that no one was guarding this place against people like Alexander. When he's finished, she continues walking in the direction of his bike.

[Alexander] Alexander follows her in the direction of his motorcycle, his clip quick, hands shoved in the pockets of his jacket.

" 'Not yet'," he snorts. Alexander overtakes Liadan a few steps out, powering ahead of her. "He doesn't get to tell you where you can or can't sleep, Lee. Not because he's your Tribe." He whips around to face her, walking backwards. "And not because he's fucking you on a 'semiregular' basis, either."

She was right. The mood in the Ferris wheel didn't last. There's something very close to antagonism in the air again. For what it's worth, when he gets to his bike, he doesn't start it up and leave her stranded on the Pier. Alex waits for her to get on, tugging his gloves on, zipping his jacket up.

[Liadan] In her pockets, her hands clench into fists that she forces to ease. She pulls out her gloves and slides them over her hands.

She doesn't get onto the bike right away, but stands a little ways away, watching him with faintly narrowed eyes. Then she sighs, whatever fight brewing within her dissipating quickly, evidently not worth the effort. Swinging her leg over the back of the bike, she settles against his back, arms wrapped loosely around his waist.

[Alexander] "Put your helmet on," he says over his shoulder, tightening down his righthand glove. "It's behind you."

By the time she has it on, his is already buckled down into place. He clicks the visor down, then starts up the Buell with a earsplitting blat of torque that they have to raise their voices to be heard over.

"Where am I taking you -- back to your place?"

[Liadan] She twists back to unhook the spare helmet, imagining whatever concern driving him to remind her of her safety comes from not wanting another tribe's kin dying while he's driving, and not from any particular desire to keep her, specifically, safe.

As she fastens the helmet down, she hollers back to him, "Yes." Her arms resume their place around his waist, and she braces herself for the kick, the pull of force when he takes off.

[Alexander] 'Takeoff' is appropriate for the way Alexander rides his motorcycle: as though it had wings; as though he had limitless space to speed in, and didn't have to worry about things like roads. And barriers. And stoplights.

It was a bit after 3am when they got out here. Now it's probably closer to 4. Alexander swerves around the roadblocks closing the Navy Pier off from the rest of Chicago, leaves the empty tourist trap behind. The Ferris wheel, the carousels, the booths and the kiosks are all silent again, some darkened, some still aglow. Alexander imagines that when this Apocalypse of the werewolves finally came, all the world would be like that. Devoid of human life. Everything ground to a sudden halt, all the lights still burning; waiting.

The city's streets are windswept and barren at this time of night. Almost every stoplight is green. The ones that aren't, he doesn't stop for anyway. Sheer luck keeps him from being spotted by some beat cop camping the corners. It doesn't take long before they're back where they began, at the base of her tall brick building.

Where he parks. Where he drops into neutral, straightening up.

"Home sweet home," he intones again, ironically.

[Liadan] He can feel the shift of the machine as Lee dismounts. This ride out, she apparently didn't care if her hair tangled in the wind. The helmet is removed, but her hair is already down.

She holds the helmet in both hands for a moment, eyes fixed on the visor before holding it out to him.

"Thanks. This was...different. Weird. But fun." She doesn't say they should do this again, however.

[Alexander] Alexander laughs as Liadan thanks him as though he were dropping her off at her door after a date. It's a quiet, ironic sound that tapers out to nothing.

He doesn't reach to take the spare helmet back. Instead, he pulls his helmet off too. Sets it atop the fuel tank. A moment; then: "Come here."

[Liadan] [perception + emp: can she tell what he's planning?]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 5, 5, 7, 8, 9 (Success x 3 at target 6)

[Liadan] He laughs. She can hear it faintly, despite the engine, despite the muffling effect of his helmet before he removes it.

She tilts her head a little, studying him. And she offers the helmet once more, keeping her hands just out of his reach. "I don't think that's a good idea."

[Alexander] A beat.

"Because you don't want to, or because you do?"

[Liadan] The helmet is lowered, and she gives his question careful consideration. For about three seconds.

"Probably both."

[Alexander] Alexander's eyes are quite dark, and with a forceful directness that's rare in humans. Rare in kin. Liadan's seen something like it in the eyes of her Garou protectors, though theirs is a supernatural fire, a predatory glitter that comes from Rage.

Alexander has no Rage. It's not Rage that gives his eyes that penetrating directness, no more than it's battle that hones his body to hardness and vigor. No more than he learned to fight because he's a part of a holy war.

All that is there, nonetheless. And he looks at her for some time, piercingly, before he simply nods. When he holds his hand out, he's reaching for the spare helmet.

"Night, Liadan," he says.

[Liadan] She holds out the helmet for him, setting it into his waiting hand.

"G'night, Alexander." And for once she says his full name without so much as a hint of mockery.