Their days are spent in the sort of leisure that others dream of. Neither of them have a proper job. He wakes up early and goes running on the beach, then hits the gym for the morning routine. She's usually awake by the time he's home, and they have breakfast together - usually in the nook of their kitchen, but sometimes out on the balcony if it's a nice day outside. It's always a nice day outside. Sometimes they go surfing in the afternoon. Sometimes they just lay on the beach, or by the pool, and talk about random shit. And at night he plays the drums, and sometimes he gets called out to do something with his crew, and sometimes Sinclair goes to check in with the San Diego Walkers, whose Sept she's not really a part of but stays in touch with nonetheless.
One night when she came home there was a guitar by the drumkit. Alex never said anything about it, just left it there. Two days later Sinclair wandered over while Alex was banging away and just sort of ... plucked a chord. Alex grinned to himself and kept playing. The next day, Sinclair actually put the strap over her shoulders and strummed a bit,
and that's when he puts down his drumsticks and hands her the instructional DVD he's been hiding under the bass drum. "If you want," he says, "we can get you real lessons and stuff."
So now when he plays the drums, she practices guitar. She's getting better and better. They're starting to jam together a little, and sometimes when he's watching TV or playing X-box she's over there with headphones plugged into the amp, practicing away in relative silence.
And at night, they go to bed together. Not always at the same time, but always together in the end - rolling into each other's arms even if they're asleep, tangling up together and sleeping close to each other, so close.
That's how it went today. A lazy day at the tail end of summer, which goes on forever and ever in San Diego. It was so nice out that they piled into Alex's Elantra in the afternoon and drove over to Balboa Park, hiked through the desert garden, then went and played in the Museum of Science for a while. They had dinner in the Italian restaurant on the promenade, and on the way home they're holding hands in the car, coming off the I-5 and turning toward their unassuming little PB apartment
when Alex's cellphone rings. That ringtone too, the one that only sounds when the EKL at the Sept calls. They exchange a glance. Alex mutters something about so-much-for-chilling-at-home and tilts a hip to dig his phone out of his back pocket, putting it to his ear.
"Yeeello," he says. And listens for a while, and talks a bit, then hangs up. "They want me to play getaway driver. Apparently some dumb fomor hid a fetish in a bank vault, and now we gotta go take part in a bank heist." He glances at Sinclair; grins a little. "Wanna come along?"
SinclairSinclair likes making breakfast. She feels all domestic and if she does it eight times in a row Alex still comes in looking delighted, surprised, exclaiming: You made omelettes? I love omelettes! And if she doesn't do it one day, sleeps in or is lazy, he doesn't even seem to care. Sometimes they just share a box of cereal, Sinclair wearing nothing but a baggy t-shirt that might be hers and might be his and might have been his once but isn't anymore, no sir, Alex wearing his running getup still, her feet resting atop his under the table.
Sometimes he gets called to go out with his crew, and sometimes Sinclair gets called to do the things his crew ends up helping with, cleaning up, providing transport for. Sometimes she just gets called, and she has to go, and sometimes she just... goes out on her own. The neighborhood around them has gotten safer lately. There are packs within a few miles who have noticed a single wolf has carved out a small territory. So be it. If she can hold it, if she can defend it, then good for her. And Sinclair does hold it, does defend it, this apartment complex most of all. There aren't a lot of domestic disturbances in this block, even. When Sinclair hears raised voices followed by someone thumping against a wall, she is the only person in this place who goes knocking on a door.
Some days she goes and puts on her bikini, floating on a cushion in the pool, her eyes covered by shades, letting the sun turn her into molten Sinclair-ness.
Sinclair didn't even notice the guitar until the people who were staying with them moved out and it was left behind. It's red. She likes red things. When she plucked it, she asked him where it came from, and he just shrugged, kept playing. So she shrugged, and went back to writing in some help forums on the couch. The next day he came over to practice and she was sitting on the ground, the guitar in her lap, the strap over her shoulders, seeing how the different strings sounded, and it wasn't even plugged in. Real lessons and stuff, he offered, if she wanted to, but she wrinkled her nose, shook her head, and started learning on her own.
Oh, she gets cranky with him sometimes if he tries to 'help', even if sometimes this is after she's asked him to help her interpret something. Vocal music and guitar chords seem to exist in two different worlds for her, and it isn't til she makes a clean break between the two and stops trying to translate that she starts learning, and only then does she start to see the connective patterns between what she knows and what she's learning. She learns like a cub preparing to hunt: it is a game. They don't play songs, when Alex starts playing along. They just... jam. They make noise. They play. It's when she's alone, headphones on and concentrating, that she really puts the work in.
One day she manages to get the first half of Smoke on the Water down pat and calls her packmates, then her parents, then his parents, then Aaron, making them all listen. She is quite delighted by how proud everyone is of her and spends the rest of the night working on the rest, a smile on her face.
Some nights she comes in and Alex is asleep, but fitfully. He stirs when the water in their bathroom rushes on, his signal that she'll be in bed soon. She comes to bed after the water running down the drain has turned clear and curls herself into his arms, her face tucked against his chest and neck, her hair smelling like water, and like her. Occasionally she has come home shifted back into another form almost immediately, dragging blankets or towels down to the floor to soak up the blood and curling up in a furred ball to heal. And occasionally, she has woken up to find Alex on the floor with her, his hand resting in her thick fur, his head on a pillow pulled from the bed, and she has simply gone back to sleep, thankful
but so tired.
But today was a good day. They ate on the balcony and that's where Alex came up with the Balboa Park idea, to which Sinclair responded with delight, they hadn't gone anywhere in forever and she wants out, she bursts into motion, she has so much energy. By the time they settle down to dinner she's ravenous, and wants to finish what's on his plate, too. She plays with his fingers gently in the car, yawning, her sneakered feet up on the dash and her head turned to look out the window, following the skyline with her pale, predatory eyes.
That close, tightly, at the ringtone she hears. She turns and winces at him, wrinkles her nose sympathetically at what he says, and then lifts his hand and kisses it while he's talking. It's okay, after all. Her eyes are sharper while he's on the phone, watching traffic more carefully, then he hangs up and she looks at him. "Do I have to wear high heels and hallucinogenic lipstick to disarm guards with my sexuality?" she asks, rolling her tongue around the last word with over-the-top sensuality. She tosses her hair, making a SexyFace.
No.
"Then I'm in!" she perks, beaming.
AlexAnd Alex says: "Woot!"
So off they go again, the Elantra swinging a U-turn and then getting back on the 5. They head north. The bank heist isn't even at some impressive big bank or anything; it's at a rundown little neighborhood branch of the San Diego County Credit Union over in Sorrento Valley. And on the way there Alex talks about how being the getaway driver sounds exciting, but really it's pretty damn boring. Except for that one time where someone came after them, and WHATSHISFACE had to shoot them. Yeah, that was fuckin' awesome --
and around here Alex gets the sense that Sinclair is worried, is acking the way Alex does when she comes home injured, and he glances at her and puts his hand on her leg where she covers it with hers. "Don't worry," he promises. "I'm really very careful out there. And like, y'know. Responsible. Non-daredevil-y."
Then they're pulling up to the bank, which is just off a wide boulevard arcing through a valley and then up to a mesa about a billion McMansions sit on. This part of town is absolutely flooded with commuters in the morning - one of the main highways between the mesas and the coast - but this time of night it's totally deserted. The bank is, needless to say, closed and darkened. Alex is quieter then, sitting a little straighter, slowing down. When he gets within a few dozen feet he turns the headlights off; parks on the curb in the shade of a tree, letting the engine idle.
"We'll just chill here while they finish up," he says quietly to Sinclair. "It's two Ragabashes from the Sept - Smoking Gun and Runs With Scissors, do you know 'em? When they come out that door we'll zoom by and pick them up."
Sinclair[HAHAHAHA WHATSHISFACE]
Alex[ETHAN. dat his face.]
SinclairTruth be told, she's heard the story of the Hollywood getaway move and Ethan shooting something in the face a couple of times now. Ethan, Jen, and Rob stayed over for dinner one night and Ethan told it again and Sinclair just gave Alex a sidelong grin. So when Alex tells her about it again now, she doesn't ack too much. She squeezes his hand, understanding that exciting actually does matter. That she can't be the only one who ever does anything that feels like something. She knows now, and it's okay. She is with him this time. She can move faster than most fomori. She would die to protect Ethan, Jen, or Rob, and consider it their due.
She would burn the world down to protect Alex, and stay with him.
"I know, baby," she says. "You always are." Which is, also, the truth. Why wouldn't he be? Why would he take risks that stupid?
She leans over and kisses him as he drives on, just the side of his face, then relaxes. They drive on, and she is calm, holding his hand until they begin to slow down, taking it away so that he has both hands free. They do this seamlessly, silently, and she wonders if anyone drives by if it will provide a good excuse to make out with Alex, a nice cover. She grins at her own silliness, watching the bank through the window. "Cool," she says, then: "Smoking Gun's all right by me," she tells him. "She's got this attitude you see in westerns and noir flicks, you know? Real steady under pressure. Runs With Scissors, well... he's about as brilliant and non-douchey as his name implies," she adds, with a thin smirk.
AlexAlex laughs aloud. He chills with one wrist over the steering wheel, right foot close to the gas pedal. His eyes mostly watch the bank, but flick to the sides, the street, the rearview mirror too.
"Is there, like, some sort of system for naming Garou? Because I swear some of the names I hear are just ... 'man, did your Septmates hate your or something?' "
Alex can't sit still even when he's staking something out. He's twisting around then, eyes still on the bank, reaching around behind the front seats until he finds ... something that rattles. Which he pulls out with a triumphant Aha! He hands it to Sinclair, and that's when Sinclair sees they are, in fact
peanut-butter pretzel bites. "These are so fucking good," Alex says.
Sinclair"Galliards do a lot of the naming," Sinclair answers. She has her feet propped up on the dash again, looks so relaxed, but he saw her once, right as he was waking up --
they were curled together, his arm laying over her waist, their bodies still naked from last night's lovemaking, last night's shower, last night's slow kisses like lullabies that put them to sleep, and he always wakes before she does. If Sinclair wakes before he does, her pack is yelling in her mind or he's shaking her awake because her phone won't stop ringing and it's someone from the sept. He knows how deep she sleeps, like she's lost in death already. That's what made it so strange to jerk awake because one of their houseguests was fighting with another and a body had slammed against his bedroom door, so strange to come sharply to consciousness and find Sinclair already out of bed, already shifting, moving, pinning that houseguest to the floor before he could remember his name.
-- and he knows how fast she can move when she needs to. She looks relaxed. She is relaxed. That can change in an eyeblink.
"And yeah, sometimes if you're a complete dick as a cub, you get a name that you deserve. The Walkers and Gnawers tend to be a little less... I don't know, hoity-toity about it. I met a Gnawer Galliard once named Talks a Blue Streak, which he did, and a lupus Gnawer named Roadkill, which he thought was very badass, and he named his litter of pups after stuff he heard in Taco Bell. But sometimes it's all in double and triple meanings. Talks a Blue Streak was also a fast motherfucker. Roadkill was a pretty brutal fighter. Smoking Gun got her name not just because of her attitude and because she actually does really like detective flicks and westerns and all that, but because she found proof of corruption in a Fostern Philodox. And as a cub, it's one thing to find hints and clues, but finding hard proof?"
Sinclair shakes her head and opens her mouth when he gets out the pretzel bites, intending for him to toss one in. She catches it, and munches, and shrugs. "I don't know the whole story on Runs With Scissors yet, but he's got a reckless streak, which is implied. He's a beast with a knife, though. So maybe that's the double entendre there, or part of it."
AlexThe truth is, Alex loves that Sinclair is so protective of their den. He loves that she considers it her den; that it's not just Alex's place that she moved into, but hers as well. Very, very deeply hers. But the truth is also that sometimes the swiftness and ferocity with which she defends their den is a little terrifying. That morning, after she pinned the rude houseguest and snarled in his face and kicked him out with all his things crashing into the hall after him - after she did all that and toddled back to bed - Alex couldn't sleep again for a long time. And eventually, he just got up and went for his morning run.
By the time he got back he'd had it all squared away in his head. It was their den. Not just their den, but the place where they sleep, the bed in which her mate sleeps. Of course she would defend it. Of course she would defend it like that, like an animal, like a vicious, snarling predator. These are the little compromises they have to make, to make it together. She is Garou. He is not. There's a difference, and sometimes it is painful and stark but absolutely necessary to acknowledge.
Even now, in a way, they're acknowledging that difference. There's no ache in it, though. She's munching the pretzel bites he's tossing her, and so is he, and she's telling him about naming conventions. He listens, interested. Laughs at Roadkill's name, and later gives a pleased, understanding little chortle when she explains Roadkill was lupus. Named his cubs after things he heard in Taco Bell. Will look at Smoking Gun differently now when she walks out. Perhaps Runs With Scissors, too.
"I like it," he says. "How you can read something important about the person from their name. I guess human names used to be like that, but these days no one really remembers what their name actually means." He thinks a moment. "I have no idea what Alexander, Madoc, or Vaughn mean."
And then he smiles at her, offering her the jar of pretzel bites again. "You're a Galliard. If you named me, what would it be?"
SinclairIf they were human beings, there'd be yelling. There'd be shouting at the houseguest, threatening to call the police, Alex would be up and out of bed and providing muscle and frankly, the two houseguests wouldn't be on the verge of frenzy. It is terrifying to be the one of least power in your own home. It is frightening to see the girl who was so soft and supple and tender just seconds ago in your arms, who was burying her cries againt your shoulder the night before like she couldn't take what you were doing to her,
suddenly baring claws and fangs, growing fur and sharply pointed ears, holding something even larger than her to the ground by its throat, every warning a wordless one. And a lethal one. Her den. Not just her den but the pocket of it where she and her mate sleep, the place that must be sacrosanct. She did not even do violence in that room, she launched out into the hall. But she was hardly even awake when she did it, acting on instinct more than anything, and that couldn't have made it any easier to bear. His girlfriend, suddenly inhuman, not even saying a word before she crawled back to bed with him, nuzzled his neck, and went back to sleep.
When he came back from his run later, she was awake, lying in that bed, and asked him quietly if he was okay. And by then he was. By then, he was ready to touch her face a little, and smile, and tell her yeah. He's okay. They are okay.
Sinclair ate so much at dinner, but wanted cheesecake, which Alex vetoed because he'd already had about three bazillion calories and Sinclair wasn't going to sit there eating dessert in front of him, but here she is, eating more. She's a blast furnace inside, her metabolism supernatural, and he's right -- they taste good. Nummy salty sweet crunchy things that are tossable. This is a good snack.
"Sometimes you can't," she mentions, in terms of being able to read people by their name. "My cub name was Havok, because the galliard who gave it to me liked comic books, and because I was, well... kind of wreaking havoc all the time. When I became a Cliath I was named Warcry, and there's a dozen Garou named that alive just in the Walker tribe right now. My Alpha? 'Wyrmbreaker', because that's ever so evocative. But... sometimes as we get older the names get deeper. There are stories. I like names like that."
He talkes some more, and she nods -- human names used to be like that. Nicknames, occupations, where people were from, characteristics, all of it. She smiles. "I know what both our names mean," she hints, because of course she does. Of course she would. But he goes on, and he asks her what he does, and that makes her stop. She blinks, and she has to think for a few moments. She takes another pretzel bite, this time with her hand, and then says: "I... don't know. I mean, on the one hand, I know you so well, I'd feel like anything I chose would leave some part of you out." She looks down, holding one of the snack bites, her brow furrowing. She looks a little troubled, a little apologetic, when she looks back over to him. "On the other hand, it's just... you aren't Garou. It isn't just about those names telling our people a story, or even the fact that we have to earn them -- I think if it were solely about 'earning' a name, most Kin would have them. Those are the names the spirits can learn, too. They're... ritualized. They're a part of who we are as a people."
She looks down again, at her hands, her fingertips. "I know this might seem backwards, but... our deed names set us apart. Because there may be many who look like me or who do things like I do, who will fight and die like I do. I'm just one Glass Walker, one Galliard -- I'm even just one Unbroken. But when this drop in a bucket has a name that can be remembered in songs and written down in histories, it is saying that whatever I've done, it was enough to be remembered. It takes me out of the masses of all the others who fight and die." She looks at him. "But there's only ever going to be one kinsman like you. You have the tribe telling you to do this or that, be this or that, but... who you are and what you do and how you do it is all so unique. It's barely even worth mentioning when a couple of Ragabashes break into a bank to get a fetish or whatever, or when an Ahroun kills a vampire, but when a kinsman stands his ground and yanks some Williams-Sonoma knives out of someone else's shopping bag and attacks this bone-triceratops-dog thing... seriously, do you think that's ever happened before? The spirits don't even need a particular name then. Neither do the Garou. They're all too busy going what-the-shit."
AlexKin are more unique than Garou. That's the bottom line of what Sinclair says, and in truth it's not something Alex has ever considered before. If anything, it's always been the other way around. Garou are more unique. Garou are chosen, are special, are more. What she says makes sense, though, and when she's finished
-- well, he laughs a little first, oddly abashed, which is something Alex almost never is. "I didn't know you heard about that," he says about the bone-triceratops-dog thing, and the knives he pulled out of that blonde Shadow Lord -- seriously, blonde, since when did they make blonde Shadow Lords? -- kin's bag. "Honestly most times I get in a fight with, y'know, really nasty stuff I'm just ... trying to stay alive. Sometimes it feels like I make so little difference. It's ... strange to think that these spirits I can't see or feel or hear notice at all. It's even weirder to think that in a way kin are more unique and more noticeable than Garou.
"But that kinda makes sense. It's almost like angels and men, you know? Garou have all phenomenal cosmic power - and yeah, I know, I'm mixing biblical references with Disney now - but it's kind of like the humble little kin have more free will. You get boxed into a tribe and an auspice and a rank and all that and if you didn't have a name that defines you, it'd be so easy to just end up a square peg or a round hole or something. On the other hand, I'm just... me."
He smiles at her again, reaching for a handful of pretzel bites.
"For what it's worth though," he says, "to me, you're just you."
SinclairShe smiles. She doesn't tell him she's also heard about some of the things he's done here, that she'll be down at that high-rise sept of the San Diego Walkers and she'll mention Alex in conversation, and someone will ask her if he's the same guy who -- and she'll confirm it. She also doesn't tell him she's, uh, gone through a few sept records. But she smiles, and she understands. Because when he fights, he just wants to stay alive. When she fights, she's staying alive, she's protecting her allies, she's combatting the Wyrm, she's obeying the Litany, she's earning her name a place in history, she's trying to change the world. And none of that is special. That is all just what she was born to do. If she gets a nod for it, it is only because she somehow -- usually by sheer luck and a stroke of inspiration -- did something uncanny or noteworthy, or the Bad Guy was particularly big and dangerous. That's really it.
Sinclair leans over and kisses him again, sudden and small and on his cheek, but she doesn't let it go on long. They're supposed to be keeping an eye out, so she just kisses him like than and then leans back, a random and tender thing. He understands. Everything he says tells her he understands, he's not feeling like she told him you don't get a name, you aren't Garou! or who do you think you are? He gets it. He is so, so special, for getting it. There are many who wouldn't.
"I know," she says, her voice soft around the edges. "That's why you're my mate. To you, I get to be... unique, and myself, in a way I am to no one else. That's how I knew."
This, too, is said with a smile.
