Tact [Nash]

[Gwen Sullivan] To call the weather abnormally mild would to be something of an understatement. The clouds had choked the sky, refusing to allow anything more than a pale gray shine down onto the city below, but despite that the temperature floated in the high fifties, touching sixty at one point in the mid-afternoon. It was humid and muggy, it felt like the kind of weather that came in August to announce a summer storm was on the way, before even the rumble of thunder on the horizon could make an appearance. Except there was no storm, and there certainly was no summer. This was just stagnant, slightly ominous, but still a welcome change from freezing temperatures and snow flurries.

Gwen was celebrating the change in weather by losing the standard hoodie that topped off her outfit. She'd dressed in jeans whose cuffs were tucked into her sturdy black boots, and a fitted olive green t-shirt bared arms and upper chest to the world. She wore no jewelry or make-up, but her hair had been washed, appeared darker than what it had been when Nash had seen her last. Previously it was mousy brown, now it was darker brown. Still dull, still without luster, but certainly darker without being so drastic as to sink into the realms of an oil spill kind of black. She's got her hair tied back at the nape of her neck into a nub of a lazily looped bun, and a fading bruise on the left side of her forehead that hadn't had full opportunity to heal away completely.

She would be found about four blocks away from the Church that Nash knew she spent some of her evenings at, emerging from an alley with her hands behind her head, only just securing her hair back out of her face and off her neck. Sharp gray-green eyes hop to her left and her right, directly across the street largely forgotten in a neighborhood largely ignored. She looked everywhere, took in her surroundings, as a force of habit rather than being compelled by anxiety that something was lurking to wait for her to slip up. A need to know simply for the sake of being able to walk confidently, not necessarily because she feared or suspected anything.

Either way, she wasn't looking behind her. That area had already been pounded out, and perhaps was why she was sporting the still-visible bruise on her head. Garou, even the young, were commonly scuffed and bumped, it was a fact of life for them.

[C.J. Nash] It's almost possible to hear that truck coming from several blocks away. The amount of work it underwent simply to survive another latitudinal excursion such as the one that had nearly destroyed it was not, all told, astronomical, yet his bank account was somewhat lighter and the prospects of having to do too much more work on it was daunting. That, in and of itself, was not the terrifying part. What was getting to him was the fact that he cannot, in good conscience, go back to Alabama knowing that there is a creature sharing his genetic information running around without some sort of blood-guidance to keep her out of trouble.

Or at least bail her out of it, patch her up when she's eviscerated by poisoned claws, try and make some sense out of the atrocities she's going to witness, something.

The thought of Curtis and Monica sheltering her hadn't even entered his mind. They couldn't have known, period, and that is what has been gnawing at him for the last day and a half. They couldn't have known.

He hasn't heard from Monica, and it isn't a lack of balls that keeps him from calling her again but a strange, almost itchy sense of propriety and respect. So far as she can tell, he'd overstepped his bounds just showing up in the first place. Why now, she didn't ask him; why after all this fucking time did he show up, hardly announced, and make accusations wild and unfounded about the paternity of her only daughter?

Nash has the windows on both sides of the truck down to get some fresh air in this fucking jalopy, a cigarette dangling from his lips, one hand draped over the steering wheel at the wrist while the other idles over the gearshift. He's been up the block once now, and is making his backtracking sweep when the girl comes out of the alleyway on the passenger side of the car.

It takes him a moment. Brake lights tap once, twice, putting him several yards away from her; the transmission protests but the engine does not actually stall. Distracted yet proficient hands and eyes have him coercing the vehicle to rest parallel to the curb, and he kills the engine at the ignition before stepping out of the truck.

[Gwen Sullivan] Nash spots Gwen as she appears out from the deep shadows of a narrow alleyway, her hair is different but the shape of her face, her size, pale eyes all catch familiar. Had he not been actively seeking her out he would have missed her entirely, but his brakes tap and he comes up against a curb to park his truck rather than crash it this time around. There is no gore on her, no blood to mat her hair or stain her face, no cuts or gashes or favored limbs when she moves. All of this ought to be a sigh of relief, when the moon was so close to full behind the blanket of clouds covering the city. She was intact, and it didn't seem she'd left anything in any other way in her wake tonight.

The old blue Ford Ranger is not forgotten, nothing is with Gwen, and it catches her notice with ease as the only moving thing apart from her and the breeze on this particular stretch of city block. She stills, fingers finishing tightening the elastic that held her hair secure, and watches as it pulls to a park, and as a man that had introduced himself as Carroll Nash, kin of the Fenrir from what she'd tasted in the back of her throat and seen in the shallow creases at the edges of his eyes, stepped out when the engine was killed.

Her hands drop from the back of her head and jam into her hip pockets. Her posture is as neutral as Nash recalls. Her body shape is different, more pronounced now at the athletic firmness of stomach and shoulders and the modest teenaged swell of breasts under a shirt that actually fit rather than swallowed her up and masked her entirely. She's sucking on an incisor as she watches him, then nods her head when their eyes meet.

"Nash," she greets simply, with only a dollop of curiousness in her tone.

[C.J. Nash] That cigarette is still plugged between his lips as he sets one foot then the other down on the tarmac and claps the door shut behind him. Squinting through the smoke, he reaches up to pluck the offending tube of chemicals and carcinogens out of his mouth and cast it onto the ground. It sizzles on the dew-damp ground and stops trailing smoke. All that's left is what's in his lungs, and he holds onto it for several seconds as he paces around the side and back of the Ranger.

When he exhales, it's through his nostrils. They flare, giving him a lupine air for a few seconds before it disappears again. In the dark it's difficult to read the color of his irises. She hasn't seen him in the daylight yet. They've only met twice, and yet the PI seems as though he's been looking for her.

That curiosity is warranted. In plenty of other people, plenty of other auspices or tribes, it would be laced with suspicion, if not paranoia. He's wearing what others have termed his Shut Up I'm Working attire: the cowboy boots that can pass as dress shoes, the jeans without holes in them, a button-up shirt and the leather jacket. His badge, though, isn't clipped to his belt, and he looks as though sleep is something to which he is becoming a stranger.

It isn't just existing in a state that most of the Nation quantifies as pre-retirement, either. This is at least one night's lack of sleep. He'd seemed rested, by comparison, after getting out of the vehicle after aiming it onto the curb last week.

She nods; he flicks his eyebrows with the carelessness he'd used to discard the cigarette.

"Gwen," he answers. One hand is tucked into his hip pocket; the other arm is slung over the tailgate of the truck. He maintains his distance, and when he gestures to her forehead, it's calmly. "That's new. Not sure if it matches the hair, though."

[Gwen Sullivan] The Kin steps up onto the curb with her, but keeps a comfortable distance. Under a moon so Rage-swollen as this, comfortable distance would be out of the way of an immediate stretch of an arm or stomp of a boot. She makes no move to close this any further, but simply stands with her hands jammed in her pants pockets, tugging the jeans a bit lower on her hips since any belt that would hold them up ordinarily was absent. She had no obvious signs of lack of rest about her, no fatigue and no shadows under her eyes like her Godi teacher had.

His hand gestures vaguely to her head, and he comments on the bruise that colored one side of her forehead. She tosses her head to move sloppily-clipped and grown-out bangs out of her eyes. This does nothing to hide the mark, that likely wasn't the intention in the first place, when you consider that she didn't flinch sheepishness or look awkward when he pointed it out. Rather she maintained eye contact while explaining, simply: "Workplace hazard." It wasn't a dye stain, and the topic of hair was left to fall in the gutter.

Rather, she glances to the bed of his truck, to see if he was carrying anything in it that might indicate what his business was. He'd stopped specifically when he'd spotted her, looked at her plain as day out the window before he got out of the truck. There was nothing around here, just foreclosed businesses and a few struggling pawn shops or discount stores closed for the night. He'd stopped for her, she wasn't so dense as to not figure that out.

"What did you need?" Straightforward as a Philodox ought to be, she cuts to the chase.

[C.J. Nash] What he needs is to just get back in the fucking truck and drive until he can't see Illinois anymore. If one wants to discuss muscle memory and the persistence of previously protected vices, his brain is crying out for the numbing oblivion of alcohol. Twice, now, he's gone to the same fucking bar and stood there without taking a shot or having a beer slid in front of him, and the easiest thing in the world would be to get utterly intoxicated, wake up in a bed that wasn't his, and drive home with a head-in-a-vice hangover without looking back.

That is a rather permissive definition of the word 'need,' though. His continued existence on this planet is not contingent upon him escaping, nor is it hinging on him getting what he came here for in the first place: an answer. The answer is standing right in front of him, and as he did not the night they met, he finds himself studying her.

She looks more like Monica, as far as her facial composition goes, has an athletic build that is likely the result of her new lifestyle, her recruitment into a war to which she had no voluntary commitment. Her hair is naturally dark and wavy.

The only reason he'd gotten so much as a glimpse at her eyes was because she'd stood, briefly, under a streetlamp as she walked him to the church last week. They're an uncommon color, though. They aren't bright, shiny British Isles green but a hazy, smoke-filled mist of a green. At the time it hadn't registered.

His memory isn't like a steel trap. It lets things sieve through all the time, things he'd wish hadn't been let go, and the things he wants to remember he can't hold onto worth a damn.

"'Need' is kind of a strong word, don't you think?" he asks. It's a stall tactic. She's busy, though, she has someplace to be, a war to fight. "You ain't spoken to your mother since about, oh, eleven thirty Tuesday morning, by any chance, have you?"

[Gwen Sullivan] Gwen Sullivan is, by and large, a canvas of her mother if you're thinking of Monica while looking at her. The thick hair in a tone of darker brown (though she dyed it so frequently it was hard to say if this new dark tone was close to her natural one or if the mousy one earlier was), the heavy lids of her eyes, and the general shape of her cheeks and forehead surrounding them. She'd always presumed that the light of her eyes came from her grandfather, Curtis's dad, who had stark gray eyes, and she'd always figured that she and her dad shared similar chin shapes.

But Nash had seen his own reflection enough to recognize himself in another when he was searching for it. The shape of her mouth and jaw lined up similarly to his own, granted more feminine, and most obviously was the color of eyes, not Kiss Me I'm Irish green and not stormcloud gray. More like a foggy swamp, or bog water, or ghostlights in the bayou.

He picks at her choice of words, and she just presses her mouth into a quietly unamused line but leaves the subject lie. He wants to know when she'd last spoken to her mother. This earns a brief flaring of nostrils and a furrowing of eyebrows. The latter response is more in thought than it is in offense. She's not so much bothered that he wants to know about her parents (again) as she is deeply curious as to why he gave a shit.

"No." Her pause is only long enough for her to tip her chin up, jut it out a little, and for one eyebrow to crawl higher than the other, expression pure questioning. "I sure hope you don't spend all of your time chasing down Wolves and reminding them to write home to their parents... It sounds like a lost cause to me."

[C.J. Nash] "Squirt, tellin' wolves to do anything is a lost cause on a good day. You're right. When your folks don't know what you are, we're talkin' the Bermuda Triangle of lost causes."

Considering the fact that he had been open enough with her the first and last time they met, confessing what it was that he was doing in the city and where it was he needed to go next, Gwen doesn't seem to be connecting dots or examining any suspicions, latent or otherwise, as they stand here talking to each other.

As he stands looking at her, there is doubt, still, on Nash's face. Through the shadows of fallen night, through the haze of insomnia and the blanket of whiskers on his jaws, she can see that he is holding himself back. This, before her, is a son of Fenris, even if he does not have within him Rage. He is a forceful personality, brash and charismatic, and if he does not keep himself quiet when it's called for he can cause more damage than anything else.

Nash seems harmless. It's how he presents himself, how he manages to knock down a person's guard without much effort, yet beneath the surface is the potential for anger and violence. He is not a Child of Gaia or one of the urrah.

It is from this man that Gwen received whatever it was--gene, blessing, curse--that made her what she is. He could not tell this to her mother without obliterating the Veil.

All Gwen knows, really, is he's looking for his daughter. The spirits say she's Trueborn and has no deed name.

"I want you to have my card," he says, reaching into his back pocket for his billfold without moving forward to give anything to her, "in case somethin' comes up you can't talk to your folks about. The address don't mean jack shit, but the number works."

[Gwen Sullivan] "Uh-huh...."

It's skeptical, but a change from the typical non-committed hum that she gave to most people when she didn't have a full sentence to acknowledge them with. He's digging around in his back pocket, hunting for a business card, but not coming close enough to hand it off to her. She stays standing as she has been, hands preoccupied in her pockets, shoulders rolled forward some, boot toes opened up just a little so she was standing comfortably rather than squared-- she hadn't been a warrior for so long that it permeated her every motion, when the moon was a ghostly whisper and nothing more she could pass as a teenager convincingly enough again.

"So you mean like wondering when you stop puking buckets of blood after a kill. Or what's to be learned from being burnt alive trying to outrun something that can't be outrun. Or how you're to prove yourself if you're hit for speaking up every time, without fail." These are statements rather than questions, noticeably. Primarily because she doubted a Kinfolk would have the answer to any of these. Her gaze is still cool and skeptical on his tired face while he pulls a card from his billfold. Her right hand slips out of her pocket, readying, but does not reach forward prematurely, not until he's extending it to her.

"Have you found your pup yet?"

[C.J. Nash] They might as well be rhetorical questions meant to cause him to flinch away from what it is he's offering, the assumption being that he has no idea what it is he is offering. It's as though he'd offered an ailing person a kidney, or a lung, a part of his body that cannot be replaced.

Even without light, Gwen can see a hint of sad amusement in the way the corner of his mouth tugs, the way his eyes flatten for a moment. It's possible she's going to keep right on moving, but the girl seems to be forgetting, or never truly grasped in the first place, that the man she's dealing with is more used to asking questions than he is to answering them.

Those who have known him for a while have learned to doubt anything he willingly volunteers. He will do or say anything, is the general consensus, to get whatever it is he wants. In this instance, she has no way of knowing, he has to tell the goddamn truth in order for that to happen, yet the entire affair is near-hopelessly muddled by the fact that he doesn't know what he wants.

Nash takes his arm off the tailgate, billfold still in hand, and jerks his head toward the cab of the vehicle.

"Get in," he says, as though it's a suggestion rather than an order. Takes goddamn balls to be in an enclosed space with a Trueborn when the moon is swelling as hot as it is, but if he's afraid, he has the tact necessary not to show it.

'Tact' doesn't typically belong in the same sentence as any noun or pronoun associated with Nash.

Once in the cab, he reaches up to turn on the dome light. A wan yet sufficient glow permeates the darkness, sending pupils constricting against the invasion of light, and he rolls up the driver's side window. When he looks back, the color of his eyes--of her eyes--is as clear as the oil in a canvas painting.

The cab smells like cigarette smoke and air freshener locked in an endless war with each other. It's as clean as one can expect the interior of a twenty-year-old vehicle owned by a bachelor to be.

"I'm just gonna lay this on out there," he says, turned towards her so his left arm is slung over the steering wheel. "I been doin' this, I'm guessing, a hell of a lot longer'n you have. There's blood on my hands I ain't never gonna get off, if you catch my drift... I got scars I can't explain to no normal person, and I seen some shit took years to go away after it was all over.

"I don't know what it's like to shift, and I ain't got the slightest idea what it's like to walk around with that Rage clawin' at you every minute you're awake, but I ain't gonna flinch, and I ain't gonna sit there gaping like a beached fish if you tell me anything like what you just said out there. Sure as hell ain't gonna hit you for askin' a question. You get me?"

[Gwen Sullivan] Get in, he tells her, and moves along the side of the vehicle to pull open the driver's door and do so himself. She pauses for only a moment, like she's weighing how good of an idea that would be. He was Kin of the tribe whose ranks she was hoping to join, she could tell that herself without anybody having to confirm it for her. He'd been to the church, she'd seen him there. She'd also seen him and Elijah, the dark-skinned Kin that stayed at the Church too, getting along just fine when fetching his truck. She didn't approach then, but rather continue on her patrol unnoticed without coming to interject herself into the meeting. Unless he was actively infiltrating and doing a fine job of it, he was on her side of the war. Even if he wasn't, she doubted he would blow cover on her, but instead wait until he had the Jarl or another in an important position to do so. He wouldn't waste that chance on a pup.

Plus, unless he had a silver blade tucked into his seat cushion, she wasn't concerned about him hurting her. She could dismantle him in under five seconds if she really saw fit. This was the one-sided scale between Garou and Kin, even an inexperienced cub could steal the life from a Kin who has more scars than she, more stories and more wars, without breaking a sweat.

So she didn't argue, but walked to the passenger side of the car, tugged the heavy metal door open, and climbed inside. She sat with her hands in her lap and pressed back into the seat, legs stretched out so the bottoms of her boots were at the very front of the floor mat.

He speaks of his experience, of the fact that he doesn't know what it's like to be a Garou, and states plainly that he won't hit her for asking a question. He wants to know if she understands that. Her mouth is a flat line as he talks, eyes on his face, still a touch skeptical, a bit disbelieving, and a little uncertain all at once. She was a teenager that was in the process of being jaded by the life she was thrust into, unknowing and scrambling to play keep-up with all the others in her age group that have known their whole lives what was up, what they were going to be, and prepared that whole time for the day they would Change.

Gwen didn't have that advantage. She'd had a panic attack and a water nozzle at the back of a gas station to clean the blood off her face and hands with.

"I get you," she answers finally, slowly in that lounge-singer rasp of a voice of hers. "But what I need to learn has to come from my Mentor. I don't need to learn to be a Kin that weathers the storm of his Cousins. I need to learn the Law inside and out and make it a part of me here." And one hand closes into a fist to bump the tips of her knuckles against her breastplate. "And I need to stomach the battle for more than just a half an hour. I barely manage to keep the bile down until people aren't looking anymore. I need to be strong for Fenris to See me."

It sounds like she's reciting what a Lupus Zealot told her.

[C.J. Nash] Their lives are not remotely similar. When he was her age, at least he had had the option of running away from his responsibilities, and was afforded the opportunity to go off and get his shit together before coming back and half-heartedly performing his duty as a kinsman. The duties of a male in this society, though, are less hard-and-fast than it is for the women. They are not evolutionarily designed to be the keepers of the hearth, to tend to the children and cook meals and hold hands and smooth hair when it all gets to be too much.

Yet they do, because that is what is needed. They do, and in the process it emasculates them. It breeds bitterness in those who cannot perform as the Garou want them to, who cannot stand up beneath the heat of their Rage without allowing their backs to bend and their bones to cry out against the weight.

There is nothing wrong, he's come to discover, with just goddamn being present and being tolerant, but this is different. They are strangers, and so far as any sane person can tell, he has nothing to gain from this situation. That he has nothing to gain ought to have been reason enough for him to just walk away.

Yet he's still here, attempting to reach out despite the fact that it goes against his goddamn nature, despite the fact that sitting in the cab next to him is a stubborn, solitary teenager. Looking at her, he can see that same quiet determination and even desperation that he'd carried with him in his early years. This is how she's told herself it has to be, and by god if a human can convince himself that he just needs to shoulder his proverbial rifle and keep going, it ought to be no surprise that a Philodox teenager can do it.

He doesn't flinch, though. He'd told her he wouldn't.

"Darlin'," he says, "your mentor ain't got brown eyes, does he? Anyone who tells you he's strong by himself is full of shit, and I'm willin' to bet anyone who thinks he's strong by himself is just missin' a couple of screws."

[Gwen Sullivan] She blinks a little at the brown eyes question, taking it seriously for half of a second until he follows up by stating that he must be full of shit. This earns the small crack of a grin on a face that had been determined to stay bland and neutral up 'till that point. Not because it was a funny joke, but because it caught her off-guard. One corner of her mouth pulled a little higher than the other, she had a smile that never wanted to fully form, only peek through like a glimpse of the moon from behind clouds on a night much like this.

"Nah, they're yellow." She gestures toward her face. "His eyes." Then shakes her head dismissively and drops her hand back into her lap. She's glancing at his rearview mirror to see if anything dangles from it, to the shifting stick, to the glovebox. Noticing everything because that's what she'd done. She already knows where the white whiskers in Nash's stubbly facial growth sprout up, she didn't need to work to commit his face to memory, it was already stuck there.

"I'm not strong alone. When I've been accepted into the tribe I'll have a pack. I've got to earn that much first, though." Teeth catch momentarily at her lower lip, the quiet that follows is the working kind of quiet, she's thinking and puzzling and it shows by the slight crease between her eyebrows. She'll look back up to him, and suspicion is spread across her face now.

"Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but why?" Why are you here. Why are you offering me someone to talk to that won't judge like Garou do. Why did you come find me tonight. There was a lot asked in that 'why', and she didn't feel the need to expand on it as much as just let it speak for itself. "Don't you have your own agenda?"

[C.J. Nash] His go-to response in situations like this would be a casually- if expertly-delivered Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies. Grown women love lines like this because it makes him seem mysterious, which is something of a juxtaposition given the fact that there is something about the way he talks, perhaps the ease of his vocabulary or the fact that he volunteers autobiographical information without being pressed for it, that makes him seem open, even genuine. It makes him seem witty and dangerous and exciting.

He doesn't want to be any of those things to this girl. Looking at her mouth, looking at her eyes, makes his heart clench up in his chest, but he's still breathing. They may very well be agonal respirations, the sort of work the lungs continue to do even after the heart has stopped functioning, but Nash is in no outward distress. This is fine, this is okay, he can be this for her and not wrench her away from her family.

Yet she's skeptical, and instead of raising his hackles or suspicions, it just confirms what he'd already thought. Beneath his whiskers, his facial muscles struggle against the latent desire to smile.

"Maybe I'm just a kind, gentle soul," he says, his wit dry, his voice as tired as his body, "who sees a young woman reminds him of himself, needin' help or guidance or Christ knows what that she can't get from no wolf-born sumbitch with yellow eyes."

[Gwen Sullivan] "Mmm."

There we go, there's the standard Gwen response. It's a hum without commitment to affirmation or negation, without dismissal and with no shards of judgment to make it pointed. Her eyes linger on his face, on the way his cheeks flexed just a little when he presses away a smile that nearly managed to surface. Her tongue suctions itself against a tooth, like she's trying to get a popcorn kernel unstuck from between it and another, then she shrugs her shoulders and looks back to the windshield, out at the environment surrounding them. You couldn't just stay focused on your immediate surroundings, you had to look beyond the room you were in to know that a rhinoceros wasn't charging you from up the street.

"Well then, kind gentle soul," she starts, letting her head rest back against the seat. "Were you driving or were we just seeking privacy in your truck, away from the numerous prying eyes on this bustling city fare?"

Eyes move back to him when she's content that nothing is lurking outside the vehicle, and an eyebrow is raised a bit higher than its counterpart again.

[What are you after, old man? Wits + Enigmas]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 2, 4, 7, 8 (Success x 2 at target 6)

[Gwen Sullivan] There isn't much of an opportunity for him to answer the question that she didn't seem to be too invested in the answer of. Her eyes sharpen on his face, seek meaning behind the expression he wore, his gestures, what he'd said when she'd first found him-- Cub, no Name, don't know if she's even changed yet-- and how he kept watching her like he was studying or looking for something.

Realization starts as a curious half-formed sensation in the back of her mind, then makes its way up to the forefront as something more complete. Her expression blanks, widens some, then closes right back up.

"You think I'm the Cub you're looking for."

[C.J. Nash] [Empathy+Perception: WHAT WAS THAT]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 2, 3, 6, 7 (Success x 2 at target 6)

[C.J. Nash] Although he has said nothing to the effect, Nash doesn't exactly have to. All that he had said in their previous meeting coalesces into this one, and the question of whether the kinsman had found the child he purported to be seeking hasn't left her lips, yet. He'd cut her off before they climbed into the truck, before he took up his current lounging stance in an attempt to seem nonchalant, relaxed, when he feels anything but.

Showing up at her mother's house yesterday had not been a mistake, yet he was not in control as he is when he has conclusive genetic evidence to support his attempts to help conclude a custody battle: he cannot say, with science backing him up, that the child Monica and Curtis Sullivan rarely see these day is not, in fact, Curtis's. All that he and Monica had was a period of Curtis's absence, of displeasure and unhappiness on her behalf. He was a footnote in the annals of the couple's history, a brief blip that proved without a doubt that Monica was not happy as a young woman in her mid-twenties.

That the dates and math only added up if one was willing to suspend one's disbelief didn't matter. What does matter is that, without his knowledge of a pregnancy, without Curtis's knowledge--to Carroll's knowledge--of the presence of another man, it didn't matter how likely or provable it was that Gwen was his biological child.

Gwen was Curtis's daughter. He'd raised her.

The kinsman is drawing a breath to answer her when Gwen figures it out, somewhat belatedly. Whatever lie he was going to cast into the water, whatever bullshit he would have come up with easily, is aborted before it can grow into something viable.

He's silent for a moment. In her eyes, widening and returning to normal so quickly he almost can't catch it, Nash sees what he had not seen in her mother. There is an initial moment of realization, of contemplation of the situation as being true, followed by rejection.

"Doesn't matter what I think," he says, slow, as though she's a horse that has gone skittish on him. "I'm offering to help you."

[Gwen Sullivan] He talks to her like he ought to talk to a wolf of any Auspice when the moon was nearly full. His voice is like an approach with arms out, shoulders low, fingers spread and hands turned so she could see his palms. It was like slow, easy steps, a gradual reaching toward to reassure, to calm, to make sure that she didn't rear up and break several of his ribs in frantic flailing. It's wise of him because he knows this is how you need to be with Garou. The part that he may have missed was factoring the 'teenage girl' part into the equation.

She looks unamused with the way he spoke and what he'd said both. Whatever she was expecting, it wasn't dismissal without a straight answer. Were she standing her hands would likely go to her hips, but since she's not she just turns to face him more fully, left shoulder digging into the back of the seat now rather than the back of her skull. She doesn't lean across the center of the bench seat to get closer, doesn't strike out at all.

Her posture is, more than anything else, up front. There's no aggression, but there's not a lot of escape either.

"It matters to you and, from what you said, the whole reason you're out here. Be straight-forward." Philodoxes don't abide by chases around the mulberry bush or twisting tongues.

[C.J. Nash] There are more than a few reasons why he didn't, wouldn't or couldn't bring himself to wait until after the goddamn full moon's approach to bring this topic up with her, yet he reveals himself to possess some modicum of control over his emotions and knowledge of the potential consequences of his actions by not launching into a fervor attempting to convince her that he's right. This young woman is a Half Moon, is struggling to learn the Litany so that she might enforce and interpret it, and while she cannot, at this moment, frenzy, it is not beyond her. If he pushes her too hard, or he incites in her some unwieldy emotion Gwen cannot swallow, she could be taken over.

As much as he had wanted to get up here and make sure that the child the spirits spoke of wasn't some lost, starving Cub, now that he is here, now that he knows, it's doused the fire that was under his ass.

The kinsman draws a deep breath, as though he'd shank someone for a cigarette right about now, but he doesn't crack the window and light up even though her lungs can take it, even though he shouldn't, by all rights, care if it offends her olfactory glands. Yet he does not go for his cigarettes.

"Look," he says, "I say it doesn't matter because there ain't nothin' I can do even if it turns out you are. Alright? What I can do is let them keep livin' with the idea that they got themselves a daughter they're lettin' do her own thing because it's better'n what they had. I can give you a place to stay and make sure you ain't starvin' and... whatever else. You need more'n a mentor, and even if I ain't your father, I'm still your Kin. Alright? This shit ain't black and white."

[Gwen Sullivan] The heavy sigh was followed by him laying cards on the table like this was a game where he felt like he was losing the round, one card at a time with a half-reluctant flinch each time he did so. She listened carefully to his words, and did not simply wait for him to finish speaking before she could cut in. She wasn't coming up with what she would say next, she was focusing on what the Kin that may very well be a genetic donor was saying.

It didn't matter one way or the other because he wasn't going to take her from her family. It didn't matter because in the end he was still her Kin and that made her well-being his concern. She wrinkled her nose up a little and shook her head, correcting the last part with: "Not my kin unless by blood. I haven't earned the Tribe yet, I'm just an intern in it." Further proof she was brought up as a human, calling herself a modern and human word like 'intern' rather than coming up with something more traditional and earthen.

The quiet that comes after is a heavy thing, sticky and still as the humid air outside. Her overgrown bangs had come loose from the elastic band in her hair, and she was dragging her fingers through them, brushing them out before tugging them back to tuck behind her ears. She's looking straight forward out the windshield again, and frowning with thought, but not poor temperament.

"The way I see it is there's already an ocean of what my folks don't know about me. Were you right about this, what you're thinking even if you're not coming out and saying it, it wouldn't be much different from when I'd come home at two in the morning trying not to make a sound, mopping up the blood after me as I went. Or when I got sick from the blood and had to pretend I was scared I was pregnant so they'd be more worried about that than looking into the fact that I was puking red."

Her scowl wrinkles up the skin between her eyebrows and at her forehead as well. She'd drifted off course with her train of thought and shook her head to reign it back in. "I go between the Church and the Caern. Anyway, you just barely rolled into town, and you don't feel like you'll be staying. Don't you have work and a home down south?"

[C.J. Nash] She's just an intern in it; as though the Get of Fenris in particular, the Nation in general, were some sort of government establishment, a non-profit organization who accepted volunteers rather than forcibly and even violently drafting its soldiers and support staff and not only awarded no benefits or credit but managed to separate its participants from the rest of society. Though he doesn't say it, Nash doesn't exactly have to come out with it and make it publicly known: if he had something back in Alabama that was keeping him cemented there, if he had family or tribe or responsibilities, they were not of greater importance to him than finding this rumored Cub that supposedly came about because of his juvenile indiscretion.

Men like him, who are self-assured and lugubriously witty and endowed with enough experience that they can easily adapt to whatever situation they find themselves traversing, somehow manage to be alone in the middle of a crowded room. He can be in the midst of talking to the most beautiful woman in the country and he would still be detached because a quick lay and a furtive kiss afterwards isn't fucking important to him.

That word enters the cab, and he fights back a smile. This girl is so young, yet her sense of humor is dry as a buzzard-picked bone.

Her gaze is cast through the bug-splattered window, some of the mess baked on from months out in a sun that beats hotter in the south, and Nash leans back against his side of the cab, stretching out his legs and looking to see if something has pinged on her radar. There are no shuffling Walking Dead coming their way, no grinning Fomori or polished Black Spiral Dancers. There's uncertainty, though, and to a Half Moon that doesn't mean anything other than the birth of more questions.

What she asks makes the weathered kinsman snort.

"Yeah," he says. "Work, at least, but that can come with me."

For the sake of having something to do with his hands that won't fill the cab with smoke, he reaches across the cab and pops the glove compartment. A "Scuse me, Squirt," precedes his invasion of her personal space, and he rummages a toothpick out of a small box of them before clapping the entire affair shut and sitting back again. The small sliver of wood goes between his teeth, and he picks up where he left off.

"If knowin' would make any sort of difference to you, they got a test--takes a strand of hair, tells you if you got the same genes as someone else."

[Gwen Sullivan] Yeah, he says, but that can come with me.

He leans across the cab of the truck to gain entry to the glove compartment, and Gwen presses back into her seat to give him ample room to do so, hands resting in her lap and elbows tucking back to keep out of his way. This wasn't the motion of someone bothered or repulsed by the person getting into their space so much as respect for that space to begin with. He didn't need to be bumping his head on her elbow, or getting too close to her torso or lap. She wasn't near comfortable enough with him for that. She wasn't that comfortable with many people at all, matter of fact.

A toothpick goes between his teeth, rolls with a twist of his tongue until it's comfortably wedged angled toward one corner of his mouth, and he mentions a DNA test. Like the stuff that they do on Jerry Springer, though she was fairly certain those ones were done with a swab to the cheek rather than hair. She lifted her eyebrows at him, tensed only a little at the shoulders.

Did she really want to know for certain? He seemed fairly sure, for reasons that he didn't relay too openly to her. Still, he spoke of being positive, if it wouldn't make any difference to her. She's watching him with pale eyes familiar to him and the mirror, like she's waiting for his next move. Then she relaxes, shoulders rounding down once more in time with her lengthy exhale through her nose.

"The greater difference would be in not knowing, if you ask me. From what I'm coming to understand, people born under my moon have a bit of a hard on for the truth." She lifted two fingers to scrub at the bruise on her forehead, frowning only a little under her own touch while she peers across the cab at him. "But don't we have Rites that can do this? Something other than a drugstore test?"

[C.J. Nash] For being as convinced as he seems to be, a challenge greater than convincing others of the veracity of his claims is holding back. If he truly wanted to, if he got it into his head that he possessed any right or entitlement to have it become known to anyone other than himself, Nash could be a persuasive son of a bitch. If he had taken longer to compile a case, if he had any plans or hopes to gain some sort of legal recognition of his paternity, that would have been how he approached Monica Sullivan Tuesday morning.

What he really wanted, from visiting Monica, was to learn if she was Kinfolk. What he had learned was that she was not, and when he walked out of there it was with the realization that she was right. Curtis was Gwen's father.

Curtis, however, knows fuck-all about how to sooth an injured werewolf. He doesn't know when to ask questions and when to just drive, probably doesn't know how to splint a broken bone or suture a laceration. The sight of his little girl vomiting, wracked with Wyrm infection or possessed, would drive him into a hysterical frenzy of his own. This is only the second time they've spoken, yet Nash is perceptive enough to have picked up the same word being uttered in defense of why Things Are The Way They are:

Mentor.

That is all Gwen has, so far as he can tell. Sometimes she stays at the Caern, sometimes she stays at the church, but she doesn't have a home because she doesn't have parents who have even the slightest inkling of understanding of what it is she faces when she goes out into the night by herself. He's gathered that, as well: she is by herself. Her mentor is a figurehead.

Yet he doesn't say that any more than he says he's fucking sure as shit that he's her biological father.

What she wants to know if there's a Rite, rather than some sort of human test, and he flicks his eyebrows in a shrug.

"I'll be damned if I know," he says. "They got Rites for everything. You figure Kora'd know?"

[Gwen Sullivan] Her Mentor was something of a figurehead, truth be told. Largely untouchable, she couldn't speak honestly with him most of the time because she was supposed to learn, not talk, and wolves learned by listening, watching, and doing, not flapping their jaws. That's how the Wolf taught the Cub. Granted she was learning from him, there was no lie about that. He was devoted to her as she was to him, he made sure that if he was doing something related to his Duties she was there to experience that.

But he also had other duties, ones to wolves in other areas, ones to his Pack, his Totem, things that she could not be there for. This distanced him, left her on her own a lot of the time, going to other Werewolves to stick to their sides for some time, to learn what they have to teach. It used to be Linus, but he's been absent. It was sometimes Simon, but she needed to know The Law and how to implement it, not how to kill things. She was already getting pretty good at that as it was, but she was a Philodox, not an Ahroun.

Fire Claws was a figurehead, but if you told Gwen that out loud she might put claws into you.

Wisely, Nash doesn't vocalize his thoughts, about her Mentor or her Dad. Rather, he shrugs about the Rite and asks if she thought Kora would know. Gwen's answer was a shrug as well, and she tugged at the hem of her shirt, making sure it rested securely over the waistband of her pants in front and in back, undoing the folds and wrinkles over a stomach that had been fit even before the change-- not muscled, not strong, but with little room for fat to cultivate.

"Perhaps. But I also think Kora has more to worry about than parentage. Linus would know...." But, but.... Another shrug, and she looks at fingernails that haven't been polished for some time now. "The test will work. My hair's been dyed a lot, though... Is it just the follicle that's needed?"

[C.J. Nash] That Kora has plenty more to worry about than parentage goes without saying. She's well into her third trimester already, she's down a Modi and a Godi after deaths and disappearances have laid waste to the Fenrir Trueborn populace, and this city is a goddamn war zone. So far as Nash has been able to tell, there are more fights for power than there are battles waged against the Wyrm going on, but nobody has asked him for his opinion on the political arena that is Chicago and he isn't exactly interested in involving himself in their affairs any more than is absolutely necessary, anyway.

Hell, he would have been perfectly content to just extend an offer of assistance to the girl sitting next to him in the cab, but he is the descendent of lawgivers. Maybe one day he'll tell Gwen about Sharp Eyes, the Forseti who was slight and nearly silent but saw mother-fucking everything and was swift in her descent to enact the rules that have been passed down for centuries.

Nash looks far more relaxed than he likely has to feel. No sane man ever takes well the news that he's somehow become a father without his knowing it, that the child in question has been raised by another male and that there isn't a damned thing he can do about it eighteen years after the fact, yet Nash seems to have a beleaguered acceptance of the crap that comes his way.

It comes from being born Kinfolk and possessing a Y chromosome.

"Strand's actually the sneaky way of doing it," he confesses. "Consenting adult such as yourself they'd rather have a cheek swab."

[Gwen Sullivan] "Then I suppose that would be the best route to take, all things considered."

The girl lifts her hands to her temples, drags her fingers through her hair repeatedly, brushing it back from her brow until it's falling in half-curved waves to frame either side of her face. It would only resemble Farrah Fawcett's famous locks for a short period of time before it was laying straight and flat once more. It was a rare thing that her hair was this clean, it was nice that it was cooperating in anything at all, that it wasn't making her feel like she really belonged out on the street. She was learning that the small things in life really were what she needed to enjoy the most, everything else was too easy to lose grip on.

There's a beat of quiet that passes through the cab, and Gwen lets it linger there for a moment before turning the tables about, inquiring Nash about his wellbeing rather than having him be concerned with hers.

"Where are you staying? If you're sticking around, you shouldn't be in a crummy motel the whole time, there's better places and I know there are other Kin that can help at least point you in the right direction."

This says something, either how her relationship with her parents has been her whole life or how it's going to take a long time to view Nash as a parental figure at all. She's still behaving like she needs to look out for him, and it's a far cry from going the opposite way.

[C.J. Nash] For a brief moment, his gaze turns a strange blend of thoughtful and concerned, as though the fact that this girl is asking a grown man what he's doing to take care of himself is more worrisome than that bruise on her forehead, or the fact that even if it turns out that they do share DNA that it doesn't mean a damned thing beyond the bounds of the Nation.

She's eighteen years old, and he's already stated he has no designs or desire to take her away from her parents. All this will mean is that, by birth, she is Fenrir.

Which, really, if we're talking in terms of who will be responsible for her actions, still means nothing. Until she completes her Rite of Passage, her mentor takes the blame for anything she does. After that, it's on her, or perhaps her Alpha. Parents, Kinfolk or not, mean very little in this society.

Yet her asking at all seems to be filed away. Nash considers this, then switches the toothpick to the other side of his mouth.

"Right now I'm in a motel across the street from Grant Park. Been holdin' out on finding something more permanent until I--" Until he knew, basically, until he knew one way or the other, but he doesn't say that. He clears his throat to cover up the hitch. "Until I knew how much space I needed. Phone number on the card I gave you still works, though."

A beat, and he laughs, the sound dusty and dry as a back road.

"The hell you worryin' about where I'm staying for, anyway?"

[Gwen Sullivan] His laugh is dry and cracked sounding, but it doesn't catch any sidelong glances from the Cub. She didn't have a lot to compare it against, sad though that might sound. It wasn't that she lived an unhappy or underprivileged life, it wasn't that Monica and Curtis and Caleb didn't all laugh and smile. It had just become an uncommon sound upon joining the society of Werewolves and Monsters, and it wasn't something that she paid a whole hell of a lot of attention to anyways.

His mention of the card is answered with a nod. She had it clipped together with a few other essential documents she'd swindled out of her parents house when she left, tucked in a plastic bag and stashed away at the Church in a napsack of clothes and other miscellaneous things she claimed to be her own. His phone number worked, she could get a hold of him if she ever needed or wanted to do so. The need is protocol, the want is implied.

As for why she worried...

"Because you're Kin, and whether you're mine or someone else's that means I've got to make sure you're doing okay." It was the same reason she's seen Cordelia home on more than one occasion, why she once led a train of three kinfolk along the streets and made sure each and every one of them made it home safely. Their breeding made her head feel light and dizzy and her stomach a little uncomfortable, but she treated it like too-strong perfume on an aunt you only saw once a hear and tolerated it for the sake of doing what was right.

Her hand went for the truck handle after another glance out the windshield-- this one stuck, her eyes glued to the window of a building up the street. She'd spied something with those eagle eyes of hers. She didn't leap wordlessly from the truck to pursue it, however, which suggested that whatever she'd seen she wasn't sure of, or she wasn't worried by. Likely the former, she was too inexperienced to properly gauge what was worth worrying about or not. "Get the test and let me know, okay? I'd like to know the truth myself. I'm not hard to find-- you found me tonight you can find me tomorrow just as easy I'm sure."

[C.J. Nash] "Whoa, hold up, there, niña."

She's about to duck out of the vehicle without giving him anything to take to the lab to be tested. Given that he'd said the sneaky way to do it was to provide a hair sample, and human beings shed a significant amount of hair, skin and God knows what else over the course of the day, he could have made do with what was left behind after Gwen raked her hands through her hair. The girl has dark hair, darker now that she's chemically treated it, but she's right: the dye has stripped it. It'd be harder to work with, would take longer.

So Gwen starts to leave, and Nash reaches across the cab to pop open the glove compartment a second time. Thus, an explanation for the toothpicks is revealed. It's not to curb nicotine cravings: it's to collect tissue samples.

He hands a fresh one to her, and demonstrates how to get what the technicians need for a sample. Both toothpicks are dropped in separate small baggies and labeled with a Sharpie before being stuffed back into the glove box.

"I'll find you," he tells her.

There's no hug, no pleas for her to be safe, no assurances that the news he'll have will be good. All he does is tip her a two-fingered salute, and wait until she's disappeared from sight before he lights a cigarette, starts the engine, and drives off.

What I Wanna Know [ST'd by Me: Nash]

[Monica Sullivan] Ring ring.... ring ring.... ring-
"Hello?"
"Hey, is this...--" Papers rustle, "Monica Sullivan?"
"This is her."
"Hey, this is Carroll Nash."
"Carroll..." A pause, brief, then: "Oh Jesus Fuck."
Click.

----------------

The following day, around eleven in the morning or so, give or take, the clouds clogged the sky as effectively as lunch hour traffic did the main highways in the belly of the city. Carroll had gotten all that he'd needed from that phone call, enough to warrant looking further into the name he'd found on one of many birth certificates. The address had been easy enough to find, Mr. Sullivan left his name in the white pages for the sake of customers that might be trying to find him-- he was never one to turn away a potential lucrative sale after all. That's probably where the nice house that Nash finds himself in front of comes from, that salesman's drive.

The neighborhood's a nice one, residential and tucked away at the northwestern edge of the city sprawl, where yards became a little more than just an alley and a back step and trees did a better job of lining the streets. The house with the number that matches what he was looking for is a pretty thing to look at even in the dreary wet and cold of Winter and Spring's meeting point-- one story tall but large anyways, with dark green siding and darker still shutters at the windows. A two car garage, windchimes hanging off the awning of the front porch, and a basketball hoop in the driveway. It was the perfect suburban home, a great place for a family to be raised.

The blinds were open, curtains drawn back to let the (albeit dim) natural light into the home, though the house's layout didn't allow full view into the house from that point, only the front sitting room. Who he was looking for was likely home, who he wanted to avoid probably wasn't. All he had to do was knock to find out.

[Carroll Nash] If he sits here too much longer in this battered blue truck that's older than the girl whose mere existence has brought him here in the first place, the engine idling because he's too chicken shit to take the key out of the ignition and walk up to the fucking door, then the neighbors are going to notice. There isn't a shred of sunlight today, nothing more than a pale gray haze over the world, which means he isn't wearing sunglasses.

He has a memorable face without them, hard lines and humored green eyes making him an easy target for people who try to dredge up details. Cutting his hair doesn't do a goddamn thing; the length of it, down to his scruffy jaw, makes it easier to lop it all off and hide. Somehow he looks younger with short hair.

When they'd met, that's how he'd worn it: short. It was little more than a dusting of blond on his scalp; there were no lines on his face but his eyes had hardened by the time he enlisted, let alone by the time he'd hit nineteen. Time and maturity has rubbed away some of the rougher edges in his gaze but the rest of him has been tempered.

All he'd have to do is just drive off, get on the freeway, and go back to Alabama. The lifestyle her parents have granted her isn't one he can meet, let alone exceed; and how is he supposed to explain how it is her parents are only half right, anyway? The illusion in which they've existed for nineteen years, maintained, would be worth just leaving. It would be easier than breathing, and yet he can't bring himself to do it. He's been holding his breath for almost a minute.

Rope-veined hand kills the engine, and he steps out of the truck.

Maybe she sees him coming. It's been twenty-four hours since her phone rang, and with every step he takes Nash is trying desperately to remember her face, the color of her hair, trying to parse out some detail he'd read in Gwen's bones. He's dressed conservatively, dress shoes and shirt and clean dark jeans, suit jacket instead of leather; no tie. Left the tie at the motel. Loaded holster's under the passenger seat and he feels naked without it.

This isn't a case for which he's been hired, or paid, yet his badge is on his hip anyway. It eliminates the question of how the hell he managed to find her.

Deep breath. One more. Knock on the fucking door. Knock--

Rap, rap, rap, rap.

[Monica Sullivan] The thing that dragged Carroll Nash to this city, the child whom he was made aware of by spirit speakers speaking their vague tongues-- giving him nothing to go off of but a city and a prophecy, had a handful of uncanny talents that set her apart from the rest of the crowd. They did not lie in strength of muscle or deftness of limb, she was not built to be a warrior any more than the natural weapons that Gaia had gifted all of her children with. No, one of the few talents that stood out was her memory. She could recall the most vivid details of every day she's lived if she sat and thought about it long enough. Every face was recalled forevermore, with name attached and all.

This was not genetic. Monica was not able to peek through the window and immediately recognize the man standing at her door. He looked like he might be trying to sell something, be it a vacuum or a religion. That or like he was about to take somebody out on a date. The neighborhood was nice, Monica had grown comfortable here, comfortable enough to open the door without feeling the need to have a weapon in her hand behind her back while doing so.

She's got rich brown hair that's thick and long, in half-curled waves that fall around her face and rest on her shoulders. Her eyes have a sleepy, hooded quality to them and are dark brown, she looks like she's in her late thirties but according to her license she's forty-two. The only make-up she wears is a hasty brush of mascara to her eyelashes, the rest is left in natural tones of brown and cream. She's dressed in a gray babydoll T-shirt and a pair of dark jeans and looks surprised but polite enough to greet Nash on her doorstep. Paranoia does not register on her face.

"Yes?"

[Carroll Nash] He was not expecting this woman.

Perhaps he had been anticipating a homely, sad sack of a housewife, her days wasted in front of the television with an overflowing ashtray and a bottomless martini glass, never leaving her bathrobe or tending to her physical appearance. All Gwen had said is that her parents didn't know what she was up to, that it was no concern of theirs what it was she was doing out on the street at night with no one looking out for her; she hadn't said anything about what they were like, what they knew about her.

Before he remembers how Monica looked back then, the name Curtis flashes into his cognition. It had been right on the damn birth certificate but he hadn't been looking at the fathers of these girls whose information he was scavenging in search of some nugget of truth.

He looks so very little like the teenager he had been in the early 1990s. There isn't a sane mind in this land who would expect her to remember the face of a man who had been, in the collective consciousness, a boy then. Monica was mature, had a husband and a son and a life when they met.

All he had had was a trail of bullshit that he fed women to keep them from finding out who he was. Back then he went by 'Carroll' because he looked young enough that it was fitting; he hasn't gone by 'Carroll' in over a decade.

He looks as though he's rapidly approaching her age, though, while she barely seems to have moved.

"Missus Sullivan?" he asks, and that goddamn drawl, that lazy Alabama sleepwalk, might trip her alarms before anything else does.

[Monica Sullivan] Monica has moved, but in small ways that aren't obvious in the least. She was pretty as a twenty-something, with those dark sleepy eyes and crooked smile that made her seem a little high and a lot amused all of the time. She wasn't showing hard wrinkles yet, but her skin wasn't quite as smooth and bright with life as it had been then. She remained hard at the core, but softer at the breasts hips and thighs now. She was more womanly, a second child had solidified that and nearly two decades had let it seem more a part of her than baby weight on a once-scrawny girl.

She wasn't ever the brightest mind available, she didn't get every joke told or understand all the underlying humor in the movies she saw. It took her a minute to catch up with fast-paced debate, but she typically got there in the end. Slow didn't always mean stupid, after all. The Alabama drawl was matched with the voice that had shocked her hard yesterday, the name matched from there, and only then does she recognize the vague shape of features that had matured and changed so greatly since then, the green eyes and the blond hair, they land a place in her memory and have her eyes flying wide.

The hand that lingered on the front door tightened, arm flexed. Her initial response was to slam the door in his face, but a chirp in the back of her mind prevented it. He'd stand there and knock again, ring the doorbell, maybe even loiter until she grew nervous that Curtis would be home and see him. It'd be faster and better to see him off herself and make sure she saw the shitty blue truck against the curb drive away with her own eyes.

"Christ," she hissed and glanced hastily up and down the street, apparently worried that someone would see him and gossip (though she certainly didn't look like she'd joined a neighborhood knitting circle, the girl he remembers never would have). "What do you want? Can't you take a hint?"

[Carroll Nash] "Apparently not."

There isn't anything funny about the situation. The kid she'd met nearly two decades ago didn't have much of a sense of humor. He didn't smile frequently, seemed keyed-up and nervous until he got a few beers in him, until he got to know the other person well enough that he could stop gritting his teeth and relax. His Navy buddies knew he was a wild man at heart, that he could be cajoled into doing some legitimate daredevil shit if he got drunk enough, and he wouldn't turn down a shot if they just kept pushing them at him.

This man, whoever the hell he is, has laugh lines around his eyes. He hasn't shaved his face all weekend, it looks like, and despite the fact that he's four or five years younger than she is, he already has white whiskers speckled in amongst the dark blond. His sarcasm is almost gentle, were not for the fact that he's no more thrilled about this reunion than she is.

That antiquated vehicle on the opposite curb has Alabama plates. He's a long fucking way from home.

As much as he wants to hold them behind his back the way he always did when he wound up standing still, or plunge them into his pockets to affect nonchalance, Nash's hands remain dangling at his side.

"I don't know about you, but I'm not a big fan'a neighbors knowin' my business. I'm here about Gwen." He should pause for longer than two seconds to give her a chance to digest, but he doesn't. "Now, the way I see it, either we can do this the easy way and talk inside where there ain't nobody listenin' in, or I can walk on outta here and find out what I wanna know the hard way."

[Monica Sullivan] There's a fair bit of Monica in Gwen. The hard stare that she sets him with is something that her daughter had inherited from her. Granted, now, Gwen's has a lot more push behind it because of what she was. Still, Monica's eyes did not waver an inch from Carroll's face, she didn't even blink she was so obstinately opposed to what she was hearing, to the very idea of letting him inside of her home.

"Fuck," she finally relents.

The door is held open still, and she steps back to allow the man enough room to step inside. He'll enter into a sitting room, squared away from the rest of the house with a narrow hall leading through an open door frame back into what is likely the kitchen, judging by the small glimpse that he can catch through the doorway. The walls are painted a dark taupe, the carpet is recently vacuumed and cream. There's a couch against the wall, two chairs and a coffee table. A stout little tuxedo cat is half-asleep in one of the chairs, eyeballing Nash lazily, curious but not nearly enough to actually get up.

Monica will close the door behind him, but not offer him a seat or a drink like a proper hostess might. Eighteen years ago she had been brash and to-the-point, more than happy to throw back drink after drink with him and challenge him for more. She was rough, she'd worn leather pants and a band T-shirt and cussed like the sailors in the bar she was sleazing about. She'd grown up some, but that way of speech hadn't changed at all.

"You've got nothing to do with Gwen, and there's no way in fucking hell you're going to try and come back off the boat and try and convince yourself that's different." There's no 'you're too late', no indication that she's bitter about him leaving, mad that he didn't stick around at all. More than anything she's anxious about him making complications. She wants him out and gone and never heard from again, and it shows in the tension in her shoulders and the scowl that adds an extra five years to her face.

[Carroll Nash] There was never any entitlement in him. He had hardly been a virgin when she took him to bed that night, or the night after that, or the night after that, yet Carroll hadn't been the sort of man who thought that there was anything in this world that he could simply take. That she was married was not something he disregarded so flagrantly as any one of his buddies might have.

To talk to him at the time, the entirety of his worth hinged on what he could do for other people. Rarely did he speak of what he was doing in the Navy in terms of what he was going to get out of it. His patriotism was almost painful, considering the fact that his peers were in it to dodge careers in the private sector, or to get out of inheriting a family business, or to chase a sense of adventure that wasn't exactly prominent in the Navy's law enforcement. He thought he would spend the rest of his damn life in the service.

He thought a lot of things back then.

Monica steps back to begrudgingly allow him in, and not much emotion comes across his face. This is not funny. His own livelihood and peace of mind, his familial security, are not at risk here. If he wasn't aware, though, if he didn't know damn well what life was like for a Trueborn whose parents were uneducated or unaware, he would not be here right now.

The wild woman he had known all those years ago has grown up. He cannot remember if she was this protective back then. All he knows is that she was, if not damaged, at least bruised and numbing the hurt of it with the whiskey that made his head swim and the rest of him last longer in bed than he would have otherwise.

Time and sobriety have thinned him out, eaten away at his baby fat.

She doesn't invite him to sit, doesn't offer him a drink, and he doesn't move any further into the house than is absolutely necessary. Now, finally, his hands go into the pockets of his suit jacket; it's as if he's sheathing weapons, trying to make himself seem less dangerous than he is well aware he looks. In adulthood, even without speaking, he is nearly magnetic. All he'd have to do is crack a smile or a joke, say the right thing, and Monica would find herself thrown off.

"Darlin'," he says, in that throwaway fashion the South perfected centuries ago, "so far as the great state of Illinois is concerned, you are absolutely right. I got nothin' to do with Gwen." Another barely-there pause. "You got any idea what your daughter's been up to lately?"

[Monica Sullivan] Monica's sniff is indignant, not nearly the same thing that it would be in a True, or possibly even in some of the more feral Kin. She isn't catching his scent, noting the soap or cologne or lack of either of those about him. She's just upset that he's here, resistant to the core, and clearly impatient with his questions. This shows in the snap of her words when she answers him.

"She's being a young adult and getting her crazy out of her bones. She's got her diploma so she kept her deal on that. We've all been that age before, and if I don't let her get out then she'll find a way out on her own and resent me in the process." That hard gaze hasn't budged an inch, her eyebrows (unpenciled, lighter than he recalls) furrowed down over hooded eyes in a persistent frown. Her arms have folded over her chest, manicured nails tapping impatiently at arms kept firm with a gym membership.

"My daughter's smart-- a lot smarter than I was. She's got a good head on her shoulders, she's doing fine and she drops in for dinner to let me know so."

Her lips twist in a sneer now. There it is, that roughness. As it turns out stripes don't change much, just the weeds they blended into.

"Now cut to the fucking chase. What business is it of yours? She's Curtis's."

[Carroll Nash] She keeps insisting on this. In the handful of sentences he has offered her, Monica has filled in the gaps and come up with the only plausible reason that he could be bothering her after all this time: he's somehow got it into his head that the eighteen-year-old who is scarcely a presence in their lives anymore is his. Not once has Nash said anything of the sort, but neither is he denying it, either.

That, there, is confirmation enough that that is why he's here. He hasn't come out and said what the fuck he wants despite having been asked more than once. Perhaps he's looking for a sign, something to tell him that his suspicions are wrong, that Monica and Curtis have a clue what it is their daughter is, what's happened to her.

His eyes are on her face, the same green-gray color they've always been, nothing like her husband's. If he didn't understand what Till Death Do Us Part meant back in 1991, Nash has a far goddamn better idea now. It's the rest of it he has trouble with.

It isn't patience, necessarily, or waiting that has Carroll watching her face as Monica goes on, at length, about what it is Gwen is doing with herself at night. A brief flicker of respect, admiration, something crosses his features when Monica tells him the girl got her diploma, the only thing keeping it from being brushed aside so quickly being the fact that the girl is a Half Moon.

His mother was a Half Moon.
They are the greatest liars of all the auspices, and yet they choose not to do it.

Maybe he was actually going to talk about this diplomatically. Maybe he's about to get his ass kicked on out of here. Nash lifts his eyebrows, briefly, gaze as gentle as it's going to get.

"You sure about that?" he asks. "What color are her eyes, Monica?"

[Monica Sullivan] Nash asks her what color her daughter's eyes are, and Monica's-- resolutely brown and unmistakable as anything else, narrow. In the fistful of days, almost able to be called two weeks that the pair had courted one another (if you could call it that), Nash had seen her get into a bar fight once. It was impossible to remember what it was about, something drunken and misunderstood, and she'd hauled off and cracked her fist into some civilian's throat. Now he couldn't be sure if that violence had only bubbled up because she was drunk, because she was young, or if there was a chance that she might repeat the maneuver onto him today.

He finds out that the latter isn't something to be concerned about. She's learned restraint or she respects the life she and her husband had worked for too much to diminish it with an assault charge on a ghost from the past. Rather than striking him, or screaming at him to get out, she rather coolly informs him: "You ever hear of a recessive trait, jackass?"

The sneer had traveled from her lips to crinkle up her nose and pinch the corners of her eyes. She's nodding her head and gesturing with one french-manicured fingertip both toward the door.

"You've overstayed your welcome, Carroll. It's time to move along, before Curtis comes home."

[Carroll Nash] Even as a teenager, young and idealistic and more than a little damaged though the details of what dinged him up so bad were lost to sobriety after a night or five of heavy drinking before the ravages of time got anywhere near them, he hadn't thought anything would come of a leather-wearing, whiskey-drinking, tattoo-bearing older woman showing an interest in him. He had scars on his body even back then, but she hadn't dug for stories; there was a tattoo on the inside of his upper right arm that looked like something a wild animal would claw into tree bark to mark its territory.

He told people it was Gaelic for 'Fuck Off.'

The memory of that fight had drifted away just as soon as they'd got back on that ship and headed out for what would end up being a two-year tour. Not for one second did he think he was going to desert the Navy for her; not for one second did he think she would leave the man she told stories about when the right song came on the jukebox.

At the time he was already a father. A two-year-old in Dauphin Island, Alabama was born with dark eyes and cornsilk hair. That child isn't alive anymore, but he doesn't know that. He suspects. The child underwent the Baptism of Fire before Nash went off to Illinois to begin boot camp, and he didn't think he'd leave another one behind to die.

If you ask just about anyone, Carroll James Nash does a lot of shit without thinking.

That said, he is a bit more forceful now than he was nineteen years ago. Monica sneers, Nash smirks, and the insinuation that he ought to get his scrawny ass on out of here before the girl's real father gets home isn't lost on him. He just chooses to ignore it.

Hefting up the right sleeve of his suit jacket, he perfunctorily eyes the face of his watch as he says, "If Curtis is home this early I think you got bigger problems'n me overstaying my welcome."

Sleeve is shucked back down, and he takes a step toward the door anyway.

"I ain't tryin' to take her from y'all." He takes another step back. "I sure as shit ain't tryin' to replace Curtis." And another; he illustrates the next sentence by pointing out the window into the world. "But that girl is out there doin' shit I couldn't even begin to tell you about, and she can't even talk to her goddamn parents." His hand disappears behind his back to retrieve his wallet. "I saw her birth certificate, Monica, either you broke the Guinness record for overdue deliveries or that ain't no goddamn recessive trait."

A nondescript business card is dropped on the table, and he doesn't say anything else before he turns to grab the door and let himself out.

[Monica Sullivan] Were this a dozen or so years back, Monica may well have chased Nash out of her home brandishing the lamp on the table at the corner of the room, or with a broom or pan or her fists alone. There would have been hollering and screaming where sentences would be lost to a string of cuss words. It would be dramatic, violent, senseless and something that the police would be called over.

But now Monica had two children, one an adult and the other thrust into a world where she had to be whether she was ready or not. She was at a stage where she was hassling her twenty-something son about whether she would get grandbabies before she gave up dying over the gray in her hair, where she decorated her house and had nice quiet dinners with her husband and thought up excellent vacations for an upcoming twentieth anniversary. She didn't want the hysteria or the dramatics. She didn't want the neighbors to call and to have police show up at her home because of disturbing the peace.

Instead she just held her teeth clenched hard when he spoke of Gwen as though he knew more about her own child than she did and shot daggers into his front and back both as he made for the door and dropped a card on the table, on top of a stack of paper advertisements for supermarkets and big box stores alike. Her arms are wrapped tightly over her chest and her blood pressure has spiked, she's having a rough time sorting her thoughts quickly enough for a snappy retort so she's opting for seething, searing silence instead.

The 'get out' was unspoken and as present in the room as the furniture was, and he was on his way out anyways. That's all she needed. She'd dispose of the evidence that he'd dropped by at all once she'd watched the blue Ford Ranger rumble away from the front window.