hospitality.

[Robbie Murdoch] It's late at night, an hour at which working folks are starting to think about bed, when Liadan's doorbell rings. She isn't expecting anyone.

[Liadan Whelan] Luckily for her late night caller, Lee is home. Her laptop is open on her dining table, at the moment filling the room with the sounds of Phoenix. The buzzing sound of her intercom cuts across the music, and she sits up. Looks at the thing on the wall as if an answer might actually be found there.

It's too late for anyone she knows to be showing up on her doorstep. There are no Garou she knows in the city who would be here, either. There is no reason for anyone to be disturbing her now.

Luckily for Lee, Eugenie Terrace is controlled access. One needs a key to get into the building, needs to pass by a security desk to the elevators before getting to the apartments. If they don't have a key, they have to buzz. Shortly after the intercom sounds, it crackles to life at the ground floor.

"Hello?"

[Robbie Murdoch] There's no answer on the intercom.

Then her doorbell rings again. And it is, in fact, her doorbell. Either her late night visitor lives down the hall and wants to borrow a pinch of salt, or else he bribed the doorman. Or maybe got past him entirely. Maybe the doorman's downstairs bleeding unconscious, for all Liadan knows. No reason why she should think like that, though, paranoid, uneasy about the stranger outside, except --

Well. If she knew, she'd call it Rage. More likely she can't put her finger on it, and so it feels more like premonition, instincts, the sort of survival skills that keeps a girl alive this day and age. A moment later there's a low masculine cough outside, muffled through the door, and then a rap of knuckles on wood.

"Liadan Whelan?" It should be noted: he doesn't pronounce it right. That voice isn't English or Irish or any such thing; it's blandly american, though the vowels are longish, flattish, just a touch of working-class New England. "Family gave me ya address."

[Liadan Whelan] She doesn't recognize that feeling as anything other than wariness. Líadan doesn't think Taggart, or Madoc, or any of the other high rage Garou she's met in the past year. Or low rage, for that matter. All she knows, when she gets close to the door to depress the button of her intercom system and there's nothing but the sound of the neighborhood at night, is that she doesn't want to open that door. At all costs, that door needs to stay closed. Maybe someone else's visitor got it wrong. Maybe the doorman slapped his hand against the switchboard, fell back to the concrete when his strength gave out.

A knock at the door, an unfamiliar voice with an unfamiliar accent. Her name isn't even shortened to the easier to pronounce nickname. It's just flat out butchered. Which means this person is a total stranger. He is not a friend or a client, he isn't anyone she would possibly know.

"Yeah?" she calls through the door. "Why would they do that?"

[Robbie Murdoch] "Because we're Family."

Just a touch of impatience there. Like he's stating the obvious now. And the capital F is almost audible. Maybe he's the goddamn boston irish mob. Or maybe --

"Will you offer me the hospitality of ya home, Liadan Whelan?" A beat. "Or at least open the fuckin' door so I can look you in the eye when I talk to ya?"

-- or maybe he's something else altogether.

[Liadan Whelan] She's heard it before. She's used the word herself to covertly discern if strangers are part of the invisible network of others, people associated with the Nation. Of course, once she found out she sent them on to The Brotherhood of Thieves, which can almost been seen from Líadan's balcony. They've never come out of nowhere, showed up on her doorstep unannounced and without warning, demanding hospitality. That, she's usually able to give freely, knowingly, willingly.

Every instinct in her body is telling her to leave that door closed. Just because he's Family doesn't mean he's safe, or that he can be trusted. She was supposed to be able to trust Nate, and now he's not allowed in this building anymore. Or wasn't.

Still, she knows the door is just wood and metal, and that there are things in the world that can splint that apart like particle board. At least he knocked, rather than popping across the Gauntlet directly into her apartment.

He can hear the sound of locks and bolts sliding open, and when the door opens there she is. At two inches under six feet tall on her bare feet, dressed in a green t-shirt and a pair of black cotton jersey shorts, her red hair twisted up and held in place with a pen, she looks like she's been settled in for the night for some time. The sense of her breeding intensifies when the door is opened. It feels like strong warrior ancestors, the promise of a large family of True Born cubs. It brings to mind green fields and great cliffs dropping sharply away into the grey grey sea.

For all of a second, her dark eyes are narrowed, suspicious behind black-rimmed glasses. Then she steps back, opens the door wider, making room for the monster.

"C'mon in."

[Robbie Murdoch] The monster, which is what he is, is perhaps less intimidating when she can see him than when he exists only as a faintly rasping voice and a dull throb of rage.

He's tall. She can see that immediately, because she has to look up at him. Even slouching a little as he is, he's a good four inches taller than Liadan, who's a tall woman in her own right -- but he's lean too, lanky. Everything about him is long. Long limbs. Long wrists. Long fingers. Long face, long nose. A jaw that would square if he clenched his teeth, but he doesn't clench his teeth or bare them at his kin.

There's a backpack on his bag. Big, a hiker's pack. The sort of thing you'd backpack across europe in. He looks like he might've done that. He looks like he might've just come back from backpacking across europe. With his two feet. He's dusty, a little dirty, worn, and he smells like the sweat of the day. It's eighty degrees outside still.

While she's taking this in, he's looking at her. Then he moves, straightening, stepping in at her invitation. And no. He's not less intimidating like this. Rage rolls out in front of him, dynamic, unstable. A man this tall, this lanky, should be graceless and gawky. All elbows and knees. He's not. He moves with a rangy, cagey ease, his weight settling liquidly from foot to foot. His eyes are a pale, glassy grey, a touch of green there; and his eyes are everywhere at once. He looks around the room he can see as though to memorize it, to know its dimensions and its plan, to be able to recite it from memory should he need to.

Then he reaches up and tugs the backpack up over his head. Off. Drops it at his feet and unzips the small pocket in the front. When he moves, the bones of his wrists roll under his skin, which is fair, a little sunburnt, not very tanned at all. The tendons in the back of his hands shift.

He pulls out a rumpled scrap of fabric. A handkerchief, or rather, simply a 'kerchief in traditional cowboy paisley-red. He hands it to her, and there's something inside, hard, a lump.

"A gift for the lady of the manor," he says, curiously formal and offhanded at once, "in return for ya hospitality."

[Liadan Whelan] Lee has to tilt her head up to look at his face, dark eyes meeting pale. Looking up at that face, the fair, slightly sunburned skin, she can almost guess that when he says Family he doesn't mean it in the general sense. Even Bone Gnawers, Shadow Lords, and Black Furies are family in a sense. He doesn't sound like he started in Ireland, or Scotland, or wherever the Fianna start their journeys. Then again, neither does she. He can't quite tell from just the few words she's said, but her voice is rather flat. She speaks with the unlilting drawl of the Midwest.

For that first moment, they study each other. Lee looks him over, one pass of her dark eyes down and back up, appraising his height, his figure, the structure of his face. She looks him over with all the sexual interest with which one might study Van Gogh's Sunflowers or Monet's Impression, Sunrise. Which is to say, none whatsoever.

Despite the presence of a shoe rack by the door, Lee doesn't command the stranger to remove his boots before passing beyond the linoleum of the entryway. That could be implied. She won't turn her nose up or glare daggers if he keeps his shoes on, however. From the door he can see into the dining area, the hard wood floor, the round table and chairs there, Lee's laptop opened over a messy swirl of photographs. If he wants to see more, he'll have to venture further in.

"You can leave your--what?" she says, and asks, abruptly. She looks at the kerchief, looks up at his face briefly, and back down again. "For me?" she asks, holding out both hands to accept, unable to hide a glimmer of delight, mingled strangely with a shadow of doubt.

[Robbie Murdoch] "Isn't that what I just said?" There it is again, that flicker of impatience, as though she kept questioning the obvious. "Take it, it's yours."

A touch of that New England drawl there too -- yours pulled out a little longer and flatter than it needs to be.

It's held there, the lump of whats-it in the broad palm of his outstretched hand, proffered to her until she takes it. When she does his hand drops to his side and he drops down to dig around his bag. Crouching like that, his balance on the balls of his feet and his knees apart, head down, he seems all angles and joints and long bones. Zippers hiss open and shut. Things accumulate on the floor beside him. A different man, someone more human or perhaps simply more polite, would wait until a genuine invitation before ...

well. Unpacking. Like he means to stay the night. Or longer.

A faded washcloth, air-dried and stiff, lands on the floor. Then a plastic folding toothbrush. A chipped plastic mug. A bar of soap wrapped in cellophane. A t-shirt worn thin from washing, and a pair of jeans, and whatever's left in his bag now sounds loose and rattling, as though all the substance had already been emptied out of it. Like he travels light, moves swift.

He shoulders the bag again. Another man, politer, would leave it somewhere too instead of keeping it with him like he's afraid she'll snoop or steal. It's not really that, though Liadan couldn't know the difference. He's just used to its weight on his back. He picks up his clothes too, easily gripped in his long-fingered hand.

"I'd like to take a shower," he says. "Will ya show me to your bathroom?"

[Liadan Whelan] She hears the impatience in his voice, and she blinks. Her face is too pale to hide the embarrassed flush of her cheeks. She can't even hide it behind a curtain of red hair, not when it's pulled back from her face. By god does she try, though. The tall kinswoman blinks her dark eyes and turns her head away, the rest of her body following the movement a second later.

Eugenie Terrace is a luxury apartment building rising above the poverty and crime of this particular neighborhood. Lee's apartment is filled with nice, quality furniture. She's a healthy grown woman, tall and slim without being skinny, curvaceous without being rounded. Anyone with eyes can look around her home and know that whatever she does for a living, she's paid well for it. Yet she reacts as if she's never received a gift before, like she's not used to small kindnesses to repay her hospitality.

The stranger starts unpacking in her entryway. While he's digging out his belongings. Lee's already embarrassed herself once. She refrains from unwrapping it where he can see her for now.

If she thinks there's something rude, or impolite about the way he's simply making himself at home without even giving her his name, Lee says nothing. She leans over the laptop, closes out a program and slides the device closed. Beyond the entry way, he can see that the apartment is cluttered with clothing and papers. He can't know it, but it's not as bad as it could be, hasn't been left to gather and collect until the weekend when the woman herself can't stand it anymore and cleans everything up. It's not dirty, there's just stuff. Everywhere.

He'd like a shower. Lee stands near her dining table, hands hanging awkwardly at her sides. She wishes she had pockets to put her hands in.

"It's through here," she says, and without stepping away from where she stands, she gestures to a door that leads into, of all places, a closet. There are clothes piled on the floor in there, too, here and there. Shirts and jeans, khakis, shoes tossed haphazardly to the side. There are shelves with shoes and hats and things. To the left, beside the washer and dryer, is the door to her bedroom.

"Towels are under the sink."

[Robbie Murdoch] He's the one barging into her home utterly unannounced. At 11pm. On a weeknight. Dirty, rumpled, dusty. Crackling with rage and a surprising, flickering impatience. He's the one clashing with her nice furniture, her expensive things, her decorations and decor and high-price lifestyle, coming in (almost) completely uninvited. Most women would be throwing a fit. Most kinswomen in this city, even, would be throwing a fit.

She's just awkward. And embarrassed -- by her ignorance of his strange, quasitraditional customs, or maybe by the state of her place. Not like she had a chance to clean up. He couldn't even ring the intercom like a proper random-boarder. He had to come right in and stare at the clutter. Though, for what it's worth, he doesn't seem to care.

The stranger shifts the backpack on his shoulders. There's still stuff in there, the assorted paraphernalia of an unknown traveler, and it thumps and clunks around a bit. She gestures toward the door and move people would just glance and nod, but he looks. He follows her hand and he observes, considers, nods.

Then she offers towels, and he looks at her with some surprise. "I got one already," he says. She can see that. He means the stiff little scrap of terrycloth in his hand. A beat. Then, "Thank ya."

He didn't take his shoes off. He crosses her living room and transverses the laundry room, not looking into her bedroom once though he'd given the living room every ounce of attention. The bathroom light flicks on -- the heat lamp first, which turns off a second later. The normal one, then. The door taps shut.

She can hear his pack whumpfing down, some carabiner or zipper or strap clacking against the wall. His filthy clothes hit the floor, too, and then the shower curtain rattles back and the water turns on.


The guest-gift, as it turns out, is a wafer of wood carved into a celtic knot. Not a particularly complex one -- just a few rings and interlocking arcs. Strange gift.


He's in her bathroom for maybe ten minutes. It only takes him five or six to shower. He doesn't help himself to her soaps and shampoos and lotions; all she'll smell wafting out is whatever cheap bar of lye he's using. Small wonder his hair, dark russet as it is, looks scuffed and tousled and haphazard. Small wonder he's sunburnt. After the water turns off he's in there a little longer, though. It's quiet. Once or twice the sink runs. Then he comes out, and he's changed into the clothes he pulled out of his bag -- a fresh, but nowhere near new pair of sturdy jeans, the sort of working-class thing you'd want to call dungarees. A t-shirt has replaced the more rugged button-up he showed up in. His shoulders are broad but he's all sinew and bone, hips and waist narrow, chest lean. He's dripping onto the shoulders of his shirt, and there are damp spots on his back, on his stomach.

"My name's Robbie Murdoch." This is a random, untrumpeted announcement. "I'm a Galliard." He looks around; if she's still holding the guest-gift, he nods at it. Otherwise he nods in the vague direction of ... whatever. "That kin-fetch'll come find me if ya break it," he says. There's something matter of fact about this, as though he expected her to know it was a kin-fetch on sight. As though he expected her to know what the hell a kin-fetch was. "You help me, I help you. It's fair."

[Liadan Whelan] She waits until she hears the bathroom door snick closed. Then she steps to the table to unwrap the guest-gift. It's not terribly complex, isn't a fantastic work of art that looks like it belongs in a shop, on sale for whatever. But that's how she holds it, as she turns it this way and that beneath the chandelier above the dining table. Lee holds it carefully, treating it like something precious and infinitely more fragile than it really is. She's afraid of dropping it, so she sets it down on the table again, beside her laptop where it holds down photographs of androgynous people and far off, foreign buildings.

He's only in the bathroom for ten minutes. That's not enough time to run to the closest Walmart and find something, anything, to make a stay of any length of time more comfortable. It's not enough time for her to go out into the world and find something better to eat than frozen pizza.

As it turns out, she does know what a kinfetch is. When he tells her the wooden knot will find him if she breaks it, Lee's hand goes to her chest. There's a thin black cord that disappears beneath the collar of her t-shirt. Another kinfetch. Who knows where it will go if it tries to find its maker.

"Ah. Okay. How long are you staying?" It's probably the least rude question she wants to ask right now.

[Robbie Murdoch] Those pale eyes, more visibly glass-green in the better light of her living room, flick immediately to her hand, her chest, the invisible pendant on that simple black cord she wears. He doesn't ask, though he looks for a moment. Then his eyes come back up, meet hers.

He's still got his backpack, it should be mentioned. Not on his back now, but hanging from one hand, two fingers through the top strap.

"Tonight," he says. "Tomorrow. Maybe the day after. Three days, sundown to sundown." He looks out the window, less a glance than a smooth cast of the eyes. "A little past sundown now but you get the point. Then I'll find someplace else."

His head turns again, and he looks around. He studies her TV and her playstation for a moment. Then her couch, which is only large enough to seat two. Not long enough for his lanky frame. A loveseat, for a couple. He looks back at her.

"You expecting visitors, next three days?"

[Liadan Whelan] Her apartment isn't ideal for visitors. The set up, the small couch, the lack of a second bedroom, the closeness of things despite the space, show that Lee doesn't expect them. This apartment was designed and arranged for one person.

It's better than her studio, though, the rented room outside of Grant Park. That place was spacious, in theory, but she shared her living space with her work space. She had a couch, and a bed with no frame, and a television. It was where someone might expect someone straight out of college to live. This place is a little more lived in, a little more full. It's more a home than anywhere Lee's ever lived.

But there's no space for extra people. Really, she wants a room to use as an office, not a spare bedroom.

"No, but I'm moving this weekend." With Taggart gone and his pack dissolved, there's little point in staying so close to The Brotherhood anymore, except sentimental reasons. And Lee isn't a terribly sentimental person. For all that her apartment is filled with things, with several gamin consoles, a fine Hummingbird guitar on a stand in the corner, nice furniture, nice decor, there are no personal photographs. There are no images of Lee with friends, or with family. If it weren't for the fact that she's standing right there, in what must be her pajamas, that she's comfortable in this space aside from the total stranger looking to trade help for help, this apartment could belong to anyone.

"Um," the hand at her chest lifts to her face, her thumb rubbing along her lower lip in thought, "there's not really a lot of space? You can sleep in my room if you want, I'll take the, uh...I'll take the couch."

[Robbie Murdoch] Surprise shows on his face so easily. It's a small expression, guarded. That's a good word for him. Something guarded about him, a little wary, not like a kicked dog, quite, but --

like a lone wolf. That's what it is. Like a pack creature without a pack, used to solitude, but wary of it nonetheless. Then for just a second it flashes into something else. The taut lines of his face relax for a second and it's nearly a smile. "Looks like I caught ya just in time."

Gone again. He looks around again; always looking around, eyes sharp, sweeping.

"Nah." The vowel's long but flat, held high on the tongue. There's almost no question he's from New England; Massachusetts; some working-class podunk town just outside Boston. He's been out of that environment for a while, though, and enough time and miles have rubbed that mothertongue thin, scrubbed it off his palate except in glimmers and glimpses. "I'll sleep the floor. 's fine.

"Why ya moving?"

[Liadan Whelan] Lee should be more guarded. She should be more cautious, having this stranger in her home. She of all people knows that looks can be deceiving. Her gradual...not comfort, but easing, like she's getting there, tension melting very slowly, it doesn't come from sense she's getting from this man. He doesn't inspire in her a sense of safety and security, anymore than any other Garou she's ever met has on that first meeting. She just knows that if he was going to hurt her, he would have done it by now. He wouldn't have given her a kinftech, wouldn't have showered and gathered his belongings like he expected to stay a while.

She could try to press the matter of their sleeping arrangements, but she doesn't. After all, she likes her bed. It's big and soft and it's hers, and she knows that he has other forms he can stay in that make the floor more comfortable. So she lets that drop.

"It's time," she says, shrugging a shoulder. "I had a guardian living at The Brotherhood down the street, but he's gone now." Her mouth quirks to the side, and she adds, "Besides, it feels weird staying in one place too long."

[Robbie Murdoch] "Heh," is all he has for that, a noise that suggests irony more than humor, but some level of understanding too.

Probably more than a little, actually. Just look at the boots on his feet, caked with dust and mud of a thousand miles. Just look at the fact that he's still wearing boots. He came in here, took a shower, changed his clothes, strapped them back on. He has a sort of comfort with this place which is not really a comfort at all but simply a sort of accustomedness -- as though he were used to strange places, strange roofs, crashing in strangers' homes and sleeping on strangers' floors.

He doesn't offer to help her move, either, though it'd be chivalrous to do so. Or hell. Nice. He doesn't seem particularly nice, though, nor even properly polite. What he has is a different, stylized, ancient sort of etiquette, wholly at odds with his slightly flat accent, his way of speaking as graceless as his movements are, well -- startlingly, prowlingly graceful.

"Well this is a nice place," he adds. It sounds more like fact than compliment. "I don't stay in places like this often."

She doesn't get a chance to ask him where he usually stays. Or where he came from. Or why he's traveling, or where he's going, or any of the things two strangers thrown together might ask each other to stop being strangers. She doesn't really seem the type to ask, though, and he certainly doesn't seem the type to volunteer the information.

He drops the backpack on the floor, beside the armchair. His head tilts, starkly feral. Never for a minute is it possible to forget that the creature in Liadan's living room is not human, that Robbie Murdoch isn't really his name, that her first instinct to shut him out and run to the farthest corner of her home and hide, hide, hide, was the right one.

He bends and he hauls her coffee table aside. Not much effort there. She's right on that count too. If he wanted to hurt her, he would have done it already. Now there's a larger space between the loveseat and the coffee table, on the rug. He puts his backpack down on one end, padded side up, a makeshift pillow.

"I might help myself to some food in the morning," he says. "Maybe some eggs and sausage if ya got it. Then I'm going to the Caern. And the city. I'll be back around sundown." Boots on, clothes on, he drops down, sits on the floor. "I appreciate you opening ya home to me."

[Liadan Whelan] There's a kind of resigned acceptance in Lee by now. It's how she faces a lot of things these days, or has learned to in the last year.

"I have to work," she says, but she doesn't give a time frame. She doesn't even say if she's working in this city, this state, this country. He doesn't know it - or maybe he does, he already knew her name and where to find her, after all - but it's just as likely Líadan will cross an ocean in her morning commute tomorrow. She won't, though, not tomorrow. Tomorrow she'll go about her usual Wednesday business. She'll run into a Shadow Lord kinfolk at The Brotherhood. Later she'll be asked to help infiltrate a children's beauty pageant, though she won't accomplish anything.

She doesn't tell Robbie what her plans for tomorrow are the way he tells her his. There was a time when her privacy didn't come naturally. Now, she's just not used to having anyone to share with.

"Yeah, I've got that. Help yourself." He settles down against the love seat. Lee sucks in a breath, lets it out on a sigh, and she moves around her apartment, turning off lights. She retrieves a spare blanket and pillow from the closet-hallway and she dumps them atop the coffee table, there should he decide to use them. Then she gathers up her laptop and disappears into her bedroom, closing the door behind her. It's only then that she sits at her desk, and she looks over at the terrarium with Socks resting peacefully. And she thinks

what. The. Fuck?