First night in a new home (Los Sangrientos)

(Hishu)

Bodycount wakes up with a gasp on the floor, breathing the cool night air in big, heaving gulps. His body, as well as the blanket around him and the mattress he just rolled off, is drenched with sweat. Scrambling up into a crouching position, he looks frantically around him, his heart beating a little more calmly in his chest as he counts the forms of Breaker, Johnny and Wukong around him in the room (presumably still asleep on their mattresses), and confirms by the movements of their chests and the sound of their breathing that they are alive, all of them, alive.

Steadying his breathing and only now realizing that he's shivering, Bodycount quickly pulls on his t-shirt and khaki shorts as quietly as possible, resisting the urge to reach out and touch each of his packmates to reassure himself further that they are alive and real. While trying in vain to restart the flow of saliva in his ash-dry mouth, he slips out of the room as quietly as he can, trying not to wake the others as he makes his way towards the room where Snow and Keys are sleeping.

Spoiler:

Breaker lays on the ground with a blanket over his body. He is fully awake and turning over the recent events in his mind... over and over... The journey to Sacramento, the shitty state of the spirit world, the run in with Rifle-Breaker, the new guy, his missing packmates, his sister's stupid outburst in the midst of battle, the chase towards the river...

He plays events over and over as is his way. Nothing is perfect but he never stops to wonder how things could have been better. A true warrior learns and never stops learning.

He doesn't notice Bodycount sneaking out of the room. Even if he did he didn't care. Bodycount understood his mindset and was most likely dealing with such thoughts himself. Blood Talons, the good ones at least, never liked to lose and Breaker was sure that letting the spirits escape did not sit well with Bodycount or Johnny.

Breaker turned onto his side. The morning would bring chores and duties. He should get a good rest. Luna help the first creature that offered up a real fight...

The lack of doors inside the building make it easy for Bodycount to slip from the room Keys crudely christened the Pointers dorm (as opposed to the Setters dorm for the girls). An expanded steel walkway ends to the left at a stairwell going down and stretching to the right along the length of the partial second story. At the end of the space that was once a series of offices overlooking the shop floor below, the walkway turns to the sharply to the right, paralleling another bank of offices that have been commandeered for the girls' dorm and ending in another set of stairs to the first floor. Large linoleum squares line the floor of the office/dorms, and here and there remnants of the cubicle farm walls lie stacked in various corners, too damaged to have been worth selling.

At the corner junction between the two dorms is a small bathroom with three stalls and two sinks, but no running water. Keys had found the shutoff and turned it on for a quick plumbing check and clean up, but the broken pipe at the eye wash station in the shop meant it needed to stay off until the pipe was repaired. On the other hand, it had at least provided enough water to give to the dogs and get the toilets working again.

As he nears the girls' dorm, the most striking anomaly is the lack of music coming from the area claimed by Keys. Whether its her laptop, her iPhone, her iPod, or just her own voice, Keys usually has music around her even when she's sleeping. It's a familiar sign of her unease that she felt the need to sleep in silence tonight.

That, or Snow accidentally erased her MP3 collection again.

Regardless of the reason behind the silence, Bodycount can see where Keys has abandoned her mattress and is instead curled up against her duffel bag of clothes, dozing on the floor near the door of the room.

{Just in case you I didn't send out the updated version of the Den, here it is:}

Bodycount pauses for a second as he spots Keys, just long enough to make sure she's breathing like she should be. Then he slips into the room and heads straight for Snow's sleeping form, crouching down and placing his hand carefully on her shoulder.

The girls only have a single matress in their room, and while Keys had abandoned it Snow is still curled up on top. Her hand shoots up aggressively to his wrist when Bodycount rouses her, but a moment later she realizes who it is and she relaxes. Her emerald eyes peer up at him sympathetically in the gloom, and she slowly sits up.

"You had a dream?" she whispers, knowing the answer already.

{Realized that I forgot to mention, Keys is sleeping in urhan. From the twitching of her feet she's clearly having a dream about chasing something.}

Wukong is also in urhan form curled up in one corner of the room rather then sleeping on a mattress. His duffle bag is to one side of him, his bamboo staff is propped up against the wall over it. He draws comfort from the two solid walls and his lupine senses. Sleeping in a strange place among strangers whom he calls brother and sister he needs all the comfort he can get.

To say the day's events had troubled him would be an understatement. Wukong wondered if this was his punishment. Maybe if he triumphed here, against such odds he would find redemption. Still, that seemed a long way off and at that moment he felt more alone and cut off from the world then he had ever felt before. It was like the night of his First Change. Things only made half sense. In his dreams he stalked the shadows trying to find that which was hidden and growled at ghosts.

Breaker felt the pent up energy within him... frustration, uncertainty... it was like a tightening coil that needed to be unleashed. He knew that the others felt the same way and could feel the unrest in them.

Hissing with disgust he threw back his blanket and made his way down to the van in the main bay. He flexed his arms and legs for a few minutes and then began to do some knuckle push ups next to the van. Perhaps a couple hundred push ups and some lifting would clear his mind...

Some of the tension leaves Bodycount as Snow's fingers close around his wrist. He nods and whispers back: "Outside. I'll show you." Then he straightens up, slipping back out of the room.

---

(Assuming that Snow follows)

Goosebumps form on his still moist skin as he steps outside in the chilly morning air. It's still dark outside, but the eastern horizon is getting brighter, signaling the approach of dawn. He waits right outside the door for Snow to catch up, before leading her over to a spot some twenty yards away from the house.

He crouches down, looking out across the desolate grounds and begins to speak, slipping into the somewhat-more-flowery-than-usual language he tended to adopt whenever telling a story, without really reralizing it.

"I dreamed about this place. I was walking through the grounds, and they were green and lush. There was grass all over, and the tree was full of flowers.

"Then, at this spot here, something suddenly crunched under my foot. When I looked down, it was a broken skull that looked up at me. It looked like whoever it was had been buried here, just below the soil, and that it was his rotten flesh that had made the grass grow so green.

"But when I looked out cross the quarry again, I could suddenly see that it wasn't just one who was lying here. Time seemed to pass backwards - the grass and flowers disappeared, and then I could see what was lying just under the ground. There were hundreds of bodies, piled at least two deep everywhere, too many and too close for it to be an old battleground. It was a mass grave.

"As I looked at all the bones, they suddenly began to grow flesh again, and muscles, skin and hair, back to how they had looked when they were alive. But they didn't come back to life. They were still dead."

Bodycount pauses slightly before continuing, still not at ease.

"All of us were there, Snow. The whole pack, dead and forgotten without so much as a marker. All of us. The skull that had broken under my foot turned out to be my own.

"Then suddenly, I heard a laugh behind me - hard, almost a bark - and a sharp pain. Everything went dark. And that's when I woke up."

Johnny stirred in his sleep at the sounds made by Breaker’s departure. He rolled over on his mattress and onto NightBird, reflexively clutching her, his hand slipping down toward the trigger. But then his hand relaxed. Like the rest of his pack, he was ill at ease. The strange smells and unfamiliar quiet of their new home added to the anxieties brought on by all they had learned today, and these revelations blurred into the spirit chase, confusing his dreams.

He dreamt he was chasing the spirits and, blessed with claws that rend the incorporeal flesh of spirits and made superior by Father Wolf’s speed, he was gaining on them. But then they were on a Tur line that ran through his territory, and he couldn’t touch them – he followed, but couldn’t touch them! And then they were all in Fremont Park: Johnny, the spirits, and the Pure. The spirits poured out Los Sangrientos’ secrets. They told the Pure of the pack’s numbers, all about the den, each individual’s strengths and weaknesses, their lack of a Locus. John cried out at the spirits, trying to silence them, but his claws were tied by the Tur – Breaker and Bodycount were holding him back.

“Forget the Tur.”, Johnny shouted into the silence of dormitory, but it was muffled by his mattress. “The pack comes first!” His arms flailed a little, and NightBird clattered to the floor. Johnny rolled over again, and fell silent, but his sleep remained restless.

“And you didn’t see who it was,” Snow states, knowing full well that to be the case. She had immediately followed Bodycount out into the dawn when he had woken her and was standing barefoot on the barren , rocky ground, having not bothered to throw her boots back on. She had listened intently as he related his dream, and got caught up in the possibility he had described in the land. She liked the sound of the grass and even imagined the old building that sat in the center of the quarry lined with wild flowers.

Her optimism turned to concern when he described the field of bodies planted just beneath the surface, and how the lush grass had sprouted and grown full and healthy on the nutrients they released into the earth. And when he told her of the bodies returning to flesh, and the pack being among the dead, a deep frown darkened her expression.

“A bad omen to be sure. It’s hard to interpret it any other way, even when viewed in the best possible light. At first I was hopeful, and even a vision of our flesh providing the nourishment that makes improvement of the land possible isn’t necessarily bad. It could have meant that our toils will make our territory healthy once again. But it strikes me that the tenor of the dream was not hopeful, and so I doubt that is the correct reading.”

“I am particularly concerned by the laughing thing that felled you from behind. It speaks to a hidden enemy who waits to strike, or perhaps even a betrayal by someone we know or will know but would not guess to be an enemy. It makes me question our decision to come to this city when you add it on top of the sickness that is the Shadow of this city, the Pure just across the river, and the strange behavior of the neighbors.”

Snow frowns even more deeply, and Bodycount can see that she regrets having verbalized that final comment. She walks forward, looking out across the quarry towards the city. Then she sighs and squats down, picking absentmindedly at the earth.

“Is that how you see it?" she asks quietly. "What do you think?” She doesn't look at Bodycount when she asks.

Keys woke abruptly at as Johnny called out in his dream. Looking around her dorm, her nose twitches as she picks up the freshly mingled scent trail of Bodycount and Snow leaving the room. It wasn't the first time that the cahalith had sought out the spirit master to discuss his dreams. Keys would have found it odd if the dreamer hadn't dreamt something after the events of last night. Knowing her alpha is safe enough with a fellow packmate, she pads quietly onto the steel walkway and heads for the guys' room.

The sounds of the sleeping dogs in their makeshift kennel on the first floor drift up to her perked ears along with the sounds of Breaker working out in the shop area. Normal enough, and comforting in the way that the pack is slowly starting to settle in.

Slipping quietly into the guys' dorm, she lets her nose lead her to Wukong's restless form. He was still new enough to the pack that his scent hadn't quiet melded with the rest yet, but he was one of the Sangrientos nonetheless. That he slept as a wolf tonight, as she did, she found interesting; another newly revealed aspect of his personality that she tucks away in her storehouse of knowledge of her packmates. She makes quiet reassuring sounds, letting her scent and presence silently seep into his dreaming urhan awareness without waking him, then moves on to where Johnny lays caught up in his own nightmare. Her jaw drops into a lupine smile when she sees him curled lovingly around his rifle. Some tings, dey never change.

Continuing to make little soothing noises, Keys noses over up against her fellow irraka, curling up against his back and lending her warmth and support through the anxiety of his dream.

Bodycount frowns too, the uncharacteristic crack in Snow's facade making him feel both concerned and strangely privileged at the same time. He squats down next to her and places his arm around her back, giving her shoulder a reassuring squeeze.

"We didn't win this place," he muses. "We've taken it as our home, but we didn't pay for it. Two packs of heroes did, with their blood and their lives. I don't know much about them yet, but I do know that they were the kind of Uratha who die for a reason. This place must be important. They wouldn't have died here, otherwise.

"I don't feel at ease here yet, not any more than any of us do. It's an...alien place. And the dream was...scary. Especially the fact that we were buried in a heap together with strangers without so much as a spray-painted sentence on the wall to mark our passing. I really don't like the idea of being forgotten. But what would be even worse is to be remembered as 'the pack who ran'.

"That's not the Los Sangrientos way. It wasn't our way when the Boss was around, and it's not our way now that you're in charge. These last weeks, the whole world has been trying to intimidate us. The Boss dying, the state of our new home, this dream - it all seems almost engineered to frighten us, to make us stand down, bare our throats, even run. But that's not who we are.

"We're gonna stare the world in the eye and intimidate it right back, until it rolls over and submits. We're going to tame and master this new home, remember and honor those who died to make it ours, and do our damndest to make sure that those who come after us remember us with the same reverence. We'll face the future together as a pack, and when the day comes, we'll fall together, as a pack. That's one thing even that dream couldn't dispute. That, all of it, is the Los Sangrientos way."

Bodycount falls silent for a moment before giving Snow's shoulder another squeeze.

"I think you did the right thing leading us here. Two packs of heroes died here - now it's up to us to give their deaths meaning. Even if the dream does come true in the most literal sense, and we are murdered and forgotten, that doesn't change the fact that we died doing the right thing. That's what matters most, in the end. I'd be proud to share even an unmarked grave with you."

Snow smiles and once goes so far as to chuckle in appreciation of Bodycount's inspirational words. She leans into him and feels the strength inside him, letting it flow into her and inspire her like the things he had said. She knew she should be sharing her strength with him, not the other way around. But the fact that he could remain so sure, and his conviction could remain so strong, in light of the dream and everything else was amazing.

"When we were younger and I first met you," she began, recalling a time that was years ago now, "I thought you were a fool. You were the first to fight, the first to charge an enemy you knew nothing about, the first to seek a challenge you had no reason to face. You sought glory above all other things, and no matter the consequences. At least, that's how it seemed to me."

"I can laugh at how ridiculous I was when I was younger, but at the time I was shocked then when Juan-Vidal told me you were the heart of his pack," she smiled and pressed into him further. "Did you know he used to call you that?"

"He said that of all of us, you were the most reliable, the most trustworthy, the most honorable, and the very core of Los Sangrientos. Although I came to appreciate you over the years and what you brought to our pack, I don't think I truly understood what he meant until recently, when I took on his role."

"You are the heart of Los Sangrientos. You've proven it again just now. And besides that you're absolutely right."

Snow slips out from under his arm and stands, turning to pull him up with her. "Dawn is here and we've a lot of work to do. Let's go wake the others and get started."

Bodycount smiles self-consciously - but also a bit defiantly proudly - of Snow's description of how he'd appeared to her when they'd first met. The observations were accurate enough, at least from the point of view of many people who'd call themselves sensible. The kind of people who'd never trade the rest of their lives for a five-minutes-long, adrenaline-filled, headlong charge into the pages of history.

When she recounts the words of the Boss, though, his smile fades, and the big man actually blushes. He doesn't have the presence of mind to cover up the moisture suddenly forming in his eyes. Not managing to say a word in return, he squeezes her shoulder harder instead, his heart suddenly hammering fast and loud and painful and proud in his chest.

He still doesn't answer as she slides out from under his arm and announces that it's time to wake the others. But as she reaches her hand down towards him he takes it and squeezes it firmly, letting his much smaller alpha have the satisfaction of pulling him to his feet.

She's earned it.