[tales & horrors]
who: Cal & Cate
what: All those things they've been avoiding telling each other.
when: Following this and this.
where: Cate's apartment.
note: Nat is woefully out of practice and apologizes for the bad quality of her writing. Warning for language; it's Cal.

Cal tried the door before he knocked. It wasn't locked, and he came in even more scared than he had been ten seconds ago, something he hadn't thought possible. He didn't stop to lock the door behind him, just slammed it shut so he'd hear it if it was opened again. "Cate! Damnit, where are you?!"

Her bedroom, actually, pacing a hole in the floor. Cate had alternated between sitting on the bed, knee jumping up and down, unable to sit still, and walked a short line back and forth across the tiny expanse of her bedroom floor ever since Cal had started CAPSLOCKING at her in the journals. That was never a good sign. She was sitting when he came in, or she would have been in there before he started shouting. As it was, she nearly flung herself off the bed, rushing out with a harried "I'm here, I'm here, what's the matter with you!" to lock the door behind him. Someone needed to try and keep their heads here. "What is wrong?"

Hopefully Cate could keep that in mind, because it was obvious Cal was making no effort to keep his head. His typical casual attitude and quickfire temper had nothing on the state he was in right now. He hadn't even had her in sight for a second before he took her by the upper arms, as much to reassure himself that she was there than get her attention. "Lock the damn door! Jesus. I just walked in here!" He always just walked in there, but apparently that was beside the point. He let her go and whirled around to head back into the living room.

"Will you breathe?" Cate rubbed her arms vaguely--they didn't hurt, but it was never particularly reassuring to be grabbed like something out of a soap opera--watching him with barely concealed bewilderment as he stomped around. Of course, Cal often stomped around, and Cal was often needlessly angry, but Cal wasn't very often visibly scared. She'd learned to tell it apart by now. "Sit." A stern look, whatever his happened to be. "Sit. I'll get you a beer, you can calm the hell down, and we can talk."

"I am not going to fucking sit," Cal snapped, again with the peculiar tight expression that meant he was more scared than angry. Cate was good at reading Cal by now: the quick movements, the sudden freezing stops, and the way he kept turning so he could face her every time she moved, as if someone Cate's size could possibly hurt him. "You're acting like a few hundred miles of desert is gonna keep you safe! Half the fucking tales in the world live in this city!"

"Then we've got a good chance of not getting noticed, don't we?" she shot back, and almost defiantly stalked past him, grabbed two beers out of the fridge, and nodded towards the couch. Attempts at normalcy helped. Her head stayed on her shoulders better that way.

Cal planted both feet in the closest he could come to the exact center of the living room. He turned his shoulders just enough to keep her in his sights but if anything came through that door, he'd see it a half-second after it started to open. He ignored the indication of her couch and the offer of a beer like it didn't happen. "It's not safe here. We should leave." He wasn't asking, and it was obvious from the way he kept looking at the door that he either wanted to put things against it or go through it.

Well, then. Beers went onto the counter with a dull chink, and after a rather difficult moment where her face screwed up, brows digging together, Cate sighed and moved over to stand in front of the door so he could look directly at her. "And where is it safe, Cal? Where do you think no one will ever find us?"

He looked at her and then past her at the door, and then back. He shifted from one foot to the other once, twice, and then stepped forward to take her by the arms again--much gentler this time. He turned her around so his back was to the door instead. "You just keep going until it doesn't feel like anybody's behind you anymore."

"That's not a good way to live, baby," she said quietly, but didn't move.

"But you keep living."

Cate crossed her arms. She wasn't angry or confused anymore; but she wasn't budging either. "I hate to get all existential on you--but can you really call that living? Running from place to place, hiding out--you were afraid to even use your real name on the journals for ages."

Cal let her go, and turned just slightly so that as he backed away from her, it was sideways into the room, rather than toward the door. He said nothing for a moment and then: "Still alive." He wore an odd, helpless expression now, sure she was not going to understand no matter what he did.

This was hitting, perhaps, a little too close to home. Cate sighed and pressed her hands to her forehead, running them back through her hair to her neck, shaking the tangled mess out. Still alive, huh? She had a thing or two to say about that. Just--not now. Maybe. Hopefully. She latched onto his hand as she'd done a dozen times before and hauled him, willing or not, over to the couch, muttering something about being on her feet all day. It was a long moment of resituating herself before she spoke.

"Ok," she said after a minute, more of a sigh than anything. "Ok. Cal. Why do you even think they're coming here? After us?"

He would rather have stood, but once he was down he didn't stand up again. Instead he just shifted his weight every few seconds. "For one you're too damn friendly on the damn journals. If that Barr guy isn't doing the killing, it's going to be a god damn fucking miracle, and you're chatting with him," he said, gritting his teeth.

This was not an argument she wanted to have. She knew damn well she wasn't saying anything of any interest to that Barr guy; she was making sure of it. Cate's lips thinned, and she said nothing.

He saw her expression, and it only made him angry. The signs were all there, the way his shoulders tensed and the way he looked at her, down instead of straight. Yet his next words seemed to be an abrupt change of topic, and the anger never realized. "Who's the strongest tale you know? Like what they can do, strongest you know." Left field. Cal never talked about tale abilities, ever.

Definitely left field. Cate started, opened her mouth once, and closed it again. Her eyes drifted off in thought, and she abruptly realized--she had no idea. "I don't really know," she said haltingly. "I guess mine's pretty strong. Uh, I don't really ask about it. What does that have to do with anything?"

"Because some of us can kill people. Maybe not direct, but we can. Say you're real good at setting fires, or making people confused. Takes a tale to kill tales, because you have to know us to kill us, right?" It was taking a lot out of him to try to sit still and think, talk, make sense. He just wanted to go someplace else where no one knew who he was.

"I don't." They could what? "I don't see--Christ, Cal, it's an entire state away."

"If he's killing tales eventually he's going to come here. Stop arguing fucking geography with me and listen."

Cate felt her lips thin again, but though she idly tongued the back of her teeth, biting back words, she remained silent. There. Listening.

Cal looked from side to side, fervently wishing he was elsewhere and then closed his eyes. "Look," he opened them again. "I'm really strong. Stronger than you. And there's a reason it's better to run than hang around and let people find out. Alright?"

Not alright. "What do you mean, stronger than me? What reason?"

"I mean if a tale wanted to be a lot stronger and they had me around, they could." Cal just wasn't good at talking sense. Especially when he was scared out of his mind and trying to explain it without saying everything.

"You--" Um. Cate opened her mouth and shut it again, turned to face Cal on the couch and the back to the look at the table. "You make them stronger? You make them stronger." Her hands flitted nervously over her knees, plucking at threads, fingers twitching, going still, twitching again. They couldn't settle for a long minute, and Cate couldn't look over at him. "And that's why...Oh, Cal." She said it in that way women did when pieces suddenly came together, in one long, apologetic exhale. "Nobody knows about you, though, yeah? They wouldn't--I mean. They can't use it if they don't know?"

"Some people do. People in L.A." Pause, and then, with difficulty, "My sister, my parents. At least three other tales, I don't know where they are. People who remember the old lives will know my tale, but not me. Nobody here I've seen." He looked at her, as if waiting to see if he knew her. "Except you."

She gave him a stern look, as if to silently scold him for even thinking she might try to use him. He should have known her better than that. "And I'm not going to go telling anyone," she said. "And there's...well, there's a lot of people in L.A. No reason to think the--the murderer knows your family."

"He'll find out. Not from--L.A. From whoever he kills next. He's going from tale to tale." The look returned to her was a flat, desolate one. It wasn't that he didn't trust her. But something like what he had just told her would be hard to forget, and besides being a healer, Cate was a sweet, caring person. Look at what she'd done for Charlie. She didn't understand. He'd known that when he'd told her, and done it anyway. "This happens, you know. Too many of us with old memories, nasty ones. Happens a lot. We're not all healers, Cate."

"You think I don't?" Cate said sharply. "I've had so many people die for me, I can't even--" she stopped, bit back her words and shook her head. Not a road she wanted to go down. Memories of her past lives were fuzzy, at best; benefit of being a giant pool of water for the first of them, she supposed. Her hands unsettled themselves in her lap again, resting tentatively above either knee. "I can't live out the back of a car, Cal." There. She'd said it. Explanations would have to come after.

He didn't reply for a long minute, looking away after half of it. "Yeah. Well. You got shit here, like you said." He shrugged a little bit, just one shoulder, the energy required to lift both apparently more than he had. Cal got up, and his voice had an unmistakable not of ending to it. "Just don't tell him any more than he's already got in that damn thing." One hand flicked out to indicate the journal sitting on the coffee table as he turned away.

"Would you stop dicking around for five seconds and let me finish?" she snapped. Sure, she'd definitely not been intending to carry on on the same note, but she would really have appreciated his not assuming, once again, that that was all she meant. "Swear to God, can't get a word in edgewise with you, while you're too busy finishing my goddamn thoughts." Exasperated sigh. And another. Cate's shoulders sunk, but she squared them up a half second later, turning to fold her legs up on the couch and face him. Her face was remarkably firm.

At least he stopped. Waited, too, with a slight lean to his step that meant he thought whatever this was could hardly make things worse.

This was--well, about as hard as she had anticipated it would be, on that very, very, very far day in the future she had envisioned telling him. Or maybe someone else telling him. But now he wanted her to leave with him and she knew she couldn't, and she knew he had a right to know. Among other reasons she really should have told him weeks ago. Her words came out in faltering stutters, each one dragged out as if having to be forcefully extricated. It certainly felt like it. "I can't live out the back of a car, Cal, because...because I have to keep seeing the doctor." Hurdle one. Her face was a lot redder than it had been a moment before, but from the laborious way she was beginning to breathe, it was pretty evident it was out of exertion and not embarrassment. Her knuckles were white as her fingers laced into knots. "I have to keep going to the doctor because--" Oh, Jesus. "I have to keep going to the doctor because I, um. I have--cancer."

It came out as if she had more to say afterwards, an incomplete thought, but her jaw locked up as soon as the word was spoken. If Cal said anything in that moment, she couldn't hear a damn thing.

Cal stared at her. Thought brought his brows down low, but he didn't say anything. He looked as he was having trouble understanding what she had said. He went still again, barely breathing and motionless, standing next to her coffee table and staring at her with a useless question hanging in the air in front of him. What?

"I'm not dying!" she said--lied--quickly. "Not like that." She dropped her gaze again, plucking at fuzz on the couch that wouldn't come off. Her shoulders dipped, her head sank, everything suddenly too heavy to hold up. "Hodgkins, Stage II," she explained. It had helped her father to hear it in incomprehensible scientific terms. "I'm...stable." A deep breath, and then all at once, "But I have to stay on the radiation or they're not sure what could happen, the tumors could spread, and if that happens--"

She cut off. Her head fell again; she hadn't realized she'd looked up.

He did not sit back down. "When you get sick all the time, this is why?"

Cate shrugged, and tried something like a smile. "Sometimes it really is just a bug," she said quietly.

"And when you don't sleep sometimes, but other times barely wake up?"

"Cal, I'm stable. Ok? I'm stable."

The line over his brows deepened and finally expression found its way into his voice, even if it was obvious in his eyes. "When were you going to tell me?"

Cate finally managed to look up, steadily this time. Her voice didn't waver. "When I was ready."

Another short, still pause. Someone outside slammed a car door, and Cal seemed to wake, shaking his head just slightly. "...Right. I gotta--" Cal turned again, a lot quicker than last time, and he had the door unlocked and open before he even realized he'd given in to the voice urging him to run. "I'll talk to you later. Lock the door."

She was off the couch a lot faster than she really thought she was capable of moving at that moment. "Cal!" Latching onto his arm somehow felt--slightly off at the moment. She settled for clamping a hand on the door, trying to gesture with the other one and failing miserably. "Please don't leave. Please. I shouldn't have said anything yet, but you had a right to know, you know, and I'm not dying or anything, I'm just--sickly." Bad word. But the only one she could think of. She stood there, at a loss, breathing sharply as if she'd just run the 100-meter dash. Ball: meet Cal's court.

With his free hand, Cal reached up and brushed a palm over her neck, just under her ear, in a strange gesture of affection that suited someone who never showed it by casual touch. He did not smile as he did it, because he hurt too much to smile. "I gotta go," he repeated. "I'll talk to you later." The hand came back and then settled down on her wrist in gentle, careful pressure. Let go.

She did, and stood there while the door closed quietly behind him. Her whole body felt tremulous, quivering; swallowing hurt, and she was blinking more than was strictly necessary. When her backside hit the floor she didn't feel it, and when she started to cry she didn't hear it. But her arms mechanically wrapped around herself, and sitting there in front of the unlocked door, Cate buried her face in her hands, and didn't look up again.