Brian Campo (briancampo) wrote in birthrightrpg, @ 2020-12-09 20:46:00 |
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Entry tags: | brian campo, hanna pulaski |
Digging Up Ghosts
Who: Hanna and Brian
What: Phone call
When: Night
Rating/Warnings: Descriptions of violence
In the end, Hanna had no excuse except that she didn’t want to inflict her headspace on anyone else.
She drove back from Henderson at precisely the speed limit, and when she got home she removed the remaining bullets from the gun and gave it a thorough cleaning. Then she put it and the ammunition in the lockbox she kept on the top shelf of her closet. She fixed a microwave dinner and ate it while reading the newspaper she swiped, and didn’t check her phone until just before she turned in for the night.
She’d considered texting Brian back with a polite ‘can’t make it’, then didn’t do that either. Felt guilty at it, since he was the first person she’d really made even half a connection with since her arrival in Vegas, but she wasn’t sure of what he’d say if she told him what she’d been up to. His offer of help was one thing, but two bullets in the head were another.
On the third day after Thanksgiving was over, she had a half day off, so she did some cleaning around the apartment before finally giving him a call. Even if it was just to let him know she’d appreciated the invite, or maybe that she was still alive.
Winter was the perfect season for running in Nevada. If Brian was honest, it was the only good season for running in Nevada, unless he did it close to midnight. When his phone rang, he was powering through a ten-miler at a blistering pace, his earbuds drowning out the sound of deep but steady breathing as he wondered how a Twisted Sister song had found its way onto his Spotify mix. He glanced at his armband, saw who was calling, and tapped the green icon. “Hey…”
He cruised to a slower pace. “Can you hear me?” The wind on Nipton Road was calm, but he wasn’t completely sure if his mic would pick up his voice.
“Yeah, kinda. You must not be at home.” There was a covered balcony beyond the glassed-in door, and Hanna was taking up space in the chair she’d dragged outside from the kitchen. The night was cool, a slight breeze wafting in, and she watched the quiet parking lot with a cup of coffee. She’d had to soak her ankle for half an hour after work after twisting it just at the end of her shift, was hoping it wasn’t sprained. But it hadn’t swelled up yet, so she was just monitoring it. “How’d your Thanksgiving thing go? Have lots of leftovers?”
“It was good. Would’ve been better if you showed up. Hang on a sec.” Brian slowed to a walk. He popped his earbuds in his pocket and turned off his bluetooth. Once his phone was out of the armband, he kept talking. “I’m back. Believe it or not, there wasn’t any food left. Turns out we’re hungry.” By now his breathing was coming back down to normal pace, the pulse in his neck following suit. The werewolf sniffed the cold, desert air. Overhead, the sky was clear and dotted with countless visible stars. “I kinda thought you’d be back to Lucky’s by now. I dunno why I got that vibe. You still in Vegas?”
“Still here. Mostly settled in by now. Getting used to the desert climate, I guess.” There was a space of silence while Hanna drank coffee, and at the end of it she said, “I didn’t feel much like socializing, though it sounds like a good time. Maybe if you send out invites at Christmas, I’ll be able to make it. But it was a...busy week, and my ma always said, if you can’t be good company then at least be lousy company by yourself.”
More coded language of a sort, but she knew Brian probably knew. There had been a blip on the news, a report of a suspicious death. What had the coroner thought, if there’d even been an autopsy? “Where are you, anyway? Not at the bar, I can hear the wind.”
“Ah, a few miles outside of town,” he roughly estimated. “I was on a run, five miles out, five back.” Brian looked west, behind his left shoulder, towards the Nevada-California line. It was a boring run in terms of terrain, but good for speed drills. Nothing but straight pavement and dirt as far as the eye could see. “A human run. I guess I should clarify.” He smiled to himself in the dark. Not that wolves were known for carrying cell phones when they roamed.
“Hey...” Brian looked ahead at the dark outline of the asphalt as he walked. “You okay?” Back when they met, he told Hanna she could call on him if she needed it, because he understood what it was like to want revenge on somebody who took away life as you knew it. But he also knew there were some things people needed to do on their own. Like bleeding people with sharpened pieces of silver, confusing the hell out of coroners and the police, but not the kind of customers who spread rumors from barstool to barstool in Lucky’s.
“I don’t think I know what ‘okay’ is anymore.” There was a muted clunk as the brunette put the half-full cup down, and she studied her propped-up ankle before adding, “How did you get through it? I mean afterwards. Sometimes I’ll catch myself wondering about some random person when I’m at the grocery store or in traffic waiting for the light to change. The one consolation is that I figured out I’m not crazy, and some days are better than others, but…”
Hanna let the sentence dwindle away into silence, let out a breath. “He looked so surprised. Not even scared, just kind of shocked. The kind of face that’s like, ‘who are you, anyway?’ Maybe you know it, maybe you don’t.”
Brian felt a thickening in his throat, a bad taste coming up along with resurging memories. “Before I answer, I want to make sure I know what you’re asking.” He ran a wrist across his sweat-slick forehead, naked because his hair was tied back. What was it about Hanna that made him talk about this, forget about the way things were now and pick that old scab? The air felt uncomfortable on his damp clothes. “How’d I get through the attack, or how’d I get through making her pay for it?”
“I don’t know. Either. Both?” She was uncomfortable too, he could probably hear it, and she would apologize before she disconnected the call. Tell him she was sorry for making him dig up old ghosts. He’d come out different too, even if he’d gotten something out of it. Even if he thought of it as a shitty ‘something’, there must have been some kind of bond or he wouldn’t have stayed, even for a little while.
The chair scraped backwards, and she stepped towards the railing to take advantage of the freshened breeze. Christmas would be here soon. The parking lot was quiet as it got later.
Brian let himself access the part of his memory where he tucked those middle years of his life. He was on the ground, flat on his back. He raised his arm and saw the gnash of canine teeth, skin tearing away from the bone of his elbow. He heard himself yell. Something dragged him away from the female wolf by the leg. The ground scratched Brian’s back as his coat and shirt rode up. Saliva, stained pink with blood, splashed his abdomen when her jaw latched onto his side.
He rubbed his forehead. “I forgave her for biting me. The pack shouldn’t have been near a campground, but she was... Kasey was pissed when she bit me. I couldn’t understand it then, but I do now. She bit me because I hurt her mate and she saw red.” He raised his shoulders, coming to a stop on the side of the road. “Some things make it hard to hang onto yourself when you shift.”
His eyes cut towards the acres of dirt and rock around him. “But I couldn’t get past how she treated me after, and the things the pack did. It’s a long story, but in the end, we were in this fight with another group. We lost our alpha. We didn’t know it yet, we just thought he was MIA. Nobody was calling the shots. It was a clusterfuck. I told Kasey I had her back, but there was this moment... Nobody was looking and I just took her apart. And yes.” Brian frowned. “She gave me that shocked look, like she couldn’t believe it. And I felt bad. I still do. But why should I give her something she didn’t give me? I think it comes down to this: Which one’s their true face? The one you see when they’re tearing you to pieces, or the one you see when they’re begging?”
“Maybe it’s both, and I don’t know if that’s worse or better. Like a bully who never had someone fight back.” Hanna rapped her knuckles lightly on the wooden railing, counting off the beats of her heart as she sorted through the ragged patchwork of her recollections. “I think... when I’m really honest with myself, I think I’d be more past it if it hadn’t been for Riley. I know what they did to the others and I know what they’d have done to me, but it’s him I’m so fucking gutted over. I’m the youngest, so I didn’t get a little brother, and there wasn’t time to tell him that.”
Her throat was despicably tight, as if she was trying to cough up a golf ball, and she scrubbed a hand over her jawline. “I made it quick. Two pops and then it was over. A lot gentler than he deserved. I guess I feel something over it, but not enough of something. I don’t know if that’s good or bad either.”
“Maybe you’re too tired to feel what you ought to feel.” Brian noticed a broken bit of pavement on the edge of the road. He nudged it with his shoe and the pieces crumbled. He bent down to pick one up. “Or it’ll hit you later. You’ll see something, maybe you’ll smell something and boom, you’re in the shit. I think your brain turns it off until you’re ready to deal with it.”
He tossed the rock in his cupped hand a few times and pitched it into the desert.
“Uh...” It was a random thought, and she craned her neck to look at the sky, where she could just see the stars through the sodium glare of the lights in the parking lot. No moon, not even a sliver of one. One of Hanna’s fellow residents was carrying two bags of garbage to the dumpster. She retreated from sight. “Does the change hurt you? I don’t know if you can do it on purpose or not, but if you can’t help it, does it hurt?”
“The only time I can’t control it is during a full moon, and that’s when it doesn’t hurt. Except the first one.” Brian picked up another chunk of the broken, black road and mapped out its topography with his fingers, which bore calluses from guitar strings and work. “I’m used to it. You’d be surprised what kinda pain you get used to. Well maybe you wouldn’t.”
Brian tossed it on the shoulder of the road and started moving again. He knocked the grit off his hand. “Why?” He frowned. “Did one of them bite you? It doesn’t take much, just enough to break the skin.”
“Keeler tried. The first one. That was my fault, I got in too close. Rookie mistake. It didn’t happen again.” Hanna rubbed her arm where Max Keeler had tried to leave teeth marks in her flesh as if it itched as if just talking about it was a muscle memory. “I don’t know what I would have done if he’d drawn blood,” she added, and she’d reclaimed her seat by now. “It’s hard enough walkin’ around like I am now. Fucked up enough. Maybe you’re braver than I’d have been.”
Because she’d be done with this soon enough. She didn’t have to worry about What if or even What do I do now?, and if she was telling the truth she admired Brian’s courage in adapting. She honestly didn’t know if she could have.
“You’d have called me.” His sweat was drying off. Brian picked up the pace to keep from shivering. “Being a wolf’s not a fate worse than death, and it’s not ‘fucked up,’ either” he said, listening to the muted thump and scrape of his shoes. “It’s just better if you choose it.” Hearing her talk like that put some things in perspective. Humans thought of being bitten as the end of the world. Born wolves looked down on the bitten. Maybe he needed to do a better job of representing what it meant to wear that scar. “By the way, if you broke that easy, you’d have died in that tree. You took on wolves with nothing but silver. That’s not easy. Not usually.”
“I don’t like bullies. That thing you said before about dogs that bite? Yeah.” There was a longer silence while Hanna let what he’d said sink in. She let it settle, and her coffee had gotten cold over the course of the conversation. She poured the dregs out over the railing, heard them hit the concrete below. Gave it another five seconds before she spoke again. “Thank you, Brian. I didn’t mean to make you dredge up a bunch of bad memories, and I’m sorry if it hurts you to talk about it.”
“It doesn’t,” he said. Brian cleared his throat. “I never actually told anybody about Kasey. I don’t know how people think I got here. I don’t come off as a guy with a lot of history. When people ask where I come from, I usually steer it to my family or music.” The whistle of wind and the long, low sound of an engine let him know a car was coming long before it got to him. He turned to look at the headlights and cleared off the road until it passed him by. “They know I was bitten and I left my pack. That’s about it.” He scratched at his beard.
“Your secret’s safe with me.” She let out a soft breath at the end of the sentence, then said, “You should come up to the city before the next holiday hits. If you can tear yourself away from the excitement of Lucky’s, I mean. There’s some good clubs away from the Strip, we could see a band or something. There’s a coffee tasting this weekend, I was planning to go, but I don’t know if that’s your thing.”
Brian’s face reflected his confusion. “People do that?” He smiled and shook his head. People would make an experience out of anything. “I’d go to watch people sip out of tiny cups and use words like aroma.” He remembered back to his first wine tasting, how it sounded like his date was describing a mouth full of cedar chips. “You name the time and place for coffee, I’ll find a show. Trust me. I’ve got good taste.”
“Yeah, it’s a real thing. I’ll check the date later, drop you a text to let you know.” Hanna was smiling as she slid open the door to the balcony and stepped back inside, clicked the lock in place. She’d take an Ibuprofen and go to bed reasonably early. She gave a final glance at the silent parking lot before closing the vertical blinds. “Get home safe, Brian. I’ll be in touch in a day or two.”
“Alright, Hanna. Later.” He ended the call and put his phone back in the arm band. It was a few miles back to Searchlight. If it picked up the pace, he could make it back before the kitchen closed and grab something to eat.