Connor Baird (lupusest) wrote in repose, @ 2017-07-03 22:26:00 |
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Entry tags: | *log, cisco delgado, connor baird |
log: the forest - connor and cisco
Who: Connor and Cisco
What: Getting sniffed by the alpha.
Where: The woods.
The cave mouth in the woods gaped wide, the opening strung with fallen branches and mosses. The ground in the small depression was moist from spring rain, musty with the scent of lichens and rotting plant life. It was quiet, verdant, and removed.
On a night halfway through the cycle of the moon, it was also fairly dark. Connor had no worries, however, that Cisco would be able to find him.
He’d recognized the man’s name as soon as it appeared on the forum, a distant memory of a seemingly improbable time. Repose was not a bad place in Connor’s mind. It was not a dreamland of childhood, but it was also not bad. It was a neutral space. A waystation. If Connor’s life was like anything, it was the Wizard of Oz in reverse - a colored landscape of ordinary childhood, and then a muted, drained palette of blacks and whites that came after.
He hadn’t inherited his partial colorblindness from either parent. In childhood, he could remember green and vibrant reds from when he was small, from the Repose woods, from puffy oven mitts hanging in the kitchen, from carpets, from juice boxes. Now, landscapes like the one he was standing against were shades of gray, purple, and blue, even in the day. Only at night, viewed under shreds of moonlight, did most other people see the world the same way he did.
He wore a pair of sensible brown leather boots for walking in the forest, but otherwise he was dressed as professionally as always, the plain black suit he’d worn to work that day, a good blue tie. The last time he had seen Cisco Delgado, he’d been nine years old, getting ready to leave on a camping trip with his family, a small boy for his age, a little quiet, but fond of the same jokes as the other boys in town, quick to make friends and keep them. He was taller now, but he still smiled easily, still had the same dark hair and blue eyes. He wasn’t smiling just now.
He had nothing to do to pass the time except wait, which he was very good at. He didn’t smoke, so there was no spark of light or trail of smoke to follow. He stood at the mouth of the cave, listening to the occasional rustle of something small and warm living inside of it - a family of rabbits, by the scent. There had been wolves, once, but they were long gone, the scent faint and cold. He didn’t fiddle with his phone, or count the leaves. He listened, as he had done when he came out an hour earlier, scenting the air for any sign of an ambush. He waited.
Cisco came in fur. There were a lot of reasons for this. Firstly, he was comfortable as wolf, and it gave him additional speed and senses. He was more difficult to kill as a wolf, and more likely to sense danger if he was walking into a trap. The ability to scent fear or gunsmoke in sweat was valuable to someone literally walking into a specified target area, and he'd take whatever advantage he could get. Second, it showed him for what he was, and it was only halfway to the moon, so the ability to fully generate a change in either direction displayed a strength and confidence in his form important to an alpha showing himself to others. Third, he wanted to show this anonymous person that he wasn't afraid. Alphas couldn't show weakness or fear. Challengers had to come to him, and a reluctance to meet them was a reluctance to ensure the pack had the strongest alpha possible to keep them safe.
The anonymous person had informed him that they were a lone wolf preferring to stay lone, but Atticus was right: if someone wanted to take a rifle from a ways off and kill him, this was the way. Cisco had decided in the moment that if someone wanted to shoot him without warning they could do it at anytime, and he didn't want to wait around for it.
Now that it came to the moment, however, he had to confess (internally) to plenty of healthy fear. He only heard or smelled the man in the cave, but that didn't mean there was no one else out there, and he felt very vulnerable as he left the cover of the trees and trotted out into the mouth of the cave. He didn't pause to make a silhouette in the center of the cave mouth, not able to bring himself to invite catastrophe, but moved confidently inward, and there he stopped to face Connor with the half-moonlight behind him. He dropped the bundle he held in his mouth, cotton and plastic, and the lenses of his glasses where they fell in cushioned relief flashed sharp and white.
Cisco was not an intimidating wolf. Not big, not small. Gray and brown (or to Connor, gray and darker gray), and he was a bit narrower than most wolves, heavier in the chest and wider in the ears. A bit foxy, his brother used to say, back when he was alive, and even before then, back when his father, Johansson Sr., had been alive. To the experienced eye, he had plenty of experience, fur growing over scars, a confident stance. He didn't growl, just put his snout up and sniffed. He didn't recognize Connor; they had both been pretty young at the time, and children are not miniature adults.
In retrospect, Connor should have seen it coming. It might have made more sense to approach this situation in a different form, but he had no interest in being perceived as a threat. A human could of course be a threat to a wolf even without teeth that could tear, but the symbolism was clear. He came unarmed, as it were. When the wolf approached out of the muddy clutter of leaves and brush in Connor’s vision, he took stock, and made no move to meet him halfway.
Not all alphas were the most physically intimidating wolves in their sphere, but it was more common than not, in his experience. He hadn’t been anticipating some hulking nightmare based on the conversation on the forums, but he hadn’t been expecting a wolf quite so unassuming. Still, presence indicated nothing about skill or the ability to win a fight. He’d made a logical conclusion based on the reputation of the previous alpha, thinking that anyone who took such a beast’s place at the top of the hierarchy must be bigger and tougher. He was only part wrong. Bigger? Probably not. Tougher? Those old scars seemed to say so.
His eyes fell to the lenses of his glasses when they flashed in the light, the first thing to catch him fully by surprise. Glasses.
Connor paused a moment while he was sniffed, then dropped to his heels, one arm slung across his knee. If he was going to get a proper once over, he might as well do it at eye level. He didn’t say anything, or try to hold down a conversation. There was no raising of human hackles, no show of teeth. As a human, when not putting on a friendly show, Connor was very much the same as he was when a wolf - quiet, almost eerily so. He looked back at Cisco, and he waited. To be attacked, to be assessed, or to be approved.
Cisco the wolf sniffed a few times to get Connor's scent, which was no more or less definitive than any other werewolf's, healthy with the scent of a being like himself, and touched with cold air. No gunsmoke, other humans, nor enemies. Soap, detergent, and deodorant that suggested the lone wolf was uncharacteristically tidy, and a bachelor besides. Cisco as wolf had calm brown eyes, a surprisingly light fawn brown. It did not make him look kindly; there were too many teeth, but after a moment his tongue lolled out to one side in a general gesture of relaxation and approval. Both ears swiveled up and twitched once before the alpha stepped back twice on the cave floor, acquiring some room between him, Connor, and the heap of cloth on the floor between them.
By the time the fur started to disappear and the wolf began to broaden at the shoulders, it was too late to do anything other than gape as naked man stepped from wolf skin. An alpha's control (or perhaps, Cisco's own?) allowed him considerable nuance when it came to changing, and he was able to keep the wolf's head on the man's body long enough to evoke thoughts of old gods are different times. Some of the scars barely visible in the dimness on leg and hip suggested he had carried over some of the battle scars as alpha, and their pinkness gave a short timeline to the fact. He was not self-conscious about his lack of clothes. Being born in a wolfpack made you immune to that kind of thing.
He stood there for a second, so they were face to face. Cisco could make out a man-shaped smudge. He blinked, and put on a polite smile. "Now that the formalities are out of the way." He put a toe out to see if his sweats were close. They should be.
Connor stood while the alpha wolf who had sniffed him out went from lupine shape to human. It didn't trouble him, watching that, or the nudity. He'd always found the reaction of most heterosexual men to seeing a penis ridiculous. Bodies were bodies, male and female, wolf and human, alive and dead. All that was shocking about them was invented, cultural, relational. They had no inherently offensive qualities, aside from, in some, a bad smell. Which he couldn’t stand..
He noticed the smooth control of a jagged and sometimes painful process, followed it with an experienced eye. "That was a nice touch," he said. His tone was light, lacking menace or judgement. There was a muted appreciation, only, and a small smile.
He clocked the scars, but really only that they were new, and that they stayed consistent. Then he knelt down, picked up the glasses and the sweats, and held them out to Cisco. "These might help," he said. "I know you," he added, as if continuing a previous conversation. "You'll find out eventually, or remember, so I'm telling you now. We met when I was small. My name is Connor, and I grew up in Repose." Matter-of-fact statements, stacked on top of each other as efficiently as firewood. "Never would have pegged you for an alpha." That same quiet, appraising tone. It took tenacity, not just strength. It took a stubbornness, and, for the good ones, a thick skin for the bite of fear. You could always be looking over your shoulder, as an alpha. The biggest, most bullish wolves and men made openings in their defenses by constantly glancing at their friends and relatives, waiting for a challenge. He'd taken advantage of those openings more than once. Cisco didn't strike him as such a type. No, more the kind to work too hard to meet the expectation of the alpha, if anything at all. No sign of that yet. Maybe he was lucky enough to be good for the role, if unexpected.
Cisco listened with interest. He didn't have to listen. Alphas didn't have to do very much at all, and he didn't have to listen to anything anyone said. It was all in the delivery of voices and sounds, and all he needed to know was whether or not the other wolf was hostile. He could be an animal, but Cisco was a werewolf, and defined himself differently. He stepped into the sweats one leg at a time, balancing without much grace (getting into pants was never going to be a pretty sight), and once he could stand on two legs he did so to peer into Connor's face. He had to look up to do it, because Connor had some inches on him. Cisco smiled. "I remember you." The smile slipped as he remembered why Connor hadn't come back from that camping trip. He remembered a rowdy child. This wasn't him. "Welcome home." When he said it, he meant it, in the moment.
There were a lot of ways for him to go in the face of that comment about being alpha. Fortunately, it didn't have anything to do with trust. He didn't think his own little sob story would have any more of an effect on Connor than anything else he had said. There was something cold and solid about him standing there in this cave, all alone, insisting that he would be that way forever and didn't want family or pack. So, Cisco answered. "I inherited. After dad passed, it was Tim, and a challenger came along and killed him. So I came home."
Cisco lifted his hands, and put on his thick glasses and smiled again. Standing there, stripped down, with his soft mouth and thin muscle better suited to a distance runner than a weight lifter, certainly, Cisco did not look like an alpha. He knew it. He was standing there without a shirt or shoes. It was a vulnerable, intensely powerful statement. "You know why I came home. Why did you?"
Welcome home rippled through him in a strange way. "Thank you," he said. He wasn't expecting to be smiled at. He also wasn't expecting to be remembered at all. He didn't think of himself as a child as the type who made much of an impression, but that was with twenty years of hindsight. He had been cheerful, and made trouble. Happy, probably.
Connor didn't have his hackles up, but he did take almost every statement with a true stillness, listening closely to everything that was said. He stood his ground, and would be unafraid to continue arguing his point that he could go it alone. He always had before. He saw no reason to risk everything by changing now, just to have a company. It might not be particularly wolfish, but it was as deeply ingrained as his way of looking, as his quiet, his thinking. He nodded when Cisco explained how he'd come to be at the head of the pack in this town. "How many in the pack?" he asked. He could have guessed, based on the heavy paths of scent when he came into town after the last full moon, but it seemed more polite to ask.
His expression finally changed when Cisco mentioned the deaths of his father, then his brother. He remembered Tim from when they were kids. He ran through how it might have played out - the father dead, the son taking over, and a challenger murdering him in cold blood. He hardened, though not in response to Cisco. "That's unfortunate. I'm sorry." He glanced into the trees for a moment. "And the challenger is dead now." Assumed.
Now that Cisco was a little more clothed, Connor could assess him as a man more distinctly. He was attractive and not too large, and no, he didn't fit the physical mold. But he was fit, and Connor had seen all types running packs, and all sizes. It was more a surprise to him that Cisco appeared to be romantically unattached than that he was alpha here.
He gave the statement the respect it deserved by way of an honest answer. "I work for the government. I was posted to the Capital. I could have stayed there, but I decided to stay in Repose instead. There's the woods. And I haven't been back. I thought I'd see what changed." He looked, again, for a moment. "You've changed."
Cisco stood under the familiar near-tingle of the waxing moon, with the night air cool against his bare back, and looked at the man that had grown from the boy he remembered. There was something grim and studied about Connor; there was nothing thoughtless about him. Even in this moment, where there might be a trace of curiosity, toothful risk-taking, even fear or wariness, in Connor the alpha could detect none of these. He wished he had more than third-hand rumor for decades past to go on. While the other man gave him the heebie jeebies, Cisco had this absurd desire to give him a hug and tell him it would all be okay.
Maybe it was Cisco’s imagination, but he thought it good odds that it would be like hugging a porcupine.
“There’s about twenty at any given time in town, but a few families come home for the moon if they want to. Depends on if they have young ones or if someone is having a hard time with the change.” Cisco was vague on purpose. Specifying names or exact numbers might make other people victims, and he was only risking himself here, not the whole pack. “More now the old alpha is gone. He was a real piece of work. One of those people that forget we’re not wild dogs.” Cisco showed his teeth. It was not a smile. “I had to change, to deal with it.”
Wary surprise suffused Cisco’s expression, replacing the regret that had come on the heels of the discussion about the previous alpha. “What do you do for the government?” He was envisioning recruiters and his hackles were definitely going up. The pack was not full of fighters, they were people trying to live their lives.
Connor was unafraid. It might stem from confidence in his own abilities, or a less healthy unwillingness to admit the possibility of failure, but, in truth, it was born of raw detachment. He'd never had a strong fear for his own life, and his assessment of his capabilities was honest. He knew where he could succeed and where he could fail. Challenging a well-liked alpha in his own territory was almost always a failing proposition, and what would be the motivation? There would only have been violence today if Cisco had brought it. If he'd been aware Cisco was considering hugging him, it might have even made him smile. There was nothing to be afraid of here.
He wasn't anticipating a person-by-person rundown. Twenty gave him a benchmark, which was all he wanted. A healthy size, not too big. The remark about change, though, and that show of teeth, they drew a different kind of attention. "For better, or for worse?" he asked. It always interested him, how people assessed their own capability to do violence to others. It would be good to know what Cisco was made of. He might be unafraid, but he knew he'd have a good fight on his hands if he ever invited one, reluctantly initiated or not.
Connor saw Cisco start to tense, and he lifted a hand. "I'm a detective. I specialize in unusual crimes. 'Unnatural.' I bring a certain...perspective to such investigations. One they are unaware of." It was frank, and it was leverage. That he offered it was a sign of trust to someone he'd known a long time, if a long time ago, and an acknowledgement that Cisco had a great deal more to lose than he did. As he saw it, anyway. "If no one in your pack is violating federal law, they won't have any problems with me. And I don't mean tax fraud."
Yes, Connor's grim combination of inquisitive conversation and uncaring certainty reminded Cisco a lot of himself a few months ago, when he was trying to deal with the joint problem of avenging a brother and acquiring a pack. People in that space always needed hugs and rarely wanted them. If that was true, Cisco thought to himself, Connor had probably been this way a long time.
Cisco found the dark kernel of truth lodged in his ribcage twisted sometimes when he least expected it, and he blinked especially slowly in the middle of the conversation, shifting his weight from one knee to another in a chorus of crackling leaves and grating pebbles. He didn't answer the question about better or worse--it was an absolute definitive silence in which Cisco looked through his glasses, the dark air between them, and into Connor's face with a solemn expression of non-response. If he'd been a wolf, he would have been standing very still with his tail moving cautiously from one side to another.
Cisco opened his mouth in a silent, quintessentially canine laugh, without sound but clear as a grin. "Good for you." All the wariness went away. "No, we don't have any criminals right now. Even our runaways are over fifty by now." Changed wolves didn't always receive acceptance from their families, and some of the pack members had been in Repose longer than either Cisco or Connor had been alive. "The Campground is actually personal property, mine. Just borders federal land so we can run." Cisco stretched his bare shoulders upward, linking his fingers and almost yawning in a wolfish gesture of relaxation, bare skin moving in the gray light. "But you probably know that by now. It's good you were cautious. You can see you don't need to, though, now." Smile.
Connor didn't press Cisco on the point. He communicated his answer clearly enough with that long look, and Connor filed it away for future reference. He'd accomplished what he came to this conversation to do, aside from dispel any threat he might seem to pose. He'd taken the measure of Cisco.
Connor wasn't worried about runaway wolves, or wolf thieves, or con wolves. If someone was running something bigger than petty and using their network of dangerous friends to do it, they earned his attention. If people were turning up dead from wolf attacks, he would look into it. His expression changed minutely when Cisco mentioned running through the forest. He hadn't done much of that recently. He'd been spending too much time in cities to afford the luxury of open forest and field, and it was trickier for a lone wolf to lope through the countryside.
He looked at Cisco's hands as they linked and he stretched, his only peculiarly canine shift in focus so far, following the motion rather than watching Cisco's face. "I do see." A small smile, finally. He looked up, gauging the distance to the road. "Can I walk you back?" It was a lesser gesture than coming fully clean about what he was in Repose to do, but a significant one, that he was willing to walk in company. He didn't exactly radiate comfort in fellowship, after all.
The way Cisco had been raised, the purpose of the alpha was to keep the pack cohesive, sane, and safe. He or she was there to prevent death, to prevent killings and the hunters that inevitably followed. Cisco had to change, first to kill his brother's murderer, and then again to become what the pack needed. To admit that he didn't want to change would be to admit that he did not want to be an alpha.
Cisco let his empty hands fell back down to his sides, the loose folds of the old gray sweats shifting along his flanks as he turned back toward the opening of the cave. "Sure. Let's go." It was cold on Cisco's bare chest and toes, but he didn't say anything about it, staying on two legs because Connor was on two legs. They progressed down the incline and up again, following the path around the lake back toward the Campground.
"I would invite you to run, but since you said you want to maintain your distance from us, I won't." Because Cisco recruited with the charms of pack life, not drafts. He put his hands in his sweats pockets as if he didn't feel the difference between his attire and Connor's tailor-trimmed suit. If Connor wanted to stay a lone wolf, he was going to find his own territory to run, or do so where he wouldn't run into the pack and cause problems. Unless he wanted to change his mind.
Connor's experience with alphas revolved primarily around wolves who saw him as an interloper. There was an occasional cautious, friendlier interaction, like this one, but for each of these, there were three or four wolves who tried to eliminate him outright. Being a free agent in a world of tightly managed groups wasn't the easiest path. It was simply the only one for him. He need admit nothing to anyone, be nothing for anyone except what he chose to be. He might not have picked this life, but he could choose the way he made his way through it.
It didn't occur to him to think of Cisco's cold. The other man, after all, could have said no if he didn't like the inconvenience. There was no question that Connor was going to drop to all fours right now, however - his suit surely wouldn't have taken to being carried in a wolf's mouth. And how would he explain errant holes left by tooth and claw to a tailor? That was the reason he would have offered, good-humored, if asked. In truth, he had no intention of being seen by any wolves in the Repose pack if he could help it. It would only make his work more complicated if he could be identified on sight.
Connor nodded when Cisco explained why he wouldn't invite him along. "Thank you," he said, watching his feet for errant branches and knots in the path, dark fringe falling toward his eyes. "You'll do well if you keep going this way." He looked over at Cisco. When he dropped the veneer of nonthreatening bonhomie, he really did have a strange way of looking through people, as if marking their every quality in a private file for future use. “If you want to keep going this way.” Alphas typically held the job until ousted, and ousted usually meant killed. He couldn’t imagine committing to such thing for the rest of his life, but perhaps his imagination was not wide, his empathy, as he knew, being stunted. It was a failing he could not change, so he worked around it, feigning what he could not understand.
To Cisco, who had been born in a family and into a life peopled with two dozen aunts and uncles and cousins who all operated as one complex and warm family, the idea of abandoning it for a life utterly alone was unenviable and impossible if there was an alternative available. Of course, he remembered the rumors surrounding the events of Connor's last days in Repose, and knew there were some barriers that couldn't be breeched. He had to think of another wolf's impact on the rest, too, and his primary responsibility was to the pack as it existed now.
Cisco assumed that, like most of the bitten, Connor preferred two legs to four, and thought of himself as a human that sometimes turned into a wolf, and not the myriad other definitions. He didn't question it.
At first, Connor's compliment sounded condescending, and Cisco's initial glance to one side was both arch and cold, as if there was some implication that Connor knew something he didn't about being an alpha. But after a moment's pause as he strode over a broken branch in his bare feet, he decided it wasn't meant that way. He didn't know how it was meant, though. "What do you mean?" Cisco's stepfather had held alpha until he died of old age. It was rare enough.
Connor wasn't under the impression he'd said anything controversial, but he got the gist of the question. "That you're doing better than most I've seen, and that you could go on that way if you don't give it up." He looked at Cisco. "I've watched a lot of packs. Mostly from a distance. Never been an alpha, but seen them succeed and fail. You're not in the group that fails." Simple enough, to him.
They reached the road before long, cool and dark, sheltered by the trees. A small group of deer had passed through here recently - a doe with two foals, crossing toward fresh water and shelter from whirring traffic. He liked being in the woods at this time of night, despite some bad associations with the wilderness. He felt at home in it, beyond just being a wolf. He was comfortable with the demands of the forest, what wasn't required to survive.
Connor turned his body toward the other side of the road. "You're going toward the campground. I'm going back into town." A parting of the ways, then. He looked at Cisco for a few moments longer. "Next time we meet, come with shoes, and I'll buy you a coffee." There might have even been a lick of humor in that, mostly around the eyes.