Urban Roots Park Oops! I did it again

@Mathis >:]

Comfy dress

---

Alright so in the interest of avoiding the last place where she'd had a stressful were interaction, she decided to go do some food shopping in Valencia (it was always cheaper to make the trek out to the Asian markets here even with transit fare) and then, after with her little grocery cart, start heading back.

She ambled through the park here, eyeing the outdoor workout equipment and the veggies and herbs and things coming into bloom, which kiew already described just some days ago here, so there was no need to repeat it.

Aww man. It would be cool to come back and pick some fresh stuff! Such a thought she decided to herself, unaware of yet another were.

Over the past year and a half, Mathis had done a good job of sweeping all of the rubble of his ruined life into neat piles, organized and delegated by how precariously balanced his feelings were. Some things he’d managed to take apart and rebuild with, while others were shoved into corners, to be returned to… another time.

But all of it changed when he’d spoken to Frank. Like he’d wrenched a door open to a wild storm and let the wind gust in. It kicked up a maelstrom of regret and sorrow and anger and resentment. Now the wind had died down, and the dust hung heavy in the air, choking his lungs and making him feel clouded and disoriented.

The cat took advantage. It sunk its claws in wild he was blinded, heightening the anxiety and stress of moving into his new apartment. It made it nearly unbearable to remain stationary, demanding that he either shift or keep moving, on the prowl for something new to brood over. It made it impossible to take the time to sweep things back into order. There were things he wanted to do, a promise he’d made and had yet to keep.

But he couldn’t think about meeting with Levi now. He couldn’t really even think at all.

So he was obliging the awful beast, leaving his apartment in Hawknell furnished with only unopened boxes, and setting out on foot. He hadn’t really realized he crossed over into nearby Valencia until he stumbled upon the park and noted municipal signage.

That would do. His walk was more of a prowl, covering ground with no direction. He smoked a cigarette, resenting the cat for dulling the nicotine.

Maybe it would have been better to find somewhere to shift. Maybe it was better if he simply yielded to the cat for good and disappeared into the mountains. It would be easier than sorting through the obliterated wreckage.

But before Mathis could turn to do any of that, the cheetah locked on to something moving through the park. Like it had spotted a hare in a field of waving grass, camouflaged, but not enough. Mathis squinted as he followed the cat’s urgent attention, not sure what he was meant to be looking for. The signal was unlike anything he’d felt before. Almost akin to a King’s power to feel the proximity of a Were in the city, only, somehow, the opposite. Like there was a blank spot in his awareness, a cigarette burn in the tapestry.

Mathis didn’t even realize who he was staring at across a bed of budding vegetables. He didn’t even realize he was staring at all until he met her eyes for too long. And then he blinked, and pieces that should have clicked into place instead scattered out before him disjointedly.

It was Asha. But it was not a jaguar.

The cat, uneasy, gave a low hiss.

Again, largely unaware. Until she righted herself, looked around for the handle to her cart to grab again, and then noticed that she was not alone. That she was in fact being stared at.

It would be nice to say that she could recognize him anywhere, but it had been quite a while since she last seen Mathis. That said, it also didn't take that many seconds for her to realize who it was. She had caved his skull in last time they saw each other, after all.

Her lips parted, as if to say something, but nothing came out.

Not too distantly loomed the fact that here was the test that would determine how Dante interacted with his future kid.

Something was very, very wrong.

Here was Asha, a woman whose life and his own had always been in the same orbit, but hardly crossed paths. Who seemed always to have some catastrophic event that sent debris flying into his own atmosphere. Scattered memories of their past interactions flickered past. He could only count a handful of times in which they'd met that was not under the guise of some tension or confusion or uncomfortable shared truth.

But their last interaction remained a glaring, splotchy stain in his memory.

Aggression and adrenaline, claws that tore and teeth that crushed. Bones breaking, blood spilling. All in the name of something that was supposed to be a fun sport. Gone horribly, horribly wrong. They'd done to each other more than what either should have endured, both lost in some bloodlust that Mathis hadn't had the means to stop. The details of that night were fuzzy, intricacies cleaved away by pain, holes torn into the memory as surely as long teeth had torn into his skull.

In fact, it seemed like ever since that night, he'd been living in a haze of unclarity. A shifted view. Looking at the world through the eyes of a beast, and not a man. He'd healed from that fight, but he had not recovered.

But where was the creature that had done it? She was not here. There was Asha, and then there was a pit of absence around her, an aura of wrongness that set the hair on the back of his neck on end. The cheetah paced behind his eyes, urging him toward her, forcing him to walk closer to determine what he was sensing.

"Asha." He said tightly, eyeing her, "You look well." But she felt wrong.

More gold eyes thrown her way. The struggle in his tone was palpable; she did not like it. Danger prickled at the back of her head as he approached her nearer, and Asha — for one shameful moment — wished that amidst shitty full moon week appetite and shitty silver burn allergy remnants, she'd also kept that actually useful fucking strength and speed.

Don't run from a were, it would catch you. So for the moment, she stood her ground, knowingly breakable. But if she could talk to Ingrid and find some semblance of remaining friendship, maybe she could talk to Mathis.

"You... too," she answered. Again, a hand to her still small belly, a protective tic that was quickly finding reason to form. "How are- how's everything?"

Him too. He almost laughed. Even after cutting his hair and keeping shaved, he was sure he looked no less worse for wear than he had since getting released from prison. He'd been hoping closure and moving on physically would help him get some semblance of a spark back, but it had yet to ignite. The same could not be said for Asha. She was all but glowing, looking flushed with health and... His eyes flicked down at her hand. It could be nothing. But, at the same time, could be the very explanation he was puzzling about. The seeming absence of her cat.

Mathis smiled mutedly. "A lot has changed for me." He admitted, then nodded toward her pointedly, "And you, it seems?"

Maybe not the first to call her out for losing the bitch that had ruined both their lives, but the first to recognize what her gesture meant, that look and the nod. Could he hear a second heartbeat, she wondered. Best to assume so, even if Ingrid hadn't called it out.

She softened, still afraid, but still resolute. Asha had at the very least always stood by the decisions this body of hers had made, even when it was shared.

It was just shared by something better now.

"December," she nodded softly.

A due date was confirmation enough. Really, it was a good piece of news. Something he should be happy for her about. He was far from the person that had any right to judge her for what she chose to do with her own body. But the fact that the child would turn into a Were made him a bit sick to his stomach. The idea of someone being born with a beast that would outright remove any sense of humanity from them... he couldn't imagine what kind of person they'd grow into. He knew what it looked like to be entirely consumed by an inner beast, and did not think anyone deserved it.

But he couldn't say any of that. Even as the cat clamped down on his inner disgust, flooding his mouth with a sour taste, he forced his tone to be light, "Ah, congratulations." The skin on the back of his neck prickled, itching as if his hackles were straining to pierced through the surface. He clapped a hand over the skin, scratching idly. "I am sure you two are very excited." He added, meaning Abraham. As far as he knew, they were still happily married, and Asha was still Queen of her own group in Ridgefield!

Two. Ha. Mathis spoke to a version of reality the cat had very much wanted to be real. In the absence of the animal that had loathed her failures to get there, and in the presence of Abraham's bizarre need to treat her like a complete piece of shit beneath his shoe, she offered a faint smile. Because it was clear Mathis didn't know what had transpired or else he would be asking who the father was.

"It's not his. Abraham never wanted a family with me."

Apparently he had never wanted forever with her, either.

It was one of those faux pas that made him immediately wish there was an eject button for his body. The cat had a helpful suggestion, and he stiffened as his joints locked up in anticipation of the shift. Mathis grimaced, subtlety lost in the grapple to keep his hold on the cat. Not here, not over simple embarrassment.

"Ah, ehm." He struggled, "I'm sorry to hear? Or-" Or maybe it was good, then, if Abraham hadn't wanted it? Or... Fuck. He grasped for something to say that wouldn't be offensive and probing. Maybe sympathizing? "Frank and I split, too." Which, just, was the worst thing to say to help his own bleating heart.

For all she had been scared, it was good to see Mathis stumbling. She... couldn't recall if the cat had ever had a grudge against him.

But oh, that confession. Her eyes widened.

You know who she would have immediately turned around and told after this? Someone who apparently now thought she wasn't even worth a friendship with.

In that absence, she sought for sympathy for the man in front of her. "I'm sorry. How are you doing about it?"

It should have been an easy question to deflect. To assure her he was managing and change the subject. But his feeble grip on a collected demeanor was slipping.

He couldn’t manage a smile as he sniffed thinly and flicked his cigarette, only distantly aware that he should put it out entirely around her. “Badly.” He admitted.

“The view from rock bottom is, ehm, grim.”

"Hmm. I get you, I was there."

Really, Abraham had... fucking pushed her there. Turned her to begin with, lied to her. Suddenly got tired of his own lying, she guessed, and abandoned her.

Whatever. Whatever. Whatever. Fuck him.

"The cat was trying to destroy me after he left. She and I were never really friends and she... blamed me for him leaving."

The way feral magic animals could hate and blame and punish and wreck a life, she shrugged.

He’d heard of her version of rock bottom, and he didn’t think he could even sink to that level. For all he wished he had done things differently, he would never erase the memories of all of the people closest to him. The thought of forgetting Frank made him feel ill.

He felt ill in general. Deeply, deeply unsettled every moment he continued to be in her presence. Something about her was different beyond simply being pregnant.

And her next words were what he needed to make the connection. The way she spoke about her cat; in such a similar way he thought about his that he physically flinched; in past tense. Past tense. She and her cat were never friends, and she’d been nearly destroyed by it.

“She’s… your cat, it is… gone now?” He’d thought it was the process of carrying a child as a Were, that her power signature was masked by the powers of a Were leader suppressing the beast to avoid shifting. But now with the context of her pregnancy, and the split from Abraham, it made no sense.

But the alternative… The cheetah hissed, rattling his bones with the truth. She was not a Were any longer.

Man. It didn't matter to him, did it? Didn't matter what kind of horrific monster it had been in her head, driving her to act on every stupid impulse under threat of forced shifting and doing it anyway. Didn't matter how many years she'd tried to bend herself and make it work. How many times she'd felt like a puppet even at the height of power. Just like it didn't matter how many times she'd told Abraham about feeling that way.

The immediate focus was on the fact that the bitch was gone.

So she nodded a soft nod, waiting for judgement or maybe worse, waiting to witness the start of a shift. How long would it take Mathis? A minute? Less. She had less than a minute to try to get away. Get in some vehicle at the end of the park.

Her heart felt very loud, even to her human ears. She could only imagine how loud it was to his.

Her heard her heart before her saw her nod. The unmistakable sound of fear. Mathis’ heart jumped into his throat at the truth. The cat’s furious hiss tore through his head, and he took another step away from her.

She’d done it. The process he’d read hundreds of articles about in the past year, a secret twisted fascination with the horrific ordeal. A forced cleaving away of the inner beast. A murder, essentially, of a part of them that seemed irrevocable. The cat that had crushed his head was no more.

And the cat that lived within it was disgusted.

But Mathis, that human man that had wept from relief on the eclipse, was desperate to know more.

“How.” He said, golden eyes glassy, jaw tight with the effort of pushing the cat away from the door. Jamming a proverbial shoulder against the iron gates as the cat thrashed and hissed, eager to be released to undo the affront that the woman had committed. But he would not let it happen. It was enough. “Tell me, please, quickly.” Sweat beaded his brow, he shifted in his shoes, unable to keep still.

Them gold eyes were one thing, that face at her, that horrified step away. But his words were another, and it rocked her fear for a moment, almost deluged with disbelief. Not that he wanted to know, which could have just been for murderrrrr, but that he wanted to know, please, and quickly.

Was that him fighting the cat back for this information? It didn't sound as furious as his eyes suggested. She stuttered into surprised response.

"It's- a pact. Psychics. If they have a pact they can do it, it's like a prowl or whatever. I could connect you with someone and they could connect you to one of those? If you want that?"

Her words were spoken quickly, at least. Even if she was unsure what his intentions really were.

A pact. He knew the process on an objective level, but not how to go about it. There wasn’t some organization in place. It was an under the table transaction, information traded by word of mouth. And she knew someone who knew someone, who could do it. He could do it.

Did he want that?

The cat yowled and thrashed, hateful as it shredded the skin and bone of his inner restraint. Mathis’ heart hammered. He dropped his cigarette.

He couldn’t make his throat work, but he could nod. Robotic, up and down in a hurried bob. Yes. Yes. He did want it. He needed freedom sixteen years of being a captive to a beast who had grown into a vengeful monster.

That little nod was all the permission she needed. Thinking fast had always been an Asha strength, and instead of trying to play "can you get your phone number out of your mouth," she instead reached in her grocery cart with one hand for the receipt tucked next to the loaf of bread, and also her purse for a pen with the other hand.

She scribbled her number down, made sure it was legible, crumpled the receipt so it could be aimed and not flap haplessly in the air, and tossed it at him. The entire process took less than ten seconds.

"My number. Text me."

And with that she grasped her cart handle and started to move away. AWAY.

The cat was good for one thing, and it was swift reflexes. Even in midst of a mental revolt, it caught the object tossed his way. Mathis gripped the paper tight in his palm, and only nodded once in silent thankfulness before he turned, and moved in the opposite direction.

Away, away, to the outskirts of the city. Where once again he’d be forced to bend to the will of the cat. But it didn’t matter. Not when, before he shed his clothes, he made sure that little ball of paper was tucked safely in the pocket of his pants.