"I wanted to s-show them that their damn golden boy wasn't as g-g-golden as he looked."

Tenement Building(#2451RJ)
The lobby and first floor of the five-story building are quite dingy, but here at least are the most obvious signs of renovation and cleaning. The further one goes up, the more chaos and decay reign, the ravages of years of abandonment and the abuse of squatters. The lights don't work up there, and many of the pipes -- rusty and old, like the rest of the building -- have been blocked off until they can be replaced. The vast majority of apartments are still quite trashed and unlivable.
Thomas Grey lives in the basement-level super's apartment; the spacious floor plan and privacy make up for the lack of windows and the neighboring boiler. It's sparsely furnished and vaguely dingy, but cleaner than the rest of the building. Also, the lights and water work. More so than anywhere else, the basement area is a haven for cockroaches, but the rats keep their distance, and their numbers are dwindling.

Grey meets Kevin outside the decrepit tenement building, wearing camo pants and a chambray shirt open over a black t-shirt. Hardly fashionable, but all the evidence points to these being working clothes; the Philodox appears to have already been many hours busy with cleaning duties. He leans against the front doors, smoking a cigarette and watching the street like an ill-tempered guard dog.

Kevin approaches the dingy tenement watchfully, perhaps remembering his encounter with drug-dealers down here some months ago. He spies Grey slouching outside and increases his speed a little to get to the philodox. "I'm here," he announces redundantly once in earshot.

Grey rakes an eye over the Ragabash and nods. "Come in. Mind the dust." And he lets Kevin inside, to a front hallway that, in the two months plus that he's been vanished, has gone more or less back to pot. As Grey leads them downstairs to his own apartment in the wreck, a one-eared bastard of a tabby cat stares balefully at them, then zips off in the opposite direction.

Kevin waggles his fingers at the cat as it scoots. "Hi, Greebo," he murmurs, revealing himself as one who's read at least some Terry Pratchett, before he follows Grey into the apartment and closes the door. "Thanks for agreeing to see me," he begins slightly stiltedly, as though unsure how to get the conversation going.

"I thought you might want to talk," says Grey evenly. The apartment has an aura of cigarette smoke and several cockroaches scutter out of sight when the light gets turned on. "Dillen told me about you and Basil."

Kevin goes that shade of pink he so often does whenever the subject of a conversation approaches romance or sex. "Ah," he says. "I was hoping to break it myself... but we don't always get what we want, do we."

Grey snorts. "A fact of which I'm well aware." He eyes the Ragabash a moment, then shrugs and starts toward the kitchen. "Get you a drink? Coffee, juice?"

"Coffee'd be good," Kevin sighs, brushing some dust from the table idly. "So what happened to you?" If he's aware that that question is imprecise, he doesn't show any sign of refining it to specify what events he's referring to.

Grey moves about the kitchen, preparing a fresh pot of java. "A coyote spirit accosted myself and several other Garou and entreated us to help protect a fetish. It led us to a spot in the Umbra and told us to touch a particular tree with a mark on it. We did so, and the next moment, I'm several miles away in the Umbra, under a new moon, and it's over two months later." He grimaces.

"What a bastard," Kevin comments. "All a hoax, then? Or do you think there was something more to it? Maybe this spirit was trying to take four of the sept's strongest defenders out for a reason?"

Grey grunts. "Who can tell, with coyote spirits?" He turns the coffee maker on and leans against the counter nearby, arms folded across his chest.

Kevin dusts off a chair and sits down on it, uneasily. "Well," he says, "there weren't any major attacks I know of while you were gone, so all's well, anyway. At least, so far as that goes." A pregnant pause, then: "Just what did Dillen tell you?"

"That you stood up in the middle of the Moot and announced that you were charach, and then ran off. That Basil was your... lover... and that Requiem was no more." Grey delivers this in quite a deadpan fashion, with only minor hesitation over the l-word.

Kevin considers a moment. "That's about right," he concedes. "I thought that announcing it like that would shake the complacent bastards up and shock them enough that I could make a run for it... we were going to quit town on his Harley and head east. But... well, it seemed a good idea at the time. Vera got to us first. I still don't know how she managed that."

Grey's mouth thins. "She's an Adren Ragabash. They have ways of finding their prey that are far superior to that ritual I tried to teach you." He shakes his head. "Why announce it at all?"

Kevin's cheeks are now a pretty fair shade of red, and his only response to that question, for a moment or three, is a faint, incoherent splutter. "I... I..." He confronts at Grey with a look that's almost defiant. "I wanted to s-show them that their damn golden boy wasn't as g-g-golden as he looked," he manages to stammer out. "I was so fed up with them all. Their p-patronising. Little pats on the back, good old Kevin, such a worthy garou. And Basil... none of them cared a highly-coloured damn for him."

Grey rubs a hand over his beard and looks ruefully at his tribemate. "Do they care for him now?" He shakes his head. "You're lucky the both of you weren't killed. But I suspect that you know that. I was fortunate to be judged by a Child of Gaia who cherishes Garou life, and even then I hardly got off soft."

"I heard there was an argument for killing us," Kevin scowls. "For a while I wished they had, but I'm... over that now."

Grey's jaw tightens. "You're very lucky. Of course, we might all still die getting rid of the tire fire, but..." He pushes a stray lock of hair out of his face. Dryly: "The least you could have done was wait until I was around to put my voice in."

"I had a hard enough job persuading Basil to wait as long as moot," protests Kevin. "He couldn't wait to be gone. Ride off into the sunset and live forever after." His lip curls in a bitter sneer. Then he looks up at Grey with a sudden bleak expression. "Thomas? ...When you, uh, did it? Did you feel... guilty? Did it feel wrong?"

Grey purses his lips, his eyes going hooded and distant. "The first time was a mistake, I told myself. We were drunk, and the time... it was an unusual summer. The second time it happened, many months later, I had no such excuse." He tugs absently at his beard. "I worried about getting caught, and I worried about her welfare when we were apart, but guilty? No. I loved her. I still love her." He folds his arms again across his chest and looks directly at the younger cliath, unsmiling. "More than anything."

"I tried to tell myself that because we couldn't make metis, it wasn't wrong," Kevin recalls. "But... I never quite succeeded." Again he falls silent a moment, then he suddenly begins speaking quickly. "I loved him," he blurts. "I'd have done anything for him. I would have died for him. When I thought they were going to kill us both, I was ready to plead for them to let him go if they'd kill me... claim I'd led him on, claim I'd persuaded him against his will --" He cuts himself off with an almost physical effort, his fists in front of him and clenched on the dusty table.

A flicker of sympathy crosses the gaunt, scarred face. "The First Law is there to prevent the creation of Metis. To a lesser degree, it's to remind us to stay connected with our kinfolk and to consider the conception of the next generation. So. You made no sterile halfbreeds, and you've always had good relationships with our kin. I could fault you on not siring offspring, but..." He shrugs. "You're young, still." Grey adds, sourly, "Unfortunately, the vast majority of the Garou Nation takes a more narrow view."

Kevin's fingers very slowly unclench a little, and his knuckles unwhiten, though his fists stay clenched. "This sounds so completely selfish," he mutters, "but I wish you'd felt the guilt. It was killing me... it still is... that's why --" Again he breaks off, then forces himself to go on. "I guess that's why I told them at moot. I needed to... to confess it."

Grey exhales a breath, then shrugs. "You, at least, can still be with him. Lara and I have the width of the continent between us. If things had been different, I would have married her." He shrugs tersely and turns away to deal with the coffee maker, which has now filled the pot with fresh brew.

Kevin doesn't seem to take much consolation in that. Indeed, he gives Grey another bleak, hopeless look. "Or to put it another way," he says, "you don't have to see her every day, be able to talk to her, be able to touch her... and not be able to go beyond because you know, for the rest of your life, if you so much as hold hands the philodoxes will be down on you like greased lightning and calling for your blood. Think of it that way, Thomas."

Grey, his back to the Ragabash, nods. "You have a point. Rather a shit situation either way, isn't it?" He gets out a couple of mugs and fills them. "Milk? I'm afraid I don't have any sugar."

Kevin seems to have had the wind taken out of his sails when Grey readily appreciates his point. "Uh. Yes, please. Milk's fine." He rubs his chin. "Whichever way up you hold it, yeah, it sucks," he agrees. "Still, if nothing else, it seems to have given Basil a real kick in the ass. You remember what he was like before..." Kevin eyes Grey cautiously. "He's keen as mustard, now."

Grey sets a mug of coffee and a quart of skim milk in front of Kevin, then sits down opposite him with his own cup of unadulterated coffee. "He seems to be. He was interesting in learning the Rite of Wounding and asking Morgan about joining your new pack."

Kevin adds milk to the coffee and drinks some of it, gratefully. "Well, yeah, maybe Natalie was right about me not fitting in a war pack after all," he says with a deadpan expression. "We'll see how we get on under Raccoon... if we survive the tire fire," he qualifies. "But Emma really got righteous at the philodoxes when they tried to tell her we should get thrown in at the front of the fight like Uriah the Hittite, and she told them she'd use us where she damn pleases... I love that girl, she must be a great alpha for you to pack with... so I guess we've as good a chance as any garou."

Grey actually smiles a bit at this. "Good girl," he murmurs, approvingly.

The level of coffee in the mugs drops steadily, is replenished, and drops again as the two Glass Walkers continue talking. The atmosphere between them remains fractionally tense, but less so than has often been the case in the past between the two, as the conversation goes onto other things and Kevin updates Grey with various snippets of news from the last two months. He concludes with a blow-by-blow account of the tire fire scouting and the vicious balefire burns which caused him to grow extra tails. "...and so I had my second encounter with a Black Fury wielding a silver knife in a month," he smiles darkly. "But you know what? Back at the farm, hidden on the top storey of the barn in the hay, and wrapped up in saran wrap... there's a bucket. And in that bucket are those four extra tails Laura cut off me. And when we kill that thing in the heart of the fire... I am gonna ram every one of those tails down its throat before I leave that place." He folds his arms with an air of determination. "I'm guessing Havoc will all be there, as your alpha's leading it all?"

Grey finishes off the last of his current cup and pushes his chair back as he stands. "Naturally. I don't plan to miss this."

Kevin grins as he too drains his mug. "I can't wait to get this out of the way," he says. "Having a punishment hanging over me isn't a pleasant feeling. Well... I'm going to go off and see whether Basil has managed to talk Morgan into joining our little pack of metis and omegas. Did you say you were gonna teach him something?"

Grey carries the mugs to the sink. "Basil wants to learn Rite of Wounding. And Morgan, I think, is interesting in learning Talisman Dedication. Which you were thinking of learning as well, I think?"

Kevin nods. "Having failed to dismally to master Questing Stone... Never try to learn Gifts when your mind's too ridden with guilt to focus," he says with ironic cheerfulness. "No hurry, though. Plenty of time once we know I've survived the fire."

Grey nods. "Indeed." He offers to see the Ragabash out; the one-eared tabby is nowhere to be seen as they pass back through the front lobby.