It was a brief moment of privacy when she was left on her own to wade in the unfamiliar territory of Fords abode. She felt constricted. The walls weren't closing in but the air was different; clean, fresh, untainted with the toxins her urban motel room was painted with. It was easier to dissolve into a puddle of languid tempt when no one was watching how her body moved. Slow, leonine. Drugged. The pills were quick to laminate her system.

She fell into a pile of bare limbs and a buttoned up men's shirt to the couch. Her phone was being fidgeted with. A hundred calls in a little less than twenty four hours, each one singing the same song. She didn't bother returning any of them. There was, though, one individual that she was scrolling to find before pressing the send key. It was cradled between her ear and shoulder, listening to it ring while she inspected the elegant architecture of her fingers.

Living within the liquor-soaked confines of the Inn for that long was just one of the nine levels of the cowboy's own version of his personal Hell. Here, nature had been condensed and butchered, the unnatural treated unnatural and collapsing in on itself until four walls felt like a prison cell; a penance for violating one of the short list of commandments that any cliched Rhy'din residence was supposed to comply with:

Never do the right thing.

The passage of months had been unkind to Cooper, as if the Mother herself had snuck in with subtle fingers to steal the natural vigor from his once healthy body and bottle it away for some other purpose. He'd lost a dangerous amount of weight, making for a too-gaunt picture on what was once such a broad, impressive frame. The light had faded from his eyes, taking a disconcerting penumbral hue that made such pretty lies in stark contrast to the hope he offered in each smile when one could be found. Or forced.

So in this, his days were meant for the hibernal tug and subsequent slumber of winter's grasp, his nights filled with self-pity and fake courage as he stumbled towards an answer to the dilemma nagging doggedly at his soul. He was somewhere in between when the call came, the dry, muffled baritone of his voice familiar and yet so distant.

"Hullo?"


"You sleepin' still, papa bear?", came the unique hybrid murmur of when a girl was bred with siren qualities. There was something different about the rich skinned creature on the other end of the phone. Even with the distance and the phone being their only link, she could lull the savagery to a dull pulse while instigating that light be spilled into the darkest of souls. It wasn't with out it's curses.

Her smile bloomed on the other end and she felt the hooded net of her lids fall a little more over the Pandora's box of pigments her eyes were sketched with. Fingers plucked and strummed at the buttons of the powdered blue men's shirt she had coiled inside of. It smelled like the man who owned it.

"It's Peaches by the way. Y'remember me, right?" How could one forget the lions mane girl?

"Kind'a," he mumbled. "Sort'a," he rumbled. "Not really," he finally confessed. Of late, the bear-hearted beast of a man had spent much of his time existing in that hazy world between slumber and wakefulness, hovering precariously in the land of memory eating fog.

Everyone knew that place. You look at the clock at noon and then after a few moments, you look again and it's seven o' clock in the P.M.

He roused from the chair he'd been slouched in, death's dark eyes panning a modestly sized room that was wall-to-ball boxes; his entire life, what the garou didn't keep, summed up in stack after stack of cardboard confinement. This is no life, a few errant pictures on the dresser taunted him.

"Yeah, kid. Hey. How y' goin'? Everything aw'right?" No one called him anymore. So she had to need something, right?

She was none the wiser to the faults of his path; a journey for a man was his own, and the demons that followed. Pixie's like her had no part in the destruction of the heart, the soul -- only the repairing of such paranormal things. Bit by bit, minute by minute. A distracting beacon of hope when the world was so, so dark. Her smile could be felt, and heard; the forbidden essence of it should have been written in the unknown tomes of fables.

"Everythin' is jus'fine, papa bear."

She didn't want anything, or need anything. Her act of calling was selfless. As many of the choices she made were.

"What're you up to?"

The phone was caught tenuously between his ear and shoulder, keeping those large hands of his free to pat down and finally rescue his Marlboro Reds from the pants he wasn't wearing. A single cigarette was lipped free and lit with the quick pass of his thumb's callus pad over the trigger, the deep draw of an inhale only slightly less audible than the ursine chuff of his exhale.

"Doin' my best Risky Business impression. Contemplatin' some'a the mo' dangerous questions'a the supernatural universe. Avoidin' the bounty Marc Franco put on m' pecker."

She could pick any one of those answers and it might have been true.

"Yo'self?"

Girlish laughter escaped the compound of her Utopian mouth.

"Cooper, love -- I am so sorry about that, yea'? I take all the blame."

Humor slurred as thick as syrup across her tongue. It was the London drift of when grime met glamour; cockney and class stitched together for an interesting accent.

"An'I can't imagine you as a young Cruise. I used to be quite dreamy over him though, yea'? Can't really think of why..." Drifting off. She could rattle on days, years, eons of time with just the White Rabbit riddles and smiles soaked in sugared venom.

The fae-crafted thing on the other end shifted, sending a bit of static in the phone. "Say, speakin' of that bounty -- What if I told you I know someone who doesn't'ave a clue about that rubbish in the tabloids an' is legit interested in you?" Cooling off the playfulness of her persona to sound more genuine, sincere in what she was saying.

"Don't sweat it, darlin'," one could almost hear the shrug in his voice, a perfect compliment to the indifferent shoulders that were still wide enough to impress. "It ain't the first time I've been in Franco's rag and it likely ain't gonna be the last, though it'd be nice if'n someone wrote somethin' flatterin' fo' a change."

"M' too tall, too wide, and too straight t' pull off Cruise..." There was the hint of tease in his tone, before flavor of her Isles-born tongue grew more candid and she was cutting to the proverbial chase. In the time between her delivery and his answer, resignation, reservation, and grim amusement set the tone. "M' not opposed to an outin', but with everything I've had goin' on, I couldn't make no promises, angel." The cowboy was serious as a heart attack, regardless of the gentle croon in the delivery of deep baritone words. "And m' findin' that the older I get, the pickier I get."

It never hurt to be honest, right?

"Aw, now come on, papa bear --", she tried a different route; the maenad murmured a song that rippled thick in the phone. A shiver of mermaid scales or the stretch of seraphim wings -- different metaphors for the enticing command her drugged up pleading could be. "-- she's a real looker, yea'? She just wanted me to give you her number, yea'? You don't gotta call her, or even make contact, but might be nice to just pretend everything is ok, yea'? Jus' for a bit?" His days were dark, maybe darker than hers, yet she was in the same kingdom of shit that he was in. Ghosts galore, wraiths of old. The black nostalgia that would never fade, only intensify over the lapse of time.

"What is your type, anyways?", she grew curious as they began to settle on the phone.

"Can't throw a rock 'round here without hittin' a looker," he teased, tempering the soft bite of cynicism with good humor before another slow drag was taken and ashes her flicked casually into the coffee can that had been serving as his ash tray. "But I didn't say no, darlin'. M' not opposed t' given the situation a look, m' just not askin' anyone t' hold out hope fo' any romance."

He'd been pretending everything was okay for months, if not years now, and at even the mention it was enough to send a fresh way of helpless anger reverberating through his rough skin until the beast beneath was all but threatening to burst out. Man-flesh rippled and then stilled, control maintained so that he could given something akin to sincere consideration to her most recent of questions.

"Y' know, that's a really good damned question?" Well, it was! "Always said I liked curvy women, generously endowed, but damned near every woman I've ever been serious with has been mo' slim and athletic. I keep sayin' I like redheads, but m' ex-wife is a blonde and I've been hooked on Mediterranean-lookin' brunettes ever since." He might have rambled on more, and for much longer, but it seemed just the consideration was a sobering thing. "M' not gettin' any younger, Peaches. M' not gettin' any healthier or any closer t' shruggin' out'a the Devil's deal. You'd think I'd just be interested in gettin' m' pecker wet with whatever time I've got befo' the Big Change, but m' not. Couldn't tell y' what I want, hon. Only what I don't want. Don't want some vapid girl, with too much drama and too little maturity under her belt. Make sense?"

She could have been one of those girls -- any number of them. Her maturity? She questioned it. Her sanity? A thin line of it was still there, somewhere. Extreme cases of drama? Finger tips investigated some of the scars that lined her thighs before they fled away, uninterested in evaluating herself anymore.

"You want a woman, yea'?", she piped up after clearing the saliva that was rising around her teeth. Her medicated state would only allow her to endure such serious moments of contemplation before deciding her psyche wasn't up for it. "I get it, yea'. I do." She felt uncomfortable in the skin she was dealt, suddenly stretching to sit up rather than lay in the groove of the couch any longer.

"Well, I jus' told her I would do it, yea'? She's a bloody sweetheart, and gorgeous to boot. Like you said, dime a dozen of glamorous one's 'round here, yea'?" Her mouth twitched with a type of inward crack at herself. Just another pretty face. "You know her. Summer. One of the Daniels." Fingers went on a journey to find her cigarettes while shaking off the rust of her earlier lapse. "Not a brunette, though. An' definitely not Mediterranean."

In all of the years he'd lived, the things he'd seen, and for all of the time (days, weeks, months, or years) he had left to him, Cooper never would have painted himself as a domesticated creature. Public or private. The Wyld still claimed too strong of a call in the core of his being.

But even good men, even with a questionable past and future like his own, still wanted what the universe was so staunch on denying them. Stability. Family.

"Summer? Hn. Yeah, I ran into her at the Star's End Bar last week. Seems like a sweet girl. A looker too, yeah." On some subtle level it made him twitch. He wasn't the fixture he once was alongst the Daniels crowd and who knew what trouble the possibility could hang over his head.

"No promises, but I ain't gonna give her the stonewall or nothin'."

"Hey, that's all I'm askin', yes'? Jus' a call. Even a text if you can figure out how." A playful jab at his age; she was youthful, coy, an elusive thing that many sought to capture while he was steady, tangible, and an aggressive force of nature when his skin crawled fearlessly over his bones. Another easy laugh was hinted at.

"Thanks, papa bear. It's appreciated, yea'?"

"S' this revenge fo' me tryin' t' play matchmaker that one night?" It was a tease and, ultimately, the cowboy wasn't put off by this attempt of hers. Given how little she knew him, he could accept that this was more genuine that other recent attempts by those who knew him better.

"I 'ppreciate y' lookin' out fo' me, darlin'," he crooned gentle. Genuinely. "Even if'n there's plenty'a things I could use mo' than a date right now, I can't fault ya fo' lookin' out. Thanks."

"Course not. I can't even remember who y'were trying to play match maker with. Was he cute?" Constantly a nymph; she could have been a modern day Venus living in the Purgatory of reality, or just another sunspun satyr that drifted too far from Dionysus. Maybe, within the animal kingdom of his senses, his species, he could taste the aura of something uncanny. Something from a fairy tale.

"Aw, no thanks needed, love. An', you know --", she trailed while padding bare foot outside. The fresh air was suddenly tainted by a bit of cancerous smoke when she lit a cigarette. Manners; For didn't smoke, so she kept the noxious smell outside. "-- if you ever need anythin'? Don't be scared to ask. Even if you jus'need to talk. About whatever, yea'?"

"I'll let y' be the judge'a that," he chortled, the soft rumble of mirth lingering and evident beneath the hibernal frost of his slumberous baritone. It was too easy, and ironically, too hard discerning who was what from whom, when you'd been in Rhy'din long enough. Cooper had long since taken to letting folks keep their secrets and left the show-and-tell for requests.

"Y' got it, sweetheart. Thanks. A lot."

"No problem, papa bear.", said the misfit in a city filled with the same. If there was any show-and-tell, she wasn't showing. Or telling. Oblivious to the genetics, the make up, the very pull of an unseen aura. She was as lost as Alice was down the rabbit hole.

"Talk to you later.", she hummed before clicking the phone off, only to scoll about and text him off Summers number.

Without even looking, he flicked the spent butt from the tips of thick fingers, knowing already that it would land safely in the old battered coffee can. Practiced ease, that's that they called it.

"Be good, darlin'." He thumbed over the end of the call, before the splayed fingers of a massive hand covered his face and he was sighing thoughtfully into a callused palm. He was a fallen king on a broken throne not of his own making in those moments, slumbed and defeated, sharing a rare moment with himself that he refused to show anyone else.

Not Mesteno. Not Lola. Not anyone. What would they say if they saw? If they knew the inevitable was nearly upon him?

When the screen finally lit up again, Cooper penumbral gaze slid to the numbers of the screen, and he promised himself he'd make use of them at some point. He just wasn't sure when.

(Live play between Cooper Gallows & Peaches Haggarty.)