It is a party of sorts at the 4 to the Royal Ranch. Call it a homecoming. There is a balloon bouquet tied to the mailbox to mark the turn-off from the county road, and a spray of fresh flowers (store-bought, these, a feminine extravagence of Helga's) in the big stoneware vase on the sideboard in the dining room. There's more beer than can fit in the fridge, but Tom's pack brought in three or four large coolers to supplement. The house is full, perhaps for the first time since Tomas, Senior passed away.
The house is crowded, though - bright with all Emmett's old acquaintances, childhood friends and rivals, grown up, grown out, perhaps some of them gone to seed a bit early. Kinfolk, old and young, Fenrir mostly - but others as well. The whole Carey clan is lurking somewhere, and midway through the evening Aiden Carey pressed on Emmett a bottle his finest home-blended whiskey.
Heard you're here to stay, declared Aiden, his breath sweet with alcohol after no more than the first half-hour of festivities. Look after the family land. Good man. Good man. Only to be shooed onward to his wife with a few choice words about lettin' Emmett enjoy all his friends.
Thomas Wolfe said, You can't go home again, and that never seems more true than when you try. There was the military, Iraq, Mosul. Then the Black Eagles, and Emmett, he's a officially a dead man, still-yet. No official existence in the United States of America. All that time away, the land is still the same, and the great vault of the sky, the mountains hazy in the distance. The scent of the fields on a summer's evening as the heat of the sun fades from the soil, dissipates beneath a soft coat of dew.
Some familiar faces are gone. Dead, or moved away, or lost to some other, nether-world. Others are changed, irrevocably. Harrowed by loss, or weathered by rage, or settled into a sort of mean, middleclass mediocrity that never seemed to be on the table when they were kids, dreaming of glory and honor, playing at pack the way ordinary American kids once played at being heros of the old west.
His brother's pack haunts the margins of the party, too. Among them, Andraj Markovic - who was a pale-skinned, blue-eyed kid too young to be noticeable when Emmett left Colorado, with a bevy of elder sisters Emmett might have remembered - and who is now a Fostern philodox, near to Adren, broad-shouldered, solid, storm-eyed. Briefly introduced by Tom to Emmett, before he withdraws with the rest of the pack to be a hovering presence at the edge of the party, not really a part of this half-human life anymore.
--
An hour or two later, the party is loosening up. The decibel level inside the crowded house keeps going up, as does the temperature. The air conditioning struggles to keep up with the heat of so many bodies circulating in such a tight space. Someone has kindled a fire in the firepit outside, and a few of the guests slip out to enjoy the relative silence. To watch the sun slip below the blazing seam of the western horizon, to feel the breeze on their skin.
Emmett drifts out too. Maybe he's just looking for another beer. Maybe he's looking for something close to quiet, breathing room. There's a dark-haired woman seated in a folding lawnchair close enough to the firepit that the flames dance like embers in her dark eyes.
She glances up, over her shoulder as Emmett walks down the stairs from the deck to the yard proper, his gait made heavy by the limp and the cane.
"Deserting your own party so soon? You are the honoree, aren't you." Her voice is quiet, her features lost in the fireside shadows as she glances back. "I don't think we've met. Not officially."
They haven't. She's a stranger, though she must belong to someone who knows someone to have been invited.
She looks up without standing up, and as he reaches the yard and takes a crosses the intervening distance, he can see why. She is heavily pregnant, eight or nine months, if he is any judge.
"I'm Éva."
EmmettIt's a Welcome Home party for a dead man. Emmett's hair is shorter, his beard is little more than a thought, a 5 o'clock shadow that he just hasn't bothered with since seeing to the affairs of his father's funeral.
There is no Mrs. Metzger. She died a long time ago and neither Tom nor Emmett talk about her, though her photos dot the walls of the Metzger home and her clothes still hang in the bedroom closet she shared with her husband.
There are so many people here. The house is full to bursting with people shoulder to shoulder. All of them happy to welcome home a kin they all thought was gone for good. The war that he fought wasn't for Gaia, and it wasn't with any of his family's blessing that he did so. His brother has killed for a Goddess Emmett will never feel or know and a movement he can't ever really be a part of. There's a disconnect in that between the siblings that the younger isn't sure can be over come.
He accepts everything with a slow to form smile and a rumble of appreciation. But finally, once the crowd has thinned and people begin to once more busy themselves with local town gossip that isn't related to this, Emmett finds his own path outside. His leg is wrecked. Shrapnel from the plane crash and a lack of care when he was a prisoner of war. It won't ever be right, but at least it was saved. So he moves with a pronounced limp, more so at this point in time than he will later. Now it is still tender. Still painful. He stops on the porch, accepts a slap on his shoulder from his sibling and pops 3 vicodin with a swallow of beer.
This too will become easier as time progresses.
But now ...
Now he hobbles down the stairs with the help of a cane, finds a place in a chair near the women with the swollen belly. "Uh...yes ma'am. You could say that." He offers her a faint smile, takes a draw from the beer and toys with the handle of the cane, that offending thing that is both a necessity and a reminder of his lameness.
"Pleasure Éva, I guess you know that I'm Emmett..." A faint smile is offered. His eyes focus on the fire, that sick feeling wrestling its way into his guts at the sight of it. "You look...ready to pop." a pause, "If you don't mind me saying so..."
Éva IllésházyShe's older than Emmet is, by a handful of years. (And older than her mate by three-quarters of a decade.) Perhaps he cannot read that in her face by the firelight, just now. Though maybe it is there, the commas bracketing her mouth as she offers Emmett the edge of a wry half-smile that lingers in the darkness of her gaze. This is her third child. When he comes, she will name him Jozsef for her father. Andraj will die sometime between the boy's first and second birthdays, and then - sometimes - she will wonder whether she should not have named him after his own father. She will never have an answer for that question.
Tonight, though - tonight is different. They are younger than they will be. Emmett wrestles with that sick feeling in his core at the sight of the flames, as he will years from now, and probably for the rest of his life. Éva's eyes are on his profile, but she is used to reading people for their lies, not their truths, and often misses the immediate and the obvious, the things they say plainly with eyes and mouth, the things that are open, for anyone to see.
She can't miss the cane, though. Or the drawn twist the immediacy of the pain from his injuries gives to his face.
"I'd be a fool if I minded you saying what anyone can see," she breathes out a half-corralled breath of laughter and looks away from him, out toward the brilliance of the western horizon, the sun blazing behind the line of mountains erupting in the distance. "My feet are swollen, my back hurts. I'll be grateful when I pop. It should be soon."
A quiet noise, at the back of her throat precedes her explanation of her presence - a stranger - in his family's house. "My - " hesitation where the word mate should be. It still feels strange to her to say it out loud, particularly to virtual strangers. " - Andraj is packed with your brother, Tom. I feel like a bit of a gate crasher, but I can't go anywhere without him hovering and looking like he's going to break someone's face for breathing in my direction.
"If you were looking for some time alone, I can mosey back in."
Emmett"Ah." He says with a slow nod and a resettling of his weight in the chair. His body is fit. There are ripples at his abdomen and sides, his arms are strong. This too, will pass, and while he will remain strong things will soften as they are wont to do with age and a lack of steady use of specific muscles. "If he listens to my brother at all he'll know that I'm pretty harmless as far as ladies are concerned, so I should be safe here with you." His eyes are gray and rimmed with black. The profile she observes is a strong one, though his eye lashes are too long and his lips are too full. It lends him an ounce of attractiveness that Tomas lost the third time he got his nose broken. Nevermind it was Emmett that broke it.
And she would find no lies on his relief. There's nothing but exhaustion both mentally and physically on Emmett's face. He is an honorable man not given to lies or manipulation or guile. She can see that as clearly as she can see the flames leaping before them. There haven't been many rumors about Emmett's love life. Not like his brother, who seems to bed whatever kinfolk flounces into Denver with an eye for big, burly men like Tom. Oh, if Éva cared to ask she'd hear that there was a girl once. A very pretty kinswoman who Emmett followed around without a second thought. But that never quite worked itself out and she isn't here at his party.
But that's the way of Emmett Metzger's life: things never quite work themselves out.
"What? No..." He says shaking his head at her offer to mosey on in and leave him to himself. Half slouched in the chair he watches the way the fire illuminates the tops of the trees and takes another pull from his beer. "I just met your ....mate? He seems like a good guy." His head swivels slow toward her, gray eyes focusing on her face. She's older than him, but he feels older still. "So what do you think of it Éva? This place...this life?"
Éva Illésházy"Andraj?" Emmet says he seems like a good guy. Éva makes another back-of-the-throat noise, like swallowed laughter, and though the twist of her mouth is fond, there's a distinct sense of reserve in her eyes as they flick back toward the fire. "He is," she concedes, quietly. Then corrects, with a certain precision, the tip of her tongue against the back of her teeth. "He is also a Shadow Lord."
[She has not asked about Emmett yet. She will, later. Mention him to Rozsa, her "mother-in-law" at breakfast one morning in the next few days, listen to the gossip the older woman knows as well as she knows the back of her own hands, or the way to layer the filo into baklava. Then she'll here about the lovely girl Emmett followed around until - Then she'll hear one-more-time about Tomas Metzger's oh-so-many conquests, of a certain type of kinfolk attracted to a certain sort of beast.]
Maybe it is the fact that she is pregnant, still fertile, so close to giving birth, that makes Emmett feel older than Éva tonight. While he is - shellshocked, they called it after World War I, the war to end all wars. Wounded, recovering, exhausted. A dead man, in name if not in fact. Who watches the flames with that sick and wary certainty. Quite nearly human, after all, vulnerable as Garou - as even the weakest Garou - will never be.
"Denver I like well enough. Though I liked it better when I lived downtown, I don't mind Roxborough much. The scenery's hard to fathom sometimes, so - immense, but I don't like the isolation." Pause, the sweep of her gaze back to Emmett's profile. "I think you were asking me what I think about being kin, though. Were you?"
