Calden White
So at SOME POINT Calden calls Tamsin aside for a word. Possibly while Jack is taking a shower or something. Like this:
"Tamsin, can I have a word with you?"
Tamsin
This is later. Maybe Tamsin just stays behind, or maybe Jack is taking a shower for what good that'll do him, but when Calden calls Tamsin aside for a word, the Fianna galliard looks like she was about to head over to him anyway. Her pupils are slightly large; her arms are folded across her chest; she's a little pale, but being super serious nonetheless - maybe more serious than he's seen her before, barring the 4th of July -
"Yeah, Calden." They're alone and together and they're somewhere off-to-the. "You're mad?"
Calden White
"Nah." So there's that, at least. The sun's slanted a little lower now; it's not far from the time of day he first met her. "Was for a second, but I'm over it."
He's quiet for a while. They're somewhere away from the others. Outside, where it's warm, and the sun falls on their faces. It's been a dry summer. There's dust in the air, hazing the horizon.
"Listen, Tamsin," he says finally. "You don't strike me as the sort of girl who purposefully oversteps or is willfully rude. So I just figure maybe you don't know, because hell -- hospitality's usually the domain of kin, since we're the ones that usually own the houses and the land. So I gotta ask: anyone ever teach you the laws of hospitality? [i]Oígidecht?[/i]"
Tamsin
"Listen, Calden," Tamsin says, just as he says Listen, Tamsin, after that silence's spun out for a second or two. The Fianna wolf-girl is looking at her toes. Then she's squinting off toward the mountains, maybe -- off across the scrubland, just boring a hole in the landscape with her eyes, look at that too hard and maybe she'll see something.
She cuts off, though, in order to flick a glance at him and listen, and it's at 'purposefully oversteps' and 'willfully rude' that her teeth set together like rubber cement got between them and she flushes so that the sunset bows down before its rival. Anyone ever teach you the laws of hospitality?
Tamsin swallows, swallows down the anger she can't completely control, isn't all that rational, just taps into anger that has nothing to do with Calden because it's Rage, so it's Holy, it's given for a purpose, and unsticks her jaw in order to say -- wanly: "I wasn't planning on asking you to slaughter your cattle. I know," she stops; rubs her palm over her clavicle. The anger turns cold, into a miserable suspicion that maybe what she knows is fantasy and what this older kinsman knows is real.
"I don't know. Maybe I don't. But I am sorry, Calden - real sorry, if you think I've broken any of them or made myself too free with what you've offered. Tell me. I," and Tamsin glances at her toes again, shoulders rising, " - things with the same heart and the same purpose, they sometimes look different on the outside, you know?"
Calden White
In the end what Tamsin says is so fragmentary and so misery-soaked that it's hard to make heads or tails of it. Calden frowns at her; it looks more like sympathy (and perhaps confusion) than anger.
"Tamsin, I would gladly slaughter cattle to feed you and your pack if you needed it. I'm not ... angry that there are four mouths to feed or four bodies to sleep. I wouldn't even mind if you were all here every day, twenty-four seven, for the entirety of the month. It's not that at all. You're my guests, and I'm glad to honor my guests.
"It's that -- well. You're my guest. You came to me. You asked for hospitality. I was glad to give it. Then you told me your packmate would be coming along too, and I thought -- well, all right. Then you told me you had a new packmate, and I decided I'd be all right with him coming around too. Then today, as far as I can tell, this new packmate -- who had never come to me to ask for my hospitality in the first place -- decides he can go ahead and bring in yet another friend of his that isn't even bound into your pack.
"It's gone a little too far. This is my home, my land. I earned the right to it because I and my fathers before me have guarded it and protected it and worked it and kept it clean for generations. I am your host, and you are my guest. If Jack wants to hang out here, he can ask me, or you can ask on his behalf. If Jack's friend Ingrid wants to hang out here, she can ask me too, or someone can ask on her behalf. I would never turn away a wolf of the Nation, but I'm not running a... a communal hostel here, doors wide open to the world.
"Does that make sense? Do you see why I was a little taken aback?"
Tamsin
Tamsin's a creature who is torn between two words: that's obvious. Human, Garou. Human, Garou. The human world's had her so long, and she misses it sometimes so much, that even when she is diligently, dutifully, obsessively flinging herself into the other world, the Garou world, the Nation of Warriors, the secret-world, that Human world often informs her reactions. That's what's been happening here.
There are all these little fluctations of rage that simmers up suddenly, gets tamped down; simmers again, burns in her like a candle just hit a puddle of oil, but it isn't allowed to leak through the skin because it's just not and that's also what's been happening here.
"I do," she says, formally, seriously. "And really, I do. But you are making a lot of assumptions about how you were going to be trespassed on. I asked you for myself and Hector, then I told you about Jack and I assumed that he'd be as welcome as I, because he's my pack, because that's what hospitality is, and it sounds like we were on the same page there. You welcome the wolf at your door. I was the wolf at your door and I've been glad for its shade; I'd not've just let anyone into your home without telling you, without telling you first, but how could you've known that when you rode up? There wasn't any way and we're Fianna and you're..."
Pause. "I guess what I'm saying is just yeah, I get why you were taken aback and mad and and um I'm sorry for that. But I also don't think I was being rude. I wasn't." Tamsin bites the inside of her lip, and then: "I don't think Jack or Hector'll bring anybody else by if they need something, and maybe soon Fog'll be strong enough in us talk each to each again and that won't even need to happen. The month's almost up, and I will still," here, she looks Calden over, guaging his reactions, "probably come by to pester you sometimes if um that's okay and maybe swap a story or two, but we won't... well, okay?"
Calden White
"Aw, Tamsin -- "
And now Calden feels bad. She can tell: because he's frowning again, because of the way he says aw-tamsin, and because -- well; it's pretty easy to tell how Calden is feeling, most times. He doesn't really work to hide it.
"Of course it's all right for you to come back. I don't want you to get out and never come back. I don't resent your presence here. If I didn't want you here, I would have told you long ago. I try to be straightforward and frank, as much as I can be. I want to work this out, fix it, and move on."
A small pause of his own. There's a moment where he wrestles with whether or not to say it; then he does, and with a certain gentleness to the words:
"Here's the crux of the problem. You said something about not letting anyone into my home without telling me first. But from where I stand, Tamsin, that's what happened today. My home isn't just that house there. It's the ten thousand acres I watch over, it's the cattle in my care, it's my cousins out with the stock, it's my dad looking out the window and wondering who the hell those people on the back porch are. That's why I was upset. Because I invited you into my home, and you invited your packmates, and your packmates invited ... someone they met in a fight, and I only found out when I came home and saw everyone already making themselves comfortable.
"Look: I could sit down and write out a whole list of ground rules of how to be a good guest if you want me to; post it up for everyone to see. But I'd rather not. This is a home, not a dorm or a hotel. And since this is the first time we've had a problem, I'd rather just address the problem and move on. So -- next time you guys want to bring someone to my place, give me a heads-up. Better yet, have your friend call me. That's all.
"And for the record: I hope there is a next time. I hope this doesn't make you decide never to come by again. Because that's not at all what I want."
Tamsin
"They'd been here all of a minute," Tamsin replies, voice rising, clearly aggrieved, and there's no amount of gentleness stops that. "Looking for me. For us. Hell, Calden. The breath I took before Jack n' Ingrid came by to let us know they needed something? That air was still in my lungs, turning to - well," here, a pause, because science was never her subject, and her teeth cement-snap together again, "carbon monoxide. Look. Look. Okay. Argh. Head's up before the ranch's territory is breached. That's what you want and honestly that is what I want to give you. I got it and I'll definitely do my best, should there be a next time, to make sure you've got it." Tamsin looks at her toes again, breathing out hard through her nostrils. Her shoulders slump, and she plays with the collar of her shirt.
Then she says: "Here's a story I heard. Did you know that there was a Fianna by the name of Rueful Heart once. His pack's name was Carrion Comfort and they were active up to the North where the winter's are so cold the marrow freezes in your bones and that's how people's legs get broken when they're young, not falling off bikes or trying to jump off rooftops and fly. That's for wussy Southerners and silly Westerners. Least, that's what they say up North where the winter's get that cold. There were two families who had stag's blood running through their hearts up in this cold place and Rueful Heart belonged to one of them.
Now, it's not a good thing, never a good thing, but the tribes sometimes fight, and Rueful Heart had a rival from another tribe, a Fenrir by the name of Wintersteeth. walked into the one and declared: Here I am at your hearth. What are you going to do? The kinswoman there, Rueful Heart's sister, looked at Wintersteeth and said: You're in my home and I choose to give you the hospitality of me and mine. And she went and got the bread, and she went and got the wine, and Wintersteeth, who'd wanted all along to just cause trouble, was disappointed. He kept making demands, you know. This wine is too red. That wine is too white. This wine is beer. This beer is piss. Are you trying to offend me?
And Rueful Heart's sister didn't like it, who would, Wintersteeth just hunkered down there waiting for the clock to strike the time is right, and maybe pay Rueful Heart back for words spoken at the last moot he'd just as soon never have been said orremembered. This is a story. I'm sure things weren't simple. Wintersteeth pack tromped in, and Wintersteeth said, My friends, and Rueful Heart's sister said, Bring them wine. Because they'd come to her doorstep, because she'd offered the Old Hospitality, right?
And eventually they left, and they left a mess, and when Rueful Heart came back and saw what they'd done he was furious and he went to the home of Wintersteeth, walked right through the cold ice-kingdom land of it, and he was stopped before he made it to the hearth by a number of rifles pointed at him direct. And that'd hurt, you know. That'd hurt bad. The brother of Wintersteeth went to shoot Rueful Heart where he stood, but Rueful Heart was Fianna, and if his tongue wasn't quick, then, well, the story you're listening to is a lie. Rueful Heart said: I'm here, aren't you going to offer me bread and drink? I carry no weapons but the ones Gaia gave me and I give myself to you."
"And the brother of Wintersteeth clicked his tongue and said: You shouldn't've."
"There's a lot more to that story. It's a vengeance story. It's a story about bad guests and good, good hosts and bad. In the end, everybody dies, and it's not for glory, it's not for the Wyrm, it's not for anything worth anything at all. It's a story about following the rules. It's actually pretty epic, but it makes me sad, especially knowing that it's true." There's a quick pause. "I'd never want to be the kind of guest Wintersteeth was, nor would any of mine. You don't need to post up a list of rules, but if you want to lay any out, tell me and don't even worry about it. Because as long as we're good we're good."
"I'll remember. Hey? I mean, I'll remember all this, and I 'preciate it all."
Calden White
There is -- forgive him -- a shadow of a smile as Tamsin gets her carbon oxides wrong. It grows a little, oddly, when she gets into her story. Not because of the story itself. Not because he doesn't recognize in that story a faint little indictment of Calden's own behavior, at least in the first few moments of Realizing He Had Guests. Not because of any of that, but because
she is such a Galliard of Stag.
And he settles in for the story. They're over by the barn, and the shadows are growing long, and soon enough Tamsin's brothers will be back from their cleansing to take a shower and eat some dinner. Soon enough Calden or one of his distant cousins will drive them on to wherever they need to go. For now, though, they're out here, relatively alone, and she tells him about Rueful Heart and Wintersteeth and,
and,
the rest of that sad, epic story about following the rules.
Calden thinks a while, when she's done. Any rules he wants to lay out. In the end he shrugs. "You know the rules," he says, "and so do I. They're the same rules the sons and daughters of Stag have followed since forever, B.C. I guess just... make sure your brothers know them too. And I'll do my best to forgive 'em if they forget.
"For what it's worth, Tamsin -- I didn't realize they'd just gotten there. I thought they might've been there for hours, with my dad inside wondering what the hell was going on. So, I apologize if I came down extra-hard because of it." He shifts his weight, getting ready to walk back. "We good?"
Tamsin
"They won't forget," Tamsin says, rather dark-voiced, thick-voiced; her eyebrows beetle together, "'cause they never did."
Then: a slim moon-sliver of a smile, and a shrug, rock-to-the-side, side-long look: "We're okay. Besides, we're Fianna, right, it's not like the Fianna are known for thinking things through, even though they totally should be, because I know this other story-- that I'll tell you some other time if you want."
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