RP:A Good Moonboy

Summary: Hudson appears at Eleanor's long enough to behave erratically and announce that he's become a werewolf. Eleanor wonders whether this new development will impact their fledgling business.

Eleanor’s Place, Cenril

Hudson is showing up at Eleanor's off schedule. Which is to say they already have a few deliveries under their belt and usually they happen on evenings and moreover weekdays. Here he is on a weekend afternoon, though, manifesting in the center of her living space and immediately moving out of range of her home security system/ the mechanical golem. He's learned not to make that mistake twice. "Eleanor?" says Huds within a second of arriving. He looks a little out of sorts. Clean but rumpled clothes. There's some strain in his face but it's faded so that he looks more tired than anything else.

Eleanor was on the far side of the attic from the entrance, perched on the side of her modest, single-wide cot. The golem was inert in a corner beside her. El was dressed in her usual garb, and was, at the time being, very carefully drawing a rune on the outer part of her left forearm using her crystal wand. A beam of white-blue light came from the tip of the crystals, and it seemed to be her tattoo gun, so to speak. When Hudson crackled into her lofty apartment, she lowered the wand into a defensive pose, and stood, the tattoo still glowing bright blue. Stumbling across the attic, celadon eyes fixed on Hudson questioningly as she quickly barked at him, “Whit th' heel ur ye daein' haur, huds? There's nae way Ah missed a pick-up.” It was then that the woman got a better look at her worse-for-wear companion, and she hesitated before approaching. Although her tone still held an edge of guardedness and snarkiness, she went on to say as she stood a-kimbo before him, still holding her wand though it now resting against a hip, “Ye swatch loch jobby, what's up?” After a beat, she added with a wry half-smile and a crinkle of her nose, “Och gods, an' ye reek.”

Hudson's defensiveness goes down a notch when he sees his old foe the golem at some distance from his current position. OK then. "No, you're fine, I'm just..." Hudson cuts the statement short and inhales, sitting on the nearest thing at or about chair level. Possibly a chair. Possibly also a coffee table, he's not paying attention. "I do not. I showered earlier today," he snaps at her more than a touch defensively. A feeling of paranoia swells within him. Just like his horse, then, she knew something was up. Isn't that why he's here? To tell SOMEONE? Eleanor was his criminal element friend (everyone has one), surely she'll be less horrified at this development than he is. He bends at the waist, drops his head to his hands. "Yesterday," he begins, then he abruptly changes course: "Well I am basically a werewolf now. And by basically I mean I am a werewolf. As of yesterday. Look, see," he tries to pull off his shirt and realizes he'd better go at the buttons, so he does, and he pulls down a sleeve, exposing the silver moon shape of a scar on his shoulder. "Can I do anything about this?" he demands of her. "You know, with magic?"

Eleanor stepped forward another pace, wary celadon twins fixed on the wolf -- the very thought, the very idea that he was now a werewolf perplexed her. She had heard that Cenril had problem with the lycanthropes, but she had not realized it was this bad; perhaps it wasn’t a Cenrili wolf, perhaps it was another. The woman could ask the peculiar details later. Right now, Hudson was in what could vaguely pass for her living room asking for her help, and for all their joking in yesteryear, she felt compelled to help. Buying herself some time to sort through this news Huds had dumped on her, she moved over to the threadbare sofa he’d found himself on (she didn’t own any proper chairs) and took a seat next to him. “Sae, lit me gie thes straecht ...Ye turned intae a werewolf yesterday.” Her blonde brows dropped over her eyes, which were guarded as usual, although she was anxious to know the complicated details of his turning. “Did ye piss aff a witch, ur waur ye ... attacked?” Because it damn well mattered how he was turned, if she was to scour her brain for a solution. Curses were tricky business, and often backfired when attempts were made to lift them. Frowning, she took a closer look at the scarring, holstering the wand for now; the tattoo on her left arm still glowed, but not as brightly as before, as the half-finished spell faded. “Ah coods probably make th' scar gang awa',” the spell blade started speculatively, lifting her stare toward Hudson’s own, “but ... makin' ye human is gonnae tak' a lot mair magic than Ah hae reit access tae reit noo.”

"I was bit," Hudson tells Eleanor, letting her get a good eyeful of the bite mark. The day's emotional toll is wearing on him, and while he registers the closeness of the blond woman, peering at his scar, he doesn't have the heart to punch back against it right now. It felt righteous to unburden to someone, at least. Eleanor hadn't reacted with repulsion, that was something. At her pronouncement, he curses -- that was to be expected -- and slumps back against the couch. He fixes his eyes at the ceiling. "I am having the worst 24 hours of my life," he exhales. He gestures in the general direction of the window before draping his forearm over his eyes. "I guess when the full moon comes out in a couple of hours, it'll be last night all over again. I'll go howl at the moon and murder livestock like a bloody idiot," he sounds deflated, at that. Pity party not yet over. He pulls himself upright and looks at Eleanor, dead-on. "I get so mad at the drop of a hat now. I straight up pushed Alvina earlier." A beat. "She fell," incredulous, the words coltish in their delivery, like he couldn't believe he'd done it. "And I twisted her arm way too hard. Eleanor I'm a five-alarm monster."

The situation was decidedly more complicated as she considered what he'd recently been through. So, he had been attacked; while that was an easier ordeal to work with usually -- well, let's just say sometimes things don't go according to plan. After all, every lycanthrope bloodline is different. Eleanor didn't want to think about the downside to his big reveal. Instead, those celadon eyes stared askew at him, narrowed pensively and studying his face as the wheels in her mind whirred into high gear. Chewing on the inside of her lower lip, the spellblade dropped her gaze then, mind still reeling with potential plans. "Keep yer panties oan, wolf loon," she eventually threw at him, quickly rising as if with purpose. Turning on a heel to look down at him, she gave an exasperated sigh. "Here's th' deal, Hudson," she started, her hands finding the swell of either hip. "Ah main hae an idea hoo tae gie ye it ay thes mess, but ... it isnae gonnae be easy, an' it's nae gonnae be fest." Eleanor shook her head at each point, her gaze almost challenging, as if she wanted to make sure Hudson understood that things were probably going to get worse before they got better. "Ah hink Ah can gie th' magic, but 'at means Ah will hae tae lae." Just after they'd started this little pixie dust-altering enterprise. She sighed again, deeply and contemplatively, before leveling that glass-green gaze at her companion. A rare moment of hesitation stalled the otherwise charismatically-inclined rogue, and she licked her lips, suddenly parched. "Dae ye ... hink ye can handle it -- everythin', until Ah return?" As in, was he going to go on a killing rampage and ruin everything they'd worked for in her absence? A girl had to ask.

Now that he's confessed his sins, Hudson begins to swim in an ocean of self-pity and he stares at Eleanor for a long time, having the sensation that her lips are moving and that she's trying to console him. That would make sense. He had to pay close attention to her when she spoke, her accent always gave him a hard time. He looks attentive right now, if you can call spacing out while staring at the twin peaks of her chest attentive. He realizes he is doing this, not even purposefully, and then looks around her room with interest, as if he'd forgotten something. He's a bit of everywhere at once, apparently. She's asked him a question, he realizes, the room's been filled with silence now. He feels the impulse to go outside, though, the sky is calling to him, he's missed her, the moon. Immediately upon feeling it, he hates this impulse. His skin is itching, he rises to his feet. "Yeah," he answers Eleanor, looking wild-eyed all of a sudden. He says this like a person announcing an urgent trip to the bathroom: "You know what. I gotta go."

Eleanor was bewildered by Hudson's behavior, but she knew she had no cause to be angry either; he had just dumped a very heavy load of bullocks into her lap with these personal admissions, and she knew that things were just too delicate to let this get out of hand. When he rose, she leveled her glass-green eyes directly up at him, her shoulders squared in a defiant posture. "Nae reit noo," she countered, everything about the woman daring him to challenge her. "Ye arenae gonnae anywhaur." She could sense he was feeling pulled in every direction at once; she could see it in his eyes, crawling under his skin as the curse gripped him tight in her lunar hand. Perhaps it was lunacy on her part to push and poke and prod at the newly-turned werewolf, but if she was going to be any help to him, she had to understand everything that he was dealing with - and that meant, of course, pushing him to control himself for as long as he could, not letting him rush off, crazed by the bestial adrenaline that was bound to take him hostage sooner or later. "Ye ur gonnae sit." Leaving her hands on her hips, she gestured back down to the couch with her chin darting down, and her eyes pointedly glancing to it, those blonde eyebrows rising.

Hudson looks at Eleanor as if she'd asked him to just 'hold it' indefinitely. When a man's gotta go, a man's gotta go. He widens his eyes at her, to convey the urgency of what's at stake here. "Eleanor, I need to go outside," he explains, as if she didn't get it herself. He rubs his forearms, which are prickling. "Like a werewolf thing, I don't want to be here, the moon is... I don't know, the moon, gods damn it, Eleanor, the moon!" He gives her a meaningful look and then barges past her in a showing of great athleticism. NOPE. Cannot be contained.

Hudson leaves to go howl at the moon like a good moonboy.

To Be Continued

Read the second part of this story at A Good Moonboy Pt 2.