October: Cracking the Bone

[mnemosyne]

Charlotte watches and listens and listens and watches and she is a girl now wearing her girl-skin. Lanky and awkward and a little bit strange looking, with a haunted or perhaps haunting fragility, though look. She is growing into those long-bones of hers. The bird-ones, which make her seem all hollow, standing beside her packmate like a kid-sister. Humans think they must be related: platinum hair and those icy blue eyes and each with a certain bred-in-the-bone attraction. Erich and his solidity and strength; Charlotte and her spare nobility.

Tension is all bright and sparking and luminous about her. She is half-moving in time with her packmate, this stiff-armed echo of his movement as he speaks. As soon as he leaves the center, the girl is in motion and she's not thinking about it, it is just happening. She has things to say and by the gods, even if she is merely a cliath, something about her makes most Garou just want to listen.

But she gets that bone and looks around the circle, stiff-armed, wide-eyed. Mulish in a way that somehow feels sulky and adolescent and looks -

- well, like something else entirely.

In the end, all she manages to get out is,

"Erich's right!" A quick, darting glance around the circle. She seems to be on the verge of giving up the bone to the next cliath when she inhales again. "I mean, they didn't even really lie. To me. I just assumed - "

Someone or something stops her; and Charlotte breathes out sharply through her nose, frowning down at the bone in her hand. Worrying a piece of shredded, striated muscle with a blunt thumb.
"Take them away or - or - "

But she cannot get it out. The words clot in her throat and fill up her mind and make her head ring and she doesn't like their eyes on her, all of those strangers. She doesn't -

"Erich's right. I mean, mostly. I mean, he is."