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Rylan and the Wilsons had barely made it out of his sight before Lucas fired off a text to the firefighter -- you are coming over tonight, followed by his address, not really giving room for a 'no' or 'busy' otherwise. Work went by fast then - some of his coworkers patting him on the back for taking on the work he did, some patting him on the back for Rylan, because they already knew the story there - and for the first time in years, he clocked out on time and booked it back to his new temporary home.

Lucas was due for a shower and a change of clothes to get comfortable, donning dark grey pajama bottoms emblazoned with the Army logo on one thigh and one of his tank tops he'd wear around the house - one that was comfortably stretched around his body with a few tatters from god-knows-what in the hem. With his towel-dried hair in a half-bun, he unlocked the front door and busied himself with work on the computer in the family room, always enjoying the view of the river from where he was and even though it was dark, the moon still painted traces of light over the moving water. It was soothing, and he needed that just then, a wind-down to a long, productive day and the promise of spending time with his boyfriend.

A quick smile formed at the thought of Rylan, prompting him to laugh at himself softly. He was like a school boy with a crush, only, his crush looked at him the same way. Smiling still, he leaned back in the computer chair, playing the day back through his mind as he gazed glass-eyed at the computer screen that had Sasha's information up. They'd come so far, and goodness willing, they'd have longer yet to go.

Lucas snapped out of his goofy smiling trance when he heard the door open, spinning around in the chair and vaulting off of it as Rylan came in. He bounded over the couch and padded up to the taller man with a large grin, putting his arms around the man's shoulders comfortably as he stood on tip-toe. "If they're that troublesome, you can always take 'em off," he teased, ending the words with a firm, sweet kiss and a soft hum that said he'd been waiting to do that all day. His fingers laced through the sides of Rylan's hair when the kiss broke, catching the flicker of darkness in the corner of his eye.

"Imp! Buddy, I got you a place to nest - " he removed one arm from the firefighter's shoulders to point towards the family room he'd come in from, " - hope it's to your speed." There was a large bird house by the back patio door, but the front panels were torn off, leaving it open. There were inner fabricated nests and houses, along with little toys scattered between the linked cages, giving the shrike the freedom to come and go as he pleased...if he wanted to go in at all. Lucas hadn't really had the time to properly bond with the little guy, but his attention was wholly for the man Imp was bonded to in turn.

Returning his hand to cup Rylan's jaw, he stole another kiss before resting back onto his heels, the hand lighting on his chest. "Before any pants come off or anything is said, I need to tell you -- you were amazing with Sasha. I am so ********' proud of you, it was -- it was like a small piece of heaven, watching you two dance. You made me want to have kids with you, do you know how weird that is?" Lucas laughed, soft and in wonder, shaking his head a little. "Making me think of you raising a family. And teasing me like that! 'Hopefully their other parent would be a more competent teacher!' You're lucky I didn't jump you on the spot!"

Huffing, he settled once he got that off his chest, settling on smiling fondly. He was just happy to have the man over, strangely giddy -- or maybe not so strange, given that the full moon had just ended. "S'good to see you. And be able to kiss you without having an anxiety attack over if it's proper to do so in front of clients or not."

A wolfish grin formed when Rylan tugged at his waistband, but he let it be. They'd explore that territory when the time was right. Right then, he was satisfied to be in the man's arms, leaning against him comfortably. "It's because of you. You are literally the reason I got to meet them at all." Lucas shook his head in wonder at the firefighter's humble attitude. 'Special,' he said. Special in the fact he dragged them out of a burning house. Christ alive, he could throttle his boyfriend for how simply good he was.

"We weren't even sure she was going to accept it," he admitted, running his hands over Rylan's arms and stepping back from him, motioning for him to take a seat in the room Lucas himself had just bounded out of. "I mean - to go through that, at her age? I had a hard time and I was much older. She's a strong kid, she'll be amazing, I really believe that." Disentangled from Rylan, he padded barefoot into the kitchen, grabbing a beer and a bottle of water from the fridge. "I kept meaning to tell you about them, but I didn't want to jinx it. Did you know, they sought me out?"

His voice was tinged with wonder as he maneuvered around the island in the open kitchen, putting the water on the table between the couches. "I guess they heard about the people in weird prosthesis at Blackfriar's. It was the lie I told at the job fair, that it was NEO that did it." Lucas chuckled, but it was humorless; that memory wasn't a fond one. Curving his metal thumb beneath the cap of the beer bottle, he slowly applied pressure. "So they called around to try and find the 'guy with red contacts and claws.' Lemme tell you, that was a weird thing to try and gloss over at work." The cap popped, and he caught it with his good hand, handing the beer over -- of course, it was Rylan's favorite.

"But the Wilsons kinda went behind Sasha's back about it initially, and I agreed to work with them after the powers that be were, ah," he hooked his fingers like air quotations for emphasis, "persuaded. I am very persuasive when I want to be." He flashed a grin. "It worked out, in the end. Sorry I didn't tell you sooner. Just...all this Pack stuff and that place and moving and your long hours -- there was never a decent time."

"She's got both of us on her side," he added in agreement, dropping the cap next to the bottle of water. "If anything, we're too stubborn to let her do any less than her best."

Lucas sighed, shaking his head and moving around to the side of the couch. Sitting on the arm of it, he pulled out his half-bun to let his wet hair down and sprawled backwards onto the couch, the wolf not prone to taking the warg's wingspan away, instead laying his head against Rylan's leg. "We're busy, yeah, but -- " It was there, in his eyes - the tiredness of the full moon that had passed, and how that had almost entirely blown up in their faces the first time. "It gets weird but we're going through it together, right? I want to be a part of your weird, and not just be the weird in it." He tried to grin, but Lucas wasn't very good at hiding his thoughts from Rylan, worry in the curve of his brow.

"Like, um -- so. There's -- this magical being, named Sunny. After the first full moon, I went to see her, talked to her about what we - the Pack - are. Wait. ********. Maybe I should back up." Lucas wrinkled his nose, biting the inside of the bottom of his lip. "The Pack? Have I told you -- ? You know what? ******** it. I'm gonna start from the beginning."

Getting more comfortable against Rylan's leg, he crossed his arms and looked up into those bright ambers, resolute. "It started with Autumn. I met her on a jog, her and Rosalinde. She told me there was weird s**t going on and I should leave if I wasn't prepared to deal with it. Also, Rosalinde could sense my fake limbs. That was probably the first red flag that s**t was gonna go south." He smiled, a little rueful, but kept his stormy grey eyes focused on the firefighter. "That happened just a few days before I met you. But you've lived here most of your life, right? So, when'd the weird start for you?"

The odd smile wasn't missed, uncrossing his arms long enough to lift his good hand, gently running the knuckle of his index finger beneath Rylan's chin and up his jaw. "Where they found the foot? I remember hearing about that, but I was still new here, I didn't really think about it much."

Lara. He looked stricken for a moment, remembering the woman and the bloody lump he'd carried out of Blackfriars, how he'd thought of her during their first date. She was Rylan's teacher? "Did you know her well?" he asked, caution in his tone. "Did you -- ? At Blackfriars -- ?" Lucas dropped his hand, rubbing both over his face, the grating feeling of the metal against his skin helping him focus. "I'm gonna jump forward here, but, a carried a woman named 'Lara' out of Blackfriars. Her dog was dead, and she was -- borderline catatonic." His hands lowered to his own chest, drumming his fingers almost nervously. There was a stretch of silence, but it wasn't hard to see his wheels turning - questioning if something like that could happen to Rylan. His jaw ticked, and with a slight shake of his head, he returned to the subject at hand.

"The night Esen crawled into my life, I'd been experiencing a lot of discomfort, an ache in my limbs - even my prosthesis." The fingers on his chest traveled to his false arm, tracing over the lines with familiarity. "And I could hear everything going on in the complex - I kid you not, everyone there was having sex and I could hear it." Lucas pressed his lips thin, eyes refocusing on Rylan's. "It was maddening. Literally the next night, she visited. Lady, the red-head. I didn't know at the time, but -- her name is -- " He hesitated. Names could get them in a lot of trouble, but hell, they were in some special sort of trouble anyway. " -- Tatiana. She's Aleksy's twin - he calls her Tatya - but she only answers to Lady. A name I gave her when I practically kicked her in the face because she changed my hand into this enormous, bestial paw."

Just thinking about it gave his fingers that slight ache - a warning of pain. Drawing in a sharp breath, he stretched his good fingers and returned them to his chest. "Sorry, I -- have to be careful, thinking about it. The change. It can bring it on if we focus hard enough." One side of his mouth hooked upwards, a rueful smile. "It goes both ways, at least."

"I'm not sure, I suspected, but -- " Perplexed, he gazed up at Rylan, trying to follow what he was saying. "I haven't heard of a Spinel, but - burning man? Mm, Autumn mentioned someone trying to burn her lungs out and someone else tried to take her heart, Zac said it was because of something he did. I don't know anything about it otherwise." He was apologetic, not liking that he didn't have the answers - but that was part of why he was doing this now. Because he had an idea, and he wasn't going to leave Rylan in the dark.

Lucas sighed quietly, eyes momentarily flicking away, trying to find the information in his own memories and piece it together. "Autumn said, uh, that there are powers that don't want us here. The Enemy, whose name we should never use, by the way," his eyes returned to Rylan's, "she called it the Gardener, I just call it the Bad Guy, but the point is, 'he' is supposedly the one that wants us to be without magic, to live 'normal, boring lives,' Autumn said." It was clear, by the tone of his voice, he wasn't so sure he agreed.

"It met Pax, then, an Otherbeing. On the Otherside, it's this enormous, shadowy deer with a s**t ton of eyes. On this side, it looks like...this six foot, earth-skinned person with painted on eyes and antlers and hooves and -- it scared the s**t out of me. I literally climbed up Autumn's walls and ran away. The next time I'd see Autumn - and Pax, actually - was when she tried to save me. That -- god. So much happened." Lucas laughed, short and humorless, drawing in another breath and trying again.

"Then, she was kidnapped, and you know what happened with Esen and the thing that had my voice. It was a fae, she said, it tricked her into calling it by name - and in doing that, it had complete control over her. That's why using names is bad. Lesson learned. But! Before that!" He grinned, brief and sheepish. "Literally just before that, when Esen had visited again, after Lady was there, we had these flashes of memory when we touched. I remembered -- I remembered tearing out his throat, Ry." The grin was gone. The memory made sure of that. "Felt it, between my teeth. It -- it set off his PTSD." He licked his lips, shifting, uncomfortable in that recollection. "I brought him back, but then the bad s**t happened and he ran and -- you know that part. I got meaner as the full moon got close, territorial, as we call it now."

He paused, lifting himself into a sitting position to grab the water bottle, opening it to take a swig. Quite frankly, Lucas wasn't used to talking so much, but he promised himself things would be different with Rylan. "When Lady visited again," he started up, drawing in a breath after having gulped a quarter of his bottle, "it was after I'd met Aleksy. He could see me as an upright wolf, and he told me a lot - about his sister, that magic doesn't 'make sense,' that his sister was in Russia and had been gone since they were kids, practically. He also said the memories aren't real and are brought on by things like Pax and the Othercats." He frowned, then, eyes turning back and forth at the floor for answers.

"Then with Lady -- I found out she's stuck in time. She didn't know what year it was, and also said the memories were from the past time I've done this - said I've done it fifteen times, Ry. Fifteen! She said we were all tools of the Bad Guy, and gave me some threadbare rules -- biting people here should be okay, but not in the Otherplace, silver doesn't hurt me, so on and so forth -- but honestly? I don't trust her. I don't know how much I can believe her. She hasn't exactly been helpful -- ********! ********. Uh. Before the second meeting, I was contacted by m--uh, Eve, she runs a tea shop. Also a were, a werefox. Eve told me there were others like us, but I didn't meet the other two until just before Blackfriars."

Running a hand through his slightly curled hair, he couldn't help but show his frustration at trying to keep the timeline straight. "Eve didn't know much more than me. But there was the second visit, and I went to Autumn because I was ********' terrified, and she put this -- this salve on me and took me to the Otherworld." Lucas swallowed hard, audibly. "It was grey, there. Raining. Everything felt -- off. And there was a voice, Lady, she was screaming -- outside the door, we wouldn't open it. When we did, she was gone, there was just...blood. And then - pain. The most intense, horrible pain I've ever known, and, ya know, for a dude that's lost his limbs, that's saying something."

He glanced back to Rylan, his gaze tight and guarded in the memories, his smile echoing the sentiment. "Pax saved me, dipped me in a pool there with some herbs. Said it was the salve that hurt me, the same salve that can protect others from that place. Said that...the Bad Guy? He's in my nature. I can't be free of this until the Bad Guy is free, which...basically makes me against everyone else, if I ever want to just be Lucas again and not a Moonwalker. The Bad Guy..." He squinted, pausing, trying to recollect the words Pax used. "He 'creates the cycles.' Pax said I wasn't a monster or like, in the Bad Guy's control, but..."

Lifting his hand, he slowly drew it over the bottom half of his face, eyes going distant again. "I don't know who we can believe. Pax saved me, has helped us, but Aleksy said the Otherplace wants us dead." He took a slow, steadying breath. "Lady told me, on our second visit, the story. She said, it began with a man who was so afraid to die, he tore down the world to stop it. It made him -- no longer a man, obviously, and she said it made him everything that we know. The -- the normalcy of life, the mundane happenings. It's his dream, or something like it. The whole 'falling in line' thing Autumn mentioned, I guess. And then she recited this poem:

I once heard of a man, who split himself in two. The one part never changed, the other grew and grew. The prior part was always true, the growing part, always new." Lucas shook his head slowly, helpless, eyes unfocused as he overwhelmed himself with everything he'd locked away and hadn't put out there. "She said we have to collect all three parts of him - the world, the man, and the girl. And she said...'if I knew how to destroy the world, I wouldn't be here, would I?'" He scoffed, soft, understated. "And she wonders why I don't trust her. Other than the fact she said I choose to side with the Bad Guy because I want everyone to be happy and safe. 'Afraid to grow.' Horse s**t."

Lucas hesitated. "I don't know. She just sounds like -- the more I learn about Lady, the more she just seems like a teenager herself, doing what she thinks she's supposed to do. But with how little she helps and how unlike she seems what Aleksy speaks of...I'd just...be careful, if you ever meet her. She's as tall as me, maybe taller, has a geometric tattoo."

But Rylan saying Sunny mentioned Lady had something to do with Michael's death...? "Do you think -- Michael was one of them? He was supposed to teach us everything..." Was he the man that was in the poem, one of the three that would free the Enemy? Lucas had no damn idea and it was really pissing him off.

Growling under his breath, he laid back down on Rylan's lap, staring at his toes as he thought: flexing his real ones, the false ones inert. "The third time I met Lady was when she took us into the Otherplace for the first time. Her hands were bruised -- like she'd been beaten. She was pissed at me, and told me I needed to trust her - in so many words." He snorted softly. "I told her to give me a reason to. And then she -- she disappeared, when we shifted and Pax's brother - The Prideful One - came along. He's this huge golden deer thing, very holier-than-thou as his name implies, he's the one that threw us back here at Blackfriars." Frowning, he shrugged vaguely, thinking about Lady. "I haven't heard from her since, other than the time I checked on her via text and she asked me to give something of mine to Aleksy. That's the last time I heard from either of them.

Which...brings me in a round-about way, to Sunny." Lucas licked his lips, glancing up to Rylan, and then making himself really look at him. He didn't know if he'd get in 'trouble' for this next part, but he still stood behind his decision. "I went to her, and we just talked. She told me about the Moonwalkers, which we are, the weres -- she said, once before, shifting shape wasn't unusual but when it became a thing of violence, like a pandemic, then it was shunned. And, uh, to change how they were viewed, the weres became the guardians of the Otherworld, mitigating how much of it leaked from out there, to in here." His brows lofted at the scope of it. "That's my job, apparently. To uh, take up that mantle." The were shrugged. "That's all I know about the Moonwalkers. There's Eve, the fox, Jamie, the rabbit, Lily, the fishercat, and a new one the full moon before last -- Ashton, a wolverine."

He took in a slow breath, and continued. "Sunny is almost three thousand years old. She said what happened at Blackfriars was no accident, that someone put Michael there on purpose - which, I guess, means Lady was involved by what she told you, but I wonder...why she wouldn't tell me. I wonder if Mercer was involved, but that'd mean Eve..." He murmured the last part a little, and then shook his head and continued. "Someone is trying to split up the ones that can access the Otherplace. She's said that she is -- she is literally the universal constant, in all our existences - she's the part that doesn't change. And she's supposedly born from magic, but we don't know for sure. And now there's a guy in her house, claiming to be her dad, so uh -- if you see her around here, it's because I invited her. She's -- "

Lucas grumbled and turned on his side a little, facing Rylan, tucking his hands between his cheek and the man's leg so he could still look up at him. "We made a pact, Sunny and I. I asked her for the power to lead my Pack safely to the Otherside, because I didn't feel I could trust Lady, and I didn't want to rely on Detective Mercer after his display at Blackfriars or some guy named Finn. I didn't want our sanity and everyone else's safety dependent on anyone else, so, I -- I gave her some of my humanity, and in return, she gave me the ability to get to the Otherside." He flinched a little, moving his good hand out from beneath his cheek and holding it up - displaying the scar there that went clear through both sides.

"A blood oath, I guess. Hurt like a b***h, but, she's Pack, now, to me...I don't know what that means. She's been gone since First Friday, I only see my Pack before we shift and never inbetween, so it's just me, and..." Lucas hesitated, running his tongue behind the back of his teeth as he considered how to say it, and decided to just out with it. "...I'm gonna go there. The Otherplace. Now that the full moon is over, I'm gonna...see what I can find there, information, something. Anything. We can't just go by the seat of our pants and half-truths from the denizens there."

The wolf sighed, his body physically sagging. "That's it. That's everything I know. I think."

The werewolf listened, watching Rylan speak, attentive. He winced slightly around his eyes at the mention of the blood in his mouth - that must have been horrible - but didn't speak up, instead rolling onto his back again to listen. Lucas watched Rylan recollect, watched him experience it all over again, and felt a small snag of guilt.

His description of Sunny was -- curious. He didn't exactly feel surprised, but it didn't exactly settle his nerves, either. "Her blood hurt," he remarked unhelpfully, sitting up so the firefighter could reach for whatever he needed without himself as dead weight on him. Lucas threw his legs over the side of the couch and simply sat next to him, taking the ID. As he looked it over, his brows slowly raised. It was like the not-Thorne, the one with longer hair and different tattoos - it was Rylan, but it wasn't.

"Proof we've done this before," he remarked in a miserable tone, handing it back. Then, in a lighter tone, he added, "At least you're still gorgeous, no matter the incarnation."