Pain Gives Way

[Shinigami]

Tempest had blinked in surprise as Faith lept up and went dashing down the stairs. Apparently his wife had come to a revelation about Hope's origins and its relation to cougars. He shook his head and smiled to himself at what a spaz he had for a wife, but it was part of what he loved about her. He laid on the bed a moment longer before pushing himself up to go looking for her, and save Hope from her spazziness, but just as he was standing she burst back into the room with their son.

Bram was thrust into his arms, and he was quick to steady the boy, automatically shifting him to sit on his hip as he heard Faith exclaim that she had an idea who Hope's father was. Temp blinked in surprise one again, but didn't get to comment due to the kiss Faith had planted on him. He moved to follow her, but before she could leave the room she turned to kiss him again, this time a lingering one that made him want to convince her to let this wait until later.

He sighed as she disppeared from view, glancing down at Bram and bouncing him a few times. "You have a crazy mommy, don't you?" He smiled at the curious look on the boy's face. He hoisted him back into the proper place at his side and wandered downstairs and out into the backyard. It was a nice day, so he gathered together some of Bram's toys and settled in the grass to play with his son, waiting for his wife to haul Hope back.

[Demeter]

Faith greeted her brother when he opened the door and pushed Hope out in front of her. "Wrath, she wouldn't be yours by any chance, would she?" she asked, peering over Hope's shoulder. "Cause, according to Tempest, she looks strangly like me. And you're a cougar and she's a cougar and a angel and your an angel."

"Dion found her in the Foster system. Bad childhood and all that crap. You know, like us. Now, is there any chance that you could have fathered a child at any point?" Faith hadn't asked her questions about her brother's life so she didn't know if her brother like women or men.

That fact that she had siblings was still new to her. This just provided a new, interesting angle on the situation.

[Maira]

Such a simple question was answered by an action that left him gawking. He had no words to answer Faith's barrage of questions. All he could do was stare at the girl she'd shoved in front of herself for him to examine.

It didn't take him but an instant to see the resemblance between the girl and Faith, and it only took a moment more to see traces of a woman he'd long ago thought out of his life forever. There was only one way for this girl to exist and look so much like his younger sister and Cecelia. She'd never miscarried. She had lied to him almost 18 years ago and the proof was standing here in front of him.

Finally he managed to stutter out, "CeeCee said she'd... that she'd lost the baby..." Then he snatched up his wallet off of the little table sitting by the door and flipped through the pictures in it until he found the two he'd been looking for. He turned his wallet toward the girl and pointed to a picture of a woman that bore a little resemblance to her, "This is Cecelia, the woman I nearly married until she'd said she lost our baby and then left me." Then, swallowing the lump in his throat he pointed to a black and white ultrasound picture and added softly, "This was our first, and only, picture of you..."

*****

Hope wanted to growl at Faith as the older girl shoved her at a stranger but the growl died in her throat the instant she got a good look at the guy. His hair was damp, but he looked strikingly like Faith and she supposed a bit like her as well if she was willing to admit it.

The two of them just stared at each other for a while before he finally tried talking. He had a deep, slightly raspy voice that she immediately found comforting even if it was rather shaky at the moment and unsure. At least she wasn't the only one slightly freaked out by Faith's actions.

When he grabbed up his wallet and turned it so she could see two pictures in particular, she nearly bolted. She recognized the woman! Sure, it was only in faded old memories but she recognized her! Now that she had a picture to look at, if she actually thought hard enough she could remember the woman's voice too. It had been a sweet voice, when it wasn't completely frustrated with her that is... The second picture that he showed her, nearly made Hope cry. She could see where he'd rubbed the picture, probably when he'd been sad. She could hear the tone now, in his voice, as he spoke of that picture.

Hope was too overwhelmed, she couldn't handle this at all. Not with everything else that had happened before moving to Dion's. Her own voice shaky, more like her mother's than she would ever know, Hope apologized, "I'm so sorry..." then she turned, pushed past Faith, and ran. All she knew when she started running was that she couldn't go back to Dion's... Not yet anyway...

*****

Wrath's eyes teared up when the girl spoke. She sounded just like CeeCee. Even all these years later he still remembered her voice. When she turned to run, he wanted to reach out and catch her arm but he'd seen that frightened look in her eyes and he didn't want to scare her anymore. So instead he watched, with Faith, as the girl took off down the road in the opposite direction of Dion's house.

[Demeter]

Faith stared after Hope and then turned to look at Wrath. "Well, I figured that she'd run but I'da thought she'd gone back to Dion's house. Congradulations, Wrath, it's a girl." She patted her brother on his shoulder and walked back to the house. She had a husband to get back to.

She greated her mother-in-law with a smile, told her that Hope had gone for a walk, and headed up to her and Tempest's apartment. She bounced into the main room and saw Tempest with Bram. She stopped in the doorway and watched as the two slept on the living room couch. She leaned on the doorframe; wondering just how long it had taken Tempest to fall asleep.

She sat on a clear space and brushed Tempest's hair away from his face. Bram was balanced on his chest, a light blanket covering his young body. Faith gently lifted the baby from his position and settled him against her shoulder. Getting off the couch was a bit difficult but she managed and laid Bram down in the crib at the foot of their bed. Once he was settled, she returned to the couch and snuggled down next to her husband. Used to sharing a couch with him, Faith elbowed Tempest to make room for herself. "Scoot over. Hope is Wrath's daughter. I have a niece. Isn't that nice?"

[Shinigami]

After Tempest and Bram had finished their play session, the two had gone back up to the attic apartment and laid down on the couch. Of course, they had ended up sound asleep only a few minutes later. Temp didn't even stir at the shift of the couch as Faith sat down or the light touch on his face, but he did become much more aware when the weight of his son was being lifted off of his chest. He felt Faith's presence almost immediately, which allowed him to relax and let her put their son to bed.

Tempest muttered as he was elbowed, but he shifted to make room for his wife, draping an arm over her waist. He was listening, but it took a second to catch up with his sleepy mind. "Uh huh. That's nice... Wait, what?" He lifted his head to look at Faith. "Seriously? Hope is Wrath's daughter? Huh, so she was part of the family all along."

[Maira]

She ran and ran until she was just so exhausted she couldn't run anymore. Then she just kept walking. She wasn't sure how long she'd been walking when she realized it was getting dark. Now what the hell was she supposed to do?

Shit.

There was no way she was going to be able to go back to Dion's anytime soon. Faith never went to bed terribly early thanks to having a baby and she was the one person that Hope wanted to avoid like nothing else. Of course, Faith had likely told Dion what she had discovered, so there was no way Hope could face her either... Shit, shit, shit!

With nowhere else to go, and nothing better to do, Hope did something totally out of character and headed into town proper. She knew there were clubs, and that between her and those clubs was a seedier part of town, but Hope didn't care. She needed to lose herself in a crowd. The girl who hated crowds was suddenly craving to get lost in one... Her world was turning upside down.

*****

The dancing had been amazing. Nobody cared that she wore hand-me-down clothes, nobody cared that she wasn't of drinking age, let alone legal age to be in the club, all they'd cared about was following the pounding rythms with their bodies. Just like her. More than a few men had tried to get a little too close to her while dancing, as well as a few women much to Hope's surprise, but all she'd had to do was whirl away through the crowd and they left her alone.

As she walked away from the club and back toward her foster home, Hope couldn't help but smile as she walked. She couldn't remember ever feeling more at peace than while she'd been lost in the music and the crowd. Except maybe the few times she'd taken horseback riding lessons while living with one of her first foster families. She'd been young though so it was really hard to compare...

Before she realized it, Hope had reached familiar territory. The scents of the neighborhood (though still unknown to her conscious brain for the most part) alerted her immediately to when she was once again "safe" and "home". Of course, those same signals also brought her back to the dilema of where to go now...

Back to Dion's? No, definitely not. Then where?

The half of her that was her father's daughter made up her mind for her and she was only half surprised to find herself walking down the sidewalk to Wrath's house. She'd walked by the house before and knew it had an extensive back garden. She also knew where the gate was.

As soon as she reached the gate, Hope flipped the latch and slipped inside. It was very late and no lights were on in the house so Hope wasn't worried about being spotted. Likely because of that lack of fear, she took her time exploring the moonlit garden. She knew instinctively that during the day the garden would be buzzing with little worker bees and she was suddenly very glad she'd come into the garden at such a peaceful quiet hour. She wasn't scared of bees, in fact they'd always seemed to like her, but she just wanted the solitude right now.

Finally, Hope found a hammock, not far from the back porch and she crawled into it to look up at the moon through the branches of the trees it was hanging between. She listened for a long time to the night sounds around her and just stared up at that beautiful moon. Eventually, though she didn't know it as her dreams were just as peaceful, Hope drifted off to sleep in that hammock. When the temperature dropped significantly just before dawn, Hope Shifted. When the morning sun peeked in through the windows of the house, waking the occupants, there was a cougar laying in the hammock in their back yard.

[Demeter]

Faith grinned. "Yep, apparently there was a girl some time ago, like always, and she told him that she'd miscarried when she hadn't. I don't know why she'd do that. Wrath's a nice guy, sorta. Anyways, I saw a picture of the woman. She must have given Hope up a while ago because she's been shuffled from Foster home to foster home for most of her life."

Faith leaned upwards and kissed the tip of Tempest's nose. "And you're the only one who noticed that she apparently looks like me. You're a good man, and little bit more observant the rest of us, apparently." Faith snickered to herself as she snuggled back against her husband, content to nap while Bram napped.

***

Mercy scowled at the drip coffee pot. The damn thing was so slow and she wanted her coffee before she had to head into the paper and deal with the people she called employees. Tapping her fingers against the counter, Mercy stared out the window into the backyard. Wrath's experiments before he did anything at the Landscaping company he'd started. Mercy narrowed her eyes at the hammock. There was something in it.

Muttering about kids, Mercy, clad in red robe and red bunny slippers stalked out to the hammock. She stared down at the cougar and sighed. Not scared out of what the animal could do to her, Mercy grabbed the edge of the hammock and tipped it over. She couldn't see a cougar climbing into the hammock but she could see a shifter doing just that. When the animal crashed to the ground, Mercy backed up a few steps and waited.

[Maira]

The sharp, hard impact with the ground jarred Hope from her dreams and she woke with a start. Her eyes flew open and she saw the hammock swinging in front of her, with a woman dressed in a red robe and red... bunny slippers? standing on the other side of it. "Shit," she tried to mutter but instead it came out as a soft growl. Hope didn't notice, as she was currently trying to scramble to her feet but for some reason her body wasn't cooperating, why couldn't she stand up? While backing away from the woman in front of her, Hope stepped on something and she suddenly felt a mild pain on her butt.

Huh?

Why would her butt hurt if she stepped on something? Looking behind her, Hope saw something that she was not expecting at all: the back end of a cougar! With that sight, the thunderstorm and the beating came back in a flash. So did the feelings of her flesh tearing and reforming. But that time she'd had wings and was still able to stand upright. What was going on?!

Beginning to panic, Hope felt the cat inside of her surge to the surface and take over. Before she knew what was happening, Hope was up one of the trees that had supported the hammock she'd slept in all night. When she heard herself hissing at the woman, Hope started to shake. She wasn't the one in control right now and she just didn't know what to do!

[Demeter]

Mercy sighed and walked back into the house. She'd need Wrath for this. He could deal with felines. She was better with vampires. She climbed up the stairs, muttering about wanting a nice, normal morning. Once she was in her brother's room, Mercy stared down at the sleeping man. He slept like a rock. "Oi, Wrath, get your ass out of bed. There's a cougar in your oak tree."

When he made no move to wake, Mercy kicked the bedframe a few times. Normally, he'd screech about the wood and scuffing it. Not that she could do much damage with her bunny slippers...

He remained motionless. Mercy went into his connected bathroom and filled up a water glass with cold water and dumped it on her brother. Once he was done screeching at her, Mercy pointed at the window. "Cougar in your tree."

[Maira]

Feathers were in many of his dreams lately and he just couldn't understand why one crazy museum employee was so stuck in his head. Still, the feathers made a quick retreat when he was suddenly choking on cold water. "What the hell!" he screeched as he jerked upright in bed. Once he wiped the water off of his face, he opened his eyes and glared daggers at his younger sister. "Whatever possesed you to try and drown me this early in the morning Mercy?!"

Her simple words stopped him from yelling at her more and he scrambled out of bed to look out the window. Through the leaves, Wrath could just barely make out a light beige feline form and he sighed. He had a sneaky feeling that the mystery cougar was his daughter and he just turned and bounded down the stairs. This was not going to be an enjoyable morning but he needed to get the poor girl out of the tree.

Once he was outside and standing under his oak tree, Wrath just stared up at the small cougar who was shaking and hissing at him. "Please don't make me come up there and get you. It won't be pleasant for either of us." When the big cat just hissed at him some more, he sighed and told her with resignation, "Fine, I'm going to go get the hose. Please get control over your cougar so I don't have to use it. I've already been drenched once this morning and thats more than enough for both of us."

Hope heard herself stop hissing at the mention of a hose and being drenched. That did not sound like fun. Fearing getting drenched, the cat quickly slid back down into her hiding place and the human was able to once again make decisions. Of course, she also happened to shift back to her human form when the cat retreated and she lost her balance and fell, naked, out of the tree.

She landed hard and the breath was knocked out of her and she lay gasping for a moment. Wrath, suddenly very aware he was seeing his full-grown daughter naked, turned and stole Mercy's robe and rushed it over to Hope. "Here you go, this'll keep you warm. Now, let me help you sit up and breathing should be easier." Looking back over his shoulder at his now shivering and glaring sister, he mouthed to her, "Call Faith"

[Demeter]

Having her robe stolen while she was still wearing it pissed Mercy off but she did as asked and called Faith. Who was wide awake and perky sounding. She showed up minutes later, Bram perched on her hip. Mercy soon found herself with an armful of burbling baby. Annoyed with her sister, who was not only awake but dressed, she followed her out to the backyard. Now all she wanted to do was go hunker down in her office at the paper and shout at people who don't understand the concept of inches and layouts and such.

Faith crouched down next to Hope. She hadn't worried about the girl overnight. "Over your snit yet? Yes, your life has been shaken up once again. You have a father. And two aunts, and a cousin. Your part angel, part cougar. Big whoop." To used to encountering the unusal, just look at her oldest sister-in-law, Faith hoped to reason with Hope. It was time to stop freaking out and time to start learning just how to control the two sides of her.

[Maira]

Wrath was immensly grateful to his youngest sister for coming over so quickly as Hope hadn't said a word to him and refused to look at him. He couldn't decide if it was because she was embarrassed or scared. Either way, when Faith arrived, Wrath moved aside and let her talk to the girl.

Hope had gotten her breath back eventually, and with the addition of the robe to her bare skin she finally started to warm up. Wrath however, in his attempts at being nice had spooked her a bit. His arms around her shoulders, trying to support her and warm her all at once was just disconcerting. All her life she'd wanted a father to be there when she fell, and now that she had one it was just too weird. She'd only found out about him yesterday and now here he was acting like they had never been apart.

When Wrath finally left her side, his gentle presence was replaced by a more familiar one. While the words may not have been overly comforting, just having Faith there made a world of difference for Hope. Apologizing to her foster sister turned aunt, Hope mumbled softly, "I just needed time to think and when Mercy dumped me out of the hammock and I woke up all furry it just startled me. I've only changed like that once, and it wasn't the same at all."

Tears were threatening to fall from Hope's eyes and she wiped them away quickly. She couldn't let her father see her cry, let alone Faith who she knew better. Even just mentioning her last surprise change brought back horrible memories for Hope. Of course, it had happened maybe only 2 months ago and some of the injuries she'd gained before her change had come, were still tender to the touch.