Now that her packmate has left, Lin's settled on the couch. Far from her usual activity of books, though, the theurge has a bow to one side, and feathers and sticks. The theurge has settled down with a pile of sandpaper, and seems to be in the process of making arrows, even as she hums along with whatever's going in her headphones. As usual, she's off-key, though it doesn't seem to bother her.

It's been fairly quiet from the bits of the house Lin hasn't been occupying, but not silent -- there was some machine noise from the utility room around when she arrived, and for the last perhaps half hour or 45 minutes there's maybe been a few soft noises upstairs, or hints of running water. Nothing particularly odd, and nothing likely to be heard over headphones. Will bare feet on the stairs, belonging to someone not particularly attempting stealth, be enough to overcome the music?

Linnaea tilts her head up from what she's doing half a minute or so later, right before feet become actually visible. She's definitely off-key, too, but it doesn't stop her from singing along. "/I got guns in my head and they won't go.../" The would-be arrow gets turned over a few times, peered at critically, and set aside as she reaches to pick up the next one and start sanding it.

The feet turn out to be attached to Felix, who's carrying his boots and jacket and wearing a towel. The fact that his hair is still looking a bit damp suggests this is not a new fashion statement, even if summer IS gradually approaching. There's a faint wince at the off-key nature of the singing, though he looks cheerful enough to see the source. "Hey, Lin. Evenin'," he greets, continuing downward, "...Nice bow. Whatcha listenin' to?"

There's a brief, if bright, grin, and Lin pulls the earbuds out and disconnects them from her phone. "Song that my brother told me about a month or so. You heard of the Strumbellas? They're from Canada, I think." That said, she hits a few buttons on the phone and the song starts over, playing out of the phone's slightly tinny speakers. At least it's not off-key anymore, though the Gaian is still humming along a little more quietly. Pointing to the bow, she continues, "I made this when I was a cub, actually. Need to get in more practise though. I learned to shoot a bit... er, differently."

"Nah, ain't heard of them before," Felix says, and heads over to listen, dropping his jacket on the arm of the couch and letting his boots thunk down onto the ground. Actually, the jacket makes a soft thunk as it hits as well, a bit more than one might expect from the leather. He's quiet for a moment, head tilted, while he listens to the song. Close observation might note hints of movement that match up with its beat, though overall most would consider him to be standing still. Possibly moreso than usual, even. "Nice," he decides after several lines, grinning again, "Lemme listen to the whole thing sometime? An' is it my imagination, or do all the girls around here shoot bows? How's yours different?"

Linnaea grins and sets the phone aside, still playing, as she reaches out and touches the bow almost absent-mindedly. "Sure. I'll make you a CD of this and some other stuff, when I get back to my apartment," she says. When, not if, seems to be the tone that the Gaian is setting tonight, with a note on the hopeful side rather than the paranoia. "Not your imagination. I think most of the Furies shoot bows, but I actually learned about it from one of the kinfolk of the Wendigo, Quin. Topsy said it was okay, and so he taught me about bows, and tracking, and a lot of stuff. Haven't seen him since I came back from England though..." There's a shrug. "Anyway, it's not the bow so much that's different, as that I learned to shoot er... seated. So I've learned over again, but yet another thing about life that's different now that I'm not in a wheelchair anymore. Every time I think I've got the hang of it I find another thing that's different somehow."

Felix blinks. "You useta be in a wheelchair?" he asks, looking her over again as if it might suddenly show in some obvious way, "...well, I'm glad you don't hafta be anymore. How come, if you don't mind me askin'?" He glances to the bow, looking thoughtful, before suddenly adding, "Actually, hold that thought a sec," and starting toward the kitchen and utility room.

The woman makes a small 'oh' shape with her mouth, and chuckles. "Long story," she says, though it doesn't sound so much like she's putting off the question as simply prefacing her answer with it. Lin peers back down at the arrow shaft in her hand, and sets it aside with the 'done' pile, then leans back momentarily.

"Galliard," Felix replies, flashing her a grin over his shoulder as he disappears from view. After a minute or so he's visible in the kitchen again, sans towel but avec jeans and pulling on a t-shirt while he heads toward the fridge. "Oh, fuck yes," he says, happily startled, when it turns out to contain substantially more than it did before he went upstairs, and the 'more' contains pizza and beer. He snags two of the beers and an entire pizza box, carrying them back with him and flopping onto the couch beside the Gaian. The box settles in his lap, and he offers her one of the beers. "This stuff all you again? Thanks. An' go ahead."

"So's my big brother," Linnaea retorts, sticking her tongue out as Felix disappears into the kitchen. When he comes back, though, Lin simply takes the beer, and nods, opening it and turning the bottle in her hand before taking a sip. "So, my big brother's garou too. Then there was me and my sister, and everyone thought I was kin. I was... nine. My brother was fourteen. He was driving me, and himself, and his girlfriend home from school when we got hit by a truck."

Felix opens his own beer and the pizza box, and gets comfy, turned slightly to use the corner of the couch as a backrest and give him a better view of Linnaea while she talks. He nods slightly to the mention of her brother again, and looks as though he might be about to ask something when she mentions everyone thinking she was kin. If so, he changes his mind, and her last remark gets a definite wince. "Bad day."

Linnaea takes a small breath in, and sighs. "For everyone, yeah," she agrees. "My brother firsted. They think his girlfriend died on impact, and if she wasn't, well, she was by the time my grandmother and some other Garou got there. I survived, but even by all the theurges could do, and the hospital after, well..." She lifts her shoulders. "I don't remember very much of it and that's probably for the best, yanno?" The Gaian shakes her head, and sighs. "Afterwards, I was paraplegic, and a whole bunch of other injuries. I broke... both legs, and my left hip, and there was damage to my spine as well. Phoenix... he felt terrible about it for years. Spoiled me a bit, once he rited, actually. And for years, I hated him, because he walked away from it."

Another wince, and Felix shakes his head a bit, taking a sip of the beer. "Yeah, I can see that. You an' him both. Both of you gettin' thrown into pretty different lives'n before, I'd guess, but in such different ways..." He considers her a moment. "So how come they thought you were kin, did the baptism just go wrong? An' how'd you manage to start gettin' better?"

"Fast-forward a little bit, yeah," Lin says, grinning. "And yes, the baptism just... went wrong. No one's quite sure why, but it happens sometimes... Anyway, I didn't get better, not really. Not at first. I just moved on with my life, and did good at my schooling and my studies, and such. I was all set to go to uni, but my family didn't want me to go to uni somewhere that didn't have a Sept near-by and people of our tribe that we knew, so I came here to go to SCCU. And then my life took a kinda furry turn sideways. I was out in the park with Charlene, and some kids thought it would be funny to throw a softball at the cripple you know? They hit me in the head with it the second time, and /I/ firsted in the middle of Phoenix Park."

Felix nods to the 'happening sometimes', "Couple folks at my first Sept useta argue periodically 'bout what it meant when gifts or rites went wrong an' you hadn't fucked 'em up; one of 'em reckoned it was bad luck an' the other figured it was spirits for some reason. Prolly they're still arguin'." He chooses a slice of pizza and digs in while she continues, nodding, and can't help a small laugh at the description of the circumstances of her change. "...I know it ain't ideal or nothin', but man, assumin' they managed to run away, bet they thought twice 'bout pullin' that shit again. So, that must've been a hell of a shock. For you, I mean, not just them."

Linnaea giggles a bit. "Charlene was right there and such, so yeah, everything turned out... alright. But it was a shock." Lin tilts the beer back and takes a long swig before she speaks. She's been her usual quietly speaking self the entire time, but there's almost ice behind the quiet words as she speaks them now. "'Do not suffer thy people to tend thy sickness'," she says, deadpan. "See, Charlene got me back out here to Edgewood, and I was still paraplegic. Even with Topsy-rhya's protection and such, I wasn't precisely the most popular cub in the Sept with some of the more traditional tribes... and I stayed a cub for over a year."

Felix rolls his eyes at the law -- likely not for the first time, although possibly not specifically THAT one. "Yeah, I can imagine. Some folks need a bigger stickectomy than others. Plus, I reckon it ain't like there weren't nothin' useful you could do sittin' down. An' I know changin' don't usually fix what got broke before then," there's a slight drift of his beer bottle closer in toward his abdomen, where the tattoo there overlaps a couple of his scars, "but, from where =I'm= sittin', looks like there's been improvement since."

Linnaea nods. "Fast-forward again. I went back to South Downs to rite, and that, I suppose, is the last part of the story. My rite of passage started in the Caern, there. I was told to go into the Umbra, and that I was not to return until I could walk." She snorts. "Simple enough, but considering I couldn't even talk to spirits yet, at the time, not nearly as simple as it seems. I picked a direction, and set off, and eventually found a small clearing, and some glade children and a flock of dove spirits. And asking for help there, like that, was the hardest thing I've ever done. It took hours to get to where I was willing to, and then... Dove made me face myself. All of everything. The spirits have a way of cutting through all of things and just going straight to the heart of a matter, dealing with them. They don't see things the same way we do." Lin lets out a breath. "But the Dove spirit healed me. And then I walked back to the Caern, my brother said they found me in the Realm unconscious in the morning, and I was unconscious most of a day after too."

Felix's brows raise a bit at the instructions for the rite, one more than the other, and he nods again, taking another good drink of his beer. "...ain't always easy, askin' for help with shit," he allows. "What'd kinda things'd you have to face? Bein' angry with your brother?"

"The accident," Lin says, nodding. "That... my disability had been part of my identity for so long that I wasn't sure what I was without it. My anger at my brother, at Garou in general. Every fear I'd ever had, every insecurity I had at that moment." The Gaian shrugs one shoulder. "There aren't adequate words for it, not in English, not in the Mother Tongue. And Dove took that, took... that anger. I can remember being angry, being jealous, but it's the sort of memory that's like a story I was told once, rather than being there. It was all a shambles there to start with, and that... The memory of the accident... all my life that was one of my most vivid memories, the little bits that I could remember. Now, well. I don't remember it. And everything that Dove took, the bit of time, the memories, that... was what had been holding me back." She leans back, and glances from Felix, up to the ceiling. "I stumbled across the Caern to where my grandmother was sitting, managed to say 'I did it', and promptly passed fell over and passed out again," she says with a grin. "It took me the better part of several months to actually /learn/ to walk again."

Another nod, this one slower, while Felix considers the lack of adequate words, and the things taken. He grins back when she does, settling back slightly. "Yeah, I reckon you'd be a tad outta practice," he says, "...but good goin'. Glad you managed it. Makes a pretty decent argument against some of those traditionalists, too, you ask me."

Linnaea grins again. "I er. I gave some people quite a shock when I showed back up here in the autumn," she says. "Was fun actually. Came back because this Sept has a funny way of doing that to people, drawing them back to where they need to be, and I thought I could learn things here, and my grandmother thought I could, so." There's a long moment's pause. "There're still a few people who remember that I was that cub in a wheelchair, though, and I still have to work twice as hard and twice as long to prove myself to them, but that's their problem, not mine."

"Eh, fuck 'em, who says they deserve shit proved to 'em anyhow?" Felix says, in a tone that sounds like an agreement. He polishes off the current slice of pizza and chooses another, looking a little bit thoughtful again. "You got some pretty unusual experiences, good 'n' bad," he muses. "Like, I figure, most of us either knew what was eventually goin' to happen or didn't know shit 'bout things. Bein' kin an' then suddenly not bein', that's gotta be different."

"It helped in some ways, though," Lin says, shrugging her shoulders. "Or at least, what helped was that I already had knowledge of like... the litany and the creeds, ranks, and auspices, and our social structure, and knew some about the other tribes. That I was working for Terminus, so I didn't have to find a new place to live, that was accessible and all that. It helped me keep up, make reasonable arguments when people were being stupid and disrespectful, and the like. It's... still the same world I grew up in, after all, it just got a lot bigger and more real. And I mean, at least the uni term hadn't started yet. I deferred my enrollment after I firsted, and that was more or less that."

Felix nods, with a half-smile at the bit about the reasonable arguments. "Good timin', I guess," he says, "Ain't that many of us that get to keep doin' what we expected after, I 'spect. Well, not countin' the ones who always knew, but then this IS what they expected after." He finishes off the beer, and stretches.

Linnaea grins. "I missed a mid-term today though," she says. "Told uni I have a 'family emergency' when everything went down, got my dad to tell them the--" just then, the Gaian's phone starts ringing. Not the smartphone from which the music is playing, but the little burner phone sitting on the coffee table, and she tenses for a moment until she looks down at it, "same." She flips it open, murmuring into it, and offers Felix a nod. "Speaking of," she explains, even as she's standing up, "that's my da' on the phone now. And my mom, and my little sister. I... should probably take this."

Felix glances to the phone when it rings, watching Linnaea answer it, and grins when she metions who it is. "Evenin'!" he calls brightly toward the phone, adding after a half-second of thought, "...or whatever time you got there." He closes the pizza box and stands, still barefoot. "A'ight, catch you after if I ain't run off, then," he says, giving her a mock-salute with the empty bottle, which he then shoves into his jeans pocket. "Might check in an' see how Lilah's doin', actually..." He leans to pull a very similar phone to the one Lin's on from his jacket, and brings it with him as he wanders toward the kitchen.

Linnaea picks up the bow, and the accoutrement of the makings of arrows, and heads towards the stairs. "G'morning, mum," she can be heard saying, even as she lifts the bow and arrows in a wave towards Felix. "It's early there, why are you even awake you could have called later I would have been fine..."