'Werewolf' is pretty racist.

     ”A gypsy, but that’s hardly a rumor, is it?” he adds.

               "Looks like you're all caught up on the small town gossip," Peter replies, reaching up to scratch at his rough jaw.

        Peter was is to being secluded from everyone else. If you make yourself someone interesting, then you suddenly become the center of attention, and that is a change that Peter is already having a hard time adjusting to. He isn't killing those girls, but everyone thinks he is. He'd shown up right before the murders began, and so everyone turned to the new guy and projected their fear onto him. He understood it-- but that didn't mean he liked it. 

                                                        He just wants to be left alone. 

     Ginger stares at him blankly, taking no pains to hide the expression on her face, which suggests (to put it lightly) that she thinks he’s probably stupid. Several seconds pass before she rolls her eyes and begins wrestling with the trash bag.

               "You know, I have been told I'm pretty clever."

        She's different-- she's angry, and outwardly so. Hemingway kept everything bottled up-- let it build inside of her until she snapped and started killing girls. He wonders if she's killed anyone yet; he wonders if she knows that she's doing it, if she is. He doesn't say anything of the like to her. Maybe if he can get close to her-- maybe if he can become her friend-- he can find a way to stop her, before it's too late.

                      “—You think so?”

          Peter asks this in a slow, contemplative tone. He wouldn’t say that he’s gotten better, really. He’s changed, certainly, but he wouldn’t say that he’s changed for better or for worse; he hadn’t been out of Hemlock Grove for long enough to know that yet. He still thinks about the things that happened— about all the death that followed him to that small town— and he can’t say he’s become a better person because of it.

         He’s seen people get better, though. He’s watched as people morphed into someone completely new, and he can say with certainty that they got better.

        ❝—Whatever I say? Like that matters. I’m as good as dead.❞ 

Technically speaking, Eric was dead- mucho dead.

Just over a year ago he had been murdered. A knife to the spine and a swan dive out his own window had done him in. He remembered the pain. The blood. The feeling of flying…. falling…

He was dead before he hit the pavement.

And yet, one year later he woke up and crawled out of his own grave, very much alive. His body was mended, and impervious to any form of damage. He no longer felt hunger, thirst, or a need to sleep. He wasn’t a ghost. Nor was he human. Eric himself wasn’t even sure what he was anymore.

Whatever he was, here he was now, conversing with a man who looked almost as miserable as he did, if not more. He probably sounded like a grim and cynical asshole.

❝Shit, man. I’m sorry. I’ve never been good at first impressions.❞

        Peter laughed and dropped his head forward, toying with the silver pendant that he wore around his neck. "Yeah, man, neither have I," he replied, thinking of the last time he made a first impression. It was on an entire town, and he'd inadvertently caused several girls to lose their lives-- several families to lose their girls. He hadn't killed them-- in fact, he'd done nothing to consciously contribute to the loss of their lives-- but everyone in the town thought he had.

        Plus, the whole being a gypsy thing never went over well. What the fuck was this, 1940s Germany?

        Peter glanced back up at the other man, chewing on his lip before holding his hand out. "Peter Rumancek." He had a good feeling about this guy. It wasn't particularly fantastic-- he could tell something was off, of course-- but he felt like this was a guy he could get along with, and making friends was hard for him.

                                                                                                 Veni, vidi, vici. 

         Let freedom ring, but allow the land of opportunity to resonate with the pure, bitter sound of success. Society, after all, was an arena for the contestants of the ceaseless game: Survival of the fittest, the strongest. There were warriors, built from cold money, from ambition, from ruthlessness, from history, from tyranny. The warriors would endure.

                             Veni, vidi .  .  . 

          Hemlock Grove had been rooted and watered by the Godfrey family; it grew, but steel walls suffocated its boundaries. The town grew dependent upon the sustenance.

                                                                     Vici. 

                                                                           They had been conquered. 

                                                                          “Godfrey” seemed synonymous with warrior. 

                                                                           Still, the word seemed… and was… empty.

           Roman brought the cigarette to his lips, not looking and hardly seeing; he was walking, and his pace almost bore the singular purpose of an ambitious man.                                                                                                     … He could not be branded ambitious man.

            Briefly, as smoke extended into his lungs, his thoughts meandered towards a drunken, hazed encounter with a man at the bar. Something about a brother who’d lost his home consequent of some business actions of his family- Roman hadn’t thought it terribly significant. He pursed his lips, wetting them, and turned his head east and west in the routine action of man searching. Exhale.

Isolation was never a permanent option. Not when there was Shelley, who deserved so much more and so much better, and not when his mother could see what he saw, though he saw that she turned her head with a disinterest. It never occurred to him that it could be an expression that was painted, that she could simply be waiting.

            Indeed, isolation was never a permanent option, but it was an option now. 

           He unlocked the wooden door, absently observing the swirling grooves formed by the dried grey paint upon the door. It was meaningless; it was nothing. Still, the fleeting thought drifted: Had the painter gotten bored, angry, or did he think himself some genius of the arts? Roman rather hoped not. It would be a terribly mundane art to paint doors.                                                                 -Why wonder when none of it m a t t e r e d ?

            The empty house, a product of conspicuous consumption, was just that: Empty. Roman had never visited before; he had no cause to do so. Even now, there was now cause. Empty, vacant, a vacuum- 

                    Then why did it reek?

                             Disregard and continue.

            Roman tossed the keys, stolen from a drawer within the estate, onto the dusting window sill neighboring the door; he took a quick drag from the cigarette, inspecting now the decidedly hideous wallpaper that bordered the hallway and the room. The house was empty, and yet it was furnished; the house rather appeared as though it had previously belonged to an elderly woman. Was she now dead, homeless, or lost?                                                                                           -Why wonder when none of it m a t t e r e d ?

           Now those green eyes examined the mustard yellow, thin carpeting that muffled his steps; without a doubt, his shoe had been more expensive than this entire house’s carpeting.

                        Disregard and continue.

                        Disregard and continue, and see that rusted brown stain on that carpet.

           Visually explore further, and now notice the shell; the remnant what could be a woman.   

          Roman had to turn his head, had to avert to his eyes- But not because of the gore, not because of the rotting intestines that spilled from the abdomen. Or was it? He had no reason… Nothing he understood… That caused him to turn his gaze.  Having no reason to have so was-                                                                                                                                The cigarette fell from his fingers and was caught by the worn, rounded fingers of the yellow carpet; consequently, mustard fibers singed. Roman didn’t notice.

         This girl… This carcass… Had been conquered.

                                                                   Veni. Vidi.  Vici. 

          Tightly now, Roman pursed his lips-His gaze flickered for an elongated millisecond to that shell… And flickered away. The gore had to be the same. The anger had to be the same. Roman’s hand went to his pocket, following the curve of a petal of a pastel flower on the wall- Peter would know. He had to know something.

            He heard his monotonous voice repeating into the receiver the address of this house-

                   This house whose deed held the Godfrey name. 

       Roman gave directions without reason though he himself was disoriented. North, east, south, west… It had blurred to be the same. 

                  Then why did it  reek?

                                               There was another one.

        Peter didn't even have to listen to the words that left Roman's lips to understand what he'd said. In fact, he hadn't even had to hear his tone of voice, because as soon as the phone rang, he got this sinking feeling in his gut-- this twitch in his balls-- that told him something was horribly wrong. He knew, before he'd even answered the phone, that another girl had been killed.

       Peter scribbled the address down-- so quickly that even he struggled with deciphering his own handwriting-- and he told Roman that he would be there as soon as he could get a ride. He managed to get one from his mother, who asked few questions about why he was so frazzled and where he was going. She knew, of course, that something was up, but she also knew that her son wasn't going to tell her what it was.

        He thanked her when she dropped him off, and he hopped out of the car and quickly went inside. Upon entrance, he pulled his arm up over his face, pressing his nose into his sleeve. Oh, god, it smelled. The body had been here for a while. Days, maybe? He couldn't be sure. Even once he laid eyes on the corpse, he could not tell how long it had been rotting there. 

Mayhap where some of her other senses and faculties had been diminished, her [ intuitive ] aptitude had been heightened by way of compensation. 

But he said he was fine, and thus she ventured not to challenge him; whatever it was that occurred outside of her line of perception, he would talk about it if and when he so chose — though perhaps not to her. She was seldom, if ever, the first choice of companion, at any rate.

          Of course. I'm always okay.

         Once the device relayed her message, a small smile crossed his lips; it was weak in nature. He knew what that meant. It meant that she had to be okay, because if she wasn't, she would break down. It takes ten times as long to put yourself back together as it does to fall apart, and he knows the struggle of keeping yourself from falling apart. 

        Peter waited for her to say something-- or to do something-- for a few minutes, and he kept his gaze averted so that whatever she did came naturally to her and not as an effect of his looking at her. After a few minutes, he supposed she wasn't going to do anything particularly interesting (or anything at all), and, without looking at her, he spoke up.

               "--I can see you, you know."

        Finally, his eyes-- blue as the sky above them-- settled on her, and his brows knit together as he tried to see past the rays of sunlight. "You some kind of stalker or something?" he asked, pushing himself up and settling on the side of the hammock. The entire scene seemed familiar too him-- too familiar, really, for comfort-- and yet it was very different. She was nothing like Hemingway.

                                                            But that didn’t make it any less true.

        He'd pressed himself close to her-- lost himself in the way she felt in his arms, in the way she smelled-- and he'd been about to kiss her again when she spoke. A grin crossed his lips and he let his head fall back, a laugh escaping. "--You know I can't let you do that. It's dangerous." He couldn't have a repeat of the cop situation-- someone holding him down, trying to hurt him, with a pregnant Letha to fend for herself.

                         No way.

          She suppressed her smile to allow for her curiosity to take over from her amusement.

        Peter laughed and leaned back on the couch, pressing himself back against the cushions. "--Hell if I know. I just felt like going for a swim," he replied with a shrug, pressing the bottle to his lips again. Thick eyebrows raised as a grin kissed the lips of the bottle, and he lowered the cool glass back to his knee.

r o m x n g o d f r e y -- independent hemlock grove roleplay blog; for Roman Godfrey

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          ‘Yes. It’s just the way you said it.’ A light laugh fell from her lips, and she glanced at the ground before looking back at him.

               "Why did I say it? You weren't listening to me at all, were you? Good to know balls is the way to catch your attention--"