Harrison & Gwen's Loft.

[Harrison]

This wasn't going well, and that, quite frankly, was one of the worst understatements of all time, or at least he thought so right then. He listened as she flung questions back at him, accusations and irritations, and they were all perfectly justified; she had every right to be angry and explode a little. Perhaps it was strange that he stood there and took it, or maybe it would work towards convincing her in the end. A man could hope.

"I hear what I'm saying, yes," he told her with a nod of his head and didn't pursue her after she took that step back. Usually someone making such an outlandish claim was out of their mind to some degree, but hopefully she would realise she knew him better than that, remember that he wasn't crazy, at all, and that she had come to trust him for a reason. "I'm sorry I had to tell you at all, Gwen, I am. If it were up to me, I wouldn't have told you, and I don't mean any disrespect to you when I say that. It's just... complicated." He backtracked a little to say, "I have every intention of being supportive, and I'm happy you want to keep the baby, I'm happy you're pregnant--" he realised as he said the words that he meant them, surprisingly, "but you need to know this." Again he pushed down a sigh. He didn't want to seem impatient or frustrated. "Gwen, I really need you to think about this. I really don't want to have to prove it to you. Please just... think about it for a minute." Harrison knew that if she stopped, took stock and really thought about it, she would put the pieces together, connect the dots; the clues were there, but he knew she had to find them for herself, otherwise it would just seem like he was putting ideas in her head. She had to accept it for herself now that he had told her.

[Gwen]

Gwen continued to gape and stare as if he were asking her to reconsider Hitler's stance on Jews, unsure where she stood, unaware of her surroundings. It gave her pause because she did know Harrison, she would never have moved in with him if she didn't know him, if she didn't trust him, she certainly wouldn't have been with him for eighteen months. And he was being so calm too, ineffably calm and patient with her, and wouldn't it be stupid if he wanted to break up with her for him to say something that ridiculous? No. Of course not. Harrison was a lawyer. Gwen raised her hands and pressed them to her face, turning away and shaking her head, thinking hard, thinking herself into knots of confusion. This made no sense whatsoever because werewolves didn't even exist. They couldn't. That was all myth and urban legend. All that stuff about the full moon and silver bullets and-- silver bullets. Silver. No, no that made no sense. It was ridiculous to even consider that it could be true. Harrison had told her he was highly allergic to silver when they'd started dating so she'd made sure not to wear any when they were out and when she'd moved in, she'd put it all into safe boxes and packed them at the bottom of her drawers.

A hand moved to her hip, the other cupping her forehead as she paced first one way opposite of him, then the other, left to right and back again. "I don't--" Gwen shook her head again, helplessly, stopping pacing across the room from him, eyes on the floor. "I don't understand what's going on. You can't be-- werewolves don't exist. Why are you saying all of this?" She wanted to know why so she could put a label to the pain that seemed to be lancing through her chest.

[Harrison]

She was starting to calm down now, bit by bit, he could see it in the line of her shoulders, how she held her arms, the crease of her brow. By now, after eighteen months, Harrison could read her better than anyone, or so he liked to think; he had had plenty of time to study her, usually when she thought he wasn't watching her, silent observation that told him so much about her that she probably didn't even realise she was telling him with her actions and general body language. He could gauge her moods rather accurately based solely on how she held herself. Using that knowledge he knew she was relenting a little, thinking about it now rather than simply reacting. He just had to be patient, and thankfully, patience was something he had in spades.

"I'm saying all of this because you need to be made aware of it, because in not telling you before now I've involved you in a world much more complicated than the one you woke up to this morning." It sounded like such an absurd thing to say, it was a strange way of wording it, but this was as much a first for Harrison as for Gwen. He was improvising, and usually that was something he did very well, but here and now in his own home with the woman he had been living with for six months and dating for a year before that, someone he cared for a great deal, it just wasn't that easy. At least the world complicated was fitting. "You think that werewolves don't exist because as a general rule that's what we want humans to think. It's better for everyone if it all stays a secret, if the world doesn't know about us."

[Gwen]

Despite his day job, despite the fact that he was a lawyer and by definition he spent a lot of time letting people think of him in a certain way Gwen had thought she could tell certain things about him too; she could never tell what he was thinking, not seriously anyway, and she wasn't as adept a reading his body language as he was of hers but she had always thought she knew when he was telling her the truth -- she hadn't known him to lie to her, and she'd thought their relationship was built upon trust because of that. What was the point of all that if when her trust was put under stress it splintered and broke? It was just that this was so surreal, so out of the blue and incredible she didn't know how to take it, what to do or say and how to wrap her head around it.

All her mind kept coming back to was one sentence; werewolves don't exist.

"Oh my god," she mumbled, her hand sliding down over her mouth, eyes closing as she repeated the statement, muffled now by her palm. Whatever was really going on -- and she still wasn't sure -- Harrison was absolutely serious about it, he believed what he was telling her completely and there was a voice in her head telling her that if anything she knew that he wasn't crazy, she knew that he was far from the type to believe or trust or say anything casually, he backed up his words, he always had. "You're serious about this." Obviously, but her brain was finally catching the thread. "Oh my god," she said for a third time, paling to a whitewash instantly and turning from the room. Gwen was going to be sick and she skittered off to the bathroom just in time.

[Harrison]

He could see it settling in, taking root and sinking down into the depths of her brain and from there, he hoped, belief and acceptance would originate. His thoughts on the matter were quickly disrupted when she darted towards the bathroom and the unmistakeable sounds of her body's reaction to her shock. Harrison hadn't seen that coming, a sympathetic frown on his face before he stepped out of the living room and into the kitchen, taking a glass from the cabinet over the sink and half filling it with cold water. When he reached the bathroom he didn't step inside, not yet, instead remained in the doorway and yet stood to one side so as not to block the exit, so to speak. The last thing he wanted was to make her feel trapped or confined in any way.

"Whatever you might think of me right now, I really am sorry, Gwen." His voice was quiet when he spoke, he didn't want to startle her or make her feel worse if that was possible. "And I really am glad." He went on quickly but smoothly to correct himself, "Happy. That you're pregnant." Almost of their own accord his knees bent to bring him down to a crouch to one side of the doorway, making himself seem less imposing. "Here." Extending his arm he offered her the glass, intending to keep hold of it until he was absolutely certain she had a good grip on the glass, if she reached to take it at all. At this point, anything was possible. She might decide to take it and throw it at him instead of drink its contents. There was no way of knowing.

[Gwen]

On her knees at the toilet, hair scooped back and her head bowed she shook her head slowly. "I don't know what to think," she told him. She didn't know what to think about him, what he was telling her or the pregnancy at the moment and it didn't matter how often he said that he was happy she was pregnant, or glad, or whatever, she couldn't get past the bombshell that he had dropped, the utter insanity of it, the way he seemed to serious, so intent on her believing him in a way that went so far beyond the possibility of it being anything like a practical joke.

After a minute or so, when the nausea had passed and she could raise her head she turned her eyes on him and moved to take the glass of water, admitting begrudgingly that she did need to wash the taste out of her mouth and rehydrate, that she needed the comfort of a cold glass of water even if it came from him, someone she was both confused by and angry with at the moment without really being able to analyse why through the shock and lingering disbelief. "Explain it to me." Gwen said quietly after rising her mouth. "From the start. You need to-- I need you to explain this to me. You're a-- a werewolf? How is that even possible? I don't understand any of this, Harrison."

[Harrison]

Even when she reached and took the water Harrison didn't move any closer, just remained where he was, watching her but not staring exactly, managing to keep from being intrusive. Maybe it was a wolf thing, that ability to be observational without making it obvious. Yet another thing that didn't really matter at that moment in time, something Harrison cast off as unimportant. He waited and listened as she spoke to him, asking him to explain it, and he met her gaze, trying to decide whether or not there was a happy medium when it came to the topic of lycanthropy and all the intricacies involved. However he approached this he ran the risk of explaining too much or not enough.

"I don't know exactly how it's possible, but werewolves have existed for centuries. I don't know where we came from in the beginning, what started it. There are theories that it started in Scotland along with the original legend of the werewolf, but I can't say for certain, and I've never met one of my kind who can." He didn't need to bog her down with all that, though, and he moved along steadily, "I was born human, in London, and I was bitten. That was a long time ago. I have complete control and I can live a normal life, do everything humans do... with the odd exception, of course." His smile was quiet and faint. "I'm the same person you met eighteen months ago, Gwen. Yes, I kept this from you, but it doesn't change who I am or how I feel about you."

[Gwen]

Gwen set the glass down on the floor, her hand resting over the top of it. Though she had asked him to explain she didn't feel like it was helping, everything he said just sparked new questions within her, and she still wasn't entirely sure that she believed it fully anyway; partly she was testing him, as if sooner or later she would ask a question that would wrong-foot him and she would be reassured that this whole thing was some kind of horrible and insane dream, or breakdown on his part. If it was it had to be the calmest dissolution of sanity she had ever witnessed. Then again, he was English.

Taking a moment, she gestured with her free hand that she needed a minute, turning her body so that she was facing him. It was difficult to know where to start with what he had just told her, the fact that werewolves had existed for centuries, or that he had been bitten? Bitten? This control he was talking about, controlling what exactly? The urge to tear people into shreds in the woods? Gwen realised with a sickening sinking feeling at the realisation that all her knowledge was pop culture based, she had no idea what to ask or what not to, where to begin, or if she even wanted to know. No, that was wrong, she did want to know, she needed to know. Finally she spoke again. "How long ago?" Gwen had turned cool and sober now. "How old are you?"

[Harrison]

Harrison could see the doubts in her eyes when she turned to face him, and he understood them even without knowing what they really were beneath the surface. He was dropping a lot of information on her, it was a lot to take in and process, so he couldn't blame her for doubting it. Doubting him. Honestly he would have worried if she had just accepted it at face value and gone about the rest of her evening without confusion or question. It was healthy for her to have reservations, it was normal.

Really he should have known the subject of his age specifically would come up, though for some reason he hadn't expected it to be faced quite so quickly. It didn't change anything, it certainly didn't change his answer, and before he had even opened his mouth to tell her he was a werewolf, he had already decided to be honest with her. "I'm two-hundred and eighty-four," he told her, albeit as gently and slowly as he could without exaggerating it so she could absorb it properly. "I was nineteen when I was bitten." Saying it out loud actually made him realise how long ago it was, how young he had been, but he shut it down, closed it out of his mind; this was going to be even more of a shock for Gwen, to hear that he was so much older than she was herself, that he had been a werewolf for years before her grandparents had even been born.

[Gwen]

There was no amusement in the laugh that came out of her, it was involuntary and hysterical, a high-pitched peal of incredulity. Two hundred. Two hundred and eighty-four. Gwen's mind couldn't even get a handle on that, she couldn't do the math fast enough on how much older than her it made him and it didn't matter really. For some reason that issue of his age made it hit home how true this all rang with her; ever since they'd met she'd thought of him as old fashioned, assuming that he was from a very traditional background at the very least, and that had always been the vague background but now it seemed to make a weird kind of sense, he was such a gentleman, from another time almost, she would think from time to time. It seemed ironic now in a horribly sensible sort of way. The logic of it made her dizzy. That and the silver jewellery; coincidence or something more?

"Two-hundred... and eighty-four," her head shook again and she pushed herself up from the floor, the nausea that she had been getting in the evenings and had apparently been triggered by shock now subsiding. Gwen moved to leave the bathroom, it felt tiny and claustrophobic now, she couldn't sit there in the corner she needed... what? Everything had been turned upside down, she didn't know what to think or do or even where she was going inside the loft, she just moved through the lounge and into the bedroom. It couldn't be possible. It just couldn't. Harrison was just old fashioned, he was a gentleman, he couldn't be generations older than her. Insecurities and worries flared up like embers in her chest, the new information breathing life into them and making her ache, making her lungs shrink down to give them room in there to rattle around she make her heart beat double time. "This isn't possible," she said, not really to Harrison, she wasn't aware of where he was right then. "You can't be two-hundred-and-fifty years older then me, it's-- that's crazy. This is just crazy!"

[Harrison]

Through his life Harrison had made the sensible choice to cycle through aliases and therefore stories of where he came from and when; there had always been an element of truth to it, and in fact when it came to Gwen, only the most telling facts had been changed, such as the date, the antiquated routine of it all, that sort of thing, anything that would have thrown up flags or had alarm bells ringing. He had told her he was from London, that he had lived there for years before travelling England and then when he had basically gone to all four corners of the map as far as the British Isles were concerned, he had up and moved to America where he had studied to become a lawyer. In truth it hadn't been as neat and tidy as that, it had stretched out over decades, a couple of centuries even, but she hadn't needed to know that. Gwen had been offered the truth even if it had been a glossed version of it.

After a few beats to give her time and to make it less like he was shadowing her, Harrison rose from his crouch and followed her to the bedroom, but again he stopped in the doorway. It wasn't that he was afraid of her, more than he didn't want her to be afraid of him. If she was beginning to accept his lycanthropy as a reality then it might be all too easily for him to intimidate her and he didn't want that. "I understand that's how it sounds." And he did. If it hadn't been for his turning, he believed it would have taken him some time to accept the facts as well. "I'll answer any other questions you have," he said to her, and meant it. "I want to help you understand this, if I can."

[Gwen]

Oh, well. It was so reassuring that he understood. Gwen gave another disbelieving laugh, thinking very seriously about grabbing her suitcase from the wardrobe and getting the hell out of the apartment before this whole conversation got any more outlandish. Something stopped her though. Harrison deserved better than that from her, surely? Even if this was... some kind of horrible onset of dementia of God knew what he deserved her to at least give him a chance, they had been together long enough for him to have earned the benefit of the doubt and she wanted to give it to him. On her terms.

"Prove it," Gwen said hotly, turning from the window. "If you want me to accept any of this-- this stuff as being true I need proof, I can't-- you can't expect me to take all of this on your word, not if you know how ridiculous it sounds."

[Harrison]

Oh, God, he'd been hoping -- praying -- she would resort to that, that flat-out, direct demand for proof, the only indisputable kind he could give her. He had been hoping beyond hope that it could all be covered in discussion alone, but this wasn't a meeting at the firm, this wasn't a heated debate over settlement, this was in a whole different league and the stakes were much greater, at least as far as Harrison was concerned. More than anything he was worried about frightening her, terrifying her, because to put it simply he wasn't a small wolf when he transformed, he was large and muscular, he gained around two-hundred pounds in mass and almost three whole feet in height when standing on two legs. How that couldn't terrify her, or at least rattle her to the core, was beyond him.

"I need you to be absolutely certain that that's what you want before I do that," he said to her seriously, almost hopefully. Was it really what she wanted? Were there any other options? Her pause seemed to stretch out, the silence suffocating and tense, and then she confirmed it, a simple yes all he needed to hear in order to know there would be no talking her out of it. She had considered it, thought it over, and she was sure.

"All right." It was more to himself than anything, a quiet acknowledgement of the situation, and then he stepped back after glancing over his head at the confines of the frame over his head. It wasn't just for space that he moved back, but for Gwen, for her benefit. Having distance between them when he was done would be for the best.

He met her gaze again for a moment, almost apologetically, and then he triggered the change. His eyes were the first thing to change, green to pale gold a moment before he closed them, and as he crouched it seemed to cascade over his body, a wave of transformation from head to toe, rippling down and then back up his spine, smooth and practised, eased along by deep breathing that kept him steady. The sounds of shifting cartilage and bone eased off and quieted, his fur settled into place, his ears flattened back before pivoting around and then tipping forward and his tail flicked from left to right. His eyes opened and found Gwen's form through the doorway several feet away and he remained still save for the rise and fall of his broad chest, not wanting to startle her or make her think he was moving to attack in any way, as ridiculous a prospect as that was to him. Gwen was the one person in the world he would never even dream of harming.

[Gwen]

Gwen couldn't even speak. There was a tremor in her hands as she stood there in the bedroom looking out through the doorway at Harrison, or where Harrison had been at least. In his place stood an enormous... wolf. It really was a giant wolf, with white fur cast into pale gold in some places where the lamp light hit it just so. She was paralysed, staring at the spot where he boyfriend had been and now where this creature was, connecting the two entities made her skull feel too small for her brain, like she was asking it to make a connection it simply couldn't. There was no telling how long she stood there gaping, her lips parted and blue eyes big as saucers but eventually she seemed to shudder out of her frozen state and managed to move to the doorway at least, grabbing the frame in her trembling hands for support as she looked out at him. All thoughts had stalled to a stop completely, she could just about manage standing and breathing at the same time but more than that was out of her grasp. Perhaps she should have been panicking, or screaming bloody murder but something stopped her from either of those reactions.

"Harrison..." she breathed, blinking and raising her free hand to play against her lips, as if trying to decipher some code or another. There was this press of time against her, the pressure of another world about to avalanche in here through the window and smother her and it left her breathless, dazed, as if she were deprived of oxygen, hyperventilating. Actually she did feel dizzy. Very much so. Gwen's eyes closed, her head dipped and she swayed on the spot, sucking in a breath too fast for comfort, her chest hurt, she had a feeling she was going to pass out and when she opened her eyes the world was, indeed, tunnelling into narrow points, blurry at the edges, so she held onto the door frame very tightly and tried to remember that the floor wasn't supposed to be tilted.

[Harrison]

When she didn't scream as an immediate reaction, Harrison wasn't exactly relieved because he could see that it was shock that muted her and left her standing there like someone had frozen her to the spot. Then she staggered to the doorway like someone just finding their legs for the first time and concern set in, his ears tipping back; he managed to swallow the whine of worry at least, and settled instead for reversing the change, pushing it back down again and rising steadily out of his crouch, blinking away the last of the shift so that he could see her clearly again.

Immediately he recognised her posture, the danger it posed. She was going to pass out. If she didn't anchor herself, or if he didn't do it for her, then she was going to pass out, and therefore collapse, and neither seemed particularly advisable, not just in general but given the fact that she was pregnant. It might not even do any harm, but regardless of that fact, Harrison found himself moving forward and closer to her, close enough to set one hand at her elbow to steady her, not sure whether or not touching her in that moment was the best thing. "Gwen, you should sit down." Stating the obvious, perhaps, but right then he wasn't sure what else to do.