Cooper's Bedroom

[Cooper]

If he wasn’t careful, the keyboard was going to rock back off his bent legs and hit him in the chest. Or the face. Neither would be particularly good for him, let alone comfortable, and it was with this thought in mind that his nose and mouth scrunched up slightly, and with one final poke at the white plastic keys that sent a strange note into the air for the brief duration of its rather meaningless and random existence, he flicked it off at the switch and rocked upright on the bed properly, taking his shoulders from the padded headboard and setting the portable instrument further down the mattress as he bounced his way to his feet. Cooper Morris often had his shoes on the bed, shame on him, and today had been no different, though he still looked down to see if he had his sneakers on. Converse in place, he reached up and took the unnecessary spectacles from his head, setting them on his face, using his index finger to push them into place. There.

He was just as casually and comfortably dressed as usual, jeans and a simple t-shirt and thin, unzipped and hooded sweatshirt, the tassels for the hood dangling over his chest harmlessly as he did a full circle, certain he was forgetting something. But, he surmised, in order to forget something, he would have had to have a purpose in mind to begin with, and he certainly hadn’t had one of those.

Crooked smile on his face, he gave a shrug, reasoning that he could just double back later if he remembered something he’d wanted to take out with him. But for now, there was exploring to do, and socialising to tend to. They might not have been the biggest pack in the world, let alone the city, but they still had plenty of members, and Cooper was fond of many of them. So he made it his duty to bound his way into their lives on a daily basis, if he could. So off he strode, towards his door, goal in mind.

Time to get started.


Continued in: Hallways.

[Cooper]

POST TIMESKIP.


The floor was littered with the failed attempts of the afternoon, cotton and wool and needles scattered over the carpet, strewn across the bed upon which neither of them sat, a haphazard mess of abandoned efforts. Really, any kind of needlework was bound to be a bad idea when it came to at least one of the two sat cross-legged on the floor and yet they had been at it for hours anyway. Why, exactly, he was so determined to achieve some kind of success, Cooper couldn't even be sure. He just knew that he didn't like the idea of giving up. Not yet, at least. He wouldn't be beaten by needles and thread.

Or maybe he would.

"Oh, wait--" The smile quickly died, becoming a frown of not only disappointment but growing confusion as he tried to lift his arm and leave the cross-stitch pattern on his knee. That didn't happen. The pattern lifted with his arm, dangling with a mocking kind of innocence from the cuff of his sweatshirt. "Um, no, uh..." Giving the pattern a little experimental tug that only stretched his sweater and garnered no success of any kind, Cooper allowed himself a little hmph. "Yeah, I don't think that's right." Blue eyes lifted from the fabric hanging from his sleeve and the awkward little design upon it to take in the she-wolf in the room with him. "That's not right." He gave his arm a shake, sending the pattern into a little spin. "Right?"

[Cooper]

"That's not right either..." Any and all focus on the cross-stitching and how it was attached to his arm was lost the moment he heard the noises from outside. There was no mistaking the rapid rush of feet past the door, the sounds of people running, and there was something in the air that had changed. It seemed thicker somehow. Cooper uncrossed his legs and rose to his feet, pattern still hanging from the cuff of his sweatshirt as he went, forgotten now even as it bumped lightly against his leg. "Do you smell that?"

Cooper knew that smell but it still took him several long moments to figure out why. His eyes widened a little when the answer cemented itself in his mind, the pieces falling into place, and he looked down at Guinevere with a kind of urgency and alarm that he so rarely displayed, all traces of innocent amusement lost to a startled kind of seriousness. "That's smoke. I can smell smoke." And what was it they said? Where there's smoke, there's fire? If there was a fire in the hotel and people were running, then it wasn't just a little cooking mishap. It was more than that.

Swallowing down his fear as best as possible and clamping down on the urge to change into a wolf in the face of danger, Cooper reached down and took Guinevere's hand to help her up from the ground even as he said, "We should get out of here." Maybe they could find someone who knew what was going on. That seemed like the best thing to do. He kept hold of the she-wolf's hand as he went, pulling the door open with the other and leaning out to glance left and right before stepping over the threshold.


CONTINUED IN: Hallways with Guinevere.