maenad.

Erich

Earlier, before they'd left her hotel room, he almost made a quip about this sort of thing. Wine and savagery. Communing with the untamable wild. Bacchantes that drank until they were mad, tore bulls apart with their bare hands -- or so the legends go, anyway.

Looking at her now -- nudging aside when she crawls back him, looking up at her as she rises up and starts drinking in a way that makes him wonder why he ever, for even a second, thought maybe she hadn't drunk wine before:

he doesn't make any quips. He doesn't joke about what is clearly sacred. Visceral and bone-deep and sacred. He just watches, quiet, his eyes following a trickle of wine down her neck; back up again to her face. Maybe she's speaking in tongues. Maybe she's speaking in a language he just doesn't know. He isn't sure, but for a clench of a moment he feels terribly lonely; left behind and left out. He remembers the harvest rites of the Fenrir. The spring fertility rites, and the midwinter rites. He realizes he doesn't know even a single ancient, pagan ritual of his own tribe. He imagines there must be some. The Slavics go back millennia; the first men in all of Europe, and thus the first wolf-men, rose from the shores of the Caspian Sea, deep in Shadow Lord territory. There must be rites of fire and wine and slaughter and fertility.

It passes. He tosses a chip of wood into the fire. He recognizes an intimacy, an inclusion, in what Celia is doing right now. He's not left behind after all, or left out. She's letting him see what it is she does in these woods when she goes camping, what it is about the fire and the dirt and the wine. That must be a rare thing. It must be worth something.

Celia

The maenads tore bulls apart. Tore men apart. Tore children apart, as some legends go. They were so mad that when they wandered into one town and were overcome by sleep, they simply laid down in the middle of the square. The women of the city encircled them while they slept, though, guarding them til they woke and were on their way. Mad and holy. Terrifying and vulnerable.

The language that Celia is babbling in is Greek. And when her prayer is done, she takes a deep breath and then drinks again, as long and deep a pull as the first. The bottle is half empty already. Her lips are staining red and purple. And then: Erich is not so left out, because she repeats it in English.

"Athena, Luna, Queen of the Sea, by whatever name thou lovest best, give ear. That thou has heeded my vow and granted me fair glory, bear witness that I have not been ungrateful. I have offered to thee a virgin maiden, spotless and undefiled. I have offered to thee the shame and destruction of wicked men thrice over, for I know their suffering is pleasing to thee. I have offered thee water and wine, fire and stone, and my every prayer. My body is thine. My heart is thine. My daughters will be blessed to thee and my sons will know all thy names.

"Gracious, sovereign Athena, blast my enemy, who strives to trip our allies and destroy our people. May his loins be childless or may his sons be stillborn and may his daughters spit on his grave. May his whole house perish, may his kinsman deny him, may all his wealth take flight. May his friends forsake him, may war soon cut him off, or may he die amid impoverished, dishonored old age.

"If my sacrifices and offerings find favor in thy sight, may all these evils come upon him unceasingly. May the tides of thy seas cover him, and may he be buried in thy depths. And so I will adore thee and sacrifice unto thee all my life, unto my life itself."

Celia finishes the bottle. Three drinks, each one determined and vengeful as the prayer itself -- the curse itself -- and the bottle is done. Her throat is stained as though by blood. She throws the bottle down. It thuds to the earth, rolls away, and she screams.

That is perhaps the most frightening thing. It's a primal sound, the rage in it primordial, calling to his own. It's a sound of horror and wrath at once, a battle cry and a bloodcurdling shriek, a howl for succor and a roar of fury. Her throat must be raw from it in seconds, but it goes on and on.

A few seconds into it, she takes a breath, and her eyes cross the fire to look into Erich's. It's an invitation -- if her prayer is his prayer. She sucks in air and begins anew, screaming that terrible, wild, nightmarish sound into the darkness again.

Erich

English this time. He understands that. He sits up, his arms lax over his knees but his face keen, ears pricked. He listens to the curses, and they are vicious and blistering and vengeful and terribly intimate. There's an old saying, which he always thought was a bit sexist, about hell's fury and a woman's scorn. Erich wonders momentarily if the Furies that raised Celia would have found the sentiment all that offense. If they wouldn't have taken a certain vicious pride in it.

And he hears the other things too. The sacrifice implied in it. There's a tug in his heart when she says: I have offered to thee a virgin maiden, spotless and undefiled. He remembers the way she poured herself into his lap the night she was not wild, or experienced, or vicious, or cunning. He remembers that confession:

I've never...

and then his eyes flicker; she's promising herself, she's promising her children, the boys and the girls, the subtle difference there. She's cursing the man she wants to destroy and will destroy: cursing him not merely to death and pain but to loneliness, ruin, ostracism, disgrace. The subtle differences there too: his sons and his daughters, which receive death, which receive hatred. Perhaps there's some primordial truth in that. Since the dawn of time, the males die young in rivalry or war; the females endure, remember, teach, avenge.

The first time she screams, a primal chill goes through his veins. It's not quite fear. It's shock. He didn't think she was capable of such a noise. He didn't think anyone else was capable of such a noise --

The second time, he recognizes it.

And Erich: affable, easygoing, playful Erich, who bounds about in his wolf form, who paws at the air and whines for help in his direwolf form,

who every so often simply loses himself completely to white-hot rage, becomes mindless and soulless and death incarnate, who chews his way literally through his enemies until he tastes grass and dirt, who secretly knows of a hidden little trigger in himself that he can flick at will -- and sometimes not at all at will -- to unleash absolute ruin, absolute destruction,

leaps unthinkingly to his feet. He tears his shirt and his hoodie off as one, ripping it over his head and throwing it at his feet like a banner of challenge. He matches her scream. Barbaric, mindless, frenzied. He screams until his chest aches, until his spine bends and his stomach crunches to force the last of the air out; until his vision dims, until the cords in his neck and his wrists are standing out, until the veins on his biceps and his forehead are bulging.

And then he sucks in a breath, huge and audible. He tears his nails across his own chest, scoring himself, an offering of fresh blood, and

this time when he screams it's a roar, he's a beast, the noise he makes shakes the ground, scatters the small creatures of the forest for miles in every direction.

Celia

This is Celia's life. This is who she is. The heels and makeup and short skirts are, for her, just a hunter's camouflage. One day, he knows, he will die in service to Gaia. He sees it now: that is how Celia means to die, too. That is, more importantly, how she means to live. And that life will be no less brutal, no less violent or furious, than his death.

She means for her enemy to be destroyed, not just killed. The sons that historically -- and even today -- would have carried on his name, the sons that would have been worth something in the eyes of the world, will not even take a first breath. The daughters that would be discarded, that would weep and mourn and remember him, will join in that destruction. Celia wishes the complete erasure of the man from memory within a generation, and all that will remain is an effigy, a straw man to burn in history books, a warning to others who might follow his path.

The bottle goes down. She screams like the madwoman that she is, that all her kind are, where even the kinswomen carry rage in their hearts that any wolf would recognize.

Erich is invited to join her, and he does. That rage calls to his, and he screams with her. Celia's hair is down, twisted, sweat-stuck to her brow and temples. She has lost the hoodie, and Erich rips himself bare to the waist to roar with her.

And then there is the bloodletting. Of course, his blood. This is true even in the rituals she grew up with: the blood of kin is too precious. It is reserved for the most sacred rites, rare occurrences and great honors. The blood of the she-wolves and their brothers in other tribes is expected; it is a given. To deny the goddess that due would be a grave insult. He is Garou; he is meant to bleed, fearlessly and freely, for Gaia and Luna alike.

The harsh truth is, if Erich did not rake his nails over his own flesh, Celia might have come at him with a broken bottle. Or driven him from the campsite to hide in the woods. She invited him. He answered; he consented.

They scream, they growl, until the violence in them is scraping their throats raw, hurting their shoulders and their chests, tightening their guts into knots. Celia is gasping at the end, wild-eyed and vicious. He thinks she must have been born under a heavy moon, and he's right. But there's so much more anger there that she was not born with, should not have been born to; it is one thing to walk in a world that is being wounded and want to fix it. It is one thing to walk in the world and be hated, to be seen as a wound, to be face to face over and over again with men who have power and be helpless to hurt them in the way they deserve.

Erich was brought up in such a way that he wants to protect her. He wants to keep her from being hurt. And that's okay. What he's seeing now in her eyes, hearing in her scream, is that he will never be able to fix it. No matter how much he protects her or guards her, he won't make her less helpless. He will never touch that core of dark fury. Her enemy has to be his enemy: not to guard her from them, but to help her rip them apart.

Now he knows why she opened bottle after bottle with that corkscrew before she took her first drink and downed the entire bottle, nearly throwing up. She screams until she's raw and then grabs another one from the case, stalking toward him with it.

Her other hand grabs his lower jaw. "Anoígomai," she snaps, as though she has forgotten that he does not understand.

Erich

He's not even human right now. He's not even a wolf, he's something monstrous that most people would literally run screaming from. He's in his largest form, the one that is for nothing but destruction, the heir and usurper of the Wyrm itself --

and she stalks to him. She doesn't even hesitate. She quite literally grabs the beast by the maw. The points of his teeth are sharp against her fingers; his tongue quivers against her palm.

They are both scions to bloody, ghastly legends. They did not, until this moment, recognize each other as such. The Maenads tore living things to shreds with their bare hands. Consumed the hot bloody flesh of their god made incarnate. And if Erich had not been born with the wrong spirit in his body, if he had gone on to carry on the tradition of all his forefathers back to the beginning, they would have called him an ulfheðnar, a wolf-man, a creature that could tap into a supernatural source of strength and fury; a berserker. A glorious, fearful thing to be.

That innate savagery is there in his eyes, abruptly unmasked and naked. His breath is a hot, blasting thing. His ears are pinned, his eyes flashing, rolling, snapping back to her as she speaks to him in a language he wouldn't understand even if he were capable of understanding language. He snarls at her, a short warning chop of sound, and then he tears his jaws from her hands and snatches the bottle from her.

It's like a toy in his handpaw. Wine splashes into his gaping maw, and some of it makes it down his gullet; some of it dribbles out the corners of his mouth, staining his fur, staining his sharp teeth. Some of it goes down the wrong way and comes back up, a great hacking cough spattering wine every which way like a living fountain, and then he downs the rest of it. The bottle goes crashing into the fire. He crashes down on all fours, hackles up, tail lashing low, a growl on every exhale.

There's a fine, escalating tremor in his muscles. He's almost forgotten what it is to pretend to be human. His blood up and roaring, there's nothing but animal cunning in his eyes. He watches to see what comes next,

what hunt is called,

who dies.

Celia

Nevermind his form. Nevermind that he could -- and might -- kill her tonight. Celia meets him, grabs him, snaps at him to open his mouth as though she would pour the wine down his throat, the same wine that stains her neck like blood from a fresh kill. He snarls at her, and she -- still holding his lower jaw -- opens her mouth and

growls in his face,

a matched sound rather than one of dominance. A standing of ground. He yanks back, grabs the bottle, pours the wine into his mouth, heavy tongue lapping it up even as it splashes down. Celia laughs, head thrown back and cackling, her eyes already bright, glassy. She shrieks in joy, in fury, when he throws the bottle into the fire. Glass shatters in the pit, sparks go up, the alcohol sloshes onto flame and then ignites, blazing upward. She whoops, grabbing a third bottle, the cork out, and

throws it at him. Wine swings out from the neck, but clearly, he is meant to catch it. Drink it. More. More. She gives him no other instruction, no other guidance. He was invited. He consented. This is not a hunt, and this is not a revel: those have rules. This isn't even the Wild Hunt of the Fianna. This is madness.

Erich

This isn't even the first thing she's thrown at him. There was a hoodie a couple months ago, which he fended off. This time it's a fucking bottle, a big heavy glass clunker that flies at him trailing wine. His paws are big and clumsy in this form. Lacks the manual dexterity of a true primate hand. He doesn't try to catch it; he bats it out the air and it thuds to the ground and wine is glugglugglugging out of it, but then he grabs it up again and upends it over his wide-open jaws.

Bubbles churn up to the top. Fluid level drops. Wine splashes everywhere, his big tongue laps up what drops it can, he throws another bottle into the fire and throws back his head and throws a howl out from the bottom of his lungs. It's a rough sound, hoarse from screaming and roaring moments ago, dissonant and discordant.

There are no rules here. There's something bloody and perhaps a little disturbing about this. The weals on his chest are gone, covered by fur, regenerated away. That doesn't seem to stop him. He grabs up another bottle -- two bottles -- tips both back and snaps, bites, laps and sputters on the streams of dark liquid. More of that ends up on his face and running through his ruff than in his stomach, but that's okay; he doesn't care. He shatters the bottles against each other. Tosses her a jaggedly broken end, throws the other into the fire.

Beckons her forward. He's inviting. It falls to her to consent. More wine. More blood. More.

Celia

Celia's eyes are glassy and unfocused. The firelight glints in them, reflected like a mirror. She watches him lap up another bottle of wine, then a third and fourth at once, which is barely even enough to touch him in this form. She laughs at him, and there's an unhidden edge of mockery in it. He tosses a broken piece at her feet and she looks at it, then looks at him.

Anywhere else, and any other time, she would hold back. She would ask. But now she just reaches down, snatches it from the ground, and runs at him, slashing the broken edge of the glass across his shoulder. It's a fleeting attack, though. She doesn't let go of the glass; she keeps running, barefoot and wild-haired, past him and into the trees, toward the west, toward the water.

Erich

Glass flashes. The Ahroun snarls, an explosive, guttural sound that lands in a low rough bark. Almost as soon as the score appears it heals, a flashfire of a wound. She dashes into the trees. He crashes after her, his great paws battering aside saplings and undergrowth, rocking even the larger trees on their roots

until he shifts again, close to his animal self tonight, close enough to it any night that the transformations are easy, instinctual. He's a wolf, then, suddenly lean and swift-footed, light-footed, leaping fallen tree branches and forest detritus, ghosting at her heels.

He looks up at her as he runs. Wine is still dribbling from the fur on his chin, his jaw, his ruff. He pants at her, tongue lolling. Then he surges ahead, cuts across her path, disappears into the undergrowth

only to reappear some hundred yards later, on her other side now, matching her stride for stride.

Celia

Celia rushes into the woods, dagger of glass held tight in her fist. She plants her palm on a fallen treet and jumps it without missing a beat, lands on a rock and screams in pain and keeps on running. Truthfully, she is not paying any attention to Erich -- what form he is in, where he runs, whether he looks at her or not. She leaves a trace of blood in her steps, a scent that swirls up into his nostrils.

Suddenly she pulls up short. She is looking at something down at their feet, and there is a savage look on her face. A second later, Celia is on her knees, tearing at the ground with her bare hands and with the broken bottle alike, her teeth gritted.

It's a burrow.

Erich

The wolf skids to a stop when the girl does. His paws skid on loose earth, and then he pivots. She's digging at the earth. He puts his nose to it, whuffs once and knows instantly what she's about. Joyously he wheels in place, gives a single high-pitched bark, and then races off a handful of yards. Sniffs, snorts, rears back and starts digging busily at a different outlet of the same burrow.

They can hear the small frantic scrabblings of whatever small occupant is inside, racing from one invaded entrance to the other. Storm's Teeth gives a sharp growl. His paws fly faster.

Celia

Celia's hand shoves into the earth. She roars as small claws, small teeth bite at her, barely scraping flesh. She has done this before, though; she grabs hold of something and yanks it out, dirt clods flying,

puts its wiggling body to the ground,

plungs the glass into its heart.

And twists it.

Erich

There's something implosive about that. A silent climax of a moment. A few yards away the wolf stops digging. Whatever frantic small creatures remain in the underground stay there unmolested. He straightens up, forepaws planted wide, his tail giving a single hard wag as Celia puts an end to the wiggling little mammal she's caught.

In this form he can smell everything. He can smell the wine in his fur, on her skin. He can smell the blood on her foot. And the new blood, the hot fearful blood, splashed from the prey. He can smell the earth and the trees and the night, the worms in the soil, spiderwebs between the branches. He pads closer, coming to stand beside Celia, his side pressed to her shoulder.

He sniffs at the little thing. It's in his instinct to open his jaws and grip it, crush it, devour it, but he doesn't. Her kill. Her prey.

Celia

Heart's blood. She twists the glass, and wine drips from the glass into the last few beats of that tiny heart. The rush of time slows around them. It circles her, spins around her and where her hands still hold the tiny beast down in the dirt. Blood is still pumping for a few moments. It becomes a trickle, it stains her hands and her wrists, it taints the air with its scent. Looking down, her drunken eyes can see the glassy blindness of her kill, its last sight frozen forever.

Erich comes alongside her and leans into her shoulder, which she sways with and presses back into, mindless from wine. She stares at the animal that he wants to eat, the animal that is not meant for eating, and tears begin to stream down her cheeks.

Suddenly, yet not without reason, Celia is sobbing. She buckles with the force of it, her hands moving from killing gestures to cradling, holding the still-warm but lifeless body between her palms. That crying soon turns to wailing, a keening that has her rocking on her knees. It is as full-throated and whole-hearted as her scream from earlier, but the sound is not rage. It is sorrow. It is mourning.

For every mistake. Every senseless death. Every lost life, every drop of spilled blood, every creature of Gaia struck down by foolishness and madness. It is sorrow for the sacrifice, even when that sacrifice is holy. Celia bends her whole body over the offering, covering its face with her palm, her lamentation a loud, undulating, unhindered thing.

Erich

And all at once the body beside hers is not furred, is not canine, is not bestial at all. It's still warm, though. Intensely so, and pressed just as closely and acceptingly against hers. He's crouching in the dirt, and then he's kneeling in it. Erich's arm comes around Celia as she bends with her grief and her offering. His embrace is a heavy, waitful, gentle thing. Not once, never once, does he ask why she weeps.

He gets it. He thinks he does, anyway. And after a while he bends over her, leans over her to press his brow to her back; nudges and nuzzles her, kisses the center of her spine where her heart beats.

Celia

He has been in almost every form tonight, right before her eyes: human to hispo, hispo to human, human to crinos, crinos to wolf, wolf to ...Erich.

He presses against her, kneeling with her, holding her. It's a gentle thing, a close thing. He gets it, and he nuzzles her and tries to comfort her and --

Celia screams at him, wordless. She shoulders him off, bares her teeth at him, tracks of tears mingled with tracks of wine and smudges of blood and dirt on her face. She snaps her teeth, snarls, chokes on a sob, and bends over her prey again. He is invited to join; not to bear witness. Never to comfort.

Erich

That would sting him if he weren't the same way. If he doesn't have blurry memories of coming down from another, yet another, and yet another of a countless parade of berserk frenzies; things that would have been celebrated in the tribe of his forefathers, a sign that he was touched by Thor, blessed by Odin, chosen by Tyr. If he doesn't remember all the times he's surfaced from a sea of red rage to be washed limp upon the shore of reason -- cold, shivering, surrounded by body parts he has no memory of dismantling.

If he didn't in each and every one of those times draw in on himself. Curl into a ball, fetal, reverting to a blank exhaustion where he just wants to be alone. It's not the same here, and he knows it, but --

it's similar.

Erich is shrugged off. All but thrown off. And he backs up, his weight shifting fluidly to his haunches, to the balls of his feet. He stands. There's an unspeakable grace in that, a stillness of pure balance. He has been in every form tonight, and through it all he has been rooted, connected, plugged in to what he intrinsically is and so rarely expresses.

He watches her a moment. Then he turns away, moving into the woods. And one more shift, then: a drop to all fours, soundless and fluid, sliding into the shadows to pursue whatever hunt calls to his own brutal heart.

Celia

Celia does not want to be left alone to curl in on herself. Nor does she particularly want comfort, or sympathy, or understanding. Celia wants this madness, in whatever form it takes, and in the end, Celia does not want anything at all. Celia is hardly even here anymore, and so

she doesn't see the way her rejection might hurt him any clearer than he can see that it isn't his companionship that's being rejected, but his... self-control, perhaps. His sense of self, or his reticence to indulge in one madness over another in that moment; it's hard to tell. She has thrown wine into the fire, she has cut a crinos-formed Garou, she has stabbed a small animal in the heart. Screamed and wailed, laughed and roared.

The irony is that for a scant moment when Erich pulls back, and pulls away, and then leaves,

he is almost the more human of the two of them.

Some distance away, he can still hear Celia's keening. It ripples through the air, rising and falling like a tide, until it has spent itself. He can still smell the blood that welled up from her foot when she scratched it on a stone. It stands out above the blood of the animal, or any prey of his own, because it calls to him more than the blood of any hunted creature. He can smell her, even when the sound of her sobbing fades.

There is never a point where he could not find her. Even if she were not tearing through the woods like she is. Even if he could not hear her when she hits the lake, holding a broken wine bottle in one hand and the hind legs of an animal in the other, waist-deep in the water and whooping, hollering, shrieking at the cold. Erich would know where to go even if she were silent, if her foot had not been cut. But he does hear her splashing into the water, screaming in a whole new way, wherever he is.

Celia is cackling. She disturbs fish and hurts her feet again. She falls over, submerges, comes up sputtering and choking and sodden and laughing all the harder, even when she spits out mouthfuls of the icy, foul-tasting water. He hears her when she begins babbling in that language again, shouting at the skies, throwing her arms out and throwing her head back, calling to Athena again, Luna again. She does not call it out in English, but he can hear it for what it is by tone alone: this is praise. This is joy.

That's when she starts calling to him, almost a taunt, like an enemy standing outside the gates

or a childhood friend on the street, yelling up to his window.

"ERICH!" she is shouting and laughing into the woods, not fifteen minutes after she was sobbing. Her knees lift, splashing up water as she tromps toward the stony shore. A soaking wet, still-bloody animal is still clutched tightly in one hand. Her soaking wet hair is half over her face. There is blood on the wine bottle, wine on the wine bottle. "ERICH! MORE WINE! ERICH, LUNA SAYS MORE WINE! ERICH GODDAMMIT WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU!"

She cackles again, her laughter hysterical. Stumbling onto shore, she howls. It's human-throated and weak compared to his own, but she has the intonation down pat. It's nothing but a paean to Luna, the simple howling of a delighted creature

with blood on her hands and the brightness of tears still in her eyes.

Erich

Wolf-Erich is never so far from Celia that he loses track of her. He is never so far that he cannot hear her calling, cannot smell her on the wind. He is never so far that he cannot be back beside her inside of a minute, less, if he had to be.

So when she starts shouting for him, his ears prick upright immediately. In this form, his most feral form, his mind is almost entirely consumed by instinct. He lives in each ephemeral moment. He does not think of what she's done or what he did or what they both might do; he thinks only that now, right now,

his far enough from her that he cannot hear her breathing but close enough to her that he can still hear her splashing. He has been hunting, himself; he has torn a scrabbling terrified long-ear prey from the earth and broken its neck on his teeth. He is carrying it still, limp and slowly cooling in his jaws, and it swings as he lifts his head, turns.

She howls. It is a strange sound, neither fully human nor fully wolf. And that calls him back a little, because he remembers that he, too, is neither fully wolf nor fully human. He drops the rabbit. He puts back his head. A howl answers hers, like to like: somewhere in the woods, not so very far at all.

When it's done, wolf-Erich pivots in an easy arc, turning on his hindquarters, and he lopes through shadows that seem sharp and limpid to these eyes.

When she stumbles onto shore he's waiting for her. He's standing at the treeline, big and dappled-grey, a freshly-dead rabbit in his teeth. He champs on it once or twice as though in consideration. Then he lopes forward, coming down the gentle slope of the shore to push the top of his head heavily, affectionately against her stomach, and past.

He stands like that a while, his side to her thigh, delighting in the simple pleasure of close contact. Now and then he gives his food-morsel a shake. His fur is thick and warm, cushioning the expansion of his ribs against her. Eventually he drops the rabbit on the ground: plop.

The wolf form comes off like water. He literally shakes it off: planting all fours and shaking like a dog coming onto shore, the tips of his fur receding, the shape of his skeleton changing. When he gets up, he picks the rabbit up off the ground by its ears and slings an arm loosely around Celia. There's no discussion of where he's been or why he's left; not from him, anyway. He thinks she might already know. And if she doesn't, there'll be time later to rehash it, when the sun is up and the night is done and they're both a little more ... human.

"More wine," he agrees.

Celia

Anyone but Erich would see her now and think her a madwoman, a wild thing. Erich sees her, shrieking and jumping high-kneed out of the shallows toward him, and he

knows that is exactly what she is.

When he comes up to her, rabbit in his jaws, she is standing on the rocks. She growls at him, low and throaty, as he rubs his head over her belly. She mutters something unintelligible at him as he leans onto her, gnawing on the broken neck of his kill. Neither of her hands are free. She babbles to him, a mix of languages, and sometimes he can hear his name, or the name of a goddess, or something that sounds like a threat, or something that sounds like a joke. Occasionally she drops her head back and just laughs.

Celia, looking at the stars until they wheel and spiral overhead, sways. She closes her eyes. She prepares to fall to the rocks and finds, instead, her body stumbling against a full-grown man. She chuckles again, warmly, and turns, throwing her wet and cold arms around his waist. Her teeth bite without warning at his chest, scraping over his skin. There's unhidden heat in that, despite how cold she is to the touch right now. There's another growl. His arm is around her. He is agreeing: more wine. She is:

biting down, as though to taste his flesh, groaning around it.

But it doesn't last. She tips her head back again, exhaling, her limbs liquid. Letting him keep her from falling, or -- if he doesn't -- simply falling to the rocks, she drapes her arms outward, still holding that knifelike glass that she slashed his arm with, still holding a limp kill with a heart cloven in two. The expression on her face is

bliss.

Erich

It's not the first time she's stumbled, tumbled quite literally into his arms. And he's as gentle with her this time as he was the first -- gentle without quite being polite, or squeamish, or over-delicate.

He catches her. And she throws her arms around him and he half-embraces, half-supports her; he hisses between his teeth as he is bitten. More than once. She leaves marks, indentations from her teeth. And then she's leaning back -- like she's swooning, like she's transported, ecstatic, caught in the grip of some trance.

Which isn't so far from the truth. He's reminded of the legends again: the maenads, the oracles, all those mystic women of pagan tradition; the ones that chewed herbs, inhaled smoke, drank wine until their minds were transported, distorted, made divine.

She's divine right now. Divine, beatific, as given over into her drunkeness and her ritual of vengeance and death and sorrow and joy. He bends to her on something akin to instinct, drawn to her smell and her bliss and that intrinsic, riveting purity of her. He puts his mouth to the base of her neck; the center of her chest, through her sodden clothes.

And then he wraps his arms around her. He lifts her up -- he's exuberant suddenly, unfettered, he throws her into the air and when he catches her his arms are huge and furred; he sets her on his back and goes tearing through the woods on all fours, wild as the worgs and the stallions the Amazons rode barebacked. The trees are a blur. The ground is a blur. Far in the distance, seen through the screen of wilderness and greenery: the far-away smear of their campfire.

Celia

Celia dressed in layers before they left her hotel. Thick jeans, which are now incredibly heavy with water. A thermal shirt, a flannel, which weigh her down and cling to her skin. She's freezing, but not shivering, and she is soaking up his body's heat with selfish, greedy closeness. Biting him roughly, hungrily, like if she could she very well might tear him apart, tear him open, just to get closer to him. Because, right that moment at least, that's all she wants. And, right that moment, it is what she gets. Erich bends to her, kissing her where he does and how he does, and she shudders, and though she laughs again, this time it sounds ragged, a burst of breath shivering out of her.

It changes, though. Erich grabs her, sweeps her up, and then tosses her up in the air like a rag doll. She swears at him, screams at him, lands a solid -- though barefooted -- kick in his face as she's coming back down, the wind knocked out of her. She looks rattled for a moment, dazed, and clings to him for a moment. Her hands tangle tightly, pulling on his fur until her eyes stop whirling. She's half-climbed onto him, her face a mask of pure will to keep the bottle of wine in her stomach and not all over him. Of the two items she was holding before, one is gone -- the remnants of the wine bottle. That thumps to the underbrush somewhere else.

After a few moments, Celia makes a noise somewhere between a hmph and a whuff. She clambers onto his back as his enormous hand-paws begin urging her that way, and then wraps her free fist in his fur. It hurts, but not much. It stings less than the slash on his arm, lasts longer, doesn't even need to be healed. And when he takes off, she shrieks again, but this time it devolves into a wild cry again, a blend of the rage from earlier and the joy from just minutes ago.

Erich

He's kicked. In the face. He laughs. His fur is yanked, his mad maenad of a Friend, she's a Friend, is grappling up on him like he's a living mountain and he's giving her a boost. Her legs feel delicate as a baby's in his huge grasp, but she's so much stronger than that. She shrieks as he runs through the woods -- his ears flatten -- he can see the scurrying of tiny life away from them, away from his violence and her madness, away from the smell of blood and death still on her prey flapping from her hand, on his prey dangling from his jaws.

He clears the stream in a single bound. The stream, and then some. He crashes through the woods, his shoulders glancing the tree trunks, branches whipping in his face. That tree trunk they both cleared earlier: he doesn't leap it, he heaves it aside, he hurtles it flying into the darkness and comes to a skidding stop by their fire,

which he dashes to embers with a swipe of his paw. What seemed so raw at the beginning of this -- a fire, built from wood they collected in the darkness, lit not by lighter fluid and fireplace lighters but by matches and careful kindling -- is altogether too civilized now. A column of sparks whirl upward. The heart of the fire scatters across the pit, and a little outside of it. Instantly the night is darker, colder, wilder, and he twists to send her sliding off his back, drops his kill by the remnants of the fire, snaps back to his human shape. He's still on all fours. His eyes glitter in the shifting shadows. He's no more human now than he was a moment ago, and he grabs up one of the two remaining bottles of wine -- two! -- and rears back on his knees to gulp from it. Gasps. Thrusts the bottle at her:

more wine.

Celia

They stop by the fire. Erich demolishes it, and Celia swears at him. Calls him something -- an idiot, perhaps. He's sliding her off or she's leaping off, grabbing a stone from the edge and pulling the embers together again, pushing and scraping them, but there isn't much she can do to stoke it again, not with her bare hands. Even in this state, she can feel heat, and yanks back from something that could burn. It may be that he still shifts, grabs wine, ignores her, but she certainly does not take wine from him. She is swearing at him, enraged by him, til she gets back to her feet and throws the animal she's been carrying to the ground.

With that, Celia goes storming into the woods, limping now, carrying a scorched rock instead of a dead animal.

Erich

A jolt of frustration goes through Erich. She goes storming into the woods. He goes storming after her. There's not a second, not a step of hesitation -- he's right behind her, his presence beating against her back, his breath harsh.

"Isn't this about spontaneity?" These: the first logical words in so long that they feel alien to his mouth. "Do what's in my heart, what I feel, instead of what's scripted? Isn't that why you never told me what to expect, just launched into it, came at me with wine and broken glass, forced me to react based on instinct?

"Stop acting like I ruined some rite I don't even know how to participate in. Fire can be kindled again. That's the neat thing about it. Come back."

Celia

"I'm not!" Celia says, sounding -- perhaps surprisingly -- not angry at all, even stomping through the woods searching for more kindling. She sways, stumbles over a hillock, keeps going. When she bends to pick up branches it's a sudden drop, a sudden spring back into midair. "I'm getting wood to make it again. Stop thinking what it's about, what it's not, what I think, whether there's a script, if I'm mad at you, if it's a rite, if you're doing it wrong -- nothing is forbidden. Everything is permitted. Even walking away, even sitting down."

She has a few branches. Turns to him. Kisses him, suddenly and yet

not passionately. Compassionately, maybe a bit messily and uncouth and her aim takes her at the corner of his mouth and not his mouth. "Gaia is alive, Luna is in her heaven, the beasts rage and weep and rejoice and die, and all is right with the world."

Erich

Even sitting down.

Erich's mouth quirks, a clip of unexpected humor: as though sitting down might be the last thing expected at the moment. And maybe it is. He hasn't been still for more than a handful of seconds since he leaned back ever so momentarily on his 'couch'. She swoops wood off the ground, pops up again. He grabs a branch up and snaps it over his thigh, and then

she turns to him. "What's wrong with -- "

sitting down, he wants to say, but then she kisses him. And it may not be passionate on her side, but that's not how he responds. The words break off. He leans into her, his brow furrows, he catches what he can of her mouth and kisses her, hard, inhalingly, his tongue flicking up the corner of her mouth as she pulls away.

He exhales. She tells him all is right with the world when all is upside down and sideways in his head, in his heart, in the depths of his loins. He laughs, a thin huff of sound.

"Right. Okay."

Celia

When she kisses him -- no, a moment later when he kisses her back -- Celia can feel Erich's want like the heat from an oven being opened. His body moves heavily towards hers, and with her eyes open she can see the tightness in his brow just as she feels the response of his mouth. He licks her, hungrily, and she can taste the bitterness of the hunt and prey's blood in his mouth just as he can still taste wine in hers.

She's gripped by the suddenness of how much she wants him, conscious in a way she hasn't had to be for some time now. He decided to use words. Start an argument that she's barely capable of understanding right now. This is not the first time they've kissed. It's the third. Not a single one of those three has been any less haphazard than this one.

Biting his chest made her groan. The way he kisses her now makes her blink, pulling back, looking at him like she is very, very surprised he just did that. As though she didn't kiss him first. Both times.

And, rather than saying anything back, Celia takes off running again, this time back towards the still-hot embers of the fire. Cold drops of lake-water spin off her hair and splatter on his face as she turns.

Erich

Erich never looks away from her. Even when looking at her sometimes makes him flush in a slow rush. Even when she catches him. He doesn't look away this time either, so he sees her like that, eyes wide and surprised-seeming, and he's thinking to himself how, how, how can she be surprised, and then

she whips around so fast water from her hair strikes him. His hand reaches for her; it's sheer predator's instinct, the urge to bring down moving, fleeing objects. His fingertips brush her shirt but then she's out of his grasp, running back toward her fire. He stands there a moment longer and then he follows her. The woods seem so much darker in this form. He runs into branches, narrowly misses a tree, trips on a root and catches his balance again, stumbles out of the forest into the little clearing of their not-really-legal campsite.

Wood branches tumble to the ground, all a-clatter. He stands with his feet planted apart, though she's the drunken one. He hears himself say:

"Come here."

Celia

They are back at the campsite where they began. Embers flicker in steady waves, deep orange with hearts of gold. Celia has dropped her own gathering of wood on the ground, a clatter that is echoed a few moments later by one of Erich's. She isn't blushing or refusing to look at him. She is pushing her hair back, now in sodden tangles, picking up her dead animal to check on it. She peers at it, holding it up by the throat, and is on her knees by the fire. Despite the bottles of wine scattered on the ground and the tent pitched to the side holding her very high-tech sleeping bag and despite the fact that their food is tied ingeniously well above ground,

the image of her crouching in the dark, inspecting her kill, is quite feral. Primitive. She turns to look at him when he walks in and drops the branches, her eyes glittering faintly with what little light is there to reflect in them.

Come here, he tells her.

She lifts her eyebrows at him. "I do as I please."

Erich

Which makes the corners of his mouth twitch; a huff of laughter escapes. He looks down, the shadows at his feet, the texture of the earth as he crosses it toward her.

"Will it please you," he rephrases with just a touch of irony, "to come here, then?"

Celia

"It would please you," she retorts, without a trace of his irony, which she frowns at. "And I am not here to please anyone."

She lays the animal down again, right on the dirt, and begins re-building that fire. Does she plan on cooking the thing? Eating it? That's doubtful. Celia has done this a hundred times, a thousand: she places the wood carefully, more slowly than before, but she can do this while so drunk she should be blacking out. She could do this in her sleep.

As she works, though, she talks. It doesn't even seem like she's talking to him. Her voice is lower than usual, withdrawn, lost still -- for how long, now? -- in whatever wildness or truth she came out here to commune with. "I do not have to give you anything you want. I can say no for the sake of saying no. I owe nothing to any man, woman, or creature."

Celia lights a match and holds it to the broken edge of a dry branch, which she then holds to the fire. She thinks idly about the cotton-ball firestarters in her pack. It makes her tired and she closes her eyes. Opens them again, watching as some of the flames catch and grow.

"I belong to myself."

Erich

There's a ritual intonation in her words. It doesn't ping on any memory he has, though -- ancestral, instinctual or real. It just frustrates him. All night he's ridden a razor's edge between one mood another another, whipped to and fro by some emotional hurricane or other. He watches her a moment. He wants to leave again; leave her to whatever trance she's in. She's tried to include him in her rituals -- he can see that -- she's said things in english for him, given him wine, shouted and cackled and taunted him back. But he can see just as plainly how little he fits here in the end. How very unlike her he is in history and in spirit both.

"Yeah," he says; it sounds short. Even this sounds out of place. An intrusion into whatever hidden, mysterious rite she's enacting now. "It would please me. But that's not what I asked you, is it? I asked if it would please you. Just because it pleases me doesn't mean it can't please you. It's not like... there's only so much pleasure and if it's mine then it's not yours. And if it does please you, then it doesn't mean you shouldn't do something that would make us both happy just because it'd make me happy too. That's not 'belonging to yourself'; that's cutting off your nose to spite your face."

Celia

Erich gets to telling her that just because something pleases him doesn't mean it can't please her, too. She looks at him in frustration that rides the border to desperation. She is drunk, she has no rage and not shift to burn it off, she cannot hold onto herself the way that he must hold onto herself. The loss of her own control could get her killed, and she is settled with that. The loss of Erich's control could get her killed, and even if neither of them say it, they both know.

"-- Sometimes it does!" she tells him, her voice strained. She throws the thing she killed, its fur already matted with water, stained with blood, crusted with dirt, into the fire. It knocks a branch down. The fire catches. Smoke rises from the wetness, the mud, but the fire wins out as it finds organs and flesh.

Celia

[derp, HIMself.]

Erich

He looks at her, baffled. "Why?"

Celia

She doesn't have it in her to be kind right now, or thoughtful. She doesn't have it in her to give him -- as he keeps pushing for, and pushing for, and demanding, and railing at her for not giving him -- an explanation. Sometimes Celia thinks quite lucidly about the whys, and is more than willing to fight with him. The fight is going out of her, and for what seems like yet another time, tears are coming to her eyes. She is drunk. She is incoherent. She is -- or was -- wild and free and inexplicable. Everything was right, even the things that weren't.

Now she looks so worn out, and the air smells like burning flesh. She doesn't even look angry. Just... at a loss. He is asking her for things she does not have it in her to give him,

does not want to give him.

Celia shakes her head, and tears do fall thinly from her eyes, but she doesn't say anything. For once it isn't even rage that stills her tongue, makes her simply unable to speak to him out of fury. Her head shakes. She looks away, and looks at the fire, and does not even reach for more wine.

Erich

Erich sighs. It's not an exasperated sound, or even really a resigned one. Just a sort of release. She's as animal-minded now as he is in his most wolflike form. A creature driven by hardcoded instinct and ritual so ingrained that it may as well be instinct. There's little point debating with her. He comes forward a few more steps, stooping to pick his own kill up. He kneels at the edge of the fire, and he lays the rabbit lengthwise, stroking its fur smooth, laying its ears back. When he speaks it's a hushed murmur, a ritual of his own:

"What is dead died so that we may live. And in time, what is dead may live again." His hand covers the rabbit's head, palm shielding the staring, lifeless eyes. "Grateful to you, little one." A pause; then he shifts his eyes to look at the charred body in the fire. "And to you."

That done, he doesn't immediately begin skinning and preparing the kill. He sits back instead, shifting until he's crosslegged on the ground. And after a while, he scoots over so he's next to Celia.

Just sits there, silent. Companionable.

Celia

They are as different as could be and still come from the same nation, the same goddess. Erich's blood and ancestors are of a tribe he does not belong to; Celia may be the purest Fury he will ever meet in this lifetime, or any that come after. He knows only the rituals and habits of the Fenrir, who raised him in that sprawling family of his, and no Lord ever taught him that which had been passed down from generation to generation. She was raised from some point in her childhood with these unstructured rites of madness and drunkenness and ferocity, rites that were ultimately about ripping freedom from a world that denied it to them millenia after millenia, even if that meant ripping that world's throat out.

Tonight, he was hunting. Tonight, for a rare change of pace, she wasn't. Tonight, he thanks the rabbit, he thanks it for an excite that may or may not even happen, but this is fair and right in the eyes of his own rituals. Come dawn he wants to greet the sun, he told her. Tonight, Celia throws the murdered creature she dug from its home into the fire, and it's a sacrifice and offering whose meaning she would not even try to explain to him. She howls at the moon, and come dawn, she will collapse, as though the loss of the night takes her strength with it. Erich is an animal. A wolf. It's a part of himself few see, even in those moments when he has lost his mind. Celia is a fury, a harpy, a gorgon, a siren. She is every monster of legend, every myth of a creature that was once just a woman but went to the wrong place, fucked the wrong man, stood up to the wrong king, lusted for women, did not want children --

she does not explain herself. People will tell themselves and their children their own stories to make sense of her.

Celia, who now feels frozen to the core, feels a throbbing pain in her slashed heel. She smells the bitterness and offal of the burnt offering, not quite like the smell of simple roasting meat. Not at all like that, in fact. Distantly the lake laps at the stony shore, retiring quietly after her splashing around in it. She wonders what happened to her dagger, though it was made of glass. She does not look at Erich as he completes his own ritual, which she is as cut off from and cut out of as he is from hers. They do not speak the same language, or follow the same gods. They are monsters from separate myths.

She tells him that Garou aren't animals, not really. He thinks: but I am. And I like it.

He tells her that she's not a harpy, he's not a bitch, no. She thinks: but I am. And I like it.

Erich sits next to her, and she closes her eyes for a few moments. When they open, she is no more coherent than she was before. But her eyes reflect fire, and she is drunk on earthy red wine and on pain and on the coldness of her own skin. The light of the moon, however thin, has driven her insane. Her rage at Erich for being what he is and who he is and saying the things he does, for not understanding the things he sees is... spent, sputtering before it even flares to life. Her joy is fleeting, but

everyone's is, in these times, and there is some poetry in that.

"I have been María, Angela, and Natalia. Always something that ends in an ah; something sighing and rolling, something that sounds like a C-cup. I was a Sophie once. I giggled a lot and blushed a lot. That would would smirk at me when he thought I was doing something cute: tip his head and give me some cocky, wry smile, and talk down to me. Patronize me, condescend to me, thinking we were playing a game. 'Now, Sophie, don't be mad, come on over here' --" she mimics the tone if not the depth of this some-time-ago man, wrapped in mockery that perhaps was meant to be gentle and playful at the time, "-- because I was such an idiot, or so drunk, or was telling him no. I said no so that he could win me over, so he could see me later looking up at him, adoring, grateful."

She knows enough, even blitzed out of her mind, not to keep going. Not to tell him about María, or Angela, or Natalia, or the men she was destroying then, or how they treated her, talked to her, what they got out of being with her, what she was to them. So she stops. Erich can hardly deal with her most of the time, she thinks; he'd tell her to stop talking anyway because it upset him too much to hear about, she thinks. It isn't without some resentment. She lets herself feel that. Doesn't apologize for it. Doesn't beat him for it, either.

"When I'm at home with the sisters, my name is Kassandra. That's the name they gave me, and it's what I'm called in rites and circles. She who entangles men. It's a title, too. I'm one of many, and it's a nice change from wherever I am at the time, on my own. Alone. There's an order to it. I know who I am there, with them. And I am just... that. I am who I am."

Celia shakes her head a little. "I don't feel like I'm allowed to be that around you," she says, quieter. "It's like you can never just... be. And then I can't just be, either. I find myself having to figure out what sort of girl I'm supposed to be for you, because if I'm just myself, we always fight."

She has a headache from talking. She speaks slowly, carefully, and it takes her a very long time to say even this much. She trails off a few times. Has to stir herself to come back to the point she was trying to make. She closes her eyes and leans forward, dropping her brow to her arms. The motion makes her cough a few times, loud but not thick, not wet, not wracking. She clears her throat, swallows, and sighs an exhale.

"I don't wanna be your girlfriend," she says, which at the moment is true, and is also

I don't want to be your Kassandra.

Celia

[oh ffs. derp. excite = change]

Erich

Ow, Erich thinks, which is silly, because

what did he expect, really.

Still, he's quiet a while. The fire is burning low. It was a haphazard thing when it started, not meant to last long, and then he dashed it apart and she rebuilt it blind drunk and ... now there's a corpse of a rat or a gopher or something in it. A slain rabbit beside it.

Even that's different. They are so, so different, he thinks. He never quite realized that before.

"I don't think you want to be my anything," he says softly. "And I don't know what sort of guy I'm supposed to be for you either. I barely even know who you are." He makes a sound, a sort of laugh, a scoff without humor. "I didn't even know your name wasn't really Celia until now. Though I guess that's stupid; who'd tell her mark her real name? You even changed my name."

Another small pause. He reaches past his crossed shins to drag his fingertips through the dirt. Makes lines, angles, patterns that he stops when he realizes he's drawing runes. They taught him that, too. The elder futhark, the old tongue. No one ever taught him a single word of any of the Slavic languages.

"Who do you want me to be, anyway? How do I just ... be?"

Celia

It's not as though she was ever going to be his girlfriend. Isn't he the one saying, over and over, that they can't, that it's a bad idea, it's an awful idea, no way are her tribemates that open-minded, he's been through this before --

Plus there's Jack. And watching her get dressed for Jack in those ultra-short skirts, those teetering heels, those lace panties and sparking earrings to draw his attention to her jugular. There's her coming back to see Erich, hugging Erich, smelling like someone else has been fucking her because someone else has.

He tells her, watching the quietly burning fire that doesn't have enough wood to last through the night, the first thing he's said about her that sounds like he really, truly understands. Celia looks at him, blinking slowly as though even closing and opening her eyelids is liable to make her pass out if she does it too quickly, but the words make her brow furrow. Not because he's wrong. Not because they aren't true. She frowns at him, achingly, because he's right -- and it makes him sad. She wishes it didn't. But she doesn't wish it was untrue.

Her eyes can't focus well enough in the dark to tell what he's drawing in the dirt, but she does see that he stops abruptly. She is still frowning, like her face is stuck that way.

"I just... you're not supposed to be a certain guy or whatever. I just want you to be Erich. And even if you do and say stuff that pisses me off or I think you're totally wrong about something, it doesn't mean I don't like you."

She's quiet a moment, and she has started shivering every few moments, caught by her own chill. She doesn't seem to have noticed. Celia gives a small shake of her head after a while. "I just want you to be Erich. And I want to be friends with you. And..." these next words come in a sigh, a long exhale of admission, though not confession: "...you turn me on. A lot. And I'm scared of it. And I don't know if I want to have sex with you or not."

Celia gives another one of those long, slow blinks. She's looking at the fire again. Her voice is quiet. "But I don't think I'll ever want to be yours. I don't want to be anyone's."

Erich

They are sitting near enough to each other that he can feel her shivering. He doesn't put his arm around her, though; doesn't automatically share his warmth. He's finally beginning to understand that it won't necessarily be welcomed. That if she doesn't ask for it, she likely wouldn't want it even if it were offered.

"I can't imagine you belonging to anyone," he says after a while. "That makes me a little sad. Not because it means you'll never be my girlfriend, because truth be told I hadn't even thought of that, and it surprised me when you said it. It surprised me when I was sorry to hear you say it.

"But no. It makes me a little sad because not belonging to anyone sort of means not belonging anywhere, or with anyone. I can see the independence in that. I can, and I do, and better than most ever will. But -- speaking from personal experience, there's also a lot of loneliness and solitude in that. Not having a family, not having people that are yours as much as you are theirs by blood and affection, who will stick up for you and help you and guard your back even if you never ask them to.

"It's weird." He laughs a little then, and they're both watching the fire instead of each other. "I think I've been on my own so long I convinced myself I'm a lone wolf by choice. But now I see you and ... I'm not. Maybe you are, though."

Celia

The way Erich puts it, it does sound a little sad. A lot lonely. Celia watches the fire while he says it. People who watch you back, stick up for you, even if you don't ask. He talks about blood and affection. Calls her a lone wolf.

Her eyes glimmered in the darkness, and reflected the firelight. They glitter now, as they fill with tears. Drop by drop wells up, and then -- silently, slowly, richly -- they begin to overflow. There's no sniffling, no ragged breathing of subdued sobs. She isn't wracked the way she was when she slaughtered her now-burning offering. She weeps so freely. No Fenrir woman -- hell, no Shadow Lord -- would cry so often, and so shamelessly. Celia doesn't ever seem to try and make herself stop. She just weeps.

"I don't know," she says after a while, and that is all she says. Her head shakes a little. "I don't know."

Erich

For once, it doesn't make him feel like utter shit to see her cry. It doesn't make him scramble to help, comfort, dam the flood, do something.

He glances at her. Then he shifts his balance; bumps his shoulder against hers. Leans over and lays his brow to her shoulder briefly. Bites her -- very lightly, very gently, his teeth pressing against her deltoid, through her damp shirt.

"That's all right," he says. "You don't have to know right now."

Celia

Celia shivers -- shudders a bit, maybe -- when he bites her like that. She releases a low sigh and tips her head, too, resting against his. She leans into him then, not for the first time ever but --

it's rare, when she leans into him, or against him.

What he says is true, and sounds forgiving. That she is changeable and inexplicable, maybe. Or maybe just that she doesn't know. The life she had once is completely gone. The life she has behind her is one she's not entirely sure she can return to when she is no longer doing what she does. The life ahead is mist, impenetrable and unfathomable. Even her want for him is this nebulous, undefined, problematic thing. Frightening, too. She feels accepted for that, all the same.

Shifting a bit, Celia's arm moves between them and then brushes his calf with the back of her hand. She searches blindly, then finds his hand, and while they lean their heads together, she slides her fingers under his, palm to palm, moving her thumb across his knuckles.

Erich

His jeans are wet too. They're sodden to the knees from wading and running and chasing and splashing, stiff and heavy as they dry. Her touch feels warm, but he probably only imagines it. Then their hands find each other, and it's not his imagination after all. Their palms are warm together, and her grip is strong and his is solid.

The night has deepened past its crest; now it's moving toward morning. Sunrise is still an hour or so off, though. Perhaps more. It's getting colder. He's not sure which of the shadowy bundles around the campsite is his shirt and hoodie. The tent behind them, though, protecting them against the wind, and the fire is slowly drying them out. Warming them.

He doesn't go to look for shelter, for clothing, for warmth. He stays where he is, holding Celia's hand. Like a child on Christmas, he wants to stay up. He wants to greet the sun, as she had greeted and exalted the moon. Still; the distance and the driving and the night and all of it makes him sleepy. Makes his eyelids droop, makes him yawn where he sits.

After a while he's leaning rather heavily on her. And he is -- she can be quite certain of this -- nodding off.

Celia

It is at least partly his imagination. Celia is frozen to the touch. That she is not chattering away in the night air is a wonder; her hand gradually does warm underneath his but it is a sapping of his heat, not a sharing of it. She does not grip his hand but rests her fingers under his; there is no grasping, gripping, even interlacing. Touch. She does not hold what isn't hers. She does not give what she can't let go of.

Not yet, at least. Not now.

They lean together, quietly, and her mind is gradually returning to her, which she resents and mourns at once. Erich begins to doze off, heavy on her, and she doesn't resent that. She turns her head and looks at him where he lies on her shoulder, slowly growing more limp. Celia begins to ease away, knowing it will disturb him, but she doesn't invite him. Not this time. She puts her hand on him instead, flat and firm: stay. And wordlessly, even gracelessly, she unfolds herself and gets unsteadily to her feet.

Soon enough the sun will rise. He wants to stay up and say hello to it, but Celia loves the moon. He has hardly ever even seen her in daylight; that afternoon when he met 'Jack', maybe another time or two. She's a lunatic. She's a maenad, and during the day, she sleeps. It is one of the only times she is truly sane, dreaming of lives she has forgotten and lives she cannot fully imagine yet.

Celia reaches into the tent, and withdraws something from her pack. Still barefoot, limping, soaked through, freezing, now shivering as she is separated from Erich's body heat and the dim glow of the fire, she cups something between her hands and carries it close to her chest, hobbling away from the campsite.

He can still hear her. It's possible, if he watches, that he can still see her. Through the trees, in some copse where they part and she can see Luna fully. But watching or not, even Erich can tell by some heavy sense in his chest that this, at least, he truly cannot be a part of. This is between her and her goddess. This is, in some ways, between Celia and her own soul.

She gets on her knees. For a time, it seems she's praying. Her lips move. Her eyes are wide, staring up at the moon, but if she speaks aloud the whispers are too dim to hear. What she holds in her hands is lifted to her brow and held there: a round vial, stoppered with a waxed cork, full of water that gleams with a purity no water in this world ever does. It looks like melted diamond, catches the light and for a moment

seems to glow, casting colors into his vision, or

simply into the night.

Celia rocks slightly, and she is weeping now, her head bowed, holding that vial to the moon, and something about this grief is purer, softer, than any ritual. This is personal. This is real. She is alone, and she does not know if she is meant to be or not. And she does not know if she has any hope of anything else. When she lifts her face again, the tears in her eyes and on her cheeks and rolling off her jawline -- they gleam like the water in the vial. She almost seems to be pleading for something.

It goes on for some time. She cries so openly, already dehydrated from wine and exertion and exhaustion, from the tears before, and before, and before. Her upper body rocks with the ache of it; it is painful to watch, if he has watched any of this at all.

He knows: he cannot comfort her. She is not his to comfort. And perhaps most starkly of all: the comfort he could give her, would freely and willingly give her with all his heart,

is not the comfort she needs.

And finally, shaking, she breaks the wax and twists out the cork. She lifts the vial and takes one sip, and one only, enough to moisten her tongue. Her head tipped back, Celia closes her eyes and slowly pours the remainder of the water, blessed by a sister though not one of her own tribe, over her face. She washes the tears and their salt from her cheeks, from her chin, lets it trickle down her neck. There is still a little left; she tips her head forward, the stream of slowly poured water dripping over her crown, rolling into her hair, anointing her.

Baptizing her.

Washing her clean.

When Celia limps back, it's hard to even tell that her hair and face are newly damp, that it isn't just the remnants of her dip in the lake. She would pick up the wine bottles, empty and full alike, but she knows no animals will come near this campsite smelling of rage and terror. She takes a shallow metal bowl from her pack and fills it with clean water from the jug he toted out here. She fills the bladder of a Camelbak. She uses the water in that jug to wash her hands quickly with a thin strip of biodegradable soap, and then she strips. Quickly now, since she is so cold already. She undresses with businesslike speed and drapes the clothes over a branch. Naked, her nipples in hard nubs on her breasts and her skin prickled with goosebumps, Celia quickly washes a little more with a rag and the cold-but-clean water. She limps toward her tent, and the only part of her that is dirty still are her feet.

At the front of her tent, she finds Erich with her eyes, one way or another. "I will wash my feet and sleep with the water and some snacks from my pack near me," she tells him, her voice drowsy and distant, like she's forgotten language again. Like she isn't sure he can even see her right now, if only because she feels so

transcendant.

"If you... want to come in here with me," she says quietly, "that would...please me. But it will not displease me if you don't."

Erich

Celia begins to ease away, and Erich's balance tips far enough to trigger some primitive primate fall-alarm. He wakes with a start, eyes flying open, one hand going to plant on the earth. He's disoriented. He looks up. He starts to follow, but she bids him to stay with action rather than word. There's a trace of disappointment in his eyes, but he doesn't argue.

He watches her go. He has a brief, odd thought: this must be how kinfolk feel all too often when their Garou walk away from them.

In the darkness, under the moon, beyond the touch of fire and mankind, she communes with Luna and herself. It is painfully, starkly personal this time, and Erich only watches so long before some instinct deeper than social construct makes him turn away. She is bent by then, she is weeping, it hurts to watch and he doesn't trust himself not to go to her. Animals avoid each other in grief; in death. This is something of the same.

He looks up at the moon himself, to which he himself has an innate affinity. There are some that would argue his bond ran deeper than Celia's. Erich would not be one of them. His loyalty, in the end, would always be split. Between Luna, between Gaia, between Thunder.

Gaia never blessed Celia. She belongs to Pegasus only because she was born to Pegasus. But Luna: that goddess she chose. That goddess chose her, or she would not be so wild, so mad, so eldritch. Her loyalty is singular, deep, and true. Erich has no place in that equation, and he understands it; keeps a respectful distance. Gives her her privacy.

In the darkness,
under the moon,
Celia cleanses herself.

Later on she comes back to him. He's dozing again by then. He's outright sleeping, sprawled in the dirt, his arms folded across his bare chest. The sound of her footsteps wakes him. He sits up, and this time his eyes are clear. It is nearly dawn, and he is an animal, crepuscular.

It's like she's forgotten language again. It's like he never had it at all. It's like she's diaphanous, fleeting, not quite real -- but he reaches out as she passes him, and he catches her hand. He presses his brow to her knuckles, his nose to her fingers. Then he turns her hand over and kisses her palm: in entreaty, in blessing, both.

"Later," he says. And a shadow of a smile: "Soon."

Celia -- Kassandra -- whatever her name might be in her heart of hearts -- goes into her tent. Erich rises, yawning, pacing the camp, popping his joints, stretching his broad frame and his heavy muscles, coming alive for the dawn. As the eastern sky begins to color he finds a tree, the tallest in the area. He climbs it, first in his man-form and then in the near-man form, kicking his shoes off, digging the short claws of all four extremities into bark. There's an effortless, primate agility in the climb. He hauls himself up in smooth, sure pulls, scaling the trunk, climbing hand over foot, grasping the highest branch he thinks will support his weight and pulling himself up in a single concerted flex.

His back to the trunk, the Ahroun perches there. He stretches his jaw and it turns into a yawn. He feels close to his ancestry -- not the genetic or the spiritual but the deeper, truer one. He feels close to his animal self, close to his primitive self; close to the wolf he is, close to the ape his ancestors were.

No song leaves his lips. He doesn't know any appropriate for the moment, anyway. He keeps his worship in his heart and his eyes. He watches: that brilliance, that first cresting gleam of light. A wind has risen from the east, pushed ahead of the sun-warmed earth. For a moment the sky is perfectly blue, the light saturating and golden. Erich closes his eyes and inexplicably feels not alone, not solitary, but welcomed. Touched. Blessed.

By the time he drops from the last branch and lands lightly on his bare feet, the light has changed to the ordinary whiteness of day. Erich stirs the last embers of the fire apart and kicks dirt over them. He strips down standing in the middle of the camp, using his cookpot to ladle water over his head, down his body. He's shivering when he's done, heart pounding, the hairs on his body standing on end. There's a change of clothes in his backpack, and only one, which means he'll have to wash his clothes when he wakes. It can wait. At the flap of the tent he pauses to wash his feet.

The unzipping flap lets a bit of daylight into the tent. Erich slips in, and immediately the small tent feels smaller still. There's barely enough room for him to turn around. He has to stoop. He zips the tent back up, fumbles with that sleeping bag from his car until he unrolls it beside Celia's. When he goes horizontal beside her, he exhales a sigh that sounds very much like contentment, very much like exhaustion and comfort and that universal praise-of-bed common to anyone who's ever stayed up too long. Cocooned in their bedrolls, there's no way for him to wrap himself around Celia the way he had in her bed.

He still scoots close to her. He stills sleeps close enough to her that their bodies are in contact through their blankets. Everything smells of her. It's a good smell, clean and pure. It stirs his blood, true; but it stirs his heart as well. Tenderness, gentleness. Uncomplicated, undemanding love.

He closes his eyes.