bodice ripper!

Erich
Well, so the last warmoot didn't go so great. Charlotte was there, so there was no need for him to recap it to her when they got back, nor to explain why he kiiiind of spends a few days a little mopier and moodier than usual.

He does get over it, though. It helps when they discover that Evergreen has a library. It helps when they spend a whole day there, the three of them lounging around on couches and in nooks, flopping on pillows in the children's library, reading silly paperbacks like teenagers. Charlotte might notice on the way out that Erich's borrowed a couple books on public speaking, which are now usually found somewhere in the vicinity of his loft.

That's where he is tonight when Charlotte comes in from wherever it is Charlotte goes when Charlotte goes out. Erich is up in his loft, flipped around so that his head is closer to the edge and his feet closer to the little gothic window. He's reading -- not his book on public speaking but a trashy bodice-ripper that makes him occasionally give little giggles of hilarity. The front door opening turns his head. He looks down and waves.

"Hello!"

There is, on the kitchen counter, the remnants of dinner: a rabbit he caught stewed with onions and potatoes and carrots. Seeing as how he can't eat onions or potatoes or carrots, the pot is now mostly full of these things with a few shreds of meat left.

Their little fireplace is on. Calcifer, Erich's named it. He keeps telling Charlotte she should tame a little fire gaffling and let it live in there, but then there's the problem of what are they going to do when it's summer again and 100 degrees outside.

"I saw the weather report," Erich is saying. "Maybe it'll snow tomorrow, isn't that nuts?"

Charlotte
Charlotte comes in from whereever Charlottes go which is not usually Evergreen but the opposite of Evergreen: deeper into the mountains and higher and higher up the slopes, following the cuts of deep valleys until they can hardly be called valleys anymore. Skirting mountains lakes and climbing those highland trees bent double from the prevailing winds. Her hands are wet and her cheeks are bright and her nose is running just a bit from the sharp differentiation between the bright cool weather outside and the blooming warmth within.

And she's quick-but-not-silent, small-but-growing, but now he can feel her distance when she is out ranging and her presence when she returns to the tinyhouse, her little messenger bag thumping against her thighs.

Charlotte is inhaling the scent of that stew, which fills up every nook and cranny of the tinyhouse and divesting herself of her messenger bag and stamping off her muddy Converses and then toeing them off to tuck them away on the front porch.

"It tastes like snow. I bet the clouds get bored just raining all the time," she returns, rustling up a bowl and a ladle and serving herself a heaping helping of what remains of the stewed rabbit and veggies. "I'd start snowing as soon as I could."

Then, craning her neck to get a look at him, she wrinkles her nose. "Ew. What are you reading?"
When they go to the library, Charlotte reads poetry.

It's the only thing that makes sense to her.

Erich
"It's called," Erich flips it around to double-check, "Seduced by the Conqueror! It's about a girl who's like secretly the niece of the English king but then the Normans invade and she pretends to be a serving-girl in the castle. And then the castle is given to this Norman lord and she hates him because he's the conqueror! Except he's all handsome and badass and stuff and she's like attracted to him, and he's also pretty smart so he figures out by like page twenty that she's actually the niece of the king. But he likes her! So he keeps her secret. And I bet at the end of the book she'll find out he kept her secret and that'll clinch it for her that she WUUUBS him."

Erich closes the book and tosses it aside, then rolls onto his stomach to better carry on a conversation with his packsister.

"It's supposed to be a bodice ripper," he continues. "But I'm like a hundred fifty pages in and they've only argued half a dozen times and kissed once. And that was only because she accidentally got drunk because she'd ... never had wine before or something and didn't know what it was. And then the next morning she was mad at him again because she thought he'd cast a spell on her or something. Oh and she spied on him taking a bath once." Erich thinks. "And he flirted with some visiting Norman lady and she was like super jealous.

"It's a really dumb book," he finishes. "But I'm having a lot of fun reading it."

Charlotte
Charlotte listens to this recitation of a book plot with a remarkably doubtful expression on her face. Erich sees this mostly upside down, the arches of her aristrocratic brows, the delicate scowl etched in the middle of her forehead and curling the corners of her mouth. She's nineteen, and either awkward or willowy, scrawny or skinny, bird-boned and fine-as-glass and strange and haunted and more-worldly than she was which is still: not much.

But she ladles out a healthy serving of stew and listens to Erich's plot summary with a growingly doubtful look on her face that resolves itself into a sharp little frown and a succinct and remarkably 'tween-ish little,

"Ew." The whole thing makes her cheeks hot and her fingers cold and her spine prickle with, well, Charlotte doesn't quite know what. So she wraps it up in that word: "Eww.

"That's so stupid. I wouldn't fall in love with him. I'd kill him and take back my castle. Why don't they write it like that?"

Erich
" 'Cause then it wouldn't be a romance novel," Erich says sensibly. "It'd be a revenge novel or maybe a medieval thriller. It wouldn't even be a historical novel 'cause those are just romances in disguise.

"Do you want more meat?" He's the one wearing a doubtful expression now: he means her stew. "I think we've got some polish sausage in the fridge."

Charlotte
"Huh-uh." Charlotte declines, curling up on the little couch, her bowl of stew in her lap, warming her cold fingers and easing some of that discomfort out of her limbs. Tucking her legs beneath her with thoughtless ease. It make come out as hmmm-mmm because her mouth is full of warm stew she's talking to him around it, gulping a bit. She is an animal, see: wolfing it down.

"It's good like this. You should save the sausage for breakfast, anyway."

There's a hole in the toe of Charlotte's left sock. Her big toe's poking through.

Then, the faintest little frown. Hesitation, before she asks him - rather more quietly in the close warmth of the tinyhouse. "Why do people think girls just want to fall in love, anyway?"

Erich
Erich gives that a bit of thought. "Well," he says slowly, "I think maybe everyone, in the end, hopes they find a person or people who love them and treasure them and make them feel ... more complete and whole than they were before. And I guess the easiest way people envision that happening is by Falling In Love. 'Cause then it's just you and your True Love and then you have a kid and that kid is like... PROOF of your complete-ness. At least that seems to be how romance novels play it.

"I think maybe it's more complex than that though. I don't think Falling In Love is the only way to feel loving and loved. I mean ... for me, it's you and Melantha. Not just you and not just Melantha. Both of you together with me, that's what makes me feel loved and loving and complete and whole.

"For other people it might be their kid, even if the other parent did nothing for them. And for still other people it might be their siblings, or their parents, or their friends, or their pets, or whatever.

"If you're asking me why people think girls just wanna fall in love instead of boys and girls, well, I don't know. I think that's just people being sexist. You should ask Melantha that, she'd probably have something smart and cutting to say."

Charlotte
Charlotte's question rises in some undeniable part from that adolescent ewww place that she affects or cultivates or covets.  There's a tension in her shoulders and body and that recalcitrant curl to her mouth as if she is working to digest something that is sour and bitter by turns and remarkably unpleasant, without losing control over mind-or-body. 

After the first couple of clinks of her spoon on the porcelain soup bowl, Charlotte stops eating and glances up at Erich as he is giving that a bit of thought, this sketched frown on her face, her nostrils flaring.  Her head cants, animal, as he begins to explore the idea-of-it slowly working through the remarkable complexities of the theurge's not-exactly-innocent and rather-resentful little question and she is listening, and

Listening, her hands still in her lap.

"Pack." Charlotte sighs happily somewhere in there, beneath his words both of you together with me.

She is quiet through the rest, listening thoughtfully, picking up her bowl to slurp a little bit.  Finally he suggests that she should ask Melantha, if she wants the real answer, why girls and not boys.  Charlotte shakes her head. 

"I probably don't really wanna know."

--

There's quiet again as Charlotte slurps her stew, alternating eating it with the soup spoon and drinking it straight from the bowl.  Somewhere in there, though, she flicks a glance back up at Erich. 

"Did you get enough rabbit?  'Cos I'm all warmed up and we could go hunting, again.  Before it starts to snow."

Erich
"I got enough," Erich answers,

which is sort of the reflexive politeness you develop growing up in a big farm family where -- while no one ever really went hungry -- there was never really the luxury of excess, either.  Where you always had to think about others, your sister who's younger and your parents who are aging and your aunt that just had a baby and your uncle who had to fight The Wyrm last night and your grandma who just broke her hip and really could use that chicken drumstick more than you, no matter how much you wanted seconds.

But he's not living on that farm anymore.  He lives in this tinyhouse with his tinypack, and he hunts for what he eats.  Most of it.  Some of it, Melantha brings home from town after work, stuff she buys with the money she earns.  At first Erich protested: he could hunt for them all!  He could feed them all!  She should save her hard-earned money!  But slowly he realized that Melantha working for money that she spends on food or warm clothing or furnishings for them all

was no different from Charlotte giving up her own spiritual energy to make talens and tricks for them all,

was no different from him tearing through the cold, hot on the trail of some wild hare bounding, bounding, running for its life.

They are a pack.  They give what they can, because that is what packs do.  And anyway that was all a digression in his head; the point is: he hunts for what he eats, and what his pack eats, and both he and his pack could eat more.  So a moment later he adds: "Well, my stomach could fit more."  And he raises up on his hands, twists and drops with his hands holding on; lowers himself from the loft with that powerful-smooth effortlessness that is his birthright.  Lands soft on the floor.

"Let's go hunting," he says.