maiden and youth.

Melantha

They went to Home Depot, weeks ago. They looked at plans, they smelled the lumber, they ran their hands over fixtures and got books on solar panels from the library. Melantha keeps saying that if they're going to live on a mountaintop in one of the sunniest places in the country, then she intends to bask in Gaia's generosity. She doesn't want a fireplace, because they are one family and they will have one hearth, and if she wants a fire then all the more reason to come over to Erich and Charlotte's tinyhouse-next-door. She has no idea how she wants to decorate yet. Well: she has ideas. Too many of them, rather than too few.

That was then.

Now: it is a sunny afternoon, as all afternoons have been sunny lately, and they are. Building. A. Tinyhouse. There's the platform, the wheeled foundation with the hitch. They are building a frame.

Mostly. Right now, they're taking a break. They are sweaty and it's hot outside. Melantha has her hair, all that lovely thick frizzy-in-winter and unbearable-in-summer hair, tied up with a bandana so it's off her neck completely, and she looks like some sort of factory worker from the 40s. She is wearing a t-shirt with the sleeves cut off and it's a big baggy shirt and you can see her bright teal sports bra through the arm-holes and through the shirt itself. She is wearing a pair of loose knee-length shorts, madras-colorful, a little baggy, hanging a bit on her hips. She is now barefoot though while they work she's been wearing sneakers, and she is wiggling her toes in the grass to cool them off. She is drinking lots and lots of water.

"I'm gonna shave my head," she insists.

Erich

It's hot. They're high up. The sun is blazing, Erich is baking, he's baking and burning and tanning and by the end of summer he won't just be golden; he'll be nut-brown. While Melantha wiggles her toes in the grass and drinks water, he stands atop the trailer platform and is all frowny intense thinking.

This is the second tinyhouse he's built. He's learned a bit; the work is progressing faster, and he's surer. They already have the floor together. They're working on the walls now, the sturdy wood-beam frame that will withstand storm and wind for years to come. He's looking at the pencil marks on the floor that demarcate where the bathroom will be, and the kitchen, and the door.

He raises his head when she says she's going to shave her head. His thinking-frown slips off; he grins. He walks to the edge of the trailer and then he hops off, landing softly in the grass. Coming over to her, sweaty and sticky and smelling of animal-ish musk, he wraps his arms around her from behind and smooches her temple. Doesn't mind if she's sweaty and sticky and smelly too.

"Nooo," he protests. "I love your hair. Just tie it up in a bun or something."

Melantha

"EW, ew. Ew. Stop," she insists, flapping her hands, winding away from him in the heat as he hugs her, gets his stinky sweat and body heat all over her. "It's too hot," she cries, flopping down on the grass because it is cooler than flesh, almost as soft. She breathes in its scent, and dumps a slosh of water from her bottle over her neck and shoulders.

"You love me happy more than you love my hair," she informs him, twisting, smirking. Her eyes are so vicious, so animal, so ferocious sometimes. "You know when you argue it just makes me want to do it more."

Erich

He lets her go, laughing, as she goes flopping to the grass like it's just too much for her. A moment later he drops down next to her. Unlike her, he's still wearing his sneakers. His socks are no-shows, and between the cuff of his shorts and the tops of his sneakers is the long hard-boned stretch of his shins.

"Okay," he says, "fine. You do that. But I'm gonna take like a million pics and then one day I'll show our grandkids and they'll be like GRANDMA WHAT THE WHAT."

Melantha

It's all too much. The house building! The heat! The man-stink! She can't. She can't even. She has lost the ability to can.

Erich comes near, is always near, near, wants to snuggle and hold and it doesn't matter if it's baking outside. But he doesn't glomp her up. She rolls around, unwary of grass stains or dirt patches, and drowses in the ground, finally moving to lie on her belly and smile at him through grassblades.

"They'll all grow up with shaved heads. Gender-inclusive clothes. By then I'll be bald naturally and they'll rub my head then their own heads and laugh, and laugh," she tells him, speaking with a strange tone, like this is something she's seen. A dream she had once, that might just come true.

"You want to have kids?" she asks him, still in that tone, both knowing and questioning.

Erich

"Not anymore," he says, smirking. "You've got a bald gene I didn't know about. False advertising!"

Melantha

She kicks him in the side of his leg. "So are push-up bras and makeup, never heard you complain when I had those going on."

It was a gentle kick, a nudge of her toes. She closes her eyes. "I'll make you a pillow. Stuff it with my hair. You can keep it and glue it back on my head when I inevitably lose all my hair."

Erich

Erich is grinning again. Erich is flopping down next to Melantha, on his back instead of his stomach. He's shirtless because of course he is; it is summer and it is hot and they are building things and this all makes him feel very manly. Or something. He tucks his hands under his head, looking up at the flawless blue sky.

"I do want kids," he says. "Not right now. No way. But like... someday. You?"

Melantha

Now she reaches out. She puts her fingertips on his chest, standing on his sternum thoughtfully. She closes her eyes. Feels his heartbeat through his fingertips. Feels the grass trying to tickle into her ear. Feels her own sweat, and the water she sloshed onto herself, all dripping, rolling. She can smell him, along with the grass. He is very manly. He is made of earth and fire.

"I don't know," she says honestly. "I've never seen myself becoming a Mother."

She doesn't ask if this makes him like her less. If they are doomed by this conversation. She just keeps her eyes closed, touching his chest eversolightly like that, smelling all that she smells.

Erich

Perhaps this is surprising: Erich doesn't immediately collapse into howls. He smiles at her fingertips barely standing on his chest. He resists the urge to take her hand and nomf it.

"You know what? I can't really see you as a Mother either. Not yet anyway. You're kinda... all Maiden right now. But then I'm kinda all ... whatever the male version of Maiden is, right now. So."

Melantha

She smiles slowly, spreading, opens her eyes. "In a lot of human religions there's ideas like that. There's not, for us. We know the goddess, and the form she takes, and we know the ties her forms have with the Triat."

Melantha shrugs, closing her eyes once more. "You're a Youth, and I'm a Maiden. You want to be a Father, and I may never be a Mother. One day I will be a Crone, and one day you will be..." opens her eyes. Thinks. Looks at him. "A Codger. An Old Fart. A Grump."

Erich

One day he'll be an old fart.

Erich laughs aloud, rolling over -- on his stomach now, sprawled beside her. He nudges her. He grins.

"And you'll still love me."

Melantha

She screws up her face, gives a shrug with this totally weird face. "Ida know. Maybe. But y'know. You gotta keep your hair and your rock-hard abs and all that. Your teeth, too."

Erich

"Oh, I have to keep my hair. I see how it is."

Melantha

She shrugs. "Well, if you want me to love you, yeah. You don't have eons of dehumanizing, reductive standards of appearance defining the whole of your worth to rebel against, so if you lose your hair it's not a powerful statement of self-ownership, it's just you being weird-looking."

Melantha elbow-crawls over to him, and kisses his pectoral muscle. "I don't want to talk about getting old anymore," she whispers. She moves; lays her head on his bicep, even though they are hot and sticky. "I'm being silly but it's also feeling kind of weird and making me sad and... I don't know what."

Erich

Erich shifts as she comes over. He rolls onto his back again; she kisses his chest. He smiles at her, simple and open. She lays her head down and he kind of curls his forearm up to give her one of those awkward one-armed circle-hugs.

Quiets, listening to her. Nods a little. "It's cool," he says quietly. "It makes me a little weirded out to think about it too. Not getting old. Just... I dunno. Thinking that far ahead when nothing's really sure, y'know?"

He closes his eyes. The sun beams down on him. He thinks maybe the sun likes him too, the way the moon does.

"What color are your sheets gonna be?"

Melantha

Melantha licks him. Lightly, catlike, licking the salt off his skin. She closes her eyes again and lays down, lets him hug her even though it's hot, and breathes in and out deeply even though she knows they gotta get back to work soon. "Getting old makes me weirded out," she admits, because it's the truth. Not one they share, but one she can share with him for the sake of honesty.

The way he says what he says.

Nothing's really sure.

It makes her think about his future. But not about him getting old.

--

"I don't know," she drowses. "Probably white. Bleach in the sun when I wash them. I'm going to have a bigger bed than I do now. I'll get new ones. Really soft. I'll hang a windchime outside. I'll make it out of bird bones."

Erich

It makes him shiver a little, the way she licks him. He knows she doesn't mean it that way, it's not supposed to be a come-on. Still. He shivers. Every day, all the time, she teaches him things he never knew about his own body. That he could be so sensitive. That he could feel so intoxicated.

"A windchime," Erich repeats, smiling, a little dreamily almost. "That sounds nice. We could hear it chiming in the breeze while we roll around in bed and laze about and never get up.

"Hope the bird bones don't piss Falcon off, though," he adds.

Melantha

"I'm not really going to make a windchime out of bird bones," she tells him, scoffing. "I'll get avian flu or something. But I don't know. As long as I thanked their spirits and honored the music their bones would make." She's quiet for a moment. "It wouldn't really be chimes. Bones make a different sound, more... cloppy. Hollow and gaspy."

She yawns. "I don't want to work anymore," she tells him. "I want to nap. In a kiddie pool full of ice water."

Erich

"Let's go take a shower," Erich says, squinting up at the sky -- one hand held between his eyes and the dazzle. "Then let's go nap in the shade of a tree or something. When the sun goes down we can work a little more. I bet we can get the frame up for the walls by the end of the week."

Melantha

"On three conditions."

She is dozing on his shoulder-chest-arm. She holds up three fingers, the heel of her hand sitting on his chest. "One: cold shower. Or at least cool. Two: we nap naked. We can have a sheet nearby or something. Three: you agree that end of the week is for puppies and we get that frame up before sunset tomorrow. I can even call in some hippies from work to help."

Erich

" 'kay," Erich says, agreeable lad that he is. "But no hippies. I think I'd scare them anyway."

This time he can't resist: he catches her hand, lifts it to his mouth and -- well. Nomfs her fingertips. Gently, nibbling at them the way a young canine might nibble at a toy, a snack, a sibling's ear.

Melantha

Melantha smiles. She watches him, lets him nom her fingers, suck on them. She breathes in, doesn't quite shiver but almost. She knows her body. She knows the parts that excite her, the ways she can be touched that thrill her. She teaches him, sometimes now. Guides his hand or whispers in his ear, tells him like a secret, whimpers when he gets it right. But this is new, too: the playfulness. The ease. The honesty. He noms her fingertips. She loves him so dearly for it.

And for being such an agreeable lad: to a cool shower, to sleeping naked under a tree, to working extra hard and getting that house frame up in a third the time.

And for being a Youth, while she is a Maiden.

home depot, and sneaking into some fancy lady's boudoir.

Erich

It's been raining quite a bit up in Evergreen. Leaden clouds gather at the shoulders of the mountains and roll down their sides; rain sweeps through the valleys and the meadows. Wildgrasses flourish. Wildflowers bloom. It is the height of spring, humid and green, and Erich's days at the tinyhouse have been filled with repairing the tiny cracks and crannies that a winter's worth of freeze-thaw left behind.

That's what he's doing right now. It is a weekday, a workday though not for the likes of Erich-and-Melantha-and-Charlotte, and it is mid-morning. It is already warm out; humid and oppressive. The sun still shines, but clouds are gathering -- a thunderstorm by afternoon for sure. Erich is outside, the sun on his bare back, his t-shirt stripped off and tied around his brow like the world's unwieldiest bandanna. He's resealing one of the kitchen windows, the caulking gun in both hands, the bottlecap gripped between his front teeth.

He sees Melantha: whether through the kitchen window (he waves!) or when she steps outside. He doesn't stop what he's doing, and that bright red cap wiggles between his teeth as he mumbles around it:

"Hey, wanna go to Home Depot with me in a bit here?"

Melantha

Melantha wakes because it is too hot to sleep in the tinyhouse as it is. She, like her packmates, loves the nighttime, but nature has its own laws, and one of them is that the mortal body must bow to chemical changes in the brain in response to the sun being out of the sun going down. It is too hot to sleep: that is all she really knows when she wakes, sweaty and flopping around, kicking at sheets, even though the ceiling fan is going. The tinyhouse doesn't have central air. It doesn't even have an air conditioner. She is becoming sure they're going to bake this summer. BAKE.

She also wakes because Erich is making noise. Not a lot: the caulking isn't hammering or prying or anything. It's just caulk. But he's awake and moving around and she responds to that, too, blearily opening her eyes and rolling over, looking out through her open curtain. She doesn't close it lately; it's too hot to not get as much air from the ceiling fan as possible. She can barely see him through the window over the sink and yawns.

Presently, she gets up. She roughly makes her bed and comes down the ladder, drinking water from her mason jar and then refilling it at the sink, which is where Erich sees her: rumpled, in her shorts and tank top, hair a dark asymmetrical cloud around her head. He waves happily. She smiles wearily, waving back.

A few minutes later, because she has to pee and she decides to finger-comb her hair a little, she comes out on the porch carrying her glass jar of water and still wearing her pjs. There is stubble on her legs when she pulls up a little fold-up chair and flops her arms over the railing of the porch to look at him past the corner of the house.

"Sure," she says. Then ventures: "I want to look at some plans and price some stuff for another house while we're there."

Erich

Erich kinda gets this wistful look on his face. As far as she can see, anyway: he's back to caulking, eyes fixed with concentration. Not exactly jewelcrafting, caulking, but it's still something of a precision job.

"Yeah, that's kinda why I asked you to come along," he says. "Thought maybe we could look at lumber and cabinets and stuff. So we can start planning your tinyhouse. Here," he transfers the caulking gun to one hand, holding it by the barrel like a miniature shotgun.

With his free hand he pulls a folded sheaf of paper out of his back pocket, which he extends over to her. About ten or fifteen pages all-told, double-sided, a bit rumpled and wrinkled and -- well, a little tiny bit damp from being in his pocket on a hot day for so long. Gross.

"I printed out some plans while I was at the library," he explains. "Just ideas for tinyhouses. Some are from companies specializing in this stuff. Others are just amateurs who designed their own. You don't have to follow any of 'em exactly, but it's a start."

Erich doesn't say it, but maybe he doesn't have to: he's making an effort. He's coming terms to her leaving the tinyhouse, building her own. He's trying to be supportive. Trying, as he so often does -- and somewhat less often with success -- to help.

Melantha

If she weren't planning on making her own tinyhouse, Erich would still have asked her to come along, and Melantha is sure of that. But he had a reason this time, a different one than the pleasure of her company. Lumber and cabinets. Plans! He has some plans. He hands her plans, reaching over, but the house is small and the kitchen window on the side is not too far from the edge of the porch rail where she rests her arms and chin.

Melantha smiles. Lightly, softly, as she unfolds the papers and starts looking through them, turning them over, thinking. "I've looked at some too," she admits: Erich isn't the only one with a library card. "I've started sketching some ideas. It'll be nice to bounce some ideas around with someone else, though."

She's quiet a bit, folding aside the papers, laying her cheek on her arms, watching him as he turns back to his not-jewelcrafting to work, to seal up their house, which will be his and Charlotte's house but also still totally Melantha's house, to make sure the den they all share stays safe from the elements. She watches him a while before she says something else.

"You okay?" she asks, quietly.

Erich

Papers rustle softly as Melantha sifts through them. Erich continues his work, making the tinyhouse safewarm and watertight against the oncoming storm season. There is a small quiet.Then: is he okay?He looks over at her. He looks at her for a moment; then he smiles. He stops what he's doing, lowers the caulking gun, comes over to her and puts his arm around her shoulders; gives her an awkward sort of hug over the porch railing."I'm okay," he says, and kisses her quick and soft on the cheek. "I'll miss having you across the way when we sleep, but like you said. You've never had a place of your own. It'll be nice to help you build one."

Erich

Papers rustle softly as Melantha sifts through them. Erich continues his work, making the tinyhouse safewarm and watertight against the oncoming storm season. There is a small quiet.

Then: is he okay?

He looks over at her. He looks at her for a moment; then he smiles. He stops what he's doing, lowers the caulking gun, comes over to her and puts his arm around her shoulders; gives her an awkward sort of hug over the porch railing.

"I'm okay," he says, and kisses her quick and soft on the cheek. "I'll miss having you across the way when we sleep, but like you said. You've never had a place of your own. It'll be nice to help you build one."

Melantha

Her arms are folded, so the hug is mostly Erich putting his sun-warmed arms around her and leaning over her, into her, enveloping her. She can smell him, and she closes her eyes in the dark pocket he creates with his arms and chest and chin. She smiles. The left side of her face is turned toward him, and that is the cheek he kisses, much too quick.

"You'll sleep with me a lot," she says quietly, and not with any tone, not with an attempt to try and insinuate something else. Just: he will sleep with her a lot.

She touches him with the back of her hand, brushing it against his ribs just because that is where her hand and his body align in their current positions. "I'm excited to have my own place," she confesses, because she is hoping this won't hurt his feelings. She's just... excited. And she wants him to be excited with her, that much is easy enough to tell. She wants to share. Like when they make tater tots and eat them hot from the pan and keep rolling them at each other with their fingertips.

"Like... decorating it and making it mine."

Erich

Erich meant for that hug to be a quick thing too, but then he kind of ends up staying there, his arms wrapped around her, his biceps and chest and chin making a neat little cave around her.

"Y'know," he says, "I'm kind of excited about that too. I'd like to see what you make it look like. I bet you're gonna paint it colors and stuff, and it won't look as plain-jane as this one."

Melantha

"I was thinking of keeping it really clean and white, actually," she says, as though both in contradiction -- of painting it colors and stuff -- and agreement -- that plain jane isn't so bad, actually. "But with bursts of color. Like the pillows. And I want to grow flowers in the windows. And herbs. And an aloe plant."

She smiles, then lifts her head, bumping against his chest, looking up at him. "It'll be nice to have a bathroom I don't share with a guy, too."

Erich

"Hey," Erich protests, "I always put the toilet seat down." And he bends his neck, drops a little kiss between her eyebrows. She's up on the porch; by all rights, he should be looking up at her -- but she's kinda leaning on the railing, and he is rather tall, and she is in bare feet, and --

well. They make it work. He kisses her between her eyebrows; she looks up at him.

"You'll still help us take care of those things you planted in our windowboxes, right?"

Melantha

"Yes. Sometimes even before you pee," she teases, and she is sitting down on a chair at the railing so of course she's looking up at him, and when she headbutts him it's in the stomach. See. She headbutts him. Gently.

"Of course. It's like. This is the pack house. And then the other one will be Melantha-house."

Erich

He smiles a little, headbutted, his hands folding tenderly around her head. "Okay," he says, feathers smoothed.

Quiet a while: his fingers combing through that thick night-black hair of hers. Sometimes he imagines her very scent trapped in the strands, lifting to his touch like so many stars loosed from their moorings in the endless black sky. Sometimes he knows it's no imagination at all.

"I will miss you," he admits. "But like Charlotte says, we'll always be together. 'Cause we're a pack."

Melantha

Her hair needs to be washed. She doesn't wash it every day, of course not, but: it needs to be washed. It's so thick, though. Her scent is wrapped around each strand, coming from her crown, lifting like a spirit from her scalp.

He will miss her, he says again.

Melantha has closed her eyes while he's touched her hair, laid her head back down again. She drowses as she is stroked, still sleepy, half-woken. He speaks of pack, and she idly rubs her thumb over her knuckles, which are not scarred, despite being threaded and torn over and over and over and over and over and over and over. As she rubs she can hear the rumble of the earth underneath them, the ancient fires that are still fluid, still shifting, as old as the earth, as new as the earth's future.

"When you miss me," she says, "just come find me. And if I want to sleep alone, it doesn't mean I don't love you. It might just mean your breath stinks. Or that I just want to be alone." She smiles to herself, softly. "But I think most of the time, I'll like it when you come into my bed.

Erich

"Okay," he says. Something about that, those words, makes Erich laugh in delight. "That sounds so scandalous." He unravels from her, stands up straight, grips the railing in his big hands and grins at her. " 'Come into my bed,' I mean. In a good way. Like... like sneaking into some fancy lady's boudoir or something."

Who knew he even knew a word like boudoir. Must've picked it up from one of his endless Netflixings. Or maybe a romance novel.

Melantha

Slowly, Melantha unfolds after he steps back, bracing his hands. Her arms slide apart and her back straightens and she looks up at him, hair off her shoulders. She has this look on her face, not annoyed and not sour and not smirking and not glinting with mischief. The look on her face is... imperious, almost. Imperial. Like an empress. The lift of her chin, the way she can carry herself even in sleep-rumpled pajamas and hair that needs to be washed. It's in the lines of her body, her shoulders, her cheekbones, the shape of her eyes and the cast of her mouth.

She moistens her lips.

Erich

Well; now he does have to look up at her. She stands over him on that little porch of theirs, and he looks up at her, and she has such a look on her face that his eyes fill with something rather like wonder.

Then she licks her lips.

Then he -- in a surge of motion like an ocean -- pushes himself up on his hands, levers himself up with his ankles crossing gently together for stability, his triceps locked, pectorals bunching. Suspended in midair on his own strength, once again face to face with her across the railing, Erich leans across and kisses those freshly-moistened lips of hers.

Melantha

It might be scary, how she can just... turn it on like that. Go from this lazy and tousled thing who may as well have gum in her hair, yawning and headbutting, to some priestess who rules the spring, and the night, and who could arouse and ruin men in a single stroke. It might be scary, and it might be a little sad.

Or it's just what it is.

He laughed, scandalized, but he liked it. She could tell, amidst the delight, that he liked that idea of crawling into her bed, sneaking. Not just because of the idea of what might happen in that bed then, but just... liked it. The story of it. This is the Ahroun who reads dollar-store romance novels fished from the library's discard bin. Who loves movies. He likes the story of it. The myth.

He likes the reality, too.

In a moment he is there, gripping the railing til it creaks from his strength and his weight, pushing himself up off the ground and kissing her. She lifts her hand and rests it lightly on his face, kissing him back. Long, and slow, and deep. Her fingers trace a line over his jaw, his temple, the curve of his ear,

run slowly down his neck.

Erich

Good thing he's so strong. Good thing he lives up to his blood and his spirit-heritage: all iron strength and stone resilience. He holds himself up like that without a waver, long enough for them to share that long, slow, deep kiss that he could so easily lose himself in.

Her touch leaves a scintillating afterimage in its wake. He can feel it, almost see it, as though the ends of his nerves are shimmering. That kiss is a slow deliberate entanglement of lips and senses both. When it ends some of that moisture has transferred itself to his lips. His teeth catch his lower lip; he licks it clean.

And then lets himself drop -- controlled, light-footed, landing soft in the wildgrass beside the porch. "Come on down here," he invites, his smile a little lazy; a little lopsided. "I'll take you into the woods. We can go to Home Depot later."

Melantha

When he drops, she lifts her head again, taking a breath, her chest lifting with it. She gradually looks down at him, and then... grabs the corner-post of the porch, lifting her leg to set her foot on the railing. Moves herself, half-swinging, slowly-swinging, into his space, dropping against him, arms around his neck, legs dangling at first, then wrapping around him.

"All right," she says. "Take me into the woods."

nobody knew i was garou.

Erich

[OH I SEE HOW IT IS, DENVER.]

Erich

In the blink of an eye May has passed and June is around the corner. They've been in Colorado for nearly a year; been up in the mountains most of that time.

As the snows melt, as the cold retreats, they've moved the tinyhouse a little deeper into the wilds again. They're up on a sun-drenched hill today, wildgrass blooming all around, trees rustling with their crowns of leaves all ready for summer. Up here they can look down and see Evergreen not so very far away. Denver proper in the distance: that's a little farther still, hazy in the mid-morning sun. And beyond that, the endless flat of the Great Plains spilling away into the east.

Erich's been working on resealing the tiny cracks and leaks that have appeared on the outer walls and windowframes and doorjambs of the tiny house, a side effect of a winter's worth of punishing freeze and thaw. That's what he's been up to nearly the last two weeks: making Home Depot trips, sanding things, caulking things, repainting and revarnishing things. Making their shared home sound shelter against the coming summer storms.

Today, though, he's taking a break from that. He's sitting out on the porch steps, and he's found a battered old baseball somewhere; he's tossing that old thing straight up into the air and catching it with solid thwacks of leather into palm. Tanned and athletic, winter-darkened hair turning golden again with the light, he's the very essence of Americana -- werewolf edition, of course.

Charlotte

Charlotte sometimes spends pieces of her days with Erich tending to the house. She does this as ritual rather than right. She knows how to use her hands, and watches him work, and learns more, but the secrets of the products he secures and then employs generally remain just that: secrets.

No, she spends more of her time away from the tiny house. Ranging higher up into the mountains, streaking all sleekwhite through the underbrush to find the small lakes laid like jewels in high valleys, to follow the courses of the swollen streams higher and higher, and on and on.

Now she's coming back down, girl-not-wolf, carrying a wooden brace with two trussed jackrabbits dangling from it and one small trout.

Dinner is served.

(Once that stuff is cooked.)

As she appears at the treeline and sees Erich with the baseball, she holds up a hand. Expects him, see, to throw it to her.

Erich

Which is what he does, seeing her. Erich stands up, all tall and easy and at home in his skin, cranks back his arm and lets that ball fly. It's a long throw, not some easy underhand lob and not some vicious straight-line fastball either. Just a nice, solid throw, arcing smoothly through the air.

After it leaves his hand he waves at Charlotte. His delicate, diaphanous, wild little sister.

Charlotte

And Charlotte catches the ball a solid SMACK in the center of her palm. Enough to sting. Enough to rattle her delicate bones. Harderly enough to notice.

Her hair is damp with sweat, and dark for it, mostly at the temples, and the bottom third of her jeans are damp and muddied and torn. She looks bright, so clean, healthy, and flashes him a smile, this quick impression of her teeth as he waves and she waves back with the ball in hand then lobs it back and crosses the clearing, Goes to put up the meat and fish 'til they're ready it for, then comes back out, and sits down on the steps beside Erich.

Shoulderbumps him. Familiar, see.

Erich

That ball comes sailing back. Erich catches it, nice and solid, and bats it lazily from one hand to the other, grinning as Charlotte grins. Soon enough she's there, climbing the steps up to the porch, and Erich is eyeing those two jackrabbits and that trout with appreciation.

"Nice catch," he says.

She goes in. She comes out. He's still out there, sitting on the steps again, big shoulders and solid back. He's no longer tossing the ball; he's looking into the trees, lost in apparent thought -- eyes narrowed, ball-in-fist propped under his nose like any moment he might start gnawing on it like a dog.

Charlotte drops down next to him. She bumps him, and jars his thoughts back into fluidity. He glances at her, smiling wry-fond, and bumps her back.

"Sept called while you were out," he says. "Northern Sun's back with his pack. They were real glad to see him."

Charlotte

"It would've been easy to stay there, you know?"

Charlotte understands why they didn't send his pack after him. They could've just been a pack together, in their den together, wolves together, with nothing else to worry them as long as ever they may live.

Charlotte is quiet. Quiet and thinking, blond brows quietly furrowed.

"I guess they knew that they could send us, even though we were packmates, 'cos Melantha was waiting for us."

Her mouth curls fond around the name, this quiet, cradling shape. Then the smile melts away, easy as it came.

Charlotte swallows hard.

"Moon's small. Do you still want to talk?"

Erich

Erich nods in mute agreement when Charlotte says it would've been easy to stay there. She's right. It would have been easy. Be a pack there. Be a wolf there. Be wild and innocent and carefree in their own private garden of eden,

where they have no names and no memories and no pasts to burden them. He understands that, too. He especially understands why Charlotte would understand: Charlotte, carrying that ugly name of hers like a stone around her neck. He thinks to himself that maybe, maybe if Melantha had been there too, they would have all stayed. Maybe for Charlotte's sake, they would have forsaken the world.

--

Moon's small. Does he want to talk?

Erich lowers the baseball. His forearm over his knee, hand drooping from a lax wrist. His fingers turn the ball over and over, restless, absent. He thinks a moment and then he nods.

"Yeah," he says quietly. "If you think you can."

Charlotte

If you think you can, Erich says, and Charlotte does not think she can. The thought that she can does not exist in her body. It has never come to be. She does not think that she can and the only way she can do it or say it or be here beside Erich with any of that in her skin is by not thinking about it at all.

God her small shoulders are tightly framed beneath her t-shirt her body tense. She watches the ball and she does not think about the baseball and she does not think about anything. There is a beginning that she does not remember and the beginning, the beginning, there are words for the beginning.

They're in her throat.

She could choke on them.

--

Charlotte folds her arms over her knees.

They needed someplace to go. Seemed as good a spot as any.

--

"Nobody knew I was Garou." She starts. This is a kind of truth. Charlotte thinks and most people think that maybe-she-knew. How could you know, then. Adolescent, adolescence, pure as the moon, how could you not remember your wolf-dreams then. "They always thought I was kin. I was - I was supposed to be mated to a Philodox. When I turned sixteen, they had a party for us."

Erich

So the story begins. Immediately, within the first five words, Erich thinks maybe he can see the lay of it. And -- he's a little ashamed to realize this -- it relieves him. It wasn't really charaching, he thinks. Not if no one knew. It's not behavior so wildly different from the Charlotte he knows and loves and almost sort of understands. It was just

a misunderstanding.

He thinks.

He listens too, though. Because the story is just starting. He listens, sitting on the steps beside frail silvery-savage Charlotte, and right now -- though he very much wants to -- he knows better than to bump her in affection or support. He lets his silence be a sort of support. And his presence.

Charlotte

Erich's relieved. Charlotte does not know that Erich is relieved. The truth does not relieve her. Her throat is tight and so is her body, and she is sitting forward now, all stark, with her pale head bowed and the pressure inside her head so insistent. So, so insistent that she isn't sure whether or not her ears might melt or leak or something,

something.

"Wasn't supposed to be until I was eighteen. But his pack was going to the Deep Umbra and maybe not coming back. So they said we had to - "

Charlotte is frowning, curled not toward Erich, if she is curled at all, but Away.

Her voice is getting smaller. She does not know or understand this.

"so we did. And I - "

And she does not say, got pregnant or any of a million slang terms to Erich, cannot say them, cannot think them. The brief lacuna in the story must stand in for the actual words she cannot say.

Her voice is even smaller.

"Then a few months later I changed."

Madness. That's all she can comprehend of it was the madness. The confusion, the rage, the pain.

Erich

So much for relief. Soon as it breaks over him -- secret, shameful, he should love Charlotte no matter what she's done and he does but he was still relieved to know it was an accident, just an accident, just an unhappy turn of fate --

soon as it breaks over him it's gone. Because then she says: they said we had to.

And it's not relief, then. It's shock and horror and something very much like rage, but deeper and blacker and more... more aware. More purposeful, less instinctive. It is anger; it is fury. He squeezes that baseball very tightly. In his mind's eye he sees its stitches straining; he imagines it bursting open like rotten fruit. He drops the ball and flexes his fingers and takes a slow breath.

"That's not your fault," he says. "None of that is your fault. They should've never made you guys. That's just ... that's really messed up."

A few beats.

"What happened then?"

Charlotte

Erich hears it differently. Erich hears it not quite correctly. Erich hears: they said we had to and squeezes the baseball as if it were the head of an enemy that he could crush with his sheer strength.

Charlotte is frowning, still, she shakes him off when he tells her that none of that is your fault. Shakes the thought off and shakes her pale head and shakes, perhaps. Vibrates, see, on some wavelength that is half trauma, half madness. And she has to correct him because he's wrong, he's wrong, he's wrong -

Her voice is oh-so-tight.

"They said we had to get mated sooner because he might die on his quest. After that I - I - " oh, it makes her so ill. "I wanted to."

Erich

"...oh."

And then Erich is quiet for a while. At a loss. Not sure what to say to that. Quiet and quiet and quiet and then:

lifting his head, looking over at her.

"Well, you didn't know," he says quietly. "And there's nothing wrong with wanting to with your mate. I mean. There'd be something wrong if you didn't." Another small pause. "Is that why you just... don't want to anymore, ever?"

Charlotte

"I don't," Charlotte starts, and stops. She is hung-up on the word, she is skewered by the thought. It turns over inside her skin and makes her - makes her -

makes her -

"I don't know. I don't know. I don't know." There is something terrible about the repetition. Something underlying. Something that is secured to itself by a hinge, somehow. Some door, opening. "I don't know. I don't know."

Or maybe the repetition is instead an orderliness. A defense against the dark, the way her insistent innocence must be. The way her strangeness, her lightness, must also be.

Charlotte does not want to talk about it. She does not want to talk about it with Erich. She does not know how to say that to Erich, who is her brother and her friend. The words turn all to slime in her throat.

"It didn't end. It didn't ever end." Just imagine the trauma of the first change: all that rage, all that confusion - enduring. Enduring. Once she changed, she could not change back. "I should've known. What I was. When he came back he hated me. Still hates me.

"Everyone did. 'Cept Lauren, and she died.

"And Chas. And you and Melantha."

Erich

She doesn't know. She doesn't know. She doesn't know. She doesn't --

by the fourth repetition Erich is alarmed; is reaching out to her, laying a heavy and warm hand on her shoulder. "Hey. Hey. It's okay."

Maybe she tears herself away. Maybe she curls into a ball. Maybe she goes still, stock-still, terribly still. Erich -- his hand lifts almost as soon as it alights. And they are quiet for a while, and then she is speaking again, and --

"Nobody hates you here," he says softly. "Not me, not Melantha, not Chas, not anyone in the Sept. They all like you and respect you. You know that, don't you?"

Charlotte

Charlotte does jerk herself away. Those stiff narrow shoulders. She cannot stand to be touched in that moment. Not by him. Certainly not by Erich -

"They don't know."

Erich

"True," Erich admits. "But I know. Melantha knows. We will like you. And respect you. And love you.

"I'm not saying you should go announce it to all and sundry. But ... I think even if people found out, they'd still like you. Those of them whose opinions are worth caring about, anyway."

Charlotte

"I hate it." There is no staying still. The creature rises, and oh, she is lovely, and oh, she is feral, and oh, she is mad. She stalks even in this meager human form. The wolf coursing beneath her skin is a livid, living thing. "I hate it. I hate all of them. When I see one - "

An arrest, see.

She is flushed scarlet.

There are pieces of herself that she can never reconcile.

Erich deserves, at the very least, this: to know all of them.

Erich

This time the pause is longer; a little more awkward. This time Erich doesn't have an easy answer available. Easy forgiveness. Easy out.

"You shouldn't," is all he manages to muster in the end. "It's not their fault what their parents did. And ... maybe it's not always their parents' fault either, the way it wasn't really your fault."

Pause. Pause. Silence.

"I think maybe ... maybe you hate them so much because you're actually kinda hating yourself. I think you really blame yourself, Charlotte, and way more than you should."

Charlotte

There is wisdom in what he says. Of course there is. It is a kind of human wisdom that everything that is pure-in-her cannot fathom, or even despises in its way. Perhaps, too, it is a sort of moon-blooded wisdom, that she is too young to see now, or too mad to ever see.

But listen: Charlotte looks up. Is it twilight? Was it twilight when all this started, Erich on the steps leading to the tinyhouse, baseball in hand, evening lowering itself like a southern belle over the mountains. This long slow curtsey into dusk.

When she returned from the woods with rabbits and a trout, beneath that slivered moon, that small moon, that silvered moon, to share with her pack.

Looks up and meets his eyes.

Usually that look is human; that instinct is human. Wolves lock gazes when they mean to challenge, when they insist on asserting dominance, and there is no hierarchy in the pack, no as such.

But listen: she meets Erich's eyes, not as a girl, but as a wolf.

There is madness in her own, that he cannot obviate or expiate. A devouring sort that creates its own echo chamber of sorts, that fills her head up with noise whenever her heart starts to pound so.

She wants to - she yearns to - what is it? Give him this. Let go. But she can't.

She can't.

"I can't stop. It makes me sick. It makes my head hurt. I'm sorry. I can't make it stop."

--

Charlotte is already changing, into something bright and pure and untainted: a wolf.

She can't make it stop. Cannot accept whatever comfort or wisdom he wants to give her. Cannot be: right, or well, or good, or stable.

Instead, this. A wordless brush of her mind against his: an invitation - to run.

Erich

"I know," says Erich, very quietly.

It is the last thing he says for a while. Charlotte is already changing; not to be left behind, Erich stands, and the baseball forgotten in his hand finally drops from his fingers to roll, to stop.

He drops forward too. Strikes the ground on his hands, which are now paws, shakes some clothes free and absorbs others into his very pelt. By then Charlotte is a stone's throw away, but he is fast, and he is following, and his big paws eat up the ground.

It is easier like this: no words, no human thoughts. He runs after his sister, wild as she is, reminded suddenly of the day they met:

don't you ever want to --

just leap. just tumble. just twist and bound to feel the strength and youth and power in your own bones. don't you want to just run free.

He does. And so he does.