Ornature

There is very little she can say.  Melantha will never change.  Melantha will never carry a metis son or daughter.  So she says nothing at all.  She scoots over closer on the bed.  She puts her brow against the curve of Charlotte's small shoulder and holds her hand.  Her other hand remains on Charlotte's middle.

No oh, honey.  No are you okay.  No questions.  Charlotte will tell her what she tells her, as she tells her, in her own time and in her own way.  But there's quiet for a while, and so Melantha gradually lifts her head, and looks at Charlotte's profile, which is aquiline and uncertain and lovely and haunted all at once.  "Charlotte... the one of them that hadn't changed yet.  Did she... want to?  When it happened?"

 

Charlotte

 

Gradually, Charlotte's fingers uncurl from around Melantha's.  They leave behind stark white outlines and deep half-moon indentations where her ragged nails dug in - and fiercely - as if Melantha's hand were a lifeline, or an anchor.  Something has eased in Charlotte with the telling, though.  She's said as much of it as she can cram into human words and a human throat and a warm, ordinary room: that unmoored, surreal indoctrination into this strange and terrible world.  She's said it, and need never say it again. 

And Melantha knows.

And that feels,

okay

- too. 

Charlotte finds her hand back in Melantha's as the other girl sets her brow against her shoulder, curves close so that Charlotte is bathed in body heat, and anchored again: here-and-now.  Less of a vise-like grip, now, more a settled hold: palm-set-to-palm, fingers firmly laced together.

There's a strange little curve of her mouth when Melantha asks the hypothetical.  About the one of them: the girl.  And consent. 

A flick of her pale blue eyes, down from the ceiling for the first time since she started her story, to meet Melantha's, in that swimming, too-close profile view.  Not precisely in focus, but: almost infinitely soft, that shared look. 

And older than either of them have any right to be.

"We were betrothed when I was fourteen.  Chas got so mad when he heard.  He yelled at Philip that she couldn't just sell off her daughters every time the real estate market crashed. It was supposed to be when I was eighteen or twenty-one and Philip told me I shouldn't get attached because he'd probably die before then and then I'd be off the hook. 

"That was in the drawing room.

"I don't see how she could get attached.  I mean, she just saw him once and I don't think he knew which of us he was getting. Just better blood and a name more august than his own.

"Nothing happened for a while.  Then Edgar changed.  He's the next-youngest.  My half-brother, an Ahroun and already a Fostern.  I don't t - I mean, she wouldn't remember it all properly.  The world was getting wiggly, then, like looking at everything through old glass."

Because Charlotte's first inklings of change were not violent: they were strange, maddening, sometimes suffocating, sometimes transfiguring.  The voices of her ancestors and the haze of her madness.  Her first, hazy, quickening awareness of the spirit world, which seemed like no more than a progression of the daydreaming sickness of an eight-year-old girl willing to brave the cane across her knuckles because she liked the tiny crab-fork best, and wanted to watch her soup drain down between its tines, gleaming in the candle-light rather than eating it properly, delicate and lady-like, sipped and never slurped from the tip of her soup-spoon (as if you were a bird, hollow-boned, landing at water's edge, ready to fly away at a moment's notice).

"Then his pack was going on a quest to the Deep Umbra, all important, with another pack of older Garou.  The sort that could take a minute, but maybe decades.  They didn't think they'd come back and they said he should have an heir.  We were handfasted two weeks before they left.

"She didn't - " a pause.  Charlotte's shoulders dig back into the bed, the blades tucked like furled wings, together.  She looks away from Melantha now, back up to the ceiling, resettling her grip around the other girl's hand.  A squeeze that says, I know you're here.  I am, too.  " - I didn't hate it.  He wasn't awful, then.  He was shy and scared?  too."

There is a Sept where everyone knows this story.  It is the shame of the Sept, the baseline buzz of gossip - it cannot be not-known.  But this part, the core and unknown truth, (which flutters against the inside of Charlotte's ribcage chest and brings bile to the back of her throat again, which she swallows firmly every other sentence she speaks, holding down her gorge) - this part, Melantha is now the only other living creature in the world to know.  Add in the dead, and she is the second. 


"When we were alone I couldn't stop looking at him." 

Because Charlotte was already a wolf.  She could smell his blood, could read it somehow as a stranger's and an intoxicant, without knowing or understanding exactly what it was that made him so immediate, so vivid, so compelling. 

"He came back later.  The summer before last?  Hardly any of the ones who went survived, but he did. And I guess he thought he was coming back to something else.  A kin and a cub and enough renown to challenge for Adren, instead of this shame to bear.

"He won back the renown, though.  Made Adren last summer.  Edgar even joined his pack. He hates me.  He said that I knew, that I had to have known - " a caustic huff.  Melantha can imagine the rest of it.    The blindness of rage and righteousness, the ugly flare of his own madness and bile. 

"Which is dumb.  Even if she maybe knew, why would she ever - "  whispered with such sudden and furious vehemence, then abruptly bitten off. A taut little  smile.  " - people listen to an Adren Philodox, though.  If I'd stayed, I wouldn't've ever had the chance to be anything except what he said." 

Melantha