Ornature

On the night of the 27th of July, 2013,

(the year is important.)

Avery and Charlotte drift peacefully to sleep in their own beds. Avery in some four-poster, perhaps, draped in silver and blue, drenched in luxury. Charlotte more humbly: in her little bed, in her little room, in her little house, with her packbrother snoring in his overhead loft. There is nothing, nothing at all, that suggests anything out of the ordinary.

In the morning, they wake and immediately know they are not home.

Everything is unfamiliar. Everything, from the scratchiness of those roughspun sheets against their skin, to the hollers and the shouts outside their window -- which has no glass, only shutters -- to the smell of traildust and the unwashed masses in the air; last night's spilled moonshine; cattle, horses, mules.

Open their eyes and they find themselves in a tiny room, crammed side by side in a bed hard as a rock. Morning sun peeking through the shutter-slats, the noise and light of the hallway outside peeking through the gaps in the wall. No wallpaper, hell no. No paint on the walls either. Just raw wood with a thin layer of new varnish. Thin, thin walls, so thin a good storm might blow the whole claptrap structure down. And some woman bang-bang-banging on a door barely latched shut with a simple hook-and-eye lock, shouting through it:

"Up, up, up! Git up an' git out! You ain't paid for nothin' but a single night, and I won't be responsible for two womenfolk wanderin' around a minin' town unchaperoned!"

Charlotte sleeps curled up like a bean in a pod at the edge of her bed in the shadow of the wall and once upon a time she had a huge room and a feather bed and a view of an oak but

she likes the tinybed in the tinyhouse better.

But see: curled up and tucked into herself, like the promise of the seedling inside a seed, her head down and sometimes her thumb in her mouth. She's not sucking it no she's not a baby, but somehow she often ends up biting the middle of the nailbed in her sleep. Just a gentle pressure of her teeth over the middle of the nail.

And wakes to this with a start, with an eruption of confused movement that has her turning over and half sitting up and getting ready to yell for Erich except -

- who is beside her?

The girl's pink head turns and her pale eyes fix on the other Silver Fang and she recognizes Avery from the moot and recognizes her blood and recognizes her and is on her feet quick scramble, looking both alert and alarmed, as if she had somehow managed to sleepwalk her way into some other Fang's bed, some other Fang's room.

She inhales sharply through her nostrils and frowns at the scents in the air and looks up through the gaps in the wood at the slanting sunlight in the dusty air and looks back at the door rattling in its frame.

"GO AWAY I'M HER CHAPERONE AND SHE'S MINE."

When Avery drifts off to sleep, she is indeed surrounded by luxury. By silver and gold and mahogany, by sumptuous cotton and soft down. She is wearing silk pajamas. Outside her bedroom door there is a tray bearing an empty glass that once held warm milk and an empty plate that once held a few light shortbread cookies. There is a book beside her on the nightstand, and by 'book' we mean a lightweight black-and-white e-reader that is a companion to her tablet, which she prefers not to read on due to the strain it puts on her eyes.

Elsewhere in the house, her brother stays up too late playing video games. Her father stays up too late reading. Avery never lets herself become sleep deprived, however. She has an early day tomorrow. She has things to do.

--

She jerks awake because of the smell. Nothing about it is right or correct or permissable. She breathes in sharply, tensing, sitting upright. She feels the change in her back teeth, longing to sharpen, but holds off, eyes unblinking, and those eyes circle to the door that is being banged on. She is baring her teeth, preparing to snarl, when she realizes she's not alone in the bed. Or rather: that the person in bed with her is not someone she knows, which might have been acceptable, even if she would have needed to ask how did you get here?

No, it's a thin young woman whose purity Avery can sense as keenly as she can tell that she is not home. A thin young woman with pink hair and pale eyes who, Avery recalls, created exploding talens to be shot with a slingshot. She recalls this because Erich told that story at the moot and everyone turned to look at her.

Charlotte scampers out of the bed all knees and elbows, making Avery blink, and yells at the person. It takes everything Avery has not to laugh, but she lifts a slender hand to her lips and smiles behind it, eyes twinkling, and then with a snap of her wrist flips her covers back, turns, puts her feet on the floor,

strides over to the door, lifts the hook, yanks it open fast enough to put the person on the other side on their guard, and levels an imperial stare at the woman banging on it.

"If I must repeat my companion, for she speaks truth, I shall, though I hope it is not necessary. I will, however, add to it: you must indeed go away, but when you return, you should be offering us breakfast." Avery's eyes flicker. Her teeth show, a bit, biting the air, when she adds: "I'm quite famished."

Well; neither of them are naked. There is that, at least. Though, confined in nightgowns that go from neck to ankle to wrist as they are, they might almost prefer the former. Charlotte yells at the innkeep -- or his wife, more likely -- and Avery flings open the door to Speak To Her. The woman, thickset, thinmouthed, tough as nails from a lifetime in this or some other frontier town, scowls up at the Philodox for an affronted moment.

Can't hold her gaze, though.

"Kitchen don't open til supper at noon," she grumbles. "You oughta be gone long before then." She turns on her heel, stumping her way down the hall. Avery can see perhaps eight or ten rooms besides her own, all in a row, with a narrow hall and a straight staircase down to the first floor. The wood, the fixtures look new. The candle sconces on the walls look new. All of it looks cheap, though, liable to go up in the first blaze, fold in the first blizzard.

Meanwhile, inside the room, Charlotte will surely have discovered the chest at the foot of the too-small, too-hard bed. It is a simple, unadorned wooden box, and it contains

their clothes. Unmistakably so, because she can smell herself and Avery on them. But they are absolutely unfamiliar to her, a cut and fabric so far out of date that it may as well be extraterrestrial.

That strict certainty, that confidence, that imperious expectation with which Avery strides to the door and confronts the stranger arrests not just the woman on the other side of it from her insistence that they git up and git out, but also the pink-haired girl (is her hair still pink? Charlotte doesn't know. There's not a mirror in the room and no glass in the windows, no reflective surfaces at all in which to find her eyes and make the passage to the umbra that much easier.

By the time Avery's .. er, conference with the innkeep's wife has concluded Charlotte is crouched in front of the chest of the too-small and too-hard bed and pulling out the clothing, and she can smell hers and read it at least maybe by size though it is strange and terrible and constricting but: she is all gawk as she studies the pieces, pulling them consideringly out one after the other, separating Avery's from her own and frowning and standing up and curling her own in her arms as she glances back at Avery,

"I think those are yours,"

in a very small voice.

Charlotte takes a very brief moment then to inhale the traildust in the air, the sad, raw-wood smell of the place, the scents of strangers layered on strangers drifting down from the rafters, wrapped up in the core of the hard-as-rocks (or rather: straw and ticking) mattress, before turning her back to, well, try to dress.

Hurriedly and with a dream-like logic. Things are here for a reason, and that must Mean Something if something is no more than a signpost.

[SENSE WYRM]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 7, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 4 )

This is a time long gone, a century and a half removed from their present. It is a world in which the Weaver is only really beginning to pick up steam, pun quite intended, and a world in which the Wyrm has only really begun to turn over in its fetid sleep. The Eye of the Serpent has not yet begun to open. Though their room, their surroundings, this entire town -- if one ramshackle street stuffed with beasts of burden and men of mines can count as such -- stinks of old sweat and cheap whiskey and sour vomit and animal manure,

it is also clean in a way that they are far too young to remember. If they were to push open those flimsy shutters, they could see clear to those white-capped peaks; not a trace of smog in the sky. If they were to drink from the Platte River, they wouldn't taste a hint of chemical waste. Not that they should drink from that river, regardless. People bathe (infrequently) in that river. Animals wade in it. Laundry is scrubbed out in it, and piss and shit probably flows through it in generous proportion. Clean is not the same as clean.

Clean is also relative. For -- though this world is far purer than the one Charlotte exists in -- it is not perfect. The Wyrm is here too, thinly, faintly, but pervasively. Not in that badtempered woman that recently departed her companion's Presence. Not in this room, these floorboards, this air. But here nonetheless, here in town, like a bad residual scent left by rotting meat that has since been through out.

The woman tells her the kitchen doesn't open, tells her to be long gone, and Avery just snarls at her, unashamedly. She slams the door and it rattles, nearly falls off the hinges. Avery's eyes are dark; she was not merely threatening the woman when she said she was famished.

Charlotte has a chest and is going through it. Avery blinks, tipping her head, told that she thinks these clothes are hers.

"They most certainly are not," she says, more like a child stomping their foot than an adult backhanding another adult. She huffs a breath outward and goes over all the same, reaching up and grabbing at the neck of this stupid nightgown to start tearing it open, if that's what it takes. Buttons? Something? She wants it off her throat, and tugs at it until it is at least a bit loosened. Or torn.

Avery lowers herself to a crouch beside the chest, lifting a shift from the gathered clothing. And then discovering a hoop skirt, the width of which seems ridiculous by modern standards but was actually quite narrow for the time. Her eyes widen slightly in something not entirely unlike horror. "My goodness," she murmurs, and then realizes: she has to do this. She really does. A spark goes off. She decides that she's going ot have osmeone make her a dress like this when she gets home, oh yes she is.

The delight in her eyes is short-lived, however, but she glances at Charlotte and nods. "Yes. Well," and begins to open her nightgown, unlacing it, turning her back on Charlotte as well more for the other woman's sake than her own. Avery is hardly shy. And they dress.

So they dress. Charlotte is shy and there's no real place to hide and this thing has weird buttons and is all one piece and she wants to put her legs through the arms but she knows about elaborate dresses no matter how much she pretends otherwise so in that dim little room, see, they dress and when they're done Charlotte turns around to do the line of buttons that no-doubt march up the back of Avery's costume with its hoop skirt and crinoline and Charlotte turns around to ask Avery to do the same for her own rather simpler gown and it is true Charlotte is unsmiling in the costume and she swallows but -

it is not Avery's fault.

"I'm Charlotte," she says, very quietly while Avery laces her up. "It doesn't smell too bad here, but there's some smell around anyway." Erich always knows what Charlotte means but Erich knows Charlotte and Avery does not but Charlotte doesn't know that half the time she is incomprehensible.

"I bet there's food in the kitchen anyway," when the dressing is done Charlo"tte peeks out into the hallway and then pulls back inside. Bread and stuff or pies of nothing else. Do you wanna find it?"

The hallway has not changed since Avery's glimpse of it. Well, no: one of the other doors has opened and a man -- unshaven, unwashed, unkempt, and only barely dressed comes out. He is pulling up his trousers as he goes, belching last night's gas up from his belly as he sways down the hall toward the commode.

There's actually an indoor commode in here. What luxury!

Avery manages the dress all right. She considers the corset but decides against it, because no. So no corset, no lacing up her back of whalebone, just shift and hoop and crinolines and skirt and waistcoat and so forth. They do help each other. Avery must ask and Charlotte is kind enough to assist, and then Avery helps her, as well. She's smiling all the while, despite herself.

She wishes for a mirror so she could arrange her hair a bit, but finds a light-colored bonnet with a lovely ribbon that she decides will do nicely and puts it on, tying it under her chill. There's also a shawl; July is not nearly so hot right now, she notices. Still hot, though.

She's going to melt. But she will look fantastic doing so.

--

"Charlotte," she says, smiling, "that is a lovely name. I remember the wonderful things your packmate said about you at the moot."

It doesn't smell too bad. Avery pauses a moment, sniffs, then nods when she realizes that Charlotte is not talking about the smell. "Thank you," she tells the Theurge, and walks with her to the door in her pretty laced-up shoes and her rustling skirt.

Her eyes catch on the man that goes by, her lips curling in distaste. She shakes her head. "I should think we'd get poisoned eating here, actually," she says, and pauses a moment to return into the room, looking for more. Which she finds. In the chest.

"Oh, my," sayeth Avery, lifting up a pair of holsters with what appear to be loaded revolvers. She lifts a brow and looks over at Charlotte. Then she begins looking for what seems most natural to her: a pocket in the skirt. Avery smiles when she finds the semi-concealed pocket and just slides the firearm in, rising to her feet again. "Lovely," she says, a bit viciously, and offers Charlotte her arm. "Now. Shall we go on a stroll and discover who has crafted this elaborate ruse, or what our purpose here today is?"

Also:

as Charlotte lifts those crinolined, hooped skirts out of the chest, she discovers under them: WEAPONS.

And Charlotte finds: not resolves, but a lady's archery ensemble. A bow that she can carry but not conceal as it is nearly as tall as and perhaps taller than she is, and a quiver that she can fasten around her waist with the arrows bouncing quiet in their leather case with every sweep of her step. And best of all: a slingshot. A small pouch. Charlotte does not trust the pouch to contain her own talens but she ties it onto the belt that holds the quiver in place anyway and then she's ready and she glances at Avery and then down at herself and back at Avery again in all her finery and -

"You look very pretty," in a low voice that sounds pretty shy and is all eyes-averted as she says it and takes Avery's arm to go exploring. Charlotte sniffs then, holding the bow in her free hand and wondering of she should fit it across her body of if that's silly She doesn't know so she holds it as they head down the hallway toward the stairs and Charlotte makes a grossed-out face when she sees the other upstairs resident and then a cloud over her face.

"Sometimes when you're in a strange place you shouldn't eat the food anyway," Charlotte informs Avery, all solemn. "Sometimes the food keeps you there."

And down the steps (if steps they find) they go.

"Why, thank you," she tells Charlotte for the compliment, smiling winningly at her. "You, my dear, would be pretty no matter what you wear, and the addition of the bow and quiver draw the wolf out in your eyes where it belongs. I am quite pleased to have you as my cohort."

As they leave, Avery does not bother to close the door behind them. She has her gun, she has her wits, she has fang and claw, she has a Theurge at her side, she has a great outfit, and her shoes even fit. What could possibly go wrong?

"As in fairytales," Avery says simply, with a nod, because she knows: when you go under the green, you must not eat or drink anything they offer you, no matter how sweet it tastes, no matter how lovely it appears, no matter how starved you feel. You will be trapped in Fairy forever, then, won't you? She knows those stories. She is not even pandering to The Weird Theurge when she accepts this, nods, agrees with it; she is utterly serious, completely sincere. At the moment she is wearing a hoop skirt, carrying a six-shooter, shading her eyes with a pretty bonnet, and walking out of a room with a straw mattress with a pink-haired girl carrying a bow and arrow.

Down the stairs they go. The creaking, wobbly, none-too-dependable stairs. Everything about this -- this hotel, if they had to give it such a name -- speaks of its newness, its recently-built-ness. Everything about it also speaks of its flimsiness, its shoddiness, as though even its owners don't quite expect it, or this new gold rush town, to survive very long.

There is, however, a small common area downstairs stuffed with little tables and chairs. A bar with unlabeled alcohols in hazy bottles. A proper Old West saloon-and-inn, it seems, complete with slatted batwing doors through which they can see the facades of the buildings opposite and, beyond them, the pristine cut of the Rockies: familiar enough that they know at once they have traveled only in the when, not the where.

They are still in Denver. A different, long-ago Denver. The air is so clear. The mountains seem within reach, they are so sharply visible.

Their unkind hostess is glaring at them from the corner, where she appears to be mopping the floor with a bundle of greasy rags on a stick. It's hard to say whether she's cleaning the place or simply spreading the gunk around. Behind the bar, a thin, sallow man -- the innkeep, one supposes -- eyes them distrustfully. The skinny one has a quiver around her waist, for godsake, what sort of ladies were these? He is not sorry to see them go as they step through those creaking doors

and out into a pandemonium of men, animals, dust, wagons, high-altitude sunshine.

The whole of the town is one street. They can easily see the ends of it -- six buildings away to their left, ten to their right. Beyond the ends of the town, the trail stretches off: straight into the east, lost in the morning light. Straight into the west, winding up the mountain to where that precious yellow metal might be hiding. Everything about the town looks new, somewhere between a couple years ago and a couple days old. Everywhere is the sound is hammers, saws, shouting, hooves. At the ends of the street, new building-frames are coming up, like new teeth sprouting beside the old.

They can see the staple establishments: the general store, the feed store, a couple other inns, one of which may or may not double as a brothel; those pink curtains are suspicious. A bank! A post office, whose sign has been crowded by a new handpainted sign announcing MAYOR'S OFFICE as well. A jail. There are wagons filing in from the east, dozens of them stretched over however many miles they can see. There are men leading mules into the west, picks and axes and hammers and carts in tow.

There is also a boy just outside the inn, leaning against the watering trough. About a half-dozen animals there, more mules than horses, shying at the sight of the wolves. The kid doesn't shy, though. Fifteen or sixteen years old -- a grown man in this world -- he looks the ladies up and down and then spits a stream of tobacco at their feet.

"Took you long enough. Boss told me to gitcha." He straightens up, jerks his head in some amorphous direction. "Follow me."

"Oh, uhm," and Charlotte blushes in the hallway and down the stairs so that the color is furious in her cheeks by the time they reach the common area of the saloon and inn, treading across those raw and filthy floorboards past that raw and filthy mop and Charlotte lowers her head just a big and watches all of the strangers warily and says to Avery in a very low voice, " - that's really nice of you. Uh, I'm pleased too 'cos you're very proper. But I really don't wanna be pretty I wanna be - "

Out through those swinging doors into the chaos of the street. It is too much for Charlotte to take in all at once except for the clarity of the air, the brightness of the sky about the filth down-below.

"scary."

A narrow shrug beneath the straight lines of the dress, which may just be a riding costume of some sort.

"At least a little bit scary, I mean."

--

Then the boy; outside, Charlotte is grossed out by the stream of spit and gives him a sharp look and forgets to be shy for that moment; then -

"Where're we going? - to the boy, even as they start to follow. A brief drifting look toward Avery's profile. "What's your boss's name anyway?"

"You can be both," is all Avery says to that, and she would know, because

she is.

--

That boy. Spits. At Avery's feet.

And she is hungry and proper and impatient. She unfolds her arm from Charlotte's and nearly goes for his throat with her hand, but stays herself just in time to exhale huffily and begin following him. She glances back at Charlotte, as though to apologize for nearly moving to threaten this young man for being so repulsive, but Charlotte asks a good question, and Avery does not interrupt his reply.

That earns them a mystified glance. The boy's haircolor is almost indeterminate under his battered hat and his ... apparently protective layer of dust. His eyes are sharp gray, though, the eyes of a budding gunslinger.

"Sheriff John Lark? He's the boss. Everybody knows him. Why the hell he called you two in here, though. Ain't my place to advise him else-wise, or I would."

The kid stops. He's standing in front of the jail, turning to face the questionable ladies. Hikes a thumb over his shoulder, "In there. Don't dawdle now, he's been waitin' since sunup an' he ain't gittin' any more patient."

--

The jail: two cells, iron-barred, one stuffed with two snoring men, the other with three. One appears to be passed out. One has his back in the corner, shaving his nails with a short, blunt-looking knife. The third man's hanging his arms out of the cell, leering at the females as they enter.

"BAWS," he brays. "BAWS, YOU AIN'T TOLD ME YOU WERE HAVIN' LADY FRIENDS COME OVER. BAWS."

"Shut the fuck up, Rollins," his neighbor one cell over snaps, sitting abruptly up in his cot. He sees the women too. Tugs a forelock. Flops back down; promptly snores.

The deputy guarding them is sitting on a plain wooden chair behind a plainer wooden desk. He is young, early 20s, blond. He's painstakingly writing a letter in a wobbly hand. Passing him, Avery and Charlotte can see the beginnings of a letter:

Dearest Anabelle,

and he nods at them as they pass. "Ma'ams," he says, and goes back to his letter.

There's an inner room. Thick walls, thick oaken door. A big desk, grand for this dusty little town. A big revolver right on the tabletop, within easy reach. Behind the table sits Boss, Sheriff Lark, the man who apparently summoned them. Or called for them. He has hair dark as a raven's wing, greying at the temples. A severe, gaunt-cheeked face marked by sun and wind and a bullet-graze to the cheek. Blue eyes, very pale, like light glinting off the barrel of a gun.

He is unmistakably kin to the Nation: a Shadow Lord, besides.

Like his underling, he too is writing, but it does not appear to be a personal letter, and his hand is swift and sure. As they enter, he studies them a moment. Then he throws down his pen and barks a short laugh. "A lawman and medicine man, they told me, and wouldn't give me names when I pressed. Well, now I know why." He stands, affects a small bow. "Ladies. Shut the door and we'll talk."

Charlotte frowns at the boy thoughtfully and catches, see, the sharp edge in his eyes. Her pale brows are drawn together and her gaze lingers on him for some time, as if stuck, and it is the horror she feels everytime he shifts that wad of tobacco in his mouth, every time that browish, staining spit sluices across his stained teeth.

"You know your mouth is turning to brown goo."

This when he tells them not to dawdle.

--

In the jail, she's all alert, darting glances at the prisoners, alternatively wary and ... well, warier, the animal sort of wariness that human strangers in groups larger than three or four tend bring out in her. There's enough politeness in her that she does dip her head and avert her eyes from the man who tugs respectfully in their direction, but she shifts her grip on her bow, thinking about how the sweep of her skirts against the floor sound like the movement of the window through winter-bare trees.

Soon as they're in the Sheriff's office, Charlotte resolves to let Avery do the talking. He tells them to close the door and she returns around rather swift, finally letting go of Avery's arm to reach and pull the door solidly closed.

Avery's eyes are cool against the boy -- for he is a boy, and younger even than her brother, who will be a boy to her even when he becomes a father in his own right. She intends, at some point or another, to show that would-be gunslinger just why anyone would call upon her for aid.

When they reach the jail, she pauses, turning to look at him. It's a moment after Charlotte has told him that his mouth is turning to brown goo. "You," she says, directly, her voice weighted with authority but soft as velvet, "will learn to speak to me with respect. You may learn on your own, if you can. Or I will instruct you."

Her eyes stay on his for a moment longer, cementing the certainty she speaks with -- it is not a threat, it is not a request. It is an inevitability. He may choose his own path from there. After that moment, Avery takes her eyes off of him again, walks into the jail, and looks around, observing the prisoners without judgement or concern. She walks steadily, slowly toward the room they're being led to, and when she is inside, she reaches up, unties the ribbon from under her chin, and removes her bonnet. She shakes out her hair, and there is sunlight aplenty here to shine off of it.

A lawman and a medicine man, he asked for. They sent him two ladies, one with a bow and arrow, one with a fucking bonnet.

Avery inhales the smell of him and considers it. She turns to look at Charlotte, wondering what the Theurge makes of this, but Charlotte is quiet, and Avery slowly turns her gaze back to Sheriff Lark. The door is closed. Avery steps forward, hair loose around her cheeks, brushing her shoulders.

"You may call me Merriweather. My cousin you may refer to as Miss Lightfoot. Now," she says, and then gracefully seats herself across from him, perched on the edge of a chair, folding her hands on her lap, "what seems to be the trouble?"

There has been a tinyhouse parked at or near the Cold Crescent building for some weeks. Since the full moon, since the moot, since the day three wolves arrived from Mexico still smelling like the sea, and two of them wrapped their arms around a kinswoman who smelled like pomegranates full and fine and rich dark earth, the sleeping promise of springtime, turned earth, rich and fecund, since then: a tinyhouse in the underground garage, odd and sweet and absurd on the streets close by. Tinyenough that children marvel and coo over it but do not approach because of the forbidding aura that the owner wears like a mantle.

However: the streets of Denver are not good enough for Melantha's first visit to the tinyhouse, and so when the invitation to tea (tea! this was Charlotte's idea. We should have tea. Charlotte does not know how to make tea. She merely knows how to ring for it. Perhaps instead they will have Grand Marnier in teacups, which she thinks would taste better, anyway. All sunlit.) was extended and accepted the two wolves went scouting.

And spent days away from the Sept to do it, and when the setting was finally chosen and the final touches were added - down to the tinywindowboxes in the tinywindows and the tinyhanging basket and the tinyhammock chair hanging on the porch - and all the gear was stowed and the only things left to do were the making of the tea sandwiches and the picking-up of the guest of honor the pack split up.

Charlotte-wolf remained behind to guard the tinyhouse and finish the tea sandwiches and maaaybe sample the Grand Marnier and Erich-wolfe returned to Denver to act as chauffeur and tour guide and realtor.

When they return, she's seated in the tinyhammock chair on the tinyporch swinging quietly and watching the road and watching the road and watching the road like a tinyhawk.

Melantha has heard about the house. Melantha has heard snippets of their travels. They have heard very little from her -- asked where she went, what she did, she didn't want to talk about it, she wasn't ready or something, she looked so sad or so uncomfortable or so unsure and the topic was dropped. She sleeps in 1999 Broadway in a dorm room and if, by chance, the wolves have gathered around her in one form or another to glomp onto her she has not pushed them away.

More likely: she asked Erich to drag over one of the other beds and make a large one and then asked them to sandwich her, let her sleep with her face in Charlotte's fur and Erich's chest to her back, however they arrange themselves, and then she sleeps deeply, steadily, as deep as she has ever slept with either of them beside her.

She does want to see the tinyhouse, and started to the elevators but Erich flailed because not in a garage and Charlotte just said tea out of nowhere, so Melantha drew on her rather considerable patience and waited. And waited. And waited while they found just the right spot to put it. Melantha waits.

--

As far as either of them know, she scarcely leaves the sept. It has a library on the dormitory floor and she reads there a lot. She wears the schlubbiest clothes you can imagine: jeans and pajama pants and tank tops and t-shirts and some of those things surely did not come here with her but were taken from a General Collection of Extra Clothing that also lives on the dormitory floor.

Split ends and chipped nails and occasionally chapped lips and dry skin and no socks. No bras, either, and comfortable underwear and sometimes she goes days without showering, which is sometimes difficult to be around. It isn't that Melantha lets herself get dirty to the point of disgusting. It's that Melantha is young, Melantha is beautiful, Melantha looks and feels and by god smells like everything you want, everything you long for and there are cubs and cliaths on that floor who look like they're about to pass out when they catch a whiff of her from down the hall or they linger outside of her room saying

hey.

awkwardly until they think to ask her a question like what's your name? or whatcha readin? just to see if she'll look at them or talk to them or something. She has shut the door on a couple of faces and a couple of mentors have caught cubs lingering around the kinswoman who is not their own and dragged them away by the scruff of their neck (or by their ears caught in a humiliating vice grip between two knuckles).

Frankly, it does not matter if she showers twice a day or not. The touch of her ancestors is not a purely physical thing. And she knows that. So she goes on letting her hair get a bit matted and goes on letting herself stink a bit and a couple of times

she

picks

her nose.

--

The day of the Invitation To Tea, Melantha showers, and she brushes her hair out but it stays in uneven, natural waves and it is still untrimmed. She cleans her fingernails and files them a bit so they don't catch and tear and rip, but her left ring finger nail did the other day and she chewed on it and spat the fingernail out, so fucking what. Her nails are much shorter than they were in D.C. It's a little thing, but most of the changes about her are little things, and many of them are probably at least somewhat temporary. Many. Some. Who knows. She doesn't yet.

She is happy, though, when she is Picked Up. She is wearing jeans that actually belong to her, she bought them in town before leaving the Furies. Her tank top is grey and of course she's not wearing anything beneath it but she has a blue and black and green flannel tied around her hips in case she gets cold later. She has big sunglasses, which she did in D.C., rimmed in tortoiseshell. She has put on lip balm so her lips aren't chapped; she has put some lotion on because even though Denver is not nearly as dry right now as it gets in the wintertime, her hands were starting to feel weird. Her sneakers are Converse, and they are red, and do not match her outfit at all. If you can call it an 'outfit'.

When Erich brings her to the tiny house, he can see her right beside him and Charlotte can see her through the windshield: her eyes going wide, her hands coming up to cover her mouth, her delight coming the way most of her emotions do these days: with bright tears springing to her bright eyes, and when she gets out, staring at it, they both hear her make a sound unlike any they've heard. It is almost a squeak when she says:

"It's got little windowboxes!"

Since arriving in Denver, Erich -- once the self-professed lone wolf, but perhaps really more just the wolf no one wanted around for a long time -- has scarcely left the company of Melantha, or Charlotte, or both. Which means he spends a lot of time at the Sept, hanging out with his Best Friends or the cubs and cliaths, sparring with the Ahrouns and the proto-Ahrouns, and rarely -- if ever -- returning to the tinyhouse.

But eventually wanderlust or cabin fever makes Erich remember the tinyhouse again. And that's about when it's suggested that Melantha come visit, which of course makes Charlotte suggest tea. Of course! Not merely because she's a Fang, but because a visit to the tinyhouse is a big deal to Erich, because once upon a time his only home was the few cubic feet in the back of a Mustang. In comparison, a tinyhouse is quite the upgrade.

And so, naturally, a parking lot is unacceptable. So the wolves go out and they scout and they hunt and they eventually find the perfect spot,

a sheltered valley up in the shoulders of the Rockies where the fires haven't strayed, where the heat isn't as overwhelming, where there's enough residual snowmelt even now in the heart of summer that the ground feels moist, the trees grow tall, and the wildgrass almost-but-not-quite hides the wheels the tinyhouse sits on.

--

So:

that's where they drive, when Erich picks Melantha up in his new (for him! and to her!) truck. They talk a little about that on the way up: he misses the Mustang -- who wouldn't? -- but the Mustang couldn't possibly pull a tinyhouse across a continent. And besides, the truck is nice too. It's tall, and it's roomier inside, and it has racing stripes. Also: a large bed, which he's thinking about putting a shell over and then converting into like a tinyguesthouse. That would be kinda awesome.

They talk a little about other things, too. Little things, really, as though both of them want to save the stuff like Where They've Been and What They've Done for when their sister is there. They talk about being a mile up in the air. They laugh about panting from walking across a parking lot, and he says he likes her hair like that, and at a rest area they exchange cell phone numbers anew and the first message he texts her is

<3.

--

It's past noon when they arrive. When that new(ish) truck of his rolls off the road, bumps into the wild, comes around a copse of pines and reveals

right there

a tinyhouse with its sides all made of wood, with its tinyroof with its dormers and its tinywindows with its tinywindowboxes, with its tinyporch and the rope hammock-chair that hangs there and, and, and.

Melantha makes a sound that Erich quite possibly last heard from his sister, when she was like. Eight. Windowboxes! she says, and he grins, and gets out, and is generally all pleased-shy and aw-shucks about it. His hands in his pockets, he follows her toward the house.

"Yeah," he says. "I just got 'em yesterday. And the hanging baskets were Charlotte's idea. We only finished building it a few weeks ago. You want a tour?" He says it like the Grand Tour would consist of more than crowding in and turning in place.

When Charlotte says they should have tea she is imagining high tea, of course. Cream cakes and scones and and butter sandwiches and sandwiches with cress and sandwiches with cucumber and sandwiches without any crust and perhaps for Erich sandwiches that are sandwiches of meat on meat around meat but cut in the shape of sandwiches, which is harder to achieve than you might imagine.

At least she has clever hands.

And when Erich imagines sandwiches he imagines things like peanut butter and jelly and ham and cheese and solid, thorough, midwestern sandwiches on hearty and homebaked bread or at least hearty, wholegrain bread advertised with a cornucopia on gleaming billboards set in wheatfields glowing with the fading light of an afternoon sun.

So the ingredients purchased for the creation of tea (high or otherwise) are interesting, to say the least, and will become more interesting when prepared by Charlotte, who is Very Serious about her creations for the afternoon but who does not know what she is doing, except that she should try to do it thoroughly and do it well.

--

[Perhaps it was not the first thing or the second thing or the third thing that Charlotte said to Melantha, but it was A Thing she said, sometime in those early days after they arrived at the Sept, when the moon was full but waning and it was huge and it was hungry in the sky and hungry in their animal hearts: your face isn't lying anymore.

And Charlotte said this with wonder and a sort of reverence, and she said it shyly and she said it seriously, because it Meant Something to her. Because split ends and the humid, human scent of her skin wrapped up with the promise of Melantha's blood were all so much closer to what Charlotte saw, when Charlotte saw Melantha, that first night in the dining room at a Club, so many moons ago. She wanted to push her nose into the corners of Melantha's eyes to see the almonds there and was happy happy happy to sleep, a sleek white wolf, curled up with the kinswoman's hands in her fur.

Melantha has never seen Charlotte in lupus before, but her fur was so pure and gleaming-white and silver-sheen and bright enough to match the light of madness in her eyes.]

In the now, tea sandwiches (some of which, may be edible. others of which, will be peanut butter and cucumber) are stowed in a picnic basket and others are piled on a small, sweet plate in the tinykitchen and Charlotte is swinging on the porch in the hammock-chair when the truck pulls up but she is on her feet before either of them can really identify her from a distance and is leaning over the railing and waving vigorously and then running down the few steps to the grass that is thick and lush up here and wild and covers her ankles part-up up her calves.

Pink-and-blond hair gleaming in the sunlight. Her vigorous wave and thudding footsteps sets the hanging baskets swinging and then she's on the ground, biting her lower lip and a bit and letting Erich take the lead on the tinytour. The house was his idea after all. His creation. He laid the first planks while she ran across the plains and he found the plans on the internet in the ranger's cabin at the Deep Hole Sept all the way back in Kentucky and if Charlotte thinks about how long they spent apart it might make her ache but she does not, now. Not much.

She's wearing a Yellowstone t-shirt and khaki shorts and has a hempen choker around her throat with those cowry shells like a sorority girl who went to Jamaica for her spring break, Charlotte, and her Chuck Taylor's All Stars with the ink on the rubber frame.

They did just finish it a few weeks ago, but,

"Erich started talking about it almost as soon as we left."

[so, melantha doesn't have a cell. so change that to --

at a rest area he wants to exchange cell phone numbers anew but she doesn't have one so he gets a scrap of paper and writes her a literal text:

<3.]

There is joy in the way they curl around each other, these three. Charlotte in lupus, held by Melantha, held by Erich. On two beds, shoved together because one would not be wide enough and two even can scarcely fit them. But no matter, because they hold each other so close. They end up smelling like each other in a way they never did in D.C. because in D.C. Melantha was also Celia as she had been so many other girls who are not herself.

your face isn't lying was said with such delight, and it made Melantha start crying. She understood, and it was the understanding that made her burst into tears, sobbing against Charlotte's shoulder with the same shamelessness and self-ownership that has her not. giving. a single. fuck. about how she appears right now, to anyone.

--

The ride from the sept to the tiny house is one of the few times she and Erich have been alone together since the wolves came to Denver. Melantha isn't exactly crawling all over him with hugs and kisses, gasping or otherwise. She's still getting used to seeing and smelling and hearing men regularly; she honestly is not sure what has and has not changed in two or three months, and the drive is decent but not long enough to really get into it and she shies from it anyway. She curls up in the passenger seat and they talk about the truck and the racing stripes, turning the bed of the truck into a guesthouse of sorts, and Erich does most of the talking but that's okay. Melantha smiles, and listens, and listens, and listens.

--

Lunchtime. Tea time. But no high tea. God knows what they'll find inside if Charlotte was left in charge of cooking. She laughs as she gets out of the truck, tears springing to her eyes the way they spring to her eyes often these days, easily. She laughs, walking forward, as Erich shoves his hands in his pockets and turns a bit pink with his grin. He and Charlotte decorated the house with flowers together. They built it.

And she is crying. Again. Her hands cover her face, even as Charlotte is running out and throwing those skinny arms around her as though this is their first reunion. Melantha leans into it, smelling a bit like soap but not like deoderant and mostly just like herself. She feels better, after a few tears into that platinum-and-rose hair, and lifts her face again, wrapping her arms around Charlotte's lean waist to look at Erich. Her temple rests against Charlotte's head.

"You guys built a house," she says, like it's the greatest wonder in the world, the 9th, the most incredible. "You built a little house," she says again, and takes a deep breath, and exhales, and shakes her head, staring at it. Her steps drift forward, her arms falling away from Charlotte.

She's changed. Or something in her has changed. Something is different there that isn't split ends or dry skin or chapped lips or a lack of makeup. It's like looking at a half-done sculpture, and bits of it are rough and there's really no way of telling what they'll become. She looks at the house like every moment it burns into her vision makes her want to weep anew with gratitude for the world, with love for the two of them, with grief for god knows what.

Melantha puts her hands on the railing of the little steps that can be picked up. She notices the hinges, because of course she does. Ingenious. She runs her hands over the sanded wood and up to the porch where the hammock chair and the flower basket hang. She smells fresh wood and flowers and the Cold Crescent parking garage and the outdoors and all the places they've been. She inhales deeply, closing her eyes and,

though she wants a tour, she wants this more:

"They got me back my real name. I'm going to go to school here in the fall. I'm not even entirely sure what I'm going to do. But I liked being in school, that one time." She's been to college before. There was a professor --

-- but she wasn't Melantha then, either. Just like she wasn't really Melantha in D.C., at least not to anyone but them.

She turns to look at them, taking a breath. What she says next is a little shameful, and it makes tears come to her eyes for different reasons entirely: "But I kind of just want to go inside and curl up and never come out."

The railing on that tiny porch is sanded smooth. As are the sidings and the steps and the frames of the windows and doors and all of it, but especially those railings. The surfaces of the cabinets inside, too. The inside floorboards. All the surfaces that bare hands and feet might touch.

The little windowboxes are so small the wildflowers they've planted in there are almost bursting out of their spaces. The hanging baskets, too: drooping low enough that Erich has to duck around them. He follows Melantha up on that tiny porch in one bound, his hands grabbing the posts on either side to pull himself up all the more swiftly. When he's up there, there's barely room to turn around. If and when Charlotte joins them, they'll be packed tight as sardines. He looks at her curiously; there isn't a shred of judgment in his eyes.

Just a question: "Why?"

Charlotte understands humans and things-human rather less well than she understands the coursing of birds through the sky or the quiet dreams of sap in the longer winter months, or the color of fear or the fading taste of a summer's day on the backs of your eyes. That tinge of gold still left in the world.

You guys built a house, Melantha says and repeats, her breath warm in Charlotte's fine hair. Which is still sort but longer than it was, just as Charlotte is still short but longer than she was, though in such a negligible way that Erich hasn't noticed and even Melantha might not. But still: growing. Just a bit.

And steady when she left and she doesn't know how hard it is to wear so many faces and never your own and she doesn't know the struggle of what happens after, stripped down to whatever the essence is beneath and wondering how to start rebuilding things. And she is a theurge: she doesn't mind the unfinished, the in-progress, because every growing thing is in-progress but she knows -

something that makes her tighten her skinny arms around Melantha as those tears come and she repeats: in wonder and grief and glory, You guys built a house.

"It's easier than building a tree," Charlotte murmurs back to Melantha, quietly, as if this thought were meant to be reassuring. Says it with such on the spot solemnity, such quiet-girlish-gravity,

--

Then, Melantha has climbed to the front porch and Erich follows and Melantha is marveling over the tinystairs and the tinyhinges and the sanded wood. Charlotte is still on the ground, one foot on the lowest step leading up to the porch.

Oh, by now Charlotte's eyes are shining too. She looks all tenterhooked as Melantha's tears spring up anew and Erich's asking why and Charlotte's breathing out all at once.

"Fall's not for a while, right now. I'd tell you when it came."

Both facts are assuredly self-evident to Melantha, but again Charlotte offers them so quietly, and with such pale, serious eyes that the meaning beneath them must be clear. If Melantha wanted to stay for an hour or an age, or even just until next Wednesday or this fall, she'd be welcome there. And Charlotte and Erich would rouse her to the world when it was time to go.

The laugh Melantha gives when Charlotte says that building the little house is easier than building the tree is almost a sob. Then again, almost everything from Melantha right now is almost a sob. She walks up, and she admits what she does, and Erich is following her wanting to know, like he always wants to know. Melantha's face tightens in on itself, shaking her head. "I don't know," she exhales finally, and Charlotte tells her that she can stay, though not in so many words, and that she wouldn't have to worry about waking up old and grey because Charlotte would wake her up in time to try and find out who she is if she wants, even if that's not what Charlotte says in words.

Melantha retreats. Retreats, retreats, just as she ran towards them when she saw them, engulfed them in her arms and tears. Something about this little house has broken her open and even she is not quite sure what is behind those cracks. She knows what the answer is, even if it doesn't make much sense -- or wouldn't, she thinks, at least as far as Erich is concerned. He and Charlotte are so different in some ways, and this is one: the truth seems to come easy for him. The world seems to simplify for him, and Melantha is not quite sure she can explain to him how the path curves from I don't know who I am to I want to curl up in this house and never come out, maybe not even for autumn. And she can't bear the argument, right now, should he press her to make sense of it.

Naturally she leans towards Charlotte, even if Charlotte talks about how houses and trees are both things that are built, and one is simpler than the other. Even if Charlotte has pink hair and alternate personalities that Melantha hasn't met yet. There are things about her that only Erich really gets, or has seen. There are things that only Charlotte seems to understand without needing it explained: here is one.

She sits down in the hammock chair so recently occupied, enough to make its slight elasticity bounce. She looks vaguely miserable when she looks up at them again. "I'm sorry, guys." Her head shakes as she looks away, looking at the railing nearby, or a windowbox, with sleepy and sad eyes that can be so bright at times. "I kinda... just feel... lonely and sad and forgotten and..."

Deep breath, hold it, exhale;

"Empty."

Now Erich looks a little miserable too. Not because the day's ruined or the moment's broken or anything like that, but just because: Melantha is his friend, and he loves her, and she's not happy. His shoulders slump a little. Then they square again. He opens the door to the tinyhouse, and he holds his hand out to her.

"Well," he says, "you're not alone. You have us. And we haven't forgotten you. Come inside. We'll just... flop on my bed together and talk. Or Charlotte's bed. I live in the loft, and she has her own room. This is our house, so ... we can just stay inside however long we want. It's got everything."

When Melantha leans towards Charlotte, Charlotte folds her skinny arms around the kinswoman and holds on. That is all; Charlotte is quiet in those moments, steadier and more solid and more fae perhaps than Melantha remembers her to be. When they met she was a strange, odd, lonely little wolf following Melantha around the way some wolves, even pups, follow the moon through the dark night sky.

Now she is still: odd, even frail, wary and alert but steadier. With a place because she has a pack, small and strange as it is.

--

Charlotte watches the pair of them with a furrowed brow, as Melantha climbs up the steps to sit in the hammock chair, as Erich just looks - a little miserable. He's holding the door open and now Charlotte climbs those few steps and turns her shoulders, stretching sidelong to squeeze past him into the tinyhouse. Erich can see that she disappears into her room and can hear the cupboards opening and closing, and soon enough Charlotte, in her Yellowstone t-shirt and khaki cargo shorts appears again in the living space, carrying a small bowl of beaten copper. Erich has seen the bowl before; Charlotte uses it for rites sometimes.

In the proper light, the metal - which is sheened and hammered into a swirling pattern and polished to a bright-penny shine - looks like a sunburst, like a birthing star wrapped in the gaseous haze of creation. Sometimes it merely looks ordinary, homey. Bright copper kettles.

Charlotte does not know that song.

Charlotte does not know that song, but she knows the shape of the bowl and how easily it fits in her arms, and she pauses at the countertop (which is taken up, mostly, with an... array of odd sandwiches) to grab an oft-reused Nalgene bottle full of water, uncap it, and pour it until the bowl is half full.

Maybe Melantha has risen from the hammock chair on the porch and taken Erich's invitation into the tinyhouse, but if not Charlotte gives Erich a Look (a flash of pale and graven concern, which is leavened by the curl of a small and secret smile) and squeezes past him again, careful now not to spill the water in the vessel.

If Melantha is still in the hammockchair, Charlotte squeezes over on the crowded porch and holds out the copper bowl full of water to the kinswoman. Waits until Melantha takes it, the metal still warm from her bodyheat.

"What is it?" With a downward tip of her sharp little chin toward the bowl.

As ever, Erich is earnest. Heartfelt. They aren't common traits to find in Shadow Lords -- they aren't even traits common to Get of Fenris stereotypes, either. No more than a heavily made-up, sexually predatory Black Fury melds with the stereotype. No more than an awkward, spindly Silver Fang fits with their image in most ancestral memories. They are all misfit toys, in their own way. Misfits from the world. Misfits from their own tribes, their own nation.

Melantha looks up as Erich says they can all just go flop on a bed together and stay however long we want. He's so proud of the house, and it makes her lips twitch in a faint smile of affection. He and Charlotte both have rooms, which is shocking in a house that looks smaller than one entire room. She isn't forgotten, and she's not alone, and... and...

Charlotte is walking way. Melantha glances after her, frowning in both curiosity and a bit of hurt, but she doesn't think Charlotte is abandoning her. It's just that she feels abandoned all the same, even if it isn't by Erich or Charlotte. Peering through the door, Melantha sees her rustling about but only in flashes. She lifts herself from the hammock to peer in, but doesn't leave. While Charlotte is doing her work, her hand reaches out, and bats against Erich's. It isn't an invitation. It's just that, at a foot or so away, he seems so far.

The theurge comes out again with a copper bowl that Melantha has never seen but instinctively, instantly recognizes somehow. Some part of her mind, distant and dark, wonders if there is blood in it.

No. It's empty, but for water. Plain, simple water. That she is holding out to Melantha, who looks at it like it might hold her future. Which, who knows,

it might.

She looks at it, and looks at Charlotte, and Charlotte wants her to take it, so she takes it. The metal warms quickly to the air and to her own body heat, answering Charlotte's. What is it?

It is not natural for Melantha to look instantly to anyone but herself for the answer. She doesn't look at Erich at first. She doesn't look at Charlotte. She stares at the water, frowning, then looks at Charlotte, then at Erich, then back at the water. She tries to blank her mind. Observation first. "It's a bowl," she says. "It's... made of copper, and it has water in it." Melantha leans over, and her hair touches the water a bit by accident, but she sniffs, then lifts her head, a few strands dripping. "It's clean water."

There's no assertion here. There is no right or wrong, she thinks. But that doesn't mean there isn't an answer.

Of course, Erich takes the hand that brushes his. And he comes a little closer, kinda squeezes in between the hammock-chair and the porch railing.

That's where and how Charlotte finds him, when she comes out with that basin of clear water. The tinyhouse has a watertank of its own. Later on Erich might show Melantha, gleefully, pointing out the tanks for the water, for the propane, for the greywater and the sewage. Pointing out the solar panels on the roof, and the tiny "fireplace" on the wall; the tiny bathroom, the tiny storage with everything built in and strapped down and secured. The tiny doors inside: one to Charlotte's room, one to the bathroom -- and the fold-out couch-bed-thing, the ladder that tucks away,

the tiny, cozy loft with its miniature and absurd gothic window.

Later, that. Maybe not even today. But later. For now, they're still outside, and Melantha has only a sliver of a view into that miraculous little house. Charlotte comes out. Erich is completely baffled, his head cocking like a dog's. What is it, Charlotte asks. He opens his mouth, closes it again when he realizes the question isn't for him.

There isn't much room on the porch; not between the hammock chair and the railing, not between the back of the chair and the front of the house, but: neither Charlotte nor Melantha are anything close to Erich's size and Charlotte is so wormy and dextrous that she emerges from the tinyhouse and squeezes as close in as she can, watching Melantha with that wintry-eyed solemnity that touches her when the moon is high and the wind is rising and the night is starting to sing.

After Melantha answers - a bowl, made of copper, with water in it. clean water - Charlotte takes the bowl and - well - dumps the water over the railing, then gives it back to the Fury and this time finds a way to sink down, to wedge herself into the space beside Melantha, to be so close that if Melantha had a wolf's senses her nose would be full of Charlotte-scent and Erich-scent and nothing else. Ultimately, the Silver Fang ends up scrunched on the floor, her spine on the railing between the opening and the hammock chair, leaning forward, wrapping her arms around the Fury's calves, resting her sharp little chin on Melantha's thigh.

"Now it's empty." Looking up with shining eyes and just holding Melantha's legs, the chair swings backward until Melantha hits the siding on the front of the house. There's so little room. "I could put sandwiches in it. Or nails. Or grass. Or starlight.

"But the bowl remembers the water. It always does.

"Everyplace we went, we remembered you. Everyplace we stopped we said your name. Sometimes we wondered if you were breathing in the same stars. Sometimes I dreamt that you were running beside me. Sometimes I dreamt that you were very far away, but I could hear you howl.

"To the moon. Or whoever. You can cry if you want. It's okay to be sad. But,

"You're our pack. You were always here."

Then she sits up a bit higher, lifting her chin to peer over the edge of the bowl and reaching in with her left hand, all delicate, getting the tip of her left index finger wet. Then she starts to trace the lip of the bowl, around and around, with her damp fingertip. After the first three or four passes, this low, resonant noise starts to build inside the copper bowl.

"When its empty, see?" A quiet hum. "That's when it sings."

A fine thread of guilt weaves through Melantha when Erich takes her hand. Doesn't just brush his knuckles back over hers or permit her to touch him but reaches back to her threefold, holding her hand in his ever-warm palm. Of course she isn't alone.

--

Charlotte is unceremonious about taking the bowl back from Melantha, dumping the water out, and surely some part of Charlotte can hear the ground erupting in pleasure at receiving the water. The earth here is so thirsty and Charlotte can certainly feel it. Recent rain has abated that thirst a bit, but the sun is hot and the air is dry, stealing the moisture back in a never-ending tug-of-war between land and sky.

Melantha isn't startled. She's patient, waiting to be instructed, and now the Shadow Lord and Silver Fang are tucked about as close to her as they can get on the tiny porch, wiggling in until the hammock chair is bumped against the wall and Melantha's shin is against Charlotte's leg and Charlotte's arms are around her calves and her whole side is up against Erich's and they're all gonna get sweaty and gross and ask any of them if they really care.

Instinctively, she reaches for Charlotte when Charlotte put her chin on her leg. Melantha's free hand strokes Charlotte's hair as delicately as if the Theurge really is made of cotton candy and moonlight. She doesn't tuck it back or smooth it away, but just... strokes it, feeling the fineness of it between her fingertips.

And now it's empty. She can put anything in it, but it will always remember what was in it before.

Charlotte tells her of what she dreamt and of what they thought of, and tears come to Melantha's eyes. She cries a lot these days, all right? And she feels as little shame for that as stubble on her underarms or legs, bare breasts under her shirt, split ends, chewed nails, chapped lips. She sniffs moisture from her nostrils and blinks at wetness in her eyes, watching Charlotte's with something that borders on adoration. And apology,

even as Charlotte is telling her it's okay to cry, and be sad. To howl.

A little noise leaves her when she says that Melantha is their pack. It's half protest and half sob, and it makes a little shake go through her shoulders. She sniffs again. She does want to protest -- maybe all of it. To tell Charlotte that it's not them, it's not that, it's the tribe and it's her family and it's her whole life and now it feels like nothing has ever meant anything, nothing has ever lasted, she was never anything real, and now she's just been hollowed out, scraped out, empty, empty, empty.

Charlotte makes the copper sing. Which it can only do because it's empty. Quietly, maybe, but it fills with sound the way it was filled with water, and that

is when

Melantha

collapses.

The tears she was almost holding back start streaming down her face freely, some of them falling in the bowl and some on her shirt and jeans, but she cries heavily, openly, yet not with protest now. With gratitude, because though none of them quite drag it out into words, Melantha, at least, understands. Perhaps she upsets the bowl and it clatters to the wood but she takes her hands and wraps them both hard around Charlotte, flat-out sobbing into the other woman's hair.

Erich doesn't have a lot of subtleties about him. There aren't a lot of bends and curves to his personality, and his brain isn't very good about going around bends and curves either. Charlotte's never tried something like this on him, and for good reason: he just looked puzzled when that bowl was handed over. He looked sort of impressed when Melantha answered so readily and directly, like she knew what she was about, and he

looked

amazed when Charlotte tossed the water out. Absolutely gobsmacked, sheer Eureka!, when she told Melantha: now it's empty. I could fill it with anything. But it remembers the water, and now

it sings.

But Melantha doesn't sing. She collapses. She sobs, she almost howls, she wraps her arms around Charlotte and Erich is left sort of awkward and unsure and crestfallen and feeling justalittleleftout. He shifts from one foot to the other. In the end he reacts the only way he knows how. He draws on the directness in himself, the not-good-around-curves, the immediacy and physicality that rips enemies apart, parts crowds like moses in the red sea, but cannot possibly have thought make a metaphor of an empty copper bowl.

He shifts. He takes on his near-wolf form, absurdly huge, so heavy that immediately the tinyhouse's balance tilts precariously toward its tinyporch: takes it because he feels uncertain and worried and so very protective right now. And in that enormous, thick-furred, protective form he squeezes in as close to the girls as he can, wrapping one forepaw around them like a lion with its cubs, and roofs their heads with the underside of his jaw.

Whuffs, too. It's not a glerg, glerg -- but it's close.

Charlotte's hair is fine, a bit damp from sweat, the pink more vibrant that it has been for weeks and months, freshly dip-dyed. The crowd of her skull tips forward as Melantha begins to slip her fingers through those fine strands, and she rests her cheek against the kinswoman's thigh, her breath warm and steady. There is something wholly animal about this gesture; see the way wolves brush past each other in greeting, sharing scent.

There's a brief note of alarm in Charlotte's sharp features when Melantha collapses forward and Charlotte flashes this look toward Erich in that moment only to find her packmate shifting into his great ironfurred direwolf form, so heavy that it tips the weight of the tinyhouse forward and sets the struts heaving.

If the bowl wasn't upset when Melantha collapsed forward, the sudden expansion of mass and concomitant displacement of air propulses it out of Melanthan's lap and sets it clattering along the carefully set floorboards. Charlotte does not notice. Instead, she's rising, half-rising to her knees to lean into the kinswoman's grasp, wrapping her own skinny arms around Melantha and just holding her as she cries, bending low as Erich shifts and just encompasses them both.

Just - there. Holding on, as long as she can, as long as she has to. As long as she's needed.

Uncomfortable in his own skin right now, not sure what to do, Erich takes the form he takes when he's tearing things apart. Melantha can only remember seeing him like this once, and she doesn't even see him like this at first. She just feels the tinyhouse tip a bit and the hammockchair swing a bit and hears the wood creak. But she's crying in Charlotte's hair, and Charlotte is looking at Erich like onoz or get over here or whatever that look between packmates means.

That's when the tinyhouse tips, and Melantha is startled, and sees Erich wiggling his enormous self closer, scooting until he can throw a robustly heavy forepaw over them, put his head atop them. Melantha's face is stuck in his ruff and in Charlotte's hair, and she starts laughing.

Just as suddenly, just as fully as she started crying, she erupts into laughter. Her cheeks are wet and her eyes are red-rimmed already, but she sniffs and laughs and leans into Erich's chest-fur with her arm around Charlotte. "You're so weird," she says softly, fondly, raspy from crying, pushing her fingers in Charlotte's hair, closing her eyes in that iron-grey fur.

--

The need to cry doesn't last so long, after that. It isn't that she doesn't feel empty anymore. It's that being empty doesn't feel like the end of the world anymore. It doesn't feel like being nothing. It feels like being all potential, rather than

all scars.

She's wiping her hands over her face after a little while, breathing in deeply to clear her sinuses again, and her arms go around Erich's neck. She kisses his muzzle and between his eyes like nothing, and she hugs Charlotte and she kisses her cheek and her forehead the same way, as though their forms have nothing to do with how she shows her affection to them. "Thank you," she whispers into Charlotte's ear when she hugs her, because -- even if it makes Erich feel justalittleleftout -- they are sisters, and sometimes there are things Charlotte will understand, will be able to do for her, that Erich can't. Or doesn't.

But then, too: Melantha hasn't spent any time alone with either of them since they all got here. And she has hugged and kissed them and cried on them and slept with them but she hasn't curled up and talked with Charlotte, brow to brow on a bed in pajama pants, and she hasn't so much as taken a walk with Erich, or

kissed him differently than she does now, or

tried to be alone with him. And he has to have noticed that. He may be noticing it, right now, wondering if something's changed. Wondering what it is, and how.

Eventually Melantha starts to get up. She wants to see the little house, she says, smiling up at them both, even if her cheeks are a little tight from saltwater. "I don't believe you both have a bedroom in there. It's not even as big as one of the dorm beds."

Erich-direwolf whuffs, low and deep and -- laughingly, is that possible? -- as Melantha calls him weird. Again. He hasn't heard that for ages. It sounds as much an endearment as anything he's ever heard, ever. So he scoots a little closer, presses into his pack, and

closes his eyes. He's quite happy.

--

"We have a bedroom and a bathroom," he insists, later, when Melantha seems ready to look at the tinyhouse. When he's returned to his two-legged form, and backed up so Melantha can get up out of her chair, so Charlotte can stop scrunching herself into a corner. "And we have a ceiling fan and a couch. The couch turns into a cot. We even have a board that sets up into a little dining table. I'm not kidding, we can just live here forever. It'll be a little cramped but we can totally just... live here forever, the three of us."

He glances down, surreptitiously checking to make sure he hasn't cracked the floorboards. Then up again, pushing the door -- even that is tiny, a size smaller than those full-sized doors that front most houses -- open wide.

"C'mon in. Welcome," he affects a plummy tone, "to our humble abode."

You're so weird - Melantha says, sniffling and laughing and crying all throat-tight, her sinuses flooded, her voice changed by the torrent of emotion. Strange how it all moves along the same axis and feels like a wave, Charlotte now thinks, because Charlotte knows waves, the beauty of their sinuous motion, the rising curve of their energy and then the way they break open on the shore.

But listen: You're so weird has Charlotte lifting her head in agreement, turning her own odd little face into her packmate's massive neck, grinning and sort of punching him in the flank with a rather small fist.

"You're a dork." echoes Charlotte, and that's not a word she knew on her own. Said it to Erich at least once every few days all the time they were traveling, and each time he had to hear the echo of Melantha's voice in Charlotte's declaration, fond and energetic.

Charlotte hugs Melantha back, of course. Kisses her cheek and tastes the salt of her tears and reaches up with her fine little hands with their peeling candy-orange nail polish on the roughly broken nails to wipe a few more away as Erich presses closer and - yes.

Erich's quite happy.

Charlotte is too.

--

"Plus we have lots of sandwiches," Charlotte adds, ducking her head. She's on the ground by now, having retrieved her copper bowl from where it went flying in the midst of the puppy pile and has tucked it into the crook of one of her spindly arms. "So we wouldn't even have to go find food if you didn't wanna for a while."

Long as you don't mind peanut butter and lox or jelly-cucumber sandwiches, that is. Or god knows what sorts of conconctions a mad little theurge put together so assiduously in the tinykitchen while Erich was retrieving Melantha from the city.

She's in sunlight, squinting up at them, shading her eyes with her right hand but ready to follow inside as soon as they head that way. Something about that survey has Charlotte studying the house - from a new angle - rather than her friends, who are all in shadow on the porch in that moment.

charlotte's wondering if she could awaken it. And if it would have anything to say. And if it takes houses a long time to learn how to speak, the way it does people and rocks and mountains and the roots-of-things.

He is a weird dork. He is an enormous grey direwolf, a monster of legend, trying to hug his best friends on a porch really only built for one person at a time, and not two people, a hammockchair, a hanging basket, some windowboxes, and a monster. His eyes close into thick dark lines across his face, happy despite the rage this form conjures in the most primitive parts of one's brain. Charlotte punches him, echoing their friend like she echoes the past, like she echoes the spirits, because

truth be told,

she is only gradually learning her own voice. And they don't talk about that, really, at least Melantha and Charlotte don't, even though Melantha knows and thought she understood and now understands in a very, very different way. She has been speaking with the same voice, singing the same song, for almost all of her life, and discovered that what she was singing to might not be able to give her what she needs.

Tears are wiped from her face by small, fair hands that shine against Melantha's darker skin. She closes her eyes and sniffs again. She feels grateful. She feels empty. But not end-of-the-world empty. Not silent. Not nonexistent.

--

and a bathroom, and a ceiling fan and a couch-cot and dining table and SANDWICHES, and we can live here forever, like that would be the most pleasant forever one could imagine. Melantha is not sure she disagrees. Her jean-cuffs drag on the floorboards as she walks in, looking up at the ceiling, at the little ladder to the sleeping loft, at the storage area across. She looks down as she passes the little fireplace and the tiny sink and the stove and fridge and all the plasticware that can be neatly locked away. She is surprised by the bathroom and it's all but squeals when she sees the little second bedroom that is Charlotte's. Without even thinking, without asking, she jumps right from doorway onto the bed, circling around on her knees,

not unlike an animal turning in circles. She beams at Charlotte, even if her eyes are still a bit red from those heavy tears. "Come on, we can hide in here and close the door and talk about him behind his back," she says, grinning on her hands and knees, even if she doesn't really mean it. She grabs Charlotte around the shoulders and tugs her inward, tumbling back with her, romping her rather gleefully into the bed. But when she reaches for Erich's hand through the door she turns her head over her shoulder, looks at Charlotte, doesn't quite ask but asks with her eyes and if the answer is yes then oh,

Erich gets pulled in, too, so they can all pile together. And snuggle. And romp. And nuzzle and possibly bite a little. She curls up on her side looking at Charlotte and maybe Erich is behind her and maybe she's letting Erich hold her, maybe like he does sometimes when they have all slept at the sept. And then stirring, stirring suddenly, breathing in and sitting up: "Sandwiches?"

Which she will go get. Unless she is stopped.

Erich is actually in this tiny little room quite a bit. And it is tiny: only baaarely wide enough to cram a full-sized bed into. The mattress touches three out of four walls. One can sit on the bed, but even kneeling on it runs the risk of banging one's head. The doorway is about a foot away from the foot of the bed, and though there are storage drawers under the bed, how much Charlotte has filled those us is inevitably determined -- at least in part -- by how far she can manage to slide those drawers out, and/or how often she lifts the entire mattress and bed to get at the storage beneath.

None of which is the point. The point is: Erich is actually in here quite a bit, just as Charlotte visits Erich's loft quite a bit. They have an unspoken little rule between them. There's a bead curtain across the open end of the loft -- an honest-to-god, clatter-y curtain made of tiny wooden beads -- and when it's open, Charlotte is welcome to visit. Same goes for the little door to Charlotte's room. Whenever Charlotte's door isn't closed, in fact, it's a fair bet that he'll pop in at least once in a while. Sometimes in homid, tossing himself lengthwise down on the bed. Sometimes in lupus, bounding up onto the mattress and circling and flopping down and yawning. So there's fur on the bed, but then that's almost a fact of life when one lives with -- and as -- wolves.

Invited now, by that open door and by Melantha's look and by Charlotte's nod or indication, Erich gets pulled in and puppypiled on the bed. They snuggle: three intensely different creatures, different in upbringing and background and tribe and blood and everything except that all three of them are misfit toys, shaped just a little different from all the other toys of their particular name or kind or class. They glomp and after a while Erich closes his eyes and

really, he would've been asleep in another moment, might've already been asleep, when Melantha suddenly pops up between him and Charlotte.

Sandwiches? -- and his eyes open. "Oh, yeah. Charlotte made a bunch of sandwiches." He hasn't seen them yet. He keeps his doubts to himself. "They're in the fridge. You saw the fridge, right? We have a fridge in here."

He gets up, too. Not very high, because then he'd thump his head. But he opens the little windows in Charlotte's room to let the breeze blow through. They can smell wildgrass outside. Pine. The mountain air, cooler than it is down in Denver; warm, still, because it's summer.

Charlotte's little room is - not precisely pristine. Neater than her room had been in the house in DC, where she had space to fill and staff to clean it and collected anything and everything that intrigued and interested her. Like the spine torn from a strangely articulated beast, or a hornet's nest still attached to the knobby branch of an old apple tree, or a collection of broken, jewel-toned bottles, each with a tiny nut growing the tiny seedling of a tiny tree.

There isn't room for such things; whatever her treasures, they are mostly packed away in the drawers beneath the bed, but other supplies are scattered on top of the sheets from her latest projects, including the wrapped set of brushes included in the talen-making kit Melantha gave her for her birthday, an odd rock shaped like a donut, a handful of as-yet undecorated beads, made of carved wood or dried clay, and a little pile of Charlotte's clothes near the head of the bed. It doesn't matter: Charlotte shoves the little pouch of brushes out of the way and everything else gets scattered - a few of the beads roll off the bed onto the floor. She'll find them later or make more.

Melantha, teasing tells Charlotte that they can close the door and talk about Erich behind his back while she's on her knees, circling and circling on the mattress of that little platform bed, and Charlotte plunges after, informing Melantha with some of her usual solemn artlessness that -

- they didn't have to close the door. They could just ask Erich to turn around.

Though something about the twitch of her mouth or the gleam in her wide eyes suggests that maybe - maybe - Charlotte was trying to thread together the elements of a little joke right there.

--

And the answer is yes, is of course yes.

In the end, Melantha and Charlotte end up curled, face to face, nose to nose, eye to eye. The breeze from the now-open window stirs the fine threads of Charlotte's hair, and she doesn't move, she is so still, the curl of her smile quiet and shy as it always is - not tremulous but fine in its way. Conscious of mystery.

Strange and ageless and aware.

Sandwiches!

Charlotte does not stop Melantha when she bounces up. Charlotte, still, does not stop anyone from doing anything, except perhaps Erich-wolf when he decides to rip out poisoned formori barbs the wrong direction. But she slips upright when Erich says that she made sandwiches and they're in the fridge and hey Charlotte is a quick little thing, light footed, with clever little hands and she slips up too, darting off the bed quick as you like.

"I made lots of them."

Filled up the tinyfridge with them and saved all the cut-away crusts and bread-frames in a plastic bag to scatter for the birds. Even if Erich doesn't like her to do it close to the tinyhouse because birds, like all animals, poop. Except they do it on the wing and therefore potentially on the roof.

So Charlotte darts out and unless Melantha follows then, she and Erich are let alone for a good few minutes as Charlotte clatters in the kitchen, pulling out her tray of piled sandwiches and locating the bottle of Grand Marnier she was going to serve in teacups except they do not have teacups, just three mugs, maybe, for warm beverages in the morning, but she cannot juggle the mugs and the tray and the liquer so:

the sandwich tray.

There are no crusts. Some of the sandwiches are classic tea-shapes, cut small. Others have been more... creatively trimmed. That one looks like a bird, while this one might be a wolf, and is that a dinosaur? Some things are difficult to render in a canvas of white bread and cucumber and butter and peanut butter and salmon spread and cheese-and-apple-and-lime and roast-beast and jelly. There are also: meat sandwiches. Three layers of meat: like turkey-ham-turkey or ham-salami-ham rendered in the same precise and neat little styles as the bread-and-butter sandwiches.

"Uh, we don't actually have tea," says Charlotte, holding up the bottle of Grand Marnier, "but we have this. Or I can get you a cerveza.

"That's Spanish for beer."

"I saw the fridge," she tells Erich, smiling fondly, even if whatever is there and is not there still lingers in her eyes, even if what she fears may not be there still haunts her a little. She looks sad. But Melantha has always had a sort of sadness to her, just as she has always had a sort of bone-deep wrath in her. It sings in her blood when they breathe her in, and it is older than she will ever be in this life. Melantha is haunted by ghosts she can't see or speak to, touch or be possessed by, but they are ghosts just the same, and some of them are drenched in blood, and some were burnt at the stake, and some were mothers watching their children die at war, and some despaired long before death met them.

Still she smiles, and she can look fond, and she can be happy, but when her own mood touches that shadow in her eyes, it is like looking over the edge of a chasm that is deeper, deeper than you ever thought it could be. It goes straight down to the core.

Charlotte murmurs to her, at one point, that they could just ask Erich to turn around, and Melantha smiles at that, eyes twinkling for a moment, because oh: Charlotte's silly. She kisses her then, quick and soft and on the apple of her cheek, beneath her eye. But Charlotte is off that bed and out the narrow doorway quick as you like, darting to get the sandwiches, she made lots and lots, and yes:

leaving Melantha and Erich alone for a good few minutes. Melantha turns her head to look over her shoulder and looks at Erich, who is as tall and muscular as ever and that is not alien to her, even went set against Charlotte's fragility. It's the other thing he is, which isn't his tribe or his blood or any of that. It's the way he is male, in body and soul alike, that has her filled with an unease that certainly has a name but has not been named aloud. It does not quite show in her eyes, but it's there. She looks at him, breathing in, exhaling, and for a moment she just looks a little sad and a little wary and a little sorry, but then:

not tea but Grand Marnier, which is nothing at all like tea. Melantha's smile opens, and spreads, observing the tray with the shapes and the tea sandwiches. Cerveza is Spanish for beer. "Birra, per favore," she says, and the double rrs do not roll as they would in Spanish but are individual sounds, a pair of consonants linked together like children holding hands. It is also a cognate, which is helpful. She scoots over so Charlotte can get back on the bed with the sandwiches, which Melantha realizes only belatedly are... interesting.

She realizes that after biting into a cucumber-butter-peanut-butter sandwich. And pausing. And chewing slowly, staring at it, then looking at Charlotte. She considers. She swallows. "It's... almost like hummus? I guess?"

Her next one doesn't fair as well. It's salmon spread and peanut butter, and Melantha flat-out can't get it down. She gives Charlotte a wry look at that one. "See, I would have put the salmon with the butter, maybe. Or the cucumber, even."

But the cheese-apple-lime, Melantha actually likes. Weirdly. She takes the slice of lime off, though, squeezing it onto the cheese, and declares that it is quite good, but she's really only talking to the Silver Fang, because obviously the meat sandwiches are for Erich. Well, for all of them, but mostly Erich, who has dinosaur-shaped ham-salami-ham and turkey-ham-turkey. Just as Melantha is eating a heart-shaped cucumber sandwich that she has carefully (but not at all surreptitiously) scraped the peanut butter off of. And, perhaps, even a cerveza-birra.

"I was thinking about social work." Out of nowhere.

They are alone for a while. And let's be honest: there's a part of Erich that would like nothing more than to roll over on top of Melantha and get reacquainted. He's barely twenty-three. It's been months. He still remembers helping her move into her new apartment. Celia's last apartment in D.C.

He doesn't, though. Maybe because Charlotte is outside, and she would probably throw up. Maybe because -- something about Melantha, something he can't quite put his finger on and ... maybe doesn't want to explore too much right now, not when they've just finally all found each other again,

feels a little different. Or distant. Or maybe just -- uncertain. She seems wary, like she's forgotten who exactly he is. Or how to deal with him. Or that there's a whole other gender out there besides her own, because truth be told, she's never really had to interact with creatures of that gender before. Not as completely and totally as herself, anyway. Not any that weren't family. And not entirely without ulterior motive, even if some of that ulterior motive with Erich was synergistic and cooperative.

It's okay, though. He smiles at her when she looks at him. He can see the sadness and the wariness, and it puts a bit of ache in his smile. But he kisses her shoulder gently, and then he rolls a little ways away from her to give her room.

A moment later, Charlotte is back.

--

Erich is spared the ... interestingness of the sandwiches. His are pretty damn good. They are meat on meat on meat, which means he rather rapidly demolishes a good deal of ham-salami-ham and turkey-ham-turkey. Not that he's greedy, of course: he does share with the girls. He actively encourages them to eat, nudging meat-meat-meat toward them until one or both tell him STOPPIT. Then he eats the rest of the meatwiches himself, and is in fact on the last turkey-ham-turkey one when Melantha speaks up out of the blue.

He lifts his head, looks at her. This time Charlotte is in the middle, so he looks across his packmate's skinny little scarecrow-body. With Melantha in the middle there was at least a gradient; from the college-quarterback build on Erich to the distance-runner strength of Melantha, to ... Charlotte. With the Theurge in the middle, she looks scrawnier than ever. Paler than ever. Happier than ever too, maybe.

"Like working with orphaned kids and abused women? I could see that."

Charlotte haunts her way back into her little bedroom. Yes, haunts, tray in hand, her pale eyes as huge as ever, not wary precisely but there is something about the precision and directness of her pale eyes as they mark the distance between her friends; the sadness and weight of that sadness in Melantha's eyes, behind and beneath even the usual sadness that can touch her. Whose memories swell in Charlotte more actively, because Charlotte's ghosts, grand and mad and sick and virulent and violent, Charlotte's ghosts speak.

And remember, sometimes, the ghosts beneath Melantha's skin. Even those whose names have been lost to time, even those who have lost their names to time, eroded by age upon brutal age.

So: she bites her lower lip and glances from Erich to Melantha and Melantha to Erich and says nothing except: okay when Melantha requests a birra, which is indeed a cognate close enough that Charlotte can interpret it without any assistant from the voices that sometimes rise and fall inside her mind.

Another minute later and Charlotte returns with a pair of Dos Equis open, limes shoved down the necks of the bottles, because that is how they were served at the shack in Baja where they stayed both what seems like forever, and, what seems like forever ago.

Ah, sandwiches. Charlotte does not seem put-off in the least when that some of her experiments in sandwich-making did not turn out well. She tries the salmon-spread and peanut butter and makes a grossed out face and this is why she had servants and though it is rare that Charlotte longs for the comforts of a staff and servants and magically refilling sub-zero refridgerators and cabinets with endless supplies of Reese's Peanut Butter Puffs cereal and caviar well: when she bites into salmon-spread and peanut butter sandwich in the shape of a .. call it a crescent moon? she makes a face and that face says: not even the starving birds would eat this.

So the meal goes.

--

Then Melantha says that she was thinking of social work and Erich knows what that means and Charlotte's glancing at him puzzling through these meanings too and back to Melantha, watching her with a lupine directness that is more about the cant of her head and the set of her jaw and the posture of her spine than it is about the subtle, expressive shift of her brows.

"Do they hunt?" Social workers, Charlotte means. She's sitting between them know, criss-cross applesauce, and sometimes she pours a little more Grand Marnier into a plastic cup and sips it and smiles because she loves the way it tastes like sunshine, but: social workers. "Because I think you should hunt."

A brief, narrow line between her brows.

"Something."

[This is for the wariness / body language with Erich at the early part of last post!]

[Welcome to The Foothills, I love Charlotte

Charlotte @ 6:30PM

[Perception + Primal Urge - Melantha ]

Roll: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8) ( success x 3 ) VALID

witness! @ 6:32PM

[witnessed!]

Charlotte @ 6:33PM

eee. Thank you Damon!]

[Melantha is very uncomfortable/wary when she's alone with Erich. When Erich leans over to kiss her shoulder, if Charlotte catches a glimpse of that, there's a sudden, almost dizzying rise of want as well as affection in her. But she recoils from that, more than she recoils from Erich-their-friend, as though her own desire terrifies or disgusts her. She's longing for physical closeness with both of them, seen especially with all her curling up to Charlotte and nuzzling and sitting veryveryvery close to her, but with Erich she seems equally repelled. It isn't a lack of trust or fear of harm, though. And it means that Melantha's rather potent physicality is only being granted outlet with Charlotte.

Paired with her earlier admission of feeling empty or alone, there's just a broad unsettledness to Melantha, a discomfort in her own skin, that has nothing whatsoever to do with Erich or Charlotte, but which she can't verbalize. She's just reacting to things, visceral and animal, and while with Charlotte she knows exactly how to behave and where she stands, with Erich it's like watching an adolescent mammal, who is not quite ready to mate, running from a sniffing male that she was just sniffing at, herself.]

Melantha looks at Erich, unsettled and far away, and he smiles. Her own expression carries that odd weight, and he can feel her shrink slightly from the kiss he lays on her shoulder even before his mouth has completely reached her. It isn't quite a flinch, but there's a sudden rise and plummet of something inside of her and she retreats from that as much as she does from him. Moreso, even. Erich rolls away, and Charlotte comes in with tea sandwiches and beers. And sits between them, and Melantha who curled in on herself away from Erich's closeness scoots nearer to Charlotte and seems, in fact, comforted when Erich is near Charlotte and Charlotte is near Melantha and Melantha is not near Erich.

Charlotte notices. She doesn't hide that she's looking at it and noticing it when she comes back into her little bedroom and her friends are about a foot apart physically and still several states away from each other in other ways. And Charlotte, noticing, maybe understanding and maybe not, sits between them, maybe intending to be a bridge and maybe just becoming one out of necessity.

He asks if she means orphaned kids, abused women, and there's a flash in her eyes that seems familiar, particularly to him, because she's never fought with Charlotte like she's fought with Erich. "No," she says, and is about to say more, but Charlotte asks her if social workers hunt.

The flash goes out a bit. Melantha hesitates, looking down at her half-eaten sandwich of cucumber and cream cheese and remnants of salmon. "Not really," she says, a little quieter than the almost-snap she gave to Erich. Her head is down and her hair is around her but there's color in her cheeks, quite sudden and uncomfortable. There's not a word for a couple of moments. She doesn't start yelling at them, and that alone is odd because Melantha isn't one to hold back, Melantha isn't one to hesitate, Melantha isn't one to hedge and worry over her words,

not when she trusts,

and not when she's hunting.

She takes a deep breath, sighs as she exhales, and her shoulders move up and down with it.

"I was thinking... about how I've been... punishing people and destroying their lives since I was sixteen, and... maybe I don't want to do that anymore. Or be that anymore. Maybe it'd be better if I tried to help them earlier, before they... turn dark, and start hurting people."

Melantha's fingers work idly at the bread, crustless and soft. "So maybe social work, or psychology, or education. Just. Maybe not hunting anything anymore." She looks up, over at Erich, frowning. "And don't stereotype me. Just oh, of course, the Black Fury goes to help the orphaned kids and abused women. I am so sick of all of us," and maybe she means the Furies, but more likely she means the entire Nation, "just keep cleaning up the damage and punishing the wrongdoers. And you know, it's really not women who are catcalling and honking and raping and beating women and paying them less and not giving them work and treating them like shit, and it's not kids who are asking to get hit or abandoned or sexualized or any of that, it's pretty much mostly men out there destroying everyone's lives and fucking over Gaia in the process. And since the real problem is actually with men, then maybe we should stop trying to teach women and kids how to survive their bullshit or adapt to it or imitate it and start fixing the men to stop being such fuckheads."

At least that, in tone and vigor, sounds more like Melantha. Sounds like she's not just trying to hide under the bed or behind a shadow. But it's so angry. It's borderline -- and perhaps a bit over the border -- hateful. Like it's erupting out of her. Like it's churning in the deep, as molten and violent as magma, shifting everything above, causing cataclysms, floods, the breaking apart and reforming of continents. Like it could very well change the shape of the world.

She exhales, heavy, almost shaken, and looks down again.

"You're not a fuckhead," she mutters quietly, which is rather directly at Erich, even if she's addressing her sandwich, it seems. "My dad and my brothers weren't, either. But most are. And I want to stop hunting, and I want to stop punishing, and I want to stop lying and manipulating and whoring myself out long, long after the bastards have done the damage. Let the wolves destroy the wicked and clean up the messes. I want to see if I can stop more of it from happening in the first place."

There's a hearty sniff. And moisture in the nostrils, and redness in her cheeks, and a thinness and uncertainty to her words,

even at their most fervent.

There are so many things that Charlotte knows: how the nightwind dreams of winter sometimes and the color of an oak's heart and the fickleness of a flame-spirit, even the smallest of them, the little englings and jagglings, which are no more than energy wrapped in need, always hungry for something to burn. And there are so many things that she remembers, that she remembers and could never know, that are contained and sharply so in her skinny body in that cozy little bedroom which is really: no more than a bed and the space for the door to swing and the narrow opening of a window left open and the heat of the meadow beyond and the scent of the piney woods up here and the dusty green scent of sunlight on the waving grass, prairie goldenbean rising above the grasses all sunlit, like a torch-caught-flame. The low hum of insects lazy in the deft heat of a midsummer afternoon.

(Even after such a short time here, Charlotte knows that the best and most interesting places in the woods are the places where things transition: where the meadow curves into the edge of the scrubby woods, those boundaries, those borderlands, where chokeberry and wild plums compete with pin cherry and mountain mahogany and fine-toothed buckthorn. The window frames a tight fight; sunlight drenching brilliant on the meadowgrass, soft shadows rippling through the blades as the wind rises, rustling. That mass of tangled growth where the meadow folds into a slope, edging a narrow defile framing in a damp hollow that can sometimes, in spring, after a storm, be called a stream. This is the background to Melantha's face, that bright wedge of sunlight behind her shining luminous around her dark hair like a halo. Her features more enshadowed but not dark - just softened in relief against the hot smear of the noontide sun.)

And so many things she does not know: deliberately or otherwise. Charlotte is so very detached from the human world. She looks at her friends and slips between them, crawling around the tray of sandwiches after she has returned with cerveza, with birra, to sit between Erich and Melantha without quite knowing what to do with what she finds there except this: make herself a bridge and a frame to keep them both close. So: she sits between them, mostly upright, feet now flat on the mattress, knees tucked together and bent. And she does not really know what to do with what she senses from Melantha and that ignorance is chosen, is invited, is cultivated as armor, as a shield.

But: she is also wolf and girl and friend and packmate and when Melantha leans into her Charlotte leans back and it is lupine, this shouldering affection, and her weight shifts to her hip with the movement, her knees tucking down to the mattress, pushing the sandwich tray - which is now mostly a mass of discarded bits of peanut butter, salmon, white bread, and lime rinds - forward, joining Erich into their next with a foot on his knee.

It is meant to be reassuring and it's not something she thinks about, she just curls into it. Says with her body: see? we are all connected. And what she thinks in that moment is that:

they should have a spirit between them. Kindled like a flame.

It is just this sudden conviction.

--

And she's listening too, Charlotte. More Melantha's tone than to the words themselves; the way it moves and changes, the way she erupts and then recedes, exhaling heavily, addressing her sandwich rather than Erich, the thinness and uncertainty in beneath her words, even when they are pouring out of her, violent, hateful.

So Charlotte leans further into Melantha, wraps both skinny arms around Melantha's shoulders and presses her nose into the Fury's hair. Breathing her in. Just breathing.

"Then you could be a priest," Charlotte murmurs, just that simple. Except: the theurge is taking this all very seriously, and that depth of awareness is evident in her tone. She has no idea what choice is, Charlotte, animal and moon-bound and mad. She never has. She has no idea how overwhelming the possibilities are. What it means to make a choice: of what and whom and how to be.

"You just have to decide how to do it," and she kisses Melantha's brow, quiet and solemn and reassuring, "whether you want to tend the twisted trees, brace them and splint them and train them to grow straight and tall despite the poisoned soil; or whether you want to heal the ground beneath their feet."

In truth, it's not easy listening to Melantha through some of that. Not for Erich, anyway. It calls to mind those painful first few meetings, when they couldn't stop fighting, when they couldn't understand each other, when she thought he was a fuckheaded male and he thought she was a silly weak little girl. It makes him frown up at the ceiling of Charlotte's tinybedroom, and it makes some uneasy twist of guilt-defensiveness-anger-rage coil in the pit of his stomach when she says the problem is the men, it's the men that are fucking everything up for everyone, they're fuckheads.

Not all of them.

But most.

Charlotte embraces her. She sees through the anger and the hate; she sees the uncertainty and the thinness. Erich wishes he could. Erich, for his part, is quiet, frowning at the ceiling, listening to his sister tell his ... his something, he doesn't even know what Melantha's relationship to him should be called -- listening to his sister tell her that she just has to decide how to do it. How to tend the twisted trees, or how to heal the ground beneath their feet. He wishes, fervently, that he had Charlotte's strange, skewed wisdom. Even if it means he says things like how birds used to be dinosaurs, and even if it means he curls up into a ball when they drive through L.A., and even if it means sometimes he's so shy and uncertain that, that...

no, he doesn't wish that at all. He feels bad for envying his odd, dotty little sister, even for a moment. He just wishes he had her ability to be close to Melantha, right now. Erich thinks to himself: she's so far away from me now. And in the end,

though he wants very much to say something, say the right thing,

he doesn't say anything at all.

Charlotte essentially sniffs at Melantha. Not physically, but almost with spirit. They're all wolves, in a way, though Melantha is the furthest removed from their ability to shift, her own ability to sense spirit and touch glory. And Charlotte... is, right now, able to be closer to Melantha than Erich. But that is not mere nature; it is because Melantha is in retreat from Erich, because she isn't letting him.

Nevermind that she's noticed that they both still wear her little friendship bracelets. Maybe they've even told her that the pigeon-spirit that rested on her own wrist for the longest time has not left their sides and is, in fact, perched in the eaves of the tiny house right now because it loves them so much and it will never ever ever ever ever go away from them, nope nope nope. There are symbols and signs of Melantha's love for them both, but right now, only Charlotte can feel it.

--

Melantha sniffs as she's embraced, knowing that some of that wasn't easy for either of them to hear. She feels kinda bad.

Held, inhaled, breathed like she's air or holy incense, Melantha opens her eyes from where her head rests under Charlotte's chin and looks over at Erich, who isn't saying anything. Those eyes of hers, surprisingly pale for all her ancestry, a throwback to some near-mythological Amazon, are limpid upon him.

A priest, Charlotte says, and it doesn't occur to Melantha that Charlotte might possibly mean one of those nasty sexless creatures roaming the world now, pulling its strings. She means a true priest, shaman, witch doctor, holy one, they who go not just in the holy place but the holiest of holies, to touch the face and hear the voice of true gods, who sacrifice and heal, who teach and study. Who do many things, because a priest is not one thing.

"Yeah," she whispers, her eyes still watching Erich, though she nuzzles her brow under Charlotte's jaw. But Erich is looking at the ceiling, and Melantha feels comfort and guilt braided together. She thinks of how far apart Charlotte and Erich are in purpose, in method: they are both violent, savage creatures, because his rage is savage and her wisdom is savage, and their moods are so distant. Melantha breathes in and sighs, and then she does what she thinks is the right thing,

though truth be told right now, she's not entirely sure.

"Charlotte?" she murmurs, drawing back a little, looking at her sister's diaphanous eyes, her own shadowed under a furrowed brow. "I think... I need to go in the woods and talk to Erich."

"Or you could stay here," Charlotte returns, rather quietly, not stealing a glance at Erich behind her shoulder even if she rather wants to. "Uh, 'cos this is a good place for making talens? And I have to go to the other side for that."

Charlotte gives Melantha one last squeeze then crawls around the decimated sandwich tray. Even after all this time with Erich, it does not naturally occur to her that she could pick it up and take it to the kitchen and clean it off. Sometimes she remembers the lessons he taught her in the white marble kitchen in the winterhouse in D.C., with all the light and the view of the big oak tree older than the country. Sometimes she does not, and the habits of a lifetime of wealth and privilege override that one brief lesson.

"It takes a while? Uh, don't drive away without me!"

But: she stops in the door, crouches down and grabs her dedicated half-sized messenger bag full of theurge-y things, then gives both Erich and Melantha tight little smiles and retreats through the door. Out in the living room, Charlotte finds her reflection in one of the windows of the tinyhouse and reaches. She's a kind of spirit-sink, Charlotte, the gauntlet thinner for her than most and it never takes her long to slip across. As she does now, with a rather small pop as air rushes in to fill the Charlotte-sized vacuum left behind in her wake.

Melantha wants to protest, and her mouth opens to do so. She looks troubled, distressed at sending Charlotte away, not wanting Charlotte to leave, she and Erich can go walking, or --

but Charlotte says talens. And so she isn't being kicked out of her bedroom, her tiny house with its pretty flowers and tiny sandwiches. Melantha closes her mouth and squeezes the other girl back, her arms leaner than they were a couple of months ago but still stronger than Charlotte's. She breathes her in, closing her eyes, missing that smell. Some of the pigeon's longing can be felt in a rush around her then: she does not want to let go. But she does, and Charlotte tells them not to drive off without her, and that ache infuses her eyes and her voice all over again when she says:

"We wouldn't," even if some part of her knows that Charlotte is teasing. Which hits her, a moment later, after Charlotte has vanished into ether plains: Charlotte was making jokes, and Charlotte was teasing. Melantha blinks. She looks at the spot where Charlotte used to be, and then

turns her head, hair brushing over her back, and looks at Erich.