Ornature

The teenaged clerks at the Baskin and Robbins cannot quite believe that Charlotte intends to eat the entirety of her order: a waffle cone with a scoop of rainbow sherbert on the bottom, rocky road in the middle, and pink bubblegum ice cream on top, laced with peanut butter syrup, the sort that hardens to a candy shell, and scattered with: peanuts, coconut, whipped cream, and topped with a cherry. She just kept ordering things and the end result is a remarkable and less-than-appetizing mishmash of strange and colorful things that make Charlotte's eyes glow with pleasure as she considers the strangeness of her creation.

The waffle cone is wrapped with several napkins and already beginning to drip sherbert through the bottom as they walk, and Charlotte is less interested in eating it than she is in examining the strange layers, breaking through the candy-shell of the peanut butter syrup and digging through the bubblegum ice cream for bits of frozen pink bubblegum chiclets as they walk the main street.

It's brilliant. They can walk here from the tinyhouse, parked as it is in Alderful / Three Sisters park in the shadows of Evergreen Mountain and Elephant Butte, but are far enough away from town and civilization that there are no close neighbors whom they might make nervous. Just campers passing through, though as the weather turns toward the wintry, there are fewer and fewer of those.

Charlotte is quiet as they drift away from the shop, and further down the main street, watching the drift of shadows as afternoon turns into evening. But there's something a little odd about her even for Charlotte; not-quite-distant and not-quite-thoughtful, just strange, as if her skin did not quite fit properly. And is has been thus for a few days, or a week or two.

"I know we're already a real pack. But I think," it takes a certain amount of willpower for Charlotte to screw up the courage to broach the subject with Erich. Even after all this time; they've drifted without a totem, together, for so very long. But the need has been in the back of her throat for days or weeks, and she finally squares her shoulders and just says it. Like Melantha would do. Wait no, Melantha wouldn't wait days or weeks. Melantha would say it, scream it, wouldn't she? Take the idea in her teeth and tear it open and lay it out at their feet. " - it's time to go on a quest and find a totem."

Ice creaaaaam.

The biggest downside of only eating meat, if you ask Erich, is that you miss out on all those desserts you used to love. Apple pie? Out the window. Chocolate chip cookies? Not a chance in hell. Red velvet cake? Only if you want to be trapped in the bathroom for the next sixteen hours. Ice cream, though. Ice cream, he can still take. Or maybe he just loves it enough that he's willing to risk gurgly stomach syndrome to get it. And the best thing about ice cream, of course, is that you can make it taste like all sorts of other desserts.

So: that's why they go to Baskin Robbins. That's why, when they walk out, Erich has a two-scoop sundae in hand. Blueberry cheesecake and almond fudge, his two flavors. Not quite as wildly different as Charlotte's, but still a bit of an odd mix. He doesn't seem to mind. He seems downright blissful, eyes on his ice cream, wandering a meandering trail down the sidewalk alongside his packmate, enjoying his treat spoonful by spoonful.

When Charlotte starts talking, he's still sort of paying attention to his ice cream. He's swirling the tip of his spoon around the sides of a scoop, gathering up more and more and more ice cream until he has a nice spoonful to nom. But when Charlotte gets to the end of her sentence, Erich takes notice, glancing over half-surprisedly.

A beat of silence. Then, agreeably: "Okay." Another spoonful of ice cream before he speaks again. "How do we do that?"

Charlotte is mostly making a mess. She is leaving a small, dotty trail of melted rainbow sherbert. That may have been intentional, from some story like Hansel and Gretel, except changed and stranger and every-so-much more dangerous. The bones are not chicken bones and there the moonlight paths are fraught with more dangerous than you can begin to imagine.

And even though the waffle cone is leaking like that, Charlotte is a fastidious little thing about it. Careful enough that none of it lands on her. On her Chuck Taylor's, on her dedicated jeans. On the Sprite t-shirt she should burn to ash and scatter to the winds so that she can dedicated something newer, less worn-and-washed.

Surprise; and her surprise is bird-like, startled and winging, like the black drift of a rookery into the sky when a circling hawk has been spotted by the lookouts on the highest branches. Crisp and bright and sidelong. Her mouth is already open to tell Erich why but -

"Oh."

is all that comes out. A beat. Two.

Then a sudden, slicing smile. All yay except wordless, see: moon-mad and sunbright. Charlotte bumps shoulders with Erich and, " - uh, I can learn the rite? Or make something that we can give as chiminage and ask another theurge to do it."

A brief lacuna; a button-eyed frown. "I mean, I think we should ask someone else? 'Cos there's another rite I wanna learn too. It'd take forever to learn them both."

"I want you to -- ! -- aw." Erich is mildly disappointed. "It woulda been nice for you to do it. But if it takes too long that's all right. What's the other rite?"

"I could learn it. It'd just take longer. So you hafta promise you won't get eaten by any seamonsters or anything before then if we wait. Or Landmonsters,

" - or groundmonsters." Charlotte shrugs her bony little shoulders, then grins as she has found another piece of frozen bubblegum buried within her melted concoction and scoops it out with a pleased little smile, nudging it to the top and side of her waffle-cone-sundae.

"The other one, well. It's an urrah one," and there is indeed something perjorative in Charlotte's use of the term urrah, though that distaste may well be merely for their weaverbound ways. The spiders make her shiver, and sometimes they make her snarl, and sometimes they make her scream. " - but it," Charlotte frowns, stops short and glances at Erich's profile. "It binds kin in to the pack's totem. So they're spiritually part of the pack, too. Not forever. You have to keep doing it.

"It's like stitching. It is stitching. It's needles and skin and spirit and thread."

Erich's eyes get so wide at that. Not at the urrah thing, not at Charlotte using a pejorative term, but:

it binds kin in to the pack's totem.

That. That makes his eyes wide, that has him nodding in enthusiastic agreement before Charlotte even finishes -- though, when she does finish, Erich balks a little. "Euugh," he says of needles and skin and spirit and thread. "That's ... gory. But even so. That'd be awesome. Have you told Melantha? Oh yeah, did I tell you she's looking for a job down here in Evergreen?"

And then another thought comes to mind:

"How do we ... recruit a totem, anyway? What do we do about chiminage?"

"It's not gory," disputes Charlotte, wrinkling her nose. Arguing with a gleeful Ahroun about what constitutes gore is not the most absurd thing a theurge is called upon to do, but see - she is comfortable enough with Erich now that she does disagree with him, without thinking about it and without stuttering her way through the contrarian statement. Frowns a bit, "it's necessary. You have to pull the spirit from us into them, see. You can't just say a spell and make it happen. It's not just some stupid magic thing."

"I haven't told her yet, though. I - I don't wanna say something until I know that someone's gonna teach me. And a totem," a faint, narrow-shouldered shrug. "We could think about what we wanna find?

"Or we could start the rite and see what comes? And see what calls?"

Then, a brief frown, a glance over her shoulder, back at the Baskin Robbins. There are more people inside the store than outside now, and a few kids spilling out onto the benches on the sidewalk now that Erich-and-his-rage are out of range of their senses.

"Like a people job?"

[ahem: "did I tell you she found a job down here in Evergreen?"]

[erm -- just ignore that line entirely. kai's "in" to the scene is that erich and charlotte are meeting melantha after she gets off work.]

[edit: drop Charlotte's question too!]

Erich hides a grin behind a spoonful of ice cream. "Oh," he says, very assiduously Serious (tm), "of course not. It's not like anything a Theurge does is just magic. Even if she's throwing fireballs from a slingshot. No sirree."

A little more really-honestly-serious then: "I won't say anything either til you know for sure, then. And," another mouthful of ice cream, "I kinda like the idea of just seeing what comes. I mean that's kinda how we ended up together in the first place. It seems ... appropriate.

"Plus," he adds, "I don't even know enough spirits to know who to chase after in the first place. And that just seems really forced and weird to me. I'm sure it works great for a lot of people! But maybe not us."

The Little Bear used to be a church. And used to be a drugstore. For forty years, though, it's been a saloon, complete with swinging doors, brass registers, carved bars and wooden stools. There's live music and bison burgers and a reputation for being one of the rowdiest bars in the mountains. The stage is hung with a traffic light. Also: several dozen bras, hanging down like streamers. There is live music right now, in fact, something called Waitin' on Ray, and you can hear it from... well, down the block. Down at the Baskin Robbins.

When Melantha comes out, her hair is in a low side ponytail that lets it fall past her shoulder and over her right breast, so it's off her face but still mostly visible, still thick and pretty and girly. She's not wearing much makeup, but last week she started wearing a little bit. A little. She's wearing jeans, and the new sneakers she got that are comfortable and not falling apart so she can wear them to the bar, and she's wearing her Little Bear Saloon t-shirt that in a way identifies her as a waitress and not a bartender. The bartenders can pretty much wear whatever.

She is wearing her new coat, too, which falls well down her thighs -- almost to her knees -- and has a hood on it and is good for shedding rain and is quite warm and has big pockets and turns her into a walking rectangle with legs. It isn't closed, but it probably will be soon, as it is very cold.

Standing outside, she looks down the street, waiting to see Charlotte and Erich, who are not hard to spot. They shine in the darkness. That is mostly metaphor, but they shine so brightly for Melantha that she beams when she catches sight of them, raising her arm and waving, thumping down the steps to head towards them on the sidewalk.

"That's not magic either." These things are transactional, steeped in lore. Part of the contract the Garou hold with creation and Charlotte takes both the contracts and the context Very, Very Seriously. She sniffs, stops fishing for bubblegum and is telling / admonishing Erich Very Very Seriously, That's just a fire elemental bound into a - "

When she glances up and espies that hidden grin.

Oh. Oh. He's teasing.

Charlotte blushes.

Just a bit, but

her cheeks go all splotchy and pink, the tone rather ruddier than the tips of her hair.

"I think that's the best way. Like, listening and seeing what calls you instead of harrying off after whoever you think you want. We should visit some of the shrines though. Like to say hi? So that we're ready to listen for them, and they're ready to listen for us."

Ahead, Melantha emerges from the saloon and does shine; or wait, no. It is mostly a scent for Charlotte. Warmth and turned earth and shoots and seeds. Dark things and secret places. Hell, unbound. Charlotte shoots up a hand waving back and Erich and Charlotte shift from strolling to a loping pace that still feels somehow wolflife, even in their very different humanskins.

Nevermind the cold: Charlotte must be wearing a thick, thick hoodie over her old sprite t-shirt, and sure she can see her breath, but that doesn't stop her from eating Evergreen's strangest wafflecone dripping a trail of rainbow sherbert, all of the pieces of bubblegum dug out of hte melting pink mess and shoved aside, but not yet consumed,

And it doesn't stop her from offering the cone-and-spoon to Melantha, just in case she wants some.

Who wouldn't, really?

Erich. Erich wouldn't want some. God, he loves ice cream and he still thinks bubblegum ice cream is gross. Especially when there are pieces of bubblegum in there, wouldn't that gum up your innards? He sends Charlotte's cone another sidelong, distrustful glance.

But then he forgets about that, because up ahead at the Little Bear, which is a saloon, which kinda made Erich a little wary when Melantha said she got a job there -- made him picture disreputable outlaws in black hats and black bandannas, made him wonder if he'd have to follow her to work and sit in a corner and snarl at misbehaving patrons --

what were we talking about? Oh, yes: he forgets about the bubblegum, because up ahead at the Little Bear Melantha has appeared. She is coming down the sidewalk toward them, a walking rectangle that Erich thinks is just beautifulbeautifulbeautiful, and both of them love so dearly. Charlotte's hand shoots up in a wave. Erich grins, he plays it a little cool, he gives Melantha an up-jerk of his chin as they lope on over.

"Hey," he says when they're within earshot. "We were talking about getting a totem. And like, just visiting some shrines and stuff, and then seeing who shows up for us." They're close enough now that Erich reaches out to give Melantha a side-hug, putting her between himself and Charlotte. "How was work?"

Does Our Charlotte take note of that mistrustful glance? Per + Empathy

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 5, 6) ( success x 1 )

Like beasts, then. Like canines that they are sometimes and also deep down and also simultaneously with their humanity and their monstrosity, they see her and it is like their ears perk and their tails wag and they want to trot over and wag and wag and rub their heads under her palms and lean heavily into her legs and bump against her and circle around her and put their heads over her like this, itself, is blanketing her with warmth and protection and comfort while

absorbing the same from her.

Of course the two of them do not just slip into lupus and start doing all of these physical things. Charlotte is offering her ice cream that is... many-colored and most of them are sort of neon or brown which don't look great together. Erich is nodding, but loping, and immediately starts talking to her and we were saying this and we're thinking about this and hug.

She smiles, squeezing against his side and then leaning the other way to bump against Charlotte's shoulder, then peering at Charlotte's ice cream, then at her. "I'm okay," she says, and: "It was pretty good. I got decent tips. I'm glad I'm not closing." A beat. "A totem?" She blinks, and swivels her head to look up at Erich, then twists to look at Charlotte as though to confirm that this is all true. "You guys are going to actually make honest werewolves out of each other finally?"

Charlotte sort of notices the way Erich is side-eyeing her magnificent creation. She side-eyes him back, her inner eight-year-old (who takes up a fair portion of her inner-self) is rather-quietly-pleased to have grossed him out. Silly Erich. Bubblegum ice cream is amazing and it is a limited edition so you really have to strike while the iron is hot and before the ice cream is melting. Soon enough it will be replaced with pumpkin pie ice cream and then eggnog and on and on and it will be months and months and months before another ice cream almost as good as bubblegum (which is: tutti frutti, and then just for the damn name) returns to the hallowed halls of Baskin Robbins.

And who knows where they'll be in a year, or a month, or a day.

The make honest werewolves idiom flies over Charlotte's pink-and-platinum head. Or beneath it. Her knowledge of popular culture is so woefully inadequate she probably wouldn't recognize Justin Timberlake if he walked up and kissed her on the nose. The first time she saw Mulan was last winter, in a too-posh hotel suite in downtown DC, on Melantha's computer.

So, Charlotte frowns a Charlotte-frown, the puzzled sort, and pulls back the wafflecone careful not to drip on Melantha while returning the shoulder bump with familiar and physical affection, simple and simply pleased.

"We were already honest. We're just gonna get a totem." A beat. Charlotte flicks a glance at Melantha's profile, then beyond her to Erich. "I said we should," and Charlotte is proud that she sadi it. Straightens her posture a bit not quite military but there is something very determined about it. A gleaming substructural pride. " - and Erich said okay."

"Dude it's not just gonna be us," Erich says, almost heatedly. "Charlotte's gonna learn a rite and -- oops."

"I don't know if I can!" A hot, quicksilver little glance at Erich. " - or if I can find someone to teach me." Then shooting an apologetic look to Melantha, Charlotte continues, somewhat guiltily.

" - but there's a rite I could learn that would, it would like. Make you part of the pack too. I mean with the totem spirit and everything. Not that you aren't already 'cos you are."

"It's a saying," she explains to Charlotte. "It's kind of a stupid, sexist one, though. You're both honest."

Leaning over, she plants a kiss on the selfsame nose that Justin Timberlake is missing out on, because she's in a good mood and her two best friends in the world are with her and Charlotte looks all happy and proud and Melantha's lips spread and open in a gleaming smile as she draws back from that little peck, because she's happy for them.

Erich is heated, and oopsing. Melantha turns to look at him, a little startled. A little crestfallen. "Who else?" she asks, trying not to sound crestfallen, nor startled. "Are they -- have I met them?"

[put second line of charlotte's post AFTER melantha's!]

"No, I meant -- " Charlotte's glance is returned with a sort of guilty dart of Erich's eyes before they go back to Melantha, "well, like Charlotte says, maybe we can bind you to the totem too. But it's still just the three of us. And even if you can't be bound to the totem, you're still our packmate."

His arm is still around Melantha, just kinda draped over her shoulders. He gives her another side-hug as though to reassure her.

Charlotte is looking guilty and unsure and Melantha is looking crestfallen-while-valiantly-trying-not-to-be and Erich is looking guilty too, but just then,

the Theurge's words are starting to sink in. It would make her part of the pack. She doesn't need to clarify that she means the spirit bond, not just the bonds of love and friendship that are, in the end, what matter most deeply. Melantha understands that intuitively, and she is very still, while Erich is trying to squeeze her reassuringly and she is blinking, her face blanked, her lips eversoslightly parted and her pale eyes wide with thought. Some people squint. Melantha's eyes only seem to grow fuller, brighter, like swelling moons turned a faint blue in winter.

"Is that allowed?" she whispers, finally, turning her head slowly to look at Charlotte while letting Erich hug her, leaning into that hug, her breath curling in a small cloud of steam.

"It's a rite." That's Charlotte's answer to the question. The theurge's version of of course it has to be. This small line between her pale brows and a flick of her pale blue eyes over Melantha's features, trying to intuit some piece of the puzzle to that question - "It's -

"There wouldn't be a rite if it wasn't allowed. Rites are sacred. They're how we - how we mark things. How we keep spirit-in-flesh and flesh-in-spirit. How we bind and how we open tombs and close borders.

"Someone did it and the spirits blessed it and infused it with meaning and power. So yeah - it's allowed. I mean it's more than allowed right? I just -

"I hafta learn how to do it? Would - would you want to?"

"Why wouldn't it be?" -- is Erich's answer to Melantha's question. Which breaks his heart a little bit, because: god, he is not used to hearing her sound uncertain. She never used to sound uncertain, not when she was in D.C., not when she was pretending to be Celia De Luca, not when she knew her place and her mission and all that.

But Charlotte has a better answer for her. She has an answer that actually makes sense, which you wouldn't expect from a batty little Theurge who sometimes barely seems able to string her own thoughts into coherence. Erich isn't surprised anymore, though. There's method to Charlotte's madness. There's wisdom in her.

For all that, she ends on a question. It's more than allowed, right? They are all three of them such hopeful, fragile, wounded, healing creatures. All of them burdened with their own pasts; all of them weighted down with their own breeds of insecurities. Erich reaches across Melantha to squeeze Charlotte's shoulder now.

"Way more than allowed," he agrees -- then falls silent, listening. It hadn't even occurred to him to ask if Melantha would want to.

"I don't think werewolves always agree with spirits on what's allowed or not," Melantha says quietly to Charlotte's explanation of why it's okay, why it has to be okay. She does look comforted, though, reassured that Erich and Charlotte won't be punished for this, won't be laughed at or outcast for this. She also still looks simply (but completely) stunned.

Would you want to?

Her eyes fall closed heavily for a moment, eyelashes stuck to eyelashes, then lift. "I don't even know what that would mean," she says quietly. "Would I... would I hear your thoughts? What would it feel like? Would it --"

It occurs to her that they would never offer her anything that might hurt her. It occurs to her that in the end, the only thing that it possibly could do is keep them bound as close, closer, than they already are. It occurs to her that of course she wants to. That she is elated. That she wants to kiss them both and sleep between them tonight and hug them forever, and that these are all okay things to feel and not things to fear.

She huffs a little laugh. "What... what do I need to do?"

"I don't even really know what it'd feel like," Erich confesses quietly. "I've never really been in a real pack. Like a pack that didn't just kinda band together for a week or two to get something done, and then scatter. And those packs aren't too tightly bound so... yeah.

"You might be able to hear our thoughts. Not all of them, I think. Just the ones we want each other to hear? And maybe the ones that we kinda let slip. But I don't think we'll turn into like... the Borg Collective. I think really we won't feel too different. 'Cause it's not like we aren't a pack already. We'll just have corporate sponsorship." He laughs a little at his own joke.

"I don't think you and I are gonna be doing all that much. We can help Charlotte with whatever she needs to learn the Rite, and to pay chiminage to whatever spirit wants to be our totem. I guess maybe," a glance at Charlotte for confirmation, "we can just ... start thinking about what might be a good gift for a patron spirit?"

Whatever Charlotte's doing with her ice cream cone she sort of stops. She's holding it in one position and the drips from her rainbow sherbet are accumulating on the sidewalk and the spoon has gone all akimbo as the ice cream melts. The creature's pale eyes flicker from Melantha to Erich and back again. That Erich has never been in a real pack makes her immediately and immeasurably said, though some spark of Melantha's wonder brightens and warms her.

Look at the way her mouth curls just before she takes a giant spoonful of those pieces of candy-covered bubblegum into her mouth, before she leans to start ridding herself of the rest of her treat. Which is to say, as they walk, she starts scooping the ice cream out into strip of grass between sidewalk and street. Where it will feed the insects that feed the birds and feed the raptors. When she gets down to the wafflecone she starts crumbling it at the edges and tossing the cross onto the sidewalk, for the bravest of the daring, darting little birds to consume.

"You'll always know when we're close. You'll be able to feel us in the back of your mind even when we're far." She's been in a pack, Charlotte. It was good, for a long, long time. "You'll know if we die." Solemn little thing, "and when we come back. If we come back.

"If we're spiritually strong enough we can share thoughts. Not read them. Just: share. It's like talking except in your head, and it doesn't matter if you're here or across the city. You'll feel the spirit, too. Sometimes it gives you some of its strength. Something it thinks you need to like - to be what you're supposed to be.

"I just have to learn the rite; we have to sew ourselves together, needle and thread. Then we have to go on a quest. I don't know if the rite will work before we have the totem, when we're just looking.

"Chiminage depends on the spirit," Charlotte explains to Erich, in a tone that says silly - " - but we do need chiminage for the theurge who'll do the rite. I thought I could make some healing talens. Everyone needs those."

A brief, flickering look upward, weaving back to Erich's profile. "Do you you wanna ask Ingrid?"

Annnnd instantly Erich's face clouds. He's got no brain-face filter at all, and very little brain-mouth filter -- as the oops statement moments before evidences. Nothing at all seems to prevent what he thinks, what he feels, from instantly showing on his face.

"No." It is very door-slammy. He marches in grim silence for a few steps. Then:

"She's already packed. Some Glass Walker dude named AFRO DADDY." Erich sounds outraged on top of grumpy now.

Charlotte is littering. And she's doing it with intention, sugar and cream and high-fructose corn syrup for the insects and so forth, but Melantha doesn't know that and Melantha is bewildered. She doesn't bring it up. She listens. And everything sounds good to her, even knowing when they die, feeling it if they come back, but she goes a little pale when Charlotte mentions being sewn together. Melantha just swallows, and her color renews, but for a moment she looked a little shaken by that.

Her brow furrows, after that, as Charlotte mentions Ingrid and Erich gets really mad,

really fast.

Melantha shifts slightly away from his side, looking at him, then at Charlotte, then, quietly: "Who is Ingrid?"

"Oh." says Charlotte, quietly, to that door-slammy no. She marches along in Erich's wake. Or, really, does not particularly march so much as trail, her pale head canted, her darting eyes fixed and bright. And,

"Oh."

Then, to Melantha, quiet but not shunting quiet. She's not whispering, she's not aiming for discretion.

"Ingrid's Erich's friend. She has a sword and she - she -

" - she's scary. He asked her to come with us when we left Washington? But she had to go or didn't want to come. Then she tracked us to Mexico when we were surfing? and came here with us when you called."

Charlotte stops littering; just tosses the remnants of her ice cream cone into the nearest trash can then jobs a handful of steps to catch back up to Erich. Bumps him physically, makes her presence known. But she doesn't say anything. She doesn't know what to say.

Erich can feel Melantha shying away. His arm falls from around her; his hands stuff into his pockets. Well, one of them, anyway. The other one's still holding his melting sundae. Charlotte fills in the blanks for Ingrid. Erich's scowl

turns darker and darker, lifting only when Charlotte bumps him, and only a little.

"She was my friend," he corrects, quieter now. "Or I thought she was. We met in DC. For a while we were both loners who didn't know anyone, so we hung out and killed stuff and had Thanksgiving at a crappy buffet diner. I mean that's kinda shit you'd do with a friend, right? Plus then she followed me out to Mexico, like Charlotte said. And we came to Denver toge--

" -- oh! Wait! You have met her. Sort of. She was there when we walked in and found you in the Sept. She just never got off the elevator, remember? Anyway: yeah. I kinda thought all that meant she'd be in the pack? Or at least, y'know, tell me that she wasn't gonna? But nope! Apparently she can come tell me the city Sept got gutted, but she can't tell me hey by the way I got packed up.

"Anyway, we had a big fight and now we're not friends anymore. And I know I sound about thirteen but that's that. Whatever. I don't think she would have gotten along with you guys anyhow."

She has a sword and she's scary. Melantha's eyebrows go up: this is a werewolf talking. Also, Charlotte seems unaware sometimes that she's pretty scary. Just... maybe not in the 'has a sword' way. She tilts her head, resting her temple against Charlotte's head. They are nearly the same height, though Charlotte seems to keep getting taller.

Her expression is sad. "I didn't know. I... didn't even know you had a friend like that in DC." Her head gives a little shake as she pulls it away from Charlotte. "I don't remember her from the day you guys got here. It does seem weird that she followed you to Mexico... and came here with you... and then just..."

Melantha shrugged. "I'm sorry."

There's a pause, and then she gives a shiver. "Can we go back home and keep talking there? I'm starting to freeze."

Charlotte is almost entirely unaware that she herself is scary. Or perhaps she knows it beneath her skin, beneath the skin of her conscious mind, somewhere down in her pure-bred bones. That she is not fragile or frail or failing. That she is made of iron and bathed in silver. That she was born, not to rule, but to stand at the queen's right hand, and whisper words no one remembers to songs no one can forget; remember how sap flows; the taste of summer; the bee's word for honey, how to make the earth open up,

and swallow someone whole.

Just now she's a girl with slightly messy hands and an alert, wary look on her face; sad-and-angry. The former prominent, though in a tasting, reflected way. The latter also: reflected, called up on her, beaten into the polished surface of her gaze.

Charlotte - nuzzles Melantha, brow to brow. Pale eyes past her forehead, on Erich's profile.

He elaborates, angrily, and Charlotte's quiet then.

She still doesn't know what to say except,

"I'm sorry, too." And,

" - c'mon. Let's go home." And,

" - race you!"

As she takes off running toward the truck.