Ornature

[Do you guys want to repost the 13 posts we have in email?]

Charlotte thinks what if he doesn't want to come and Charlotte says, "Okay," with spark of something that feels weird in her mouth. Neither ash nor flame, but something in the midst of combustion that makes her tongue tingle and what she says means more in this moment than what she thinks, because there is a mild spark of light in her eyes and a curling edge to her little half smile because what she thinks is that the worst thing would be okay too.

Because she's here.

"Maybe I will call him."

The sink is full of scraped-off burned cookie-bits and the air is full of that Christmas scent, piney-boughs and sweet spice and Charlotte is smiling one of her strange little smiles, like she's remembered a secret no one has ever known before.

"He can't stay here though. There's no room."

"Nah," Erich says, smiling across his shoulder at Charlotte while she decorates cookies and he chills out leaning against the counter waiting for Melantha to come home, "he could totally stay here."

It says something about Erich, what he says next. It says something about the sort of person he is, how generous and unselfish he is, how welcoming and eager and happy to have guests:

"I've got a queensized mattress. If he doesn't mind we can totally share a bed for a couple nights. And if my sister comes maybe she can squeeze in with you. If worst comes to worst, like if Melantha invites people too, I can always go sleep in the truck, or curl up on the floor in wolfskin.

"I wouldn't mind at all. But well, if Chaz would rather have his own room and his own bed, we can always park the tinyhouse behind a hotel or something. That'd work too."

Charlotte's hands are dusted with multicolored sugar crystals, and while she is really rather precise (if, ah, fanciful) in her cookie-decorating habits, the bright sugar is scattered all over the counter, her hands, her t-shirt and even her seams of her jeans. Tiny little particles are sticky in her hair, but given the moonlight and cotton candy color she maintains (with Kool-Aid, sometimes, and sometimes with Manic Panic dye) they seem almost deliberate. Decorate rather than accidental.

Strange to see so feral a creature engaged in something as thoroughly ordinary as decorating cookies. She is so spare and lean, her torso a parabolic arc, her arms long and elegant, defined by the solid bones of extraordinary breeding.

Charlotte loves this den. The closeness. The way their scents have mingled and permeated the wood. It is tinytiny and there is something in her that requires space, that wants to soar, but the child in her loves the neat little cubby of her bed, her window looking out into the dark wash of the piney woods near Evergreen filling with snow. She is biting her tongue with concentration as she works to dot her little galaxy-person with tiny pinprick points of changing light. Nebulae or starclusters, places where burning-things are born, and where they go to die.

Erich offers to share-his-space without a second thought, and he's smiling at her, leaning against the counter and watching her. He interrupts the sweep of light from one of the ceiling fixtures and cuts an oblong shadow across the room.

Charlotte looks back up at him, then. Shining eyes behind the sweep of pale blond lashes.

"Your sister's welcome to sleep with me. But I think Chaz would be happier with his own room. He can get a car and drive out here, too. Or rent a cabin or something. I don't wanna park in a hotel parking lot."

She's such an eldritch thing. Sometimes Charlotte doesn't quite seem real; seems half-spirit herself. Well, obviously they're all half-spirit, Erich's not dumb about that or anything, but: Charlotte seems that way more than the rest of them put together. Like maybe if you looked at her side-on she just wouldn't even be there, in that shape, or...

he's looking at her sort of side-on right now, though. He's smiling at her, and that smile widens when she looks back at him. "Awesome," he says, and straightens up. "We'll sorta kinda plan on it, then." Which means they won't plan at all, but will keep the possibility open in their minds. "But if it's just my sister she can probably just split my bed and then if Melantha invites someone she can share yours and, yeah. It'll work out.

"I'm gonna put the tree up," he adds. "Not decorate it! But just take it out of the box and put it together so it's ready to decorate."

Because of course they bought a reusable, not-real-live tree. Because of course they wouldn't chop down a tree, end its life, for the sake of a holiday. They couldn't really afford to be so wasteful, and even if they could -- they wouldn't.

"I'm glad," he adds, a little later, when he's dragging the box to that small semi-open space next to the kitchen sink and cutting the tape, "that you're gonna maybe invite your brother over. Families should get to see each other once in a while, even if they're far away."

For what it is worth:

Melantha would be horrified if they cut down a tree, unless it was a little thing that fell down on its own. It's like I don't even KNOW you anymore, she'd say, or her eyes would say it for her. Melantha would agree that Erich's sister should come and she would be vaguely worried about Charlotte's brother because she got a strange weird vibe from him and she never realized it but it was because he was like looking into the past of the sort of men she destroyed and seeing who they were when they were in their twenties and not their forties or fifties, and she would sense better than Erich that Charlotte is worried that her brother wouldn't even want to come and she would be worried for Charlotte and worried about what Erich's sister is like because even though she's concerned with what this important person means to Erich and what she might think of Melantha, Melantha is even more worried about what she'll think about her, because outside of the tribe and outside of Charlotte, almost every female relationship she's encountered has been one of combative deception, aloof and inauthentic and suspicious and vengeful right from the start.

Melantha is, wherever she goes, one of the smartest people in the room. And her mind is bored so easily, runs a million miles a minute without trying. To say that Melantha 'overthinks' is one way of putting, though that's less flattering than something about having played every possible chess game to its last moves before she ever touches a piece. That makes it sound way cooler than it is, to hold so many possibilities in mind and have nothing, really, that challenges that sort of brainpower.

So she worries a lot. It's something for her brain to do, tricking itself into thinking its being productive.

--

Tonight, Melantha comes home late, and it is not footsteps crunching their way towards the door tonight but the sound of an engine. Not the truck, obviously, that's been parked where it was when she took off on foot to the saloon. But an engine nonetheless, and maybe for once she allowed a coworker to give her a ride, but that would be so unlike her, she doesn't want to share the location of their little mobile den even with people she likes at work, and then the engine cuts off.

She comes up to the door, stamping her shoes off on the porch, and swings it open and the inside smells like cookies that are slightly burnt and smells like icing and smells like Other Winter Things, and her cheeks are pink and she has no idea they are discussing anything about where to stash people who are invited for the holidays, and she looks triumphant. Her eyes are bright with exhilaration.

"I bought a Jeep!" she declares.

The tinyhouse is small enough that the cold air blasts in all sharp and wild the minute Melantha opens the front door. Erich's going to open the box for the tree and he's telling Charlotte that they'll plan on things they might not really plan on and Erich's telling Charlotte about how important family is, how they should get to see each other, even when they're far away, and Charlotte's shooting him a strangely perception glance, which is sidelong and a bit poignant as he makes this declaration, and she looks far more human in that moment, put together from the snips and snails and sugar and spice that make up the core of us, beneath our skin and bones.

Meanwhile, there's the sound of an engine without, unusual enough that it pulls Charlotte's pale eyes from Erich to the front door, her head cocked animalisticly, her body tensing faintly through the shoulders, her mind reaching out without thought to brush against Melanthas. A wordless, nearly physical acknowledgment/query, like a wolf shouldering past its packmate, exchanging scents after a day's hunt.

That blast of bright, sharply cold air brings a tinge of pink to even Charlotte's cheeks, and Charlotte's hands are dusted with pink and green and purple sugar crystals, and tiny decorative candy pearls, and everything else from the cookie decorating kit she bought at one of those little boutiques down in Evergreen and Melantha looks so triumphant and excited that Charlotte almost natively and naturally assumes that she is bringing home a kill or something grand and there is something really rather quietly grand about the brightness in Melantha's eyes, the heralding swirl of wind-and-winter that backgrounds Melantha's entrance, enough that Charlotte throws up her arms and throws them around Melantha's neck. Hugs her, rather wildly, happy that Melantha is happy, for all that Charlotte does not care one whit about a Jeep.

"That's cool. We made cookies! They're a little burnt."

You know, reciprocity.

[Melantha totally brought home a kill. She stalked the Jeep in the wilds of Evergreen. She harried its owner with her teeth and wit. And then she savaged it with cash money and dragged it back to her den and her pack to present them with THE GLORY OF HER TRIUMPH.]

The sound of an engine pulling up outside makes both Charlotte and Erich tense instinctively. Two blond heads swivel door-ward. Two pairs of blue eyes swing noise-ward. And then --

and then --

Melantha's presence becomes known to them. By her proximity, by her totem-bond, by the faint unmistakable spirit-smell of her purity coming up to the door. And Erich straightens up from where he's leaning, his arms pulling tight across his chest, a smile revving up across his face almost entirely without his notice or permission.

Melantha! says Erich-brain. Melantha Melantha Melantha Melantha Melantha Melantha Melantha Melantha Melantha Melantha Melantha until the door opens, until she's standing there smelling like the cold and the mountains and the trees and

her new Jeep.

HER NEW JEEP!

"No WAY," Erich bursts out, while Charlotte is hugging Melantha. He comes toward them, he restrains himself -- barely -- from group-hugging like a dumbass, and then of course he doesn't restrain himself after all and just squeezes them both half to death before moving past to look out the door. "Wow. That was really fast!" -- and he swings around, grinning at them.

The response of their telepathic queries is the equivalent of a boop! on the nose in somewhat childish, delighted friendliness. It's Melantha, and Melantha isn't sobbing because there's so much blood and she's nearly dead and this guy is nearly dead and there's a dead thing outside, and Melantha isn't telling them to relax, she only called on Volcano's strength to lift a heavy thing at work, it's just Melantha coming home and saying hello.

Then saying she bought a Jeep. Which Charlotte could not care less about it, but Charlotte cares a lot about Melantha, so she doesn't have to look hard to see Melantha's vicious sort of pride in this, the happiness at surprising them, the fact that in a way this is bringing home a grand kill, one that she worked very long and hard for. She is hugged by Charlotte's skinny arms, then hugged by Erich's much thicker arms in addition, and she squeezes into the group hug for a moment, breathing in deeply.

"You just scrape the black parts off," Melantha says, which is odd, because this is not a memory from the commune of Black Furies nor one from her spy days, but a much older one. She nuzzles her nose into Charlotte's hair for a moment, then gives Erich a separate, brief-but-close hug, smiling warmly.

"Yes way," she insists, and: "It only cost like two thousand. Well. After registration and stuff. I talked him down a bit since no one is buying cars in December and since I had cash."

The Jeep outside is a dark green Grand Cherokee with gray trim. It is a hardy car, fit for the mountains, and could probably tow the tinyhouse if need be. Melantha is standing there in her coat, pink-cheeked, bright-eyed, smiling. "I thought we could use a second car. If only so I don't have to walk to work whenever you guys are in Denver with the truck, or stuff like that."

There are other reasons they should have a second car, one bright in recent memory. What if Melantha had not been a twenty-minute run through the umbra but farther away, with their only truck and what if it had been Melantha bleeding out instead of a strange and what if -

Charlotte inhales Melantha's scent, which is both familiar and heady, and which makes the girl close her eyes with a deep, abiding, primal pleasure, giving one last squeeze after Erich glomps on, then letting go. The door's open, that bright chill in the air, and Charlotte peers past Melantha's shoulders, past Erich at the open door, catching a glimpse of the Jeep in the darkness, then back to Melantha.

"Erich scraped them. I was decorating. But we have a few more if you want to decorate, too. We still have all the sprinkle colors left except pink and plum,"

and, indeed, pink and plum are the most prominent colors or Charlotte's cleverly and rather oddly decorated gingerbread people.

"Oh! I made you some gourds, okay. I put them in your loft."

"We put lights up too," Erich says, looking out the door at the newJeep while he stomps into his shoes, and then he's hopping down the porch and going to circle the car and kick the tires and brush snow off the sparetire on the back. "You saw them right? We lit them up so you'd see them coming home. And we're about to put the tree up and I think we can put some lights up inside too and, yeah.

"CHRISTMAS.

"This car's awesome," he adds, turning around, coming back up the steps now. Taking them in a quick athletic bound, glomping Melantha up again and hugging-swaying her. "Aweeeesome."

No one mentions the Other Reasons. It's not necessary, and since they aren't the only reasons, even less so. Melantha just smiles, hugging and hugged, still in her outerwear which is good because Erich is leaving the front door wide open, jeezus, erich. He's bounding around but Melantha stays just so, nuzzling Charlotte a little, squeezing her back with a tightness and familiarity that the two have that is different, very different, from the physical closeness that Melantha and Erich have.

She notices sometimes that Erich and Charlotte aren't that physical with each other. Not in homid, at least. She wonders how much of it is the sibling-esque nature of their relationship and how much of it is Charlotte's sometimes jangling, clanging tension, and how much of it is stuff she can't even guess at. She and Charlotte draw apart easily, painlessly, Melantha looking past her pink hair at the sprinkled and frosted cookies, smiling.

"I totally want to decorate, too. And --"

gourds.

Melantha's lips spread with a smile. "Thank you, Charlotte," she says, leaning over to kiss the Fang's temple through her downy, pale, dyed hair. "I'll keep one on me from now on." Maybe two. They're small, after all. She can fit them in her coat pockets or a bag easily enough. And Melantha is practical, and Melantha really hates blood, and she's not keen on dying or watching anyone die around her anytime soon.

--

Lights!

He is outside. Melantha pokes her head out of the door, which doesn't require much movement due to the size of their den, and watches Erich kick and stomp and peer and inspect. She half expects him to start sniffing at the thing, shifting to lupus and wagging his tail. It makes her smile. "I did see the lights," she tells him, since they are currently shining not far from her face. "We should do more inside. And candles."

CHRISTMAS.

Melantha just laughs, a clear and clean sound that defies the muffling silence of a snow-packed ground. It's not so snowy down in the metro area, it couldn't be. But up here, even with the daily sunlight, there's white powder on the ground.

He bounds back, and she steps into the house so there's room for him, and he's hugging her and swaying and he is so gleeful and she just wiggles her arm free to shut the door because cold. She hugs him back, though, squeezing him as tightly as she held Charlotte just moments before, her eyes closing for a moment as her face rests on his chest. She's full of odd little memories, and they're good but a little poignant and every time one comes up, she tightens her hold a little more on one of her packmates.

"Do you guys... wanna do like... Christmas gifts?" she asks, thinking of the tree.

Charlotte. Well, Charlotte beams. Bends into the whisper of Melantha's mouth over her temple, like a willow maybe, or a reed. Pliable, see? And slender. And strangely strong.

Her pale eyes shine with pleasure and happiness and contentment, the animal sort of contentment that comes from a full belly and a warm den and strength and purpose in the world. The sort that seems so far from possible when her madness takes her; seizes her, harrows her, wraps her up in the paralyzing echo chamber of her own mind.

Mmm.

Charlotte inhales again, both as Melantha leans in close and as she draws back, turning - Lights! - back toward the buffeting of cold wind pushing through the open door because - jeezus Erich - Charlotte is not wearing her coat. Though she also does not seem to mind. She just hums beneath her breath, finishes with her current cookie, glances over the others pleased that she saved some for Melantha, probably at Erich's suggestion, and then dusts the little crystals of dyed sugar off her hands, onto the thighs of her jeans.

Watching them as Erich scoops Melantha up into his arms, swaying, gleeful, with her breath in the back of her throat and a stray and animal thought that they should have the chance to be alone, shouldn't they, in their den. To -

- well, her breath doesn't go farther than that and Charlotte folds the thought into a half-hundred others, neatly in some space in the back of her mind. Her pale eyes track easily from packmate to packmate and her fey little smile comes easily as well. Charlotte does not like the artificial tree. Not that she wanted to cut one down so much as dig one up and invite it inside in a little pot, on their little table, but how could you manage it in the frozen ground, without chewing up the roots and shocking the tree with the story of its own kidnapping.

So they will have an artificial tree, and real greens from limbs that feel to the ground under the weight of an early snow, the scent of pine all sharp and cutting-bright in the air. And candles, and gingerbread star-people.

Melantha asks if they want to do Christmas presents.

Charlotte gives Melantha a curling shrug and a simmering, quiet little smile.

"I have everything I need right here."

It's hardly Charlotte's fault that she feels just a little sidelined when Erich embraces Melantha like that. Just a little extraneous, just a little third wheel. She, after all, was born to a human body just like they were. She was born in human society, inundated by human culture, and the culture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century seems about as obsessed with sex and love and the all-important male-female pair-bond as Victorian culture was obsessed with propriety.

Erich disentangles from Melantha, though, and shakes his head. "Aw, yeah, we all do," he says, "but I think presents don't have to be about what you need. It can be about -- "

and, children of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century that they are, no one could blame them if they expect him to say what you want, greedgreedgreedgreedGREEDGREEDGREED! That's not what he says, though:

" -- taking the time to think about each other, and to find or make things that your friends would like. And vice versa! So yeah, I totally vote we do presents."

Well, Melantha is the sole breadwinner in this household, and she just dropped a couple of grand on a car, and that sounds like a no1curr and a yeah kinda! to her. She is huffing a laugh as she is brought into those heavy arms, before the squeeze and gentle shut of her eyes. She does not notice Charlotte's unvoiced thoughts, Charlotte's unfollowed trails. She draws away from Erich after the long hug, butting her forehead on his bicep like an affectionate animal, and starts shedding layers.

"You already got me presents," Melantha tells Charlotte, meaning the talens. "And you and Erich made me cookies, too." She is hanging things, shucking snowy boots, shaking out her thick hair that is so shockingly dark, especially when compared to Charlotte's almost-white and Erich's bleached-wheat. "I'm not great at making stuff, though. I mean. Stuff you'd want," she explains. "I just know survival stuff."

Charlotte gives a rather shy, narrow-shouldered shrug as Melantha defines the talens and cookies as presents. Then flashes a quicksilver little smile with a mulish sort of curl to it near the end. On someone who was decidedly not Charlotte that half-smile would verge on the sly, but Charlotte is Charlotte and there is nothing sly about the creature sharing the tiny space with them. Who ducks behind Erich to shut the door if no one else has.

"They're not all for you," Charlotte is saying as she slips behind the pair of them because she is wearing short sleeves and is FREEZING to shut the door. "Erich and I are gonna eat some too. And I'm saving some for the birds and some for the fish that get frozen in the lakes. Do you think they dream of stuff when they're stuck in the ice? Anyway you brought us home a Jeep-thing.

"We should do presents though," Charlotte has now decided, "and it doesn't have to be something you make or something you buy. It can be something you know or something you remembered or something you forgot you knew. Or something that made you smile, or made you sad, or made you both.

"Wrapped up in pretty paper or plain paper or nothing at all. Beneath the tree or in its arms. Did I show you my skull?"

"Yeah," Erich chimes in, "it doesn't have to be something you can touch. That's an awesome idea. It can just be ... anything at all, that you want to share or give or, yeah. Okay, Charlotte totally said it better than me. But dude, Melantha, if you wanna teach me how to start a fire with my bare hands, I'm all for it. I can, uh. Teach you how to fake-fart with the crook of your elbow?

"Also," speaking of skulls, "maybe you can have Chaz bring you your spine if/when he visits."

"Well... you made them for each other, too," Melantha says, regarding the cookies, and how they can be presents for everyone. "I don't know if birds and fish like gingerbread, though. Maybe they dream about berries and seeds and... types of algae."

She shrugs, finally down to jeans socks and and sweatshirt and the sweatshirt is dark blue with a wide neck and the face of a fox on the front. A fox wearing a scarf. She climbs over a chair and listens to Charlotte, turning her head to listen, as she makes her way to the couch which is where she likes to have cereal after she works. "I did bring home a Jeep," she confirms, which is a gift to all of them mostly herself. "I haven't done presents and Christmas in a long time. Not with... you know. Not-horrible people, and that was never really on Christmas."

You don't spend Christmas with the girl you're fucking on the side. Maybe a few days after Christmas. Never the day-of.

"What skull?" she asks, getting down a bowl and the cereal, which is a generic version of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. And to Erich, as she opens up the tiny fridge to get out the little quart of milk which is the only kind of jug they can buy so they usually get a few quarts at a time: "I'm okay with no presents." It's not diffident, it's not distant; she just is. As she pours her cereal, as she pours her milk: "I don't mean to sound... like a wet blanket, or a sap or anything. It's just that I feel that way people seem to feel when they get Christmas presents whenever I come up to the tiny house. I don't really want anything." There's a beat, as she shuts the milk back into the fridge, looking at her bowl. "Also I really have no idea what I'd give to either of you."

Erich's figurative ears sort of droop when Melantha says she hasn't done presents and Christmas with not-horrible people in a long time. They droop a bit more when she says she doesn't want to do presents this year either, but then

he perks again. Because she says she feels like Christmas every time she comes home. Which means! Tinyhouse was like a Christmas present every day. Which is pretty awesome.

She pours her milk. He snuck a hand into the fridge as she got those quarts out and now he has a can of Sprite, which he pop-hisses open and slurps from. "Well," he bargains, "if it's okay with the two of you I'm gonna get you guys something. Just 'cause Melantha's given us friendship bracelets and Charlotte's given us pigeon-beads. I wanna get you guys something you can carry around! It's only fair.

"We don't have to make a big production of it, though. And, yeah! What's this about skulls? Sorry, I just jumped straight to your spine."

[I AM JUMPING ORDER JUST THIS ONCE]

"That's why we wrapped it up in lights." Charlotte returns, when Melantha tells them that coming home to the tinyhouse is like a Christmas present every day. The thought makes her smile: all of it. Makes her hum, too, with the sort of unstudied harmony of overtones, the strange echoes of other notes folded into the intonation of a single sound. Hum in her body more than her throat, and smile around that feeling, which is bright and correct and solid. Which makes her feel like her feet are touching the earth always, always, no matter where she is.

Charlotte grabs one of the iced gingerbread people for herself but leaves the icing and sparkles for Melantha and Erich to finish decorating the remainder of the batch, if they are so inclined, and is biting off the arm of the gingerbread person first and about to tuck herself onto the couch, pretty clearly accepting of both Melantha's and Erich's preferences regarding presents and Christmas and every layer of awareness between them. Except she does interject,

"You had to break the beads. Melanthan can't hear the pigeons or even see them now." Musing. "Maybe I'll make new ones."

before the subject turns back on itself to that of her skull.

Oh, Charlotte beams. Stuffs the remainder of her gingerbread person solidly into her mouth and CHEWS CHEWS CHEWS because her mother would perhaps be willing to committ murder to keep her children from speaking with their mouths full and swallows in a dry and rather painful rush, perking - "Avery gave it to me. In a really pretty pink and silver box. It's awesome."

Pinkening with warm pleasure and a sort of sudden self-consciousness at the memory, Charlotte slips into her little bunk of a room to retrieve the skull and show them both. Gives Erich a quick glance and a small shrug, and tells him in a quiet voice, "Avery told a story about it at a moot last summer. The guy she killed."

[CORRECTION:

Pinkening with warm pleasure and a sort of sudden self-consciousness at the memory, Charlotte slips into her little bunk of a room to retrieve the skull and show them both. Gives Erich a quick glance and a small shrug, and tells him in a quiet voice, "Tamsin and that guy in her pack - Hector? - told a story about it at a moot last summer." ]

"Yeah," Melantha is echoing. "I had to break mine so it would go find you. What pigeon spirits?" She blinks.

Skull.

This is what they talk about in the day before Christmas: fish frozen in lakes, gingerbread, skulls and spines. Avery gave Charlotte a skull in a pretty pink and silver box and it's awesome and Melantha's eyebrows hop up in something between bemusement and actual surprise and actual hilarity. She's heard about Avery from both of them. She just smiles for Charlotte, coming over to the couch to eat her cereal. "She gave you her trophy?"

"Oh, dude. She gave you the skull? You were the awesome Theurge she was thinking of! Oh man. That's awesome." And Erich, taking up the station Charlotte abandoned, starts to decorate the cookies. Well, no: first he takes a cookie and slathers it in frosting and sprinkles it with sprinkles and just NOMFS IT. And keeps talking, too, while decorating and full-mouthed and all:

"You totally deserve it though. You're like the best Theurge I know. Granted I don't really know that many, not well, but still. Yeah.

"Aw, man," sudden guilt then, "I never told you about the pigeons, Melantha? After you broke the bead! Your pigeon came to find us. And then our pigeon found you. And like, after all that time with us, they kinda turned into our friends. Yours especially. Like pretty much every time I'm in the Umbra now, it comes find me. Sometimes I see the one we had in our bead too, but that one kinda comes and goes. Aw, I wonder if we could teach the pigeon-spirit to materialize so you could meet her. I mean, you kind of already have, but. Yeah."

While Erich is nomfing the poor really-not-even-decorated-just-slathered gingerbread cookie, Charlotte nods quiet affirmation in response to Melantha's question and slips into her little room to find the skull. Which she has kept wrapped in its lovely box in a corner of her bed. Which is a little bit creepy but there's not a whole separate wing of the tinyhouse in which to display their trophies so what happens is: the lovely, lovely hatbox gets carted out and perhaps Melantha and Erich noticed it and thought it was something Charlotte collected or curated or maybe it was the conveyance of a family present or god knows what, but: instead of a lovely, lovely hat, Charlotte pulls out a human skull!

- and Charlotte is beaming, showing it off to both Erich and Melantha, blushing more deeply when Erich recognizes the story, and even more deeply when he says that she is the best theurge he knows and not really talking until the speculation turns back 'round to the pigeon spirits.

"The one that was in your bead, it loves Erich and me 'cos it remembers us. It has everything that was in your heart when you were missing us. Erich's mostly loves you so it doesn't stay as much, but they're a pair. So they also love each other.

"If I can't get them to materialize, I'll take you to see them someday."

With a blithe sort of confidence that Charlotte rarely displays. Then, having shown off her skull she heads back into her bedroom to put it away.

It is nearly Christmas! And the tinyhouse is still up in Evergreen. It moves from time to time -- partly to avoid getting an abandoned-vehicle ticket, and partly because the snowfall has been so heavy, and the cold so bitter, that Erich doesn't want the wheels freezing into place. Or the tinyhouse getting totally buried. Or Melantha having to go too far to work every day, and so on and so forth.

Still, for the past week or so, it's been situated in the residential part of town, amongst other little alpine-style houses that are one by one putting on their Christmas costumes. Lights on the eaves, wreaths on the doors, plastic Santas on the lawns -- it all leaves the tinyhouse looking rather shorn and forlorn.

So maybe it's Charlotte's idea that they decorate. Charlotte, who once threw the loveliest birthday party Erich had ever seen, with lights in the tree and meatcakes and candles and and and...

Charlotte, who suggests lights for their house. Little tiny all-white icicle lights draping from the roof outside; big, bright, colorful bulbs inside, plus maybe some fake snow and the like for the cabinets. And a wreath for the door and, of course, a tree. So that's what they're working on right now, with Melantha at work and the two of them at home. Erich is outside on a ladder, hammering tough little brackets to the eaves so they can hang lights up year after year without repeatedly making holes. Charlotte is inside working on inside-decoration-stuff, and just for good measure their tiny little oven is on and Erich is trying to make gingerbread cookies from store-bought mix.

Trying, being the operative word. Though even if it fails, he has eggnog ice cream in the freezer.

The door is wide open. It's frigid inside. Erich yells from the back (or the front, depending on whether the tinyhouse is parked or moving) -- "Hey, can you come see if this is on straight!"

Charlotte does not care about Christmas particularly, but she loves the lights. The time of year demands them. It is dark dark dark and we have to pray to make the sun return; we have to light up the darkness to remind ourselves that the seasons will move as they always do. That we sleep and wake and sleep again. There is a thing called Yule and a thing called Solstice and a thing called Christ's Mass and they have all been folded in together.

It is winter and the snow is deep, and the day is wan and the night is dark and long and the earth sleeps beneath its blanket of frigid white.

But spring will come.

It always does.

--

It is freezing inside the cold snap right now is sharp enough that it makes Charlotte's lungs burn with every breath she takes and even with the tinyfire and the tinyoven both on and the gingerbread cookies maaaaybe burning in the oven (Eric made men. Charlotte made sparrows and and tree branches and eyeteeth) the scent is festive, bright and spicysweet. Whatever she is doing inside is perhaps not traditional but does include the crisp scent of pine branches still metallic with cold and snow, but she abandons it readily enough to poke her head out through the door and then the rest of her body, hands in her pockets, pulling her hoodie close against the cold. She's been working inside so isn't wearing the bulk of her winter's coat and is clenching her jaw because she wants to forestall chattering and tips her head back and up, pale eyes flickering over the lights Erich has already put up.

"Which way do you want it?" Charlotte asks, thoughtfully, her nose wrinkled as she considers his work thus far.

"I'm trying to get it straight across!" Erich calls over his shoulder. "I mean like the top part, not these dangling lights. Up here? Does this," he points at one bracket, "look like it's straight with this one? Say stop when it's straight."

The second bracket is free in his hand. He slides it very, very slowly down the wood.

Charlotte wants to ask why it has to be straight across, why isn't crooked okay, why - except, well. She is not genuinely a two year old and staring up at him, dark down here but bounded by a half-circle of light spilling from the front door to the tinyhouse, the neighborhood similarly framed by a rich depth of shadow and the bright, welcome glitter of lights on the eaves, trees and doors of the various houses, she watches him with rather bated breath and a small, queer smile on her face until -

"Theretherethere!" Charlotte calls out, excitedly, as the brackets match up, straight across. "Right there!"

Erich is facing the brackets when she calls like that, so she doesn't see him grin, amused, endeared, happy that she's so happy.

A solid stroke of the hammer knocks the little bracket into the wood. Then he tucks the string of lights over the bracket and just hops backwards off the ladder, hands sliding down the sides, feet hitting the snow with a muffled thump.

"Awesome. All done. Wanna wait 'til Melantha gets here to light it up and decorate the tree? We can set the tree up though." And this is when he notices she's not in any outerwear. "Aren't you freezing? Let's go in."

He throws a brotherly arm around her shoulders. They look a little alike, blond-and-blue. They look nothing alike. He's all meaty upper-midwestern germanic-descent posterboy, cut out for quarterbacking, linebacking, hockey. She's frail and feral, her shoulder bony against his side.

Charlotte is cold. Her nose is red and starting to run; supernatural constitution or not, the sharp cold has that effect on her as her sinuses are already starting to stream, and she stands there are stiff-armed and stiff-legged to stave off the shivers and is stiff shouldered as he throws that brotherly arm around his shoulders but they are close enough now, that she just bumps back against him, all animal affection. familiar and assured.

And she has grown taller. Hardly noticeable day to day but now she is taller than Melantha, a skinny stick of a creature, bird-boned and gleaming-eyed.

"We should light it up now," Charlotte says, considering his work from way down here before she allows him to steer the both of them back inside. " - so that she get to see them all lit up in the darkness, welcoming her home. But we'll wait for her to get home to decorate the tree."

They haven't far to go, to get inside, and Charlotte turns back to pull the front door closed behind them, and inhales deeply. Gives him a sidelong look that might seem sly, except she does seem merely happy.

"The cookies smell good."

No they don't. They smell like they're burning.

But maybe that's just the bottoms.

"Oh that's an awesome idea. But we should totally wait until she's back to go out and look at the lights outside, 'cause then we can see them with her."

Charlotte closes the door. The air smells like cookies. Erich grins happily, agreeing: "That does smell goo-- wait. No. That smells like burning. SHIT."

-- and he goes to yank the door open on their tiny little oven, fanning the smoke away frantically as he grapples for the oven mitts. Fumbles with the little cookie tray. Gets the cookies out, holds them yelping hot hot hot while Charlotte moves the cutting board off the burners so Erich can set them down there, where

after a moment's inspection

they determine that yes, indeed, the cookies are burnt. But only on the bottom.

"Well," says Erich, optimistic, "I'm sure we can just scrape the tops off and eat them. It'll be a little weird but it'll still be good. You ever had gingerbread cookies before?" He's genuinely not sure. He doesn't trust her ultra-privileged upbringing to have exposed her to such mundane delights.

"'Course I did." Charlotte returns, a quiet little scoff in her voice. All as if. The scoffing note mellows into something rather more quiet and rather more golden, a glowing and vague nostalgia. "We weren't supposed to go into the kitchens," she goes on, explaining then, " - but Cook would pretend not to notice and sometimes she'd save me stuff. Or one of the girls in the scullery. Sometimes I had gingerbread.

"I mean probably." Leans in to sniff then, as Erich examines the cookies and declares that they can just scrape off the burnt part. "When I was little and there was extra pie crust sometimes Cook would save it and give it to us to make shapes with, and we'd sprinkle them with sugar and cinnamon and she'd bake them and we called them scrappies. 'Cos they were made outta scraps, see.

"Phillip didn't like that though. She said it was common." Charlotte finishes with a shrug.

"Do we have icing? We oughta have sprinkles and icing."

"Yeah," Erich has already taken a spatula out and is hard at work scraping the edible parts of the cookies off the burnt-black parts, "in the fridge, and the little cupboard over the fridge."

A small pause.

"What's your family doing for the holidays?"

How they have room for both sprinkles and icing in the tinykitchen of a tinyhouse is a mystery, but Charlotte opens the cabinet door and Charlotte opens the fridge door and finds both sprinkles and icing and the sprinkles are red and green because the season is red and green, flame-marked and fir-huedand the icing is simply white and maybe it is simply that Erich thought of it and bought them especially to use to decorate cookies or maybe such things simply appear, in the places we need them, at the times we need them. Like some kind of serendipity.

So: sprinkles and icing are ferretted out as Erich scrapes off the burned bits and Charlotte stills a bit, glances from him to the second bottle of sprinkles (these are pink and heart-shaped so, not to seasonal, and they cannot have been here since last Valentine's day since the tinyhouse is younger than that, isn't it?) in her hand and back to him. Puzzlement written across her brow.

Then she shrugs, Charlotte, quick and jerky in Erich's peripheral vision. "I dunno. Maybe a big ball for the Sept. Or something I dunno.

"That's what they used to do."

It blows Erich's mind sometimes how different their families are. How different their lives were before their lives intertwined and began to run parallel to one another. Maybe that's a sort of serendipity too.

The bag of gumdrops that Erich takes down from a high shelf and plunks next to Charlotte for gingerbread decorations, though? That's totally something he bought 'cause he thought of it 'cause they're gingerbread cookies and that's what you do.

"Do you still talk to them? And your brother, and stuff?"

"I talk to Chas sometimes," returns Charlotte, quietly and not-quite-sulkily. There it something darting in her gaze though. A kind of livid wariness has entered her body language and her pale eyes dart from the gumdrops to Erich's profile to the gumdrops and back again. "Uh, you know. Still."

"Sometimes," Erich echoes, thoughtful. They are working together, more or less. He scrapes cookies off the cookie pan. She decorates them. The designs are vivid and fanciful and they make no sense at all, except maybe to Charlotte. Erich doesn't mind. He doesn't even mind that he won't really be able to eat these cookies. He made them for Charlotte, and for Melantha, the way Charlotte made them pigeon-beads.

"But not a lot?" He tries to keep his voice quiet, gentle; tries not to make Charlotte feel cornered. He doesn't think it's working, though. The cornered part, at least. "Why not?"

The designs are fanciful. Some of these are gingerbread people Erich cut out with the cookie cutter enclosed with the kit. Some are stranger pieces, occasionally identifiable given the original intent, but more often than not the cookies expanded with the cooking beyond the initial confines and cooked altogether to form what appear to be - in the end - rather fanciful brown blogs.

And Charlotte works quietly with her sprinkles and uses all of them, the Christmas ones and the hearts and the icing and she does have rather clever hands and the designs that started as bare, wintershorn branches or doughy portraits of small birds all fluffed against the cold darting daintily over the surface of a deep-packed snow have become blobby not because she is uncareful or imprecise but rather because she did not understand the way dough expands and spreads in the oven.

The work is slower now though, and Charlotte is bent over it all furrowed and thoughtful and frowning and, yes, uncomfortable. Pricklingly so.

"I dunno," Charlotte murmurs at first, her shoulders twisting in a quick and - yes, defensive - little shrug. "He's doing other stuff now and I dunno what it is. And I'm doing other stuff too and he doesn't know what it is.

"That's all."

Erich gets the last half-burnt cookie off the pan and then puts the pan in the tinysink to soak. Hands free now, he dusts crumbs off, then folds his arms loosely over his chest as he turns to lean his lumbar back against the counter.

"Do you wanna maybe ... visit D.C. sometime? And see your brother? We could take a Christmas roadtrip. I bet Melantha wouldn't mind. I bet her boss would even give her time off. If she doesn't I could just go talk to her." Beat. Then, slightly mortified: "I mean. With a Gift. Not... beat her up."

Charlotte quickly shakes her head, close-cropped blonde-and-pink hair going all fly away in the dry heat. Wild from static electricity.

"We can't leave the Sept," the girl says, solemnly. Owlishly, and Erich knows its true.

Charlotte does not mean Forgotten Questions.

He knows it's true. He knows that really, Melantha probably couldn't get time off work either. Not that much time. Not enough time to cross most of the United States west-to-east and east-to-west again, plus time in D.C. with Charlotte's brother. Not when she just started a couple months ago, if that.

Still, he looks a little crestfallen. He angles his gaze down toward his toes for a moment, bare on the wood floor. They always leave their shoes by the door because there's so little space that whatever muck gets tracked in here eventually ends up in their beds. After a moment he raises his head and says, "Well, maybe we can have Chaz visit you out here. I'm sure he'd wanna see you again.

"I mean. If you wanna see him again. Do you?"

"'Course."

There is an undercurrent of deep and quiet passion in Charlotte's voice. She's not really looking at Erich then, not even sidelong, so she doesn't quite catch the moment when his crest falls, does she, and there's something a bit awkward about being joined both spiritually and in such physical proximity and still not looking directly at each other. Or well, Charlotte is the only one who is not looking directly anywhere, isn't she? And she has stopped what she's doing (which is decorating hte mid-section of one of the gingerbread people to look like a spiral-armed green sugar galaxy dotted by giant floating pink hearts) so she doesn't even have that my hands are full excuse.

"He's my brother."

"Well, let's invite him out here then! And I'll invite my sister out too. She's in college now so she can go wherever she wants, she doesn't even have to tell the rest of the family. And maybe Melantha can invite someone too and it'll be awesome."

This is how Erich thinks. Or: this is how Erich wants to think. He wants to think things are simple like this. That hurts can be paved over like potholes with a few little changes, a few easy fixes. He knows it's not true -- knows it better than most, maybe -- but he still wants to believe.

"You should call him and ask him if he wants to come out. Maybe after the holidays, if he has to go home to your parents instead."

Once upon a time (the best and strangest stories start with these four words), not so very long ago (and continue with these), Charlotte spent as little time in the Cold Crescent Sept as was practicable, for a wyld thing in a city with few enough wyld space. Summer saw the little pack camped up in the high valleys of the Rockies, and winter has brought them lower, lower yes but still rather far away. Only the official dissolution of the Sept of the Cold Crescent and Erich's determination to keep the Sept in the aftermath of the judgment of the elders brings her here.

And regularly.

The shrines feel all strange to her, this humming space alive with electricity, wrapped in a web of information, all glass and chrome and steel, the city spread out below, glittering in the new-come and early darkness, like a radiant galaxy. Often as not Charlotte begins her exploration of the shrines - the shrines that remain, the shrines that are newly-built, the shrines, too, that Erich would never allow to be entirely striped to pieces - not in the center of the space but its borderlands, frowning out of the windows, her breath a warm mist against the frigid glass, all humid and opaque.

And that is where she is tonight.

Avery is looking for Charlotte.

--

On the 43rd floor, where such horrors came to pass, there are shrines. Well. There are shrines if people have built them anew, and few have. Most were gone in the fire and blood. Many were gone as soon as the Great Alpha made his pronouncement. Only the transient wolves who come through here to guard the place still may have built some.

Or the one that Charlotte's own packmate put up for Luna. There's that one. Maybe there is one that Charlotte has built.

--

The elevators here do not ding, not on this floor. The emergency lights are not on, have never been on. The building hums. You can hear the mechanicals.

Avery walks out of the sliding doors, and sees exactly the girl she was looking for standing at the glass. There is a hatbox in her hands, and to see Charlotte, she breaks into a smile.

"Charlotte! My dear!"

Charlotte has not yet built a shrine, but she brings in stuff and stuFF and Stuff and her stuff is scattered around the remnants of the stripped and empty space. Squirreled away, forgotten, half-remembered. Scattered until inspiration or something close to it hits her. Hard for her to imagine how to honor volcano up where they are flying so high, so Falcon, perhaps, surely Falcon.

Soon, soon, soon.

--

Now though, Charlotte at the window - meditating, not brooding - her thick hoodie unzipped, her distinctive pink-and-platinum hair curling lightly at the ends, mussed from the hood. Avery exclaims her name and Charlotte recognizes her without looking, the vibrancy of her voice but she turns to look anyway, spins on her heel and gives Avery a rather shy smile.

And a sort of greeting-shrug, hands in the front pockets of her jeans, her spare frame all adolescent slouch.

"Hey. Uhm, hi. I mean, Avery-rhya."

Not for long, Avery wants to say.

The hatbox is white and pink in vertical stripes of organza. There is a large silver crepe bow on top. It's lovely. She crosses the room with it, smiling, her long jersey skirt swaying and kicking and whispering a bit around her boots. Her jacket covers the rest, her scarf white. The temperature dropped rapidly tonight, down to frigid, bone-shaking cold. Avery came all the way up from the lobby, and her cheeks are still a bit pink.

Avery. Daughter of Falcon, twice over, and so very blessed by him.

"I," she says, pleased with herself, "have a gift for you."

"Oh!" Charlotte exclaims, startled. She is not dressed for the weather. Perhaps she forgot the change, perhaps she merely shivered her way through whatever trip she made here. Perhaps she slipped across the gauntlet and ran ran ran through the city's reflection, befurred and brilliant, a pale streak beneath the moonless sky.

She is not dressed like a Silver Fang, like Avery. Beneath the unzipped hoodie - which is fine, of course, the best quality but - a Mexican Sprite! t-shirt in fading green, and jeans that are maybe half-an-inch too short for her, and Converse all-stars. The rubber margin is covered in ballpoint pen doodles.

And Charlotte's eyes dart from Avery's face to the hatbox, which is lovely, and back to Avery's face and it's not suspicion on Charlotte's features then, but a kind of cautious, wary ...

desire. "You didn't - " have to Charlotte is starting to say, but Avery is so bright and so pink-cheeked and so pleased and so lovely that it is hard to be anything else, so Charlotte sidles a bit more forward and swallows and the look she shoots to that box is still peremptory somehow. Like she daren't quite ask (all breathless), " - is that, I mean, did you mean the box?"

Without quite thinking about it, Charlotte is standing a leetle bit taller.

Avery does look every inch the Silver Fang. From that long hair cast straight and golden over her shoulders to the pristine white scarf -- cashmere, naturally -- to the supple black leather cropped jacket that hugs her arms to that long dove-colored skirt and the high, caramel-colored boots. Truthfully, she's a little saddened that her outfit does not present the gift to Charlotte better, just as she is a bit embarrassed to be giving it to her in the hatbox that is better wrapping than most people's Christmas gifts, but these things do not dissuade her.

She comes nearer, and she holds the pink-and-white hatbox towards the Theurge, beaming with pleasure.

"It's what's in the box," she says teasingly, cajolingly, and nods at it. "Take it," she urges softly.

Being this close to Avery makes Charlotte feel all strange and prickly and hot and aware of lo-the-many ways in which she does not match the promise of her blood, and also, strangely, makes her forget it too. There are all these threads pulling tight beneath her skin and Charlotte feels all odd, and a little bit floaty, the way she imagines a planet might without a sun to circle, Avery is teasing, cajoling, and Charlotte is charmed in the way that Charlottes are charmed.

The shy smile deepens but never loses its fey edge; Charlotte seems as much like a mythical animal glimpsed in the margins of a half-remembered forest, but more solidly so.

So urged, the girl darts a glance up at Avery and then, yes, reaches out for the hatbox with a (slightly grubby) hand that Charlotte herself does not particularly notice.

"Thank you." Charlotte's cheeks are pink now. She has not been out in the cold in quite some time.

And, slowly, slowly, she opens the box.

Charlotte, whose blood is purer and whose spirit is stronger and who is so very blessed by her ancestors that they sometimes walk through her body as though it is their own... feeling strange and prickly and hot and aware of her own shortcomings when she is near Avery. Avery would be bewildered. Avery would be stunned. Avery would be confused and saddened, but she would not sock Charlotte in the jaw the way she did Erich when he basically told her no no, madam, let me throw myself into the jaws of the space-wyrm for you, after all, you will do so many great things and I am but a hapless pawn in our great war, m'lady and she thought she didn't hit him she was going to begin speaking very shrilly indeed. And loudly.

No: she does not feel the urge to raise her voice at Charlotte, and probably would not even if Charlotte were to say foolish things like her packmate sometimes does. Nor can she imagine feeling the desire to punch Charlotte in the face, though if it were strictly necessary she might have to get over that.

Mostly, right now, she is just thrilled that Charlotte is taking the hatbox from her. Because Charlotte, in her way, is like a unicorn, and she seems to be interested in her present, and Avery is beside herself with excitement. She clasps her hands to keep from clapping, but does not hug them by her chin. Instead, she lowers them, pressing her lips together as Charlotte removes the hatbox's lid to find clouds and clouds of gauzy silk, one enormous length of it wrapped loose as a hurricane's spiral around the skull of a full-grown man sitting in the middle.

It has been ruthlessly cleaned. Occasionally it has been given sunlight to bleach it. It is in good shape. No bits of flesh, no rotting smell -- and also no antiseptic smell, which is a plus. It has a vaguely botanical scent instead, some other natural cleanser or oil or something. It has most of its teeth.

Avery's eyes are aglow. She watches, breathlessly, waiting for a reaction. Maybe it would mean more if she told the story behind it. Wait, no: didn't Celduin tell that story at some moot? Will Charlotte remember? Will she recognize it and recall the story? Will she realize that she -- she! -- is the talented Theurge of Avery's own tribe to be waited for, sought out, and gifted like this?

Stay tuned.

Charlotte is pulling out the spiral cloud of gauzy silk and seems quite thoroughly charmed by the extravagence of the wrappings, the liquid spill of those lengths of silk through her fingers. And she is unwinding them and unwinding them and unwinding them to find, at the center, a scoured skull and -

"Oh," somewhere in the middle of this Charlotte has settled herself down on the floor, the hatbox between her legs. It is a charming picture, like Christmas morning, except on one of the abandoned floors of an abandoned Sept that has been stripped of most of its furnishings and left echoing-empty aside from what they have brought in with them but:

"Oh - " all delight, this quiet exclamation that goes from native diffidence to a half-transported enchantment as Charlotte pulls the skull from the last of its wrappings, which fall away like a winding cloth from a corpse.

Quite simple, really, and quite simply happy, Charlotte starts to, well, babble, "I used to have a spine that Lauren gaven me and I took it to Washington when I went there with Chaz and I kept it in my room and we looked out over the old oak tree and I have one of his acorns but our house moves so I don't know if I should plant it but because I can't put it in a pot because the tree was way bigger than our tinyhouse but Erich said that I should get one and that I shouldn't bring my spine with me but he said I can have it now.

"Except not through the mail, so if I get my spine it won't match but it matches anyway because one's a head and the other's a spine all slinky and spiny and it's perfect is what I mean.

"Where'd you get - "

And this time, the oh is soundless, just an open-mouthed intonation of the syllable. Charlotte's eyes are fixed on Avery and nearly grave there, but Avery can read the way the realization creeps across Charlotte's consicousness in the widening of her eyes, and the deepening stain of red in her cheeks.

Oh.

Charlotte wants to refuse the honor a thousand times over. Doesn't she know? Couldn't she see? Wouldn't she -

But who can refuse Avery Chase?

"Thank you."

The box and the gauze are the gift! SURPRISE.

Not really. Charlotte gets to the skull, has lowered herself to the ground, and Avery follows her, a smooth crouch, as comfortable as a lioness. She folds one arm loosely over her knees, watching in serene pleasure now as the Theurge brings yet another new, more vibrant memory to this spot that held such unspeakable horror and violation. Cleansing is a process. So is grieving. So is redemption.

The skull of the man Avery warned, then helped slaughter, is lifted up. It is lighter than you would think. Heavier, too, somehow. She babbles. A spine! Acorn. Their house moves. Perfect.

Patiently, and rather happily, Avery just listens. She tips her head, as though this is a conversation and not a babbling of words, as though this is an instruction and not just word salad. And then Charlotte asks, and half-asks, and then realizes, and Avery smiles.

Gently.

Charlotte whispers a thank you, and that is when Avery shakes her head, and says quietly: "I am in love with Calden White." It is the first time she has said this to anyone, though Charlotte can't know it. Calden knows. Anyone who sees her with the kinsman can tell there is something coy and happy and intimate between them. Avery says it without anything but what it is: no claim, no defense, no assertion, no details, no hedging, no embarrassment, no deep-breath-now-we-plunge, no ache, no invitation for questions. Just this. Just the truth.

She is in love with Calden White.

"You have my deep and abiding gratitude for what you did for him," Avery goes on, just as softly, holding the other Fang's eldritch, fey eyes with her own, which are not some unnameable color but something more approachable, something warm and summery and yet achingly glorious in its own right. "The skull is yours for your talent and your power, which all who meet you know, and which the spirits and your people speak of in greater measure with each turning of the moon. It was meant for you from the moment I told its original owner that I would be taking it from him.

"But my gratitude," she adds, her brow furrowing just a touch, "is not something I can give you in a box, and it cannot be wrapped in silk. You have my favor, Black Sheep. And if there comes a day or a time that I find a way to truly show you the depth of that gratitude, know that I will."

[EDIT:

Charlotte whispers a thank you, and that is when Avery shakes her head, and says quietly: "Do not thank me, Charlotte." That refusal, gentle as it is, hangs in the air for a moment before she goes on: "I am in love with Calden White."]

Charlotte

Charlotte cannot know it but what is there about the posture or the admission or not-admission, the statement that is arresting. Three and one half-thousand voices seem to be all rattling around Charlotte's head and she is pulled in a half-a-dozen directions, babbling, yes happily, all stream-of-consciousness as she handles the skull of a man who was broken long before he was dead. Who could not know any sort of redemption, except for whatever was granted him in a violent burst, by Avery, with her claws.

Look, see - Charlotte is blushing and not-really-looking back directly at Avery who is crouched before her. The flush spreads down from her hot pale cheeks, down the column of her too-long throat. Were she dressed differently, by which we mean well, that throat might be swan-like or elegant and there is something beneath all this about Charlotte that is not elegant but graceful; swift, and animal in its promise, yes.

But now: arrested. Pale eyes fixed on Avery so directly and that flush slowly draining from her cheeks and throat.

Charlotte's skin is fine and white. There is a distinctive gravity to the rhythm of her breath. The steady tidal bearing of it. A pulse beats, visible, at the base of her throat.

So.

So.

--

At the end of it, the girl-who-is-not-a-girl swallows. Her skull is on the floor between her legs, but one hand is smoothed across the crown, the curve of her palm fitted neatly over it. Charlotte seams her mouth and licks her lips. Begins to respond - just an intake of breath - then stops and offers a curling shrug.

"I love Melantha." Shining eyes, and tears behind them, but Charlotte does not shed them. "I bet she's alive 'cos of him. It's like a circle. Or thread made into a length of cloth.

"Stronger for the weave."

There are parts of that night that Avery does not remember with perfect clarity. She unleashed her rage and tapped her will. They shot at her from above. They shot at Celduin. They shot at Calden. She remembers the men on the bridge; she does not remember if it was she or Jack who killed the tattooed man on the path whom she threatened with this fate. She does not remember shifting back into her human skin. She remembers a blanket wrapped around her body, blood staining her jaw and throat and breasts, remembers Calden assuring her later that she had nothing to be so ashamed of, even though she was.

She doesn't quite remember if she ever gave a thought to the redemption of men like this or not. There are better garou than she who do ask such questions. Sometimes she wonders if she was always so callous, if this should have been her clue all those years ago that the life of a kinswoman to Falcon was not her path. Then she feels bad for equating callousness to the state of being garou; it seems unfair to her to paint all of them in such light, especially when wolves like Keisha roam the land.

Charlotte speaks, and Avery lets her thoughts drift from her again, not so self-centered, focusing her eyes on the other Fang again.

She thinks, briefly, one last thing: she is so glad that there is one of her tribe here who is like Charlotte. So wondrous. So wise. She decides that if anything should ever happen to Erich -- perish the thought -- Charlotte will not be left adrift. Nor will Erich, in the reverse situation.

--

Charlotte loves Melantha. Avery's lips part at the statement, the truth in it, the difference between I am in love with and I love. She gives a small smile, exhaling softly, gratified in some deep way that Charlotte understands in part what this meant to her: to have him survive. To have that not be the end.

The truth of the matter is, and perhaps they both know this on some level, it was the kinfolk who saved each other. Had either one of them been hunted alone, they might have died. Had Calden not handed Melantha a gun. Had Melantha stopped shooting because the sight of all that blood terrified her. It was their strength. It was their determination. It was their will that kept their lights from going out in Golden.

It still means something that Charlotte laid her hands on Calden, and did so before healing the one she loves.

Avery, glorious and shining and wonderful and perfectperfectperfect Avery, knows in the depth of her heart that in the same situation, she doesn't know if she would have done the same. So she reaches over, slowly, and lays her warm hand atop Charlotte's, holding the Theurge's eyes.

"I think you are right," she says quietly. "All the same: know that you have my favor. And should you need me, call on me."

Her hand squeezes once, then slips away as she rises to her full height again, looking down at Charlotte with something like contentment in her eyes: to see a favorite of hers so pleased, surrounded by the wrappings and holding the gift that Avery had the pleasure of bestowing on her. She looks so at peace, looking on her like that.

"Good evening, Black Sheep. May it be well for you."

With that she leaves, turning gradually and walking herself back to the elevator, thinking that though she saw him quite recently at her packhouse, she should like to brave the snowy roads and go north tonight.