Ornature

Erich is out patrolling or something. Erich is out fighting or something. Erich is somewhere, and it is too cold for Charlotte and Melantha to be lazing out on a rock near a creek; they are closer to town now, even though Melantha can drive herself to work and they don't strictly have to be within walking distance of the saloon. It's winter. You stay near other living creatures. You stay where help can hear you if you howl, even if those helpers may also be terrified of you in the middle of the night.

And Melantha isn't working today, at least not yet, so she's doing chores. She bagged up all the laundry, for all of them, loaded it into her truck, and spent some time at the laundromat in town reading a book and chewing a granola bar. The beds all have freshened sheets and pillowcases and blankets now, which is not a weekly or even bi-weekly occurrence. Everyone has clean underwear and jeans and t-shirts and hoodies. She washed the plastic dishes in their little sink and dried them with a towel and put them away in their little latching cupboards. She even dusted here and there. She wiped out her shrine-bowl. She shook out the black furs that Charlotte brought her back from kills. She tidied and rearranged and spent some time sitting cross-legged on the couch, mending some holes in various items of clothing with needle and thread.

Melantha knows how to darn a sock. Melantha knows how to make things last, and use them again and again, just like how she knows how to build a fire and scavenge for food in the wilderness.

Charlotte is there, sometime later in the day, and Melantha has been ever so productive and the tinyhouse still smells like all of them but it's missing the sour tang of not-clean smells. Melantha is pretty picky about how she cleans; there's no reason for most of those chemicals, and it irritates her nose and her packmates' noses, so she uses things with witch hazel and tea tree oil and so forth; she scrubs the shower with half a grapefruit and some kosher salt because really, she doesn't think you even need baking soda. The bathroom smells clean and the beds all smell clean and some t-shirts with armpit holes have been restored to their spots in the rotation and occasionally, there is a quiet drip of the still-damp dish sponge in its holder by the sink.

"Hey."

Says Melantha, seeing Charlotte, smiling gently at her.

"I was just about to have some lunch. You want a sandwich?"

Charlotte is there, later. Charlotte, like Erich, like Melantha, comes and goes. Unlike Erich and Melantha, she usually comes and goes through those secondary doors known as mirrors, finding her reflection and slipping through it, easy as water through a sieve. Perhaps these passings leave behind the subtlest and strangest of scents, which is impossible to character or compare because it is not precisely physical, because it is not physical at all, because it is made of a substance that is begins to change as soon as it hits the fractured and structured immediacy of the world they inhabit, all these physical things.

So here is Charlotte in the freshly cleaned tinyhouse, with the scent of grapefruit and salt bright as summer in the air, while outside the sun shines, or it does not, and the wind blows cold, and the temperature drifts as it does, and the evergreens around Evergreen shiver in the passing winds.

In from the other side, Charlotte always seems both bright-eyed and far away, as if she has only just awoken, and brought part of her dream-world with her. She crawls out of her bunk and strips off her worn and rather ubiquitous dedicated messenger bag, full of tidbits and tchotkes, wattle and clay and bone, feathers and carcases and found things and formed things, and then her hoodie, leaving her in her dedicated t-shirt and jeans. A week ago she came home wounded. Not badly - Charlotte needed a day or two of furious sleep to recover, really, and ot much more, but her things were ruined and Mexican Sprite has given way to the Denver Broncos. Charlotte does not know what the Denver Broncos are, though. She liked Mexican Sprite better.

"It smells good," Charlotte says, inhaling deeply. "Like breakfast." With a smile. "I would like a sandwich. Do we have peanut butter and bananas? And Reese's Peanut Butter Puffs?"

Melantha uses natural products, no chemicals, when she clean. Charlotte, for all her dedication to Cold Crescent, feels sometimes screamingly ill at ease in cities. But she still eats garbage like whoa, and there's always some sort of childish cereal in the little latching cabinets of the tinyhouse.

When Charlotte came in wounded but not bad, Melantha still was worried. She still came and slept inside Charlotte's bed that night as though simply being nearby would finish off the healing, help it somehow, and maybe it did. Maybe the ancestors that sing their memories so powerfully in her blood watched over the Silver Fang as she slept, as she recovered, and this meant as much as the closeness of a friend nearby. People do better when they're at home. People do better when they're with the ones they love.

"Citric acid and salt are better than scouring powder," is Melantha's answer to things smelling like breakfast. She smiles. "We have some roast beef, and I think we have peanut butter. We have one banana left but it's pretty brown. No cereal. Well, some Fruity Pebbles."

She sniffs. "We need groceries." Which is true. She leans back a bit, tipping her head. "Now that you're better and all... could you tell me what happened the other night?"

"I like brown bananas," says Our Charlotte with a supple curve of her narrow shoulders. She does like brown bananas. Sometimes it is astonishing how brown she likes them. They turn to mush and taste like banana candy, though since the weather has turned there is always the option of freezing bananas that have hung around the tiny kitchen too long, then mashing them up like soft serve ice cream. "I'll have a brown banana and Frooty Pebbles sandwich. But no peanut butter."

And Charlotte makes a face.

Brown banana and Frooty Pebbles sandwich sounds delicous.

Brown banana and Frooty Pebbles and peanut butter sandwich sounds awful, apparently.

Charlotte pads through the tinyhouse and settles down on the couch, bending over to unlace and then toe off her boots before curling up with her legs beneath her. Her hair is getting longer and blonder and just the ragged tips are pink right now, and the static electricity from the dry heat in the tinyhouse makes it stand out like a vaguely startled halo all around her head. She watches Melantha with that wolfish look she always seems to have when they see each other after some time - any time - apart, which is keen and intent and perhaps a bit mesmerized, then gives another one of her rather shy half-shrugs by way of response.

Which is not a dismissal of the question. Charlotte never dismisses anything Melantha says to her. "Uhm, I don't know," is how Charlotte begins the little story. Erich is better at this sort of thing, and Charlotte's cheeks tinge a bit uncomfortably pink as if she had more eyes than just Melantha's on her. "I was in the city and on the other side and all these things were running from this spot and I went and looked and Looked and looked and there was a bit ugly Thing on the other side and that Uktena kin who argued with Erich - and these other two wolves fighting it. So I went through to help them.

"And we killed it but it exploded and I saw it was gonna explode and that girl was there so I jumped in front of her and it exploded and I got hurt and that other girl healed me and I healed her and that's what happen."

There's really no telling with Charlotte: what will sound good. Bubblegum ice cream with M&Ms may be fine, but peanut butter and Fruity Pebbles is a no-go. Okay. Melantha rolls with it. She rolls with a lot that Charlotte does or says, odd as it may be. Which is strange, since she argues constantly with Erich, even fondly, even while they're hugging or saying nice things about each other. They disagree and it more often than not makes the other smile. But with Charlotte, Melantha just accepts.

She smiles, too.

Reaching over, she touches her fingertips to the pink ends of Charlotte's hair, like stroking her fingers over the strings of a harp. It's an idle gesture, a thoughtless one, and intimate in that thoughtlessness. She is watching her fingertips in Charlotte's hair when she notices the way Charlotte is looking at her. For a moment, her pupils constrict a tiny bit, but it passes. She listens, her hand returning to herself as Charlotte tumbles out The Story, which isn't much of a tale but then Charlotte isn't a Galliard.

"Lola," she feeds Charlotte, being the Uktena kin that argued with Erich. And it exploded and Charlotte jumped in front of Lola and Melantha takes a measured breath. Her eyes flicker with something uncanny and savage, but it doesn't find expression in words.

She's quiet a moment. She can't exactly tell Charlotte she did the wrong thing by protecting a kinswoman. And she isn't quite sure how to tell Charlotte how Not Really Okay she is with close calls, with her two closest friends and some of the only people who still matter to her coming home still wounded and maybe dying and all of that. She swallows, and leans over to press her forehead to Charlotte's temple, and sighs. Then, after a very long moment, she gets up, swings her legs under her, and proceeds two steps to the kitchen to start making her friend a sandwich.

And then she changes the subject like a motherfucking hero.

"I was thinking about us building another tinyhouse," she says. It is out of the blue.

Charlotte looks so terribly young. Those wide and widely set eyes, the lie that is their strange and startling clarity, the tapered jaw, the finely jointed, nimble little fingers. Those eyes stay fixed on Melantha when they are in the room together, when Melantha is farther away and when Melantha comes closer and when Melantha begins to stroke the pink tips of Charlotte's fine hair, Charlotte leans thoughtlessly closer, her pale eyes half-closed, her expression briefly and finely drawn.

Lola, Melantha supplies, and Lola, Charlotte agrees wordlessly. Nodding her head all, yes, her. That girl. That one. Charlotte is still watching Melantha even as the kinswoman leans over to press her forehead to Charlotte's temple, but with the closeness of that contact, the wolf-girl closes her eyes - screws them shut - and leans so damn firmly into the contact. Human, with all the heaviness of a lupine greeting. She wants to say I'm sorry but she does not know why. The words curl in the back of her throat so present she can taste them, but cannot begin to fathom their origin. They all live with the promise of their death, bright beneath their skins, shadowing each breath they take. Even their priests are made for war.

--

So. That moment: quiet, fierce, to all too many different reasons, and then it is over, and Melantha changes the subject like a motherfucking hero.

Melantha is thinking about building us another tinyhouse. Charlotte looks a bit startled though Melantha is making a Frooty Pebbles and brown banana sandwich so she might miss the way that startlement chases across the young theurge's features, before ending in a quiet oh, which turns into a beetle-browed and thoroughly thoughtful look, before it at last resolves itself into a question:

"Do you think your Jeep is sad that Erich's truck has a tinyhouse to pull and it doesn't?"

[OH MY GOD. DENVER STOP BAKING ME. holy shit. i have seriously gotten that same hello msg like 3000x now.]

[I didn't tell you that Errin coded that in and attached it to your user account? yeesh, sorry, I guess I forgot!]

They all look young. They all are young. Erich is so fair haired, so pale eyed, so much like a farmboy that he used to be. Charlotte is elfin, ethereal, ageless in her purity. Melantha can so easily look the coquette; her cheeks are round when she grins a certain way, giving her a childlike seeming.

And Erich is a savage berserker, and Charlotte sees things no one else can comprehend, and Melantha is a priestess of dark, ancient rites. They are all young. They are all from another, older world, too.

--

There is nothing to hold the sandwich together. No mayo, no peanut butter, no jelly, nothing. So she mushes the bananas quite a bit so the Pebbles will stick. She puts it on a plate when she's done, licking a bit of banana from her thumb as she carries it over to her friend and sits back down next to her. Charlotte's question makes her smile.

"No. It's just a truck, unless you woke it up when I wasn't looking. I don't think it knows enough to feel sad or jealous." She leans back against a pillow, watching the Theurge, hands on her knees. She takes a breath. "I was thinking... then I could kind of have... my own house, sort of. And obviously you guys could come and go and sleep there and eat there and go back and forth and stuff. But we'd have more room. And... I'd..."

Her voice is getting a little smaller, which is not usual for her. She shrugs tightly. "I'd have a place of my own."

Which, one may not realize til just now, she's never really had. She takes a breath and holds it, waiting for a reaction.

Charlotte: exercise that empathy you are trying to develop. or just developing.

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (4, 8, 8, 8) ( success x 4 ) [WP]

[She's nervous about this making Charlotte (immediately) and Erich (indirectly, at the moment) feel rejected. She doesn't want them to think she does not love them! Also she's never had a place that was just hers. And under the surface there's also this motivation of being able to be with Erich sometimes without messing with Charlotte, but she doesn't want Charlotte to feel pushed out or pushed away or anything.]

The plate rests on one knee. If they bought that cheap and mushy white bread the sandwich would stick together better just by smashing up the slices with the banana but they don't. They buy bread from a bakery in Evergreen. Sometimes sliced and sometimes not-sliced. It has seeds in it. It looks like it was made from something that grew out of the ground, and flowered and went to seed and shed those seeds and started all over again. That germinated. That woke up fighting in the cold dark earth, long before the sun had reached its zenith.

Charlotte balances the plate on her left knee. She balances it there but not for long when Melantha brings it back, and takes up one of the triangles of sandwich (Charlotte likes them to be diagonally cut. There are reasons. She does not know why.) and lifts it to her mouth. Some Pebbles fall out. Three red ones and one half-smushed grape one. That's okay. There are more inside.

So one bite and it is a rather big bite because Charlotte is a wolf and wolves are hungry animals and her blood burns bright and her body needs fuel. And Charlotte is chewing while Melantha explains that no she does not think the Jeep is sad unless it has been awakened (Charlotte disagrees; just because something is asleep does not mean it cannot be sad. Sometimes sleep is the saddest piece of her life) and does that smiling then she takes a breath and another breath and her voice is getting smaller and Charlotte, our Charlotte, does not notice many things, at least not many human things because she is deeply and markedly and remarkably in human but she notices these, the very first tells.

Notices them and her eyes sharpen on Melantha and her mad little head is cocked thoughtfully and she is watching Melantha and listening to her with a bright and sharpened attention and then Melantha finishes, and she's holding her breath now, waiting for a reaction and this is the reaction she receives:

Charlotte half-rises quite abruptly, upending the plastic plate with its new made sandwich and its quarter of stray Frooty Pebbles and shifts to one knee on the little couch, half-rising, and wraps her arms firmly and quite fiercely around her kinswoman. Face buried in Melantha's lustrous dark hair, her pale eyes half-closed, breathing in all that mystery, exhaling sense. In this moment Charlotte, on her knee, is a bit taller than Melantha and her mouth is near the kinswoman's temple and her breath is warm and her cheek is cool and her eyes are closed.

"If you want a place of your own I think you should have it. I know you'll never be far from me."

Charlotte and Melantha get to pick the bread, because Erich can't digest it. And they both like this kind, with the seeds and the feeling of growth and a bit of crunch to it, a bit of life even after it has come from the oven. In summer they tore pieces off of an unsliced loaf, eating it with a hunk of mozzarella while they sat in the sunlight on the grass. They fell asleep in the grass, stomachs full. It's winter now, and winter seems to ignite hunger even deeper than war during the warm months. Melantha puts on a few pounds; Charlotte and Erich eat even more voraciously. They buy the same bread.

She feels herself being looked at intently. She is used to this, and the difference between Erich glance-staring at her through his rearview mirror and then turning just to Look At Her and the way the Charlotte sometimes just arrests on her, lost for a moment. She is used to the difference between the way Erich and Charlotte watch her and the way that humans watch her, male or female. She is not upset at being looked at so closely, because Charlotte is her best friend, and if anyone can look deeply at her and still love her without reservation or hesitation or judgement or even concern, it is probably Charlotte.

The sandwich goes. Melantha frowns a little, hey, she made that, she cleaned up, but she doesn't want to yell at Charlotte, especially when Charlotte is just hugging her, very tight, all bony arms and surprising strength.

Her shoulders relax at what Charlotte says. She exhales softly, slowly, and a lot. She tips her head toward Charlotte, and into that embrace, silent for a little while. She won't ever be far, and Charlotte is not upset at all. Charlotte does not feel stung. Charlotte does not feel hurt. So Melantha mumbles into her arm, quietlike:

"So I should tell Erich, too?"

Erich. Who they both know will probably be more twisted up over the idea of the three of them not being all smooshed together anymore. But Charlotte tells Melantha what she already knows: yes. Yes she should tell him that she wants this, that she's thinking about this. Even if he's stung and hurt and howling and worried. But at least now she'll know that Charlotte won't be. She will only have to face one sad face. And maybe, to be fair, not even that.

She closes her eyes. Until Charlotte feels her relax. Until she can slip her arms away, and maybe pick up the sandwich, cuz the floor is pretty clean right now, and if not then well. Well. They can make something else that Charlotte will eat. Eat bowls of Fruity Pebbles on the couch, talking about, perhaps, what kind of house Melantha might like.