Ornature

[OH I SEE HOW IT IS, DENVER.]

In the blink of an eye May has passed and June is around the corner. They've been in Colorado for nearly a year; been up in the mountains most of that time.

As the snows melt, as the cold retreats, they've moved the tinyhouse a little deeper into the wilds again. They're up on a sun-drenched hill today, wildgrass blooming all around, trees rustling with their crowns of leaves all ready for summer. Up here they can look down and see Evergreen not so very far away. Denver proper in the distance: that's a little farther still, hazy in the mid-morning sun. And beyond that, the endless flat of the Great Plains spilling away into the east.

Erich's been working on resealing the tiny cracks and leaks that have appeared on the outer walls and windowframes and doorjambs of the tiny house, a side effect of a winter's worth of punishing freeze and thaw. That's what he's been up to nearly the last two weeks: making Home Depot trips, sanding things, caulking things, repainting and revarnishing things. Making their shared home sound shelter against the coming summer storms.

Today, though, he's taking a break from that. He's sitting out on the porch steps, and he's found a battered old baseball somewhere; he's tossing that old thing straight up into the air and catching it with solid thwacks of leather into palm. Tanned and athletic, winter-darkened hair turning golden again with the light, he's the very essence of Americana -- werewolf edition, of course.

Charlotte sometimes spends pieces of her days with Erich tending to the house. She does this as ritual rather than right. She knows how to use her hands, and watches him work, and learns more, but the secrets of the products he secures and then employs generally remain just that: secrets.

No, she spends more of her time away from the tiny house. Ranging higher up into the mountains, streaking all sleekwhite through the underbrush to find the small lakes laid like jewels in high valleys, to follow the courses of the swollen streams higher and higher, and on and on.

Now she's coming back down, girl-not-wolf, carrying a wooden brace with two trussed jackrabbits dangling from it and one small trout.

Dinner is served.

(Once that stuff is cooked.)

As she appears at the treeline and sees Erich with the baseball, she holds up a hand. Expects him, see, to throw it to her.

Which is what he does, seeing her. Erich stands up, all tall and easy and at home in his skin, cranks back his arm and lets that ball fly. It's a long throw, not some easy underhand lob and not some vicious straight-line fastball either. Just a nice, solid throw, arcing smoothly through the air.

After it leaves his hand he waves at Charlotte. His delicate, diaphanous, wild little sister.

And Charlotte catches the ball a solid SMACK in the center of her palm. Enough to sting. Enough to rattle her delicate bones. Harderly enough to notice.

Her hair is damp with sweat, and dark for it, mostly at the temples, and the bottom third of her jeans are damp and muddied and torn. She looks bright, so clean, healthy, and flashes him a smile, this quick impression of her teeth as he waves and she waves back with the ball in hand then lobs it back and crosses the clearing, Goes to put up the meat and fish 'til they're ready it for, then comes back out, and sits down on the steps beside Erich.

Shoulderbumps him. Familiar, see.

That ball comes sailing back. Erich catches it, nice and solid, and bats it lazily from one hand to the other, grinning as Charlotte grins. Soon enough she's there, climbing the steps up to the porch, and Erich is eyeing those two jackrabbits and that trout with appreciation.

"Nice catch," he says.

She goes in. She comes out. He's still out there, sitting on the steps again, big shoulders and solid back. He's no longer tossing the ball; he's looking into the trees, lost in apparent thought -- eyes narrowed, ball-in-fist propped under his nose like any moment he might start gnawing on it like a dog.

Charlotte drops down next to him. She bumps him, and jars his thoughts back into fluidity. He glances at her, smiling wry-fond, and bumps her back.

"Sept called while you were out," he says. "Northern Sun's back with his pack. They were real glad to see him."

"It would've been easy to stay there, you know?"

Charlotte understands why they didn't send his pack after him. They could've just been a pack together, in their den together, wolves together, with nothing else to worry them as long as ever they may live.

Charlotte is quiet. Quiet and thinking, blond brows quietly furrowed.

"I guess they knew that they could send us, even though we were packmates, 'cos Melantha was waiting for us."

Her mouth curls fond around the name, this quiet, cradling shape. Then the smile melts away, easy as it came.

Charlotte swallows hard.

"Moon's small. Do you still want to talk?"

Erich nods in mute agreement when Charlotte says it would've been easy to stay there. She's right. It would have been easy. Be a pack there. Be a wolf there. Be wild and innocent and carefree in their own private garden of eden,

where they have no names and no memories and no pasts to burden them. He understands that, too. He especially understands why Charlotte would understand: Charlotte, carrying that ugly name of hers like a stone around her neck. He thinks to himself that maybe, maybe if Melantha had been there too, they would have all stayed. Maybe for Charlotte's sake, they would have forsaken the world.

--

Moon's small. Does he want to talk?

Erich lowers the baseball. His forearm over his knee, hand drooping from a lax wrist. His fingers turn the ball over and over, restless, absent. He thinks a moment and then he nods.

"Yeah," he says quietly. "If you think you can."

If you think you can, Erich says, and Charlotte does not think she can. The thought that she can does not exist in her body. It has never come to be. She does not think that she can and the only way she can do it or say it or be here beside Erich with any of that in her skin is by not thinking about it at all.

God her small shoulders are tightly framed beneath her t-shirt her body tense. She watches the ball and she does not think about the baseball and she does not think about anything. There is a beginning that she does not remember and the beginning, the beginning, there are words for the beginning.

They're in her throat.

She could choke on them.

--

Charlotte folds her arms over her knees.

They needed someplace to go. Seemed as good a spot as any.

--

"Nobody knew I was Garou." She starts. This is a kind of truth. Charlotte thinks and most people think that maybe-she-knew. How could you know, then. Adolescent, adolescence, pure as the moon, how could you not remember your wolf-dreams then. "They always thought I was kin. I was - I was supposed to be mated to a Philodox. When I turned sixteen, they had a party for us."

So the story begins. Immediately, within the first five words, Erich thinks maybe he can see the lay of it. And -- he's a little ashamed to realize this -- it relieves him. It wasn't really charaching, he thinks. Not if no one knew. It's not behavior so wildly different from the Charlotte he knows and loves and almost sort of understands. It was just

a misunderstanding.

He thinks.

He listens too, though. Because the story is just starting. He listens, sitting on the steps beside frail silvery-savage Charlotte, and right now -- though he very much wants to -- he knows better than to bump her in affection or support. He lets his silence be a sort of support. And his presence.

Erich's relieved. Charlotte does not know that Erich is relieved. The truth does not relieve her. Her throat is tight and so is her body, and she is sitting forward now, all stark, with her pale head bowed and the pressure inside her head so insistent. So, so insistent that she isn't sure whether or not her ears might melt or leak or something,

something.

"Wasn't supposed to be until I was eighteen. But his pack was going to the Deep Umbra and maybe not coming back. So they said we had to - "

Charlotte is frowning, curled not toward Erich, if she is curled at all, but Away.

Her voice is getting smaller. She does not know or understand this.

"so we did. And I - "

And she does not say, got pregnant or any of a million slang terms to Erich, cannot say them, cannot think them. The brief lacuna in the story must stand in for the actual words she cannot say.

Her voice is even smaller.

"Then a few months later I changed."

Madness. That's all she can comprehend of it was the madness. The confusion, the rage, the pain.

So much for relief. Soon as it breaks over him -- secret, shameful, he should love Charlotte no matter what she's done and he does but he was still relieved to know it was an accident, just an accident, just an unhappy turn of fate --

soon as it breaks over him it's gone. Because then she says: they said we had to.

And it's not relief, then. It's shock and horror and something very much like rage, but deeper and blacker and more... more aware. More purposeful, less instinctive. It is anger; it is fury. He squeezes that baseball very tightly. In his mind's eye he sees its stitches straining; he imagines it bursting open like rotten fruit. He drops the ball and flexes his fingers and takes a slow breath.

"That's not your fault," he says. "None of that is your fault. They should've never made you guys. That's just ... that's really messed up."

A few beats.

"What happened then?"

Erich hears it differently. Erich hears it not quite correctly. Erich hears: they said we had to and squeezes the baseball as if it were the head of an enemy that he could crush with his sheer strength.

Charlotte is frowning, still, she shakes him off when he tells her that none of that is your fault. Shakes the thought off and shakes her pale head and shakes, perhaps. Vibrates, see, on some wavelength that is half trauma, half madness. And she has to correct him because he's wrong, he's wrong, he's wrong -

Her voice is oh-so-tight.

"They said we had to get mated sooner because he might die on his quest. After that I - I - " oh, it makes her so ill. "I wanted to."

"...oh."

And then Erich is quiet for a while. At a loss. Not sure what to say to that. Quiet and quiet and quiet and then:

lifting his head, looking over at her.

"Well, you didn't know," he says quietly. "And there's nothing wrong with wanting to with your mate. I mean. There'd be something wrong if you didn't." Another small pause. "Is that why you just... don't want to anymore, ever?"

"I don't," Charlotte starts, and stops. She is hung-up on the word, she is skewered by the thought. It turns over inside her skin and makes her - makes her -

makes her -

"I don't know. I don't know. I don't know." There is something terrible about the repetition. Something underlying. Something that is secured to itself by a hinge, somehow. Some door, opening. "I don't know. I don't know."

Or maybe the repetition is instead an orderliness. A defense against the dark, the way her insistent innocence must be. The way her strangeness, her lightness, must also be.

Charlotte does not want to talk about it. She does not want to talk about it with Erich. She does not know how to say that to Erich, who is her brother and her friend. The words turn all to slime in her throat.

"It didn't end. It didn't ever end." Just imagine the trauma of the first change: all that rage, all that confusion - enduring. Enduring. Once she changed, she could not change back. "I should've known. What I was. When he came back he hated me. Still hates me.

"Everyone did. 'Cept Lauren, and she died.

"And Chas. And you and Melantha."

She doesn't know. She doesn't know. She doesn't know. She doesn't --

by the fourth repetition Erich is alarmed; is reaching out to her, laying a heavy and warm hand on her shoulder. "Hey. Hey. It's okay."

Maybe she tears herself away. Maybe she curls into a ball. Maybe she goes still, stock-still, terribly still. Erich -- his hand lifts almost as soon as it alights. And they are quiet for a while, and then she is speaking again, and --

"Nobody hates you here," he says softly. "Not me, not Melantha, not Chas, not anyone in the Sept. They all like you and respect you. You know that, don't you?"

Charlotte does jerk herself away. Those stiff narrow shoulders. She cannot stand to be touched in that moment. Not by him. Certainly not by Erich -

"They don't know."

"True," Erich admits. "But I know. Melantha knows. We will like you. And respect you. And love you.

"I'm not saying you should go announce it to all and sundry. But ... I think even if people found out, they'd still like you. Those of them whose opinions are worth caring about, anyway."

"I hate it." There is no staying still. The creature rises, and oh, she is lovely, and oh, she is feral, and oh, she is mad. She stalks even in this meager human form. The wolf coursing beneath her skin is a livid, living thing. "I hate it. I hate all of them. When I see one - "

An arrest, see.

She is flushed scarlet.

There are pieces of herself that she can never reconcile.

Erich deserves, at the very least, this: to know all of them.

This time the pause is longer; a little more awkward. This time Erich doesn't have an easy answer available. Easy forgiveness. Easy out.

"You shouldn't," is all he manages to muster in the end. "It's not their fault what their parents did. And ... maybe it's not always their parents' fault either, the way it wasn't really your fault."

Pause. Pause. Silence.

"I think maybe ... maybe you hate them so much because you're actually kinda hating yourself. I think you really blame yourself, Charlotte, and way more than you should."

There is wisdom in what he says. Of course there is. It is a kind of human wisdom that everything that is pure-in-her cannot fathom, or even despises in its way. Perhaps, too, it is a sort of moon-blooded wisdom, that she is too young to see now, or too mad to ever see.

But listen: Charlotte looks up. Is it twilight? Was it twilight when all this started, Erich on the steps leading to the tinyhouse, baseball in hand, evening lowering itself like a southern belle over the mountains. This long slow curtsey into dusk.

When she returned from the woods with rabbits and a trout, beneath that slivered moon, that small moon, that silvered moon, to share with her pack.

Looks up and meets his eyes.

Usually that look is human; that instinct is human. Wolves lock gazes when they mean to challenge, when they insist on asserting dominance, and there is no hierarchy in the pack, no as such.

But listen: she meets Erich's eyes, not as a girl, but as a wolf.

There is madness in her own, that he cannot obviate or expiate. A devouring sort that creates its own echo chamber of sorts, that fills her head up with noise whenever her heart starts to pound so.

She wants to - she yearns to - what is it? Give him this. Let go. But she can't.

She can't.

"I can't stop. It makes me sick. It makes my head hurt. I'm sorry. I can't make it stop."

--

Charlotte is already changing, into something bright and pure and untainted: a wolf.

She can't make it stop. Cannot accept whatever comfort or wisdom he wants to give her. Cannot be: right, or well, or good, or stable.

Instead, this. A wordless brush of her mind against his: an invitation - to run.

"I know," says Erich, very quietly.

It is the last thing he says for a while. Charlotte is already changing; not to be left behind, Erich stands, and the baseball forgotten in his hand finally drops from his fingers to roll, to stop.

He drops forward too. Strikes the ground on his hands, which are now paws, shakes some clothes free and absorbs others into his very pelt. By then Charlotte is a stone's throw away, but he is fast, and he is following, and his big paws eat up the ground.

It is easier like this: no words, no human thoughts. He runs after his sister, wild as she is, reminded suddenly of the day they met:

don't you ever want to --

just leap. just tumble. just twist and bound to feel the strength and youth and power in your own bones. don't you want to just run free.

He does. And so he does.