Ornature

They began building the second house in the first week of June.

Melantha bought a trailer bed to tow at the back of the Jeep. She and Erich started going to Home Depot a lot. Granted, they also started running off into the woods more, by themselves and all. It's summer. They do what animals do when it's warm and verdant outside.

The frame is up, the house is being built, the second tinyhouse that is just for Melantha, that will sometimes fold down a railing and share a porch with the other tinyhouse but will be her territory, her own. She and Erich work hard on it. They work a lot, early in the morning or into the night when the heat isn't quite as oppressive. At least in the mountains it's a little easier to cope with; it's cooler.

Right now, Melantha is not working on the house or working at the saloon. She's down by a creek, washing out some clothes with this nifty bio-degradable soap she gets from REI. Her thick hair is tied up in a kerchief like some 1940s factory girl. Her sweats are elastic at the calves, and though there are sneakers on the shore, her feet are currently bare. She's standing in the water in a THROWED ROLLS t-shirt she definitely borrowed from Charlotte or Erich because Melantha does this all the time, stealing hoodies or boxer shorts or whatever else, as though everything is communal, which

in some ways, it is.

She is humming to herself as she washes.

Charlotte comes and goes. She does what other sorts of animals do, in the summer, when it is verdant and green. Which is to say: she ranges, higher and higher and farther and farther, seeking whatever strange things, small or great, that she seeks. Following the memory of a cloud or the promise of a rill or the flight of a something over a ridge. Honoring a promise or folding it into a quiet, riddling sort of bribe or meditating at the edge of a high clear lake that has not seen the reflection of a human face in half-a-year.

Charlotte also helps with the construction: when she can, as she will. She hasn't got Erich's brute strength or Melantha's determination but she helped construct the first tinyhouse and she has small, clever hands, and she can use any of the manual tools they employ, thhough she is still suspicious of the power tools they might rent they way some cats are suspicious of their reflections and,

it is summer. It is a certain day and a certain hour and a certain slant of light and Melantha is washing clothes in the creek when there is a noise in the woods and the noise is deliberate in its way but also minute, you see: animal.

And the underbrush at the creek's edge is thickthickthick, all that water, all that abundent growth, but the animal threads through all of that growth, prowls down the embankment, as silver-white as moonlight on virgin, just-fallen snow.

The spell of its majesty is broken only by the sweep of its tail: low. Wagging.

Melantha grew up first among boys. Her father, and four brothers. Then two brothers, when a pair of them ran away because Black Fury-born sons could never be Black Furies. But then came Damaris. Then came the nights when it stopped being her father who came to her in the middle of the night to comfort her while she cried over her lost mother and lost brothers and started being Damaris. Then came the sort-of sister she sort-of grew up with. Then came the fires, and the betrayal, and the horrors. Then came Oregon, and the caernless sept in the wilderness. Swimming in bathing in that endlessly deep reservoir, learning not to be afraid of such abyssal darkness. Then came all the sisters, lithe dark things with broad shoulders and heavy brows and steely eyes and soft fur, warm palms. Then came the teachings of ancient things, of goddesses before gods were ever considered, of the fear and awe that humankind once had for birth, and all the glory and terror that brought with it. Then came the Black Furies, and her life among them, for a very long time.

She grew up, in truth, among wolves. When they leave for days, even weeks, she fears and she worries and she reaches out in her mind to her sweetest sister of all, a caress without words, asking for an answer: are you there?

are you well?

will you come back?

And yes, and yes, and yes.

She still fears and worries and reaches out, but she doesn't panic. She goes on building her new tinyhouse. She smiles when Charlotte shows up and helps with this or that. They talk little. Melantha talks a lot. She has an active, engaging mind, eager and full-throttle, but when she is with Charlotte, she tends to talk less. More comes through body language. Granted: plenty comes via body language with Erich, too, but they argue a lot. They talk about everything. He gets so many things wrong. Melantha suspects him of things he would never dream of because she is not used to being able to trust a man, any man, when so many men got so very close and made such a mess of her and she tolerated it because, well

the same reason Erich and Charlotte tolerate it when they get hurt, don't they? It's war. It's not meant to be gentle.

She has been doing so well, though. For all her summery absences Charlotte can tell that: Melantha is getting stronger of heart and mind and soul. Her spirit is coming back, the brightness and resilience that was there when Charlotte first laid eyes on her. She is building a house with her own two hands and the hands of her two best friends. She lives in the wild, washing in the river and eating on the grass. She is within herself again. She is healing.

Melantha is humming a song from Mary Poppins. About birds. And she is glancing up, hearing a noise, and watching the pale white silver thing that comes from the shadows. She smiles, knowing the form and the eyes. She thinks that if she could change, she'd be black the way that Erich is gray and Charlotte is white. They'd be such a team. They are such a team. She keeps washing, and humming, and when the wolf comes near the bank,

she cups her hand and sends a wave of water flying towards her bestie.

There is a certain way that puppies wrestle with water, see - which is not a thing with which you can wrestle, right? which is liquid and which is ever-yielding and which is movement and formless and yet: puppies, so splashed, but at the wave that engulfs them, lower they heads and raise their butts and slash, this way, that way, nipping in every direction, barking at the waves, chasing the tide,

and this is a creek, isn't it, not an ocean, not even a river. There's a current, hard to see except where it runs all bright rills over smooth-stones, but it has no pull, it has no hidden undertow, no tidal movement, and that wolf is an adult, a young adult but an adult. Charlotte is twenty. She is no longer a puppy and yet, that spectacular, lovely creature, bearing the purity and madness of a ridiculous number of inbred generations, is splashed,

and pounces,

and nips at the wave, splashing against the rocks, leaning into it, hurtling through it, glorious, glorious, until she crests it and rises through it, all dripping wet, and lolls her mouth open, see -

almost like a grin,

before she starts to shake herself dry, sending droplets raining EVERYwhere.

--

(Of course she sees, of course she knows, of course she feels, that beneath her skin and behind her eyes, Melantha is healing. Is finding her balance and her place, is filling in the places left hollow, is sleeker, is more sure, is more solid and gleaming in her way, than she was this summer-last, when they came without stopping from Baja to Denver, dragging their house behind them, to find her again. Healthier, more solid, more immediate, more real than she was, too, before all that, when she wore a strange, false face painted over her own face,

for the hunt.

Charlotte's stronger too, isn't she? And yet, still somehow - always? broken. So easily broken, shattered. Some things were never made to heal, or never meant to. Madness is the curse of her tribe.)

Charlotte looks too graceful and too majestic by half. Melantha splashes her and grins as her friend nips and jumps at the water like it's something she can wrestle down and pin and win, YAY. She bounds into the creek and Melantha is grinning. It rained earlier, the air is cooler than it used to be, the creek full of water. She doesn't mind the shaken-off water hitting her face and everywhere else, since she's already standing in a creek.

She just waits for Charlotte to stop, then leans down, pressing a little kiss between Charlotte's eyes, on her narrow brow. "Hello, bestie."

This is what Charlotte is, after all.

The wolf threads herself heavily against Melantha's thighs, the push of her head a physical caress, a scent-mingling, a ritual greeting, a marking-of-pack and a mark-of-pack. Human words seem so strange to the wolf-mind, the practice of kissing too, right? But Charlotte is not merely Charlotte-wolf, she is Charlotte-the-girl wrapped up in Charlotte-wolf, all alien and familiar and her tail thumps affectionately against Melantha's thighs as Melantha greets her, this heavy, brushing beat, and then there is no more beat because she is stepping away, because she is changing, because she is sloughing one skin for another and another and another until she is a girl-again, a young woman, lithe and remarkably spare and lovely in a strange and fae and hollow-boned sort of way, and taller than Melantha now, by an inch - no, by two inches.

"Hi." Says Charlotte, and then looks around, and blinks at the wash Melantha is doing, and says, "I can help with the laundry." Because she can: this girl who had never cooked for herself and had no idea how to run a washing machine before Erich showed her, because everything, everything necessary, was done for her, before she can here.

Then she blinks at the shirt - Melantha can see her reading it - and her smile sort of sharpens and deepens. "They really throw the rolls there, you know? You hafta catch them if you wanna eat them.

"Erich caught his and gave them all to me."

Of course he did.

Now Melantha is all wet. Her sweatpants are wet and her end of her shirt is wet and her arms and legs are wet. She doesn't mind much; she was sweaty anyway. She scritches Charlotte a bit, behind the ears and along the scalp, her hand all wet, but it was wet anyway. It smells faintly of honeysuckle and soap, but soap made of things like beeswax. It's not bad.

Charlote moves, and Charlotte changes, and Melantha leans over to pick up the shirt she draped over a rock to rinse it again, squeezing and rinsing it out. She likes summer; you can dry your clothes on lines strung between the eaves of the tinyhouse and the branches of trees.

"You don't have to," she mentions. "I'm almost done," which she is, tossing the wrung-out shirt into a basket of clean, wet, rinsed clothes to be hung. "But you can help me carry them back and hang them, if you want. They're heavier, on the way back,"

because of water. Duh.

She smiles, tromping over to the basket of 'dirty' for the last thing, a pair of boxers that Erich hasn't even worn for like three weeks because Melantha stole them because they were baggy and soft and comfortable. She doesn't do Erich's laundry. Erich does Erich's laundry, and usually just does it at Cold Crescent, which is why he totally smells bad most of the time. Some of the time.

Melantha doesn't mind his smell, most of the time.

"Didn't you catch any yourself?" she asks, instead of that was sweet or of course, since he can't eat the damn things or he was just showing off or... anything else.

"'Course," says Charlotte, and she says 'course to two or three things: of course she will help carry the laundry and hang it on the line like prayerflags that fly in the himalayas, where Melantha's clothing will get infused with some faint edge of the spirit of whatever wind is moving that day; or perhaps the husk of sunlight falling through a spare, warm, dusty day, or maybe the fickle play of moonlight through the pattern of the oak leaves, or -

Also: of course she caught some rolls. Charlotte is not strong and she is not hearty and she was not made for war, except in the manner that they are all made for war, because war is necessary, because war binds their nerves and claims their eyes and burns all bright in their hearts: but she is swift, see, and graceful, and light-footed, and she has very clever hands.

"I caught more than Erich, and I ate some and saved the rest for the sparrows outside. They can go anywhere, you know. Sparrow. Just like us.

And she inhales - hmm, delicious, the scent of beeswax and honeysuckle, which also makes her think of beeds, which makes her remember -

"I found a beehive in the woods. If we figured it out we could get some honey from it. I don't know how to do that though, without hurting the bees. I guess we could ask nicely."

Erich asked her what color sheets she wanted to get for the bed that will be built into her new home. Melantha, sharp as she is, was intuiting much more: he wanted to try and visualize what it would be like, could he tolerate it, would it hurt, what would it look like, what would it feel like, where would she be sleeping if not in the alcove across from his loft. If he could picture her sleeping soundly among her sheets, maybe he would feel less anxious about the whole thing. And Melantha knew it didn't matter what color her sheets were, to him. She said the honest truth: white. To wash, to bleach in the sun, to go with whatever, to feel clean and cool in summer and soft and familiar in winter.

Melantha doesn't have sheets yet. She doesn't have a mattress yet. The bed isn't done.

But she'll snap those sheets out after washing them in the snow-fed creek here, dry them in the sunlight or -- in colder weather -- take them to Cold Crescent. She can do that. She has a Jeep. She can go wherever she wants, whenever she wants, by herself or with Erich or Charlotte riding shotgun. And she's building a house she can tow.

She could run off into the sunset and never look back, if she wanted.

She would have to want that.

--

Melantha smiles. She's crouching, washing the last pair of boxers, scrubbing them with some soap in the creek, which dissipates the suds so rapidly it's as though they never were. She does it twice. She does it as efficiently and quickly as she skins rabbits, which she does with startling speed sometimes.

"You could," she says, thoughtfully, of bees. She looks up at Charlotte, as she's scrubbing the second time. "Erich and I were talking the other day, about some stuff. I decided I want to drive out to Oregon when my house is done, and visit the sisters." Glancing down, she licks her lips, thinking. "I... started to think about some things, and... how I felt, and whether or not they really abandoned me when they sent me out into the world."

Quietly, then, shaking the boxers into the water. "I sort of think maybe they didn't. That... maybe they thought they were giving me a gift. Letting me go. I don't think they really knew what all I wanted from them."

To be one of them. To be with them. To be beloved, and to belong.

Melatha exhales slowly. "So I want to go back, and see them. And talk. I told Erich I want to go by myself, but... maybe you two could follow, a few days behind." She looks up at Charlotte again, rinsing and rinsing, making sure all the soap gets out of the fabric. "We could go to Baja from Oregon. A caravan."

Charlotte doesn't know what the sisters did or why the sisters did it. The only sisters she has ever had - other than Melantha - were the little girls raised by a too-strict mother who hated the modern world and all its technology to the point of phobia, in their starched crinolines and impossibly fine little clothes. Sometimes one inherits the right sort of madness for one's world - a tendency towards exacting precision, a fastidious nature that approaches the otherworldly. Sometimes one does not.

But, Charlotte, she sort-of thinks that Melantha is right and she also sort-of knew that Melantha would want to go alone and some part of her is at once ready to let go for as long as necessary and sort-of frightened that Melantha will simply: go away.

As people do, for the reasons they do.

And some part of Charlotte is even at peace with that idea,

but this is not the human-part. Not the girl-part. It is the part that waxes and wanes with the moon.

"Okay." Charlotte says, quietly, as she does, not precisely diffidently, but close to it. "When do you want to go?"

Melantha watches.

Erich is not the only one who loves her.

Or the only one who might fear losing her.

Melantha aches.

--

"When the house is done," she says simply, shaking out the boxers, wringing them out tightly, squeezing water back into the creek from the fabric. Shaking them out again. Rinsing them out again, again, because you have to be sure there's no more soap left. Triple sure.

She watches Charlotte. "You got quiet."

"I want to say, What if you go back and you want to stay?"

There's just one more piece of clothing. Charlotte doesn't help with that last bit. It's a one-person job, so she stands back, up to her ankles in the water, up to her mid-calf, the jeans dedicated to her spirit and soul darker for the water.

She's not precisely looking at Melantha because it is hard, it is so very hard, for Charlotte to talk about her feelings and her fears. Thinking about them makes them real, makes them powerful, makes them difficult, makes them loud. When she thinks them - when she feels them - there are times when she knows that they will never ever stop. Just get louder and louder and louder until everything else she might hear gets all drowned out.

But: see, this diffident little shrug, after, mildly dismissive.

"I want to ask that, but I don't think I should. It's not a fair thing to ask. Because if you want to stay, and they want you to stay, then you probably should. Or at least, you shouldn't not stay just because it might make me sad.

"So that's why I'm quiet. Because I shouldn't ask that. It's not fair. Just 'cos you're far away doesn't mean you stop loving someone. Just 'cos they're dead doesn't mean you stop. They're still inside you."

Melantha watches her, holding the boxers lest they be tugged away by the soft current. They'd be easy to catch, but still: wasted energy.

What if she goes back and wants to stay.

Her brow furrows. She aches, oh, she aches. That Charlotte wonders that at all, and that Charlotte is so scared to even vocalize it because it will be too big and too overwhelming for her.

"I think there will be a part of me that wants to stay there," she says quietly, because she's thought of that. But she rinses, and she wrings, and she talks. She sighs. "Except that... I left. They gave me my old identity back and sent me off and I didn't beg to stay then. I was so hurt, and angry, and confused, and I missed you and Erich so much. Then when I was with you, I missed the sisters so much, and I was still so hurt and angry. It was really, really confusing.

"The more I think about it now, the stranger it seems that I even grew up that way. That it was my life. That I did everything I did." She frowns, and is quiet a moment, then shakes her head. "I know it's cliche, but I'm a different person than I was a year ago. "

Melantha looks up. "Beyond that... I love you more than so many of the sisters I was ever with, Charlotte. You're not a sister. You're my sister. That's different." She hesitates. "And... I'm in love with Erich. They might -- might -- let you stay with me, if I went back. But never Erich. He'd never be allowed into the sept. Then I'd be with them, and I'd just rever to who I was a year or two ago, and be separated from you, and apart from Erich, and... I don't want that. Even if a part of me feels, and aches, and whatever. I know it's not really where I belong anymore. At least not right now."

"You're - " a deep breath; the sharpest sort of pause, which feels arrested, see. Charlotte has made her way over to the bank and found a rock on which to perch and she's watching Melantha now with her distinctively pale eyes and - " you're in love with Erich?"

[perception + primal urge + volcano, functioning similar to empathy]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )

Empathy reading: There is a remarkable complexity to Charlotte's feelings on the matter, layers wrapped up in her body and mind that even she is not entirely accessing. Prime among them is a genuine happiness for.. Erich as much as Melantha. Charlotte knows that Erich has been in love with Melantha for a very long time. She made the pigeon beads, after all, so that they could stay together. That happiness has a bitter-sweetness that could be misread as loneliness - and there is a degree of that wrapped up in there, but it is more complex and pedigreed than you could expect. There is also a strange, scissoring tinge of jealousy that she does not understand and cannot admin. Hasn't Charlotte been half-in-love with Melantha for a very, very long time.

From all of that, Charlotte does not pick out that some part of Melantha may very well want to stay with the Black Furies, turn away from whatever life she's built outside of that sept and just go back to what is familiar. She doesn't hold onto that part.

She also doesn't try to analyze Melantha's confusion, or explain it. See: Erich sometimes does. He doesn't think he's very smart, but he likes figuring this stuff out, and explaining it, and he likes it because sometimes it lets him help more, but he'd hear about her confusion and her sundering longing, and he'd probably talk about that, or at very least: tell her it's okay to be confused, and want two different things. Charlotte doesn't do that. For Charlotte, confusion can just be confusion.

Charlotte does not glow with pleasure to hear that Melantha loves her more. She does not blush with tenderness at the call of sisterhood, or ache with reciprocal love to hear that Melantha doesn't want to be separated from her.

She hears:

I'm in love with Erich

and repeats back:

you're in love with Erich?

but some of her breath is held, like if she lets it out it will take a secret along for the ride.

Charlotte, perhaps too concentrated on her breath to secure the other outlets, tells secrets with her eyes instead. They all have such pale eyes, this ragtag band of wild children. Pale, bright, secret-keeping and secret-telling and vividly intelligent and starvingly rageful eyes. And Charlotte's are conflicted, more often than not, because Charlotte's madness walks in stride with her purity: beautiful and intense and terrible and sometimes, a little overpowering.

Melantha-in-the-water looks at Charlotte for a while after she asks that question, requests that repetition or clarification or confirmation. She looks at her, sensing her joy, her compassionate pleasure. Sensing the sense of an outsider, though maybe not just an outsider to Erich-and-Melantha, because she isn't not at all not even a little bit, but a bit of an outsider to the world. Maybe.

She is quiet for a few seconds then. She finishes whatever bit of laundry she's doing, then wades through the creek to her friend, lifting cold, wet hands to either side of Charlotte's cheeks. Melantha looks in her eyes for a heartbeat, then for three more.

She kisses Charlotte's brow, right above her third eye. And she kisses each of Charlotte's cheeks if she's allowed, high on the arch of those art nouveau cheekbones. One, two. She draws back then, finding Charlotte's eyes again, droplets of creek-water finding Charlotte's neck as they roll from Melantha's fingers.

"I love you, too," she says quietly.

I love you also.

I love you back.

Charlotte is so, so still when Melantha comes close to her. Closer. She does not feel like a wolf but a deer in the dappled shadows beneath the denser canopy that frames the life-giving waters of the stream in which Melantha does her laundry, except of course that delicate alertness one associates with prey is always an illusion with Charlotte, entirely human in its signification: the slender jaw, the two-wide eyes, the elegant arc of startlement in her brows that asks without asking -

who

- when the answer is -

me.

So, still, chin lifted, mouth slightly parted as Melantha comes close, her alertness fine and strange and alien and pure enough that she hardly belongs in the fallen world she inhabits, does she? Except that's all a fucking lie: we all belong here. Everything is soiled, was made to be soiled.

Melantha's fingers are cool on Charlotte's temples, on her skin, the hushed and faintly mineral scent of the mountain stream. The tannins of the pine needles through which the water has run. Charlotte's family is so far out of human understanding that she is not familiar with the rituals of baptism - the Judeo-Christian rituals - but she understands water, doesn't she - and the water feels like a rite, some sacred ritual that she cannot quite name.

--

Charlotte gives Melantha a short, tight little nod by way of response. I know, even if she cannot verbalize it, and her eyes are shining, and she is taken by a wild little urge that she swallows down even before it emerges, some mad, self-protective little reflex that has her smiling tight around the edges of her own mouth and nodding again, see?

she knows.

she knows.

Some things cannot be spoken and some things cannot be dreamed and for Charlotte, so many things cannot be spoken and cannot be dreamed and like a puppy she bumps her brow against Melantha's then, somewhere mid-nod and pulls herself upright and pulls herself back and pulls herself scrabbling up the muddy bank and takes her share of the laundry, more than her share if she can, if Melantha - who smells like wild places and dark secret things and spring water against cool, hidden stones and the first turning of the earth warming beneath the sun after a long, dark winter - will allow her to take more than her share.

Later, see? On the walk back, or even at the tinyhouse, hanging the laundry out on the lines stretched from the frame of one tinyhouse to another. Charlotte will say, "I think you can go and run with them, even, want to be there and still come back to us. I don't think you just have to have one place. The moon doesn't. She goes away and comes back.

"I could make you something so you'd remember.

"Maybe not a pigeon. Maybe something out of earth. Igneous rock."

Charlotte gave Melantha water. First thing, when she could not open that disgusting senator's chest and make art from his rib-bones, when she could not get Melantha to say that she would never, ever let him touch her again. She did not judge, at least not out loud, but she gave Melantha pure, pure water, so that Melantha could get clean again. Charlotte understands baptism, even if she doesn't understand baptism. Charlotte baptized Melantha, even if she wasn't there when Melantha stood under moonlight and poured the water over her brow, onto her face and into her hair, even drinking the last few drops. Charlotte was not there but Charlotte was there, and Melantha was clean, and things happened out in those woods that night, the next morning, that mattered then and still matter now, which might not have happened if Charlotte had not given Melantha water.

Melantha, in response, doesn't know what she gives Charlotte. What she can give Charlotte, except loving her and trusting her and sharing secrets with her. Melantha doesn't even know that it was a year or more or something before Charlotte could ever talk to Erich about what she went through, even though she told Melantha so early on that Melantha was still living at the Hay-Adams. They tell each other secrets and they trust each other with truths and Melantha believes in Charlotte's ability to intuitively understand and accept her just like she believes in Erich's ability to argue and meet her, match her even at her most vicious pace. It was Charlotte who explained things to her with a bowl and some water, and Charlotte who understands Melantha's shrine of black fur and metal and fire and tiny, small things she finds that make her feel anchored or make her feel happy or make her feel simply more like herself.

Her hands stay on Charlotte for a moment, even through that suppressed urge that Melantha has the mercy not to pull from its hiding place, but then

Charlotte slips through her hands like so many droplets, away, away, because

she can't.

Whatever it is, she can't, and that is why Melantha has never asked.

--

They pick up the basket of wet clothes and carry it between them, sharing a load that was only for one person when it was dry. They carry it into the sun and open air and the lines that Melantha already strung up, pull clothespins from a mesh bag of them, continue the work. Melantha is very quiet, and Charlotte is quiet, and the water dries on their skin til it may as well have never been there.

But it was.

When Charlotte speaks, Melantha has grown so used to the silence that she almost startles. She looks over, sudden, and what Charlotte says makes her entire heart fold in on itself, aching.

"Charlotte," she says, leaving a shirt hanging by one sleeve, letting it dangle. "Charlotte, I don't need anything to remember you. I would never forget you." She leaves it dangling, moving to Charlotte right then and wrapping both her arms around the other woman, pulling her close.

The moon goes away and comes back.

Melantha has tears in her eyes, and tears against Charlotte's shoulder. Very, very quiet ones. They don't shudder as they drip, and there are only two of them after all, but they are there. She squeezes Charlotte, fiercely.

Charlotte can't.

She can't.

She doesn't know what or why and she doesn't think about it because if she throught about it there would be things inside of her head that go frighteningly wrong and terrible and she doesn't - she doesn't - she can't -

--

Melantha loves her. She has the mercy not to seek, and sometimes not to see, and never to ask.

Charlotte, for her part, does not know the gift she has been given, the gentleness with which she has been blessed.

--

There is something reflexive about a squeeze that tight. Charlotte returns it without reflection and without consideration, holds on to Melantha just as tightly as Melantha holds onto her.

Moreso.

Skinny arms wrapped around Melantha's shoulders, face presses firmly into the jointure of Melantha's neck and shoulder. The dark tangle of Melantha's gleaming hair all around, so full of her scent that Charlotte swells with adoration, love, and a fierce, fierce protectiveness.

"I know."

Charlotte says, and this is firm, this is solid, this is unthinking.

"I meant, something that would spark in the darkness. Something to light your way home."

Let's stop dancing for a moment. Let's pretend the music stopped.

Let's admit that Charlotte has been half-in-love with Melantha for a long, long time. Let's admit that Melantha has loved her back. And let's own up to the fact that at the brook, when Melantha said that she's in love with Erich, it hurt Charlotte's feelings. Let's face the fact of how much it hurts to love, and be unable to love, to want to touch and be unable to touch, to be watching your own feelings and your own longings exist separately from you, as though they're through some kind of cloudy, impermeable membrane, and to know that if only you weren't so fucking crazy you could pass through. You could love, and touch, and you could say stuff and ask for stuff and it wouldn't make you snap in half.

Let us confess, in all purity, that maybe what Charlotte wanted to do and very much did not want to do at all and was very afraid of and very much hoping for were all the same thing: to kiss Melantha not on her eyes or brow or cheeks or shoulder but just kiss her.

--

They are Volcano's children. They aren't supposed to attack without giving warning. It doesn't mean that they can't be ambushed. It doesn't mean they can't get blindsided. They're honesty itself, a pack of equal voices because the earth's voice is one voice all fire and stone and movement, and it costs them something to hold all these things back. To keep them under the surface, under the water, to keep them cooled off and slowed down, so they don't wreak a cataclysm.

But let's admit these truths to ourselves, because we know, and they know, that nothing stays silent -- nothing stays dormant -- forever. Unless it dies.

--

Skinny arms hold tight. Melantha's not skinny. She's slender, but she's athletic. There's muscles in her arms, there's all the solidity of earth there. As always, she is sniffed a little, inhaled quietly. This she is used to, and does not mind. She succumbs to it, comforted by the familiarity.

Charlotte tells her what she means. Melantha smiles into Charlotte's shoulder. "You don't have to make me anything," she says, lifting her head but staying close, looking into Charlotte's eyes because they are rather close to the same height. She smiles, even though it aches. "I'd be able to find you guys."

The air smells light sunlight and fresh turned earth and the light is changing now and the sun is moving across the sky, as it does, shifting the shadows in which they are cast, lengthening them. The year is already starting to fail, isn't it? Each day shorter than the one that preceded it but it is still summer and summer will simmer across the peaks and the slopes and the high planes for a long, long time,

until the earth turns again, and goes to sleep.

There's some resistance in Charlotte, when Melantha pulls back to find and meet her eyes, because Charlotte - animal thing - wants to bury herself in Melantha's scent, fold herself into the sunlit warmth of Melantha's hair. It feels to her both wholly indulgent and somehow safe and it doesn't make her head hurt and since Melantha stopped wearing another face over her face there is so much honesty sometimes, so much clarity in Melantha's gaze that Charlotte is -

Charlotte is -

Charlotte does not think about such things.

Their eyes meet, pale and clear and Charlotte can taste the ache in the edges of Melantha's sundering smile and it brings tears to her eyes and she does not know and does not ask why.

Just swallows back the swollen little lump in her throat, swallows hard against it and holds the look and says,

"Promise?"

And she asks not because she doubts, you see, but because this has somehow become to her a ritual exchange, a compact, a ritual, a rite. She believes. She believes, there's no doubt in her eyes, just an aching sort of implicit trust.

This past winter they sheltered all together in the tinyhouse that Erich and Charlotte built. Little fireplace, little house, a bedroom and two lofts. When winter comes this time, Melantha will be on the other side of two walls. She will not have a fireplace, and yes Erich was aghast, though. There's a reason. A good reason. She wants an excuse. Always, but especially in winter, she wants to make sure she has a really good excuse to come back. And sharing a fire with her packmates is a very good reason. Especially in winter.

This may be the first time she sees tears in Charlotte's eyes, may be the first time ever. Melantha doesn't know what to do, only she does, because tears don't frighten her, tears don't hurt her. She wraps Charlotte up again and holds her, doesn't try to say anything about it at all.

"Yes, promise," she says quietly.

Charlotte is wrapped up and buries herself once again in Melantha's hair. Her pale eyes screw shut and her nose is pressed against Melantha's neck, just at the hairline, and her mouth is against Melantha's pulse, soft enough and present enough that she can feel the doubled beat of Melantha's heart through her skin.

It is not a kiss, but there is a whisper of movement as Charlotte lifts her chin and resettles herself in Melantha's embrace, her own body humming with a ferociousness that borders on certainty,

that they will all be together until they die.

That, somehow, this is where she was always meant to be.

"I'll still make you something." Charlotte, quiet. "Because I want to."

So of course Charlotte just dives back in. Melantha has so much hair, and she doesn't always shower every day and it's summer so she sweats when she's outside in the sun or working or walking. She smells like creek water, which isn't super-pleasant but at least it's earthy. And she smells like heat and sunlight right now, and sweat, and all of that is living in her hair, pulled down from the kerchief it was in at the water.

She laughs a little into Charlotte's hair, because she's very sad and hurting and she's also inexplicably happy and comforted. She doesn't know what truths are living in Charlotte's heart or whispering in her mind, but they are truths; Theurges know things. She knows that. Erich knows that. Theurges just know, sometimes, and you have to close your eyes and trust it and respect it even though it can be scary, just like you close your eyes and trust Erich's strength or Melantha's honesty.

They will be together until they die. All of them, together. Strong and wise and true.

--

"I know you will," Melantha says, which perhaps isn't the most gracious thing she could say right now, but is the truth. She smiles, hugging Charlotte,

for a very long time, in fact.

They cannot stand there forever. That may be the way movies end and every story that ever came with a lesson attached to it by way of finale, but that is not the way Real Things work, and for all that they are monstrous and mythic and strange and golden and warm and terrifying and broken and fiction and non-fiction all at once, they are assuredly: Real Things.

Someone breaks that hug apart. Maybe it gets to the point where it is strange and awkward and Charlotte does not precisely understand the awkwardness because she is more animal than she is girl and belongs more to the moon than the earth, but even she can sense it sometimes, now. Someone loosens her arms, someone turns her head. Someone inhales a breath that is not comforted and beloved but is on its on, very much what next?

There's still laundry to be hung up. They don't really talk while they hang it, the click of the clothes pins all wood on wood, the tension of the line and the slack of it. The weight of the wet clothes.

They twist more water out of the heaviest pieces and maybe - maybe - there is a bit of a water war that starts the way a dog's shake does - all accidental - and then gets married with laughter and turns deliberate.

While the laundry dries, they go hunting.

Together, of course.

Today, tonight, Charlotte can hardly bear to be apart.