Ornature

The moment slews so very strangely and even after living together for so very long Charlotte shows very little interest in popular culture, in Netflix on Melantha's laptop or Erich's tablet, curls up with them when they want to pile in for movie night as often as not as a wolf, and only becomes a girl when Melantha insists that Charlotte will really, really like this one. Like the time they watched Mulan.

So there they are on the patio beneath the tower that lifts their shrines into the sky, over the crawling pit that they quite nearly died to keep sealed, in the failing twilight.

The business people have all gone home.

Sometimes the lights go on in the building, as the cleaning crews move through the mostly empty offices. Then off again. The building management company is very environmentally conscious. The place does not blaze through the night. The planters are xeriscaped and there are cachements and rainbarrels and solar panels and there might even be a geothermal heating system if there weren't a pit from hell quite literally in the subbasement of the place.

Charlotte's cheeks feel hot.

They are bright little fever points and she takes a breath and another and another and does not quite remember to breathe out. Something about the word squick makes her shoulders tense before he has even moved on to sex and relationships.

And Charlotte trusts Erich implicitly and entirely but:

this hurts,

this hurts,

already this hurts her head.

She is in a room and the walls are closed and the air is closed and there is a - a - a buzzing noise that comes from everywhere and nowhere inside her and when it comes, it never stops.

"I don't - " Charlotte is saying, "I don't - "

"Hey," Erich says,

cuts in, he hopes, as she starts to get that sick look, that green-around-the-gills look, that trapped-in-a-diminishing-room look. "Hey," he says, again, his hand reaching across the table but not touching her, no, some instinct tells him not to do that carelessly right now. "I'm here. You're here. You don't have to do anything. Okay? I just thought maybe it'd help but if it doesn't, if it makes everything worse, you don't have to do anything at all."

[Denver @ 6:22PM

♪♫ Welcome to Dedicated Dicing Den, we've got fun and Charlotte! ♫♪

Charlotte @ 6:22PM

WPRoll: 6 d10 TN7 (1, 1, 3, 3, 7, 7) ( success x 2 ) ]

Charlotte has both the sick look, the green around the gills look, the trapped in a diminishing room look, the world is made of razor blades and arsenic look, and another look entirely. It is just as sick, you must understand. It feels fleshy and wet and ripped-from-the-body but they are wolves and they are monsters and they understand that some things must be ripped from the body.

"I can't - " and she is a little bit breathless, you understand, but, "I can't just talk about it," this is a struggle, even this is a struggle, fighting free of the noise inside her to be here, to be present, to remember that Erich is her pack. She does reach out; brush her mind against his, "without feeling like it's happening again. Like it's happening again and it'll never stop happening and I won't -

"Sometimes it's like quicksand. But if I just think about - about good stuff."

They are pack. Their minds brush together the way their bodies do sometimes, unself-consciously and naturally and amiably. Their minds brush together now, though hers is sick with horror and revulsion and old decay. He shivers a little -- she can see it -- but then he reaches out, reaches back,

brushes her with his mind and with his big hand folding over hers for a second.

"There's so much more good stuff than bad," he says. "Even if the bad is like quicksand, it's like... well it's like a little puddle of quicksand, and you can reach right over and pull yourself out using the nice, uh, the nice grass and stuff next to it." He sucks at metaphors, he thinks.

The truth is, Charlotte jerks her hand back; as if she had just touched a hot stove, a scalding kettle. Her slender fingers, the small knobs of her knuckles, the twists of the friendship bracelets Melantha gave them so long again still knotted there, worn until they have frayed, repaired or perhaps Repaired as often as is possible, and she tries not to let her hand jump when he touches her but they are what they are and and she is what she is and ugh,

another shiver.

And Erich is trying, struggling, reaching to understand, to remind her that all that noise is just noise; is passing; it goes away, every time it goes away, there are good things all around her and she knows it. There is her pack and the moon in the cradle of the sky and the rise of the nightwind and the tinyhouse(s), one rising beside the other high up in the mountains. There is the hunt, and the harrowing, and the prayers at dawn. The ache to howl in her throat, the sharp bite of instinct beneath her skin. The pleasure of bringing down a foe, of tearing them open, of spilling blood and watching it steam in the cool morning air. Of cleansing: making what was Wrong, Right.

And Charlotte listens, and she listens, and she believes him with every part of her mind, except the part that is damaged, which will never believe him, and so she nods agreement: because all these things are true.

Just as: all these things are false, in equal measure.

Charlotte's breathing is still high and tight and fast.

But: she hasn't freaked out.

She hasn't puked.

Perhaps that is progress, of a sort.

Erich's hand darts back nearly as fast as Charlotte's, but it's different. It's different. It's not the way you jerk back from fire, from pain: that instinctive motion, that reflex arc that cuts the brain out of the loop entirely. His: quick, yes, but not as quick. There's a mind there. There's thought. It's the way you jerk back from a wounded animal who just whimpered in pain. Who just, maybe, bared its teeth in warning.

They sit apart, divided by a table. He watches her and she -- she tries to hold it together. After a while he stops looking at her, made ashamed by her trauma. He shouldn't stare.

"Do you wanna -- "

he breaks off. He thinks; seconds tick. He tries again:

"Maybe we can ... maybe we can go run. On the other-side. Up in the mountains. Maybe that'll make you feel better."

There is something odd and wrong and perceptive about Charlotte, sometimes, and that strange face, the hollows of her cheeks, the compressed plane of her features, those huge pale eyes and she is being careful, you see, because things inside of her are very very strange and the world is strange and sometimes it feels as if there were hot little needles pulling together everything wrong, and sometimes the world is too close, too intense, too immediate, and sometimes it is too far away.

Erich at her side, made for savagery, and she is not remembering precisely the first time they walked together, from the GW campus to his car-that-was-his-home and how he made her feel like she were sailing at the prow of a ship, the wind in her face, the way strangers parted for them, but she is aware of it, pricklingly aware, and she is lifting her stubborn little chin.

Gives him a quicksilver smile, the sort that seems to have disappeared before he even becomes aware of it.

"We can run here. Hunt. Warder said there was something he wants us to check out four blocks north. A sink. You wanna?"

Erich: dubious. Charlotte can see it on his face. He begins: "If you think you're -- "

-- and stops. A beat. No, that's the wrong way to go about it, all wrong. If he doubts her, if he doubts her ability and her strength and her self-awareness, the fact that Charlotte herself would tell him if she couldn't -- if he doubts that, then everything else may as well be for naught. He may as well tell her: stop trying to get over your past, because you never will. Stop trying to rise above your madness, because you never can.

He doesn't believe that. Either of that, any of that. He doesn't believe that, and so, after that hesitation, he returns her smile. Small and slight and hesitant, hesitant but growing.

"Yeah." Palm to the floor and a push: he gets up. "Yeah, I wanna."