Archainn Tunnels creeping hunger

The weather warming, less clouds in the sky. Sita was all too familiar with this time of the year. It was almost two years ago that she'd had her own children, and simultanously learned just how dangerous she could be. Even unintentionally. It wasn't simply a switch to be turned off of her own will. The heightened awareness aside, it made her irritable and a certain kind of needy. Marian had been grating on her nerves, despite Sita actually quite wanting to figure the other woman out. Perhaps when they'd reached their destination. But for now she simply couldn't fathom why she was so attached to Azra. Did she like him? Questionable.

Sita wandered the plateau they'd settled on for the night, keeping an ear out for anything odd while the others supposedly slept. Naturally, she was restless, both from the season and excitement. They would be nearing the end of their journey soon, certainly. Besides that, it was chilly, but a lovely night nonetheless. Felt like a waste to sleep through it.

keeping events of marian thread vague since no idea what the outcome will be

Now that @Marian was snoring heavily, Azra found that he could not sleep. Normally, the noise would not bother him, however with the insane amount of tension in the air, namely between Sita and Marian, it was all simply too much. With the darkness wrapped around him, and the scent of two women in heat practically choking him he felt like he could not keep his eyes closed. Protecting the ladies—from themselves, or from outsiders it was hard to say—fell to only him and he was starting to feel like he would crack under the pressure. He was not a confrontational man, normally, and would have preferred to avoid and laugh these things off but there was nowhere to go and do that. No one else to just let things slide.

At least, for the moment, there was some peace and calm that he had all to himself. Except as the moment stretched on, his friend occasionally twitching or groaning beside him he realized he would prefer a walk. In spite of everything, he wished that Walleye was here just to break the ice a little. Perhaps if they waited a day or two, Walleye would catch up.

Gathering himself, Azra stood and walked towards the edge of the plateau, hoping to catch a glimpse of moment amongst the rocks. The area they were in at the moment was not particularly steep. Walleye could make it.... Right?

The crunching of old snow and shifting of rocks caught her ears and she paused, tail flipping up instictively. It brough with it an obnoxious scent and she let it fall when she saw it was simply Azra looking out as she had been. Her tail flicked a bit again as she wrapped her mind around a plethora of ideas, mostly fogged by the month. Don't be a fool, Sita. Or do. You're free. It was truly hard to say. She'd had a plan once upon a time. Now it was all flipped on its head and she had to make a new picture from a jumble of puzzle pieces.

"Having a hard time sleeping, too?" Sita strolled up to Azra, smiling gently at him as she approached. She settled beside him, not quite touching. It had been a hard journey. Still was. It was nice to know she wasn't alone in all of it.

currently travelling with walleye

He smelled her before he heard her. There was no where Sita—or Marian—could go that he would not feel his nose being playfully tickled. It wasn't an awful smell, it was just awfully strange, and he felt awful not knowing what to do about it. It was if one day they were normal, then the next they woke up smelling like cougars or some different species entirely. Were women a different species all along? Aliens? Over the past couple of days this thought had kept him up more than he liked to admit. But at the very least, having advance warning of Sita's presence was helpful. It kept him from jumping out of his fur.

"Ohhhh, yeah," he said, rolling his shoulders as if the movement would make him feel more comfortable as she settled down next to him. From their first meeting they the boundaries between them had been...more like twigs laid across the ground. Twigs were easy to step over. "What's keeping you up?" He couldn't tell her about the aliens.

(This post was last modified: Mar 07, 2021, 09:09 PM by Azra.)

"I'm excited to get over this mountain." She told him, looked out over the world. Felt powerful. Too bad mountains were a terrible place to live. She was not a fan, even though the views were lovely. Sita gave him a playful attempt at a comforting nudge. "What about you?" Sita was fairly certain she'd left him asleep back there, but apparently not.

Or maybe he'd been faking it? She wasn't his keeper, though. It was nice to have some company.

currently travelling with walleye

The nudge almost knocked him right over, sending another strong draft of her scent towards him. Something in his chest felt like she'd knocked a whole nest of bees down from a branch. He smiled back at her, nervously for some reason.

"Through it, most likely," he reminded her. He still hadn't been able to find the entrance to the caves that he had seen. He was beginning to wonder if he had imagined them and the whole interaction with Saga in the first place. But he would try again in the morning to find some hole big enough for all of them to squeeze through individually. "Or, I suppose if I just find the tunnel we can have @Walleye go through and we go over but... I wouldn't wanna let him go through that on his own." This was entirely forgetting the fact that the old man had, somehow, survived this long and probably had his own set of skills—that no one had witnessed—that would keep him alive in the event that someone left him unattended for longer than a couple of days. He wasn't a puppy (or a cubbin').

For several, long moments he floundered with a possible response to what was keeping him awake. At first he made a noise kind of like an "ahhhh," then an "uhm" and a sigh. "I just. Uhm everything's very, distracting right now, you know? I didn't uhm. Remember about." If he had the option in that moment to simply drop dead of embarrassment, he might have taken it. "The time of the year if you know what I mean."

How could she not? Sita had puppies of her own. And yet she had not problem being this close to him.

He seemed uncomfortable. It was clear why. Sita wasn't a fool. Well, that wasn't true. Her intent was not always good. And her decisions not always sound. Platon, Vasco. Sometimes she followed her heart more than her brain. Sometimes she followed neither. Like a puzzle piece that couldn't quite find its place. Sita just had to find the best place to jam a mistake into her plan. She was a strategist, after all.

There was something oddly satisfying in his discomfort. Azra was a friend, so naturally she didn't want him to be that way, but it felt like having a bit of control that she could not typically harness. In this case, she wasn't entirely eager to wave it in his face. Though, in this case, her body, not brain or heart, was yelling at her to do just that.

Sita shook her head, "I think he is far more capable than we all think, but I would like to see him survive the journey. I'm sure we'll find it. And at least it's getting warmer." The night wasn't an excellent example of the weather, but the warmth brought life to her blood and she wagged a little at the thought of the impending springtime.

She hadn't actually expected that to be the reason he was awake and she gave him a very intentional side-eye. "It is a very distracting time of year. I extend an apology to your nose. Why does it make you so uncomfortable?" Truly, it was a necessary part of life or there would be no more wolves. And Sita thought, perhaps, she was a secretly shining example of disconnecting your heart from your loins.

currently travelling with walleye

Sita was right, he was sure, so he nodded along and grunted his assent. Azra didn't have a whole lot of experience with older wolves, as he had spent a lot of time in a roving troupe of various, ever-changing yearlings. One would even imagine that he might have been drawn to older wolves, since they had so many stories to tell and so much knowledge to share about the world. These things did intrigue him, desperately even, but it was hard for him to come to grips with being up close to the edge of mortality. This, he was still uncomfortable with. He looked at Walleye and saw someone fading away. But also, he saw an age that his father never got to be.

On the other hand, Sita hardly seemed bothered by anything—not Walleye's age, not her scent, or being distracted. She asked point-blank, but without judgement, why it made him feel uncomfortable. Was it that obvious? Azra didn't really think that much about how his body language looked or words sounded like from the perspective of others. "I mean... you have kids so I guess it's uhh, different for you." She knew all about it, and Azra knew barely the first thing besides what he had been told and quickly tried to forget. Sita was older than him, but probably not more than a year... meaning. With some shock, Azra realized she would have been even younger than him when she—

"I guess it just seems... scary? Kinda intimate? I mean... Idunno?" Was it worth guessing at what the deed was like when she knew for sure?

Sita hummed thoughtfully at that. True, she had had children, so maybe it was different. Sita loved her children, but found herself at odds with the idea of loving an act. Nothing about it was exciting or romantic. It was everything that happened much earlier and much later. She thought about her mate, gone and how her heart fluttered for him. It no longer did. There was a faint stirring for others, but she couldn't love what she couldn't see. Hope could be a killer.

"Are you curious?" She asked him, absolutely nonchalant. Sita got to her feet and her tail twitched against her ankles. "It's neither scary nor intimate. Though I suppose that is up to personal interpretation. But scary? No."

currently travelling with walleye

"Uhm, I mean..."

He was. Azra was a curious soul. He turned over every log and watched worms for hours as a kid, followed all sorts of butterflies over the territory borders only to be brought back by the nape of his neck by his siblings and packmates. He nearly fell in the river for staring at it too close, trying to figure out why water was wet. He spent hours trying to mimic bird calls. But this didn't strike him as the same sort of curiosity. It wasn't innocence.

But as Sita got to her feet he found his eyes, and his whole head turning to follow her. There was a lot he wanted to say, a lot he wanted to ask about. Yet they were on a journey together. There was plenty of time.

And he was an idiot.

"Yes?"