Fallen Tree Cove no veil between me and the wheel of fire

For @Namid <3

There were some things she had to fix.

But she was terrified of fixing them.

If she didn't, she could pretend everything was fine. If she didn't, she could just—do exactly that, leave it be and go bury herself with her shame somewhere, where no one would ever find her unmarked grave. Where she didn't have to go through this.

The easy way out. The one she wasn't good enough for.

There was more than just that, though. There was the whole damn world and the sun and the moon and the cursed mountain they lived on—why did it have to be a mountain? Couldn't her parents have settled in a forest, too? Maybe.. maybe things would've been better then.. if she had grown up feeling safe in this world, and not just within the den in which she was born. If she had been able to explore beyond the horizon without thinking the land itself would eat her, and not just the inhabitants of said land, would she have come out different?

The older she got, the more she thought about it—and the more she thought about the explosion of her four months younger self. It had been the first time she had tasted frustration and bitterness and anger in its potent mix, and it had been as intoxicating as it had been frightening for those brief, brief moments of riding her furious high. She had known she would come down hard, and she had, but by then it had been too late.

She felt something similar still, but it was aimless and restless, and had her roving the mountain the darkness. Sometimes, she was reckless, making jumps she wasn't entirely sure of, challenging her footing as she raced along slick and steep cliffs, but just as she wasn't sure of them, she was never unsure of them either. And she had begun to venture down into the forests below, never being away for more than a day, but long enough to get down where she could speed up among the trees, and forget about the world she'd left behind.

She liked the west better than the east, but the east was closer.

As a child, she had been meek. She had been withdrawn. Introverted. Insecure. And what was she now? She stuck to herself, avoiding mostly everyone but Kajika, and most of the time in between her doing something actually useful, she felt like a bomb about to blow up. She was still withdrawn, and introverted. She was still insecure—it was probably what made her flash her teeth at shadows when no one was watching. Anxiety was running her body, and sometimes, when she thought no one saw her, she allowed herself to look as worn and ragged as she felt.

Kajika helped, but he was making her mind go places it couldn't go, think of things she couldn't, dream things she could never have. She stuck to him, like a burr in his fur sometimes, but there was something else she needed to do. Something she needed to get over.

Something she needed to fix.

She didn't have the first clue as to how, though. All she had was a broken memory of an encounter that couldn't possibly be real—fragmented and edged in a suffocating blackness—but everything pointed to it actually having had happened. The way her mother acted. The way she'd wanted to throw herself off every cliff she'd found for weeks.

And nothing had changed. She'd gone, she'd come back. And all she'd had since that day was a facade of politeness, but noting more. Nothing deeper.

It hurt more than being ignored would've.

Restless, she stalked through the Cove in the blackness, following a scent trail and feeling.. sick. Weak. Ashamed. Angry. She had.. done unspeakable things. And she had wanted someone else to fix them for her. She had waited for someone else to fix them, or for things to just magically return to normal, but as ever, the world had not come to her rescue. She had been left in a cold, confusing place, and nature didn't even have the grace to take her back, even though she clearly was good for nothing but making Kajika happy.

Which.. was a big deal, to her, but it wasn't helping. Not with this. Not with the voice in her head, calmly pointing out to her that she had absolutely no right to feel miserable about what she had done, because it was surely much, much worse for Namid.

Or she had simply burned that bridge, her mother had given up on her because she was hopeless and spiteful and worthless, and this was how it would be from now on out. Nothing had certainly pointed in any other direction since that day.

She swallowed. Thinking about it—that grim, bleak, all too likely possibility—still made her throat feel thick and her eyes threaten to overflow.

All she wanted was to.. damn, it was so hard to admit it, even to herself, to handle that emotion without wanting to trample herself or feeling silly or ..just giving herself a hard time. Get over it. You're on your own. You have to deal with life yourself. No one sticks around with their parents for fifty years. She swallowed again. The trail had come to its end, leading into the dark maw of the medicinal den.

"Mama?" she whispered, tentatively, into the darkness.

Above her, the myriad of stars shone bright and distant and cold.

I have loved the stars too fondly

Neha had been gone for nearly a full month. She’d promised to come back, that it had only been for a visit but Namid was forced to face the truth that was the likelihood that her eldest had run off with Draven. Not only had she lost another daughter, the daughter that had been with her longest, that she’d thought would never leave her, but she’d also lost the prospect of knowing her grand pups as well. Lunette had come back, yes, but their relationship as still as strained as before. When she’d been gone the mother had sworn to herself that she would try to mend things, that she would make it right but upon seeing the girl all she’d been able to feel was shame. Not shame toward the girl, but toward herself. She had been right. She’d been weak and reckless. The matriarch had been foolish and wished her daughter and Draven well with a smile on her face even as her heart was breaking and said nothing. Now she might never know what had become of them. It felt like all she had was Vespertio, her rock and forever the love of her life. She clung to him at night, wrapping herself up in him for dear life afraid that he, too, would disappear from her. She shuddered to think of what might happen in that circumstance.

With the absence of both Neha and Draven the woman had taken up the role as the pack’s healer. It was a good way to keep everything off her mind. She threw herself into making sure that their supplies were well stocked and cleaned, then if she had time she would tidy the communal den and so on and so forth. She about ran herself ragged every day trying to keep herself occupied, collapsing in a heap next to her love in hopes that she would be too exhausted to produce dreams. It wasn’t often that that happened.

This day she was sorting the herbs, a pile next to her of various things that she’d deemed too imperfect to meet her standards. So immersed was she that she’d missed the sound of approaching pawsteps. It wasn’t until the girl called out that she realized the presence. She flinched, taking a moment to take a breath and steeled herself before turning and moving out of the darkness of the den. “Yes?” she asked, a small smile on her lips.

To be fearful of the night

In the black of night, her heart was rattling in her chest, and everything she tried to keep away crowded in too close. Her eyes were burning. Her breathing was shallow and shaking. She wanted her mother to flow out of the den and.. and something. Embrace her. Lick her cheek. Say something, something that was nice and.. and somehow fixed the gulf between them.. and she was so, so afraid. She had been a stupid child, a stupid creature, so lost in her own misery she hadn't realized she'd crossed a line and once she did realize, had thrown her hands up in defeat and gone all-out because if she was going to fuck things up, she might as well well and truly do it.

Not a wise strategy. For a child so dependent on the safety of her pack and the kindness of her parents, threatening to end all of that was not a smart thing to do, but it had been about the only honest thing she had done, if you didn't count anything that had to do with Kajika.

She was merely reaping what she'd sown—taking the consequences of her foolish actions. She didn't deserve better than this. She'd made this bed herself. She'd dug her own grave. She tried to be brave, to accept it for what it was; her own foolish mistakes. You couldn't have nice things if you weren't nice. You wouldn't be loved if you were despicable asshole. She'd pushed her mother too far and it.. god's sake, it was her mother.

And her mother looked out of the den. The starlight painted her silver. Made her glow. “Yes?” she asked, a small smile curving her lips—the way she might've greeted anyone in the pack. The way she might've greeted a stranger, for of all things, her mother was kind and caring. Lunette felt her heart twist in her chest.

She didn't stand a chance. The hitch in her breath turned into sobs. The distance between them was a glacier—cold and vast and impossible to cross. Warm tears pooled in her closed eyes, and she seemed to fold in on herself as she somehow shrunk before her mother.

Not even in her wildest dreams had she been able to imagine the void opening up inside of her—the bottomless pit of raw grief, the fear spanning from horizon to horizon. Fear, of a life in which.. for the rest of her fucking life.. her mother did not love her. Did not want her. Did not care for her because she was an idiot. It was an abandonment that struck to her very core, more primal and visceral and real than anything else she had ever experienced.

In some impossible way, she managed to open her eyes. She managed to tilt her head up and look at her mother. And through the sobbing, she managed to ask the one question burning in his mind, her voice full of all the weakness and the fear she normally kept hidden even from herself; "Do you still love me, Mama?" she whispered through the tears.

I have loved the stars too fondly

It seemed that as soon as she came into the girl’s vision a peculiar look came over her. Her brows rose in surprise as Lunette instantly broke down into sobs, a bit of panic rising in the mother’s chest. What was happening? Was something wrong? Did something bad happen to her child? She moved forward to nose at the girl’s cheeks in an attempt to staunch the flow of teachers from those soft brown eyes. Brown eyes that met hers and nearly knocked her back with the absolute amount of panic and fear held within them.

 

"Do you still love me, Mama?"

 

Namid paused in confusion, brows pulling together. She didn’t think that was a question that needed to be asked. The pale queen was soft hearted and a pushover when it came to those she cared about. Once you proved yourself to her she was yours for life and the same came tenfold for her children. What could have made her think anything else? Then again, the mother had been so consumed with her own hurt and confusion recently that she supposed her manners could have suggested it. Guilt dripped into her emotional stream. She swooped down, pulling the girl against her chest. “Lunette, there is nothing on this earth you could do that would make me not love you. You could kill someone and I would help you hide the body without question,” she said with strength.

To be fearful of the night

We both type like pros. I call Lunette 'he' and you try to staunch her flow of teachers. <33333

She was so afraid, that she had done something she could not reverse. She was so afraid, that her mistake had been unforgivable, and that she would forever be estranged from her mother—her beautiful, beautiful mother, who, in hindsight, Lunette realized had suffered something terribly in the past year. And considering how Lunette herself had suffered, she couldn't help but blame herself, wonder if something had happened when Namid delivered her, to bring them both down into the darkness.

And then Ismena left. And Neha had the gall to go and breed and disappear, after Lunette had chewed her mother out over..what? She couldn't really remember the details anymore, lost in a panicked blur, but it had been bad and —unfair? Maybe, maybe not. She had been angry, she had been hurt, she had been so, so confused, but had it been Namid's fault?

It was easy to lay the blame on others. Say, look at what you made me, but deep in her heart, Lunette knew that everything. was. her own. fault.

Her mother's nose touched her cheek, but the damn question still burned in her; are you treating me like you'd treat anyone? Have you disowned me? Am I too awful to be your daughter? So she asked it, and through the veil of tears she saw the confusion unfold.

And she wanted it to go away. She wanted to take the words back. She wanted to bite them back into her throat, her lungs, erase them from ever having crawled into the air between them—I'msorryI'msorry I shouldn't doubt, please, don't be sad, don't be mad, don't be hurt. She waited. She braced. For impact, she guessed; for things to go to hell a thousand times over, and for her to leave the mountain that same night, disgraced. Too stupid. Not good enough. Not worthy of her mother's love. A troublemaker. Her shoulders shook with her silent sobs, tears dripping down her chin.

She shouldn't have doubted. She—but honestly, how could she not doubt, when she was the one who had hurt her mother? How could she not have doubted she was still worthy of her love? It was a doubt that reflected back on her, and not on her darling mother. Namid pulled her close, and Lunette, who had been taut as a coiled wire, relaxed into it. The words—about killing of all things—barely registered in her mind. The only things which were real were her mother's fur, her mother's warmth, her mother's scent, the sound of her heart.

Lunette buried her face in the soft, silver folds, shaking and gasping as regret and love and doubt and pain flowed from her. "I love you Mama," she managed to get out at some point, her feeble voice mixed in with the sobs and the fur.