Who: Red and Wolf What: Threats! Where: Rose's cottage When: Now? Warnings/Rating: Cranky babies making threats? Some flashbacky type things from Red.
Red knew she couldn’t stay. She shouldn’t. There was a child on the other side of the door now, and as much as she still had moments when she hated the man whose mind she shared, she grudgingly admitted that he was at least protective (almost ferally so) of his child. And the mother of his child. And that was something she could finally agree with. But she needed time lately as well. With the child’s birth, she began to once again claim more time through her door, though the time brought with it new and frustrating discoveries.
The men in the woods. The one who was wolf. The journals that were full of those that did not understand. Her goal was safety - ridding the land of those that would harm without forethought. Beasts and humans and human beasts - there was barely a difference in her mind. And though the woods were mostly quiet, spread over acres and miles, she wandered with knife close to hand and her axe on her back, ears stretched for any sound that might filter through the leaves and trees. Her steps, careful and precise, took on a sort of a rhythm as she walked - even and steady as a clock’s tick, though she stuttered them from time to time, listening hard for something that might fall within and without of the rhythm she set. It was lulling and trancelike while at the same time keeping her full attention, so it was surprise that overtook her thoughts when the trees opened to a clearing with a small cottage.
Her steps stopped before she was anywhere near the building, still half-hidden by the forest’s undergrowth, bright hair tucked into the scarlet-lined hood, only browns and earthy tones to the visible parts of her clothing. It was close trousers, shirt and vest and the cloak, everything cut down from the overlarge men’s tailoring that each piece (save her hood) had once been, now suited to a slight girl moving through the woods without getting her clothing hung up on a branch or bramble bush. In her sudden stillness, she almost began to blend with the tree next to her, and it gave her a moment to study the small building. She needed the moment to gather herself first, to tell herself that the cottage wasn’t her grandmother’s, though the sturdy stone looked to come from the same ground. Knife suddenly in hand, she watched for a sign of what she should do with this new discovery.
The Wolf hadn't necessarily been expecting her to come, even after writing to her on the journal which now sat on the floor, close to the hearth where he had been sleeping. Rose was out of the house on an errand of her own, and he had wandered through the forest for long hours before returning. He was still having a difficult time reckoning with the limitations and advantages of his new body, and the only way he knew how to acclimate to it was to walk old trails, learn them a second time. Hunting, he learned, was not impossible. Difficult, with such a large, loud body, but he managed to catch a rabbit in its burrow by driving one of his long limbs inside.
He broke the creature's neck and carried it back to the cottage.It was strangely satisfying to know he could still find and kill food with only his body to wield in hunting. The rabbit was a scrawny thing, as most of the creatures that had survived in the forest were, but there was enough meat on it to keep him satisfied for a little while. Perhaps strangest of all was how...unappetizing the raw flesh seemed after he tore the skin off. glistening red in the light from the fire. Come to think of it, he had never seen a human eat raw things, only the cooked stuff in bowls and dishes. In the very brief moments he'd spent thinking on it when he had still been a wolf, he'd assumed cooking was a kind of ritual humans had, like the sort they did in their largest stone houses, where a man talked and everyone listened quietly. But now he realized that they couldn't really eat the stuff unless it was cooked, or that they didn't like to.
He put the rabbit carefully on one of Rose's metal dishes and set it on the grate above the fire. He didn't know what it meant for the thing to be cooked enough, but he assumed it happened sometime before it burst into flame, so he knelt on the rug and watched the rabbit, impatiently. When he could finally bear to eat it, the aromas of cooked meat had filled the cottage. He ate the thin creature down to the last bone, sucking and gnawing the marrow from the centers. It was hard to crack the bones with his weak jaw and blunt teeth, but he managed.
He slept, not long after, and when he woke he walked to the back of the house, where the water was, and cleaned his face, letting the water trickle back through his hair. He drank deeply from the pail, long swallows of the cool, clear water, and then he heard a sound.
The Wolf set the pail down on the grass, so it wouldn't make a noise. The sound he'd heard was of crunching leaves and branches, of a large creature at the other edge of the clearing, hidden from his line of sight by the cottage. He might not have the hearing that he had when he was still the creature he ought to be, but it was still sharper than a normal human's, sharp enough to catch the girl's approach.
The Wolf’s body tensed, and he edged toward the corner of the cottage, listening. No sound, now, not a whisper. He slid his body slowly around the corner of the wall, like a predator emerging from the brush. His feet didn't make a sound, his movements eerily quiet, and he stared into the forest where he'd heard the noise. His weak eyes couldn't penetrate the growing dark, but he could pick out a dim shape.
For a thing that had recently been a wolf that terrorized the entire countryside, he didn't appear all that intimidating. He was tall, yes, but only of average width, though visibly and densely muscled in the lithe way that a Wolf should be. His hair was blonde and thick and still a little damp from the well water. His clothes were simple, a pair of black jeans and a white t-shirt, Mundane pieces from Rose. They were different from the clothes he saw the villagers wearing, but Rose had yet to see fit to tell him why. His fingernails were long and clogged underneath with dirt. His face was handsome in a strange way, broad cheekbones and a wide jaw. His eyes, however, were unmistakably those of something not quite right, black as the growing night, flat. If he had pupils, they were impossible to see from this distance. Though they did not flash like a wolf's would in the fading light, they did watch, and focus in on the girl’s shape in the trees.
He said nothing. He remained still.
As Red stood there, waiting for something to happen with the sort of expectation that sometimes solidified in the air before a storm, her nose caught the remaining scents of cooking meat, a meal that had been finished for a while but that still hung in the air. Her stomach twisted in a hard knot around its own emptiness, and for that moment she pressed her free hand against her body to try to silence the growl of a hungry belly. The man on the other side of the door had plenty to eat - he and the woman were good providers to their small family, but Red often went long periods of time without a decent meal. She could hunt sometimes, but more often than not she simply stole something from a home she passed. Nothing large, nothing that would break even a poor family, just enough to keep herself from starving. It didn’t stop her body from reacting the the scent of food on the air though. and she frowned at the twist and the sound of her stomach.
It didn’t take long for someone else to appear, and she held herself still as the figure came around the side of the small house. The nerves under her skin lit up at the sight of him - fight or flight at the basest level. Because even if he wasn’t the Wolf she’d spoken to on the journals, there was something about him that was dangerous. Something that cried to her as something to stop. His clothing was wrong, and his eyes (from what little she could see over the dim distance) were wrong, and his movement was wrong. Her stomach fell and lept and twisted at once, not with hunger any more, but with what old soldiers would call battle nerves. Her fingers tightened around the handle of her knife, and after a moment that stretched almost to the point of snapping, she took one single step forward, away from the tree, her outline solidifying into something more human and less a spirit of the forest.
The Wolf remained still as the shape resolved into something more definite. He was still in the way that all his muscles were coiled for action, ready to react whenever need be.
"You can't come here," he said, breaking the silence with a few definite, sharp words. His voice was deeper than would likely be expected for his youth, and he hardly seemed to blink. He had made an agreement with Rose, and while promises were human things, she had offered him food and she had no pack of her own. For the time being, despite being a witch, despite destroying his forest, he'd run with her. And she'd told him to protect this place. As far as he was concerned, this was their territory - no one else was welcome.
Red had frozen again after her first step, watching him watching her. Her heart, though used to the pump of adrenaline that had surged at his appearance, double-beat in her chest. His voice startled her as well, not what she had been anticipating. Her fingers twitched around her knife handle again, knuckles pale under the layers of dirt and dried mud. In that moment, her hood pulled forward to hide her face in shadow, not even her eyes or the angle of her face visible, still and poised, dirt caking parts of her dark clothing, she looked almost more animal than he did.
“You shouldn’t be here either.” Her own voice was quiet, and it was rough, the voice of someone who hadn’t spoken to another being in too long. It required a grating clearing of her throat before the words even managed to force their way out. “This is not a place for you. Or your kind.” Her eyes told her he was human, but her heart said wolf. Either way, she couldn’t simply ignore it.
The Wolf didn't flinch, nor move from the spot he'd chosen. The girl didn't look the way human girls he'd seen looked. She was dirtier even than most of those in the poor villages on the outskirts of the forest. He bristled when she named his 'kind', lifting his chin a fraction, eyes narrowing. He didn’t think for a second to refute the statement, to pretend at full humanity. "I have a pact," he said. "This woman whose place this is, she made it my place also. I protect it." No doubt his ears would be flat on his head with aggression if he still had his old shape, and his fingers found fists, unthinkingly. He was drawn up to his full height. You had to make yourself look as big as possible to convey dominance and threat, and this girl and her knife and her dirty clothes screamed it right back. "My kind has been here much longer than yours," he said. His voice carried flat and harsh, lips pulling back from his teeth. He’d heard too much, of late, of who owned or didn’t own this forest, who had a right to it and who did not. "You should go back to the houses. Outside the forest, where humans belong.”
“The woman is a fool and needs protection from herself then. How long before you plan to slaughter her in her sleep? Or force her to be...” Here she stumbled over her words, old thoughts usually ignored making their sudden and forceful presence known. A man’s shape that hid something far more sinister, and a girl too young to heed the warnings of her mother. Asking after her grandmother and receiving a tooth-filled smile in response, a dinner of meat and wine, both thick and too-metallic on her tongue. The feel of sheets on her bare limbs, skin and the sharp scratch of nails, and it was only then that she realized something was so very, very wrong.
“No!” The word came out suddenly, sharp in the clearing, and she took two more quick steps forward. She was still near the tree line, but no longer hidden by the undergrowth. Visible from her concealing hood down to the scuffed soft leather of her boots, and it was obvious how slight she was. So close to still being only a girl. With the swift movement of her steps, the hood moved just enough that a strand of that copper-bright hair slipped forward to swing out into the dying light. “No, you must go! You cannot stay with her!” The years-old memories made her voice cut through the stillness, a tremor to it that was fear and anger both.
The Wolf didn't know what was wrong with the dirty girl in the clothes of a man, but she acted a little like a creature touched by madness, an injury deep in the head, or the sickness that made them fear water and attack packmates. Humans must have something similar - in his long winter hunts he had once seen a woman chained outside her home, shivering, naked, blue, ravening and screaming at the door like she wasn't a human at all.
The Wolf didn't bear a weapon. He didn't know how to use one. But years of hunting humans from necessity had left him with a hefty amount of knowledge about how their bodies worked, where the soft parts were, where the blood ran close to the surface of their thin skin. He didn't have teeth to bring it out, but his nails were over-long and jagged, and the light in his eyes when she came nearer said he could still bite, even with short teeth. "If you think she can't protect herself," he said, as the slip of a thing moved toward him, "Then you haven't met her." He smiled, and didn't know he was doing it. He was just getting the hang of expressions. They didn't come quite as naturally as a snarl, or the flip up and back of ears, but they had the same kind of significance, it seemed, and came as much without thinking. He didn’t like this girl, who came onto the clearing he was supposed to protect with a weapon in her hand. "You look soft," he said, with all the rumbling, low malice of a warning growl. His eyes falling on her thin limbs. "Small," he added, looking up at her. "But soft. This is my place now. You come any further in here, and I'll show you how soft you are." He stared, still. "Humans are always surprised when I show them that."
The smile caught her up, and she stared out of the shadows of her hood at the Wolf. It was wrong, the smile, in the moment where there should have been no smile, and it was that wrong expression that made her take one step back again, but she squared her shoulders, making herself as broad and tall as she could. He may have been across the clearing, but she could tell that he was bigger than she was. The growl was unmistakable, even rumbling under a human voice, and she straightened her spine even more in response. “You are soft too,” she snarled at him, matching the threat in his own voice. “Or had you not noticed how human you look? Or how many soft spots wolves have as well?”
The Wolf still watched, tensed, coiled, even as she stepped back. The smile dropped as his mood changed, uncalculated. He didn't know how to fake expressions yet. "I do," he said. "It's likely that neither of us would survive. You would cut me, and I would tear your throat out." His dark eyes watched. "Or you would wound me, and I would survive to eat what was left." The growl in his voice remained, and he showed teeth to prove he would not back down from his post outside the house. "Leave."
“Or you would bite me and I would leave your soft belly open to spill on the ground.” She refused to admit defeat, even just in words, and her steps took her two forward again, not to completely cross the clearing, but to give her a sense of purpose and place. For as much as she wanted to run at him, slice him open, leave him to die, there was a man with a child on the other side of the door. And she had a responsibility to not leave him dying in the clearing. “You do not belong here either. It’s not your place.” Her knife hand clenched, dirt gritting under her fingers, but she turned, stiffly, the movement causing her hood to catch the evening breeze through the forest and slip back. It revealed the curves and angles of her profile - cheekbones and jaw too sharp, eyes too hard and hungry - and the curve of a braid the color of the setting sun. She snagged the fabric again with her free hand, pulling it forward as she took the few steps to carry her back out of the clearing.
"I have no place but this forest," he said, a little of the growl leaching from his voice. The girl had stepped back. She would not fight. He hadn't even noticed, but he had begun to lean forward toward her, back curving down, and he straightened again. He licked at the back of his teeth, where a little blood clung from the half-cooked rabbit. With that hood back she remained a slip, all sharp pieces. No, she wasn't anything at all like the humans in the villages, like the women with their round edges. He wouldn't forget her face.
He didn't turn from her as she moved away. "Come onto my territory and threaten me again, and I'll hunt you down where ever you go." That was a promise, not an idle threat. If he didn't enforce his territory, what good was he anyway.
Red was already half among the trees, but she turned back to glare at him, the angles of her face just visible in the shadows of the hood. “I have no other place, Wolf.” The disdain was laced heavy through the word. “This is my territory as much as it is yours. If you hunt me, you’ll not find me easy prey.” With a flick of her wrists, her hood was pulled even farther forward, and she slipped between one trunk and the next, her words filtering back toward the clearing. “Stick to your rabbits.”