Emberflame Ridge I sold my soul for this?

@Ukko

The woman — having forgotten more about herself in the days that passed, leaving her without identity — roamed from the cliffside and the ridge, and found herself situated in the middle of nowhere. It wasn't really nowhere, she could've easily traced her way back to the grotto or back home to the keep, but for her addled mind, nothing made sense. Nothing was familiar. And there was nothing here — just grass, far as her eyes could see. The distant shadows that indicated far-off mountains gave her some clue as to where she should go next, and it was with a lethargic gait that Octavia sauntered onward; she thought it seemed fitting somehow. That it was right. To be wandering and not sitting stagnant and alone.

So instead she wandered, still alone, still in pursuit of something, but not knowing what. A vague sense of unease passed over her as she neared the western mountain range, so she deviated to the south. There were cliffs here too, mountains, stones, piles of rubble and the decidedly arid landscape which had become a perpetual backdrop; the heat of summer warmed her through, but something remained chilled deep inside of her. Something that could not be touched by the humidity in the air. She felt the nagging at the back of her neck again, blinked feverishly as a sheen crept over her vision, and marched up the ridge — thinking idly that she could see forever from on high, and maybe that would help her somehow.

It isn’t like Ukko to travel far from his home—when he had one—but something put fire under his feet to cause him to cross boundaries. He’d spoken to @Asterr early that morning and what he wanted to do. He knows he’s meant to stay close to the young woman, especially with Jolon still there, but he doesn’t suspect the male to be able to achieve much when he’s down one leg. If it had been up to him—and he hated the thought he recognized so easily as his father’s—he’d have killed him. He’s nothing but a burden on his new home and resources but he barely has his foot in the door, including none of them likely respecting his place in their hierarchy.

What had caused him to leave the claim of the lair, Ukko isn’t sure. He wants to check on the maplewood and see how they are doing from a distance but he knows he’s not ready for that just yet. One day, he tells himself, but for now he moves along the mountain range with ease.

Perhaps he’d even eventually find Capri’s home though he’s certain she’s moved on with her life. The crush he’d felt for her only resurfaces if she crosses his mind but she didn’t likely wait for him to come around. Friends, perhaps, but he doesn’t hold on to much hope.

A scent crosses his nose and he stiffens, becoming rigid. It is familiar, and painful, and Ukko freezes in his steps, considering turning tail and disappearing back where he’d come but his legs don’t work like that. Instead, he moves and follows it, drawn to it like he’d always been and always will, and his one mistaken coming to the forefront of his mind as he finally catches a glimpse of the woman. He hovers for a few minutes before he takes a few long strides to catch up and barks (then winces, because why would he do this to himself?) and waits to see if she gives him the time of day.

She looks out and down, seeing the cascades of rock and the curving silhouette of the many trees, but there is nothing familiar here. It doesn't bother her as much as it should, and Tavi finds herself oddly contented by the absence of everything; she is alone, the world is at her mercy, and everything is alright. Whatever happened merely hours ago was already a blur.

She did not move until a sound beckoned for her from behind - familiar in the sense that she could identify the animal it came from, as one might identify the shriek of a particular bird within the forest, but not the precise entity that called out. She turned and regarded him in the same manner she had looked athrough Reek - blankly, but with some curiosity. Silent like before, and briefly reminded of the stranger on the other cliff. Was she there again? Had she left that place?

It takes a second but she turns around and looks at him. 

And that’s all.

Dark orange eyes narrow and his head tilts. It hasn’t been that long since he’d seen the woman. She’d been angry at him and he’d been a coward. What will she think now, if she gives him the chance? He hadn’t earned his place in Ryujin other than fucking the boss and worked his way in, but he’d gotten a second chance to do things right. A matter of time on whether or not he actually succeeds. 

The thought is cut short when she doesn’t do anything else. She watches him with questions written across her face in a language he can’t read. 

“Tavi?” he calls. One paw lifts and he takes a step forward, slowly, to see if she’d object to his approach. He thinks back to Asterr and her command for him to stop but he’d been treading on thin ice. Not that he isn’t here, for he certainly has a lot to make up for, but he forces his weight forward to close the distance.

Her mind is sent spinning. Back, before her encounter with Reek, or with Stark, or with any of the wolves from the Keep - to before she had all this stress put upon her. Her mind fluctuates between the memory of Ukko as he was, back in the Maplewood, and then to Reek - to the passion they shared, the adultery, and everything is muddy. Tavi hears her name spoken and she tilts her head, at first not understanding it, staring at him wide-eyed like a fawn caught before a wolf for the first time. But she knows that name. Maybe not as herself, but she know it. She knows the story of Tavi, the liar, the sneak, the girl who snuck her way in to the woods after a boy — and the woman who selfishly took a man away from his family.

And then, as she thinks of these many and layered things, recognition does dawn upon her; she does not speak a name, but Tavi does slide step by rigid step towards Ukko, and just as she comes close to him, she buries her face in to his scruff and takes a deep breath. The smell of him is different — it isn't who she sought, truthfully, — but she wallows in that scent regardless and the comfort his body grants to her is a great relief. The wolfish embrace ends as she pulls away, and she does this slowly, as if to be parted from him is bringing her real pain. As she sets her eyes upon him again they are heavy as if ready to close and take her off to sleep, and through her lashes his face contorts — being Reek, Stark, Ukko, all at once, and yet strange too, as if she is visiting a shadow.

There’s only a moment more of the weird expression before it changes to shock and Ukko finds himself more confused with more questions that she’s not answering. When he comes to a stop, she makes a more forward, but it’s awkward and misplaced and before he knows it, her nose is in his neck. He becomes stiff, a few seconds passing that he doesn’t know what to do with. Will she attack him? Will he let her?

His jaw tightens and when she remains, he begins to ease up. It takes longer than it should and slowly he curls his neck around her, holding her close, and trying to keep her near when she begins to pull away. He hadn’t gotten a chance to absorb the entire embrace and now he’s losing it while she slowly backs up and he lazily brings his gaze up to her. 

“Tavi,” he murmurs and puts a step forward to close the distance she’d put between them to pull her close once more.

There is that name again, and she hears it from three voices - three different mouthes, all from the same wolf - and sways softly, as if it is sweet music and she has been lured in to a state of calm because of it. But then he is drawing her close again, pulling her in, and the woman lets him. The embrace they share reminds her of the many between herself and her lover; a soft purring sighs out of her at the memory, remembering the grip around her waist, the stress upon her joints as a body is hoisted atop her back, the pleasure of it — and she burrows in close, breathing him in, tasting the dust upon his fur and thinking, I am home I am home I am home!

Hungrily the woman begins to administer some soft touches with her lips, nipping at his skin with her teeth - drawing her tongue across his throat and feeling the pulse of the veins just beneath the surface. Tavi draws her face across his chin like a cat might, feels him drifting around her like a warm rain cloud, and knows what she wants — maybe not from him, but the woman doesn't know who she's with by now. It could be Ukko, it could be Reek, or Stark, or someone new, or nobody at all — a figment of her imagination knit together in pieces, like a jigsaw. All she knows is she wants, and there are shattered memories in her head that tell her how to achieve her goals.

Tavi draws her snout up the side of Ukko's throat, nibbles at the base of an ear, and breathes a moan as if it is so terribly difficult and so frustrating that she need to speak at all: Missed you, she sighs, and then resumes her attempts at affection; she is rough with him without meaning to be, awkward as if she has never done this before, but for Tavi it feels new and old at the same time. So very alien, but right, but wrong, and so mixed up.

Pulling her close only keeps her still for a minute and Ukko whines but she’s licking him, kissing him, nipping at his face. At first he wags his tail and feels a wiggle in himself but it only takes a few seconds for things to turn rough. A whine comes out of his mouth again and he pulls his snout away when she nips a little too hard. His eyes search her face to find something missing entirely that, for a brief moment, is lost. 

She moans and speaks and he feels shaken back to reality. It would be easy to melt into her but something hooks his mind and holds him back.

“Tavi?” he says then, realizing he’s doing nothing but saying her name over and over as if it might get somewhere. There isn’t anything else he’s able to say, there’s so many questions he isn’t sure what to ask her. He swallows a lump in his throat and whines a third time to try and pull her back to him and soothe her nerves. “Talk to me,” he pleads instead, hoping maybe she’ll give him some clue so he might have a chance to figure it out.

She is overwhelmed as she searches for some sort of connection, something to root her here and in this place instead of all the places and all the moments; because that is where she is, always, now. Drifting from moment to moment, fragment to fragment, to the present and the past, and cannot quite stay anywhere. He says her name again and in hearing it, she finds some purchase on reality; but there is something pulling her out just as swiftly, and Tavi offers up a smile to him.

"Talk to me," he asks her, begs her, and the tone of his voice makes her erupt with a soft tittering of laughter. It is not her laughter, no — Tavi was always big and obnoxious, but this laugh is small, like a mouse has snuck inside her skin and begun playing with what it's found there. For a moment she is stuck there, and then gasps, breathing him in again, and admits, No, no talk - because why would they need to talk? They needed to do so much more, didn't he want to? Didn't he love her? Want her? Reek — she thought the name and felt her body grow stiff, and she pulls away from Ukko as if he has smacked her, but then upon looking at his face and truly trying to study it, she knows this is not Reek at all. At least, for the moment.

U...kko? she murmurs, surprised to see him, of all people, and here? What was he doing here? Hadn't he left? Or had he gone to find her more treasures for her den? The confusion was added to the melting pot of her emotions but soon enough Tavi was overwhelmed by a sense of mirth, of glee, of great and unwavering gladness to be in his presence again; as if their fight had never happened and the night in the tangle was still ages away, far in the future. Yet she cannot seem to make her tongue work the way it once did, and so she falls silent, and so Tavi draws close to him again. This time she is not so affectionate nor insistent for his closeness, but she does not withdraw either; the kisses end, but her tail is wagging and she is happy to be with him again.

This isn’t right. He doesn’t know what it is but he knows it’s not right. It’s not Tavi. From the weird smile on her face or the strange giggles coming from her lips. His eyes don’t stop roving her face for some sort of clue, once or twice glancing around them for someone else, but he ends up empty handed. She declines the plea to talk to him and he closes his eyes then, knowing he won’t get the answers from her. He may never know them, if it continues on this way.

She says his name. It’s not his name, not from her mouth. This isn’t a woman he knows and for a while he doesn’t answer.

The silence lingers between them awkwardly and builds to the point Ukko thinks he might explode. The sudden new wave of confusion pushes him toward a few answers but there isn’t enough to grasp so that he can hold on to them, shifting a little so that he may still be solid enough for her to lean.

“What’s wrong?” he says softly near hear ear, nuzzling against her warm fur. Perhaps if he can get her back to the lair. Maybe Asterr will know what to do. His mate. Ukko stiffens again and breaks the embrace, shaking his head a little and taking a step back. “I can take you to help,” he adds, uncertain if she’d understand or even be willing to go with him at all.

The silence is strange. It is worse than when he speaks her name, so she hides within him, presses herself in to his thick fur as if to hide away forever. The moments of quiet are punctuated by his heartbeat, which she listens to with a sense of fondness, of familiarity, but that dwindles the longer they are silent together; and she burns, oh how she burns, because the wanting is still there, and Tavi drifts between thoughts of her beloved boys. The problem with having a type, she thought with sudden lucidity, is you can never tell them apart. This voice in her head is different; it isn't her own, it isn't something she recognizes, and then even her brain is silent, and Tavi forgets.

What's wrong? says the dark man, and his voice drapes across her like a blanket, warm and comforting, with the irregular beat of his heart in the background. She hums something useless and monosyllabic, nibbles softly at his fur like a child might grasp for their mother, and then Tavi sinks to her haunches, content to just linger as a piece of him. He offers her help, and that sets her off again — laughter peals out of her in waves, suffocated by his pelt at first, and then she rolls back, nearly falling away from him in a neat little pile, and Tavi is laughing like she used to.

She snorts, and the overwhelmingly obnoxious sound of her hearty, big-bellied glee overtakes the cliffside. She gets to her feet and staggers around Ukko, her head slouching between her shoulder blades at first, and then her shoulders stoop down as she smacks the earth and invites him to play, because for a second she is a little girl again and this isn't Ukko, but her brother — but that doesn't last either. She feels the wind course across her scruff and twists on the spot, addled by the sensation, and catches sight of him over the small of her own back. Mmn, take me, she purrs, and bats her tail at his chin before sauntering away a few steps.

As a gap forms between them, she is laughing again, the tittering rat-infested laughter that was so unnerving the first time around. Tavi has become uncoordinated and reacts as if she's drunk when her paws catch upon a small ledge, and she has to correct her movement in haste lest she fall on her face — and as she stands up properly, she scoffs, staring down at the dirt with a dumb smile, but the laughter has faded.

Ukko holds his breath as he watches the weird display before him. The brief flash of the Tavi he knows back to the woman he can’t even recognize. Maybe if she could get back to Asterr, she would know what to do, and everything will be fine. Ukko to save the day, like it… always had been. He sucks in a breath and shakes his head, worried that whatever this is has been going on for longer than now and left a sinking suspicion in his stomach. The request unsettles him and he lowers his head, stepping forward to nudge her again. 

“Come with me,” he says and leans into her for a moment, hoping to leave his mark on her enough to keep her focused. “It’s not far.”

As the woman lifts her head, maybe to the sound of his voice but maybe just because, she sees his dark silhouette and a part of her brain shrieks: danger! She bristles all over, and her eyes go wide, the pupils mere specks of black amidst the hazel of her eyes; and then she relaxes before the moment is over, and forgets again. Or maybe she can finally tell Ukko apart from Reek? Maybe the memory of what had happened hours ago had already faded? She hoists herself to her paws then, swaggers back a step as if to avoid the man as he approaches, and then she chuckles, and drunkenly slurs, Come, ehehe, but does not shoot down the idea, and is ambling after him as soon as he begins to lead the way. Whether Tavi knows whats going on - where she's going, where she is, anything - is perhaps unneccessary. She lets out tiny squeaks of laughter every so often, as if this is one great big joke.