Making some assumptions about injuries from the raid~
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What wretched timing.
Wylla was still nursing her hurts from the invasion, both emotional and physical. She was still so angry that no one else had turned up to fight the intruders with her, no matter how many times she was told that the two she fought were not the only ones who came. Their strength was divided. She tried to tell herself it wasn't personal that she had been left to fight alone. Mostly, she was still sore, her wounds still raw, and her pride as well. It would take time for all of those things to heal.
Time waited for no wolf, though. When she woke with a familiar heavy and amorous feeling in her veins and the smell of fresh blood in her nose, she cursed aloud. Would that she could sleep it off and will it back another day when they were more fit for it! That wasn't how these things worked. She grumbled and rose from the snow to shake out her coat, then pressed her nose to the ground and inhaled deeply, seeking her mate's musk among the others.
So be it then. She had let it pass her by last year in her anger. She would not let it happen again, no matter how bruised and bloodied they were. She feared for a moment that
@Mahler might refuse or be too unwell, but she shook it away and began to follow his trail, boldly waving her tail as she went. If anything would cure his hurts, surely it was this?
Mahler’s path was unsteady, frantic, and heavily perfumed. Wylla could tell that he was angry long before she spotted him ahead, and not only because of the charged quality of his urine. He was moving in a less predictable manner than usual.
When she found him, they stared at one another for a time. Again Wylla worried that he might deny her this. There would be no reason for it. They were man and wife now and he had once asked to do this again with her, so she had no reason to think he did not want more children. But there was a hard cast to his lilac eyes, purple chips of ice on his approach that only melted when he lowered his crown to butt against her shoulder.
Wylla let out a slow breath and twined her fur with her mate’s, like slender fingers sliding into the calloused grip of a strong lover’s. She snaked her body sinuously down his side and pressed her nose into the junction of her neck and shoulder. Her touch was soft; she knew he was in pain there.
Knowing it did not stop the urgent spark of want in her stomach or her gaze when she brought it back to his. Rivenwood would heal. They would heal, and new life would help to mend them all.
They had lost a year. It was both their stubbornness. Wylla, feeling undermined, begging for Mahler to start life anew with her somewhere else, and Mahler, feeling scorned, digging his heels in, insistent that the life he had built himself was more important than the one she dreamed of.
Even now she had moments of self-doubt where her inner voice whispered to her that she had abandoned every dream she had for her life in favour of his. Even now there was a niggling doubt that the life she lived was fulfilling in all the ways she wanted it to be.
They had lost a year, and she did not plan to lose another, and not only for love and stability, things she felt they could provide when they had not before, but because Wylla was unmoored and purposeless outside this relationship now and desperately needed... Something more. That was a deeply buried secret she would never, ever tell. She did not think of it often, but it was not entirely selfless, this desire. No. Nothing Wylla did was ever entirely selfless.
Regardless of what drove her, she and Mahler deserved this this year. Both of them. So she wound her lithe body against his, relished the firm muscle even after his body's wasting, leaned into his affections, stole heated kisses and uttered purling growls to stoke his passion while she warmed the air around them with spring's hopeful glow.