Emberwood let's have some fun this beat is sick

He'd done his best to be helpful, but sometimes that meant just getting out of the way and allowing the healer-wolf to do her thing. There was something about the shape of @Dhalia's ears that called out to him, and when he'd looked into her face to find a mirror there, he'd decided he would trust her.

Not that there were many other choices.

Dusty Rose was nearby when the woman pronounced Reverie stable. Though he wasn't sure he liked the tone nor the look on her face, he was able to convince himself he was imagining it, and he took heart in the fact that she was going to be okay. He came back to her side and tried not to let his mouth tremble at the terrible stillness of her. Had Dad looked like this on the day that he died?

"Thank you," he murmured, soft and quiet. He peeled his eyes away from his lover's face to look at the healer woman instead. "Dhalia, right? That's..." One of our daughters. "That's pretty. Real pretty."

In all truth, the girl was not okay - but she was lucky. An inch more and the bite would have hit her jugular. At that point, even her parents, for all their years of experience, couldn't have helped her. Dhalia's job would have been to collect the herbs to embalm her. She had prepared for that when the silvered man had found her, frantic and on his way to the Creek she just come from. Her only hope was that the golden girl - Reverie, they called her - had still been breathing, heart beating, when she'd arrived.

So she'd set to work.

The air was laden with heavy spice when she finally stepped away, her own paws caked with blood and heavy with exhaustion, but her job had only just begun here. 

Funny, how her old life came knocking the moment she thought she might find some place to settle.

Thank you, she said to the coywolf she took for Reverie's mate, by the way he hovered, like she'd seen many do. My parents must have thought so too. They lucked out when they realized smashing my grandparent's names together was also the name of a flower. They're healers, too. They had taught her everything she knew.

Dhalia hooked a used cobweb with her paw, one of the many blood soaked ones around the bed. Dusty Rose, right? Idly, she wondered who he'd been named for. Help me bring these outside the den. Once we wash our paws, we'll gather more so we're ready to redress her wound. Come, she said softly, with a glance Reverie's way, and hoped the coywolf would listen. It would be good for her to busy him with something he could do for Reverie, now that she was stabalized. More than just lingering around. Your wife needs her sleep.

He was flattered to receive an explanation of how and why Dhalia had been named. These things were deeply personal, and though he judged her for it, he was still pleased to be on the receiving end of her carelessness.

"What were your grandparents called?" he asked her, figuring she would lack similar circumspection in this matter. Things must be different where she was from, even if he was sure there was some coyote in her.

He followed her reluctantly from Reverie's side, keeping one large ear cupped in his lover's direction so that he would know at once if she called out for him. He did not like being commanded, and he liked being away from her even less — but he figured that now was not the time to start arguing with her healer.

Had she said her grandparents? A slip of her tongue, or maybe the exhaustion from tending to Reverie was taking its toll. Dusty Rose didn't need to know she'd gotten half her name from her aunt and not her grandmother, though, and he'd never meet either of them for those details to really matter, so she shrugged that away and simply said, Dhani and Chelhia, and left it at that.

Dusty Rose followed her without complaint, and she was glad for this. Husbands could be both stubborn and unhelpful, but this man seemed to hold neither bad bone in him. A breath of fresh air, really, and it would soften her approach. If he was teachable, then he was far more useful to her both now and in the longer term.

How much do you know about healing? she asked, after they'd buried the blood soaked rags and now washed their paws in a nearby creek, Have you ever done it before? She could show him more than dabbing the blood away from Reverie's wounds, if he had the ears and interest to listen.