Hideaway Strath that's the language that stuns, scars, breathes into you

roar's eyes open (super late)! open to anyone realistically allowed inside the birthing den! :-)

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Roarke’s routine is normal except with it is interrupted by an outlier that the winter’s bane cannot predict. These are (usually) all handled in the same manner. Fussing and protesting with banshee screams until he things are on track once more …or as “on track” in the simple way that Roarke understands such things (which is to say not at all). He does not understand but it just is and he obeys his baser instincts as they command him to do what infants do best: eat, sleep and poop. It is comfortable. Roarke is often fussy until he is in his “place” — within touching proximity of Eiryls, a subconscious need that the pudgy, mobster in the making has yet to understand. It is miracle that she is not dead, that she was not dead upon being torn from the sac with him. Roarke does not understand this either, but he knows without knowing how when he is not near her and that is good enough for him to raise his voice in vocal protest.

Everything was normal. He was pressed between two siblings — Eirlys and another bean that he acknowledges as best he can acknowledge anything he cannot see and forgets about the second he wiggles out of their proximity because if he cannot feel it is ceases to exist to him until it…does. He suckles at his favorite teat (which is to say all of them because they all produce the same sweet mother’s milk just the same) until his stomach is contented and full. He detaches his greedy mouth from Lotte’s breast, little salmon pink tongue draws across his jowls to collect the droplets of milk that have dribbled down his chin and onto the plush, creamy pelage of his chest. It is sudden and it startles the winter’s bane into utter and uncharacteristic silence as his eye peep open, the seal that coagulates his eyes closed to the world breaks. The caliginous world he knows is in ruins as milky blue irises draw in light. His heart begins to pound as he blinks up at the large shadowy figure of Lotte and lets out a trembling whimper before he squeezes his eyes shut willing the comfortable darkness to come back.

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Eirlys senses her twin’s distress in an uncanny way she’ll never be able to fully explain, and she stirs from her own place at Lotte’s side to investigate. She feels his cries in currents of vibration that she can’t quite appreciate as sound yet and crosses the distance between them with a flurry of tiny turtle flippers. In the space of a few seconds they are one again, a snowclad Orthrus fashioned of cotton and cloud. Eirlys whimpers and snuffles, burrowing into her twin insistently, and then slowly begins to fall asleep despite herself, barred from the world Roarke, Ceallach, and Mallaidh now know by two paper thin walls.

Cameo! Tag me if I need to respond. <3

Mallaidh spends most of her waking hours—outside of eating, of course—studying each new change. One eye had opened, giving her a hazy view of the world and with that she’d been rather pleased but the very next day, the other opened. She has two eyes! And, to top even that, a few days ago, her ears had begun to open. This time, both were neck and neck and as she nears the first full month of her life, she can see and hear.
 
Neither sense is all that great, though, but her vision has sharpened that she can distinguish shadows from beings and one being to the next. There are two pale lumps and one darker and then her mother (still confusing to look at) and the others that visit from time to time. What she doesn’t realize are her siblings slowness in comparison (the two lighter ones in particular) but who’s keeping score?
 
When Roarke cries, Mallaidh is instantly separated from her eat for her to send her hazy gave in their direction. She can’t really tell the two apart, other than one is twice the size of the other, but the one making the cry remains unknown. The longer she stares, the more they don’t change, and her stomach still wants for food. Mallaidh, disgruntled from being disturbed, latches back onto a teat where she gnaws roughly with her newly erupting teeth.

Lotte is only partly aware of her children’s unrest at first; her stomach is filled to bursting with meat provided by both Chusi and Arturo and she is sprawled on her side in the half-slumbering doze of the nursing mother. It is the trembling whimper that first draws her attention in a pointed flick of one small, bearlike ear — but Mallaidh’s growing teeth grinding down sensitive flesh startles a muted, “Ai, pikku raivo!” from the smoke-and-shadow bitch. Bending her head to the little bears, Lotte smoothes her tongue over Ceallach’s sturdy spine, nuzzles encouragingly at the dark fury that is Mallaidh, nips a fleck of leaflitter from Eirlys’ snowy fur, and focuses at last on the winter’s bane. Roarke is the third cub to open his eyes, and Lotte is overjoyed at his accomplishment — indeed, it’s been a long time coming and she admittedly feared he might never open them. “Hush now, mo stóirín,” she coos to the snowclad eagle, borrowing a line from one of Brontide Corten’s songs. “Have you found your eyes at last, wee bear?”

She exchanges a glance with Arturo, who looks proudly on, murmuring his own soft reassurances to his son. “It is Eirlys’ turn now,” she quips, making note of the fact that three out of four of the Fearghal bears have functioning eyes now. She draws Roarke to her breast, cuddling him close that he might not feel afraid, trying to keep him somewhere there isn’t so much light to disorient and upset him. She hums the summoning call of the tundra and lets it morph into a soft lullaby, smoothing her tongue over his crown.

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The darkness returns but it is not the same. Roarke does not understand that he will never again perceive darkness in the same manner that he had for the first weeks of his life. In the now, it is his greatest source of comfort and it eludes him. There is still light even as he buries his face into his mother’s plush pelage as if he could worm his way back into her womb; but already he forgets the comfort that the womb had given him for the two months of his making. It is Lotte’s presence, her warmth, the embracing tickle of her silken fur against his face that offers him comfort — in the same manner that a human child turns to a blanket. The reassurances of his parents fall of deaf ears as Roarke tries to pretend with impressive tenacity that it didn’t happen at all; but he must pull his face from his mother’s belly to breathe and he does so begrudgingly, taking in a greedy breath of air that has the potential to rise into a banshee scream when there is proof of light. It is defiant and so is his developing body. His eyes blink open slowly. Progression is as defiant as the tenacious Roarke Fearghal and survival demands he does not fight what is merely inevitable. Roarke relinquishes the victory with a heavy sigh and searches the strange, milky shadows that he will come to recognize as his Family in weeks to come.

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Lotte continues to soothe and coddle her son, wanting to make the transition from birth-blindness to the seeing world as easy as possible. “You needn’t fear the light, little snowbear,” she says, eyes prickling with saline as she thinks for the umpteenth time of Dagfinn. The twins make it difficult for her; she keeps musing to herself, “This must be what we were like.” She falls abruptly silent, not even humming for a moment or two, and Arturo offers her the sweet reassurance of her touch. She leans into it and revives her low crooning, though it dips deeper into her wide vocal register, heavy with the weight of her loss. Ceannasach will never understand what Lotte now feels in quite the same way that Coelacanth and Amoxtli, Serein and Sirimiri, Crosscurrent and Undertow do. The same way that Roarke and Eirlys will one day feel.

There is part of her that wants to separate them before they can grow too closely, to rescue them from the inevitable pain of separation that will come whether they like it or not. It will come before they are ready, because they will never be ready. To cheat them of their bond is practically sacrilegious, though, and so Lotte simply pushes all thought of her children’s future pain away. For now, she can prevent it. Control it. She’ll savor these days and be grateful for them in the future, when her little ones hurt as Chusi has been hurt, in a way that is infuriating and heartbreaking and terrifying for the parents who have no power to stop it. “Little Roarke, I love you so,” she whispers to him, bumping her nose lovingly against his little round sides.