Hideaway Strath the loving nest

Since Ran was never intended to survive very long, it seems only fitting she die today. Thanks for the brief stay! <3

Ran's paws never stopped hurting since she had come to the new pack. There were many frightening new wolves and scents and movements and Ran tried to get by, but she remained small and underdeveloped. She was happy to have Hemlock, 'Hem' if you asked Ran, and she felt at peace so long as she was with her.

But her body just couldn't keep up — she might seem like a much younger pup than she was if anyone looked at her. It was hard to tell without simply knowing how young or old she was. But she was a lot older than she looked and she remained small and weak. She often complained about the pain in her paws and cried a lot, missing her home and her siblings still even though @Hemlock provided much in replacement.

That morning her paws still hurt. She was still small. She was hungry, but anything she ate would just come right out the same way. Ran was shivering. "Hem," she whispered, asking for her mother, but after that one word, that last breath, nothing more came out. A last shudder followed and then her body was still.

<3! I had been looking forward to threading with Ran, but this is just as fun xD

Sirius watched little Ran with a jealous eye. All he knew was that Hemlock had gone for a day and returned with the grey oddity with the intent to care for it. He kept his distance, smelling sickness but unable to make sense of the uneasiness he felt around her -- and she was so needy! Crying out at all hours, and stealing the attention of his own surrogate without impunity. He didn't realized it, but it was making him angry. He looked for Hemlock, wanting to talk about how he felt, but he only found Ran alone.

His mood darkened immediately, and the Svartell boy, who had never once shown an ounce of incivility, approached Ran with a growl as her last word eked out. "Hemlock is mine," he hissed, spine stiffening even as a death rattle stilled the poor girl. And though she had already gone, Sirius pounced suddenly on her still-warm body and began to chew angrily through her throat.

Feel free to react however you think Sirius might!

“Sirius!” Lotte barked sharply, her voice a whiplash of guttural sound. She advanced toward the boy in a few swift steps, dark lips peeling back to reveal each gleaming alabaster tooth all the way to the gumline. To be quite honest, she wasn’t sure whether the boy had killed the weak little whelp or whether he was just worrying at the corpse, but the former alpha’s command was plain as her head and tail lifted and her moonbright eyes pinned him with a fierce glare. “Get away from there.” She hadn’t heard his incredibly creepy whisper, which was probably a good thing; and she didn’t miss the guttersnipe who was a poor and inadequate sight when leveled against Roarke’s intelligence, bravery, and dashing good looks.

That didn’t mean she wanted Hemlock to see her one foundling trying to guillotine her other one, though. Lotte meant business, and a low growl sliced through the air as she made to shoo off the boy with a harmless snap to the air in front of him. If he didn’t move, though, she wouldn’t hesitate to take further action. “We do not defile the fallen in Teaghlaigh,” she rumbled at him mightily, every guard hair standing on end and ears thrust forward.

He was about halfway through Ran's neck when the sudden and stern appearance of the commanding Leifteanant, startled Sirius away from the corpse. Had this been a meal he was consuming, he might've reacted defensively, instinctively. As things were— chewing through the neck of another wolf; a small girl, a child— he was left with the weight of an intense guilt on his conscience that had him cowering from retribution. Tail tucked and ears laced to his skull, the boy backpedaled with a sharp whine, not daring to look anywhere in Lotte's direction, lest he catch the ire in her expression.

"I.. I was just—" He didn't know how to explain this. He didn't know how to escape what he had done when he had just literally been caught red-mouthed in the act. He licked his bloody chops anxiously, another whine escaping him. "She didn't belong here!" he shouted at the ground, the fur along his spine rising as his defensiveness began to peak.

It was hard for Lotte to stay impartial and commanding when the sight of Sirius' bloodstained mouth turned her stomach. She knew, though, that this had to be dealt with — immediately. Her kneejerk response was to agree with the guiltridden boy: no, Ran, inferior creature that she was, had not belonged here. Not when Roarke was missing.

Still, "Hemlock bore her here and Arturo accepted her as part of Teaghlaigh. She was part of this Family as much as you or Mallaidh or Ceallach or..." She bit her tongue and ran the words together to stave off the hurt. "Roarkeneirlys." She stood over the broken, twisted body with a moue of distaste that she couldn't fully conceal. "You are not a soturi, Sirius. A true warrior would not kill for sport or emotion." She hesitated. "Losing Ran this way will make Hemlock very sad — " Lotte didn't know how sad. She didn't know how much the fireflower would be able to take. She didn't know whether Sirius would be permitted to stay after his admission of guilt, and she didn't know whether Hemlock would survive losing him, too. She considered her options with narrowed eyes —

— and maybe it was a destructive tendency that happened because she missed Dagfinn still and was half-crazy with grief at losing Roarke. Maybe it was bitterness that Arturo had made his offer to Hemlock without first consulting her. Whatever it was, she decided on the one thing that would cost her everything she had chosen to stay in the Teekons for.

"There is something we could do," she told the little boy very solemnly, her eyes glinting cold and hard, "but you must be absolutely obedient to me and trust me."

Sirius was frightened and reeling. He hadn't considered his actions, not truly, and now that his better senses were free of the red tint of wrath and the green tendrils of envy, he could taste the mistake on his mouth and the blood-iron of another wolf was simply foul. He hadn't been able to taste it before, but the bile in his stomach turned and his mouth began to salivate in a precursor to a gag. The feeling that he needed to wretch became stronger when Lotte mentioned that Hemlock would be sad.

"N-No!" he said sharply, the difference in each eye almost falling away as fear lanced through them both just the same. "Sh-She can't be sad! She has me! I'm still here, and I can keep her happy by myself, I can! She won't be sad, she can't," he started to tremble through his hysterics, calmed only when Lotte seemed to relent to his error, and told him that they could do something about this.

Sirius met her hardened gaze, his sniffling fading as he sobered to what had been said. The boy nodded, pulling himself out of his crouch. "Anything. I'll do anything, Lotte. I don't wanna make my mama sad, I promise I don't."

Making a conscious decision to betray the Family was easier for Lotte than it ought to have been. Arturo was her husband and her king, and she was happy to believe in and abide by his laws — but this was about the Family. This was about protecting Hemlock and Sirius. Lotte never once questioned that Sirius had killed Ran — even if he hadn't killed her, he was still angry enough to do it, and that was another thing that needed to be addressed before Hemlock was permitted to conceive. "Sometimes I fear I am too broken," she remembered the wise woman saying, and her heart hardened along with the line of her mouth.

A secret fear she'd harbored since Dagfinn's departure was loss of self. There was no sprawling tundra to sprint across out here — no need for subterfuge — no need for masks. There was no point in speaking the language of the tundra since nobody was around to understand. Her children understood their mother's garbled tongue well enough, but without any reason for them to use it, they would lose it someday, too. Lotte was fluent enough in the common tongue to get her point across even if her syntax didn't always seem completely natural, but she was losing bits and pieces of the wolf she'd been — and maybe that was part of her desire to latch onto this plan, too. She was not by nature an altruistic beast.

"Everything will be all right, Sirius," she said solemnly. "I will make it all right."

Hemlock's happiness was contingent upon keeping Sirius safe — Lotte could do nothing for Ran, but she could save this child. "Breathe deeply," she told the boy, her practiced voice regaining a warm, velvety quality. "Today you become a sot — a soldier of Teaghlaigh. Go to the stream and wash your face and mouth. Return here to me. Do not stop to talk to anyone. Do not look for anyone. If anybody stops you, tell them this: Lotte asked to speak with me alone." Her eyes bored into the child, muzzle reaching forward unflinchingly to try to meet the Svartell's eyes. "Do you understand me, Sirius?"

Everything will be alright...

I will make it alright.

He trusted Lotte unreservedly. Not only because Sirius had no choice, but because he was still a child— a foolish, emotional child who would apparently do anything to keep from seeing Hemlock's love divided from him. He looked up, his gaze only making it as far as Lotte's buxom chest as he began following her instruction to take deep breaths and calm himself. The method was effective enough, easing back the sting in his eyes and rapid-firing of his poor heart inside his chest. The boy swallowed thickly, tasting foul iron again, and he had to take another few deep breaths to avoid reeling into a panic again.

What did I do? What did I do?!

Lotte's voice caressed and commanded him. She dubbed him a soldier, which he knew meant being strong as well as it meant following orders, and he listened carefully to her directions after that. As she asked if he understood, the boy nodded, only to realize that she wanted to make eye-contact. He steadied his quaking, and breathed again. "Wash up. Come straight back. Don't.. look for anyone. Someone stops me, I tell'em: Lotte asked to speak with me alone," he repeated back to her, correct despite the uncertainty with which he spoke.

When it was confirmed that he had his task committed to memory, he took off full-tilt from the densite, and charged for the nearest source of water. All the while, he muttering to himself over and over again:

"Wash up, come back. Wash up, come back. Lotte asked to speak with me alone. Lotte asked to speak with me alone."

When Sirius had gone, Lotte crouched next to the body, careful sweeps of her tongue blotting the bitter blood away from Ran's torn throat — covering the scent of Sirius' saliva with her own. Her mind flitted quickly, constructing a story that she could tell with her own filthy, desecrated mouth in hopes that Sirius would never need to dirty his own lips. She could smell the boy all over the corpse, and she knew — she knew, even as it turned her stomach — that disposing of the evidence was the best course of action. She couldn't risk doing that while he was on his way back, though. Moonbright eyes sharpened as her hackles rippled, saliva pooling in her mouth at the nauseating thought of eating wolfflesh — but for Sirius and Hemlock, she would do whatever she had to. As it was, she loped off to the nearest cache where she'd placed the body of a fox; it was too cold now to plausibly be the culprit for Ran's demise, but she could at least rub its pelt over the cooling, stiffening bag of bones.

She lay the bloodied, musky fox across the little girl's body and used a gentle massaging motion of her forelegs to mesh the furs together. Only when she could smell the stink of fox and death more strongly than she could detect Sirius' living, breathing scent did she stop, returning the fox to the cache and settling down with her head hung low to wait for the boy.