Stone Circle Sister, you are going to be an aunt.

Even for someone as naive in relationships as Nanook, her sister's situation seemed a messy one. Over the months she had considered her parent's split - and had remembered her father's absence almost more than she remembered his presence. Nanook hadn't payed attention enough to know the fine detail of ma and pa's collapse, but at Desna's words she wondered if thoughts like her sister's had at all spurred them to run in different ways. Had ma been unhappy with their father? Another face shared her early memories - a male, large and stormy grey. She remembered so little of him, but his presence - and that spawned a sapling of wonder to whether the strain in ma and pa's mateship had been shadowed by something her young mind couldn't understand at the time.

"Hmm."  Her mind turned with ideas and possibilities - ways to solve the emotional struggle her sister chewed on now. The logical course would be to accept whoever this new male was as her mate, and give him total fatherhood of the pups. After all, that is what he was, and the pups would need a father. But reality groaned, because then there were those feelings involved, ones that flowed so readily through Desna, and Nanook's face sunk to a frown.

But before she could speak, Desna turned the conversation on her, and whatever perplexion had begun to form lifted with a blink. Her mouth opened, and closed, and opened again, all without without words. "You - me - you want - " She didn't finish, but a tiny laugh escaped her throat. Desna couldn't be serious - her? Did she even understand what she was asking for? She lifted her gaze to her sister's eyes, to retort with a shard of her lingering ice, but a flash of heat drove her tongue to silence and her heart to a skipping rhythm. Oh. She wasn't joking. A chorus of alarms sounded in her brain - no, no! This was a terrible idea! But there was something in Nanook that wanted this, deeply, and her ears pressed against her skull. "Are you sure?"