Sleepy Fox Hollow Gain the weight of you, then lose it

What was a fifteen minute walk turned easily into twenty-five at the snail's pace Wylla kept, and for her, it felt like hours. Most of her steps were slowed by the toll the fever and hunger took on her, but every one with her injured shoulder scorched her and made the next one harder. When they reached the water, she outright collapsed into it and gasped at the relief of cool water washing over her legs and flanks. Wylla wasted no time in gulping it down, heedless of the churning in her stomach at the temperature shock.

Mahler went to work then, causing Wylla to grit her teeth and moan through the sear of water entering a raw and bleeding wound. Thanks to the infection, it had hardly healed at all despite the days since sustaining it. She gnashed her teeth through the pain, but for once, didn't turn to threaten or strike Mahler at all.

Maybe, for once, it was getting through her thick skull that he did care.

When he was finished and had helped her to a dry spot near the edge of the water, Wylla sank weakly onto her elbows and shivered in the mountain breeze. Better than the fever, though. Better than being in sweltering heat, too, which would only have made things worse. She clamped her jaws shut to still the urge to chatter her teeth, but when he indicated that he had to go and find more herbs, she blurted, no! before she could catch herself.

Well, too late to take that back now. Don't go, she mumbled, more than halfway embarrassed with herself. She had spent all these months since Sagtannet wishing he would just disappear, because maybe then she could forget him, maybe then she could find true hate in the spiteful words she said to and about him, but while she meant a lot of what she said about how he seemed to care only about his wants, and said a lot of things he never showed with the expectation that she would just believe it, and seemed to diminish all her grievances, and dared to imply she would just lay with any man for pups while her heart was torn apart with grief...

She didn't want to be alone anymore, she was starting to realize, even moment to moment, here, now. Thirty minutes ago she had told him to leave, now she asked him to stay. Sagtannet had not felt like home, but neither did any place he wasn't, not even when it had been her and Stag. Now Stag was who-knew-where, and she was getting too old and too tired to keep inventing reasons why Mahler was horrible just to fuel some self-righteous belief that she was any better than him.

She was just as selfish, parting herself from their children, making them choose. Just as selfish, wishing death on herself despite how it would shatter them. Just as selfish, selfish, selfish as he was, and after all, hadn't she done most of this to herself in pushing him away out of fear of losing him?