Duskfire Glacier save your advice cuz i won't hear

It's all good! My eyes are a bit bleary, so apologies for run on sentences. It's about time these two met for real (:

How he'd gone so long without encountering Maera was beyond him: in all honesty, he should have at least seen her around. But the girl proved more elusive than the sun on a rainy day, and truth be told, Malachi didn't have such a great track record himself. He'd found her trail countless times, but had managed to convince himself again and again that she was busy, or that she had someone else to keep her company, or that she didn't really need him barging his meddlesome nose into her quiet life.

But all these excuses simply covered the nerve he held inside, because if he told the honest truth, he didn't think she was busy, and he didn't think she had many friends to keep her company. Before Scarlett had arrived, she'd had Danica and Arabella, but they were both long gone, and their scents remained only as a distant memory lost to the sappy scent of pines and to the overshadowing aroma of the wolves who had come to fill their ranks. Whether or not she needed him was another question, but he'd never been a part of her life, save for being a constant presence at the Glacier since their arrival. In her own grief he imagined she'd sought solace with the pack's older women, or with her father. When one caretaker left, another came, and so it went. She had never come to him, and so he assumed she didn't need him, and life was easier that way, because he didn't know what he would do if she did.

Yet when he passed her trailing scent that day, the thought came again - the one that had been relentless in its presence, always nagging the back of his mind that it was time to just go and find Maera and meet the remainder of the Sveijarn brood, the child of the parents he'd been working to preserve the pack for day in and day out. He'd tried before, but Tuwawi had intercepted him and he'd used her appearance as an excuse to stop his search. But as he lingered at her scent that day, no Tuwawi appeared, and no excuse cropped up to make him turn away. So with reluctant resolve, he lowered his head to pick up her trail and followed, swallowing the uncertainty that came with his advance, and spinning him into circular rhythm with the girl who tracked his own.