Ouroboros Spine xlvvi. ringing in my head, when you broke my chest

She ignored him. If he thought it was a matter so simple as food and sleep -- as if she did not spend much of her time napping with her young as she recovered, as if Moonglow had not helped her -- then there was nothing more to say. 

Lótë just waited, eyes resolutely locked on her children until Kukutux arrived with Aiolos and Kigipigak, heart pounding in her ears the whole time. Relief crashed through her like the waves breaking over her paws that day on the beach. "I would like to be with my family," she murmured, feeling small -- a burden -- and hating it. "Adrastus has made it clear that this hearth belongs to him. I do not want it."

"I do not belong to it. Nor to you," she told him softly, tiredly, emeralds flickering to him only once as she stood. 

"He has found my children, one of them anyways, to be...unsatisfactory," she did not care to inflect any tone upon the words, did not look in anyone's direction, clinging carefully to any shred of composure she had left. Her child deserved a voice to speak strongly for them, not to warble with tears. "And the idea that I would love and accept my child for who they are is unreasonable and irrational." 

"Would you all help me move them to my previous den?" she glanced to them all then, green eyes flitting between the trio briefly before returning them to her pups. Shame filled her. Not for her child but for her husband.

How ironic that he should be the exact bully he feared would harass her child.