Bearclaw Valley your dark splendor

there was a change in astara, and one that merrick did not appreciate. her tall frame was built with a hard litheness he had often enjoyed embracing, and so the thickening of her waistline was noted, as was the change in her scent. her loyal affection had not discontinued, but merrick felt an impending sense of otherness about his panther.
and so he sought out @Evien, taking up the trail of the healer's scent with a disconsolate look upon his lopsided features. 
"something is wrong with her," he blurted when he had found the chocolate doctor, not bothering to explain about whom he was speaking, as he assumed evien would know.

Evien was in his den for once, sorting through some of the herbs. It was hard to dry them out with the rain falling the way it was, so he was having to get a little creative about keeping them relatively dry and fresh. Moss and little racks that he'd made of sticks were crucial to his process here, and he was meticulous about his organization.

The boy jumped a bit at the sound behind him, ears flicking toward the leader as he approached. He frowned in confusion and concern, tilting his head to the side. 

"The girl?" he asked, brows arching. "What's wrong with her?"

in the pause between statement and answer, merrick cast an approving eye over the pretty feature that evien had claimed for his pills and potions.
when the boy shifted to face him, merrick slumped to the wet earth with a sulky splay of his tattered ears.
"she's fat and smells weird," the bearwolf answered mournfully. the raven was changing; he did not recognize the name that evien used, for he had never given the woman one of his own.

Fat and smells weird? Evien smiled slightly and moved over to crouch beside the other boy, green eyes warm. "What's the smell like? Can you describe it?" he questioned, tipping his head to the side and letting one ear fall over to the side.

He didn't know the name of the girl, because she was mute (duh van) but he could gather enough to assume who the father was. And since there was no way that the black wolf would be able to express this to Merrick herself, so Evien might be the one who had to break the news.

merrick scowled, attempting to pull the proper words forward into a legible sentence. "usually she smells the way it feels when you take blood out of someone's neck," he muttered, uncaring if that was coherent or not. 
why was evien smiling?
"now she feels softer,"
weaker
"there's something about her i don't understand, and i know everything about her."
single eye intensified its beam.
well what's the diagnosis, doc?

Well, that was an extremely vague and also very Merrick response. Evien sighed through his nose and shook his head slightly, settling down on the wet earth in front of the leader.

"Well, she's going to get a lot bigger," the medic explained, stretching out his legs. "Fortunately, these... symptoms aren't permanent, so she should return to normal in a few months. After she gives birth to her pups." 

Green eyes watched the coywolf intently, awaiting his response.

whatever he had expected evien to say, it was not this.
for an entire minute he stared patiently at the young healer, brain burning too slowly through the information given.
a sharp tic yanked at the skin beneath his eye.
he thought of the curled beings inside his lover
grubs
the tic came again again again again
indra gasping her last within his jaws
indra watching him fondly as he chased birds inside bearclaw
indra nudging him closer despite his milk teeth
merrick's mouth twitched. he clapped a paw to the horrid mosquito drone of his tic tic tic'ing eye.
"what?"

Well, that... was not the reaction that Evien expected. Surprise, horror, an outburst, maybe. But not the staring - just constant, unblinking, and then his eye began to twitch. It was obvious the young coywolf hadn't expected the girl to be pregnant, but Evie had expected him to say something. Merrick was almost never without something to say. 

"The girl. She's pregnant," he went on carefully, rising to his paws. "I have some fennel seeds that I'm drying out for when she needs to make milk for the pups. It's best to prepare early."

his ears heard evien lay too-casual plans for a future that could not could not could not exist. merrick stared first at the earth, then with great effort wrenched his eye back to the healer again.
"i don't want them."
little too late, but no matter. for a long moment he gazed at evien, biting the inside of his cheek. he had promised not to ask after the darker things the doctor has in his medicine cart, had promised that he would not ask evien to use them on anyone but himself.
the taste of blood came as he convinced himself not to ask if there was something his nightshade could consume, change that event upon the horizon.
"this ... this fucking sucks." he sucked his own blood from the mouth wound and stared off at nothing with a dire expression.

In truth, Evien did not know of any herbs that were used specifically for miscarriage. Some that could cause it, if given too many, but he didn't think of them in that moment. In his family, birth was a good thing - it had never been encouraged to end a pregnancy, so he'd be no help to Merrick on this particular front.

"I don't... know what to tell you," he offered softly, ears lowering a bit. He thought he'd be excited. "What don't you like about the situation?" the boy asked, looking to get to the root of the matter.

fangs bared in a cold grin, ice crackling over the volcanic rage of his features. "you're fucking kidding me, right?" if evien was attempting to be objective, it was unwanted. 
look at me, his single eye telegraphed in flames. you want to hand me a child?
"it's best if this never happens," merrick declared, shoving himself upright.."have you told anyone?"

Evien arched a brow at the sudden outburst, a cold feeling twisting in his gut. It was something about the look in Merrick's eye, the curl in his smile. Part of him wanted to growl back, to ask what he'd ever done to warrant being talked to like this, but this situation wasn't about him.

The healer stepped forward, green eyes flashing in their own way. "I haven't told anyone," he responded, moving to block Merrick's exit with careful steps. "What do you mean, it's best if this never happens?" His ears pressed back slightly and his body tensed a little, waiting for an answer. "I don't have anything that can stop it."

nostrils flared in ire as evien moved to keep merrick from leaving. head sank down between his creamrust shoulders; tongue slithered out to lap the side of his scarred muzzle.
a step, the high flare of his tail as hackles sprang to life and he thrust his ragged ears toward evien in the clear ancient demand for capitulation.
"you're a swell guy. don't do anything you're going to regret. ursus needs you," merrick bid softly, clapping the healer's shoulder with a secret dig of his fingernails.
with that the man flicked tailtip and began to curve around the doctor, intending to head for the mouth of their paw-shaped valley.

For once, Evien wished he could just step back. Let things happen and just pretend he never knew these pups existed at all. But he couldn't do that, not with tiny, innocent lives at stake. He was a healer - he maintained life, god damn it, and that included the little ones growing in the raven wolf's belly.

In a moment that only lasted a brief second, but felt like it stretched on infinitely, Merrick moved to pass him. The footstep echoed in the medicine den, thunderous and earth-shaking, like the steps from the Tyrannosaurus Rex in Jurassic Park after it had escaped its enclosure. And Evien was the electric fence that turned on last-minute to stop its tirade.

The boy moved in front of Merrick again, shaking off the hand on his shoulder and meeting the cyclops' gaze. "I'd regret it more if I didn't," he admitted, hair raising along the back of his neck.

at any other moment, merrick might have appreciated the challenge of the young healer. his skills were useful in ways the young coywolf could not fathom, and evien had grown into himself impressively. 
that being said, his clear messages were thrown aside, ground underfoot, as the doctor claimed a greater role in merrick's life than he was allotted. singular boil of orange glint; merrick cocked his head as a black-silk smirk unfurled across his lips. anger, yes; the boy was infuriated, but the constant questioning of his place at the helm of ursus championed a greater need to show all of them
who
he
was
"evien, if you do not trust me, then get out." dead silence now. the healer had ensconsced himself into the heart of bearclaw. he had merrick's admiration and respect, the adoration of fields, the awestruck attention of ico. he too could be a god.
but there was only one king in the valley, and it was not evien.
a challenge. merrick waited.

A few tense moments of silence stretched out between them as Evien mulled over how to respond to the challenge presented before him. It felt like he was sitting at a table with two glasses of wine before him, with the assumption that one was poisoned and the other was not. But the truth was that one was laced with nightshade, the other water hemlock. The former would leave him paralyzed, the latter in agonizing pain.

He picked up the glass with the hemlock. 

The boy relaxed his shoulders in defeat, sighing through his nose and affixing green gaze on singular orange. "Promise me you won't hurt them. The girl, the pups. If you don't want them, then I'll take them. Let her nurse them until they're weaned, and then you won't have to worry about them again." It was a bold claim, almost desperate, but he needed to know that these pups would be safe.

People like Taylor could smell the promise of violence from a mile away. People like Taylor were: taxi cab drivers, soldiers, both former and active, bartenders, airport managers.
A fistfight in a space barely fit for two men. It smells like nickel and sweat.
Evien's voice drifts into his ear. The other ear is stubborn and at times blazes white with pain like a TV with burst tubes, so he has to cock his head. The pups, he hears, a snatch of a sentence, and he knows that he has stumbled on something clandestine, a pandora's box, a mimic. Two heads put together over a field of nuclear buttons. He holds his breath.
There were only a few times where he had been compelled to do something so strongly, as if he was not a wolf, but a vector, an arrow that had been leading inexorably up to this moment. He emerges into the scene voicelessly.

In his eyes, a clear message: Don't hurt him.

merrick, the disrespected.
merrick, the unheard.
merrick, the oddity, even in his own ranks.
and though he had tried quite hard to weed out the weak from ursus' rank, surround himself only with pretty creatures gone off the edge of madness — for you had to be mad in order to follow a clear candidate for a padded room — he was learning now how very different he remained.
merrick loved astara only. she had been the unchanging star in his firmament far longer than any other.
and so hurt leapt into his gaze as fields came upon the scene and warned him, the click of a calloused thumb against the edge of a lighter, and evien acted as though these vague potentials of life were somehow as valuable as a living wolf.
how dare you act as though i would hurt him for speaking his mind?
how dare you put the silt in her belly before my nightbird?
pain, and merrick lifted his proud young head to grind them both with a hard expression.

It was becoming clear that there was no way Evien was going to get to Merrick like this. Body sagging in defeat and gaze traveling to the floor, he stepped back. It wasn't like he had the power to stop him anyway. 

The boy barely registered that Kepler had entered, feeling sick and exhausted and so much like a failure he could barely breathe. 

"What do you want me to do, Merrick?" he asked quietly, looking back up at the coywolf through eyes warring between misery and anger. "Do you want me to be okay with... whatever you're going to do?"

Unreachable. Merrick, a skyscraper that screams up to an endless blue. The endless agency and lonesomeness of mountains. Something twists in his heart.
Untouchable. Evien, shuddering, up to his nose in a defeated anger. An inert anger that edges close to disgust. Something else twists in his heart.
He doesn't hear the doctor's words over the beating in his ears, that humming, that whir starting in his head and migrating to his ruined ear and then finally setting in the other ear like being dunked into water. This is what it feels like to be digested alive. He is familiar with it. Three boys and madness snapping at their heels. Something twists on his face. A fine facial muscle stutters just under a blond cheek. What are you going to do?

"i want you to stop assuming the worst of me, evien," merrick answered evenly. "you've worked yourself into a fucking frenzy over nothing but the simple fact you've forgotten that not everything needs your input."
"this does not concern you. it is a decision i will handle with her." muted, grey-rock methods that turned the boy's surface to cold stone. immutable.  unyielding.
"what i need for you now to do is get out of my way and let me go talk to my fucking wife," merrick hissed. "you've said your piece."
a blaze in his single eye as he leveled it upon fields now. "you don't need to protect anyone here from me. least of all evien. he's earned his place. you've earned it," he repeated to the young healer. 
a step back. "i'm gonna go now."

It took everything in him not to flinch at Merrick's words. It had not occurred to the healer that he might have been wrong about Merrick's intentions - he was just so sure that he was going to do something. But maybe Evien should've given it more consideration.

If he wasn't wrong, though... he was condemning these pups to death.

Defeated and resigned, all the healer could manage was a slow nod of his head, green eyes turning off to the side before he walked past both of the other boys and limped his way up into his den, vanishing into the darkness and stopping to stare at the makeshift racks he had made to store his herbs.