Heron Lake Plateau Just smell with your eyes

The nightmares came back, if that's what they were.  He had to wonder -- they weren't scary, just enough to jolt him awake in the middle of the night.  The ghosts.  He wasn't sure if @Raven had noticed.  He didn't want to worry her.  This time when he woke up, it was early enough in the morning that the light was starting to creep across the landscape and he deemed it kind of not worth trying to go back to sleep.  He did his best to not wake her and set off slowly to the borders.  Guess it was time for an early start to the day.

It had been the same when their pups had been born last year, but in the resulting chaos, by the time they would have had a spare moment to sit down and talk about it, he'd done a damn good job burying the memories.  So then it was useless.  But now after hearing what had happened to Phox and Camilla, it had unsurprisingly dredged the whole lot back up again.  And of course, he had to go against his own advice, at least for now.  If he could just lock everything away again, that would be idea.  It hurt nobody but himself, as far as he could tell.

But until then, Quixote would take his time.  Take a breath, slow down and remind himself that the ghosts were in his head.  Fear is the mindkiller and all that.  Hopefully a calm day.

Though some might have said their becoming a mated pair was sudden and ill-thought-out -- and at the time, they might have been right -- over the year that had passed since, the bond between Raven and Quixote had deepened into something so intimate and connected that, individually, they were but two halves of a much greater whole. So attuned were they to one another's needs, emotions, and quirks that it often seemed they could have an entire conversation without any need for spoken words at all. A single glance between them was frequently all that was needed for Raven to understand how her mate felt about something.

All of that was to say that Raven did notice something was off with him. She'd noticed for some time now, in fact, but hadn't wanted to press. Qui was one of those types who, if he wanted to talk about something on his mind, he'd talk about it. His departure wasn't what woke her, but rather the dim, unconscious awareness that she was alone. It was a quiet, primordial instinct that made every animal just a little more alert to its surroundings, and as she blinked her sleepy eyes in the early morning light, she saw with a tinge of regret that her subconscious wasn't wrong. For a moment she remained where she lay, gazing off in the direction his scent seemed strongest, before she seemed to make a decision about something and rose to her feet.

His scent was easy enough to follow through the thinly-scattered trees, whose canopy rang brightly with the cheery, tinkling music of spring songbirds. As the sun climbed steadily over the mountain ridges to the east, its watery light angled gently through the dew-damp trees and painted the surroundings with a soft, scintillating shimmer. She loved this time of the day, when the world -- and she herself -- felt rested, clean, and renewed. Somehow, morning always seemed to wash away the preceding night's troubles and worries.

She found him after a while, the shadow of his black form ranging along the scrubby fringes of their borders. There was both purpose and distraction in the way he moved, and she could tell he had a lot on his mind. Mindful of the direction of the breeze, she moved so that it would carry her scent to him as she closed the distance. Soon, she was by his side and for the moment, the gentle brush of her shoulder against his was the only thing she said. Perhaps it was all that needed to be said.

Aaa!  <3  Have I mentioned I'm glad you're back?  You kinda write awesome posts, haha.  And sorry, my boy is apparently an introspective mess again, whoops.

It was probably the only thing he'd kept from her and it was also probably stupid to do -- he wasn't good at lying, so the only option became to just try to bail when it was effecting him the most.  He tried to be strong, to try to make sure that he wasn't somehow stealing all her attention with what he thought were unimportant problems and preventing her from doing the thing he thought would help the pack the most -- stepping back up to alpha.  But she'd already decided to do so, he just couldn't ruin it now.  He'd be fine. ... Right?  It went away before, but would it stay gone?

But think of the season.  Though at the moment they weren't imminently expecting pups -- he hadn't thought much of that yet, there was still enough time yet that he wasn't going to worry something was wrong -- but if they were, the ghosts would surely come back.  Perhaps they'd haunt him more strongly when the pups were his own.  Yeah, it was probably a good thing that Quixote hadn't arrived on the scene.

And honestly, as her scent drifted towards him, he felt bad for even trying to hide it.  She had to be able to tell.  Raven was the one who grounded him, after all, and he was not one that would typically drift astray.  Raven and the children were his world, and he didn't care what the rest of the pack thought of him as long as they were safe and happy.  He could be the bad guy, the jerk, but he meant well and did what he thought was right with unyielding dedication.

Soon she was with him, the brush of her shoulder still felt electric.  Raven knew something, and so she was here.  She was always here for him.  She was far too good to him.  His ears tipped back guiltily for more than one reason, and perhaps if it had only been because his departure must have woken her, perhaps he'd stay silent and they could just enjoy the morning together.  Instead he opted for a rather pathetic attempt at a misdirect, as he tried to convince himself that was the only problem, Sorry I woke you.  He reached out to nuzzle her cheek as they walked, his focus on the borders waning and shifting to solely rest on her.

It's awesome to be back! And your posts are fantastic, omg. <3 I've missed the interaction between these two. Sorry this one's kinda short and choppy. TV is very distracting right now!

His attempt at deflection elicited a smile from her and she touched her nose to his cheek in a gentle kiss of sorts. "You didn't," she said softly. "When I woke up, you were already gone." She was long used to his absence in the mornings by now, what with his dedication to patrolling their territory and keeping tabs on the pack. It just made the mornings he was there that much sweeter.

While she was the one who grounded him, he was the one who gave her much of her strength and resolve. A bolder she-wolf now stood where a timid, oversensitive one had stood a year ago, and much of that was because of him. It bugged her now to see him wrestle with things that he felt he couldn't share with her, and while she'd never been one to dig at him or wrestle information out of him, she really wanted to know what had him so pensive these days. The bolder Raven pressed where the shyer one might have receded before. She touched his neck gently with her muzzle and asked, "What's going on in that head of yours, love?"

I've got a combo of a Twitch stream and mad refreshing for the Tegan thread goin' on, rofl.

But each time she touched him it undid the work he'd done to button it all up.  Unbuttoned, even.  Maybe something more scandalous for a metaphor because have you seen the other threads going on right now??  Anyway, oh fine, torture him into talking, we all see how it is.  If she wanted to know, then he felt obligated to try and pour it all out in a nice decanter for her.  The only problem was how did he even begin to explain it? To admit this should have been dealt with last year.

Start from the beginning maybe?  Not the beginning beginning, but like.. This beginning.  Not the first one.  Just.. What you said happened to Camilla.  It sounded sort of like what happened to you.  He left it at that, hoping she'd just get it from that tidbit.  He couldn't really bring himself to say that it was the whole losing children thing that was really what was the issue there.  Sure, it seemed like both families had ended up with ones that survived, but... There were those that were lost.  Raven had been the one to accept their passing, but Quixote hadn't even tried, so the ghosts waited for him instead.  It had slowly been eating at him, and now look where he'd ended up.  It was not the way he'd expected things to go, nor was it the way anyone would have wanted.  He just wanted them all to be safe and happy, free of the horrors the world might throw at them.

I'm not much better off. Between the lulz on Discord and that darn Tegan thread, the struggle is real. XD

It was never easy for her mate to open up, and when he did, it was always hesitant and halting -- sort of like trying to get a nervous person to walk out onto a frozen lake. One step at a time, they had to be cajoled and coaxed. That was what it was like trying to get Feelings^TM out of Quixote Voulge, but fortunately for both of them, Raven's skills at getting people to open up were approaching ninja level.

Still, though, sometimes he said things that got to her, and when he finally told her what was bothering him, she felt a simultaneous warmth of affection for him and a crack to the hard shell she'd built around the place where the memory of her dead children lay. Seagull. Jay. She tried not to think about them much, but the truth of the matter was that she couldn't stop thinking about them. With spring flowers so prolific now, she regularly took brightly-colored blossoms to the little grave where they slept. In her dreams, six puppies ran and played, not four. Grey Jay had his father's eyes; Seagull wanted to be a healer like her mom. Her pace slowed somewhat as the gravity of what Qui had said settled onto her shoulders, and she looked at him with somber eyes. "It was a lot like what happened to me," she admitted hesitantly, her voice quiet. "I'm not sure how Camilla's handling it, to be honest. Sometimes I'm still not sure how well I'm handling it."

So much had happened last year around the time of her childrens' birth, and she herself had been so close to death, that Qui had been busy to a degree that might have driven a lesser wolf insane. Taking care of her and keeping her alive, orchestrating the manhunt for Screech, and running the pack without her help. And then in the months afterward, there had been Ceara's disappearance, Blackfeather's return to relevance, Caiaphas's challenge, Raven's subsequent step-down, all that crazy drama that had led to the Firebirds forming, probably lots more crap that I'm forgetting, and through it all, the never-ending demands of parenting four wild youngsters. "You never had time to mourn them." Like a broken bone left to heal without being properly set, the months that had passed had only stunted his recovery and left infection inside to fester. She just looked at him with a gaze so full of love, empathy, and shared pain, wishing not for the first time that she'd been less preoccupied with everyone else's needs and more attentive to his.

Quixote had hoped to somehow have her say no, he was getting it all wrong.  Somehow.  It wouldn't make sense but it was that little irrational bit that he clung to.  But no.  It was the same, and that fact made him feel sick and useless.  He couldn't begin to imagine how Raven must feel if it tore at him this much -- and here he was fussing over his own suffering.  She always came first in his world, so if Qui could comfort her, he'd rather do that, so he reached out and nuzzled her cheek, wondering if there was any way to somehow make things better. Probably not, but damned if he wouldn't try.  

It would probably make sense for them to stop walking at some point, but continuing on made him feel like somehow he was continuing to move away from his problems, so that wasn't gonna be his call.  He'd seen everything that had tied itself to Screech's attack as his fault.  Screech shouldn't have even been in the pack for what he'd done -- not that Quixote had known at the time -- and because he was still there, he had the chance to attack Raven again.  Because Quixote hadn't been there, he'd almost lost Raven, they had lost two of their pups before they even had a chance.  Yeah, it probably wasn't really his fault, but it still shouldn't have happened.  There were signs that could have prevented it, right?  He tried to speak, but his voice hitched, and a short breath of an I-- was all that happened.  Words just weren't happening, and he looked down at the ground, defeated.

Quixote survived by convincing himself there was nothing to mourn, that once they were gone, they were gone, and didn't exist because that was in the short term far less painful -- there were things to do, and as his mate realized, there just hadn't been time.  He thought it would work because it sort of had in the past -- just take the feelings, put them in a box and leave them on a shelf in the garage until you forget what's in there.  But nope, JB had to go out there and take that particular box off the shelf and place it on the coffee table with a bow on top.  Other things he and Raven had dealt with together, and he was better for it, but this was the one he'd never even tried to touch.

Forgive the shortness — I’m at work, plus I already wrote up a nice lengthy reply and then somehow managed to delete the entire thing because I suck at mobile lol.

For once, Raven wasn’t sure what to say. The healer who had answers and counsel for everything was somewhat at a loss for words where this subject was concerned, not only because it was relatively uncharted territory for her (thankfully, dead children weren’t something that folks had to deal with a lot) but also because it was a topic that was fraught with heartache and Issues^TM for her as well. Truthfully, she hadn’t really unpacked all the baggage she was carrying herself. It’d been easier to sweep it under the rug and focus on other things, like alpha-ing and healing from the wounds she’d sustained at Screech’s hands and, of course, raising the children who’d lived.

But then again, did anything really need to be said?

”I know,” she finally said after a few lengthy moments, her voice soft. Her amber eyes lingered on him as they continued to walk, inviting him to say more if he wished but full of understanding and compassion if he didn’t.

And I should just... Not write posts after 12am. XD

It was one of those scenarios where he knew this was not something he excelled at as a leader or as a person.  What would he even say?  But it wasn't like Raven could be too far from the page he was on, they'd done this all together.  Even if his perceived failures had caused it in whatever negative world he lived in.  But when she talked, his steps swayed closer to her a moment so he could nuzzle her cheek.  Why couldn't he have changed things? Why couldn't he figure out what to do now?

Still, he couldn't really get a grasp on any of it -- it was at a level that was somewhere between trying to hold on to fine sand or water.  Just a tiny bit he could maybe sort out or relate to, the rest was too unknown.  What should I do? he asked.  It was entirely open-ended.  Where would he start?  Should he talk to Phox and Camilla?  What could he do for Raven?  There were probably a half dozen additional questions that his player can't think of at this hour, too.  None of it was anything he knew how to fix -- not that it could be "fixed" for several of them.

Raven wasn't really sure what Qui wanted from her. She caught her mate's eye and replied with a shrug, doing her best to advise him although she was still navigating the same uncharted waters herself. "Just...face it?" she replied a little uncertainly, her voice soft as her gaze followed a bird that darted through the air across their path. "Face the feelings head-on. Let yourself process them however they need to be processed. Try to stop blaming yourself in that indirect way you always do." At this, she flashed him a faint grin, nudging his shoulder lightly as she did. "It was Screech's fault they died, not yours. There was nothing either of us could have done." Until the day she died, she would blame the brother she'd disowned for Seagull and Grey Jay's deaths as well as the developmental difficulties Kite had been born with. Whether or not it was actually a result of Screech's attack never crossed her mind. The only regret she felt regarding the boy she'd raised and called her own once was that he was somehow still alive.

"And talk to me," she added a moment later as their aimless strolling took them over a high-grassed hillock dotted with spring flowers, the silence around them punctuated by the humming of bumblebees at work. "The best way to deal with infection is to lance the wound and let it drain. Like we're doing right now." Naturally, the healer saw things through a medic's perspective, but she felt it was a fitting metaphor nonetheless.

Oh, if only it'd be that easy.  Face what part of that resulting giant emotional katamari?  There were so many angles to it -- but yeah, it did boil down to his failures, but it wasn't necessarily just one.  He nudged Raven back but it was a little halfhearted -- he could intensely focus on one thing, or he could spread himself thin thinking about too much and probably fail at all of it. And he's still out there after that. I get that there was no good choice to deal with him at the time, but still.  I don't know how I'm supposed to do anything but think it would have been different if I'd been there -- or been there sooner.  I was supposed to protect everyone -- but especially you.  And just-- He obviously hadn't done a good enough job, because then everything else happened.  He probably deserved the ghosts, but Raven hadn't deserved any of it.

His failures and frustration and the unexpressed sorrow had pretty much welded itself into a wall, and he just stood at the bottom of it not knowing how to approach taking it out.  Qui was pretty sure the thing that would crack first would be the rest of him -- not that.  How could he figure out how to talk about whatever parts he needed to?  It was a very foreign vocabulary to him, and he felt like Raven had a head start on it, at least.  He, too, took a second to look away, but he couldn't appreciate the landscape, his mind was too busy.  It was just... There.  And he was continuing to walk away from his problems.

He took a breath, then sighed.  It's not happening again, he said at last, determined but a little emotionally shaky on the whole thing.  It wouldn't happen again because he'd do anything -- anything -- needed to make it the truth.  If someone was shifty, he wasn't going to trust them near his family.  If someone tried anything, they'd be dead.  That was a truth he could hold on to and fight for.  It was simple and perhaps a little too black and white.

Teensy bit of PP toward the end -- hope ya don't mind. If so, just throw a shoe at me! :P

She listened as he spoke, understanding where he was coming from even if she didn't wholly agree with it. It wasn't that he didn't have a point -- because he did -- but it was just that it all seemed a little pointless to dwell on things that might have been. But then again, she had told him to talk to her and that was what he was doing, so she listened openly and didn't judge or interrupt him. Now wasn't the time for her opinions or speculations. She still stood firmly behind her belief that none of this had been his fault. Sure, he might have been able to prevent it from happening, but he couldn't be everywhere at once. He couldn't be by her side 24/7. But she knew that his devotion to his family -- to her -- was a core part of the foundation that made him who he was. And no amount of reasoning to the contrary would ever change his perspective, would ever make him feel any less responsible than he felt now.

To his final words, she just nodded and leaned in to affectionately nuzzle his cheek. That needed no confirmation or response: she knew his dedication to her safety and the safety of their children went without saying. Several silent moments passed before she began to slow her pace and eventually came to a stop, her eyes lingering on his feet as a thoughtful expression overtook her features. Something was on her mind, something she'd wanted to talk with him about for a while, but the moment had never seemed right. And while, on the surface, this seemed like the perfectly wrong time to bring it up, perhaps it was exactly what they needed to talk about just now. Perhaps it was precisely the opportunity Qui needed to get it right this time. As her mate turned to look at her questioningly, she caught his lambent green eyes and said in a soft voice barely above a whisper, "We could try again?"

All good! :D

He, too, paused with an inquisitive tilt of his head.  A pause, and he nodded, small but eager. It was a weird way to put it if you looked at the whole thing too objectively.  The children they had were great, but yeah, them coming into the world hadn't exactly happened the way either of them had imagined.  Just remove the bad parts and it was pretty great, though.  But there was always the chance something could end up being worse -- a fact that would come to light in however many days 'til Camilla keeled over.

He stepped forward to embrace her, but paused midway as his brain caught up and brought up a valid point, What about you?  Are you up for it?  After all, his contributions to creating a darling (or devilish) litter of puppies were significantly less dangerous -- or draining, or stressful, or any number of other words -- unless he got hurt while hunting or something, but that could happen any time of the year.  Raven had been through a lot, and he wasn't exactly the doctor around here to know whether it'd cause any problems with future pregnancies.  Obviously he hoped that wouldn't be the case, but it'd be something he'd definitely revisit with more urgency after Camilla's death.  Raven was worth too much to him, and if she thought that it'd put her own life in danger, he'd be happy without the risk.

The question he asked her was a loaded one, and as she returned his embrace, she thought about it. Really thought about it. Her previous pregnancy and the events surrounding her childbirth had been a litany of horrors, for sure. But when she really broke it down and examined each factor piece by piece, it was easy to see that none of the negative events had actually had anything to do with pregnancy itself. Most of it had been folks being assholes (chief among them: Screech). That was a thing that could be controlled with relative ease on her end — simply choosing to let Qui handle that sort of nonsense instead of taking on the stress of it all herself would be a big help.

Screech being out of the picture would be an enormous help too.

So with these thoughts in mind, she looked at her mate with certainty in her amber eyes and answered, ”I am. If you are, of course.” She knew Qui was a cautious wolf and did not like to take risks unnecessarily. While it was necessary that the alpha pair of a wolf pack reproduce, she knew that if it came down to following what was traditionally expected of their position or choosing to keep her safe from potential harm, he would choose the latter.

His tail wagged wildly a moment as he kissed the top of her head and kept her close. Better start brainstorming names. Perhaps it would be what was needed -- permission to accept and let go. Sure, if it wasn't necessary, that would have been better, but they didn't have that choice. This would likely be the first of several conversations,  as it was unlikely he could so easily brush the ghosts away, but it was a start. A start sounded like what they needed.

At least for a little while the world would be good. They would have something to look forward to, and should fate allow, perhaps this would be the true turning point -- they'd been through enough so he couldn't see how things could possibly be worse than they had been already, as a couple and as a pack.

He totally just jinxed it.

Wrappin' this one up!

His response was everything Raven had hoped for and more, and it filled her with such buoyant joy that she couldn't contain herself. She rained kisses down on his face, his muzzle, his throat, whatever part of him she could touch, and her tail wagged so hard it threatened to throw her off balance. As they resumed their walk, they started brainstorming ideas for names right then and there, and for the first time in as long as she could remember, Raven was happy.

(TOO BAD THAT NEVER LASTS LONG IN THIS FAMILY LOL)