Heron Lake Plateau Just smell with your eyes

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.