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When the elder finally lead a living, breathing Kiba out into the moonlight, the group of three wolves heaved a collective sigh.
“We’re not that kind of pack.”
Tsume could clearly recall Kiba’s earlier words, asserting that he wasn’t their leader. That they had no leader. Maybe that they weren’t even a pack.
But, ever since Kiba had been missing, their group had barely held it together. In fact, they hadn’t held together—Toboe would have stayed behind in the village if it weren’t for Kiba. Hige wouldn’t have stuck around much longer.
Tsume stole a narrow-eyed glance at Hige over Toboe’s head. That big mouth of his was flapping open like a fish, staring in awe at Kiba’s reanimated body. Tsume didn’t know what Hige’s deal was, did he even care about going to Paradise? For as much as he yapped, he wasn’t actually that much of an open book.
Even so, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that Tsume and Hige were of different breeds. Whether he had wanted to continue looking for Paradise, or for Kiba, Blue, or Cheza, he didn’t need Tsume for that. And for some reason, Tsume had an eerie feeling that there was only one thing on that list that Hige was actually pursuing.
Whether he himself even knows it or not.
Tsume followed Hige’s line of sight back to Kiba. Even as the moonlight strengthened him, he still looked like hell. It wasn’t hard to imagine that he had been on the brink of death. To be honest, it wasn't hard to imagine that he had been dead under that bush, and that the Hmong elder had somehow pulled his spirit back from the afterlife.
The soft lunar radiance that usually blanketed the wolves in an ethereal glow now cast harsh shadows down the lines of Kiba’s face. His bones were far more prominent in his cheeks and wrists. His clothes were baggier. He was skeletal, and he shambled more than walked in a way that looked like it would sound creaky.
If it weren’t for the clarity in Kiba’s eyes, and the bright spots of moonlight reflected there, Tsume might have held on to the tension in his chest that had been gathering ever since Darcia’s castle. Fortunately, Tsume could see it, and with another reassuring nod from the Hmong elder, he was able to finally let himself relax.
Kiba was back.
Now they could go and find Cheza again.
They could all still make it to Paradise together.
“What happened in there?” Tsume asked.
Now that the precarious situation had passed, he let his curiosity take over.
Sure, Kiba had been gone a while, and sure the plant was poisonous, but still. Tsume had seen firsthand how strong Kiba was, and for what he lacked in strength he made up in bullheaded determination. Anything that could have brought him so low was certainly a force to be reckoned with.
Kiba’s voice wasn’t weak, but it wasn’t strong either. If anything, his words sounded careful—like he was putting a lot of effort into sounding normal.
“Just...I met a nice woman.”
A heavy silence hammered down after Kiba’s explanation.
Tsume...had not been expecting that response at all. The absurdity of it—he felt like a flea could have landed on him and knocked him clean over.
Hige was the first to find his voice again.
“Whaaaat? A woman?? You???”
He sounded just as bewildered and surprised as Tsume felt. Really, this was about the last thing he would have expected. Kiba, who seemed so single-minded and hellbent on finding Paradise. Kiba and his strange relationship with Cheza.
To think that Kiba would get caught up with some woman and lose sight of that…
Tsume couldn’t help but to laugh a little, and he looked Kiba over again. Well, stranger things had happened, he supposed. And to that point, Kiba did seem a little more...settled.
“That explains why you’ve lightened up a little,” he rationalized.
Next to him, he felt Toboe and Hige turn to look his way.
“What’s that mean?” Toboe asked with earnest innocence that always squeezed at Tsume’s chest in bittersweet pangs.
“You wouldn’t understand,” he muttered, cuffing the kid on the back of the head lightly.
Tsume’s thoughts of ‘let him keep his youthful spirit for just a while longer’ were hardly interrupted by Hige’s indignant claim that he wished he could have gone there too.
“Why wouldn’t I understand?” Toboe practically pouted, and suddenly Tsume drew a funny connection between Hige’s indignance and Toboe’s peevishness.
Toboe didn’t want to be left out of the loop, and Hige—
Hige didn’t want to be left out either, though he seemed fine leaving Toboe behind, though he had been fine leaving Blue’s owner to the mercy of the elements, fine when he would have inevitably gone his separate way from Tsume.
“You’re not talking about it, that’s how I know you’re upset.”
Tsume contemplated his own words that he’d said to Hige. Sure, Hige had been upset that they’d lost track of Blue in the aftermath of Darcia’s castle, but they’d also lost Kiba. Tsume didn’t have the heart to even bring him up back then, and now—now he was starting to realize why.
“The whole time, it felt like there was something I was forgetting,” Kiba added.
Already his voice seemed a little more firm, his stance more solid.
“Cheza?” Tsume asked absentmindedly, his thoughts still circling through the connections between Hige and Kiba, and Hige and Toboe, and Hige and Blue—
“Not just her, you guys too,” Kiba continued in that solemn way of his. He barely paused before he went on to admit, “I thought you were dead.”
Another pause draped over them, dark and heavy like the night sky, and then a bright flash of anger pinged in Tsume’s gut, but it wasn’t his. Both he and Toboe turned to Hige, as they felt his temper spike before his verbal outburst came.
“Are you fucking serious? Do you have any idea how hard we looked for you?”
The connections that Tsume had been theorizing about suddenly snapped into place. If the tone of Hige’s voice didn’t make it obvious enough, one look at his expression made it clear as day. There was heartache written all over his face.
Slowly, Tsume shifted his gaze to Kiba.
Kiba’s appeared to be taken aback, maybe startled was a better way to describe it. Startled, but not nearly as surprised as Tsume would have expected. Not half as surprised as Tsume felt.
And then Kiba and Hige exchanged a look so charged that Tsume could feel heat coming from it.
“Oh, you did?” Kiba’s voice was level. He was doing a remarkable job at staying calm—at trying to calm down Hige. “Sorry...”
Hige sighed and broke eye contact. The tension in the atmosphere eased a lot. Tsume realized he’d been holding his breath, and he let it out all at once, his shoulders sagging a bit. Already, he was trying to think of a way to let the two have some time to hash out whatever needed to be said between them. He briefly glanced at Toboe next to him, who he knew must be brimming with questions. To his credit though, the boy remained quiet, simply watching the scene play out in front of him.
Then, Hige heaved a dramatic sigh. “That scatterbrain of yours is never going to change, is it?”
It was an attempt to gloss things over.
Kiba said nothing, and Toboe said nothing, and Tsume could have let it go, but then—
What would happen the next time this issue erupted?
For the sake of their pack, for the sake of these two idiots, it was better if he gave them the opportunity to reconcile now.
“Hey, Toboe, you hungry? I think I hear a rabbit over there.”
Toboe perked up instantly and looked at Tsume with excitement.
“Really? Where?”
Kiba and Hige looked at him too. Both of them held looks of understanding.
“Yeah, c’mon.” Tsume pushed away from the rock he had been leaning against and looked out over his shoulder into the distance. He planned a long, circuitous route away from camp that should give the two all the time they needed.
“You coming Hige?” Toboe asked, then hastily added, “Kiba, you should rest, we can all share with you.”
Hige smiled, his usual smirk washed out in the cold light of the moon, almost not a smirk at all. Almost soft.
“Three wolves against some rabbits? Definitely overkill, and we’d scare ‘em all away. I trust you an Tsume can get the job done.”
He ruffled Toboe’s hair, but his gaze remained towards Kiba.
Toboe just blinked as he accepted Hige’s logic without question. “Ah, yeah, that makes sense.”
Then the two wolves were off to run circles in the desert while the two remaining wolves stayed behind at camp.
~
Tsume and Toboe’s footsteps faded away into the distance, leaving Hige with an ever growing cacophony of thoughts echoing through his mind. These were feelings he hadn’t expected to face any time soon, especially not like this. Now it looked like he didn’t have much of a choice. Both he and Kiba knew that they had been purposely left alone together.
“So...a woman, huh?” Hige started off easy. It was doublespeak, but he couldn’t bring himself to be more direct.
Kiba looked uncharacteristically frail and unhealthy, like the next breeze might jostle his soul out of his body, but his eyes were intense as ever and his stare pinned Hige to the rock he was leaning against. Hige shuffled his feet, unconsciously trying to back up. He pressed his sweaty palms against the rough surface of the boulder, even as the sharper edges began to dig into his flesh.
“So, did she look like Cheza, or…?”
His voice sounded nervous, not that it mattered. His posture gave away that much. He forced himself to stare back at Kiba, though his brain was doing a good job of obscuring the details. He both wanted to know and didn’t want to know. This conversation—this whole situation—was something that made him feel sick with excitement and just plain sick.
“She was a caracal.” Kiba stated plainly.
His expression didn’t give Hige any insight into what the white wolf might be thinking. If anything, he just looked tired, which made a lot of sense all things considered, but…
“Ah, so is that your type then? Different species? Flower-girls...caracals...” Hige trailed off. He was slowly, slowly getting to the heart of the matter.
“There is no rabbit.” Kiba was blunt and dropped the safety of the pretense that Tsume had handed them.
Hige felt his heart skip a beat, and then an eerie sense of calm washed over him. He found himself smiling in spite of the situation.
“One foot out of the grave and you’re already sharp as ever,” he quipped.
Of course Kiba wasn’t going to beat around the bush, this was Kiba after all. His directness was something Hige admired about him.
Kiba took a few shuffling steps forward. Hige didn’t move. He tried to get a sense of how Kiba was feeling via his scent, but he smelled mostly like death and the bitter herbs medicines that the Hmong elder had used to heal him. He was still trying to work out some definitive clue when Kiba brought his head to rest on Hige’s shoulder and pressed their chests together.
Kiba felt heavy against him, and Hige tentatively brought his arms to rest around Kiba’s waist. Kiba did not shy away from resting more of his body against Hige. It was like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders, and finally his exhaustion was making it impossible to bear on his own.
Emotion suddenly pricked at Hige’s throat as he realized how close of a call Kiba actually had. He couldn’t tell if he was angry at Kiba for leaving, sad at his dire circumstances, relieved that he was here and okay in the end. He rested his chin on Kiba’s head and blinked back the sharp pain in his eyes.
“You almost...” Even in a whisper, he couldn’t finish the sentence.
It wasn’t long before Kiba changed the subject.
“Why did you look for me?”
In the storm of Hige’s feelings, anger surged.
“What do you mean? After everything—?”
“No,” Kiba cut him off, “I don’t mean now. I mean at first. When I was in the cage.”
As quick as it came, the anger receded, leaving Hige confused.
“I’d been shot by Blue’s old man, and they took me to that research facility and caged me. You were inside because you were following Cheza’s scent, but you...You found me.”
Hige took a deep breath and thought back to that day.
He’d followed Cheza’s scent to the city. There had been traces of other wolves around that he could have investigated, but he hadn’t. It wasn’t until he had already slipped past security into the research facility that he’s smelled Kiba. At that point, he was the closest to Cheza that he’d ever been. He was so close to finding out the origin of the scent that had brought him to the city, and yet, there was something about this particular wolf’s scent that had him taking a detour.
Was it because he’d smelled blood? Because he sensed the wolf was hurt?
Was there something just that much more alluring about Kiba’s scent than Cheza’s? Even though Cheza had been specifically bioengineered to appeal to wolves?
Did he feel like he wouldn’t be able to get past the security guarding Cheza directly?
Was he hesitant to find the source of the scent that beckoned him across the land?
What if—?
Was it—?
Kiba was still waiting for an answer.
“I don’t know,” Hige admitted finally, weakly, softly. “But whatever the reason, I’m glad I did.”
A thought occurred to Hige as Kiba shifted, pulling back just a little and lifting his head and putting his hands on Hige’s shoulders. The look on Kiba’s face nearly flat out confirmed the thought.
Everything Kiba had known had been destroyed, his friends, his family, his childhood home. Ever since then, he’d been running alone, searching after Cheza’s scent, the only thing that felt familiar to him anymore. He didn’t know why he was the only one that survived, and he was alone for so long after that he began to accept it as his fate. He was destined to carry out this mission. To find Cheza. To get to Paradise.
Was he so romantic to want to believe that it had been Hige’s fate to find him that day?
The way he leaned forward with half lidded eyes and slightly parted lips seemed to imply yes.
Hige didn’t much care if it was fate, or luck, or coincidence. He just cared about Kiba, and his musings were completely wiped clean the second they kissed.
From the start it was an open mouthed kiss, hot and breathy. Direct and to the point, as Kiba always was. He wasted no time and had no apprehension about sliding his tongue along Hige’s, sucking his lower lip into his mouth, breathing his newly refreshed life into him.
Hige dug his fingers into the jeans on Kiba’s hips, trying to steady himself. Trying to keep from tumbling over, as he melted back into the rock behind him. He’d wanted for so long, and to finally have this was—he was falling, he was dissolving, he was having an out-of-body experience, his soul was wrapped around Kiba’s tongue.
Kiba was a natural born leader, and Hige was going to follow him to the end of the world.
When they parted, panting for air, an involuntary whine escaped from Hige’s throat. He wasn’t embarrassed in the slightest. He wanted Kiba to know how he felt, what he did to him.
Though, even in his scrambled state of mind, he could understand if Kiba needed a break. He wasn’t up to his full strength yet—the thought of Kiba at his peak nearly stopped Hige’s heart, again—and anyway, they had so much time now. So many open opportunities on the horizon.
Hige pulled Kiba close again, into a tight hug. He squeezed his arms tight around him and breathed deeply. He was starting to pick up Kiba’s true scent again, under the sickness and the herbs. Their bodies pressed together, he could feel both of their heartbeats racing each other. It was just him and Kiba and the moonlight shining down upon them, and he took a long slow inhale and just let the moment be.
After a healthy, nourishing pause, Kiba stirred in his arms.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured.
Hige didn’t know what Kiba was apologizing for.
For running off alone? For almost dying? For waiting so long to kiss Hige?
All of that seemed so far away now. An apology wasn’t necessary...
Hige grinned. “Make it up to me.”
Kiba raised an eyebrow and gave him a look that was so wanton that even after all of that Hige felt his whole body flush.
“I-I mean, it doesn’t have to be right now,” Hige stammered, flustered.
Kiba smirked. His right hand gripped Hige’s shoulder tighter, and his left hand snaked around the back of Hige’s head.
Hige knew what was coming. He bared his neck, and let Kiba suck an IOU right into his skin.
“F-fuck.”
Hige was hopelessly turned on now. He was whining again too, without shame.
“Yeah,” Kiba breathed, right by Hige’s ear, “Later.”
Hige prayed that was a promise.
~
There was no rabbit, and they didn’t find any on their hunt. Toboe did come across a small rodent—a mouse or a vole or something—but it dove into its burrow before he could catch it. His crashing after it scared some birds that had been sleeping nearby, but Toboe didn’t have the heart to chase after them, and Tsume figured they would be more feathers than meat.
After what seemed like an appropriate amount of time, Tsume decided it was time for them to return to camp. From spending that much time in the moonlight, he didn’t feel so hungry anyway.
Toboe must have felt the same, because he didn’t complain. In fact, his spirits seemed to have lifted a little. Tsume guessed the kid just needed some time to run around and work through the stress of the past few hours with activity.
They returned to the Hmong camp, which was quiet since most people had turned in for the night.
Hige was where they had left him earlier, though now he was sitting with his back to the rock instead of standing. His legs were stretched out in front of him, and Kiba, in wolf form, had his head in Hige’s lap. Kiba’s breathing was slow and consistent—he seemed deeply asleep.
Hige had his hand resting on Kiba’s head, his fingers idly stroking his fur. He looked up as Tsume and Toboe approached, a wholly peaceful expression on his face.
Tsume was looking for it, so he could immediately spot the differences. For one, the atmosphere didn’t feel primed for an explosion anymore. For another, Tsume didn’t need Hige’s sense of smell to notice how his and Kiba’s scents were intermingled, not to mention the kind of scents that were present.
“Didn’t bring anything back to share?” Hige asked, keeping his voice low as to not disturb Kiba. He didn’t sound disappointed—he had known they were going on a fool’s errand after all.
“We didn’t catch anything,” Toboe explained, taking a seat himself. He stretched his arms over his head and yawned. The sleepy ambiance of the camp seemed to be getting to him. “So I guess we’re staying here for the night, huh?”
Tsume sat down too and half-listened as Hige and Toboe carried on their muted conversation. He wondered if Toboe would figure it out on his own, or if they would have to tell him. He could be so naïve sometimes. The Hmong people had seemed trustworthy and capable of looking after him, otherwise Tsume would have never agreed to let Toboe stay behind...
He sighed and shook his head. Maybe it would be his turn next to come to terms with his own issues. Gehl’s death and how every time Tsume looked at Toboe he felt an overwhelming burden of guilt to never let something like that happen again.
He sighed again. Not now though. Now was not the time.
Their pack—their group—whatever, was back together and felt stronger than ever. They were going to find Cheza. They would solve the mystery that was Paradise.
Tsume’s mental pep-talk was interrupted by an outburst from Toboe.
“What?!” Toboe clapped a hand over his mouth and glanced at Kiba to make sure that he hadn’t woken him before continuing.
“What is that?” he hissed, with a somewhat teasing quality to his voice.
Hige froze. It was dark, but Tsume could still see what Toboe was referring to, and he could feel the waves of embarrassment radiating from Hige.
That was some impressive hickey.
Hige laughed nervously in response.
“Finally,” Toboe concluded, “Finally you two worked it out.”
Nervous laughed turned to genuine laughter, and soon they were all joining in.
~