Chapter Text
“How the fuck did I wind up with the defective wolf?” you grumble, wondering aloud to the empty forest around you.
Not quite empty enough.
Kankri’s ears prick back at you, and your wolf-brother either reads your tone or recognizes enough keywords to extrapolate successfully from experience. -- That is very inappropriate/unkind/rude.-- The grey wolf demon’s mental rebuke is overlaid with the strong impression of a snout sniffing uninvited at hindquarters.
You cross your arms, kicking a chunk of sod out of the forest floor. --I notice you didn’t say untrue,-- you shoot at him on a dagger-sharp thought.
The barb earns you a wave of disapproval, pressed onto your mind like the sharp, cool scent of pine, the scratch of needles in fur. Your wolf-brother doesn’t even bother to glance back at you. Built small and agile—ha—runt of the litter more like—he pads ahead through the trees, picking up each foot carefully. The dappled light picks out the hint of fox-red striping on a coat that is otherwise an unexceptional, unrelieved grey; rusty mirrored lines running from browbone to ear and back along his flanks. He’s slightly too stocky to be described as dainty but you’d never know it from the way he acts.
--You are a challenging troll-brother,-- Kankri declares, his tail flagged primly, his eyes a serenely unflustered gold-in-black. --You require a differently-skilled wolf.--
--/(keeper/teacher/trail-finder),-- the last thought echoes. -- ((woolbeast-herder.)) --
You grit your teeth and yank at your hair. Your ears, far less agile than his, twitch. “What I need ,” you growl, switching back to spoken words on the off-chance that this will short circuit a lecture, “is not to have my life falling into shambles around me.”
-- Scent-crossed trails/slipping stones/little broken branches and twigs in the den. That is a useful mouth-noise,-- Kankri muses. His thoughts have a distinctly self-satisfied tinge, the smothering scent of thick smoke. -- I know many words.--
“Great .” You throw your arms up, waving dramatic circles in the air. “Thank you so fucking much for that epically ungermane conversational tangent, Kankri, that was extremely insightful. I am just rapturous with delight that my misery can provide fodder for your vocabulary-fetish; I could shit myself with pleasure on the spot. And by the way, do you actually have some goal in mind for where we are going right now or am I just following you because I am too stupid to have any better plans?”
--You are running with no scent ahead of you and no prey to hunt,-- Kankri thought-pictures at you. This is pretty much his way of saying yes, indeedy, you are an idiot. It’s you. --I will pick the good/right/best way until you are ready to go back.--
Right. Back. Because rejoining your little scouting party-for-three isn’t going to be hideously awkward after your epically obvious flight.
On the other hand if you wait long enough that Sollux or Terezi and their wolf-sibs get worried and come looking for you it could be downright mortifying.
Dreamwalking alpha of alphas, but you’re a stupid, ungrateful bastard. You should still be over the moon that you even have a pack, somehow, miraculously, and instead you’re off sulking because your romantic inclinations got thwarted by a suppository-dose of reality.
Like it wasn’t really, really obvious that Mituna and Latula had been circling each other for a flushed quadrant for perigees now. And, okay, it was harder to picture Sollux and Terezi flushed than it was for their wolves, but pitch, yeah, pitch could work. Sollux had his other concupiscent quadrant in counterpoint to his wolf-brother’s, heart-to-spade, so a spade-to-heart would be ideal, even, make it a set, ha, that ought to turn the pointy little shitbrain’s gears.
(You hadn’t really thought—but with the way they moved wide around each other with an electric awareness of the other’s presence, the way they traded clever little verbal barbs like lovebites—yeah, you could see that amping into something blacker.)
You’d been so sure Kankri was developing an interest in Latula, too.
--Trail-chaser is a very good hunter,-- Kankri thinks approvingly, with absolutely no sign of your own emotional turmoil. -- She scents/sees/stalks with no nose.--
Resentfully, you let a wave of the broody self-pity excrement-festival that is your brain lap out over him. You figure it’s at least partially his fault you’re feeling it. Everyone knows that wolf-quadrants are the most serendipitous. The wolves fall in with their troll-siblings in the conciliatory quadrants, and all the best, most fated and romantic matches happen when the trolls follow their wolf-sibs in the concupiscent quadrants.
It is completely unfair that you have the only wolf you’ve ever heard of that has demonstrated no inclination toward concupiscent activities whatsoever.
Kankri doesn’t so much as twitch an ear as he thins the mental link between you. The remaining touch where his mind hooks into yours is pure, disinterested dismissal. -- If you want to mount someone so much then find a mate on your own.--
...And that’s you put in your place. You should really know better than to tangle with Kankri on the topic by now. As if your wolf-brother could be described as tractable in any circumstance. It’s right there in his name: the scent of metal like cooling blood, the bitter tang on the back of your tongue, the iron bones of the earth, unbending.
Guiltily, you squelch the perpetual, niggling worry that bonding a freak mutant troll has in some way damaged him, that your weird off-caste blood could have tainted him, changed him, even as the color stained his eyes. That you were never meant to have a brother-in-soul at all.
No one, no one , questions a wolf demon’s choice in sibling. Plenty of people were appalled when a tiny bundle of fur plowed right through a crowd of more suitable candidates and declared you his . Plenty of people still prefer to pretend you don’t exist. But no one, then or since, ever breathed a word of challenge.
Besides, if Kankri catches the direction of your thoughts you’ll wind up cornered and mentally blasted with his own thoughts on the matter until next dawnbreak. He’s the only wolf you’ve ever known that lectures . And he’s not afraid to nip your shins until you bleed to ensure you pay attention. It’s impossible to envision Kankri being anything but what he wants to be—and you take comfort from that. Patronizing, stick-in-the-mudpit migraine on four legs that he is.
-- I heard/felt that .--
-- Eavesdroppers never hear anything good about themselves.--
--A *very* challenging troll-brother,-- he thinks, again, and the thought echoes with images of bumbling, still-blind puppies and an unflattering odor that you think might charitably translate to ‘dumb as shit’. --I must be a very talented wolf. --
As you both settle in to expand upon this favored exchange of mental barbs, you turn the remaining portion of your attention back to the forest around you. The trees look spindly-strange to your deepwoods-reared eyes, nothing like the behemoths rising up into the canopy that you’re used to. A good number of these you could even fit your arms around.
As a new pack with barely a dozen member-pairs and a young queen and alpha to boot, you knew you’d get pushed to the worst territory, far past the fringes of established packs. You’re too small a group to challenge for something better, so you’re left to seek territory farther and farther from the home ground, out in the shallows of the woods, skirting the sealed lands and human civilization alike. It’s ground full of lesser demons and barely formed elementals, the dregs pushed as ever to the edges. It makes for a strange sort of tradeoff, in your opinion: the last dryad you spotted hadn’t even had fangs, but half the demons are too dumb not to try to eat you. Exactly as fun as you might have expected.
Still, you hadn’t realized just how alien the land would feel—all the plants wrong, the light unfiltered, the air strange and sparse in your nose.
Fuck, just two days ago your little three-pair scouting group had run right into some human’s bleatbeast herd, sending the dumb beasts panicking through the trees and probably giving the humans more scary demon stories to tell. You’ve never even seen a human before, and now you’re dodging their livestock and villages and worrying someone’s going to set a hunter on you.
Made for a good meal, anyway.
The thinness of the trees here suggests you’ve wandered closer to the forest shore than you’d meant to. The Captor-brothers and Pyrope-sisters are far enough to mute thoughts and emotions (thankfully), but still close enough that you can comfortably pinpoint their location through the packbond, some hours north and deeper to forest.
The rest of your packmates are blurred to indistinction by distance. You can’t tell exactly where they are, but the bright, possessive pull of the Piexes-sisters on your mind declares the direction of the main group. The second scouting party feels fainter through the pack-bond, despite being closer, but there’s the (ugh) Serket-sisters to anchor the connection. Mother wolf, but Feferi’s queen-sister has weird taste in quadrants. Seen from that light, you should count your blessings.
Past time to stop indulging your own self-absorbed awfulness and head back.
Back to camp and the none-too-subtle psychic broadcasts of two very horny wolves, filling the air with their blissful satisfaction with each other. Back to the awareness that if Terezi and Sollux hadn’t yet devolved to tangling on the ground, clawing their way through each other’s pants it’s only out of some misplaced sense of pity for your sorry lonely ass. Boy, does that sound fun enough to shit yourself over.
...Maybe they’ll be done?
bluh.
Maybe you’ll go find a swamp to crawl into.
--You would become muddy/smelly/easy-to-track,-- Kankri puts in, radiating distaste like the scent of bitter herbs. --I will find you a lake.--
-- Your sensitivity,-- you tell him, -- is what carries me through from night to night. Truly, I am warmed right down to the throbbing cockles of my spleen. --
-- Big lake ,-- Kankri returns, agreeably. --Cold/wet/deep.--
You charge up the slope after him, determined to introduce some dirt and sticks into that fluffy grey coat of his. As you crest a small rise, the wind shifts, carrying a fresh set of scents through the trees.
Kankri breaks his flight, tumbling haunches-over-ears. He rises from the leaf litter to face the new tailwind. You turn with him as his mind thrums tension through your limbs, suddenly alert and wary. The velvet of your back and arms bristles.
-- Stranger/Not-pack.-- Kankri’s thoughts curl in puzzlement, interest, alarm. -- (Demon.) --
You’ve caught the scent yourself now, half through your own nose, weakly, and more distinctly through his. “Wolf.” Your eyes scan the trees. --Oh, great. We’re going to get hazed out of someone’s territory. I thought you were paying attention.--
Kankri broadcasts deep offense like a swampy fog. --This is not territory/claimed-place. There were no marks. -- A brief lemon scent of uncertainty enters his thoughts, quickly transmuted to reproach. --Your yapping was very distracting. --
In the broken shadows below you catch just the flicker of movement, of some bright color, your unseen stalker weaving another pass closer, approaching by guarded phases. You remain still, crouched for fight or flight, not yet baring fang or sickle. Still just the one scent. Maybe your luck is in and you’ve stumbled across some rare pair of loners rather than a newly-denned pack or competing ground-seekers.
You try a broad mental call to any troll-kin in the vicinity, a quick, conciliatory, ‘ hi, let’s not fight ’. Psychic linking to strangers has never been your strong suit and you can’t tell if any of your message is received. It’s probably just as well—you are almost certain your undertone of ‘because I will kick all your faces in, come try me ’ slipped through.
The shadows ripple and your observer moves to stand just in the open, legs braced wide, ears tilted slightly back in caution or suspicion. The black wolf demon observes you intently through narrowed eyes. He’s younger than you expected, full grown and good few handspans taller than Kankri, but still with that rangy quality that means he hasn’t finished filling muscle into his adult frame. There’s a scrap of some bright colored fabric fastened loose around his ruff—something to make him more visible to non-pack?—and one of the gold eyes watching you is marked above and below with the stark white scarring of old injury.
He stares direct enough to be a challenge. You stare back. Silence stretches while you all stare at each other, tense and uncertain. It begins to feel absurd after the first few long moments.
Okay, maybe you are going to have to make the first move.
--Do not fight with the not-pack wolf,-- Kankri tells you, firmly.
--I don’t actually run around looking for fights with everyone I meet, you know.--
The extremely dubious smell of meat aged just too long presses into your mind. You nobly refrain from reaching over to thwack your wolf-brother. It would set the wrong tone.
Instead, you reach out for the stranger-wolf’s mind, trying to find a balance to your thoughts that’s non-confrontational without rolling over and showing your belly. A balance you are more than capable of, thanks ever so much, Kankri.
You settle for truth. --I don’t know what you want, but it would be an extremely pointless time-waste to fight with you and this ground is too crowded to be worth scrapping over anyway. Thin trees, shitty hunting, swarms of lesser demons, and it’s more riddled through with humans than sores on an infected backside. Our pack will be moving on soon. So will you, if you’ve a tenth measure of the sense the empress gave you.--
The black wolf blinks twice.
Kankri huffs and scours your mind with the scent of pine needles. --I said no fighting!--
--Excuse you, you wolf-sized fur clot, but that was a demons-damned *masterpiece* of politeness. It could be bronzed and set out as a teaching display for the newly pupated. ‘How to win hatefriends and influence people, a schoolfeed in choking down your never-ending fury at the stupidity of others so you can bleed out of your spongy internal bits slightly less often.’ Lovingly upchucked by Karkat motherfucking Vantas, diplomat extraordinaire.--
Kankri lays his ears back, huffing again.
--Ha! Now who’s being undiplomatic? --
Across from you, the black wolf demon takes in the entire exchange with his head tilted slightly. You don’t know what to make of that continued silent attention.
Breaking the stand-off, he pads toward you. His body language is less cautious now, ears pricked up with interest, but he still angles back and forth in his approach in a way that’s a bit unsettling. Not chatty, this fellow.
You reach out toward the stranger wolf’s mind again, trying to get a sense of his surface emotions, at least. His presence is there, seething and staticy, like getting the jumbled pieces of a puzzle tossed at your feet to make sense of. Wolves rarely trouble to pare their communications down specific word-shapes and there’s an art and a flavor to translating from the scents/feelings/images as conveyed. This feels more disconnected and formless even than that. It’s… untuned, none of the conflicting bits or stray tangents filtered or ordered for presentation at all. You might as well be receiving the raw contents of his mind, shouted at you.
It strikes you for the first time to wonder if he’s even bonded . Well, not un bonded, not this far from the homeground, but what if there’s a reason you’ve only encountered one presence? Widow-wolves can be strange, when they survive their troll-sibs at all.
--Are you... alone?-- you ask, as carefully as you know how.
--((yes))-- thinks that mind, falling grey ash smell, even as a larger part blazes back --(( /NO))-- and you are hit with a tumult of always, always being alone (alone together), better safer apart, stay away, stay safe away --( together)-- , and hate and fear and resentment and distrust and, threaded through it all, a dark, cynical amusement.
You take a moment to try to untangle the bundle of thought and emotion you’ve been handed.
Beside you, Kankri has slowly tightened like a spring, his ears fixed forward almost aggressively, his mind honed down to a single sharp point of attention. You wait, expecting the onslaught of correction or interrogation to burst forth, but he holds his thoughts unshared.
Not a widow-wolf, anyway, but—something still strange. Did something happen to him and his troll-sib? Did something set them apart from the rest of your kin? The tumult of his thoughts echo in your head. Alone, yes, you know that kind of isolation, that bitter hunger. You stomp down on a seedling of emotion that wants to grow into sympathy. It has not been your experience that such sentiments are likely to be welcomed from you, of all trolls.
Still. You straighten from your wary crouch, keeping your hands carefully away from your weapons, palms open. Maybe you’ll be rebuffed, but. You stretch out one hand before you. With measured steps you approach the strange wolf.
He watches you come, demon gold eyes unblinking. A green-tinged glint of caste-color catches at the edges of them.
--We don’t mean to be your enemies .--
--((hostility/suspicion/amusement))-- His eyes eyes flick to your offered hand, back to you.
You take another step.
The lunge comes all in one movement, not even a flare of aggression in his mind against yours to warn you. You fall back, sickle drawn, hand clutched to your chest. Kankri’s at your side in a flash, pressing in warm to your hip, hackles raised and whole body vibrating with uncertainity. --Fight/run/don’t-fight/run/stay/run?--
Your freakish blood makes bright smears of red on your hand and shirt as you try to press the new punctures on your palm closed.
The black wolf sits back on his haunches, watching you, head tilted slightly to the side again. The scrap of fabric at his neck stands out sharp against his fur, like a bloodstain to match yours. His mind still projects that steady blend of suspicious curiosity, undirected rancor, and sardonic amusement. Amusement dominates.
“No,” you tell Kankri, eyes still studying the black wolf. --No, it’s fine, I don’t think he really meant it. Well, obviously he meant it, but.-- You juggle your sickle and and the straps of your pack, trying to fish out a bandage to wrap your hand in without bleeding all over everything. --I think this is just… his way of saying hello?--
Kankri’s wave of nostril-scorching disapproval encompasses both of you.
The black wolf snorts.
You give up and put your sickle away again, side-eyeing your bitey new hatefriend in case he decides to try for another chunk of you. You wind the strip of cloth in tight rotations until the unfortunate color of your blood stops showing through. You consider your options.
-- You are extremely frustrating ,-- Kankri tells you as you take a bold—or, more accurately, stubborn—step back towards the scar-eyed wolf. The rebuke rings in your mind with the sense of fur-pulling, random snatches all over, even where your velvet is far too short. You shrug him off.
--I think we’re getting on great. Practically besties already. Why, would *you* rather go make friends?--
You’re surprised when Kankri actually moves to hang close to your heel, head low, tense and nervy. --He does not know the correct way to go. (foolish/hard-head/bleatbeasts) ((both))-- Disapproval still veins his thoughts, but it’s crystallizing sticky-stubborn, like pine sap. --I will help .--
You approach the black wolf together.
--If you bite me again,-- you tell him, --I am going to bite you back harder .--
The black wolf flashes his teeth lazily. His spine stretches as he stands to meet you. His mind is equally a tangle of mixed signals: acid and amusement and challenge. --((might))--
You decide to stop at a comfortable middle ground.
From this distance, you can see the secondary color showing vividly in gleaming green slivers at the edges of his golden eyes—not the brighter glow of strong emotion or the complete haze over of a true wolf-rage, but distinct enough to suggest he’s closer to agitation than the rest of his posture would let on. In fact, other than that glint of acid green, he appears almost pleased with you both. Still not friendly, but intrigued.
Your brow furrows. The color’s strange, actually, lime shading into a more sickly electric hue than you’ve seen from other bonds to that hemocaste. You’re returning stares too directly again, but dawning speculation clutches in your chest, like a hand. Could there be some other wolf-bonded blood-freak mutant you’ve not heard of? Maybe one that’s managed more hemo-nonymity than yourself? And if there is...
You don’t get time to process exactly what the ramifications of that conclusion would be.
The black wolf glances to the side, mind flickering a hazy message of recognition, and then you can hear something approaching rapidly through trees and brush.
“Sorry, sorry, he’s with me!” a voice calls. “Don’t touch him, please; he’s mean. Slick, what have I told you about cornering—”
The figure breaks into view.
You fall back, snarling.
--Human! -- Kankri says and then teeters between flight or moving to help the other wolf flank her, scattering the targets you make.
The human, for her part, halts abruptly, her green eyes wide, one hand with a musket in it still out for balance.
She’s midblood tall, dressed in sturdy, forest-camouflaged clothes, alien in cut and style, but not so very different to your own in function. The long, messy black hair is about the only other thing at all familiar to your eyes. Her skin is sand brown, bare and unvelveted. Eyes human-colorful behind the clear round lenses of her glasses, with white, not black or caste-color, around them. Hornless, clawless, ears small and rounded, two square blunt teeth showing prominently where she’s pressed them into her lower lip.
You get the impression she’s studying you with equal fascination and that’s… disconcerting.
...She smells like broken leaves and earth and the heavy, organic scent of living things, slightly muskier than any troll. If she came closer, you wonder if you could catch the bite of iron in her blood.
-- She smells wrong/strange/not-wrong, -- Kankri murmurs, puzzled and uneasy, wind through fur.
The human turns those strange, bright eyes between you, from you, to your wolf-brother, to the black, scar-eyed wolf. “Okay. When you said you found people …” She gestures fractionally with her musket hand.
You start, snarl picking up again.
She goes very still. Moving slowly, the human opens her free hand, turning it out, placating. She tilts the gun barrel further to one side. “No, sorry, easy.”
Your eyes narrow.
“Easy,” she says again, like you might spook, voice going slow and soft. “...Can you understand me?”
“I don’t know. Can you talk like you’re not lecturing a wiggler?”
--No fighting!-- Kankri tells you, even as her eyebrows wing up.
You resist the urge to send your wolf-brother a dirty look, but only because you don’t want to take your eyes off the human with the demons-damned gun . Trolls are faster than humans. You think you could cover the distance between you before she could get a shot off. Maybe. You’d rather fade back into the trees but the cover’s so damn patchy here in the forest shallows… you shift your grip on your sickle and test the give of the earth under the pads of your feet.
“...What’s a wiggler?” the human asks. Your rancor doesn’t seem to have landed. Maybe she’s the slow one.
“The dreaming mother’s mewling crotchfruit. The organic embodiment of pointlessness as shat into the world by forces either beneficent or having a marvelous laugh at us all. The entirely irrelevant distraction which I do not understand why I am explaining at this moment—does any of this help?”
“It’s a baby? Or a puppy?”
“What the fuck is a baby,” you say, and manage to flatten out the question before you reach the end of the sentence. “No, don’t tell me; I forgot you’re a mammal. You brood your own larva. I don’t want to hear anything about your horrific gut parasites; you just shut your gapehole right there. I don’t care if you have a whole litter chewing their way out of your stomach right now.”
This stymies her. Or maybe it’s the way you’re gesturing furiously with your sickle.
Kankri nudges at your mind, frustrated and fearful and rabidly curious, trying to pry further translations from your brain. --Why are you talking about breeding?--
The black wolf demon sits back on his haunches and yawns, a mocking flash of fangs.
--You should not breed with the human,-- Kankri adds. --She has a gun.--
--Merciful fuck, please shut *up* about breeding.--
“Okay,” the human in question says after a tense silence. “That is definitely not how any kind of babies work. I sure hope.”
You explode into a growl, curling your lips back to show her all your teeth. “Great! Thank you. I think we’ve all enjoyed this lovely cross-cultural exchange of reproductive biology schoolfeeding. Do you have any other invasive personal questions you’d like to cover, or can we skip to the part where you attempt to shoot the scary demons or run yelping for your human pack?
That hint of—openness, of curiosity falls away from her, leaving something serious and professional in its place. Something that assesses you with frank calculation. Suddenly it’s easy to remember why you found her threatening, why this situation is dangerous. She scrutinizes you for a long moment, her green eyes on yours too intrusive, too presumptively direct. It makes you hunch, bristling. Somewhere at the back of your brain, warning bells sound, some mental connection tries to light. Green…?
“I don’t shoot people just because they’re scary,” she says finally. “Do you mean trouble for the people here?”
“We don’t want to fight you for your territory, if that’s what you mean.”
“Not my territory—I just wander through from time to time.” One eyebrow quirks and there’s that flash of something open and unguarded again, before her eyes go back to trying to pin you to a tree and pry you open. “But I wouldn’t like to see any of the people around here hurt. They’ve been good to us.”
“Watch me swell up and bust from caring so hard. We don’t want anything to do with any of you. Happy? Are we going to try to murder each other or will you go away ?”
The human examines you a moment longer. Then she blows out a sigh,her musket butt tapping the ground as the tension slumps out of her. “Wow, those options suck.” Her tone is frank, her posture is tired, and you try not to notice how much less alien that makes her seem. You try not to notice that with her weapon down she’s left herself vulnerable to attack, that you’re all but certain you could be across that distance and at her throat before she could recover.
You must not be the only one who notices, because the black wolf stands and prowls toward her, moving in on her flank. You rub your thumb restlessly over the hilt of your sickle and debate just breaking for it. You just have no idea what direction you want to break.
“...I don’t suppose you’d want to talk?” She doesn’t even back away from the wolf stalking in at her side and you’re half expecting blood and half wondering what it is your instincts are muttering that you’ve missed. “Just for a bit?”
You wish she’d stop looking at you with those too-green, human eyes. Looking at you and talking to you, like you could be the same, like you’re not a possible enemy, or a stranger, or even some non-caste, barely tolerated freak. The tips of your ears twitch, trying to lie back in confusion.
Kankri, outwardly still, but inwardly a flurry of furious attention, tugs at your mind. --She smells *wrong.*-- he repeats. The scent swirls through your brain, that alien human musk laced through with the smells of fur and den and familiarity. --She smells like kin/wolves/us. Why?--
Why…?
Surmise blossoms in your brain as a dozen details you’d ignored come howling back for your attention. All the velvet on your body stands up. Green eyes . You’d taken him for a widow-wolf, from the first, hadn’t you, strange and feral and alone as he was, and that sickly color not quite like a bond at all. She’d spoken to him, he’d recognized her, it had all been right there in front of you and yet, and yet—surely it’s not possible—
The black wolf demon slinks up alongside the human. She sets her hand on his head, an idle intimacy.
Your understanding of the situation snaps into an entirely different perspective, like an image inverting.
“You—” you say, and fumble.
She looks at you with surprise— surprise. “Oh, I thought you—” She bites her lip. “Haha. Oops! Um, well. This is—this is Slick. I found him when he was—a few years ago. Littler. And I’m Jade, I don’t think I said—wow, I’m doing this way wrong.”
You can’t take your eyes away from that clawless, human hand twining possessively into black fur, from the scrap of multicolored fabric bright like a slit throat behind it.
There is a collar around his neck .
Kankri’s snarl starts low and almost inaudible.
“That... is disgusting,” you say, voice shaky.
The human’s hopeful expression snuffs out like a light. She falls silent.
“That is repulsive, ” you repeat, shock slowly transmuting into a molten tide of fury, your brother’s anger singing the cold, sharp smell of metal and blood into yours. “You—what did you do? Where is his pack , where is his troll-sibling, what did you do to him?”
“I didn’t, I just found him, I just—”
“—Oh, what, like he just turned up magically in your pocket one day? You just happened across a fucking wolf demon and you thought to yourself ‘oh, I know what I’ll do, I’ll just take him home and keep him’?”
“It wasn’t like that! He was alone, he—”
“—What do you think we are, your tame woolbeasts? How dare you, how fucking dare you; you think you can just—what? Have us all for animals? Make fucking pets out of us?”
“He’s not a pet! ”
“ Shut up, you terrors-taken taintchafing human witch!”
She stares at you, face blanched and utterly empty, and then she’s making a lunge for the black wolf, catching him him around the neck with both arms, dragging her weight back to stop his silent, murderous leap for your throat.
He checks his momentum just barely, still straining toward you, lips peeled back, eyes gone solid, murderous green, glowing all through. His snarl arrives only after the fact, a rising, venomous vibration, like he’d much rather kill you than warn you. He’s got to be twice her weight. She couldn’t hold him if he didn’t allow it, but he stays in her arms and hits you with his mind instead, the clearest, sharpest communication you’ve had from him all day:
--MINE.--
The thought rolls through you like a thunderstorm.
It checks your own angry momentum. Kankri’s growl snaps off, thoughts disassembling into confusion.
The wolf chooses the bondmate, always . And nobody questions that choice. That’s ingrained, that’s unshakeable. A truth that goes all the way back to empress and mother wolf; the first, undying dreamers. But, but she’s a human. She can’t form a bond, not a real one, not one that counts. Can she? It’s some human magic, a trick, a half-truth—
She’s hanging on around his neck and her face looks like you savaged her. Blank like she doesn’t dare show wounds. She might be holding him back or she might just be holding on.
Your outrage stumbles. Kankri’s mental touch is a wordless, eddying fog in your mind, doubtful and unsettled.
You don’t… know.
She sucks in a breath and the missing emotion floods back into her face.
“No, you shut up. You utter fuckface! You weren’t there. Where were you when he was in a cage? Where were you when he was all alone? Don’t you tell me what I should have done like you know anything about it. Don’t you tell me how I should have left him. You don’t like my choices? You don’t like me? Fine , I don’t care. You don’t get to decide who my family is.”
Her voice gets angrier and angrier as she goes, picking up speed and temper. Her fingers tighten in fur, on the stock of her musket. The black wolf’s eyes blaze eery light. The human’s eyes are the same ferocious green and you can’t tell if you’re imagining the hint of a glow licking up behind them.
“We don’t need you, we don’t want you. We’re doing just fine on our own.”
Every word feels driven straight into your chest.
“And if you think you can take us, you just come and fucking try. ”
You stand there, breath knocked out of you, almost mesmerized, and wonder if this might not be some human magic after all. You can’t look away from her, and you can feel those eyes from horntip to toes.
You have, you are beginning to suspect, royally fucked up. Full-fledged Karkat Vantas ruining everything special.
You just can’t decide which particular reaction you should be berating yourself for.
In the face of your silence, in the absence of immediate challenge, the violence leaches slowly out of the air. That dangerous green light recedes from the black wolf’s eyes until you can see gold at their center again. Far from calm, but... present. The human blows out her breath angrily, flexes her fingers open and closed.
“Bluh, argh.” Her voice still sounds unsteady. She shakes out her dark hair like she could shake the unpleasant emotions away with it. “Or we could… not do that. I think maybe you had the right idea in the first place.” The words emerge tired, flat, all the secret edges filed away.
You find yourself reaching automatically toward her mind, like you might with a packmate, trying to—what? Read between the lines? Establish common ground? ...Offer comfort or apology? If she were a troll you might manage it, even without a packbond, but she is not a troll. You can’t find anything there and you can hardly touch more than the seething, surface emotions of the scar-eyed wolf.
She can’t quite clear the hostility from her eyes, milder cousin to the black wolf’s stare, but she trains them fixedly on some middle point past your shoulder. “How ‘bout we go back to that. You leave us be and we’ll return the favor.”
...She pulled her wolf-brother out of a rage without even a moirail to balance her. True bond or not, that’s not a feat to be accomplished on superficial relationships.
“I’m sorry,” you blurt, and are utterly unsurprised when this fixes precisely nothing.
The human blinks twice. Her glasses glint. The set of her jaw remains angry, her face closed. The black wolf pings your own conflicted thoughts back at you: - -((sorry /not)) --
Your ears twitch, heating uncomfortably.
“You might want to head on your way in any case,” the human adds, more neutrally. “There’s been livestock going missing in the area for weeks and people are getting trigger-happy. I really do try not to shoot anyone sentient enough to be reasoned with.”
You can feel the fog of Kankri’s thoughts, coalescing into the disagreeable notion that he might have been wrong . It sits in your brain, a dark, lumpy clot of discomfort, impossible to ignore.
--...what do we do?-- he asks, almost plaintive.
Your chest… feels strange. Probably because you’re still doing stupid things with your lungs: i.e., forgetting to use them.
You should leave. Take her up on her offer and abscond while you can. There’s nothing here you can change and you’re not sure you should. They aren’t any version of you and Kankri. You can’t make her less a human, you can’t make them less a disturbing anomaly. It’s likely the kindest thing you could do is leave them be.
You can’t make them less alone.
-- Let’s be dumb , -- you say, and take a step forward.
The human’s attention snaps sharply to you. The black wolf curls back his lip.
Moving in precise increments, you put your sickle away, hooking the rune-etched blade back into the leather strap at your waist. You fight a case of nerves that are busy reminding you that that is A HUMAN, HUMAN, ANGRY HUMAN WITH A GUN and take another step. Kankri falls in at your side, close enough to keep your joint approach from presenting as a threat. You can’t stop your shoulders from hunching, your horns dropping low, every step wary and half poised to bolt.
She does not look friendly.
With every step you’re less certain of your receipt and yet more certain that this gesture worth carrying through. Some confirmation, some fleeting moment of acknowledgment, you can manage that much, at least.
This would be easier if they didn’t both have you pinned under eerily similar eyes: guarded, suspicious. ...ready to bite. This would be easier if she weren’t so distinctly human .
Well, you’ve already had one chunk taken out of you today. Two’s hardly any worse.
Probably.
She did say she wouldn’t shoot you.
Also probably.
You sidle a few steps closer, heart beating hard in your chest. You still can’t read anything behind that bare, strangely vulnerable face, gone closed off and inscrutable.
You turn your bandaged hand palm up. Two pairs of eyes fix on it. A flare of acid amusement, hot pepper sharp in your nose, flickers from the black wolf. The human tilts her head, looks back to you.
Her eyes are wide and very green, dangerous like tanglevines.
You extend your hand.
Voices cut through the trees and you jump about a foot in the air, jerking back, all your velvet bristling.
All four of you look south, toward the noise. The voices call again, humans, distant, in a group. More calls, breaking off to the southeast. Something’s got them out in force.
You fall back a step, without thought. Another. Time to go.
“Wait!” the human says, breaking her silence.
You hesitate.
Her face sets with decision and she speaks, all in a rush. “Go too far that way and you’ll run right into the village wardstone circle. You’re better to go long around to the west and follow the creek bed down into the valley to cut through the rocks. No one will notice you there.”
“Oh, I. ...Thanks.”
She catches you off guard with a brilliantly sunny smile. “Don’t worry about it,” she says, and then mimics your gruff growl: “Now will you go away ?”
You flash her your own teeth, mostly a smile. “Same to you, furless.” You rock on your feet and then daringly dart in to brush her fingertips with your own.
Salt, iron.
You pull back almost as quickly, pulse adrenaline fast. Her mouth shapes a surprised ‘O’. You avert your eyes, horns prickling with heat. Your fingertips tingle.
“Empress keep you, Jade, Slick.” Even the names sound alien in your mouth, and you know the blessing for a lie. There is no pack to bind them into something bigger, no queen or alpha to weave them back into the dream when they pass. Does she even really understand what that means? Her wolf-brother must.
She lets Kankri sniff her hand, too, and winds her fingers into Slick’s fur as the two wolves also trade brief greeting. You attempt your own experimental hand offering. The black wolf contemplates you with a scarred gold eye, knowing and immovable, darkly amused, flank pressed firm against her side. --(mine)--
The human—Jade—has one eyebrow up. Her lips purse in a friendlier version of that hot pepper amusement, framing blunt white teeth. “Luck to you both,” she says, and adds practically: “Don’t get shot.”
You roll your eyes and head off at a lope.
The trees close around you, leaving you alone with your brother again.
In the distance you can hear the humans spreading out, calling back and forth about whatever they are about, making more and more ground unavailable to you. You’ll have to swing very wide out of your way to circle back to Sollux and Terezi unaccosted. You think you’ve had about all the human accostment drama you would like for one day. You’ll be glad to get well clear of here. Rejoin the rest of your pack, find and claim some ground as far away from the forest shore and humans as you can manage.
And yet, somewhere at the back of your brain you find yourself plotting, practicing excuses you might use to come back here. Just for a bit.
You know you’re in trouble when Kankri doesn’t tell you what a terrible idea that is.