Silver Scars & Hollow Hearts

After The Fire

The celebration lasted long past midnight.

Klaus knew this because he tracked time the way he tracked everything,automatically, underneath whatever he was actually doing, like a second mind running in parallel with the first. He did not leave early. 

He did not calculate when it would be appropriate to leave. He stayed because this was his pack and they were celebrating and he was a part of it, and for once in his life he was going to let that be enough.

It was close to enough. It was closer than it usually was.

He was on his third cup of mead, he never had more than three, a discipline he had kept since he was nineteen years old and had learned the lesson about fourth cups the hard way,when he became aware that someone was watching him from across the Hall.

He looked up.

Liora Ashvane was not looking away.

She stood near the south wall with three other senior pack warriors, a cup in her hand and her weight shifted to one hip in the particular way she stood when she was relaxed but not entirely off duty. Her deep auburn hair was down, which she rarely allowed at pack functions. 

Her sharp green eyes were on him with the kind of frankness that Liora never bothered to conceal, because she had never seen the need to, she was the pack's finest warrior, the woman who had won the regional combat title three years running, and she did not particularly concern herself with managing other people's feelings about her attention.

The attention itself was not warm. It was not hostile, either. It was simply... assessing. The way you might look at a piece of equipment you hadn't expected to perform adequately and were now revising your estimates about.

Not impressed. Just surprised.

Klaus held her gaze for exactly three seconds,long enough to acknowledge it, not long enough to make it into something it wasn't and then looked away.

He heard, from somewhere behind him, one of Liora's companions say something low. He caught Greywood Pass, and the eastern flank, in eleven minutes.

He heard Liora's reply.

"I know. I was there."

Her voice was even. Not dismissive. Not impressed. Simply factual, in the particular way of someone who processed information without immediately attaching emotion to it.

Klaus took a long sip of mead and thought about nothing in particular.

He found Vanitas later in the evening, when the celebration had settled into its later-hour rhythm,quieter, more personal, people drifting into smaller groups and conversations that would be remembered more clearly than the ones in the early roaring hours.

His brother was standing near the hearth with Elder Cassian, the oldest member of the pack council. 

The Elder was a man so old that his wolf form had gone entirely white, and his human form was not far behind, a small, sharp-eyed man with a spine curved by age but a mind that Klaus had never once caught being slow. They were speaking quietly. Both of them stopped when Klaus approached.

Something shifted in Aldric's expression. It was brief. If Klaus had not spent fifteen years studying that face he would have missed it entirely.

"Brother."

Vanitas said it with warmth, stepping sideways to make space.

"We were just discussing the council meeting tomorrow. Nothing that can't wait. Come, have you eaten enough? You look like you survived on rations for six weeks."

"We did survive on rations for six weeks."

"Then sit down and eat something that isn't compressed dried meat. That's an order."

Klaus sat. He ate. Elder Cassian watched him with the specific attention of a very old wolf who has seen a great many things and is currently deciding how he feels about the latest one.

The Elder said nothing more that evening. He simply excused himself after a few minutes with a politeness that was almost too careful, and he did not look at Vanitas as he left.

Later, Klaus would remember this.

Later, he would remember the way Vanitas had tracked the Elder's departure across the Hall, and the way his brother's hand had closed, briefly, around his cup before releasing it.

Later.

Not tonight.

………………………….

He left the Hall at the second hour past midnight, when the last of the fires were burning low and the celebration had thinned to its most committed participants. 

His quarters were two buildings away across the settlement's central yard, a walk he had made thousands of times, in every kind of weather and every kind of state, and which he could have navigated without sight if he needed to.

The night was clear and cold, a half-moon throwing pale light across the rooftops. His breath came in small clouds. His boots were quiet on the packed earth.

He was tired. Not the sharp exhaustion of the campaign but the softer kind, the kind that settled in when a threat passed and the body was finally allowed to lower its guard. The kind that felt, if he was honest about it, almost pleasant.

He stopped at the edge of the yard and stood for a moment.

The pack's settlement spread out around him in the dark, its buildings familiar as his own hands. The smoke from the Hall's hearth drifted past overhead. Somewhere to the north, an owl called once and then was quiet.

Home, he thought.

He pushed open his door and went inside.

He did not see the shadow that detached itself from the wall near the Elder's quarters and moved silently in the opposite direction.

He did not see his brother watching from the Hall doorway, still and patient in the dark.

He slept deeply, the sleep of a man who had earned it, and he dreamed of nothing

at all.

It was the last uncomplicated night's sleep he would have for a very long time.