Rind.

Note: Sorry it's been so silent around here for the past two weeks. I've been busy with a few summer preparations, but things are on a bit more of an even keel now, and should be a bit more regular from now on.

- Jenner


Gustin woke up slowly. It was his ninth morning in the house. He sighed, rolled back over on the furs. He'd kept track of the time, like a prison, through scratches on the wall and by how long his nails had grown. Annoyed with waking, his stomach growled. In the center of the room, backlit by the rising sun, Kuskellanar was cooking first meal. The smell of rabbit meat and the small, flat, dough that Kellan fried wafter over to him. Gustin slid his legs over the wide splay of furs that the wolfe called a bed, put feet on cold wood and jumped over to the small patches of furs leading a path to the cooking pit and bathing rooms that Kellan had laid down on the third morning that Gustin had complained.

The wolfe grunted a greeting as he approached, but otherwise didn't acknowledge him. This was how things had been for the past six days - there seemed to exist a covenant of silence between the two. Kellan would not speak about his intentions for Gustin, and in turn asked Gustin no questions of who he was, where he came from, or most importantly, what he knew.

Kuskellanar's rising was what woke Gustin every morning. The human slept on edge, half-awake, constantly terrified of waking mid-sleep to find the wolfe in any number of horrific positions he'd imagined. Gustin had learned, over the course of his twenty-seven years, that a vigorous imagination was one of his greatest defenses. Preparing for the worst situation kept one's heart beating.
So even the littlest sound woke him.

That first night, he'd tried to sleep on the floor by the fire and been dragged over to the bed by Kuskellanar. He'd thought of bolting again when the wolfe had put large hands on his hips, but the wolfe snorted and laid him forcibly in the bed, placing him purposefully between himself and the wall, and turned on his side to sleep.
That night had been a long night.

The next day, Kellan had showed him how to use the bathing rooms - after a few days, he had even given Gustin an assignment, teaching him how to make soaps from animal fat. Growled at him when once he did it wrong and nearly spoiled an entire batch. Gustin had been in a lot of sticky situations in his life, he reflected, had faced a lot of dangers and had a lot of threats made upon his person, but there really was nothing quite like Kellan's growl. The low tremor in the wolfe's voice made him stop short every time.

Gustin slept continuously on edge.

~:~

It was the eighteenth morning. The snow was just as high. Kellan opened the door once, every morning, for only a few seconds, to blow new air into the room and taste the wind. Gustin caught on after a few times, and would wait by the door to catch his only glimpse of sky before the same brown-grayness of the walls swallowed him completely again.

Kellan generally went out sometime in the mid-morning; Gustin knew the time only because the gray in the sky which could be seen through the two high, tiny windows faded to a gray-blue and the distant but persistent sound of water dripping alerted him to the fact that the sun was out. He'd managed to get the door open once, when Kellan wasn't home, just because the four walls had felt so damn close around him and he'd been so desperate for space, for sunshine, for the crisp bite of clear air that tasted like cold rain-snow and bird feathers and smoke and maybe, distantly (Gustin imagined) like home.

It had taken him almost twenty minutes to get the damn thing closed back again and in the meantime, three fires had gone out and the entire house had gotten a chill which lingered for days. Kellan had growled at him when he came home, gone out again and returned with armfuls of smaller furs to stack on the bed. It was the first night they hadn't spoken at all, and the first night Kellan had slept close to Gustin.

~:~