Chapter Text
It's dark.
It's only ever dark, when he bothers to come in here. When he can come in here.
It feels safer in the dark, somehow, with the moonlight filtering in through the window, glittering over the surface of an inch of snowfall on the sill. Quiet, and dark, and empty, and safe.
Not for the first time, Laios hovers by the doorframe another minute or so, counting his heartbeats; knuckles white from gripping the doorframe. Listening, breathing as quietly as he can. He relaxes slightly when he hears a heavy snore the next door over, and finally, gingerly, steps inside his father's study.
He sniffs the air, the way he sees Nussa do sometimes when she comes inside. He likes to see if he can smell anything different, if he could notice a difference. It always smells like a lot of things in here, a mix of his father's work and his only hobby. The earthy, bitter smell of fresh ink and sealing wax from a stack of correspondence, paper, dry wood from old bookshelves. Tonight, there is the lingering smell of smoke and burning oil from the lamp that had been put out not too long ago. A rare smell, as well -- beeswax, wood tar, and worn leather that indicate his father had spent some time maintaining his hunting bow, now hung up neatly on the wall, far from where the natural light could sneak up on it.
The smell of the bowstring wax is unusual -- not strange, necessarily, but uncommon. Laios' nose burns a little at the faint stink of alcohol, followed by a chaser of caraway, and that is really unusual, typically reserved for when his father is in one of his moods. The excitement of noticing something new is short-lived as the implication sinks in, and Laios takes a few minutes on high alert to listen again for any stirrings the next room over before he makes another step. He is rewarded for his patience with the sound of another loud, saw-toothed snore that has him pad a little farther in, emboldened.
At least if his father was drinking, it's unlikely he will wake up again until morning. Not that Laios intends to push his luck by messing anything up in the study, or being loud enough to wake him. Not that he ever intends to…
There are antlers mounted neatly over the walls on either side of the writing desk, affixed to polished wooden placards, engraved with numbers. Date, weight, sex, species, approximate age. His father only keeps the specimens that interest him in this fashion; the largest or the most unique. One is set with a scuffed antler on the left, a complete vacancy on the right -- it's too dark to read the inscription, but Laios already knows what it says.
November 26, 488. 307.4 kilograms. Male. Approximately three years of age.
His mother recounted, with a hint of disgust, that while the midwife had left to get fresh rags and his father hurried to wash his hands, the old hunting dogs had blown through the door and flocked to sniff the fresh new baby. By her recollection, Laios had long been anointed in dog saliva and fresh elk blood by the time his father held him for the first time.
He reaches up to touch the antler, familiar and smooth against his fingertips. He liked that story, even if his mother didn't like retelling it. And he likes this room, as long as his father is not in it.
Various preserved fox and wolf pelts drape over stern and uncomfortable pieces of well-made wooden furniture, headless and inoffensive. Before the room was locked every day, he used to play his fingers through the fur and try to find the small stitches where the skin had been pierced, trying to piece together how they had died. How many bites it had taken, whether the final blow was caused by arrow or hunting knife. It's been a long time since he'd tried, and he touches the soft winter coat of a fox, draped over the armrest of a chair beneath the window, as if a talisman warding against the cold.
This room is always so uninviting during the day; the door typically remains closed and locked unless his father is inside, and he keeps the key on his person. Even when he is inside, the oil lantern and imposing silhouette scream 'I am too important to bother, stay away' -- a rule that Laios, Falin, and the dogs all follow, as long as his father is there to enforce them. He always says that he only does it to make sure that the dogs don't get into his things, but Laios is pretty sure it's to keep him out; not that he would ever ask.
It does mean, however, that he only gets to look at the painting when his father forgets to lock the door for the night.
It was a wedding present, from his mother's family to his father. It may not be a particularly beautiful painting, Laios wouldn’t know; the colors are a little dark, and the shapes are a little abstract, but it was the first piece of art -- real art -- that he had ever seen. There are drawings in his monster book, sure, but that is more like a field guide; identifying features all need to be drawn in, or it wouldn't be a particularly good reference guide. This is more... emotional, he thinks. Or it should be.
It is a painting of a tallman woman, one with large and tired dark eyes, a flat nose. She sits in a chair beside a dim fire in a stone fireplace, ash blonde hair pulled into a low, messy plait over her shoulder, held back from her face by a kerchief tied atop her head. In one arm she cradles a swaddled baby, and in the other hand she holds a ladle, tending to a simmering pot of soup. Over the back of the chair is draped a beautiful fur cloak.
While the woman and the fireplace are depicted in warm and deep tones, dark browns and welcoming oranges and little highlights of yellow, the cloak is depicted in a silvery blue, seeming to glow in a light of its own, not from the fire at all. Its white fur is dappled with tiny black spots that become so numerous in places that the skin appears to be black, shining and ethereal.
A selkie is a monster, according to a not-quite local myth; a seal who can shed her skin and become a woman, walk about as if a normal human, and return to the sea a seal again, wrapped in her cloak, happily accepted back by the other seals. Laios had seen seals before, basking on the beach in his mother's hometown -- they have big, dark eyes and smooth, wet skin, and they make weird little huffing noises when their nostrils open and close. He had sat just up from the rocky beach one day when he was visiting his grandparents, not long after Falin came along. Nearly an entire afternoon watching the seals enjoy a rare, cloudless day in the sun. Burned into his mind's eye was the moment that a particularly round one had rolled onto its back and let out a sopping wet huff of a bark around a bloody mouthful of headless fish, sun gleaming off of its silvery belly. His mother had joked, softly, that it looked like one of the dogs begging for table scraps, but instead, it had reminded him of the painting.
A quick and careful fisherman, so the stories claimed, could keep a selkie's skin for himself, trapping her in human form. There were many such stories, he had read, where a fisherman would fall in love with a selkie and take her coat so she would forever remain a human. They would marry, then, and likely have children.
"A happy ending," his mother had said with a soft smile, reading to him by his bedside, and quietly snuffed the candle out to tuck him in.
What a cruel thing, he had always thought. To fall in love with something so beautiful and different, only to trap it in a world where it doesn't belong.
Selkie stories come from the area where his mother grew up, more to the southwest than here. The demihuman section of his book explicitly left them out, only mentioning them as a footnote somewhere in the mermaid section -- that northern reports of selkies had turned out to be simple mermaid sightings. Long ago, drunken fishermen had confused mermaids for seals, and confused and conflicting stories had grown wild from there.
As much as he adored monsters and the idea of seeing them so close to home, learning from the guidebook that selkies were made up had been a huge relief to his anxious, overthinking mind.
The painting, he had been told, was supposed to be symbolic. A tongue-in-cheek wedding gift for a man whose first love was hunting; a painting of a wild beast who had voluntarily given up that part of itself to tend both hearth and human child. A trophy head mounted on a wife rather than a wall, won through duty and provision rather than deceit and theft. It is a happy story, his mother had told him, so many times before, when he had doubtless looked doubtful. Why, then, did Laios always see that silver-dappled coat, placed where the fire of the hearth failed to shine upon it, and think of the seal on the beach, sharp teeth in a soft round mouth, partially masticated scales clinging to its wiry whiskers?
This painting is supposed to be about leaving behind an empty and purposeless freedom for the warmth of home, and duty, and family -- that is what his father had told him, in a way that invited no further conversation, when he first aired a spoken protest at the unfairness of the selkie's fate.
He shouldn't get so worked up about it, he knows. Selkies aren't even real, after all.
Why, then, does he always feel so homesick looking at it?
For the first time in a long while, Laios sits on the stone floor, reaching behind him for the pelt on the ground. The fur is snow white and boasts two textures; long, coarse hairs sit on top, and shorter, softer hairs lie beneath. It is the skin of a mature dire wolf his father had killed in his youth, back before they had been hunted to extinction on the Northern continent -- a majestic creature relegated to nothing more than warming a lone human's feet while he penned trade agreements in a dark and stuffy office.
This fur had been an object of obsession when he was younger. Laios was always laying on top of it and touching the wiry hair, digging soft, tiny fingers into the undercoat to try to comprehend the difference in textures, the reason for it. When they had given him his guidebook, he had pored over the section on dire wolves with bright eyes, laying fully on a pelt whose length dwarfed his father, who was not a slight man by any means. The skin is skillfully riddled with stealthy stitches to hide punctures from the unrelenting teeth of hunting dogs, punctures from arrowheads, and a few less-than-professional slices from his father's hunting knife. Despite being more hard-fought than any of the other trophies in this room, it still manages to be beautiful, nearly otherworldly in the light, even on the floor.
With a familiarity he usually only reserves for his sister, Laios pulls the pelt over his head, draping the slack, lifeless paws over his shoulders and pulling the fur over his head, tight to his back, like a cloak. Moonlight filters through the ice-white strands of fur and onto his cheeks as he gazes up at the painting.
Not for the first time, he wishes he could set her free from the prison of her frame. If she could move, he knows she would simply put the cloak on and dive back into the ocean, where the other seals lived. She could bite fish in half with her sharp teeth and powerful jaws, she could lay on beaches in the sun and go wherever she pleased. She could be a monster and come and go by her own will, not the will of some random human.
Laios pulls the dire wolf pelt around himself a little tighter and closes his eyes, imagining, not for the first time, the way the sunlight would feel falling on a glorious furred back, four powerful legs allowing him to clear fallen logs and maneuver through snow and dense forests, descending upon an elk with wicked teeth and cunning and hearing its indignant death bellows as it crumples to the ground, shaking it around in his powerful jaws. Going anywhere he likes, sleeping all day, wrestling with other wolves, sleeping in a warm pack in a safe den, far away from cities or towns, with only the birds and the wind through the trees to fall asleep to, snow muffling all other sound...
When Laios finally comes to, the birds are chirping faintly in trees nearby the house; there is some kind of crow outside of the window, peering in; neat little footprints mar the perfect layer of snow that had accumulated there overnight. It's not quite light out yet, but the moon has retreated and taken with her the silvery light that drenched everything in magic and melancholia last night, and the trees outside are illuminated only by the remnants of a faint, cool glow. Even without rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he knows that it's just before sunrise. The hens will be up soon, and his mother shortly after them, so he has to move quickly.
Laios' face is cold from sleeping on the stone floor, and his back hurts, but he's careful not to make a sound as he gets to his feet. He lays the pelt out exactly how it was before, smoothing out its fur with one reverent, lingering hand, before he quietly makes his way back to his room.
Falin stirs in his bed when he enters but doesn't wake, snuffling softly in her slumber, and Laios feels a wash of guilt come over him. She must have come looking for him after a bad dream and fallen asleep waiting for him to come back. Her nose has been blocked up from a cold for a few nights, and Laios pulls his sleeve up over his curled fingertips to wipe it for her, rolling the sleeve back up on his arm so the snot doesn't get everywhere. She furrows her brows a little in her sleep from the unexpected sensation and the brief inconvenience, but seems to relax afterward, her breathing somewhat cleared, if only temporarily.
Between the visions of another life that he had toyed with in the night, his aching back, and Falin's soft, nasally wheezing, he knows he's not going to get any sleep.
Laios crawls under the covers anyway, careful not to disturb Falin as he slides one arm under her and one arm over, carefully transferring his weight into the bed so the wooden frame doesn't squeak. Once he's settled, he observes that the bed is colder than the floor had been, and he turns that thought over in his head a few times like a smooth stone, worn soft by the waves, before setting it aside. From underneath Falin, Laios pulls the blankets in to seal in her body heat, pulling her to curl into his chest and resting his chin atop her head. Close like this, her breath reflects off of his chest and up through the cage he's made with his arms and blankets and body -- she seems to relax more into the bed the more she's insulated, and if nothing else, he's plenty glad for that. Her fine hair catches up in her breathing and brushes against his chin when it flies up, which tickles a little, but it's not as if he was going to get any sleep, anyway.
If Laios has to be human, if he has to live in a house that smells like ink and paper and alcohol, he can at least give Falin the safety of that den, safe and warm and full of family.
Surely, he can at least do that.
He peers through half-open eyes out the window, sunlight not quite filtering in just yet. Even so, before his eyelids give in to the desire to rest, he sees a blurry silhouette behind the half-drawn curtain. It looks like a raven, but much smaller -- a crow, maybe? Only, he has never seen an adult crow with blue eyes.
It must be something else then, Laios thinks vaguely to himself, drifting back into dreams of running wild through the forest, gamboling between the trees with paws the size of mallets and a mouth like a bear trap. It's probably nothing important.