Chapter Text
The fire burned, blinding, all consuming. The smoke thickened with each second, rendering poisonous whatever oxygen the flames had yet to steal. It seemed as if nothing could satiate the raging inferno devouring Verso’s home.
A flash of white appeared around the corner. A dog’s bark echoed. A ghost, perhaps, or a hallucination from Verso’s dazzled senses.
He never stopped moving, but he never seemed to get anywhere. His heart raced in blind panic, weakening even more his smoke-filled lungs. Verso barely could distinguish the painting he passed by as he tried to map a way out in the suddenly unfamiliar corridors. The smell of burning oil was suffocating.
He turned past what had once been the top of the staircase but now looked more like the seventh circle of Dante’s hell. He’d been here before. Verso vaguely remembered pushing Alicia down the stairs before they collapsed, but since then he’d been running around in loops, meeting wall after wall as he tried and failed to escape the flames licking his skin.
He turned tail, faintly hoping he’d missed an exit in the hallway he just left. His gaze crossed the burning remains of their family portrait as he spun, and he froze, watching as the last bit of Monoco the first’s calcined eye turned into ashes.
Another bark echoed, louder, and the vanishing portrait was replaced by a much livelier dog rushing towards him.
For as long as Verso could remember, there was a Monoco in the manor.
Monoco the first was a blurry feeling of yapping and games across his childhood, the exact color of his coat long gone with time and memories. Verso’s chest had burst with love for the puppy, and the canine’s eyes had always reflected the same in turn. Time had even less mercy for dogs than for men however, and Monoco the first had died. He’d left a hole in Verso’s heart no symphony could truly express.
Monoco the second was a tiny thing who had come too soon after the death of Verso’s playmate, bought unfairly to fill up a space no new dog could ever fill. Verso had refused to call him “Monoco,” nicknaming him Noco instead, and the new name had stuck. His yapping had hurt his ears, but the creature had clearly only been yearning for love and affection, and after a while of living together, Verso’s heart had mellowed out. He’d taken to be the one walking the dog throughout Paris, when even the large Manor ground became too small for the overexcited pet. There was a lot to say about well-timed dog barks when he needed excuses to escape his family scrutiny.
Monoco the third had been a surprising addition. Verso had found him injured on the sidewalk a few years earlier. His parents had wanted nothing to do with the filthy whelp of an unknown breed, but Verso had begged them not to throw him back to the streets to die. When none of their circle had wanted to take the mutt in either, calling him too energetic, too whiny, too dangerous, too old to be tamed, Verso had begged once more to keep and train him as Noco’s companion. The young dog was large, three times bigger than any of the other Monocos. He would become a formidable guard dog, Verso had argued from the height of his twenties.
His parents had agreed, and the hound had been named Monoco the third, both to keep the ongoing trend of Monocos and because Verso once woke up to an over-eager puppy on his bed and dazedly called the name of a partner long-gone.
He didn’t get to participate in the dog’s training, in the end. A few months after Monoco the third’s arrival, he managed to fetch himself an apartment in Paris and left the family home. The echoes he’d heard of it weren’t good. Ever since he’d been gone, the hound kept running away. The mutt responded poorly to training attempts, stubbornly moving or starting fights even when told to stay still. He’d bitten enough trainers that they were considering applying a muzzle of him, despite no serious injury ever occurring.
Yet in Verso’s presence, Monoco was always cheerful and kind, doing every trick you could ask and expect a dog to do. A bit overexcited maybe, jumping at him and play-biting more than necessary, but never harmful or overly threatening in any way. Verso would have taken him with him, but his apartment was small and in the middle of the city. It was no place for a dog as big as Monoco to live, not when he could run back and forth the whole Manor ground and barely be tired. Between this, the imposing muscles growing under the white fur and the nocturnal whining, Verso guessed he was some kind of wolf mixed breed. Another reason not to lock him up in a small bachelor lodging. So Monoco the third stayed in the Dessendre Manor, and Verso only saw his growth in bursts through his rare visits.
He looked fully grown now, Verso thought dazedly, looking at the white wolfish shape charging through the flames to reach him. He still wasn’t sure the vision was real. Heat rendered his sight blurry, and most of his thoughts were fizzled by the rising panic and pain.
The Manor cracked ominously around him. Verso’s frozen legs rushed back into movement. He could feel flames licked his bare skin. At least there was no tissue left to catch fire; his clothes were long gone, stripped off before they could burn.
He must have been screaming at some point because his throat felt rough, as if the ashes had turned into sandpaper and rubbed it raw.
Verso had been trying to find a path to one of the garden windows at least, visions of leaping outside the building away from the agonising heat dancing at the forefront of his mind. The last one he’d hoped to use to escape had been a dead end, high flames forcing his panicked and oxygen-starved mind to turn tail. The terror pressing at his chest was the only thing keeping him moving now, even as it increased with each step as he got more and more lost in the stinging ocean of smoke. Verso couldn’t remember where the next window was.
He hiccuped in another puff of air charged with smoke and coughed. It did more harm than good, the coughs painfully wracking his body and forcing his mouth to swallow even more smoke. It brought a blissful moment of silence before screams rang again in the midst of the roaring of the flames. Verso’s hand climbed to his throat as he desperately stumbled forward. Where was the window? Ashes and blood coated his tongue, filling his senses with dry bitterness. He could feel his throat and lungs clogging from the heavy particles, burning him from the inside.
The white blur disappeared around a corner before reappearing, closer. Verso moved towards it despite the increasing weakness of his limbs and the silent threat of his blistering skin.
He hoped it wasn’t truly Monoco. One of them burning to death was enough.
He stumbled and fell a few steps later, head spinning. His right knee thumped into the burning floor. Verso felt more than he heard another scream wrenching itself from his throat, right before he curled into another coughing fit. A painful shudder wracked his frame. Despite the overwhelming heat, he was colder than he’d ever felt. To worsen things, the adrenaline-fueled numbness was fading, giving him peeks of the indescribable agony waiting beyond.
Verso knew before he ever heard the crack under his feet that he was done for. Tears rolled on his already soaked cheeks as despair tightened his ash-clogged throat.
He hoped Alicia had gotten out.
Verso clung to that thought, even as the floor finally gave in under the flame’s assault and collapsed. Pain overwhelmed his senses as burning wood and cutting shards surrounded him from all sides. A wolf cry rang in the distance, the sound both melodious and heart-wrenching to his hammering ears. His swollen fingers weakly twitched in yearning to accompany the song.
Verso couldn't move. He was barely aware, suffocating under tons of coal-hot rubbles. He attempted to breathe in and choked, triggering more blood to climb up his throat and suffocate him. Coughing wasn’t helping anymore.
He wheezed, and cried, and wheezed some more. He wouldn’t get out of the Manor alive, he knew. He wondered whom his parents would mourn more, between their hundreds of Canvases and their wayward Musician son. Another shudder shook his frame, irritating the burned skin against the broken wood that trapped him. Everything hurt. Verso was too aware of the liquid fire running in his veins, of the smoke accumulating in his lungs. It felt unfair. If he was going to die, he wished the world would at least grant him the mercy of a quick death rather than this stretching agony.
He didn’t want to die.
The moon rose above his head. Verso blinked, before remembering he was in a burning building, not outside, and that the moon didn’t have such pointed ears. He blinked some more, dry eyes stinging from the omnipresent smoke, and Monoco’s large wolfish face appeared into focus.
“Go away,” Verso rasped. He tried to raise an arm to chase him away, only to find his shoulder fully blocked by a heavy beam. As the dog didn’t move, Verso painfully swallowed before pushing more sound out of his mangled throat. “Shoo. Leave.”
Monoco sniffed and whined, pacing the unstable rubble with his belly dangerously close to the burning wood. His white fur looked grey from the accumulated sooth sticking to it. Verso worriedly listened to the dog’s ragged breathing piercing through the fire’s roar and wood complaints. The smoke was just as bad for Monoco as it had been for him. He attempted to shout at the dog to scare him off, only for a miserable squeak to escape his mouth.
Verso closed his eyes, spent. He didn’t have enough air left to move, much less speak again. No amount of breathing could reduce the world’s spinning or chase away the smoke-thick fog wrapping around his mind. It felt harder and harder to care about anything but the taunting agony of his limbs and the terrifying yet hopeful knowledge of its incoming relief.
A wet muzzle nuzzled his neck. Verso tore himself away from the numbing fog weighting on his thoughts to force his eyelids open. Monoco had found a way down to Verso’s trap and was lapping at his burned skin, whines escaping his throat. His tongue felt cool on the blisters, bringing back some warmth to Verso’s freezing veins.
Teeth gently wrapped around his wrist, pulling it up. Begging him to stand back up and escape the raging inferno around them. It was a fool’s quest: he barely had enough strength left to keep his eyes open, much less push the rubble trapping him away. Yet, Verso made his best attempt to comply. His torso barely rose by a few centimeters before he fell back, wheezing as much as if he had run a marathon. The wood was sharp and hot against his blistered skin, determinedly caging Verso into his grave.
Monoco’s whines got louder.
“...is fine,” Verso managed to rasp. “...eave.”
Monoco’s ears flicked back. He growled, hackles rising as the wood above cracked and the fire roared, threatening to finish the collapsing work it had started and put Verso out of his misery.
The following vision must have been a play of light from the suffocating fumes because the dog’s shape lengthened and twisted, until it looked less like a dog and more like a human of sorts, albeit a hunched one covered with fur. The hallucination began to carefully yet efficiently push away the rubble around Verso, hissing as some of the hottest pieces burned its claws.
The world blinked in and out of existence at a rhythm only known by the roaring flames surrounding him. Before Verso's dazed mind could make sense of the silhouette moving around him, a path had been freed and human-Monoco pulled him up onto his shoulders. Pitiful cries escaped Verso’s worn throat as the movement pulled at the various burns covering his body. They increased to mute screams as brushing irritated his damaged skin while being settled against a broad back. Soothing rumbles echoed from the hallucination as he adjusted his head and legs as comfortably as possible, uncaring of the smear of blood Verso was spreading onto his white coat. Then, he ran.
Verso desperately grasped at the fur and closed his eyes against the waves of agony assaulting his senses at each step, each shake feeling like a firework exploding in his nerves. He tried to focus on the feeling of soft hairs between his swollen fingers, getting a sense of their shape despite the spreading numbness. The fur was cool.
He didn’t remember them getting out of the Manor. Pain had made reality wander far away, black spots taking over his vision as the world spun and his mind collapsed on itself. He did remember them stopping, vaguely wondering about the sudden influx of green surrounding them and the absence of fire despite the smell of smoke filling his nostrils. He also remembered an insistent touch making his burns stings, Monoco’s wailing howls and whines, as well as muttered curses in a language his dazed mind couldn’t quite grab.
All of it felt otherworldly, some trick of Verso’s oxygen-depraved brain. He relaxed into the wet soil below him in between burning pulses of pain. He could feel his heart slowing down and his veins freezing. Verso knew he was dying. He had known it since the stairs collapsed and Alicia’s blurred silhouette stumbled beyond the raging inferno. He welcomed its peace now, even as the wails turned into growls and angry snarls shouted at him.
Verso smiled at the white blurry shape of Monoco. He didn’t understand why he’d see the dog he’d brought home rather than his family during his last moments, but he didn’t mind. The mutt had always understood him best. A last shuddering breath filled his lungs, heavy with clogging ashes, and the fangs of death closed around him.
It was funny, Verso thought, for death to sound so apologetic while it tore him apart.
𓇢𓆸*ੈ𑁍 ꕥ 𓃦 𓃥 ꕥ ༘⋆ꫂ ၴႅၴ 🐾
Verso woke up to a rough tongue lapping at his skin. It was warm and wet, massaging his muscles and invigorating the blood rushing through his veins despite the cold hanging in the air. His nerves felt tender, as if he’d been plunged into a boiling room and lightly burned all over. A whine escaped him as the tongue teased a sensitive part of his neck.
“Stop, Monoco,” he mumbled, curling on his side to escape the sensation. His mouth closed wrongly around the words, letting out something more akin to gibberish than actual sentences. “Five more minutes,” he sleepily added when the tongue didn’t stop.
“You’re awake?” someone rumbled above him. “Good.”
Verso grumbled and nuzzled into the mellow surface he was laid on. The scent of fresh earth and dying leaves filled his nostrils. No, he wasn't awake.
Another whine escaped him as he was pushed roughly onto his back. He clamped his mouth shut, surprised at the lack of control he had over his throat. Passing his tongue over his teeth, Verso found them terrifyingly sharp. He tried to gather on his feet, but found his spine was kind of stuck, keeping his arms and legs too close to balance. Verso struggled to stretch them more, blind to the limbs’ pain as fear sent his heart racing.
“Don’t panic,” the previous voice said next to his ear as his struggles increased.
Verso did exactly that. Fog filled his thoughts as his breathing turned rough and he fought against his curled spine to regain his balance and stand up. His legs ached from the twisted position he was pushing them into, but he persevered. Then, he found something. A little nudging of sort, whispering be should bend his muscle this way, make the limb spread that way. As soon as he tapped into it, the knowledge on how to reach the standing posture he called for flooded freely into his mind.
Cracks rang as his bones shifted, flesh growing alive and articulation bending unnaturally. Verso pushed forward, continuing to try to straighten up as he chased after the little tingle telling him he was doing the right thing. Stinging pain bloomed along his skin and the taste of blood mixed with ashes filled his mouth. His spine straightened some more. Verso blinked, suddenly as blind as he had been in the fire. Flames licked his skin, blistering and freezing at once.
A white fury charged at him and tackled him back into the fresh mellow forest ground just as Verso finally found some purchase on his burning feet. “No! You’re not ready yet.”
“What?” Verso coughed, respiration cut by the fall. His bones twisted back to their unnatural shape, the burning sensation fading as fast as it had appeared, and he found himself utterly unable to push off the heavy weight pinning him down. More whines curled in his throat, and it was a conscious effort to restrain the embarrassing noises.
As nothing moved, Verso’s panic receded enough to let him gather some wits. He focused on the bared fangs a few centimeters from his face. They belonged to a dog large enough to be mistaken for a wolf.
Monoco.
Monoco, who had appeared through the fire in the midst of Verso’s hallucination. Monoco, who was the only living being around and had spoken.
Memories of the previous hours flooded back into his mind. “I— the fire—” Verso barely noticed the gibberish mix of growls and yelps that escaped him in the midst of the reeling confusion shaking his mind. “What happened?”
Monoco lowered his head until their noses touched, an apologetic whine rumbling in his throat. “I made you a Wolf.”
“A wolf?” Verso repeated, unable to understand what Monoco meant. He was just beginning to feel the fur tickling his skin and the lengthened shape of his jaw.
“A Wolf,” the dog corrected, emphasizing the sound in a strange way. He mournfully licked Verso’s face. “I’m sorry. You were dying, and—” The licking stopped in favor of Monoco nuzzling his head into Verso’s with another whine. “There was no other way.”
Verso nipped back in forgiveness, foreign instincts whispering to him the keys to a language beyond human knowledge. The sharp tip of his fangs felt right against his tongue, and the wrong bend of his spine felt more and more natural the longer he stayed sprawled on his back on the bare forest ground. There was a quiet seed of acceptance blooming in his heart. He wasn’t human anymore.
It probably beat burning to death.
“How?” Verso asked, in the strange language he was realising he’d spoken in all along.
“An ability held by my kind,” Monoco answered, hopping off his torso. “Our natural offspring are rare, but we can turn another being into one of Us, if we wish.”
Verso nodded, understanding the words but struggling to wrap his head around the concept. Monoco had looked all the parts of an ordinary injured stray when he’d brought him home. A bit rough around the edge maybe, but tame enough to pass as a dog rather than a wolf, much less whatever a Wolf was.
He couldn’t deny the grey fur covering his body that Verso could spot from the corner of his eyes however. He flipped back on his belly, finding his balance more easily now that he stopped trying to force his limbs to move like a human’s. “How do I turn back?”
“You can’t,” Monoco growled. “Not yet. Your body still remembers too much.”
Verso scowled. “I feel fine.” He turned his head and confirmed the strange fur growning on his ribs looked on the healthy side, apart from a few odd patches here and there. There was a dull ache pulsing in rhythm with his lungs, but it was weak and easy to ignore. Compared to the pain that had assaulted him during his panic-fueled struggles earlier, it was nothing. “Did you heal me?”
“Becoming a Wolf is like being reborn with a blank slate,” Monoco explained. “This shape doesn't remember most of the pain, so it’s uninjured. But your old shape still remembers, and returning to it so soon will bring back the wounds.”
Verso shuddered as echoes of the agony that had tortured him during the fire burned through him. He didn’t even realise he was reaching out to what Monoco called ’his old shape’ before he felt his muzzle flatten and his bones twist again.
“Stop.” Fangs snapped in front of him, calling him back to reality. “Don’t transform yet. I mean what I said; you may die if you try,” Monoco stressed once Verso had gathered back his senses into four legs and a tail.
The sensation of the uneven ground under his hands— under his paws really— felt weird. He let his spine settle in the foreign horizontal way it called for and awkwardly pushed himself up. Verso looked at Monoco, still unused to being “standing” yet at eye level with him. “What am I supposed to do now?”
His tail wrapped under his belly, betraying the uncertainty tightening his chest in a way he didn’t quite know how to hide yet. He couldn’t return to Paris like that. He was… There was no way his parents would recognise him. And what would he do even if they did? He had no hands to play, much less paint. At best his family could give him the same treatment he had given Monoco: the life of a dog.
Monoco stepped forward. ”You can be a Wolf.” He nuzzled his neck in reassurance. “I’ll teach you.”
Verso let out a breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding and nuzzled back. “Thank you. I trust you.”
He jerked back as soon as the word escaped him, confused and embarrassed by the raw honesty that had escaped him. He’d only meant to thank Monoco, not to…
The wolf chuckled and nipped playfully at him. “Come on. I’m hungry. Your first lesson shall be to hunt.”
Monoco sprinted into the forest, and Verso followed. Once he stopped trying to focus so hard on the wrongness inhabiting his body, running actually turned out to be as natural as breathing. Verso barely needed to look to know where to go: Monoco’s smell tickled his noise, acting like a foolproof guide. His paws smoothly hit the icy soil covering the ground, knowing in advance which twig would crack and which pit would slow him down.
With each leap and bound, Verso could feel a wildness growing in him. A hungry instinct was blooming in his veins, pushing aside any human confusion and worry to focus entirely on the alluring promise of sharing a hunt with his packmate.
Verso shook his head against the foreign notion uncurling in his chest. The movement felt uncomfortable, ill-fitted for the shape of his neck. He let his whole spine shake instead, and it felt right.
His first meal as a Wolf was a raw rabbit. Monoco ended up catching it for him, his own balance still too awkward to successfully get the jump on the anxious prey. It was skinny, lacking most of the fat it would have needed to survive the next two months of the winter, but neither wolf cared. By then, they had both been so hungry Verso hadn’t even thought before baring his teeth and plunging them in the tender fur. A satisfied rumble had purred unwarrantedly in his chest. The meat was still warm from the fresh kill.
Verso only realised he’d been eating raw meat like an animal once his muzzle was deep in the rabbit's insides and his fur was red from blood. He froze. It should have been disgusting, yet he only felt the satisfaction of his stomach getting filled. The wild thought that his parents would have a stroke if they saw him now crossed his mind. Then he caught a whiff of fresh meat scent and stopped caring about people who weren’t here in the now, and messily devoured the fresh heart.
They washed up their muzzles at the river after the meal, greedily lapping large quantities of water after all the exercise. The fresh water tickled the short fur around his nose. It tasted like snow.
Once their thirst was quenched, Verso took a moment to look at his new appearance in the water’s reflection. A dark-grey wolf met his gaze. The white patches of fur along his head were the only traces left of the inferno that had almost killed him, back when he’d been more human than wolf. Even the tightness in his chest he’d felt earlier that day was gone, replaced by the deep expansion of healthy lungs.
His tongue passed over the dripping fur around his lips, and the movement felt natural. Verso looked at the mirroring picture in the water and saw himself. The ease with which he’d adapted to this new body was almost terrifying. He wondered how long it would take before he entirely forgot what he once looked like, how it once felt to be human? Would he even want to remember?
He felt fully wolf now, his previous life like a faraway blur in front of the much more present smell of a rival stepping on his and Monoco’s claimed territory. It had not even been 24 hours yet, but each moment had been more filled with joy and freedom than the past ten years of his life combined.
Verso was terrified that Monoco was wrong, that he would never be able to return to his burned-addled human form. He felt terrified that he wouldn’t want to.
𓇢𓆸*ੈ𑁍 ꕥ 𓃦 𓃥 ꕥ ༘⋆ꫂ ၴႅၴ 🐾
From then on, the days were a blur of naps, hunts, play-wrestling and moon-howling. The nights soon became the favorite part of Verso’s new life. His voice mixed with Monoco’s in a melodious symphony, the resulting melody grew from the tree roots to the stars. Verso had never fully appreciated how harmonious the song of a wolf could be before.
It wasn’t as if Verso cut all links with his former life. He’d tried, as much as he could, to keep the human pieces of him tightly close to his chest. Monoco had encouraged it as well, even as he showed him the way of life of wolves. His packmate seemed as worried as Verso about what would happen if he stayed a wolf for too long and definitely lost the burnt remnants of his humanity.
One of their morning rituals became speaking. The Wolves’ language came instinctually to Verso, but practice with Monoco allowed him to determine its nuances and tells so he could consciously tell the truth or mask it. In exchange, his packmate would turn into a humanoid shape and Verso would teach him French. He was getting good at it too, years of listening to it helping him find the right words. Once Verso could transform as well, they’d be able to hold entire conversations.
Sometimes they wandered into the city, false collars around their necks to masquerade as large dogs. The smell of carriages, piss and wastes from too many animals cramped into tight spaces was overwhelming for their sensitive noses. They wandered in anyway, trading off the city’s distasteful atmosphere for the treasures it could keep in its center. More than once, it proved to be a true cavern of Ali Baba, filled with treats and tools and trinkets they could never hope to find in the forest.
One of their pack’s favorite city-supply was candies. They’d steal them from stores when the waiter had their back turned, or gather them from the ground where a child had put up a tantrum and thrown the delicacy onto the paved road. The first time, they’d both thrown up soon after, their wolf stomach not made for the sugar-filled food. Verso faintly remembered shouting at the various Monocos trying to steal his desserts, repeating again and again that it was bad for dogs. He stole more candy anyway, chasing after the childhood memories of delicious forbidden treats and unwilling to discipline himself in a world where he was finally free.
They’d end up finding out that if Monoco turned human, or humanoid-ish enough to speak, thick fur keeping him warm against the winter cold, he wouldn’t get sick from the stolen desserts. Verso began to grow a pile in an abandoned burrow: for when he could turn human again, he repeated to himself even as ants and mice regularly attempted to steal his prize.
Another one of the city’s treasures was the news. With each trip, Verso dug the trashcans for the journals of the past few days. Reading as a wolf was hard, his focus disappearing with each turn of wind, but Verso persevered anyway. He tried to share with Monoco as well, trying to twist his canine mouth around the notions the Wolf tongue couldn’t translate, or compare them to concepts that already existed.
He kept the one showing a picture of his parents in front of the burned Dessendre Manor to himself. His eyes never managed to see more than a few letters before un-wolfish tears blurred his sight, but once he’d confirmed none of them formed the word Alicia, he didn’t need to read the text to know what it was about.
The famous Painters’ tragedy. Their only son lost in a housefire with most of their creations. An accident, or a crime? The investigation is still ongoing.
They did visit the manor as well, once the weather became warmer and rainier while the daylight time lengthened. The burnt wing had been mostly fixed by then, but some sooth stubbornly stuck to the walls, giving the looming building a haunted atmosphere despite its colorful garden. Verso had felt a pang in his chest upon gazing up at the closed windows and the skittish servants. This wasn’t what his family home was supposed to be like. Silent, yes, and a bit stifling sometimes, but not this dark depressing house standing in front of him. The Dessendre Manor had always been, most of all, a place made to promote creation.
His family’s smell wandered through the door, bitter with grief and sickness. Verso’s only comfort was that it was fresh, assuring him everyone was alive. Apart from the newspaper he’d hidden in the burrow alongside the candies, it was his first tangible confirmation Alicia had successfully escaped the fire.
It was tempting to slink inside and see her state for himself. To see what the newspapers had refused to say, when they’d entirely barred her name from the report of the fire. To force his tail to wag and make his eyes large so the Dessendre family would adopt him the way he had Monoco, unaware of the truth.
He yearned to return to his former pack even in this shape, to be close enough to protect and love them, even if it wasn’t as the human he’d once been.
Yet the wolf inside him was hesitant. A lump grew in his throat as he stared at the familiar door, trapped between two worlds. The memory of a fable from Jean de la Fontaine, the wolf and the dog, lurked in his mind. Verso loved them, but he remembered all too well the stifling feeling encompassing his human life. His father’s judgement, his mother’s expectations, the permanent gaze of high society turned towards him as everyone questioned the Dessendre’s middle child's attraction to music. A waste of skill, Clea had said with a frown, even as she’d presented him with a job offer to be the lead pianist of the Paris orchestra.
Staying would mean letting a leash wrap around his neck. It would mean being stuck inside, barking instead of howling, wearing a tamed mask while boiling from the inside, in a trapped lie far from the forest’s wilderness.
Verso’s thoughts halted as Clea’s silhouette appeared around the corner, her nose twisted into a frown. Verso’s paws made the choice for him. Her head turned in his direction and he scattered, melting back into the shadows, Monoco’s silent steps at his side.
After that visit, the days passed with a wolf’s sight, each excitedly new and different, feeling so much brighter than the haunting memories of a life between four walls. Verso didn’t have the time to care about the repercussions of the Dessendre’s middle son’s disappearance, or energy to lose over pointless wondering whether his family missed him or if they had already moved on. His thoughts were filled with the scent of the forest around him, with the anchoring presence of Monoco at his side, with the concern of ensuring their pack’s survival. Would today’s hunt be successful, or would their bellies growl tonight? Would they sleep in the abandoned grange near the spring, or run all the way to the cave near that hill? Tomorrow might be a city day, as the hunters would scourge through the forest with their loud noises and dogs, making all the prey hide deep in their burrows and threatening their pack with bullets.
The weather turned hotter and dryer, the sun shining too brightly on their coats. Even after shedding, their fur was too thick for the heat gathering between the city’s dark stones, so they stuck to the hills and the forest, napping most of the day and hunting during the fresher nights.
Sometimes Verso missed the life he’d lost with the fire, but the thought rarely stayed long. It wasn’t forever, after all. Just long enough for his body to heal, like Monoco had said.
Plus there was always this new smell to follow, this strange cave to explore. Verso had a pack and his belly was full. The wolf in him purred in contentment as they nuzzled closer to their packmate despite the overwhelming heat, earning a rumble of complaint and a light kick even as Monoco rearranged himself to accommodate him.
Life was good.