Chapter Text
Neither Seff nor Rohan strayed from their spot in front of the fire for some time. It was hours until Seff stood and decided to tuck into bed, and Rohan took her spot again curled up on the chair, and in the interim mostly the two spoke about what things had been like before.
“Did you like to read?” Seff would say, or ask, “Did you like video games?” or something of that nature, and Rohan would reply, “No. Not really,” or, “Maybe when I was little,” as if she wasn’t still little. "Did you have friends?" she asked once, and Rohan nodded, and replied disingenuously, and refused to respond to any further pressure. Seff wondered if there was anyone she missed.
The conversation would always peter out from there, and the two would return to watching the fire intently, and Seff’s eyes would once in a while wander back to the clock, but never catch the life in its carvings.
Once, there had nearly been a fruitful moment; Seff asked if Rohan played any instruments, and Rohan nodded, and said she played the violin; Seff's eyes lit up all of a sudden, and she dug out her viola and showed it to Rohan, but it was far too large for Rohan to try and Seff was feeling suddenly insecure about her own skill, so after a few notes to demonstrate nothing came of it in the end.
Eventually, Seff returned to her bed, and Rohan to the chair. When Rohan was asleep, she changed, piece-by-piece and under the covers, into new clothes, cold and stiff where they had been folded in her wardrobe, nearly identical to the old ones to not tire herself with too much choice. She closed her eyes and let the length of the day make itself apparent, with nothing else to show for it but all she had scavenged and her own exhaustion.
She slept a long ten hours or so, and though she had worked all through the past few months mostly to keep the fire burning, she had not once felt as tired as she did now. It was as if she was completely relearning her ability to communicate, and, without noticing, doing so had drained her to the dregs.
She wondered when she woke up, finding Rohan still asleep, and stood to check on her, how long she had been alone.
It was tempting to begin counting from when the sun had vanished, of course, and certainly that was when the isolation had become apparent. She could no longer text her friends, however rarely she did; no longer would she receive calls from clients. She couldn’t even read the responses of others, anonymously lurking on some old forum for a technical question when one of her power saws broke down.
She asked herself how much of a difference it truly made.
She confronted, briefly, as she checked the blanket for the faint rise and fall of Rohan’s chest, the stretch of time before. She was unsure how many days it had been before she stopped taking guests in, or maybe before the guests stopped making the drive to her doorstep; she was not certain how much time it had been before it was no longer normal for her to ignore every call, and how long it had taken for the calls to stop coming at all.
She turned away from Rohan, satisfied that she was still alive, and looked at the fire. It was running low, and its light was growing hazardously dim. She stoked it and fed it another piece of wood, then left for her stores outside to find even more, which she warmed, one-by-one, in front of it, then added to the blaze until it once again roared.
She then turned to the food she had rationed together. The stores of hay were still mostly intact, for when Rohan awoke, and there were a good few cans of meat remaining. She remembered the few remnants of her older hunts, too, and returned out back to retrieve them from the chest freezer. No longer too hungry to cook, Seff took a large cast-iron pan and set it on the fire, and got to frying the very last of the frozen venison she had into something close to a meal. The smell spread throughout the cabin; a reprieve from everything else, Seff thought, and pleasantly warm against the snap of cold air that needled at her nose.
She placed a pot over the fire, as well, and stepped outside to gather armfuls of snow. She filled it as much as she could with snow and ice, then added a purifying tablet, separating the tiniest bits of sediment from the water and disinfecting it. She carefully poured the separated water out into another pot, then left the pot with the sediment beside the fire to clean later; she boiled the water, just to make sure it was clean, then poured in her rice and placed the lid over the pot.
She would have washed it, before, at the urging of her wife, but now she was hungry, without either patience or running water, and so instead she hoped the texture would be fine and it was not contaminated with arsenic or some other poison, as she thought she might have read about years prior, in a magazine left out on the counter. The instructions on the bag told her to, if cooking it on the stovetop, boil it for twenty minutes, so she continued cooking the meat and silently wished she had done so later. She supposed, now, it was a bit of a pipedream to want hot food.
She had no thermometer, but, intent on cooking her food fully well-done, was willing to settle for "slightly burnt". She turned it regularly, and, eventually, took the pan off the heat once it was firm enough for her to trust it. By that time, the rice was about halfway done, and so she wiped her paws clean, sliced the venison on a thin plank of wood atop her bedside table, let it rest in its own juices, and sat back. The clock crept closer to twenty minutes. She glanced back at Rohan every now and then, making sure she was alive, asleep, and comfortable.
After an eternity, when the rice finished cooking, she took a plate and fork (both were freezing cold) and, without a table or chair to sit at, returned to her spot on the floor. She considered how she would do the dishes: she would boil more water and wash the pots and pans with it, and her plates. Over time, prior to finding Rohan, she had become lazy and started eating straight from her hands. This, she felt, made her significantly more civilized. The plank she would throw in the fire; she had plenty of wood and did not need to bother washing and drying it, particularly because she had no idea how to even go about doing such a thing.
Seff attempted to eat slowly, savoring each bite. Rohan was asleep, and not there to judge her, but nevertheless she felt some shame at how she had lunged at the can of meat earlier and devoured it so hastily. She thought she had seen fear pass over her expression before, and considered she may have been imagining things, but also wondered how she could possibly be sure.
One evening, a few months after they'd married and a year after Seff had moved into her house, Wynn pulled her aside at dinner. They had both finished eating, their dirty dishes piled in front of them on the kitchen table, salad bowls and spoons and serving forks and still-clean steak knives. Seff had been staring out the window; the pane was collecting raindrops. Wynn stood and tapped her once, then twice on her broad shoulder.
"My parents called. They're worried about you," she declared.
"Why?" Seff replied, and turned her head. "What are they worried about?"
"They're worried you'll hurt me," Wynn said, tearing a napkin up into little shreds.
Wynn looked at her with her liquid brown eyes, set on the sides of her head and wide and vulnerable, a slightly concerned expression set across her face.
"What, do they think I'll eat you?" Seff asked. She barked a sharp laugh.
"Yes," Wynn replied. "Essentially."
"God forbid a girl be butch," Seff said.
"I'm not joking. That's what they think, even if they'd never put it in those words."
"They were fine with it when we started dating," Seff said. "Mostly."
"I know. I don't know what changed. Maybe they thought about it too hard. Worked themselves up into a frenzy. Watched too much cable news or something."
The air grew heavy and humid, even indoors. The August sunlight turned narrow and aurum in the shroud of clouds that swallowed it. The deciduous trees Wynn enjoyed keeping around and Seff trimmed each morning had cast their leaves onto the ground. They hadn't yet begun to rot together or freeze.
"Do you believe them?" Seff tapped on the window a few times. One of the fatter raindrops merged with the small ones beside it and trailed down the glass. "I mean, you know there's a difference between what you are and the animals we have to eat, right? You're not the same. Not even remotely the same. They know that too, right?"
"What kind of a question is that?" Wynn asked. She sat down at the seat across the table from Seff. "I don't know exactly what they think, but I love you. Of course I don't believe them."
"I'd never eat anything sapient. There's a line between them and you, same as how there's a line between me and any wild dog."
"I know. You think I'd be married to you if I didn't?"
"Is it really about species, or are they just mad you're marrying a woman?"
"It might be both. I'm sure they'd find some other reason to fret if it wasn't you." Wynn shrugged. "They think you're a predator, you know. They don't care what variety. It's all just a convenient metaphor for them."
Seff sighed and drummed on the countertop with the tips of her claws. "I don't know how to convince them. I mean, God, you're older than me. Richer. Taller, if I slouch. If anyone's taking advantage of anyone here…"
"I don't know either." Wynn tossed the napkin shreds over her shoulder and into the bin behind her. "I bet they think you made me this way. They had a vision for who I'd end up with. Some genteel ram from the city with a nice, well-paying job."
"That didn't work out too well."
"Obviously not."
Seff sighed. "If it's any consolation, my parents aren't…" She trailed off and dug her teeth into her lower lip. "Well, you know, the only reason they haven't been on my ass about all this is because they're not really in the picture. So count your blessings, I guess."
"Great." Wynn exhaled sharply. "So there's no one on our side, right?"
"I've got friends. You've got friends," Seff said. "Isn't that enough?"
"I wish."
Seff ran her paw across Wynn's head, over the thickly curled, eggshell-tinted wool that covered her scalp. "What did you say to them about it?"
"What can I say? I'm renting this place from them. I can't exactly beat the price."
"Are they going to kick us out?"
Wynn shook her head. "They love me too much. Love in quotes, maybe, but it's good enough." She took Seff's paw from her head and looked her in the eyes. "If they kick anyone out, it'll be you, and I won't let them do that."
"Worst comes to worst, I can find a place to stay. Don't worry about me."
"I won't have to. I'll talk to them, and they'll come around." Wynn shrugged. "I'm trying not to catastrophize, you know? They're not terrible people. They just don't like change, and I think the wedding was too real for them."
"You came out to them five years ago. We started dating four years ago." Seff licked the blood from her lower lip. "How much time do they need?"
"I think they were kind of hoping it was a phase and we wouldn't stick together. They want grandchildren."
"Well, we could adopt, right? There are a lot of interspecies support groups. Queer support groups. Probably queer interspecies support groups, too. Lots of kinds of families out there. Two mommies. No mommies. Probably other atypical quantities of mom, too." Seff cocked her head to the side. "Lots of kids who need parents. Doesn't matter what they look like. It wouldn't be impossible."
"Yeah, I guess."
"Or, you know. Donors. There are lots of options."
"Well, anyways, don't tell them that. It'll confuse and frighten them." Wynn added, in a lower voice, "I'll just wait until they kick the bucket."
After a moment, she chuckled, and Seff stood and kissed the top of her wife's head. Wynn kissed her back, and then lifted her arms and wrapped them firmly around Seff and drew her into a tight embrace—deceptively strong, Seff had called it once—and buried her nose in the thick fur of her neck and breathed out.
"I don't think I'm ready for kids, anyways. Let's try to be newlyweds a little longer," Wynn whispered. She shook her head and leaned back. "Hell, let's stay this way as long as we can."
"I mean, they call it the honeymoon phase for a reason, don't they?"
"I choose to remain slightly delusional. There's no reason anything should have to change. Not until we're ready, at least."
"I can get behind that," Seff said, and held her back, careful not to grip too tightly.