For Midge but AW!

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Kestrel wandered and didn’t talk much. It was dreadfully lonely, but he supposed a part of him was hoping to get used to it, eventually. No warm body to curl up next to at night, no familiar golden face to chew on, no silver bullet racing alongside him. He knew, kind of, what he was getting into when he… It was never going to be easy, thinking about what he wanted. Every thought still went back to her.

It wasn’t all bad, at least. Every so often he got a visitor; a kestrel, like him. Presumably the same one that had tried to eat his eyeballs, presumably here to try again. He’d catch the occasional glimpse of red and blue feathers flitting through the trees, watching him. He liked to rip off chunks from his hunt and toss them some distance away, trying to coax the little falcon down. It worked, once, but she’d taken to the wing in a flurry of angry screeches when he’d gotten too excited and lunged to say hi.

He called her Dandelion.

She watched over him, even now, her feathers ruffled disapprovingly as he squelched through the cold, cold mud he’d churned up from the bottom of the swamp. A shame she couldn’t indulge with him. He wagged his tail, flinging loose debris into the ether, and she pointedly turned her head. Kestrel just grinned. He’d catch a frog for her later. That should make her happy.

---

What a wretched season winter was, but at least in this world, it was beautiful to look at. In her old life, the winter simply heralded an inability to get truly warm, even with how warm werewolves ran; a humid kind of cold that clung to the bones. Choumi spent as much time as she could in the kitchen, rising early just to fire up ovens and stoves to fill the frigid, musty air of the underground labyrinth with the smell of her latest baked goods or hearty soups.

Things were a little different during this winter. She had no stoves, no ovens to warm her by. No fresh-baked breads or steamed vegetables.

Only pristine snow, frosting the trees as Choumi walked through them. The skies were clear, and the sun beamed down to warm her dark back as the Ite walked. There was an unpleasant amount of mud in this area, thanks to the streams cutting through the landscape, but Choumi kept her chin up and tail swishing pleasantly. Any cold in her toes was mostly tolerable, thanks to her new pelt soaking up the sunlight and her perpetual movement keeping her muscles generating more warmth. The tiny hunter was plenty warm, no matter the temperature surrounding her, and she bounced from stone to stone through the quiet, still marshy forest. Ice shielded the still-running rivers, but Choumi pounced on one just to hear the satisfying snap under her paws before leaping free of the ice-water splashing her dark paws. She landed with a whuff, before movement and the sound of footfalls caught her attention. The scent on the wind was another wolf, not tinged with pack-smell, so Choumi trotted closer and wormed her way between a bush and a tree to step into view of the stranger so she could say hello.