The Wildness Within

I Don't Want This 2

In the end he packed everything up and took it back to the lake himself. The rug was water-wicking, and he propped it up outside his front door and let it shed all the water it had gathered. He took the hamper to the kitchen table and left it there, before walking through his blessedly empty house and shedding his boots, his pants, his shirt, leaving them all in the corner of his room. The shirts and pants draped neatly over a chair just for that purpose, and the boots leaning alongside them. Naked, he crawled onto his own bed and lay flat upon it, stomach and chest against the sheets and face down. He placed both his hands over the back of his head and tried not to think about anything at all.

It was an effort not to worry about Ash and Gwyn. Especially Gwyn. All this time he'd been trying to present himself as calm and knowledgeable and stable and a certainty in a chaotic world. What he did for his clients.

But those clients, he never saw them for more than two or three days. What he gave to them wasn't indefinite. It was finite. Given in the moment and then he could rest alone afterwards.

Every time Gwyn came back from the Raven Prince, it was a disaster each time. Even when it went well, Augus had to wait to find out what happened and always got the sense he was only hearing shreds of the story. Gwyn wasn't the best storyteller, and the Raven Prince didn't lower himself to send a better messenger.

There were nightmares to contend with every night, and they were often loud enough to wake both the brothers long before Gwyn himself would rouse. Perhaps Ash didn't need as much sleep as Augus did, but Augus found it trying. He wasn't made of endless patience. He'd neglected himself, the small routines of self-care that he focused on to find inner calm. From looking after his claws and keeping them safe and trim, to conditioning his mane or using masks on his face to keep his skin fresh.

He'd not been above ground properly to walk about on his own, since he'd discovered Gwyn. His whole life had become imbalanced, and he couldn't solve it just by telling himself he'd deal with it.

Not anymore.

It couldn't continue on the way that it was going. He wanted Gwyn in his life. He wanted Ash in his life. Those two things were certainties.

But the way it was happening? Augus made a low sound of frustration into the bed.

No. He needed to see clients. He needed space. He didn't feel an ounce of guilt for having kicked them out of his territory. He didn't feel remorse that he'd cut the picnic short. Ash – he knew – would deal with it. And Gwyn at the very least could learn that he wasn't the only one who had problems.

Augus laughed weakly into the mattress and then pushed himself up onto his elbows and cleared his mind.

He had the whole place to himself. The lake, the house, his territory.

He could do whatever he wanted.

Augus' lips pulled up at the corners and he slid off the bed and walked nude to the hamper, where he picked at the salads Ash had made for him and surveyed his house. Books and videogames and board games and rumpled bright blankets, the minutiae and detritus that Ash strewed everywhere he went.

The next two hours he devoted to cleaning every surface until his house looked like his house again. That alone gave him a sense of belonging in his own space, and he felt himself truly begin to settle, his spirit lighter than it had been for a while.

*

He spent the day in the watery safety of his lake. He swam naked in the depths and harvested varying species of waterweed and root plants, keeping it all in a loose hessian bag that he tied to a rock anchor, where it would float and stay mostly living until he needed to prepare it.