Into The Mountains(COMPLETED)

Chapter Five

Jennie POV

So little was familiar that I actually liked making the crests. Needlework, embroidery, it was a skill I'd been taught and learned well, but one I despised. Here in the pack, I was grateful to have it. I could devote myself to it for hours, and even concentrate enough that I soon wasn't making the careless mistakes I would have made at home. It was the only thing I had though. I didn't have the array of instruments I knew how to play, most particularly the harp. I doubted, even if I'd been able to talk to a lot of people those first couple of weeks, that any of them knew the two other languages I could speak well. I was lucky enough they knew my own tongue. All the poetry, lyrics, and passages I'd been made to memorize didn't help me start the cooking fire. Cooking was the worst. I was good at learning, had always been told I picked up things quickly, but cooking was by far the most frustrating thing I'd ever tried to figure out. I was a stubborn person, and I insisted to myself that I would learn this cooking thing.

To some extent, I think my battles with the cookware became what I lived for, which only made each failure more demoralizing. I didn't know how to take pleasure in things here, or relax. I felt almost constantly tense. The only time I felt at ease was when I was working on the crests, and even then it was only a partial relaxation and with only a little enjoyment to it. I let Lalisa have me as often as she seemed to show interest. I was so useless at everything else, but even an omega was good for sex, I figured. I enjoyed it too, experienced some relaxation afterward. I just also hated myself a little more each time. I would have to let go of the ideas that had been worked into me that enjoying sex at all was wrong, and then that enjoying sex with Lalisa strange body was wrong. I was working hard at thinking of her as a woman/man too, and not a Hell-beast.

That, at least, was coming along well. She was normal and nice enough in her personality that she was definitely more human than beast in my mind, becoming more so all the time. I only had to wait a week to know I was missing my courses. Not that I'd doubted Lalisa and Solar, who both treated my pregnancy as a matter of course, but I had held onto some hope anyway that Lalisa and I wouldn't be compatible. I knew that wasn't something I should have hoped for, but I hadn't wanted our first encounter. I hadn't wanted her children. In fact, I wasn't sure I'd really wanted anyone's children, though it had always been part of my fate to give birth I supposed. Children had just seemed so far off for me still.

She was keeping me to give birth to her children, so it would follow if I weren't pregnant she'd abandon me to my own sooner. When things were quite bad, I wondered why she didn't kill me and start over. I had often come close to asking her this, but always some small instinct of self-preservation kept me from doing so. Still I was depressed. I didn't tell anyone how unhappy I was, it didn't matter, I still had to do all these things that were expected of me. If I wanted to live, I still had to perform the duties of a wife. Twice before I'd finished the alpha's crest I almost walked out of the house, hoping some young male would kill me. The raping I could do without, but if it had to come with the death than I was almost willing to go ahead with it anyway.

Both times were just after destroying something over the cooking fire. It was just one disappointment after the other, only now I got to be disappointed with myself and there was no one to complain to. Finally, two weeks after I'd arrived, the crest for the alpha was done. I shouldn't say finally, I had worked long and hard on it, but quickly too. Since it was the one familiar thing I could latch onto. I folded it, wondering when Lalisa would be home. I put it over the back of a chair and wondered what his own crest looked like. I had a guess the alpha wouldn't like me making that crest, but I wanted to in that dull sort of way I wanted to have something to do with my hands whenever they were empty. Lalisa would like it anyway, I thought. Maybe I'd ask Solar what it was. Lalisa walked through the door looking particularly tattered. She was in in werewolf form again, the one she wore most of the time when leaving the house.