mostly for Naniko, but if anybody else wants to join, feel free.
set after the pack formation thread, i'm assuming Odebeh forced Nani to keep him company that night XD
She was having the dream again, the one that had been plaguing her for the last couple of weeks. It was almost like his hands were on her again, striking against her fur; sometimes when she woke up she could still feel a light ache in her ribs. Pilot had done a very good job of stitching up her sides, but they had only just healed to the point where they didn't hurt when she layed on them. And she had no other option but to lay on her side. It was too uncomfortable to lay on her back or on her stomach.
But this time she was sure she'd felt something. Her eyes snapped open, fur standing on end as she cast her gaze around the immediate area, searching for the red male. There was something unfamiliar about the room she was in, and it took a moment for everything to come back to her. She wasn't downstairs, where she usually slept, and Conri wasn't there. He wasn't coming back. As she realized this her fur flattened. What was Odebeh chattering about? Bouncing? She'd never heard of such a thing, jumping on beds. She'd jumped off a couch once in Citta Umana, back in the old lands, and had almost rebroken her leg...but that was the closest.
"I'm awake, I'm awake..." She mumbled, stretching her legs out both in front of and behind her. His movements didn't jar the bed too much, as Naniko outweighed him by more than a few pounds, but they'd certainly woken her up. Last night he'd been tired, she supposed, and now he was a little more rested. More energetic. "Don't go too high or you'll fly off" She stated, beginning to rise. It wasn't very far to the floor, and she stepped down off of the cushy bed with no difficulty. "You hungry?" She was even a little bit hungry...she'd be able to show him where the food cache was, in the basement.
It had been a while since she had taken care of a pup as little as him, but she'd have her own soon enough...this would be good practice. Technically she could have nursed him, but he was getting a little big for that...and she wasn't sure how long her body would produce the milk if she started nursing a pup early. Was there a certain amount that ran out gradually? Or did her body make it? She wasn't sure. Deuce had been able to handle taking Apollo and Sirius when she had been nursing Taliesin and Noah, and this was only one pup.
But would that be weird, getting milk from a stranger? She wasn't sure. Maybe she would suggest the idea later if he didn't like the meat that they had here. Naniko couldn't hunt in her condition, so she relied fully upon the cache of cold meat in the cellar. "It's down a bunch of stairs. You got up them all right...but are you okay with going back down?" She asked, stopping at the top of the first staircase. If he could get down these stairs then the basement steps would be no problem.
"Yes, I'm coming" It took her around the same amount of time to get down the stairs, her legs and back protesting with each step, but she managed to get all the way down to the bottom. She still wasn't used to this, things hurting like they did now. She had never gotten this far along in a pregnancy. It figured that the one time things actually had worked out for her, that she hadn't miscarried, that Conri was gone. But at the same time, she was completely sure that she didn't want him back. Their pack was centered around the idea of friendship and pack loyalty; she was sure that even if Conri did come back, he'd be chased out by one of the members.
She made it to the bottom of the stairs, her tail wagging at his enthusiasm. "Only one more set of stairs" She promised. The basement steps had an easier slope to them, and were wider...so it wouldn't be as hard. Her paws took her through several rooms and into the kitchen, where she prodded at the basement door until it opened. "Right this way" She started down these stairs, heading for the hole in the ground in the middle of the room. It was covered up by a sheet of plastic, and she pulled it aside. There was a lot in there today, rabbit, squirrel, and a few birds, and she looked down inside of it. "What do you usually have to eat?"
I'm baaaaack! But with extremely slow college internets ;_;
The hole was pretty deep, but she had rigged a way for the wolves to get food out of it anyway...as long as it wasn't too heavy. Usually it wasn't; they couldn't fit that much food into it. There was a piece of wood at the bottom of the hole with a few small pieces of rope coming up from it, out of the hole. The food sat on top of the piece of wood, inside the plastic-lined hole.
She gripped the rope in her teeth, pulling up and backwards, lifting the piece of wood like an elevator so that the meat was almost level with the top of the hole. "Grab whatever you like. There's at least a few squirrels in there" She said around the piece of rope in her mouth.
