Letters to the Dead Part3-A
Alice’s death is the first of Owl Packs original members to go. Vieno feels in a way responsible for it, because he had asked her to come visit if just for a little while and she had said yes.
Vieno knows something is wrong when she doesn’t show up on the day she was supposed to get back. He shakes his head and paces around the cearn steady becoming more worried no matter what Wyvern pack or owl packs new members do to calm him. He can feel it in his bones, in the way the air is so still and he wants to howl and let it break forth from his human chest.
it’s two days after Alice is supposed to be there and Wyvern pack has finally gotten Vieno to go to his apartment and sleep instead of pacing the Cearn when they get two visitors with a bag. They come into the Cearn asking for the Owl Pack Alpha and Eithan takes off without a word to Vieno’s apartment complex, jemmies his way up to Vieno’s floor and bangs on his door until Faelan and Rhi poke their heads out frowns marring their faces. They usher him in and ask if Alice is back safe and Eithan can only reply that there are garou in the cearn asking for Vieno, for the Owl Pack Alpha and all three know that the news can’t be good. They shake Vieno awake and make sure he’s eaten before telling him the news that there are people in the Cearn looking for him, and that they might have news about a pack mate and he rips out of the kitchen and into his car barely waiting for them before he heads towards the cearn.
When they get to the Cearn Vieno is introduced to them and he politely leads them to the area that’s Owl Packs. They show him a picture of Alice, she’s laid out on a cold metal table and he says that yes, that’s one of his pack members and he wants to cry and howl and call his brother and have his packmates, his first packmates of Owl Pack, surrounding him and circling close and weep together. He doesn’t want Alice to be gone, he wants her awkward words, and strong small smiles.
But she’s gone.
The garou say they’ll bring the body down to the cearn for her burial if he wants to claim it, and Vieno wants to yell and scream at them because how could he not want to have his packmate’s body buried close? and then it hits him, he’ll have to tell Isabel, and oh Gaia how can he explain this, because it’s his fault, and from the way that the Garou explained it her death was painful, probably just as much as Iflar’s death except she probably didn’t even realize that it was coming. She wasn’t even that far from her car, just barely out in the woods at a rest stop. Vieno thinks that he should have been there, that he should have picked her up or told her to take the train or hell a plane and that he’d pick her up at the airport, but instead they agreed that it would be easier for her to drive down and then stay at his apartment. She had been so excited, had said that she wanted to tell them something when she got back, but now, well they’ll never know what it was. As soon as the two garou leave his area of the cearn he pulls out paper to write to Isabel, its a short letter but he supposes that it’ll have to do.
The two visiting garou stay for a few days waiting for their packmates to bring her body down. Owl pack attends her funeral in the cearn, they say nothing as Vieno preform the rites of the dead for her send her soul home to the Black Furries ancestral homeland. They don’t mention the tears falling from his eyes or the way that his hands shake all day afterwards, or the fact that he had shifted to Galbro and barred fangs at the Black Furry elder over the right to bury her and preform the rights or the way the elder had backed down when wyvern pack had stepped behind him ready to fight for his right to bury a packmate.
No one talks about how Vieno throws himself into his work in the cearn and scribbling away in owl pack’s section of the cearn in little notebooks, or how were at one time he made sure others were eating and now how others are making sure he eats. The Child of Gaia elder says nothing and only will shake her head when ever she sees him, fingers occasionally brushing across his shoulders when they pass in the hall just the briefest of mothers touch flowing through her fingers, trying to heal a pain that it can’t.