[fic] copper and axinite (1/4)
fic: copper and axinite: summer (1/4)
fandom: btvs/teenwolf/tmi
characters: allison/lydia; dawn summers, clary fray
word count: 3,600
setting: set a few years before the events of destiny came a calling; witches-au allison thinks she'll never find her familiar...
a/n: written for the femslashbb's March challenge: Elements (there will be a chapter for every season)
[summer]She found her familiar when she was seventeen - two summers after her grandmother finally succumbed to illness and left them on their own. Five years after giving up hope that she would ever be granted a familiar.
Even without her predisposition to the more physical arts of her birthright, Allison would still have leaned towards that side of her nature. Losing a mother at too young an age and an aunt too soon after that instilled in her older sister an unquenchable thirst for knowledge contained in musty old books and in their youngest sister a frightened aversion to her own power, which she unknowingly poured into her art. In Allison, loss created a lust for vengeance that threatened to crack her skin and peel her to the bone.
Dawn’s familiar was a small, dark raven that checked in on the full moon and otherwise lived her own life. She appeared one night in the dead of winter. Dawn held her dark feathers to her chest and cried and cried and wouldn’t speak of why. Months later they learned of their mother’s death, but by that time Dawn had already mourned in her own way, had turned her spine to steel. She didn’t shed a tear at the funeral, just held Allison with one hand and Clary with the other; too young to be a rock for such small children and yet no one dared come to take her burden from her.
Clary’s familiar was a small grey mouse that the cats never chased and her sister never acknowledged willingly. Allison can’t remember a time when the little guy hadn’t been underfoot, stealing Clary’s art pencils and sneaking into her room, trying to get her attention. On Clary’s fourteenth birthday, Dawn bought her a cage and put him inside. A lecture posing as a birthday present, Clary called it.
Allison was sure her familiar wasn’t coming. It wasn’t rare for a witch who favored offensive spellwork to have a familiar too wild to be found. Something that hid itself away far from where it could do accidental harm.
Some witches just didn’t have familiars. Dawn pointed this out time and again, just when Allison didn’t really want her to - her eyes full of concern and her fingers marking her place in a book or tying her hair back on her way out the door. To have three familiars in one family was strange. Their mother’s family had always been strong in this regard, but with no way to know anything about their father…
Allison convinced herself she was better this way.
A lone wolf, she laughed, her fingers sliding through Dawn’s long hair as she braided it in front of the fire.
I don’t think you’re a wolf, Clary would muse from her perch at the window, a sketchpad on her lap and her hands in constant motion. Not a lone one anyway.
Allison sometimes felt as though she was the one out of three of them that needed their little pack the most. That her two sisters would flourish on their own and it was really her clinging to them, holding them close in fear of being alone.
Each thought that of the others.
That’s what sisters are; pack animals with a strong sense of loyalty that don’t know how to let the others fly free without losing a piece of themselves in the bargain.
The forest around their grandmother’s home on the outskirts of the tiny town they had always called home with a deep sense of frustration was untouched by anyone but Allison’s soft footfall - even in summer.
There were legends about the forest - strange creatures and ghosts and wild animals that could rip out your throat before you thought to scream.
Grams laughed at them all and gathered up her baskets and her granddaughters and tripped out into the shadows to gather her herbs and bury her secrets. Allison running from tree to tree, climbing so high she felt like she was flying.
After grams died, the others didn’t like going into the forest anymore. It was too painful them. So now Allison went alone, armed with Dawn’s baskets and her bow and quiver. She could spend hours alone under the trees, regardless of the weather, without feeling restless or suffocated by the silence. When she was home alone she fidgeted and worried and chewed holes in her bottom lip, wore out the carpets in the hall. On those rare occasions that Dawn and Clary were both gone, Allison generally escaped into the cool woods that creeped further into their backyard every year. She knew to leave a note on the counter so the others wouldn’t worry over her absence, but she also never felt the need to rush back.
As if, when she was safe beneath the trees with her weapons on her back and the soft scent of Dawn’s herbs floating up to her, there was nothing to fear anywhere in the world.
The week after grams died, she had practically lived in the forest. She and Dawn had built a treehouse several years before just a few yards in and she slept there for three nights, until Clary came out crying, curling up into her sleeping bag with her. It was less a house than it was a few rickety beams of wood perched precariously under a tarp. But it kept her dry while she needed it. She dragged Clary back to the house and the next day took the house down.
Dawn helped her fold up the tarp that had seen so many of their childhood games and didn’t say a word.
I won’t come back next time, Allison had finally said, her throat raw from crying, her face dry for the first time in days.
Dawn blinked slowly, No. You’ll always come back. They walked a while in silence. On the edge of the forest, just in sight of the house, Dawn grabbed her elbow, I’m more worried about you never leaving.
I’m never leaving!
No… I mean… Dawn bit her lip and shifted her weight. Clary has her art and I have my books… you had the tree house. If you stay cooped up with us forever, I’m worried we’ll lose you and… I don’t know… She shook her head and then walked to the house, leaving Allison behind.
It wasn’t the first time that Allison felt like Dawn was twenty paces ahead of her.
It was the first time she didn’t feel a pull to run after her, to try to catch up, to grab her sister’s hand and laugh in her face and try to shoulder a bit of the burden, to twirl them around and pretend that they didn’t have the weight of a broken heart to carry around.
Dawn had her books and her herbs and her languages and her raven and her burdens.
Clary had her paper and her paint and her magic and her mouse and her fear.
Allison had her bow and her arrows and her trees and her silent strength.
Which she didn’t think was all that much to offer, but it was what she had.
The summer the year she turned seventeen was an ordinary summer, all things considered. She graduated and was set-up to take a job with the local doctor’s office as a front office secretary. It didn’t pay well, but it looked damn good on a resume and she could keep her weekend and evening hours at the coffee shop. She was aware that Dr. Hart had offered her the job out of respect for grams, but they all decided a long time ago to accept the pity and charity of their neighbors while they had it.
They were leaving soon, anyway.
Dawn insisted that she enroll in online classes that fall - easy stuff she could do at work without anyone batting an eye. GE stuff that would transfer anywhere. Which only gave Allison a couple of months of relative freedom.
She spent more and more time in the forest.
It wasn’t that she hadn’t had friends in high school - there were a few girls that she could count on for a sleepover or movie night if she needed it, but Dawn had always been her best friend and when she left high school two years before to work full-time, Allison had retreated more than maybe she should have. And now, graduating a year early only pushed that wedge more firmly between her and the friends she still had left.
Out in the forest, she wasn’t avoiding her friends or her high school or the empty room at the end of the hall with all of grams’ stuff still inside and untouched. Out here, she was just a seventeen year old girl who really loved archery and maybe other than that was normal.
Even if there was nothing whatsoever normal about her life.
The summer was hot.
It should have been mild, maybe. Or sticky. Something with humidity and sweat dripping down her spine reminding her that she was there, that she was real. Allison never needed to be reminded how real her skin was beneath her clothes, but the imagery would have been nice. A sticky summer would have appealed to Dawn, the words full of alliteration and curling thirst beneath repeated, mournful tones. A mild summer would have appealed to Clary, the temperature a bit too cool allowing her to wrangle the stillness of sunbeams onto her sketchpad.
But this is Allison’s story. And so it was none of these things. It was hot. Not too mild and not too humid. A burning sort of heat that seemed to come only from the sun, easily escapable in the shade of her trees.
She was standing with her legs wide and bare and tan and a sweater tied around her waist and thick-soled boots on her feet and her bow cocked in her hands, ready to fire, when her familiar curled onto the ground at her side. She was more startled that a cat that size had managed to sneak up on her when she was usually so hyper-aware of her surroundings, than that a tawny cougar was lying patiently only three feet from her.
For a moment or two, she didn’t move, only aware of the animal through her peripheral vision. For a minute she calculated the risk of turning and embedding her arrow into its hide. And then she thought of the horrified expressions on her sisters’ faces the first time she bagged a wild hare, like she had personally slaughtered their hearts and brought them back as a present. Coming home with a cougar - as bizarrely placed as it was - slung across her back would probably result in her being forced to eat all her meals at the coffee shop for the next month, and there was really a limit to her intake of Danishes.
And then she considered what would happen if she moved at all. There was clearly a very calm cougar within arm’s reach and she didn’t really want to be lunch. Was she going to be stuck like that forever?
Exhaling slowly, she released the arrow and it struck her target. Okay, it was an inch off and on any other day she’d be pretty pissed off at herself about that, but any other day wouldn’t have a mountain lion in attendance.
With very careful movements, she lowered her bow and turned her head to look at the cougar beside her. It was lying a bit like her sister’s cat Rain sometimes did when she was working on her art instead of paying him attention, head resting on its paws and eyes looking up solemnly and a bit sadly.
Are you a sad scary lion? she asked. Because well - why not?
The cougar rolled its eyes at her. She would swear on her bow that the damn thing ROLLED ITS EYES like a human.
Did you… I’m insane. I’m crazy, aren’t I?
The cougar tilted its head to one side and then let out a deep breath before standing up, looking at her one last minute, and then walking very sedately off into the forest.
Well… fuck.
Three days later Dawn threw her out of the house for pacing from room to room while she was trying to study with a basket and a list of herbs to gather that she didn’t really need (Clary had already locked her door three hours previously because she was tired of Allison coming in only to wander around for a minute and then leave again); in general they were used to her restlessness, but three solid days of it had them all on edge. So, armed with a trusty basket and her favorite bow, she made her way into her sanctuary.
The cougar was sunbathing on a rock near a stream - asleep in that way that house cats often are, as if they are sleeping from sheer boredom with their eyes half-open as if daring you to interrupt them. Allison sat down nearby and watched for a minute.
You know you’re in the wrong county, right? Hell I think you may be on the wrong side of the continent.
The lion shook its head as if dislodging something from its ear and rolled on its back playfully, as if laughing at her.
Allison laughed with it and set her equipment aside so she could lie down.
She was safe enough on the other side of the stream. Anyway, this was her favorite spot, wasn’t it? The stream flowed wider in the spring and froze over in the winter, but this was always its widest spot - it split around a large cropping of boulders that caught more sunlight than most areas of the dark forest. The lion had claimed that spot today, but either bank was nearly as warm. Especially in the heat of summer.
Allison propped her head up on her forearm and looked up into the branches of the trees.
It was amazing how still she could be here. How that yearning in her skin could suddenly - without warning - feel slightly at peace. Like a cork on a bottle.
Birds chattered and bugs hummed and the spring trickled by and it could have been any other summer day.
When she woke, the cougar was gone and the sky was starting to dim. She gathered up Dawn’s requests and made her way back home.
Calm and at ease for the first time in days.
They continued on like that for a few weeks, Allison and her wildcat. Sunbathing and hunting, edging close to each other only for Allison to shrink back. Witch or not - the cougar was still a wild animal and she didn’t feel entirely safe with it, even after weeks of nothing but good humor.
One day she sat in the living room and watched Clary doing laundry. As she walked back and forth from the laundry nook behind the kitchen and back to the couch to fold clothes or upstairs to fetch or deliver items, her cat - a mangy old thing called Rain - stalked her playfully, popping out from behind furniture or batting things out of her hand. Sometimes even darting away from her as if to say, “haha you can’t catch me!”
Rain is playing with you, you know? Allison mused from the overstuffed chair in the corner.
Clary tossed her ponytail, Yeah well, he can’t very well help me iron, can he? Unlike a certain lazy sister of mine.
Allison threw a pillow at her and smiled when Rain leaped out to pounce on it the minute it landed on the floor.
It gave her an idea.
How did her cat always knew where she was? Sneaking up on her from the side or somehow lying in wait just a few paces ahead?
Allison figured it was probably the same way Rain always knew where Clary was, watching from the wings, actually underfoot while Clary was distracted.
Playing.
So she decided to play back.
Usually when she left the house she went directly into the treeline behind the house, heading South, but one day she walked out the front door and turned East, towards town. She tried not to look behind her, tried to pretend that she wasn’t waiting for her cat to find her. But she was.
Once under the cover of the trees she broke into a run, following an old path down to the South, a few hundred feet from where she usually entered the forest. She got to the stream in only a few minutes, weaving her way haphazardly through the trees. Her usual spot was back upstream to the West of the house, today she turned to go further East, jumping from side to side of the stream.
There was a small pond down to the East. She didn’t usually go there - especially in the summer - because sometimes kids and teenagers from town would come down to play there. But earlier that month a community pool was finally opened - after years of town meetings and bake sales - so she knew the pond would be empty.
When she got to the pond she was out of breath and a little sweaty.
And her lion was waiting for her on a rock near the pond’s edge, standing on wide legs and purring deeply.
Allison had only heard it purr a couple of times.
When she came into the clearing she groaned, How did you know?
The cat jumped on and off the rock, a bit like Rain would do when he was excited, and then rolled on its back, feet high up in the air.
Allison laughed, Show off.
The lion angled its head back towards her - still on its back, its long tail tapping slowly.
Allison winked and ran in the opposite direction.
She could hear the cougar behind her, large paws soft on the earth always just a few paces away, and she ran faster, darting to and fro like she was a cat herself. For a moment, she wondered if she was only tempting the thing to eat her, goading it into thinking her as prey - and then it appeared on her left, hanging from a tree branch and looking rather smug.
Well if this was how she was going to die, it would be a helleva way to go.
Playing cat and mouse with a mountain lion.
That she was beginning to think wasn’t as wild as she’d originally assumed.
It was waiting for her at their little island, asleep in the sun. Allison was winded and exhilarated. She collapsed next to the stream and whispered, Next time, cat.
She began implementing her bow into the game, shooting off scraps of cloth with her scent in a different direction than where she was going. She was never fast enough or clever enough to actually throw her wildcat off her trail, but they both seemed to enjoy the challenge.
Her arrows were always neatly stacked on the back porch the next morning.
Until one week - near the end of summer - when it wasn’t there.
It took Allison only about ten minutes to realize that she was alone in the forest. She made her way slowly to the little rock island but there was nothing there. No hint of her copper-colored cat anywhere.
She lay on the rock until it grew cold and hard beneath her back and then dragged herself back inside.
For nearly nine days it was the same, just Allison alone waiting on a rock.
She didn’t dare tell Dawn or Clary - knew that they would be terrified of her sister making friends with a potentially very dangerous wild animal. (Or they would point out what she should have already come to terms with: that it wasn’t at all wild and that she had found her familiar at last. But that was even more heartbreaking, because what if it didn’t come back?)
On the tenth day, she woke up on the rock and found her wildcat curled into her side, purring deeply and fast asleep, it’s large head gently resting on top of its own back. Allison reached out to run her fingers through the soft coat and two hazel eyes opened to stare deeply at her.
You came back, she whispered as they stared at each other.
The cougar let out a huff of breath and Allison smiled.
Just don’t leave again, okay?
And like that, the cougar was gone and Allison was once again alone in the forest, the sky beginning to darken.
Three weeks passed and in that time Allison came to the very discouraging conclusion that her familiar had found her wanting and had decided to move on. She came to terms with that in her own, frighteningly stoic way, and tried to soldier on. It was nearly autumn and that meant she’d soon be short on free time, anyway.
She filled her days with her sisters - teasing and cajoling them and throwing herself into their projects. Dawn eyed her curiously from time to time, but had learned long ago not to pry into Allison’s moods. Clary was hell-bent on being a teen right out of a horror film and alternated between being sugary-sweet and screaming through locked doors.
It was like any other summer in the Rosse household.
Until one night, when the doorbell rang and no one was expecting pizza and Clary was grounded for the tantrum she had thrown earlier that week about dish-duty and Dawn never went on dates anymore and that left Allison to deal with it and on their front porch there stood a girl with long copper hair and bright hazel eyes filled with tears.
I’m sorry, she whispered. It’s just that you asked me not to leave and I had to explain why I did.
fandom: btvs/teenwolf/tmi
characters: allison/lydia; dawn summers, clary fray
word count: 3,600
setting: set a few years before the events of destiny came a calling; witches-au allison thinks she'll never find her familiar...
a/n: written for the femslashbb's March challenge: Elements (there will be a chapter for every season)
[summer]She found her familiar when she was seventeen - two summers after her grandmother finally succumbed to illness and left them on their own. Five years after giving up hope that she would ever be granted a familiar.
Even without her predisposition to the more physical arts of her birthright, Allison would still have leaned towards that side of her nature. Losing a mother at too young an age and an aunt too soon after that instilled in her older sister an unquenchable thirst for knowledge contained in musty old books and in their youngest sister a frightened aversion to her own power, which she unknowingly poured into her art. In Allison, loss created a lust for vengeance that threatened to crack her skin and peel her to the bone.
Dawn’s familiar was a small, dark raven that checked in on the full moon and otherwise lived her own life. She appeared one night in the dead of winter. Dawn held her dark feathers to her chest and cried and cried and wouldn’t speak of why. Months later they learned of their mother’s death, but by that time Dawn had already mourned in her own way, had turned her spine to steel. She didn’t shed a tear at the funeral, just held Allison with one hand and Clary with the other; too young to be a rock for such small children and yet no one dared come to take her burden from her.
Clary’s familiar was a small grey mouse that the cats never chased and her sister never acknowledged willingly. Allison can’t remember a time when the little guy hadn’t been underfoot, stealing Clary’s art pencils and sneaking into her room, trying to get her attention. On Clary’s fourteenth birthday, Dawn bought her a cage and put him inside. A lecture posing as a birthday present, Clary called it.
Allison was sure her familiar wasn’t coming. It wasn’t rare for a witch who favored offensive spellwork to have a familiar too wild to be found. Something that hid itself away far from where it could do accidental harm.
Some witches just didn’t have familiars. Dawn pointed this out time and again, just when Allison didn’t really want her to - her eyes full of concern and her fingers marking her place in a book or tying her hair back on her way out the door. To have three familiars in one family was strange. Their mother’s family had always been strong in this regard, but with no way to know anything about their father…
Allison convinced herself she was better this way.
A lone wolf, she laughed, her fingers sliding through Dawn’s long hair as she braided it in front of the fire.
I don’t think you’re a wolf, Clary would muse from her perch at the window, a sketchpad on her lap and her hands in constant motion. Not a lone one anyway.
Allison sometimes felt as though she was the one out of three of them that needed their little pack the most. That her two sisters would flourish on their own and it was really her clinging to them, holding them close in fear of being alone.
Each thought that of the others.
That’s what sisters are; pack animals with a strong sense of loyalty that don’t know how to let the others fly free without losing a piece of themselves in the bargain.
The forest around their grandmother’s home on the outskirts of the tiny town they had always called home with a deep sense of frustration was untouched by anyone but Allison’s soft footfall - even in summer.
There were legends about the forest - strange creatures and ghosts and wild animals that could rip out your throat before you thought to scream.
Grams laughed at them all and gathered up her baskets and her granddaughters and tripped out into the shadows to gather her herbs and bury her secrets. Allison running from tree to tree, climbing so high she felt like she was flying.
After grams died, the others didn’t like going into the forest anymore. It was too painful them. So now Allison went alone, armed with Dawn’s baskets and her bow and quiver. She could spend hours alone under the trees, regardless of the weather, without feeling restless or suffocated by the silence. When she was home alone she fidgeted and worried and chewed holes in her bottom lip, wore out the carpets in the hall. On those rare occasions that Dawn and Clary were both gone, Allison generally escaped into the cool woods that creeped further into their backyard every year. She knew to leave a note on the counter so the others wouldn’t worry over her absence, but she also never felt the need to rush back.
As if, when she was safe beneath the trees with her weapons on her back and the soft scent of Dawn’s herbs floating up to her, there was nothing to fear anywhere in the world.
The week after grams died, she had practically lived in the forest. She and Dawn had built a treehouse several years before just a few yards in and she slept there for three nights, until Clary came out crying, curling up into her sleeping bag with her. It was less a house than it was a few rickety beams of wood perched precariously under a tarp. But it kept her dry while she needed it. She dragged Clary back to the house and the next day took the house down.
Dawn helped her fold up the tarp that had seen so many of their childhood games and didn’t say a word.
I won’t come back next time, Allison had finally said, her throat raw from crying, her face dry for the first time in days.
Dawn blinked slowly, No. You’ll always come back. They walked a while in silence. On the edge of the forest, just in sight of the house, Dawn grabbed her elbow, I’m more worried about you never leaving.
I’m never leaving!
No… I mean… Dawn bit her lip and shifted her weight. Clary has her art and I have my books… you had the tree house. If you stay cooped up with us forever, I’m worried we’ll lose you and… I don’t know… She shook her head and then walked to the house, leaving Allison behind.
It wasn’t the first time that Allison felt like Dawn was twenty paces ahead of her.
It was the first time she didn’t feel a pull to run after her, to try to catch up, to grab her sister’s hand and laugh in her face and try to shoulder a bit of the burden, to twirl them around and pretend that they didn’t have the weight of a broken heart to carry around.
Dawn had her books and her herbs and her languages and her raven and her burdens.
Clary had her paper and her paint and her magic and her mouse and her fear.
Allison had her bow and her arrows and her trees and her silent strength.
Which she didn’t think was all that much to offer, but it was what she had.
The summer the year she turned seventeen was an ordinary summer, all things considered. She graduated and was set-up to take a job with the local doctor’s office as a front office secretary. It didn’t pay well, but it looked damn good on a resume and she could keep her weekend and evening hours at the coffee shop. She was aware that Dr. Hart had offered her the job out of respect for grams, but they all decided a long time ago to accept the pity and charity of their neighbors while they had it.
They were leaving soon, anyway.
Dawn insisted that she enroll in online classes that fall - easy stuff she could do at work without anyone batting an eye. GE stuff that would transfer anywhere. Which only gave Allison a couple of months of relative freedom.
She spent more and more time in the forest.
It wasn’t that she hadn’t had friends in high school - there were a few girls that she could count on for a sleepover or movie night if she needed it, but Dawn had always been her best friend and when she left high school two years before to work full-time, Allison had retreated more than maybe she should have. And now, graduating a year early only pushed that wedge more firmly between her and the friends she still had left.
Out in the forest, she wasn’t avoiding her friends or her high school or the empty room at the end of the hall with all of grams’ stuff still inside and untouched. Out here, she was just a seventeen year old girl who really loved archery and maybe other than that was normal.
Even if there was nothing whatsoever normal about her life.
The summer was hot.
It should have been mild, maybe. Or sticky. Something with humidity and sweat dripping down her spine reminding her that she was there, that she was real. Allison never needed to be reminded how real her skin was beneath her clothes, but the imagery would have been nice. A sticky summer would have appealed to Dawn, the words full of alliteration and curling thirst beneath repeated, mournful tones. A mild summer would have appealed to Clary, the temperature a bit too cool allowing her to wrangle the stillness of sunbeams onto her sketchpad.
But this is Allison’s story. And so it was none of these things. It was hot. Not too mild and not too humid. A burning sort of heat that seemed to come only from the sun, easily escapable in the shade of her trees.
She was standing with her legs wide and bare and tan and a sweater tied around her waist and thick-soled boots on her feet and her bow cocked in her hands, ready to fire, when her familiar curled onto the ground at her side. She was more startled that a cat that size had managed to sneak up on her when she was usually so hyper-aware of her surroundings, than that a tawny cougar was lying patiently only three feet from her.
For a moment or two, she didn’t move, only aware of the animal through her peripheral vision. For a minute she calculated the risk of turning and embedding her arrow into its hide. And then she thought of the horrified expressions on her sisters’ faces the first time she bagged a wild hare, like she had personally slaughtered their hearts and brought them back as a present. Coming home with a cougar - as bizarrely placed as it was - slung across her back would probably result in her being forced to eat all her meals at the coffee shop for the next month, and there was really a limit to her intake of Danishes.
And then she considered what would happen if she moved at all. There was clearly a very calm cougar within arm’s reach and she didn’t really want to be lunch. Was she going to be stuck like that forever?
Exhaling slowly, she released the arrow and it struck her target. Okay, it was an inch off and on any other day she’d be pretty pissed off at herself about that, but any other day wouldn’t have a mountain lion in attendance.
With very careful movements, she lowered her bow and turned her head to look at the cougar beside her. It was lying a bit like her sister’s cat Rain sometimes did when she was working on her art instead of paying him attention, head resting on its paws and eyes looking up solemnly and a bit sadly.
Are you a sad scary lion? she asked. Because well - why not?
The cougar rolled its eyes at her. She would swear on her bow that the damn thing ROLLED ITS EYES like a human.
Did you… I’m insane. I’m crazy, aren’t I?
The cougar tilted its head to one side and then let out a deep breath before standing up, looking at her one last minute, and then walking very sedately off into the forest.
Well… fuck.
Three days later Dawn threw her out of the house for pacing from room to room while she was trying to study with a basket and a list of herbs to gather that she didn’t really need (Clary had already locked her door three hours previously because she was tired of Allison coming in only to wander around for a minute and then leave again); in general they were used to her restlessness, but three solid days of it had them all on edge. So, armed with a trusty basket and her favorite bow, she made her way into her sanctuary.
The cougar was sunbathing on a rock near a stream - asleep in that way that house cats often are, as if they are sleeping from sheer boredom with their eyes half-open as if daring you to interrupt them. Allison sat down nearby and watched for a minute.
You know you’re in the wrong county, right? Hell I think you may be on the wrong side of the continent.
The lion shook its head as if dislodging something from its ear and rolled on its back playfully, as if laughing at her.
Allison laughed with it and set her equipment aside so she could lie down.
She was safe enough on the other side of the stream. Anyway, this was her favorite spot, wasn’t it? The stream flowed wider in the spring and froze over in the winter, but this was always its widest spot - it split around a large cropping of boulders that caught more sunlight than most areas of the dark forest. The lion had claimed that spot today, but either bank was nearly as warm. Especially in the heat of summer.
Allison propped her head up on her forearm and looked up into the branches of the trees.
It was amazing how still she could be here. How that yearning in her skin could suddenly - without warning - feel slightly at peace. Like a cork on a bottle.
Birds chattered and bugs hummed and the spring trickled by and it could have been any other summer day.
When she woke, the cougar was gone and the sky was starting to dim. She gathered up Dawn’s requests and made her way back home.
Calm and at ease for the first time in days.
They continued on like that for a few weeks, Allison and her wildcat. Sunbathing and hunting, edging close to each other only for Allison to shrink back. Witch or not - the cougar was still a wild animal and she didn’t feel entirely safe with it, even after weeks of nothing but good humor.
One day she sat in the living room and watched Clary doing laundry. As she walked back and forth from the laundry nook behind the kitchen and back to the couch to fold clothes or upstairs to fetch or deliver items, her cat - a mangy old thing called Rain - stalked her playfully, popping out from behind furniture or batting things out of her hand. Sometimes even darting away from her as if to say, “haha you can’t catch me!”
Rain is playing with you, you know? Allison mused from the overstuffed chair in the corner.
Clary tossed her ponytail, Yeah well, he can’t very well help me iron, can he? Unlike a certain lazy sister of mine.
Allison threw a pillow at her and smiled when Rain leaped out to pounce on it the minute it landed on the floor.
It gave her an idea.
How did her cat always knew where she was? Sneaking up on her from the side or somehow lying in wait just a few paces ahead?
Allison figured it was probably the same way Rain always knew where Clary was, watching from the wings, actually underfoot while Clary was distracted.
Playing.
So she decided to play back.
Usually when she left the house she went directly into the treeline behind the house, heading South, but one day she walked out the front door and turned East, towards town. She tried not to look behind her, tried to pretend that she wasn’t waiting for her cat to find her. But she was.
Once under the cover of the trees she broke into a run, following an old path down to the South, a few hundred feet from where she usually entered the forest. She got to the stream in only a few minutes, weaving her way haphazardly through the trees. Her usual spot was back upstream to the West of the house, today she turned to go further East, jumping from side to side of the stream.
There was a small pond down to the East. She didn’t usually go there - especially in the summer - because sometimes kids and teenagers from town would come down to play there. But earlier that month a community pool was finally opened - after years of town meetings and bake sales - so she knew the pond would be empty.
When she got to the pond she was out of breath and a little sweaty.
And her lion was waiting for her on a rock near the pond’s edge, standing on wide legs and purring deeply.
Allison had only heard it purr a couple of times.
When she came into the clearing she groaned, How did you know?
The cat jumped on and off the rock, a bit like Rain would do when he was excited, and then rolled on its back, feet high up in the air.
Allison laughed, Show off.
The lion angled its head back towards her - still on its back, its long tail tapping slowly.
Allison winked and ran in the opposite direction.
She could hear the cougar behind her, large paws soft on the earth always just a few paces away, and she ran faster, darting to and fro like she was a cat herself. For a moment, she wondered if she was only tempting the thing to eat her, goading it into thinking her as prey - and then it appeared on her left, hanging from a tree branch and looking rather smug.
Well if this was how she was going to die, it would be a helleva way to go.
Playing cat and mouse with a mountain lion.
That she was beginning to think wasn’t as wild as she’d originally assumed.
It was waiting for her at their little island, asleep in the sun. Allison was winded and exhilarated. She collapsed next to the stream and whispered, Next time, cat.
She began implementing her bow into the game, shooting off scraps of cloth with her scent in a different direction than where she was going. She was never fast enough or clever enough to actually throw her wildcat off her trail, but they both seemed to enjoy the challenge.
Her arrows were always neatly stacked on the back porch the next morning.
Until one week - near the end of summer - when it wasn’t there.
It took Allison only about ten minutes to realize that she was alone in the forest. She made her way slowly to the little rock island but there was nothing there. No hint of her copper-colored cat anywhere.
She lay on the rock until it grew cold and hard beneath her back and then dragged herself back inside.
For nearly nine days it was the same, just Allison alone waiting on a rock.
She didn’t dare tell Dawn or Clary - knew that they would be terrified of her sister making friends with a potentially very dangerous wild animal. (Or they would point out what she should have already come to terms with: that it wasn’t at all wild and that she had found her familiar at last. But that was even more heartbreaking, because what if it didn’t come back?)
On the tenth day, she woke up on the rock and found her wildcat curled into her side, purring deeply and fast asleep, it’s large head gently resting on top of its own back. Allison reached out to run her fingers through the soft coat and two hazel eyes opened to stare deeply at her.
You came back, she whispered as they stared at each other.
The cougar let out a huff of breath and Allison smiled.
Just don’t leave again, okay?
And like that, the cougar was gone and Allison was once again alone in the forest, the sky beginning to darken.
Three weeks passed and in that time Allison came to the very discouraging conclusion that her familiar had found her wanting and had decided to move on. She came to terms with that in her own, frighteningly stoic way, and tried to soldier on. It was nearly autumn and that meant she’d soon be short on free time, anyway.
She filled her days with her sisters - teasing and cajoling them and throwing herself into their projects. Dawn eyed her curiously from time to time, but had learned long ago not to pry into Allison’s moods. Clary was hell-bent on being a teen right out of a horror film and alternated between being sugary-sweet and screaming through locked doors.
It was like any other summer in the Rosse household.
Until one night, when the doorbell rang and no one was expecting pizza and Clary was grounded for the tantrum she had thrown earlier that week about dish-duty and Dawn never went on dates anymore and that left Allison to deal with it and on their front porch there stood a girl with long copper hair and bright hazel eyes filled with tears.
I’m sorry, she whispered. It’s just that you asked me not to leave and I had to explain why I did.