A/N: Me? Own Wolf's Rain? Only in dreams... One nice thing about angering my Quent muse: he's really easy to poke at, offering an extra little late canon-friendly side-story, even if he is distracting me from finishing the next chapter of my longer novel. (No relation. "Blues" is still under construction.) Rebecca Yaiden's name is fanon, as is a certain change... though it's only a dream, after all, isn't it?
"Watch me, Pops! Watch me!" Quent turned towards the sound of his son's voice, moving through the ethereal mishmash of familiar grassy knolls and gently rolling farmland that made up the illusory landscape without ever quite identifying where he was. In his dreams, the good ones, at least, it was all there. It didn't have to be exactly like it had been in real life; it didn't take him an hour and thirty minutes to drive to the grocer's and the neighbor's cattle never wandered into Rebecca's garden in his dreams, except when Bruce wanted to chase them out. It was enough that it was Kyrios, and Rebecca and Bruce were there.
"Watcha up to, sport?" Yaiden asked, peeking through the rows of corn, ripe on the stalk.
"Mama can't do it," Bruce Yaiden said, trotting proudly out before his father. Or at least, it sounded like Bruce. Those brown eyes were the same, too. But Bruce - the real Bruce - did not wag a long, fluffy heather-brown tail or perk up his ears as he approached his father. It was just because Quent had always seen him with Blue, those last three years… They'd been inseparable until the day he'd died. "She said that you would know more about it."
That Quent did. That he most certainly did. "Bruce," he directed hollowly. "Change back."
The little wolfling before him just fixed him with his son's big brown eyes and stared, as stubborn as Bruce Yaiden had ever been in waking life. "Why?"
"Because I'm you're father and I said so!" This was just a dream. Quent knew that. He shouldn't have to reason with it.
"Mama can't do it…" Bruce said nothing, but his words echoed through his father's head nonetheless.
No. Not Bruce. That's not Bruce. Not Bruce, not my son, not my boy, not me… A selfishly cruel but inescapably compelling solution presented itself in the form of a cold weight at Quent's side. He didn't wear the sling holster in the good dreams of Kyrios, but it was getting harder to turn this dream from the path of nightmares. It's not Bruce… not really, the gun seemed to whisper to him. It was a comforting sentiment, more so than it should have been.
"Change back," Quent directed one last time.
"I've forgotten how." Bullshit. Quent had never asked the wolves how their illusions worked and had never really cared to find out, but he couldn't imagine forgetting one's true form. "Show me, Pops?" Why did he have to offer that slow, curious wag, like Blue trying to figure out exactly what her boy was telling her?
"I can't," Quent replied mechanically, trying to ignore the teasing whispers of the rifle at his side. Even if this was all just a dream - it was just a dream - aiming a gun at his only child was unthinkable. "You have to do it yourself."
The wolf pup offered him a wide, devilish dog-grin. "Maybe I'll just stay this way. You ought to try it, Pops. You'd like it."
"Don't you dare, Bruce Yaiden." Quent took a step towards the wolf with his son's eyes, and Bruce fled back into the cornfield. "Bruce!"
Yaiden pushed apart the rows, but for once the Kyrios of dream and fond memory's fertility worked against him, impeding his pace even as Bruce shot forward through the endless field of corn. "Bruce!" he shouted once more, but the muddied light brown tail was already slipping out of sight.
Quent kept running. He was not letting his son go without a fight, without any explanation for why his imagination had clothed his boy in wolf's skin. The corn seemed to go on forever, never giving more than the occasional swaying stalk or torn leaf to mark Bruce's passage. Still, Quent could track him easily enough. He was good at tracking wolves. It was almost as if he could smell the young creature before him…
*
The wolf that awaited him at the end of the field was black, one eye almost golden from the reflected firelight to its left, the other a shadowed blue. Quent shivered despite himself, even once she turned her head to gently push away the brown male that had awoken him with an illusionary hand that revealed its true nature as a paw when he blinked. "Hige," she admonished the other wolf softly. "He needs his rest."
"Didn't look like he was getting much rest to me," the husky young male countered her, cocking his head at Quent. "You were mumbling something, and it sure didn't sound happy." Yaiden decided that the best course of action for the moment was to pretend he'd never awoken.
"We all get nightmares, sometimes. Even Cheza can't fix it all." She sounded as if she fully expected her companion to understand where he was coming from.
Hige nodded unwillingly, reaching out to Blue, this time. "Yeah. Some of us just have more fuel for nightmares than others." Some deserve them more, he seemed to say, and Quent couldn't truly argue with him.
"I'm no flower maiden, but that doesn't mean I can't try to help him sleep." Blue's warm fur brushed against his shoulder, but through half-lidded eyes, Quent could see that she was still facing the brown wolf as she laid down next to her human. The black she-wolf's tones were somewhat exasperated, but there was as much regard in her voice for her conversational companion as for her "sleeping" charge.
"What about me?" The boy was either blind enough to miss the way Blue looked at him, or emotionally clingy enough that Quent wanted to shake him. The old man twitched in annoyance, causing Blue to turn and lick his cheek. Of course, if the young wolf needed her… well, she was used to being needed, and Quent had told her that he no longer did. (It was an utter lie, but he'd wanted it to be true when he'd said it, which amounted to the same thing.)
"Toboe's offered to help me look after him," Blue told Hige. That little rust-colored runt? Quent didn't know what to make of the wolf-boy's misplaced loyalty. He hardly knew what to make of Blue's. "We're taking it in shifts until Pop's well enough to stand on his own, so I'll be able to give you my undivided attention in a few hours. Until then, I guess you could go comfort Tsume if you don't want to keep us company."
"You'd like that, wouldn't you?" The grumble in Hige's voice was only in jest, but he seemed serious enough as he nestled in closer to her, pressing her warm and snug between him and Quent.
The black half-wolf laughed softly. "Actually, I think I'd have to fight him, if it came to that." Blue dropped her head to Hige's shoulder, and with it, her sarcasm. "I'm yours, Hige, and you're mine. It's just… Pops is still my Pops, even if I'm not his dog anymore." Quent didn't deserve that loyalty.
She was half wolf. Cheza had confirmed that. It had never really occurred to Quent to consider what her other half might be.
"Nothing's gonna change what you mean to me, Blue; you know that?"
"Yeah," she said softly. "This won't change." There was a lull in the conversation that Yaiden didn't think he wanted to open his eyes for, even if a part of him had to approve it just because it meant Blue was getting a little of what she deserved. "You sure you're all right with us?"
"I can tolerate one poorly-sleeping drunk if it means being with you." Hige stared at Quent as if he knew that not all the thoughts beneath his loosely shut eyelids concerned his dreams of Kyrios.
Quent just turned his head away. "Don't do anything you wouldn't me doing in your bed," he muttered.
He tried to ignore Hige's whispered reminder that he and Blue, point of fact, were not in a bed. She just laughed him off.
No, the girl was not his dog. Quent wasn't sure whether or not this made things worse.
*