A/N: Blaming this one on a prompt from someone on Tumblr. I think this is the first AU I've ever written, in ten years of writing fanfic.
Here is Clara. Clara is born, and Clara grows, and alongside the house in which she does these things, there is a plain, all filled with waving grasses in summer, wheat-gold and spent, and all filled with barren snow in winter, pristine and primal. Her parents were wedded there; her mother is buried there. There is life and death and cycles and time there. She watches the field through the windows of her childhood— now five, now ten, now fifteen— and in the winter of her twentieth year, she realizes how empty it looks. It has always seemed full, till now; it has always seemed just what it should be. But the look of the field now, as she goes to sleep preparing to wake up with a decade in each palm, is of something missing; of something not right. It harries and worries at her, like a hound on the hunt. She spends a night of fitful dreams.
In the morning, the sight of green is a blessing, a shallow and wide-spread relief.
"How can a fforest have grown overnight?" Everyone wonders. Everyone asks. Clara doesn't wonder, Clara doesn't ask, Clara whispers a thank you to the seeds of the grasses. She watches the wind skirling through the leaves.
The fforest is a puzzle. Each tree is a piece. Each tree fits nicely, correctly and properly, and seems to take up far more room on earth than it should. The town is terrified of it. They only speak of it in whispers, and sometimes not even then. Sometimes when a whisper is headed for the subject, it steps aside hastily and changes to something else, it pretends as though it never intended to bring it up at all.
Clara isn't terrified. Somewhere in the woods is her mother, and nowhere her mother would choose to be could ever be truly fearsome. She walks through it, in dreams, and the trees stand aside for her, and nothing and no one holds her hand. She is fearless. She is without fear.
When her father tells her that she must take the flowers to her mother's grave, on the anniversary of her mother's death, just as though there is no fforest in the way, she doesn't mind. She takes the flowers in her hand— they are red and white and yellow, autumnal colors, and her mother might have loved them; she can't remember; but either way it is tradition— and stands before the puzzle box of the fforest. She stands for a moment in silence, and then she grows impatient, and she says, "Please."
The trees grumble to themselves, and shift. They stand aside for her.
She enters.
The light inside is green, which she has expected. It was green in her dreams, too, except for when there were bursts of warm yellow, which she could not explain. The trees overarch her, they grow into the sky and put down roots there, too. They hold the circle of the skies in its place, blot out the sun, make jest of the moon. She touches them each, lightly, as she walks through.
"You're being so good," she tells them, and she smiles, at them, at herself. In her hands, the flowers wait.
She walks.
She walks for some time. The fforest is hiding her mother's grave from her, she thinks. This isn't very nice of it, and as her frustration grows, she begins to kick a bit more viciously at the trunks she climbs over; tug a bit more violently at the limbs. She even goes so far as to crack to the marrow of a narrow branch— though she is sorry for it afterwards— and it is this that finally brings a comment from the Wolf that has been following her; following her for some time.
"Temper, temper," he says.
Clara does not shriek, but that is only because Clara is fearless. She does go quite still, clutching now at the flowers with both hands, and the Wolf circles around her. He is a Grey Wolf, or rather a Silver one, and he has a keen narrow face and the eyes of something lurking in the darkness. She does not know what to make of him, and because she does not know what to make of him, she is defensive and edgy and holds the flowers as though they are a weapon.
"Don't come any closer," she says.
The Wolf immediately comes closer. He doesn't touch her, though, doesn't even reach out. Instead, he squints at her a little, and sniffs.
"Curious," he says.
"What," says Clara.
"You are."
"I am not. What do you mean?"
"You're a young woman in the middle of the fforest," says the Wolf. "A mysterious fforest, sprung up all by its lonesome, with no help from anyone, all overnight. And what are you doing? Not carrying an axe, to cut down the trees. Not carrying a gun, to protect yourself. Carrying flowers. Curious." Another circle; another circle. Clara is getting peevish. "Where are you trying to go?"
"I'm trying to go to where I'm going," snaps Clara. "It would be ridiculous if I were to try to go anywhere else."
"True," admits the Wolf. "Where is that, then?"
"Stop moving," says Clara, "and I may decide to tell you."
The Wolf stands in front of her, and she can make out the details of him at last. The Wolf's tailored suit is a clean black with elegant lines; when he puts his hands in his pockets, a flash of scarlet shows through like bitter blood. Another detail: he looks at her, and when he looks at her it is with a weight that no look has ever been given. There's gravity to his gaze. She feels simultaneously bigger and smaller under it. She hesitates.
"You promised, now," says the Wolf.
"I did no such thing."
"Come on, then, Clara." His tone is wheedling. "Don't disappoint me. Where are you going?"
His eyes on hers feel so much like they have been there before, feel so much like they know her, that she doesn't think to ask how he has learned her name.
Finally she finds her tongue.
"To my mother's grave," she says.
"Ah. The flowers."
"Yes."
"She died some time ago, did she? You make the pilgrimage every year."
"She died when I was three years old, and I am twenty now."
"Ah," says the Wolf again, and sniffs the air. "That's a lot of flowers. Well. Well, well, well. I will tell you this, Clara. I am not unacquainted with these parts, and I am not unequipped with a keen sense of direction. If I point you where you would like to go, would you let me travel with you?"
"Travel?" says Clara, raising her eyebrows. "It isn't far, I wouldn't call it travel."
"Humor me," says the Wolf. "I don't like to walk alone. I haven't a thing to protect myself with, and you look as though you could do some damage with those flowers."
Clara looks at him, a bit skeptically, and thinks that his teeth, sharp and ready as they are, would be quite enough protection for anyone. But he is being cooperative, and more or less polite, and she can see no harm in merely letting him walk by her side for a short while.
He is pleasant company, for a Wolf, witty and sharp and endlessly knowledgeable, and he seems to know the fforest like he's been walking it since the day he was born. He finds her a path where there was no path before, he noses it out from beneath the leaves, and he calls her attention to the beauty of the trees, lets her see the wonder of it and never lets her take a false step. He even runs for a little while, playfully, and she chases him through the fforest, till he leaps out at her from behind a tree and they tumble to the ground, where her heart finally catches up to her and she realizes it is going far too fast for a little romp in the woods.
"Clara," says the Wolf, softly, and he presses his hand above her wildly fluttering heart and smiles. "Don't scare so."
"I'm not scared," whispers Clara. "I'm fearless."
"So you are," whispers the Wolf back, and he stands and offers a hand to help her from the ground. "Just know, then, for your own peace of mind— if not to lay your nonexistent fears to rest— that I would never harm you. I never could."
"Well," says Clara, "I appreciate your concern— but you'll excuse me if I don't take your words for truth."
"Well," says the Wolf, almost apologetically, "that wouldn't be very bright of you if you did. I am a liar, after all. Lying is a survival skill, and lying well is an art."
"And you are a wolf," says Clara.
"True," says the Wolf. "I am a liar, and I am a wolf. Being a wolf is also a survival skill."
She smiles at that. She can't help herself.
"I think I'd like to learn."
He looks to where her heart beats, quickly still, as though he can see it.
"I'd like to teach you," he says, softly. Then, louder again, "I can tell you I've been lying to you, now that we've got all that about me being a liar out in the open."
"Wolf!" says Clara, stung. "What have you been lying to me about?"
"Where we are going." He waves a hand at the fforest about them. "I haven't been taking you to your mother's grave at all. This fforest is much bigger than you humans and your silly little traditions to honor the dead. This fforest is bigger than anything— bigger than almost everything put together. And only I can navigate it, so." He shrugs. "Are you going to run screaming into the distance, now that you know how I've betrayed you?"
"That would be silly, wouldn't it?" says Clara. "I don't know how to get home from here."
"A very valid point," says the Wolf. He looks to the front, glances behind them alertly, takes in a deep breath of the air. "This way."
He leads her forward, speaking conversationally all the while. The trees of the mysterious fforest are mysterious all in themselves; they are a type that have not been seen for centuries. They fit together like a puzzle box, which Clara had clearly already noticed because she was a clever thing, for a human. They stand aside, but only for those fearless enough to command their attention. They have taken over house after house, village after village—
"There is a house, there," says the Wolf, pointing with long and delicate fingers. "In case you feel the need to check."
There is a house, there in front of her. Clara knocks and Clara enters, Clara calls and Clara searches; no one answers and no one is in.
"Do you see?" says the Wolf, hushed and quiet. "They've been startled from their beds. They've run for it, and run into nothing."
He goes up the stairs on all fours. She follows him, and they lean from the window in a peculiarly companionable silence, looking out on the fforest. She sees the truth of things: this is not a house all by its lonesome. This is a village.
She searches, then, house after house, knocking and calling, running from cellar to roof. Nothing. No one. The world is vacant and empty, an open door swinging on its hinges in the silent breeze.
He waits for her in the town center, which now sports a rather nice flowering shrub of some sort.
"Did you know?" she says. "That this was going to happen."
"It was a statistical possibility," says the Wolf, "but then so is everything."
"But you know the woods. It's plain as day. Did you know that this would happen to them? Couldn't you have done something? Couldn't you have saved them?"
"Can't save everyone, you know, Clara," says the Wolf, examining his nails. "Well. Let's be honest. Don't want to save everyone."
"Not everyone?" she says. "But someone."
"Someone," acknowledges the Wolf.
"Who?" she says. "Me?"
"You," says the Wolf.
When he looks at her now, she feels as though she is bigger on the inside.
There are more villages to see. He leads her further into the woods, still not taking her by the hand, still dragging her along half-willingly, by gravity. Only, she finds that her feet are stepping along on their own now, and she can sense the path. He isn't leading the way, anymore, is he? He's walking along at her side, and his smile is one of victory, of triumph.
He pushes a branch aside for her and she stops under the arch of it, makes him stop with her.
"Was it you?" she says, half-swallowing the words.
"Was it me— what?" says the Wolf, politely.
"Was it you," says Clara, choosing her words with care, "who brought the fforest?"
The Wolf smiles at her, and his eyes glint with all the silver in the world: a fortune.
"Oh, Clara, Clara, Clara," he says. "My Clara. I am the fforest."
She is going to protest; she is going to question; she is going to scream; so he puts his hand up, as if to stop her, but it's more than that. He touches a finger to her lips, turning his hand just so; so precisely, so the pad of his finger is soft on her lips. He presses, and if he would smile, his smile would be wicked. But he does not smile. He bites her instead, but the bite is a kiss, and she can only tell the one from another from the slight pain of the first, and the way the latter stirs her somewhere deep, brings her hipbones forward against his and her toes to a curl, pulls her upward like a fire in a whirlwind, like cinders and sparks; his finger still against her mouth, he kisses her sideways, past it, around it, keeping her quiet, and the sound of her quietness echoes in the fforest. The fingers of his other hand work deftly under clothing to stroke the skin above her ribcage, to pause as if to count.
He holds her for an eternity of time, and she feels that all of this is impossible.
Onwards they go, still not hand in hand, past empty villages and bloated husks of houses; the fforest has eaten it all, all and sundry, there is nothing left. Until quite suddenly there is; just when Clara thinks she will never hear the sound of a human heart again— apart from the thunderous roar of her own that rises when she catches the sideways glance of the Wolf— the survivors come tracking through the woods. They are led by a man, a man handsome and stalwart, and he is fearless, and the trees stand aside.
Clara and the Wolf hide in the hollow of the shadow of a trunk, and watch them.
"There they go," says the Wolf. "You wondered, and here they are. Answering you with their very existence."
She turns her cheek against the bark, to feel the roughness of it.
"Will they make it?" she says.
The Wolf looks at her.
"If they have survival skills," he says.
She follows them with her eyes. She marks the path they'll take, back towards the light. Finding the sun, somewhere. Finding something that was hidden. Tramping past a lonely grave, covered with the ghosts of flowers past.
"Do you want to go with them?" says the Wolf.
"They don't need me," says Clara.
"It isn't a question of need," says the Wolf. "It's a question of want."
"Do you think they would follow me, if I walked up front with their leader?"
"Who are you going to follow?" counters the Wolf. He takes hold of her chin to turn her head toward him, to make her look at him, but he can't control her eyes. His own glint in the shadow of the trunk. "I can show you wonders."
Clara still follows the humans with her eyes as they disappear into the fforest, swallowed up by the trees. She swallows hard, herself. She isn't going to follow anyone. But she can save that information for later.
"I like wonders," she says, slowly. "I like— I want to see the stars." She turns to peer at him in the gloom of the fforest. "Can you show me the stars?"
"Stars," says the Wolf. "Stars are nothing. Stars are foreplay. Stars are for beginners and yokels in red cloaks."
"I want to see the stars," says Clara, stubbornly.
"Stars," says the Wolf, with a careless little laugh, and a yawn. His mouth is a circle against the dark. "I eat them whole."
The thought excites her, the thought of what they must taste like, the stars, to be eaten whole. Sweet on the tongue, a fire in the belly. She reaches for him, clutches at his upper arm. He looks at her hand askance but does not protest.
"Will you show me," says Clara. "I want to eat the stars, too."
He looks at her pensively, leans down to taste her again, kisses her slowly and thoroughly and thoughtfully, to see if she's worth having around. The answer seems to be yes.
She leaves the flowers in the darkness of the hollow of the trunk. They grow there, in the circling damp. Against all odds, they flourish.