AN: Hello friends! It's your lucky day because today just happens to be a SNOW DAY for my school district. (In case you didn't know, a SNOW DAY is when school is canceled for bad weather. They're AWESOME, which is why it's written in caps.)
So enjoy the new chapter, lovelies!
Loricorn out.
Recuperating
The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be judged. - Maya Angelou
"Um, there's probably food in the kitchen somewhere. Just put everything back how you found it, please." Delta said once she'd wrestled the cabin door open. Sam stayed next to her wordlessly, concerned by the fact that she was trying to hide what she was feeling from him. His eyes met Dean's, and Dean raised his eyebrows. Sam just shook his head, looking back at Delta and following with her like a large shadow as she crossed the small hallway to a living room. Dean, Faz and Ryan started getting food, but Cas and Sadi followed Sam and Delta into the living room. Cas claimed a seat in one of the two overstuffed threadbare armchairs while Sadi stood by a window. Delta stood in front of the couch, looking around at the room while Sam sank, literally, into the couch. He almost felt like falling asleep, except for Delta's obvious discomfort. He watched as she tensed like she was going to walk to one of the pictures hanging on the wall, then changed her mind and went to the fireplace in the corner, looking up at the things on the mantel there.
Dean and Ryan joined them after Faz kicked them out of the kitchen and took their own seats, Dean in the other armchair and Ryan in the ancient-looking rocking chair next to the small bookcase in the corner.
There was a small silence, then Delta turned sharply from the picture she had been looking at and said, "I wasn't born here, but this is where I grew up, with my sister and brothers until my mother took us back to the clan." She chewed on her lip, trying to sort out what to say and feeling the most uncomfortable that Sam had ever felt her feel. "My mother was one of the four lieutenants, second in command to the Alpha at the time. My father was a Tracker, and so was my younger brother. My other siblings were Warriors. They all died a long time ago, around the time my mother became Alpha. It… destroyed my father, my siblings dying almost all at once. But he was so proud when I became a lieutenant to my mother." Suddenly, her voice changed from a low heartbroken tone to a soft snarl. "I should have seen it then, the way she got over three of her children being murdered in the war so quickly. My younger brother was executed for the same reason I was exiled, because he wouldn't hunt down the rest of the selkie survivors. My… my father was killed in front of my entire quadrant, all the people that I was in charge of, for trying to hide my brother from my mother and the other lieutenants. She killed him herself. I was exiled soon after that for helping him, to the shock of the other clans. They were told that if any of them were discovered to be helping me, they would have a full-scale war on their hands." Delta had looked at the carpet under her feet, at the walls, at anything but them the entire time, not even looking at Faz when she entered with a plate of sandwiches partway through her story. "Some of them still did. Not entire clans, but those that thought what had happened to me was outrageous and far from fair. They didn't even know what really happened. Most of them were killed to keep the news of them helping me from reaching my mother, and the ones that weren't just haven't been discovered yet."
Silence greeted her words. Ryan and Faz looked shocked, like they'd had no idea, although Ryan also looked like something made more sense now. Sadi's eyes were downcast and sad, but she wasn't surprised like the other clan members. Cas was staring out of one of the windows, while Dean was looking at nothing at all.
Sam never took his eyes off of Delta, projecting his feelings at her. She glanced at him, feeling gratitude so strong that it almost wiped out every other thing she was feeling.
"Well." Faz said, clearing her throat. She uncrossed and recrossed her arms, then continued, "There's more sandwiches in the kitchen if we run out of these." She nodded to the plate sitting on the small-ish table sitting between the armchairs.
Dean immediately attacked those with Ryan, both of them grateful for the distraction, while Delta left the room, heading for the front door with shaking hands.
Sam followed her. "You okay?" He asked when the door closed behind them, even though he knew she wasn't, not really.
"I didn't want to leave you guys in the dark with me acting weird back there." Delta said instead of answering. "You guys deserve an explanation, especially you." She glanced up at him, far from sheepish. "Do you think that was too much? Telling all of that at once?"
"I think that it's better that we know everything now than getting the story in pieces." Sam refrained from adding that that was technically what she'd done, though he couldn't keep his voice from sounding dry.
She seemed to be thinking the same thing, and seemed not to miss his tone. "I didn't tell you all that earlier because, well, I'm not good with sharing secrets. And honestly, would you have believed me? Es obviously knew, but I'd never told anyone else everything, ever."
"She told me to let you tell me everything when you felt like you needed to." Sam said as they crossed the thick grass to one of the paths. "She told me you'd get there eventually."
"She was right, as usual." Delta said ruefully. She smiled one of her rare genuine smiles, a wisp of sadness and regret overshadowing her expression. "Still, it had to be hard, not knowing what was really going on."
"Most of the time, yeah." Sam said, then added mildly, "You're frustrating."
"Well, I'm sorry, Sammy." Delta said, narrowing her eyes at him. "Not like you're a nice walk through the park, either."
"You're worse." Sam pointed out, a small smile appearing on his face.
"I know." Delta said, her eyes flickering as she dropped her teasing attitude and acted serious. She bumped his arm with her shoulder gently. "I'm sorry."
He bumped her shoulder back, not needing to say anything to tell her that it was okay.
She stopped in the fork of two paths, looking one way before she traveled down the other. "C'mon, there's something you should see."
Sam followed her to a squat building surrounded by huge oaks with low, sweeping branches. He had to duck his head several times just to stay on the path. She pushed the door open after fighting with the handle, creakily swinging it in and walking carefully into the building. He followed, seeing soft grey shapes outlined in the gloom.
"What-" Sam's question was cut off as Delta jumped up, grabbed a rope, and pulled down with her entire weight. With an explosion of dust and a shriek of warped wood, a hatch in the ceiling banged open and flooded the single large room with multicolored light.
Bookshelves lined every wall around the large space, which had thick carpets and several comfy-looking chairs in the middle, even curved ones at one end where the wall turned into a curved set of windows. Heavy drapes covered those, while an ornate sliding ladder rested in its tracks on the left side of the room. Sam looked up in awe as Delta crossed to the drapes and deftly pulled them open, flooding the room with even more colored light. Each pane of the windows was a liquid, warped mass of a thousand different colors intermixed together in spirals, blobs, and twists. Delta unlatched the glass door set in the side of the curved window, then pushed it open carefully.
"This was my father's library." She said, propping the glass door open with a rock and turning to look up at the shelves. "My mother wouldn't let him have one in the cabin, so he built it separately. All the other buildings on the grounds were my additions, for people that've been taken that might need a place to adjust for a while."
Sam turned to look at her. She looked back evenly before she looked away, crossing the floor to jump up onto the ladder. She pushed it sideways, then pulled an old book off a shelf before climbing down.
"Besides his favorites from across the centuries, he had books like this that he wrote himself." She handed the book to Sam, who opened it carefully after examining the cracked spine.
The page he flipped to greeted him with a title; Differences between Werewolves, Other Skin-changers and Bloodline Shapeshifters: Ailment Versus Born to Be.
"Woah." Sam flipped through a few pages, stopping when he reached a detailed diagram of a werewolf with something that looked like a spell under it in Latin. "What does this say?"
"It's the spell to temporarily shut off the werewolf virus." Delta said, looking at the book upside-down. "It turns them human briefly, usually until the moon goes down." She pointed to the bottom of the page open on the opposite side. "Description's right there."
"Does it work?" Sam asked, glancing at her.
"For me it does. I don't know if humans can make it work, since you don't have mage-magic in you." Delta said, then shrugged. "Either way, yelling a spell while being chased by an uncontrollable super-wolf takes practice."
"Huh, I bet." Sam said, turning more pages. "So what all did he write about? You're dad?"
"Lots of things." Delta said, crossing to a chair and sinking into it. Sam leaned on the arm of her chair, reading absent-mindedly. "He wrote mostly about other species, like histories and lore, and different cases he worked. He researched extensively, even getting into the field to track down sources. Vampires, werewolves, ghouls, wraiths, banshees, what you'd call magical creatures like pegasi and griffons. And he wrote about the clans."
Sam swiftly looked up from the page he'd been skimming. "How much did he write about the clans?"
Delta looked up at him, picking up on his sudden intense energy. "Everything he knew." She said.
