Winter
Sometimes when the nights grow long and cold, he goes off by himself and wanders beneath the heavens. The snow crunches only slightly beneath his paws, and he barely feels its cold — what he notices more is the sharpness to the air, the crisp cleanliness that the deep winter nights bring. That air brings back memories. Winter is always a time for remembering.
Just as occasionally in the summer, he fancies he's a pup again as he dozes in the afternoon shadows, now he recalls other days of his youth, harsh days and nights that perhaps should have killed him. Should have killed them both.
Sometimes he wonders how they made it through, and he's never really sure. Maybe fate meant them to live so that they could play their parts. So that she could then die at another time, and his heart with her. But maybe there was no fate, and it had been only their own strength that had brought them through. He wonders at that. Fell was always the strong one, not he.
It's on these nights when he thinks he understands Fell's need for solitude. He feels it himself. Away from the pack, with most of the forest asleep, he wears no mask of contentment, for who can see? Here, he can lose himself in memories, and mourn the loss of them as he mourns the loss of her.
He doesn't know if he will love again, as he loved her. Sometimes he thinks it would be a crime against what he felt for her if he gave that to another; at others, that the crime would be in denying what she died for.
But he knows he still loves her either way, and he could neither change that, nor desire to.
Always, before he returns to where the pack lays dreaming, he howls a single quiet, silver note at the moon, but meant for her, wherever her spirit has gone. In that he finds his real peace, and so in the days that follow, he wears his mask unburdened, unaware as it slowly becomes his truth.