This is a drabble-ish chapter. Timelines are starting to clash, and now we're getting into the good stuff (I think).

So let's goooooo!

A storm never quite rolled in.

The tremors that had been gently rumbling through the ground during the night hours, and the dark, dark sky, seemed to be extent of the adverse weather.

But Manny still could have sworn that it was colder.

Sid had lit a fire after Ellie retrieved him from the waterfall, and the twins had found their way back all on their own. Nobody had been in the mood to do more than lay around the flames and keep watch on their surroundings.

Now, as a frigid morning broke over the pitch trees and horizon, Manny glanced at Ellie.

Of course she'd been right, and nothing had happened to put them in any danger. Their herd had moved far enough inland at this point that, unless there was a major earthquake, they'd be safe.

She must have already been awake, because Ellie opened her eyes and looked at him. She smiled and sat up a little, reaching for his trunk. "Good morning."

"Morning," he answered gruffly.

"Sweetie, I know that you're worried, but it's going to be okay."

In front of them, the fire was completely out, and the cracked and blackened logs had crumbled down over each other. He could barely see it in the dawn light.

"Why did we let them go roaming again?"

"Because that's what they wanted. Besides, we went roaming when we first got married." She nudged him a little. Manny loved her for her enthusiasm. But it was no match for his stubbornness.

"We had a herd."

Ellie fixed him with a look that said, Fine, if that's how you want to play this, and her voice dropped low. "A herd of two animals actually big enough to fight and three smaller, useless ones?"

"Did you just call the twins useless?" Manny whispered back, cracking a smile without meaning to.

She shrugged slyly. "I love my brothers. But I probably would have been less okay with them accompanying our daughter than staying here with us. If anything, Peaches and Julian are probably safer this way. It balances out, and you know it."

Yeah, she was probably right about that.

"What about Buck?" Manny went on stubbornly. "If he'd have stayed with us…"

"Our neighbors would hate us even more – not that I really care what they think – and instead of having to bathe our infant daughter along with her three uncles after that swamp disaster, we would have probably been rescuing them from the middle of it as they were dramatically sinking."

"Buck would have already had it handled. He was a survivalist."

"And crazy. And…" She tugged at his trunk, "we taught our daughter as much as we could as she grew up. No matter what happens, she knows what to do."

"I know she's not little anymore, but…"

"And not as helpless. We always knew that, one way or another, we wouldn't be protecting her for the rest of her life." Ellie cut him off softly. "We told her everything she needed to know, and we did the best we could. While I'm not happy that we've clearly got some changes coming up, I'm glad that they went. I think it's going to save us from hovering over her until we're too old to do it anymore. Trust me, this is going to be really good for us, too."

Manny had never liked the idea of not being able to hover. And he wasn't sure that Ellie was completely right about the kids' absence benefitting any of them. After all, he'd been "fine" on his own until Sid had come screaming, literally, into his path. But he'd been "fine" because he hadn't known how much better everything was about to get. After he met Sid, and after they'd actually gotten on the route south, it felt like his life was always looking up.

Building a home, instead of wandering away into the unknown in search of nothing, had changed his life. It had changed him. He just wished that, that had been something he'd been able to teach their daughter too.

"Come on, let's go to breakfast." Ellie smiled at him, no doubt seeing the worry and the resistance in his eyes.

"Alright." Manny whispered back and helped her up.

000

When he woke up, the world was blinding.

The whites of the last few days – snowstorms and glaciers and a fire with a center so hot it looked pure white – were nothing to this. He had to blink and blink and blink just to pick out the black-browns of sheer cliff walls on the edges of his vision.

It took more effort than he'd ever suspected himself capable of, just to rise to his feet, and Diego blinked dizzily at the snow shifting off his back and onto the ground. He'd been almost completely buried in it, and that alone made his hackles raise in alarm.

A quick sweep around the immediate area told him exactly how long he'd been out for. All of the warmth and the darkness of their traveling weather had been overrun by the avalanche of snow that had been waiting, all along, in the clouds.

Across from him, under an overhang of rock, an orange coat lay unnervingly still. It was in his peripheral vision, and he didn't bother to actually look and confirm. Because Diego already knew. He hadn't seen Soto die, but he'd felt it in the sound of the icicles hitting their marks. He also knew that the others that should have come back, hadn't. And the two scents he really wanted to pick up, needed to be able to pick up, were buried with the others under the massive drifts piling up along the inside walls of Half Peak.

Diego was alone.

He knew he needed to get moving and get out of here. The longer he waited, the worse the weather was going to get. Plus, his ears perked a little as he began limping toward the mouth of the hollow, the longer he waited here, the less chance he'd have of picking up the tracking markers he needed somewhere else.

If he got a move on, everything may work out. He could at least trail them for a while if he couldn't catch up yet. Plus, that would give him a chance to make sure the other members of his pack weren't following.

Yes, that was a good plan. He'd be there to buffer them from any retaliation, and it would give him a chance to pull together a better apology. He wasn't good at saying sorry, and the self-conscious awkwardness usually came off as callousness. He wanted to get it right so that they'd have no doubt that he had changed his mind about them. About everything in his entire life, in fact.

That was a scary thought. He didn't know how he felt about that.

Were all packs like this? Or just his? And how did he know right from wrong if it was dependent on the pack, or the leader, or an outside influence? In this case, an influence that called him annoyingly-clever names and made an effort to be friendly for no reason.

Or maybe Soto had been justified in wanting revenge but went about it wrong. Had he set his sights on the human leader, things would have been different. Better, perhaps? It would have been fairer. No jumps or waterfalls. No babies. No mammoth and sloth…

Would that have been better for everyone involved?

His mind was creating fragments of thoughts, always more focused on what he was sensing through his nose and ears instead of the whirling snowfall inside his head. At this point, that was probably for the best.

His paws sunk too deep into the drifts as he rounded the last of the twisting corners and headed for the narrow pass that would take him down to the valley floor.

When he got to the entrance, he lifted his head from its bowed position against the wind. It was a steep, steep path and completely snowed in up to his chest. It would probably take all of his energy just to fight his way down it. But there was no other way to get to the valley floor without doubling back for miles.

He'd passed out for too long and now he'd run out of alternatives.

Why had he been running out of so many alternatives lately?

He frowned at the narrow crevice. They'd obviously found it and made their way down. There was no other way to Glacier Pass from here, and he'd have known if they were still wandering around the sheer cliffs and gullies of Half Peak. That meant they had a fighting chance of reaching the humans on time. Depending on how far along the small band of people had gotten, maybe he could wait for them on this side of the Pass. They'd have to come back through to go south.

Time to pull himself together and get this done. If Manfred and Sid were anywhere close, he'd know. Catch up; work it out from there.

Diego slowly began to climb his way over and into the drifts. It was going to be a long way down.

He deliberately didn't think about his shoulder.

000

"It's going to be okay." There was a soft voice in his ear and a shift, and then Shira's face was right next to his. He'd know this sensation anywhere. He didn't open his eyes, but she knew he hadn't been asleep. "Besides, Brian's got enough to do. Nobody wants him to get distracted right now."

They couldn't afford to. As the leader of the local mammoth herd, Brian had decided it was time to alert the area. He'd been working on putting together a meeting of sorts for half the year, sending runners far and wide to ask for input, safe haven, news of other places.

Because their world was slowly crumbling apart at the fault lines. First the intense snowstorms that reminded Diego of days on his own, fighting through hunger and pain; the slow-moving glaciers that kept crisscrossing their territory; the tremors of shifting land; and the foreboding that this was only a shadow of what was to come.

They couldn't move, though. Not from here. This was home.

"We did the right thing." Shira added when he didn't say anything.

"No, you did the right thing."

Shira smiled smugly when he opened his eyes just enough to see her. "You wanted them to stay, and there's nothing wrong with that."

"There is when Manfred gets ahold of me and wants to know why I'm deliberately involving myself in his family again."

"Without you he wouldn't have the one he's got." She mumbled peevishly and shifted a little so that they were lying next to each other, but their heads were further apart.

Diego just frowned and looked over to where Julian and Peaches were still sleeping. They were wrapped up in each other, content and self-assured.

They clearly didn't understand the moral of last night's story.

Diego was an unnecessary side trip on their family's route. Without him, Manfred and Sid would have found the baby, delivered him home, and been on their way south. Or, without him chasing the human mother over that waterfall, they wouldn't have even needed to do that much.

Either way, they'd clearly moved on, and he had too. They were more than likely happy, and Diego certainly wasn't complaining. If he missed them sometimes…well that was what he got for instigating this big of a life upheaval. At first, he'd been so sure that the miles and miles of snow would lead to an eventual reunion and an eventual return to a pseudo-normalcy that would echo pack life in most ways. It had been all he knew, after all.

Because the terse, often tense, times they'd had together as a "herd" were almost an equivalent to the way it felt to wake up in a pack day after day.

Of course, now he knew that pack life and herd life were two very different things, and he often imagined, especially after moving here, that Manfred and Sid were getting along happily in a friendship of ongoing trust and affection. They'd worked hard for it, like most of the animals Diego had met these last few years. Friendship and tiered pack structure weren't really compatible concepts. He'd been used to distrust, passive aggressiveness, and often all-out aggressiveness.

After being out of a pack and on his own for so long, learning about Shira's life with Gutt, a mess he'd become all-too-familiar with, had been eye opening. She was so stubborn about seeing what she wanted to in her leader, and it had taken her a long time to come down off of that environment and realize what he'd been trying to tell her all along – she'd walked from one pack straight into another. Deep down, Diego knew if he'd had the chance, he would have unknowingly done exactly as she had.

There was a change in atmosphere, and Diego immediately knew the mammoths were awake, probably even before they did, and as Julian, and then Peaches, squirmed a little and opened their eyes, Diego nudged at Shira with his nose. Best to give them some privacy.

She cracked an eye and gave him a sarcastic look before closing it again and yawning.

"Good morning." Julian was cooing to his wife from across the clearing in an unexpectedly quiet voice, and Peaches mumbled something back to him. They exchanged a few more whispered words that sounded vaguely like "I love you" and "How are you?"

Then the mammoths were looking at them, and Diego raised one eyebrow with a smirk, nodding to them in greeting.

Peaches grinned and stood up quickly, pulling Julian unsteadily to his feet with her. "Morning! We're ready to get started."

Diego just stared at her for a second in confused surprise. "Started?"

"Exploring the area!" Julian chimed in, yanking on Peaches' trunk in his excitement and turning to her for agreement.

She nodded enthusiastically, looking back to them with this big, bright light in her eyes. Next to her, Julian's expression was similar.

"Yeah, we talked about it, and we want to just…you know…wander around. Maybe with you guys. You could show us stuff!"

They'd said all of that to each other just now? In the looks and the good mornings and the meaningless little questions?

Shira was blinking at them a little too, but then she just nodded coolly and got to her feet with a determined edge to her movements. "Sounds good to me. I'm going to get some food; I can show you a place with your kind of food if you'd like."

"Yes! I'm sooo hungry." Julian bunched up his feet in a way that Diego was beginning to realize was his unconscious signal that he was beyond trying to contain himself.

"So uh, what do you guys eat for breakfast?" Next to him, Peaches looked like she thought she was being sneaky.

Diego just rolled his eyes dramatically and tilted his head toward Shira. She wanted to invite them places and push him into uncomfortable situations? Then she could answer some of the questions.

"Normally we'd hunt, but all the carnivores that live around here catch fish." She ignored his look.

"Oh," both mammoths said in unison.

It worried him that neither had really thought that far ahead. Had Manfred told them anything at all about predators?

Diego gave them a stern look in an attempt to convey exactly what he thought of their unpreparedness. "This whole area is safe for herbivores. The local mammoth herd and saber pack have an agreement. As long as you're still within the pack's territory, you don't have anything to worry about."

"So when you're not around here, you go hunting," Peaches prodded, oblivious to his chiding.

"Well…no…" Whatever Manfred had or hadn't said, Diego should have known this was going to be a question at some point. He'd been so caught up in worrying about them being here, he hadn't really moved on to considering how they should deal with them being here. Stupid.

"The whole Half Peak thing kind of ruined his appetite," Shira drawled before he could think that far ahead.

"That makes sense," Peaches nodded, mollified.

"Let's just go to breakfast," Diego suggested. He was about as hungry as Julian seemed to be, and there was an unease growing in the back of his mind that Peaches' questions were just the very tip of a rather large iceberg. "There are plenty of trees around the area of the lake, so you guys should be able to find enough to eat."

"We'll see about exploring after that," Shira added as they all turned to go.

Both mammoths gave a childish squeal, and Diego fell into step behind his mate with the sinking feeling that an old kind of trouble was brewing on the edge of their arrival. He wasn't sure that launching himself in front of a pack leader would be enough to stop it this time.

Shira and Diego are such a lovely couple, and we're going to see more of their early relationship in later chapters: AKA when it wasn't so lovely. Without the life or death circumstances that define their encounters in Continental Drift, their attitudes are going to tend toward animosity. They have more time to stew in pre-love "hate" for each other, and it's going to get tricky when Shira has the ongoing influence of Gutt clashing with what Diego's telling her.

For context, the lake that this community is situated on is part of the Great Lakes in the United States, and it would be a perfect place for Gutt to come when he felt like getting some terrorizing out of his system. I have feelings about him and his motivations, and we'll definitely be getting into some of those later.

For now, hope you enjoyed the chapter! Please R&R!