The Wolf Queen & The Alpha Brat

(Rhydian)

The argument starts after breakfast.

we’ve both been carrying things that are too large for the amount of sleep we’ve been getting and the particular pressure of two people who love each other trying to manage a war while also managing each other.

It starts, when I reach for my armor.

"You’re not on the line," Elena says, from the table where she’s reading a report. She doesn’t look up.

"I know I’m not on the line."

"Then why—"

"Because I’m running the internal perimeter and the internal perimeter requires me to move fast and moving fast in a shirt is—"

"Senna said—"

"Senna said no impact to the left side. Wearing armor isn’t impact."

She looks up. "Wearing armor and then moving fast in it when you don’t have full rotation—"

"I have full rotation."

"You had three-quarter rotation this morning."

"It’s better than this morning."

"That’s not full rotation."

I put the armor down. Not because she’s wrong — she’s not entirely wrong, the rotation is still restricted, Senna said one more day — but because I need a moment to figure out which argument I’m actually making.

"I can’t keep doing this," I say.

She’s quiet.

"I can’t keep being the person who stays inside," I say. "I understand why you need me to, I understand the logic, I’ve agreed to it twice and I’ll probably agree to it again because you’re usually right about these things." I look at her. "But I can’t keep being protected. It’s not how I work."

"I know how you work."

"Then you know this is—"

"I know it’s hard." She sets the report down. Her hands flatten on the table. "I know it costs you something every time. I know you look at the formation and you see where you should be and you feel—" She stops. Starts again. "I know."

"Then stop—"

"I can’t lose you." She says it flat. No management, no Alpha composure, just the sentence, sitting there in the morning air between us. "I can’t, Rhydian. I’ve done the math on everything in this war. Every variable, every risk, every possible outcome. And you’re the one thing I can’t do the math on because when I try to calculate what happens if you don’t come back I can’t—" She stops. Presses her mouth together. "The numbers don’t work."

I look at her.

Her hands are still flat on the table. She’s not looking at me, she’s looking at them, and I can see what it cost her to say that — not because she said something she’s ashamed of, but because Elena doesn’t put things like that out in the open and it takes something to do it.

"You can’t protect me by keeping me inside," I say. Quieter now.

"I know."

"If something gets through the line—"

"I know, Rhydian."

"Then what are we actually arguing about."

She looks up.

Her eyes are doing the thing they do when she’s feeling something she’d rather be thinking instead. I know this look. I’ve been collecting it for months — the specific quality of it, the grey gone a shade darker, the particular stillness of someone trying to manage a feeling that doesn’t want to be managed.

"I had to leave you at the post," she says. Very quiet. "In the camp. I had to leave you there and come home because there was no other option, because the Pack needed me and Senna needed time and there was nothing I could do, and I sat in the war room and I stared at the eastern map and I—" She stops. Something crosses her face. "I’ve been running this Pack alone for a year. I’ve been fine. I know how to be alone and functional, I’ve done it, I’m good at it." She pauses. "I don’t know how to be alone anymore. That’s what I’m not saying properly."

The room is quiet.

I pick up my jacket from the chair. Not the armor. Just the jacket, which is warm and doesn’t require arguing about.

I cross to the table.

She watches me come around to her side. I pull out the chair beside her and sit in it, and the table is between us and the morning is coming through the window and neither of us speaks for a moment.

"I’m not going anywhere," I say.

"You were literally—"

"I know where I was." I look at her. "I’m still here. And the left side is better than yesterday and will be better tomorrow than today, and I’ll be on the internal perimeter where you need me, and if the line holds we’ll be home by tonight arguing about something else." I pause. "We’re going to be arguing about something else for the rest of our lives. That’s just what this is."

She looks at me.

"Is that okay?" I ask.

Something shifts in her face. Small. Soft. The thing underneath all the rest of it.

"Yes," she says.

I take her hand off the table. Hold it. She lets me, which is still something, that she lets me, that two months of lessons and slow trust have gotten us to a place where she just lets me take her hand and doesn’t manage the response.

"We’re both terrible at this," I say.

"At what."

"Needing someone." I look at her hand in mine. "Neither of us knows how to do it without it feeling like losing something."

She’s quiet for a moment.

"Speak for yourself," she says, but her thumb moves against my knuckles, and that movement has nothing to do with the sentence.

"I am," I say. "And also you."

She almost laughs. That half-caught sound she makes when something lands funny before she’s decided whether to let it.

We sit for a moment.

Then I reach across and pull her chair around and she comes with it, turning toward me, and I get an arm around her and she— doesn’t resist. She puts her forehead against my shoulder and I can feel her exhale the exact weight of the morning in one slow breath.

"The perimeter," she says. Muffled slightly.

"I know."

"You take the cloth if you need to carry anything."

"I’m not carrying—"

"It’s a bandage, Rhydian, not a statement."

"It’s a very specific statement."

"It’s functional." She pulls back slightly. Looks at me. Her hair is down from whatever she’d put it up in, some of it falling forward, and she doesn’t fix it. "Take the cloth. And check in with Brennan every hour."

"That’s not the internal perimeter protocol."

"It’s your protocol. Until Senna clears you."

I look at her.

"Fine," I say.

We look at each other for a moment in the particular way we look at each other after arguments that don’t fully resolve but arrive somewhere better than where they started.

---

That evening is quiet.

Not peaceful exactly — the settlement never fully goes quiet anymore, there’s always a patrol moving, someone on the gate, the specific low-level alertness of a place waiting for something. But the main push doesn’t come. Marcus’s force held position for the third day running, which Brennan says suggests either coordination problems or a waiting strategy, and either way we got through the day without the eastern line breaking.

Elena comes in late.

I’m in bed, I told Senna I’d be by ninth hour, which I actually managed, I feel a certain amount of satisfaction about. The fire is low but not out. I tended it before I lay down.

She comes in and takes her boots off and sits on the edge of the bed and just stays there for a moment with her elbows on her knees and her head slightly down. The kind of sitting that means everything has been given to the day and there’s nothing left to arrange.

"Come here," I say.

She lies down. Not beside me, actually on me — her cheek on my chest, her hand flat on my ribs just below the bandaging. Her weight is real and warm and completely present.

I put my arm around her.

She’s asleep in under four minutes. I know because I’m counting her breathing, the way I learned to from the early weeks when sleep was harder for both of us and the dark had a different quality. Four minutes from horizontal to gone.

I look at the ceiling crack.

Northeast to southwest. Wider near the middle. The lifted plaster above the wardrobe.

I run my hand through her hair. Slowly. The way she used to do with me when I woke from nightmares, the particular gentleness of it, unhurried, no destination.

She makes a small sound. Doesn’t wake up.

I keep going.

Outside the window the settlement is doing its night. Patrol sounds, occasional voices, the fire in the main yard visible as a glow against the dark.

My side pulls slightly when I breathe deep. I breathe shallow.

I look at the ceiling.

I’ll fix the crib joint tomorrow.

The rotation is better. Senna will see it tomorrow.

She said I love you too, in daylight, in the morning, out loud.

I keep my hand in her hair.

She sleeps.

I stay awake a little longer, just to feel it — the weight of her, warmth, and her breathing against my chest.

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