Page 45 of Feral Keep

The braids are gone now. He washed them out over the last few days, working his talons gently through the section he holds, until the careful plaits dissolved into waves. At first I thought he was ruining them. Gretchen braided so tight, neat, like she was building walls around my head. But when he finished, what was left felt different.

Alive.

My throat tightens around that word when I put it next to my own scalp, something turning over slow underneath my ribs. Alive isn’t a word camp-brain hands out easy. Alive was surviving the count, surviving the cough that took the girl two bunks down, surviving another morning the guards didn’t pick your name. It wasn’t supposed to mean anything as small and stupid as hair.

I’m alone in the main chamber for maybe ten minutes. He’s at the edge of the warren, doing something with the thermal vents, his broad shoulders moving as he works. The light is afternoon-bright, coming through the membrane-walls in shades of amber. Morning insects have started their grinding chorus in the branches above. The air carries warm stone and a faint mineral tang off the vents, a smell I’ve stopped flinching at. My hands drift up without permission. I touch my own head.

My fingers half-expect a voice to bark them back down. Hands are for working, not for touching yourself. No voice comes. Nobody’s counting me. The quiet just sits there, and slowly, my hand stays where it is.

The texture under my fingers is nothing like what was there before.

The grey-white ends are still smooth, that slicked-back camp smoothness. But the roots—Christ. The roots are thick and springy, coils that resist my fingers, that push back against the pressure I apply. There’s shine in it. Actual shine, like something living and fed. Like something that’s been getting what it needs. When I lean my nose toward it, it smells green and warm, not the flat tallow stink of the grease Gretchen used to work in to keep it lying down.

My own face is a stranger to me now. Haven’t seen my reflection since I was fourteen, since before the raids. Before Gretchen’s camps. The mirror in the settlement was broken during evacuation—I remember the woman trying to smooth my hair before we ran, her hands shaking, because appearances mattered even then. Especially then.

Four years without a mirror does something to a person. You stop being a face you can picture and start being a set of jobs your body can still do. Lift this. Carry that. Don’t fall down. Somewhere in there I forgot I had a face at all. My throat goes tight thinking about it now. It’s the tightness that comes before crying, except crying was never safe, so it just sits there. Something in me wants to anyway.

I push up onto my knees and cross to the stone basin he keeps filled near the vents. The water sits still, flat as glass in the amber light. I lean over it slow, one hand braced on the cold rim, half-expecting nothing, half-expecting a stranger.

There’s a shape. Dark eyes. The curve of a cheekbone. Hair lifting soft around my head where it used to lie flat and dead against my scalp. Not a whole face—just pieces, breaking apart every time my breath disturbs the surface.

“I don’t know you,” I tell it, quiet, and my own voice comes back off the stone walls strange to my ears.

I sit back on my heels and go back to my hair instead. That much I can still recognize.

The texture under my fingers tells me everything.

I run my fingers through from root to end, slow, and the difference is stark. Grey-white ends like brittle straw. Roots like something being pulled from dark, rich soil. New growth. The camps tried to strip everything from me—they broke my body, emptied my ribs, made me afraid of my own skin. Gretchen tried to keep what was left neat. Managed. Contained.

This growing underneath her braids is mine.

The coils resist me when I try to smooth them. That’s the part that catches in my throat. They’re not cooperative. They’re just growing the way Black hair grows when it’s fed, when it’s got moisture, when it’s not being tortured into submission. The springs of it push back against my fingers, and I have to work to trace a single coil from root to end. Halfway down, I find a tangle—actual hair knots where the braids are starting to dissolve—and I work through it slowly. It’s thicker than I expected. Heavier. Like my hair used to have substance and I forgot.

The shine in it is what undoes me.

I follow one coil, trace the spiral, and something in my chest tightens, hard and sudden, like a fist closing around something it’s not ready to hold. It’s small. It’s only hair. But my hands are shaking slightly as I touch it again, and again. This is mine. This is growing. This is happening whether the camps wanted it or not.

The shake in my hands isn’t only the good kind. Some of it is grief, plain and ugly, for every month Gretchen kept these roots scraped flat and hidden, for every version of me that never got to feel this. There’s no word ready for a feeling that’s glad and furious at the same time, so I just let my hands keep shaking and don’t ask them to stop.

He comes back before I catch him moving. The smell of him reaches me first—warm char and something wet underneath, like rain hitting hot rock—before his shadow falls across the chamber, tall, broad, that dark silhouette that used to terrify me. Now it just means he’s here. Now it means the cold in my shoulders loosens slightly.

But I jerk my hands down fast.

My pulse spikes before my brain catches up with why. Caught. Caught touching myself like it’s mine to touch, caught with my guard down, and some old wired-in part of me is already bracing for a voice to ask what I think I’m doing. Stupid. His eyes are already on me, that golden gaze tracking the heat crawling up my neck. The sharp ears rotate toward me, attention tightening.

Nothing happens. He doesn’t move for a switch or a strap. He just watches. My heart keeps hammering another few beats before it believes it.

“What,” he says, and it’s not really a question.

“Nothing.”

He moves across the chamber in that too-smooth way, the one that should be threatening but isn’t anymore—not when the threat has spent the last eighteen days fucking me with my own pleasure as the priority. His tail curls once, lazy, uncertain. When he stops in front of me, he’s close enough that the heat radiating from him makes the air shimmer.

One large taloned hand rises toward me, and I know exactly what it can do. What it’s been doing.

But he reaches for my head. Gentle.

He gathers a section of my hair near the roots and lifts it slowly, watching the way the darker coils catch the light falling through the membrane-walls. His breathing shifts. Something in his chest rumbles, too low for me to interpret, and he turns the section of hair in his fingers, examining it like he’s reading text. The coils spiral over his talons in a way that makes him go very still.