Page 64 of Feral Keep

I sit with him, present but not touching. The camp-women didn’t know how to be gentle—we knew how to be here. Gretchen sat with me the night after my mother’s anniversary, the night I couldn’t sleep, the night the shaking came and wouldn’t stop. She didn’t hold me. She sat on the barracks floor with her shoulder against the wall and her breathing steady, and the steadiness was enough. I could find the rhythm underneath the shaking and follow it out.

I breathe, steady, slow, for him—giving him a rhythm to follow if he needs one.

He breathes, ragged at first, then slower, matching.

“I was a teacher.”

The sentence comes that evening. Full. Subject, verb, object. The longest construction he’s managed since the rut broke, and it sits in the air between us with the weight of something excavated.

“Third grade.” He pauses. Frowns. “No. Fourth. I think fourth.”

His eyes are distant. Focused on a point somewhere past the root walls, past the canopy, past the thirteen years of feral silence. Seeing a room I’ll never see. Desks, maybe. Chalkboards. Things from before that I barely remember existing.

“What did you teach them?” I ask.

The question surprises him. His eyes come back to me, the gold sharp, present. Like he expected me to sit in silence, and instead I asked a question. Asking a question means I want to know, and wanting to know means something he doesn’t have a word for yet.

“Reading,” he says. “Math. But reading—that was the thing.” His hands move in front of him, shaping something invisible. “The moment when the letters stop being shapes. When they become words. When a kid goes from looking at marks on paper to hearing a voice in their head.” He stops. His hands drop. “I lived for that moment.”

The teacher. Under the crimson skin, the horns, the nine feet of muscle, the cock that filled me for a month—a man who taught children to read. Who lived for the moment when shapes became words.

The feeding. The tending. The patience that outlasted the feral wall. The utensils carved from bone. The nest deepened and rebuilt, season after season. Thirteen years of building a home for no one.

Not just instinct. The muscle memory of a man who spent his life taking care of small things—children, letters, the fragile, breakable process of learning. The mutation stripped his mind, stripped his language, stripped everything that made him Alexander. It couldn’t strip the part that tends.

“Billy could read,” he says. Quiet. “He was—good at it. Sam was almost there. Dickie was too little.” A pause. His jaw works. “Sam would’ve gotten it. That year.”

The tremor comes again. His wings shift against his back—the membranes rustling, catching what’s left of the daylight in dull red flashes, the involuntary movement of a body that doesn’t know what to do with the thing inside it.

I move closer, just a foot, close enough that if he reached, he’d find me.

He doesn’t reach. He sits in the grief the way I sat in the camps, enduring because the alternative is worse. The feral brain held this for thirteen years. Held the territory, held the instinct to provide and tend and keep, and for the last eight of them, held the grave. The holding is over now. The wall is down. What was behind it is pouring out, and it looks like a nine-foot male shaking in the furs while the fire burns low and the names of three dead boys fill the air.

“Billy,” he says again. “Sam. Dickie.”

He says them like a list. Like attendance. Like a teacher calling names in a classroom, waiting for the small voices to answer.

No voices answer.

My palm finds his—not near, but on, flat against the back of his massive hand, my fingers barely covering the first knuckles. The contact is deliberate. A choice—the way shifting my hips in the rut was a choice, the way saying Red was a choice.

He turns his hand over. Wraps my fingers in his. The grip is careful. The claws retracted. In the firelight his crimson skin swallows my dark hand whole, my fingers disappearing past the second knuckle inside his palm. The heat of his palm spreading through my skin.

He holds my hand in the firelight and grieves for the children who never grew up.

“Your—” He stops. His thumb moves once across my knuckles, the smallest stroke. He tries again. “Your people.”

The question sits in the firelight. Nobody has ever asked me that. In the camps, your people were whoever slept in the next bunk, until they weren’t.

“My mother,” I say. “The settlement. Until I was fourteen.”

His gold eyes stay on me. He waits the way I waited for him—no pushing, no filling the quiet.

“She grew things.” The words come out slow, rusty from disuse. “Herbs in cracked pots. A vine she trained up the shelter wall. She gave the plants names—silly small names, like they might come when called.” My throat tightens. I keep going, because he said three names into this fire and I can manage one. “She used to oil my hair on the ground outside our shelter. She hummed while she worked. I can’t remember the song anymore. Just the feel of it in her chest, against my back.”

“Fourteen,” he says. Careful. Already braced, because he knows how these stories end now. Everyone’s story ends the same way.

“The Ordained came at night. She didn’t make it past the first hour. I got the intake line.” Camp-speech, flat and short, because flat and short is the only way it comes out at all. “Five years back. It doesn’t feel like five.”