thirty-three hours. [attn: errin, kai, liz!]

[mnemosyne]

Charlotte does not like to drive.

The first half-dozen times Erich tried to get her behind the wheel, the theurge refused to touch the keys, her arms crossed firmly over her narrow little torso, looking tense. Not the shell-shocked tension that turns her stiff as a corpse and saucer-eyed some small prey animal, but the other tension, sullen and sulky, some adolescent protest against the world. The pedals were too far away. She couldn't reach. She didn't like the engine or the noise it made. She didn't -

- he convinced her, eventually. Took some time to find the right tack. Asked her what she would do if he was hurt and she told him: she'd heal him. Asked her what she would do if he was tainted and she said: she'd cleanse him, or summon a spirit that would. Asked her what she would do if he was poisoned or - well, Charlotte-wolf had an answer for every scenario until Erich asked her what she would do if he was dead. They were in one of those cheap hotels off the side of an interstate, somewhere in one of those long states that remain nameless to this day in her head - just long expanses of mostly flat though sometimes rolling land covered over with corn, bisected by long, straight stretches of asphalt. The sort where Charlotte never disturbed the sheets and refused to bring her pillow in from the car and slept curled up on her bed, a small white wolf, noise tucked beneath her tail. She charged him, then, the way Erich Storm's Teeth charges his enemies. With a sort of abandon, a thoughtless commitment to -

--

So she learned.

Plowed her way into a half-dozen cornfields and took her turn thereafter, very occasionally, on the road. Places where the traffic was light and the lines were straight, in broad daylight because, well. Charlotte all too often has many other things on her mind.

But still: Charlotte does not like to drive.

Hates the truck, all metal monster, the way it cages them in. When she's a passenger she can tip her forehead against the windowglass and watch the countryside roll by, all dreamy, half here, half on the other side, her breath fogging the window and distorting her view, giving everything a foggy halo. When she's driving, she has to sit up close, both hands on the wheel, and remember eight things too many at the same time. And roads: roads as black and yellow and far too straight. They make you follow them when maybe you'd rather go some other direction. Full of laws and directions and signs and instructions and demands, roads, and on the otherside, Erich, they are bright humming blue corridors of Weaver energy, and even the most minor ones are crawling with spiders, and sometimes you can feel the layers of earth beneath the asphalt, shivering with potential energy, aching shrug them off. Shrug them all off.

--

In the cab of the truck, Charlotte's quiet around Ingrid. Alarmed and slightly-in-awe of the Shadow Lord Ragabash, with her sleek clothing and that animal presence that drives away all human beings. Charlotte feels neither like a thug nor a predator: she is skin-and-bones, stark as a starving bird, all angles and edges with strangers - strange humans and strange wolves, all borderlands. All boundaries. All places-where-things-meet, and only wolves can see the glory of her blood, the way it limns her with that halo of Luna's promise: Falcon's wayward daughter.

As a passenger she sits with her seatbelt fastened and her heels on the seat and her knobby knees sharply bent and her farmer's tan (because all that time she spent learning to surf, she did it wearing an oversized t-shirt over her bathing suit, shrouded in it, and her tan covers her arms up to her elbows only, and her legs from mid-thigh down. Odd bits of her shoulders and all of her face and neck) and her arms wrapped around her calves and her nose against the glass. Quiet with Ingrid (maybe she says, "Uhm, that's a nice sword." Or "Uhm. That's a tinycar." Or "Uhm. Erich really missed you. He talks about you all the time.") and chatty with Erich. Chatty chatty chatty, watching the bird's trail on the otherside or discoursing at great length on subjects he cannot really follow, these flights of ideas that come and go. The way trees remember slow and how sap moves and why the desert through which they are driving feels so much more alive than Iowa (cornlandia!) and and and -

Erich paces and paces and paces on the ferry but Charlotte loves it, finds a place as close to the prow as she can and sits where she can smell the ocean and watch it coming toward them in dark, swimming waves, her face turned into the wind. Is delighted when they make landfall and on and on.

--

1999 Broadway has Charlotte looking up. Up and up and up. She's doubtful; she does not understand how a Sept can be contained somehow in one of those things but she can feel the potentiality up there, someplace above, someplace high, someplace where winged things and soar and stormclouds reign and lightning splits the night, coruscant.

Spends all that time in security rigid and wide-eyed but the delay, this last obstacle is just enough to spark the faint corona of her rage so that when she gives them her deedname she says it not with her usual half-swallowed shame over it but a sort of growlingly adolescent energy that makes it sound - well, defiant, like a mantle or a promise rather than an anchor.

And, and, and - upstairs, our Charlotte hangs back, like she doesn't want to intrude on the reunion between Erich and Melantha - except, this is no intrusion at all, and after Erich Storm's Teeth swings the kinswoman around Charlotte grabs her from behind and aslant, wraps spindly arms around the Fury's strong, familiar form, buries her face in Melantha's hair and just -

- breathes.