Chapter Text
Carried onward by the thrill of discovery, Blue ran for miles and miles. All around were new and different plants, scents, and quick little things that scurried from her path—these, she sometimes swerved to catch, devouring them in sweet, crunching mouthfuls. She ran until her lungs burned on each inhale and the sluggishly bleeding wounds carved into her body threatened to reopen.
She’d done her best to avoid the broad roads that vehicles followed, passing through more heavily forested land instead. Moving ever higher, she crossed several swift rivers to continue up and over a steep rocky ridge to where the trees thinned and the air turned crisp. Tiring at last, her pace slowed to a light trotting jog. She still encountered signs of humans—a rutted road cutting through the rocky earth, or craggy bark marked by bullet holes or splashes of paint, and sometimes, a distant wisp of smoke or glimmer of light caught her eye—but, like the distance from tree to tree, signs of potential danger grew further apart.
As daylight neared and needing rest, Blue picked her way carefully across barren swaths of granite where only a few hardy plants took root to seek shelter amongst the underbrush. She found a suitable spot easily enough. Thorns scraped uselessly against her hide as she shoved through a dense tangle of branches to settle into a nest of grasses, fallen leaves, and soft earth.
In these, the final chill hours of the night, she wrapped her tail around herself and tucked her nose near her hindquarters. She slept lightly—she’d done nothing else since losing her packmates—and, for a short while, dreamt of how things used to be: days full of training and hunting, nights a blur of comforting sameness with her sisters’ bodies tucked warm around her.
When dawn coaxed out animals bigger than simple snacks, Blue stirred. Her scales eagerly soaked up the first bright, slanting rays of the sun as she crept from her hideaway. Her breath hung like mist on each exhale, another novelty. She blew out a fresh puff of air and snapped at it, jaws closing on nothing. Exhale, bite. Exhale, bite. When the amusement passed, she hunted, skirting the edges of a grassy meadow to find deer to be an easy kill. She ate her fill of its most tender parts before leaving the carcass upwind and returning to her thorny nest.
Insects came for the meat during the peak of the day, along with a few scavengers of no concern. She could hear small teeth scrape on bone as fat flies buzzed excitedly, their wings whining and intermittent as they took flight and settled again. Eventually, a flutter of wings from something large enough to move the corpse with each tearing mouthful. But nothing approached that shook the ground with heavy footfalls, just more of the same small creatures, so Blue dozed and healed, emerged to gorge on the deer's ripening flesh, and slept again.
When her wounds ceased oozing, her restlessness returned. The desire to explore rose up with it, a hunger her sisters had never shared. Curiosity had driven her this far, and it pushed her further despite the risk, the need to see and hear and know as strong as her drive to hunt. When she resolved to move onward, she waited once more for night to fall, searching for the soft glow on the horizon once the sun disappeared. There would be humans and buildings—lots of buildings—in that direction. That was where she needed to go.
She set off towards that distant city, arriving in the quietest hours of the night to pad through wide, empty streets, her head swiveling from side to side as she took it all in. The place was vast, acres stamped with boxy dwellings and lined with vehicles. It had been teeming with people during the day, and even now some were still awake, easily observed through illuminated windows. From the safety of shadows, Blue watched a solitary woman eat from a bowl in front of a television in one home, while in another a man sat tucked into a chair with a book to read. Down the block, beyond the bloom of a streetlamp in a near-empty parking lot, an enthusiastic couple fornicated in the backseat of a car. She observed this, too.
The scent of humans saturated every corner, and she took note of the variety of things she found clustered around their homes or discarded in refuse piles. Shiny bits frequently caught her eye, but she claimed nothing. She needed a more permanent den, somewhere less cold and with better cover.
Blue left the city, making her way slowly southward, rarely straying very far from recent signs of humans. She avoided remaining in the same location for more than a few days, just as she’d done on the island when passing through unfamiliar territories. The terrain stretched on seemingly forever, endless with opportunity. Even in the grassy valleys she didn’t come across any other living thing larger than a cow. This world was ripe with prey, and while they were slow and tempting, she left them unmolested in their herds. Animals that were tagged at the ear and branded at the rump meant they were counted.
While she found plenty of places in the mountains to den, the cold nights often left her sluggish, and the lure of lights and the teeming promise of people continued to hook into something raw and primitive inside her. She settled eventually in a series of foothills where the horizon even at its darkest hour bloomed with the glow of habitation. The houses in the nearest sprawling community sat spaced neatly apart from one another, quiet in the late hours, their square little yards scattered with trinkets for her to collect. It became routine for her to slip into the streets after the sun had gone down, peering through windows to better understand how these humans lived their lives. Sometimes she returned with a new bauble or a tasty treat scavenged from metal garbage bins, and sometimes with only a bitter hollowness that no amount of crunching bones could satisfy.
Blue was, she knew, lonely.
In her past, before the fences came down, she’d had contact primarily with two kinds of humans: the ones that carried weapons and the ones that carried research equipment. Both had wanted things from her that she didn’t always care to give. Occasionally, there was a third kind who’d come to look at her. They’d been sometimes delighted, more often stinking with terror, but always curious and staring. The ones in this town, she determined, were like that third sort: soft and vulnerable and generally stupid. Dangerous, she didn’t dare forget, but not much of a threat on their own.
Owen fit into none of those categories. He had been something else. Something beyond. She could hear his voice if she tried. The last words he’d spoken to her with his hand outstretched had meant follow and belonging and had come with conditions shaped like bars. She remembered other things he’d said to her, too, quiet and low in that old life, when he thought he’d needed silly clicking toys to get her attention.
Blue tapped a claw against a flat glass bauble she’d brought back from her last foray. A familiar sharp click echoed in the den.
The other raptors had rarely paid attention when Owen would sit and read aloud to them from books or paper or screens, interested mainly in the morsels rewarded if they remained still and calm long enough. Human words had been difficult enough for them to understand that they didn’t care to learn more than oft-repeated commands, but Blue had craved knowing and so she learned to parse the strange blur of syllables and some of the symbols that matched them. Owen had words just for her. He called her beautiful, gorgeous, and a vicious little murderer, his scent shifting whenever he ran his hand along her neck or down her spine.
Blue let out a wavering throaty hiss. The sound reverberated in the rock walls. The den, large enough for a nest of three, had seemed perfect when she’d first dug out the entrance. Now it stretched too wide, cavernous and empty. She raked furrows into the sandy floor as a thread of sunlight inched across the twitching tip of her tail. If there was nothing for her here, what could she do? Her sisters were dead, and Owen—
She'd left him behind.
If she retraced her route to where it had begun, what then? Enough time had passed that the trail would be gone. She had chosen not to follow, not again, but what use was that now when there was no more pack to lead? Irritable, Blue retreated deeper into the shadows of her den and sniffed at the still-healing puncture wounds scattered along her hide. The worst aches were simply that—dull hurts that held no rotten smell or building heat. The experience of older fights told her the nagging pain would last another week at most.
Even the idea of waiting for a brief handful of days curled her lip away from her teeth.
Her eyes narrowed to slits. She was clever. There would be a way to hunt him down.
She’d always been good at predicting how prey would react, but that was generally a matter of instinct—fight, flight, or protecting a mate or nest. This sort of puzzling out would require understanding. Luckily, Blue had a very long memory.
Her recall extended to memories hazy and indistinct, the things she’d experienced not long out of the shell. Owen hadn’t begun reading to them yet, and she hadn’t understood the mash of tones that spilled out of his blunt-toothed mouth, but she could remember those tones, the soft shape of his words, and passing them through the filter of what she knew now would give her insight.
“You lot are growing so damn fast!” Pride. Amazement.
“Just how smart are you?” Excitement. Fear.
And later, when he let them run loose around his small office and she’d taken interest in the pictures tacked on the walls: “This here? This is a map. It’s like… a drawing of a place. We’re here, on this part of the island.” He tapped a spot amidst a tangle of lines where cubes represented the buildings and red lines traced the perimeter of enclosures. Slowly, he traced a line with his finger from one map to another where she recognized the same jagged shape of the island repeated, only much smaller. “And here’s where we are on a map of the whole world. Tiny isn’t it? I come from waaaay up here in America, which is kind of the opposite of tiny.”
Owen’s expression shifted, his mouth quirking to one side—Amusement (self). Humans revealed so many things in their words when they thought you couldn’t comprehend them.
“You know, before I took this job, I bought a little bit of land right about here. I was going to build a cabin with my own two hands.” He flicked the spot with his forefinger. “Some real alpha male lumberjack shit, and… you can’t understand a word I’m saying, can you, little one.”
At the time, she’d simply cocked her head to the side and trilled. He’d carried her back to the paddock under his arm. Safe. Loved.
She closed her claws around her glass bauble and curled her tail tight around her. If she could find him, she could feel that way again.
When night fell, Blue left her den and began her new quest in earnest. She looked for a map in the cans of refuse people left outside their homes, and in the metal boxes filled with free newspapers that were restocked weekly. Finally, she found one in the flickering light of a bus stop after the lumbering vehicles had stopped their circuit. With the help of the bright red marker indicating the stop’s current location, she matched the grid of lines to the grid of the street. Frustratingly, there was nothing to tell her where she was in relation to Owen’s map. This was too specific. Too close.
With a snarl Blue slashed her claws against the wraparound shelter. She expected to not leave so much as a mark, but as she shook curls of plastic free from her claws she recognized how different the materials here were from those on the island. Almost everything was less durable, more vulnerable, built for humans and only humans. Could that be why the prey here was so easy to catch? Why she’d seen no real trace of others of her kind?
Blue tapped a talon against the concrete thoughtfully and studied the shelter a second time. Words she recognized by their shape on the map were repeated on more than one piece of paper tacked to a nearby wooden pole. She reasoned they must represent a notable location. If she could recall where they'd been labeled on Owen’s map, she would at least have a direction to start from.
If the size of her island had been so tiny in comparison to Owen's vast homelands, she likely had very far to go on only a ghost of a chance. Hope and frustration swelled behind her breastbone as she trotted back towards the houses, foraging now for something durable she could use to carry with her the few small treasures she’d found. When Owen had come for her she hadn’t been able to bring him back to her den before the soldiers with guns had come.
She yearned to show him the objects she prized, from the perfectly round glass baubles to the flat disc of metal and its trailing ribbons. He would like them. He’d always loved to see what she found for him in the jungle.
This time when Blue set out, she didn’t avoid the roadways, but she still saved her traveling for the dark of night. It wasn’t difficult to stay far enough away to be able to use the constant stream of vehicles to guide her without fear of being spotted.
Along these wide, busy roads there were places that vehicles stopped at like watering holes, and she discovered with careful scouting that all of these locations had maps. With people coming and going even in the darkest hours it was tricky to get close enough, but Blue was patient when she needed to be. Stop after stop she checked how far she’d come and calculated how much further she likely had to go. It would be more than twice the length of her first journey down the spine of the mountains, she guessed.
As the towns grew smaller and further apart, the nights grew longer and colder. Prey remained plentiful but her breath steamed more often, and the chill was hard to shake even in full sun. She worried that she'd made a mistake, that she was only chasing a slow and painful death.
But then, a needed respite. A pair of hollow-ribbed dogs joined her, lucky enough to meet her when she’d been heavy-bellied and sated. The brief feeling of pack was a good one, their furred bodies welcome and warm beside her in the rocky cold, and she allowed them to eat their fill on the scraps of her kills. She thought they might run with her for many months, but they ultimately left her at a town where refuse bins promised to provide without long stretches of travel.
Pushing on, Blue woke before the last of the sun left her. She perched atop a rocky outcropping, surveying the landscape that stretched out. Ice gleamed beneath the heavy branches of trees. If she were to turn back here—to stop her searching before the snow forced her to retreat or find a way to adapt—she likely wouldn’t have the drive to try again. And though this was a far different sort of hunting, she was determined to find her prey.
Somehow, eventually, she did.
She’d gotten lucky and caught the scent of him in a tiny town that was little more than two dozen houses clustered around a rusting gas station. Tracking that faint, unforgettable scent led her deeper into the mountains to a muddy dirt road and a perimeter fence twice her height lined with razor wire. Electrified, she guessed, recognizing the wires running in straight lines through the mesh.
She dug a small hole beneath a log to hide her pouch of baubles, just in case, then plucked a bit of grass from the earth. She'd had plenty of practice searching a fenceline for weaknesses, and slowly circled the property, inspecting the posts and touching the grass to the wire to test if the faint hum of energy passing through it waned.
At some point, she triggered some sort of alarm. Owen's scent came to her on the breeze and her ears picked up the faint click of a round being chambered. She retraced her steps, creeping carefully through the brush until there he was, waiting with a rifle braced and ready against his shoulder.
She sat frozen for a moment as she watched him scan the edge of his property, and before his caution turned to something more deadly, she made a sound and emerged slowly from the high grass.
He froze in place when he spotted her. Of course he hadn’t been expecting to see her. Why would he? “Oh god, Blue—” he said on a breath, and slowly he lowered the rifle, thumb engaging the safety before shouldering the strap to show her his hands, palms spread. Harmless.
Threat removed, she trotted towards him, too long waiting for this moment to hesitate.
Owen’s eyes glistened briefly as he gathered himself together. He rose to his full height, lifting his chin and rolling his shoulders back to play at dominance. Not fooled in the slightest, Blue butted her head into his chest.
Abruptly his expression shifted, his nose wrinkling as a laugh sputtered out of him. “Blue, Jesus, you reek. Where have you been sleeping? In a landfill?”
She didn’t understand the last word, but she understood the sentiment. His kind was so sensitive to smells. Remarkably so considering they were unable to track anything but the most pungent scents no farther than a few meters. She chirruped and butted her head against him a second time, trying to communicate to him that finding a spot to bathe hadn’t been high on her list of priorities. He'd been her priority.
Owen put his hand on her neck, palm following the blaze of color that ran down her hide in a familiar caress. “You hurt anywhere?” he asked, and the gentle stroke turned searching. His fingers pressed near old scars and new, and found knots that made her snarl in warning. Slowly, he moved to prodding along where her hide went from armored ridges to the more delicate scales of her belly.
She craned her neck as he inspected her carefully from tip to tail, noting when he seemed concerned and when he seemed surprised. It was only after he checked nearly every inch of her that he brought his hands back up to her neck and head. She chirruped again, pleased at the attention.
Owen looked like he wanted to say something more, but he straightened, striving to project more authority. Blue whuffed her amusement out with a breath that stirred the short wisps of his hair.
“You absolutely need a bath. And when was the last time you had your teeth brushed? It’s disgusting.”
Not only did a bath mean warm water and more long sweeping touches, it meant welcome and also forgiveness. A wash of emotion rippled through the full length of her, sending her tail twitching and her talon tapping against the hard ground.
Owen led her into his home through a sliding glass door. A sharpness in his tone warned her to refrain from exploring. She pitched forward with curiosity, leaning as far as she could into the rest of the room without stepping on the soft carpeted surface that he clearly didn’t want her on. His scent enveloped her, hanging warm in the air and infused in the very fibers of the building. The smells of the rest of his pack were there, too, faded enough that she gauged they’d been gone for many weeks.
“Over here. You’re lucky I went with the whole walk-in open design trend.” Owen stood beside a doorway and hung the rifle on the wall beside it.
Blue scented the main room again, impressing the smells and layout into her memory.
“C’mon girl. It’s just a bit of soap and water.”
She tore herself away from the mix of smells—they’d still be there afterwards—and padded into the other room. The floor was colder, covered in slick tile. She unconsciously shifted her weight to keep her talons from clicking with each step. The floor was level around the toilet and the sink, and most of the room until it suddenly wasn’t. She dipped her head down to inspect the gently sloping angle with a close eye.
“I can’t believe you found me.” Owen stretched an arm over a low wall to turn on the taps, and Blue brought her head up sharply as a series of nozzles sputtered and hissed. The flow of water turned steady, pitter-pattering onto the tile where the droplets gathered into a stream. Blue cocked her head as she moved to where Owen wanted her, swiveling around to continue watching the tiny river rush towards a hole in a floor and disappear underground. The angle was for drainage, of course.
“Good girl,” Owen said, and she lifted her head in time to see him strip to the waist.
On the island, when she’d been small, a bath had been a plastic bin and a sponge, then later, a strong hose and large brush affixed to the end of a stick applied from the other side of a metal cage. Owen had rarely bathed them once they reached maturity. He’d preferred training exercises and leaving most other tasks to the human called Barry. But Blue had never forgotten the feeling of being cradled in his hands, or the crooning sounds that accompanied the sensation of warm water and a soft sponge.
As Owen approached her with the vulnerable expanse from his neck to his belly bared, Blue reared upright, a flicker of fear and nervousness and something else warring with the urge to let him close. The water cascading out of the wall fell like rain along the long stretch of her spine. Her gaze skimmed across Owen's body—the span of soft pale flesh with its light scatter of fur. She could rip him open so easily, spill his innards with a swipe. No matter how far she’d traveled to get here, a dark, hungry part of her couldn’t help but read him as prey. He was smaller than her now, but his presence loomed large before her as she allowed him to ease into the space with her.
“That’s it,” he said, never once dropping his eyes. In a moment, the prey sensation faded. “Just a quick wash to get the stink off you.”
He knew she could kill him, that he had no protection from her teeth or her claws. And yet he didn’t flinch when she reached a foreleg out and ran the blunt, curving backs of her talons over the ripple of muscle along his ribs. Trust.
“Watch the goods,” he said with a bit of a laugh.
Owen soaped his hands until they were thickly lathered. He held eye contact as he reached to touch Blue high on her neck. She let him, and her claws twitched and flexed as his hands slid effortlessly along her hide, slipping down the long column of her throat to spread towards the joints of her arms. She extended her neck to its fullest, inviting his hands to massage their way back up along the muscles of her throat. She swallowed as his thumbs dug in and moved in one long sweeping push back up to the hinge of her jaw. The sensation nearly mimicked another raptor leaning in and rubbing their head up against her. Bonding.
She trilled softly as he did it again, and as he ran his palms over the sides of her face. His fingers curled over her muzzle and scratched lightly at the soft, sensitive skin under her jaw. Something stirred in her, not so dark as bloodlust but just as raw, and she thought of twining the whole length of her body against his, tail coiling around him, pinning him to her.
Her head jerked up, startled by the sizzle that shot along her nerves. It came from the place where she’d changed, back when he'd first left her. After she'd spent so long alone with no other raptors to take as a mate and fill her den with eggs.
“You okay, Blue?” Owen remained still, cautious. His hand on her back pressed firmly as he looked her directly in the eye.
She rubbed her nose against his shoulder to signal that she was fine and he resumed washing her, thorough in his attention. She leaned into his touch more heavily, talons tapping as he scrubbed one leg before the other, and slowly, the flesh buried inside her body stirred.
“Is that—" He paused, his hands low on her underside.
She twisted her head around to give him a questioning look.
"I'm just going to have a little feel, okay, Blue?” Gently, he prodded the area around her cloaca and his eyes widened as his fingers explored the weight of the cock swelling inside her. “Well, I guess you’re uh—you’re packing now. That’s new. I thought they finally pulled those frog genes out of the raptor line.”
He spoke a lot more words she didn’t comprehend, as if he needed to fill the silence, but she was only half listening as he more briskly washed beneath her tail. He detached one of the shower heads from the wall to rinse the soap from her, the spray much gentler than the hose that used to rinse them off through the bars. She didn’t mean to make a sound, but as it passed over her belly, a high, wavering call rippled out of her.
Owen backed a step away as the sound echoed off the tile. “Whoa, Blue, that’s not what I’m here for.”
Her tail twitched, stretched out and stiffened even though he’d stopped touching her there. She could feel the rush of blood thickening her cock more keenly, readying it to push beyond the sheath of her body.
Thankfully, he didn’t take his hand off her, palm still pressed to her haunches, digging into the muscle there as he angled the water to flow along her back. It was a different pleasurable feeling, calming and comforting when he hit the same spots he’d scratch after a hunt. The mating urge subsided, and she leaned against him in the small space, soaking up the feeling of pack and belonging.
She chirped as the last filth of the miles that had separated them swirled down the drain.
“Missed you more than you know,” he said, and patted her fondly. “We’ll figure out what to do about that whole downstairs business later. For now, what am I going to do about your breath?”