This day is one full of many surprises. Death and new ties and memories that abound. There is a strain between them for they are both bogged down on this day. Praetor with his fathers defeat (yet there is also lightness in this moment) and Aithne with her re-emergence of vulnerability. It is not kind of her to rip him from his family so soon upon their arrival yet Aithne, normally so practical, cannot help doing it anyways. There is a selfish need within her in this moment that swells up and consumes with his nearness. It is like a fog is lifting as his scent swirls in her nostrils and spreads into her bloodstream. Addicting and potent it erases the bad - if his scent did that, what of his touch? It is commendable that he pauses to make sure that his family move on their way and Aithne waits and reins in her impatience, dogged due to her flickering memories. Pressure, pain, loss. Powerlessness.

Then they are moving and he is close at her tail. With each step it seems her body drags down, weighed, and once she deems them far enough away she stops and turns to him. Ears swivel forward to catch his voice, his soothing voice as she looks at him and feels his worry. He is sorry he was not there. Should she be mad at him for this? That he was not here to protect her? Nay! The idea... once it might have been preposterous to her. Insulting. Now the idea was faintly attractive as her belly squeezes, remembering the hot blood that had filled it in her rage.

"No!" she gasps suddenly and she steps towards him. Her eyes have a crazed look in them quite suddenly as she stands a hair breadth away from his own muzzle. "You had to take care of your family just as I had to take care of my pack. They are one in the same. I am glad you are here." The last words are spoken with a sigh of relief even as she steps forward and does what she has longed for but feared. She places her cheek against the side of his neck and presses into it, inhaling and consuming his touch. Her body shudders beneath the contact as if trying to reject it.

"I killed him." She whispers the words into his fur and they are lost sounding, for she does not talk about Kaius even though he might assume so, but of her past. "For what he did to me. I killed him." Praetor would not judge her. He had proven he would be a constant in her life, she thinks, and their bond demanded that right? Look what had happened to Andras when his bond snapped, would it not be so with them?