My c o l d desire
to hear the boom, boom,
b o o m of your heart

She was dreaming, but of what? Who could say? The mute night did not reveal her secrets to just anyone. Tesseract was probably the only one that knew anything truly about the dark and russet creature. Her mother misunderstood her, knowing only that she had attacked and killed several of her half siblings. Even Tesseract did not truly share such vengeance for unclean blood. But the three squirming pups that lay at her side were pure. They were produced by two creatures so intwined that they may as well have been imprints.

Her sleep was abruptly stopped, a sharp bark echoed down the chasm of her den and in her half-sleep she did not recognize the noise. Her nose smelt Tesseract but the den always smelt of her lover. Of her equal. Of her brother. There was the slightest scent of rabbit and her ears pricked forward but the desire to protect her children far outweighed her desire to eat herself. She propped herself up to a semi-sitting position, instinctively her lips curled up over the pearly white teeth and a rush of air escaping from her throat was the closest thing to a snarl that she could produce. She tried desperately not to move her hind legs, knowing the pain to be barely tolerable. She was not bleeding in an excessive amount but she was pretty sure she was swollen and bruised back there. Caligula silently cursed herself for not hiding the scent of the blood. Now some rogue wolf was coming to eat her children and she would sure as hell make sure that she at least gave him a run for his money before he got that chance.

And yet, when it was Tesseract that stuck his nose into the den, with rabbits that were still fresh, Caligula slowly dropped the facade that she could in fact take another wolf right now. Instead her ears folded back, and her tail weakly thumped against the heavily bedded den. Even that was short lived as she felt pain stab up her nerves. She nudged the three girls, as if to present them to their father. In the dim light it was difficult to see the two of them that were so dark but they were there, alternating between suckling healthily or sleeping to recover from the hard birth that they had been subjected to. There was a soft content smile on Caligula's features and it broadened as he complimented her. She lowered herself back down, her body language relaxing. With Tess here, she had no empty worries.

It was only as her mind thought back about the rabbits that she shifted and slowly rose up to retrieve the large one from the cache that Tesseract had brought back. She was ravenous but so sore. Her hind legs trembled in the effort and she briefly ignored the screams of the three girls at being deprived of their meals. She kept a ear trained on them while she broke the flesh of the rabbit, immediately going for the liver, the lungs, the heart, and the rest of the viscera that was easiest to pull from the carcass. She barely tasted the creature that Tesseract had brought her, preferring to gulp chunks of meat down as if she hadn't eaten in weeks. When she hardly left anything but the skeleton and skin, she moved back to the girls, licking them and moving to them to one of the drier areas of the den. First the one that so perfectly blended the characteristics of both of them, then the one that took after herself, and finally the one that was the inverted version of Tesseract. She settled near them and gave the soft smile of a content creature.