Holds-the-Fire's own eyes widen at his reaction, and she shoves herself backward, overbalancing both of them. Chester windmills, coughing, and sits heavily on the forest floor. Holds-the-Fire dances backward, yipping orange, and backward-rolls to a crouching stop, panicking enough for them both.

Chester blinks. The two lock eyes.

Then his chest shakes with laughter, and his lips follow. He can't help it. They're in unerring cosmic emotional sync and yet have no body language in common. It's perfectly ridiculous.

Holds-the-Fire is paralyzed for a moment, reading him, and then her own lilac flares, along with a vivid indigo of relief. She chuffs. Chester doubles over in laughter, and she goes bright blazing lilac, dropping to her knees and gasping for breath, and then they're helpless on the ground together, yaps and guffaws mingling in pleasant catharsis.

As the laughter subsides, Chester sits weakly back upright. "What was that?"

Holds-the-Fire sits up, too, her lilac receding into a pale violet curiosity riding a background muddy orange. I see I have learned nothing of human ways. Is that not how you express gratitude?

"That was way too intimate for gratitude," Chester says. He can see Holds-the-Fire shading into creamsicle, so he adds, "Intimate, like, um… a precursor to, ah, mating."

That muddy orange spikes to full vibrancy. I was just thanking you for your lessons! she protests… although some threads of olive green also stir, as some corner of her brain gets stuck on the idea. Tooth-licking has nothing to do with mate-pairing! It is an everyday gesture!

Chester, too, feels not-entirely-unwelcome feelings stir back up. But this time, he clamps a rigid cage down around them. The Holy Mother's teachings are very clear—thoughts of sex are a distraction from transcendence, only to be considered once already enlightened—and now that the intoxication of the moment has passed, doubts are creeping in. He wouldn't be delaying Holds-the-Fire's transcendence if she wanted to tease those mutual green-blues to life, but the Holy Mother already thinks dimly enough of his own spiritual journey, and maybe he should take some time to sort out the two enlightened beings' conflicting directions.

"I understand, but maybe we shouldn't lick each other just yet," he says reluctantly. "It might give me the wrong ideas."

Holds-the-Fire forces gray over a disappointed rose-pink as she, too, fights to tuck those green threads away. I understand, she finally gray-says, and then seems to have second thoughts. Green surges back, along with muddy brown pride, but she sits alone with those colors for a few moments, then licks her hand and uses it to smooth down her hair, letting the hues dwindle.

Chester finishes shoving his own intrusive thoughts back into the shadowy corners of his mind, then coughs into his sleeve. "Is this the same misunderstanding we had back on the boulder?" he asks, trying to break the conversational lull. "When I went limp and you, uh, startled me?"

Holds-the-Fire shades black as she thinks about that one. Perhaps, she says. At first we were just human-talking. But then you gave submission words, and a submission display. Then you would not let me accept it. Light violet and muddy orange mix. Is sniffing your tail-hole and under-tail also part of mate-pairing for humans?

Chester feels a flush rise to his cheeks. "You probably don't ever want to do anything with other humans', uh, tail-holes." He squirms. "Unless they ask. But, uh, if they do, that would be a mating thing."

Holds-the-Fire's face twists, and she tries to suppress ripples of creamsicle. Humans are weird. What have tail-scents to do with mating?

Chester holds up his hands. "Don't ask me."

She considers that, colors twisting, then lets them fade away back to light violet. So how do humans express gratitude?

"With words," Chester says.

Words? Holds-the-Fire peach-says. That is all?

"… Yes?" Chester responds. "Almost all human interaction is through words."

Holds-the-Fire stares at him, a dozen colors blurring together. That is sad, she finally says, with the swirling blue and yellow of sympathy.

"You'd be surprised," Chester says, a bit surprised himself. "You can say a lot more with words than you can with emotions. I could tell you were afraid earlier, for example, but it took words to help us understand how to make it better."

But you do not need to understand gratitude, she says. You need to feel it. Gratitude cannot be howled from a distant hill.

Chester… can see her point. There's a vast chasm between a perfunctory gray "thank you" and a sincere blue "thank you". He takes for granted the ability to tell the difference, to the point that there's always a part of him which wonders about the ones he hears over the phone. He understands that that uncertainty is how normal people feel all the time, and that's why they do their social dances. But people couldn't actually live that way, could they? Presumably they've got their own way to be certain, a way he's never had to learn and therefore can't explain.

"I'm sure it can," he says. "Otherwise people would do it differently."

Holds-the-Fire studies him, a thin black which resolves into the light violet of curiosity. You feel… doubt? she asks. They haven't covered that emotion, but she seems to have gotten enough data to calibrate the full spectrum.

Chester chuckles, caught out. "You got me. I'm sorry."

She smiles, with a smug streak of muddy purple, before tilting her head at him, her aura shifting briefly into caramel. Here, then. I will show you human gratitude and wolf gratitude, and you can understand how poor the human way is. A flare of lilac and faint orange, worry papered over with a joke: If it will not startle you.

Some part of Chester marvels that, for once, the idea of caramel as "planfeel" feels far more natural than "spyfeel". He's so used to the epiphanies of people trying to take advantage of him that the color feels manipulative by default. But Holds-the-Fire's version, threaded through with blue and a hint of light green, is different. Collaborative. Inviting.

There's no question that he wants to accept. But they just finished the conversation about giving him the wrong ideas.

He retreats into loquacity, as he sometimes does to give himself time to think. "That's a kind offer"—and still not unwelcome, though those intrusive thoughts are close to slipping their tethers—"though I don't know if it's necessary." Holds-the-Fire's ulterior motives are literally visible (and from the color, not primarily sexual). "So far every time we've tried to figure out any sort of physical contact between us, things have gotten weird." And if she's used to physical contact as a background part of everyday life, wouldn't that mean he's the one acting weird and distant despite everything she's done to make him a packmate? "I don't want more misunderstandings, so maybe we should stick to what we have now?" Fall back to safe ground, there will be time for explorations later, he hopes there will be time for explorations later… although given how the day is going, who knows how weird things could get? "And then there's that whole other thing where I immediately make assumptions about your tongue in my teeth"—wait, that was his outside voice, abort abort ABORT—"and, uh. Look, the Holy Mother, I, um, impure thoughts"—his colors right now must be as messy as Holds-the-Fire's; she's regarding him with black and cerulean and lilac swirling amid creamsicle, and a subtle but quickly growing brown resolve—"you're only the second transcendental being I've ever met and if I'm ever going to become worthy myself, I need to"—and she presses a finger to his lips.

Stop talking, she brown-says, and the machinery of Chester's brain seizes immediately.

He stares in silent rapture at Holds-the-Fire's fingertip on his nose, his world reduced to that single digit. Her flesh is warm against his. A little shiver passes through him. She lifts it away, and he remains motionless, mouth hanging open.

Holds-the-Fire leans in, pinning him with her eyes, and rests a hand on his shoulder. (Chester realizes that she's slowing down this time, gauging his emotions along the way, and although he's so bathed in awe as to render the gesture pointless, he still appreciates it.) Her nose brushes Chester's, and then he feels a gentle pressure on his lips, wet and warm, parting them and pressing against the front of his teeth.

She tilts her head, tongue lapping in and out, and her breath is hot in his mouth, and she leaves a foreign lubrication between his teeth and gums which tastes faintly of the sweetness and tang of rotting meat, with her tongue occasionally darting further forward and curling up around his incisors to flick against the roof of his mouth. It's intimate in a surprisingly platonic way, and disgusting in a surprisingly pleasant way, and she's practically glowing with pastel blue and violet, and he definitely likes that part the best.

She draws back, leaving her hand on his shoulder. As weird as the experience was, Chester immediately misses the departed tongue—then catches himself before that flaring desire can ignite a greater flame.

Well? she says—and from her still-vibrant glow of joy and trust, and her own stirrings of green, he knows that she knows exactly what he thought of it.

"Whoah," he breathes.

Better than human gratitude, she says in an all-too-smug muddy purple.

"You haven't done human gratitude yet," Chester says automatically.

Holds-the-Fire shades pink, and Chester immediately regrets sticking his foot in his mouth—his correction was a reflex, not a challenge. But her frustration is good-natured, very nearly purple, and the pink dissipates into that whimsy. I did say I would do both. Very well. Tell me the thank-you words.

"It, uh, goes the other direction," Chester says.

Her mood shades back toward pink. I cannot say thank you until I know your words of gratitude.

"But you just…" Chester starts, then trails off as he starts piecing it together. If Holds-the-Fire was raised by wolves, how could she speak human speech? Whatever lets her understand him, and telepathically communicate, must be poking their respective brains with pure meaning, in a way that he interprets as words. She wants to go all the way and say the words herself.

"Ohhh," he says, "I get it." He faces her squarely and looks in her eyes, speaking slowly and enunciating. "Thank you, Chester."

Holds-the-Fire suppresses a spike of orange with brown resolve as she balls her fists and takes a breath. "Fan kyu shess da," she says, stumbling parrot-like through the sounds. Her voice is husky yet melodic, and as she repeats the words like a mantra, it turns a gorgeous violet with overtones of pastel blue. "Fan kyu, Shess-da. Fan kyu!"

"Thank you," he repeats.

"Fank yu," she adjusts, and her thoughts press in on his mind again. Ches-ter is your name. So 'thank you' is your gratitude-words.

"Yes!" Chester says, nodding excitedly. Her violet-blue has spread to a full-body glow, and it's infectious. "Congratulations, you're learning how to human!"

Holds-the-Fire blazes purple and muddy brown for a moment, joy and pride. I suppose I am. Thank you. A swirl of contemplative dark purple takes her over. The human way feels better to say than I expected. But I think I still prefer the wolf way. And you?

Chester scoots over next to Holds-the-Fire, taking her hand again. "Honestly, what I like best is seeing you so bright blue."

Some part of his brain, he realizes to his surprise, has labeled that the changeling way. Is he so excited to be living in a world of magic that he has accepted the shapeshifting love-eating bug thing without reservation? Or maybe it's that—no matter how bizarre and uncomplimentary it is—he finally has a word, an explanation, for his and Esau's color-sight? Either way, he can no longer imagine himself in a world without the strange people who introduced him to the term, or the even stranger wolf-girl who, in her own way, is just like him, an outsider hiding in plain sight amid her people.

Her glowing colors acquire a sheen of purple, and she abruptly snuggles in against his chest, pushing him down to the ground and sprawling atop him. He struggles reflexively, and her teeth lightly dig into his throat—and he's about to start freaking out again when he realizes she's as happy as he's ever seen her, without even a hint of anything close to red.

She releases her bite, nuzzling and licking at the area, then leapfrogs over him and nips at him from a new angle, and he realizes: this is play-biting. It's adorable. It's the pure, vibrant joy of a puppy, and soon he's carried away by the blaze of her hues, laughing as he grabs and wrestles with her.

She soon has him thoroughly pinned despite his greater size, and starts vigorously licking Chester's face as he laughs, helpless. Then several other wolves dive into the pile, all wagging tails and enthusiastic yaps, and Chester is smothered in a mountain of fur.

Long minutes later—covered in wolf slobber and shed fluff, his saffron airport robes rather the worse for wear—Chester drags himself away from the center of the pack, sitting against a nearby tree and gasping for air. Holds-the-Fire wriggles free from a particularly intense play-fight, disengages, and scampers over to him, sprawling against his side as she catches her own breath.

You are right, she says—and despite her exhaustion, she's a vivid satisfied purple which is immediately joined by tendrils of cerulean and stirrings of green. Sharing instincts is the best way of all. That is what gave you the courage to enjoy the wolf way, and gave me the courage to try the human way.

Chester smiles and wraps an arm around Holds-the-Fire, letting his emotions do the talking for him.

Then he freezes. She's shading dirty yellow. He replays the last few moments, trying to determine how he messed up, but she's not pulling back from his touch, and the timing of her new emotion doesn't match anything he did.

She notices him noticing. The yellow drains into gray. I'm sorry, Holds-the-Fire says, sitting up and wrestling with pink.

"What?" he says. "Sorry for what?"

(At least it's not just Chester. One of the smaller wolves, tail wagging, lopes over to drag her back to where the younger wolves are still play-fighting. She flashes it a thin, watered-down yellow. The wolf echoes that same urine-like hue and veers away to rejoin its packmates.)

Nothing, she gray-says.

Chester frowns. It's clearly not nothing, he thinks at her, switching away from words for emphasis. I want to help. You want to treat me like a packmate? Tell me.

Holds-the-Fire fidgets for several moments, fighting off stirring orange, before responding. It has nothing to do with you, or pack, she yellow-says. Sometimes I am reminded of how much more I once could do.

Abruptly, she stands up and lopes back over to the boulder where they started, picking up the phone and the stolen rifle which were forgotten in the rush of emotional discovery. She returns to Chester, pressing both into his hands. Tools are a very different power, she says, yellow flaring anew. But I will master these.

Oh, right. The gun.

"Maybe," Chester says, trying to tamp down discomfort he knows she can now sense, "we should talk about what happened to your powers? I'm hardly an expert in, uh, magic, but—"

No, she interrupts, a sickly self-directed pink which she smothers underneath brown. The magic of tools is what cost me everything. So— her aura once more ignites into shimmering gold—it will be mine.

Chester swallows through a suddenly dry throat.

The two of them lock eyes for several moments. Holds-the-Fire's aura of transcendence fades away to peach, then creamsicle.

Why do you react with fear? she says, tilting her head and staring. You are pack. The more power I have, the more I can provide for you.

"I-it's nothing, Swamini-ji," Chester lies. It's the world's most stupidly pointless untruth, and it's abstractly fascinating to be in the position of telling it; he can't imagine how it could possibly help the situation, but years of living with the Holy Mother have conditioned it into him like a muscle reflex. He sets down the gun, thumbing the power button on his phone. "This is indeed a marvel of modern technology—"

Ches-ter, she pink-says, and even though the inflection is nothing alike, his terror spikes for a moment just at the similar cadence to the Holy Mother's reproach.

Then Holds-the-Fire grabs him roughly by the shoulder, bathing him uselessly in blue again, and the gesture prompts him to refocus into the moment. Ches-ter. Calm. Tell me.

He looks helplessly into the eyes of the girl the unicorns see as a villainess (a viewpoint he has at least acquired some context for). She's no longer projecting calm at him, but is still herself blue, a deep and protective hue which ratchets Chester's panic level down considerably.

He tries to remember the last time he saw that on the Holy Mother.

"The color," he starts, and swallows. "The color you were just now, when you talked about the gun."

Holds-the-Fire shades back to peach. What of it?

"That's the color of transcendence I mentioned earlier." His mind is racing overtime with what to say, because the question on his lips is unthinkable:

Was he wrong?

Chester had only ever seen it on the Holy Mother, and of course it was the color of ultimate transcendence, because that had been the one thing she had possessed which the rest of the world hadn't. Now that Holds-the-Fire can turn that color too, he both wants and needs to extend her that same assumption. And yet, both times he's seen it, she's been talking about the weapon she wants to learn how to use. It's hard to square enlightenment with a killing tool—and that behavior is textbook amber, base desire.

Except it isn't! They're gold, that doesn't just happen, he needs to accept that he doesn't understand the ways of enlightenment, that all of the terror the Holy Mother inflicts on him is just to keep him on the path—

I do not understand, Holds-the-Fire creamsicle-says, against a growing background of dark blue.

Chester's relief at that protective hue is basically infinite. If Holds-the-Fire were to turn out to be just another Chryssa-swamini, that would break him. He needs, more than anything, to know that if he ends up enlightened himself one day, that he can become a person he can still like.

… That goes beyond blasphemy into heresy. It's the ugliest thing he's ever let himself think about the Holy Mother, and not by a small margin. But now that thought is out in the open, he doesn't have the energy to deny it any more: he doesn't like Chryssa-swamini. If she was anyone else, he'd call her cruel.

Ches-ter? Holds-the-Fire prompts.

He looks up, blinking. She's the finely mixed blue and yellow of genuine concern.

"Holds-the-Fire, listen," he says, staring into her eyes and taking her hands. He's fighting down terror. (How could he not? He's holding his own base, flawed judgment above not one but two enlightened beings. But the only thought running through his mind is I can't lose her.) "I've seen that kind of desire only once before. I know the sort of person she is—what you might become if you let that desire define your transcendence." He glances at the gun. "Please don't."

She's both kinds of speechless for a moment. A mess of warring colors.

Then a gradually building orange and yellow: How could you say that? What I can do was not enough. Is not enough! She snatches her hands back and shakes them at him, limp fleshy digits. I have no claws! My teeth cannot tear! I must protect my pack and feed them! Without my crown, what choice DO I have but tools?

Uncertainty gnaws at Chester's gut. "I understand, but tools can enable the worst of humanity, too." A vivid image passes through his mind of Anton, screaming red and firing blindly. "Listen. What do you think this tool does?"

Holds-the-Fire crosses her arms tightly over her chest, her emotions receding into a stubborn dark brown. The fire-stick can kill at great distance. I watched the angry cow-man kill a deer which slipped past the fences to graze with the cows, and he wounded Howls-Off-Key the last time we stalked the cow herd. Why else do you think I want it?

To hear her admit it so openly takes Chester aback. "D-don't you think there might be better ways?" he stammers.

Of hunting? she gray-asks. Is the pack to graze on the grasses?

"No," he says. "Of dealing with… people. You said Anton shot one of your packmates. Wouldn't it be better if he never had the fire-stick… the gun… at all?"

Yes, Holds-the-Fire says, shifting to creamsicle as she struggles to see Chester's point. Which is why I took it.

"But he has other guns. You've seen that already."

Then it is all the more important I have this one, is it not?

"No!" Chester says, starting to get frustrated. "Because that means now you're going to settle your disagreement with guns! And more people will get hurt!"

Holds-the-Fire tilts her head, her earlier skeptical gray hardening. He is already using these… guns. What other response is there?

"You could talk it out," Chester says earnestly.

She chuffs, a dry lilac-gray. Is that humans' answer to everything?

Then she hesitates, her colors pinkening as she reads his reaction. Never mind, she says, deliberately muting her frustration and changing the subject. Tell me about your woman-box.

By now, Chester is wrestling more with guilt than with Holds-the-Fire—feeling like he has let her down despite steering her away from a path which leads only to ugly violence. At that request, though, his train of thought violently derails. "My what?"

Woman-box. She reaches out to him and takes the phone from his hand, then fiddles briefly with it until his lock screen comes on, a glamor shot of Chryssa-swamini sitting cross-legged in a tight golden dress which leaves little to the imagination. Holds-the-Fire turns it to him. You were holding it when I first met you. I figured out how to make the tiny woman come out of hiding, but she does not respond to anything I say.

Chester gently takes the phone back and stares at the image, not immediately replying. Chryssa-swamini's face is swirling up his earlier doubts again, and a new layer of guilt with them: is he going to mess up with Holds-the-Fire the same way he always has with the Holy Mother? What if he's overthinking this, and is merely dragging Holds-the-Fire away from her enlightened path with his weakness and naiveté?

Holds-the-Fire hesitates for a moment, then circles him and forces her head under one of his arms, staring at the phone along with him. Who is she? Your feelings toward her seem, she says with the mildest tinge of orange, complicated.

That draws Chester back into the moment. "She's…" he starts, then retreats into vagueness, not certain how to finish that sentence. "The one I mentioned earlier. Uh, a picture of her, anyway."

Pic-ture? Holds-the-Fire creamsicle-says.

Chester glances around for a stick—the gun is right by his side, but he doesn't want to touch that any more than he has to—and draws a tiny stick figure and a tiny stick wolf in the dirt nearby, keeping his other arm draped over Holds-the-Fire's shoulder. "Picture. Basically it's just a drawing, like this. Except the phone draws it in full color and captures every tiny detail." He pulls up the smartphone camera, takes a photo of a maple leaf, and hands the phone back to her.

Ah, Holds-the-Fire says, looking back and forth between the phone and the leaf, with violet excitement and some faint threads of green joining but not overwhelming a light violet curiosity. So there is no tiny woman? She is a regular-sized one, elsewhere?

"Yeah," Chester says, not at all enthusiastic about where this conversation keeps heading. But he figures that he should take his own advice and talk this one out.

He sighs and lets go of Holds-the-Fire, then stands up and climbs the boulder, motioning for her to follow. She tilts her head, light violet intensifying, and scrambles up the rock after him.

Chester reorients himself, finding the sharp, dark teeth of Blackrock Spires above the northern horizon. His eyes flick down from its peaks to the ashram on the mountainside.

Then he loses himself in staring.

How can the ashram—which has defined every part of his life for as long as he can remember—no longer feel like home?

Author's Note

Every AU Embrax fic is obligated by law to include its own spin on the pair's single best on-screen moment. Sorry, I don't make the rules.

Tune in Sunday, Aug. 18, for a glimpse at the past with "Canine, Ursine, Soldier, Spy"!