He would never be quite sure later how he got Jessamine away without setting off lightbulbs in the other two cub-bearers' heads, but somehow he managed it. At any rate, whatever calmness it was that he had found evaporated as soon as he got out of earshot of his mate. The walk back to the hallway where the cubs that were his but not his were waiting just inside the door was close to the hardest thing Oak had done in his life.
On the way, above the light beating of their stockinged steps on the hardwood floors, he told his da about the encounter. Beryl's head would need to be looked at first thing, possibly tended to if he would let them do it, and of course if it was bad enough they would have to make him. Although Amber hadn't looked much the worse for wear, all things considered, he had almost certainly lost blood. Combined with the previous day's discovery of Beryl's new feeding habits, this meant he would need a long look taken as well, to make very sure that the loss didn't take its toll on him. If Beryl was to wake up from his bestial trance only to find that he'd killed his brother, then there was no use trying to save him in the first place. Twins felt each other too deeply for that.
All the while he was reasoning these things out, forcing his mind to sort and file in an orderly manner, his muscles were a long continuous flow of water, washing its trembling way from his head to his hesitant feet and making his heart thump at three times its normal speed. Their father had used to say that Oak and Spruce were very alike in their handling of unpleasant surprises, and it was times like this that Oak had to agree with him, in spite of being uncomfortably aware that Spruce was better at the ploy. He could pass as under control, to those who didn't know him well; Oak could only try.
Jessamine was truly calm as usual, only nodding to each thing that his son said would need looking after in turn, the quiet flow of his mind working palpably behind the smooth grey of his eyes. Oak could only wonder how he did it, yet that was always the way things had been for as long as Oak, the eldest of all Jessamine's cubs, could claim to recall, and for that he was very glad. His cubhood would have been chaos without the even influence of both his parents, whose calm dispositions none of their cubs had inherited.
"Oak told you what happened?" Spruce wanted to know as soon as the two of them reached talking distance of he and Hemlock. Pokerfaced as ever, the eldest of the Corslin litter had taken up residence just inside the door of the sickroom with his littermate's company close by. Oak could hear the soft murmurings and thin growls of the cubs, speaking among themselves in language only a Kindred or an animal would understand.
"Of course," Jessamine answered quietly, one of his sympathetic smiles announcing in soft tones that everything would turn out all right. "Have they calmed down now?"
"Physically. But the tension is still high. It could break out again at any time." Spruce shook his head, throwing strands of black hair into more than their usual disarray, then reached up a hand to push them back. "I'm not sure that there's anything to be done about it other than keeping a close eye. Amber is the cause of the problem, the reason for the fighting, but he won't move out. We could try to move he and Beryl both: other than that..." He shrugged.
"I don't think they were fighting over food exactly," Hemlock piped up seriously. "It was more a fight over the fact that Beryl's got his own personal prey," here he squeezed his littermate's shoulder sympathetically before he pressed on, "and the other two think they should instead. They could take out Beryl pretty quickly and he's not so bad yet that he would consider taking them both on afterwards, so it was only each other they had to contend with. So feeding them more often won't help matters. Spruce is right. It has to be either separating them or tight supervision."
Jessamine peeked around the corner of the door into the room. "I probably should have separated them out in the first, but I was thinking only of the short-term then... and I didn't think it would move this way. Their fevers are still there, leveled out like their intake of liquid... granted, it's not water, but it's something. It's almost like they're waiting for something to kick everything back in and bring them to the deciding point."
He turned back around to face his three offspring.
"That will come in with a bang, I think. We'll need to be ready for it. Until then, thank you for not upsetting Sedge and Jade." He smiled once more. "I don't recall you three being so considerate, you know. Then again, you've grown up very well."
Hemlock shifted, embarrassed. "Da..."
"No, I know you don't want to hear that. But you have. I'm not being sentimental, I swear it, only saying that we are all equipped to get through this. Do you understand? Good.
"Now Spruce, you are right. We'll have to-"
"Da!"
It was a chorus. Jade and Sedge, wide-eyed and as upset as Jessamine had just been thanking his sons for not making them, had called out from the other end of the hallway and started tripping over each other's sentences as soon as they saw that they had the attention of the group in the hall. Jessamine made his way toward them while they talked, forgetting his comfort in the face of new work.
"Birch and one of the twins-" Sedge floundered. Jade drowned him out.
"-Ginger's at the door with them, and their healer, he's sick too! He said they came down with it yesterday, Ginger, I mean-"
"All right, calm down!"
Two mouths snapped shut. Dazed, Oak shifted forward to hug his mate, faintly aware that Spruce was doing the same with Jade beside them. Sedge's body trembled from head to foot, jarring slightly in Oak's embrace.
Jessamine took a deep breath.
"Is Willow here? The healer? Or is his mate taking care of him?" he asked, facing Jade first. The redhead swallowed.
"Um... yes, Ginger has him. They're in, in the living room." He paused to point back the way he came with a vague flap of an arm as if he wasn't himself quite sure where that was anymore. Oak thought he knew how that felt. Nothing in the house was the same anymore since the entire fiasco had begun.
"All right, then." Their resident healer gave them a brisk nod. "Mem, you and I will need to go see what can be done. Sedge, Jade, are they as far along as Beryl and your twins are? Do they still recognise us?"
Sedge spoke up this time. His voice was muffled by his husband's shoulder.
"No. Willow still knows me, but Birch and Topaz..."
"Are they violent?"
Jade shook his head, sniffling; Oak started at the sound. He hadn't realised that Jade was crying. "No," the redhead answered, his arms snug around his husband's middle, "not overtly. Only as much as Hazel and Hyssop were, when they came, and the healer's not that bad. He - he knew who I was..."
Jade's voice trailed off, sounding slightly confused, and it was then that Oak remembered that his family and his mate's had only become tight-knit with one another within the years of Jade and Onyx's absence. Jade would not recall Willow and Heather, heads of the Rante family and parents of both Sedge and Ginger.
"He remembers you, from when you were a cub," Jessamine said, nodding in a satisfied manner. "You and your brother have hair that's not to be forgotten you know, and Da and I used to know all of the cub-bearers for miles around when there were enough to fill up the herb shop. Now," he shrugged. The shop of the present was always filled with so many humans that it was difficult for Kindred to speak of Kindred matters together, like they used to.
"Summer was in and out so much, I doubt there are many who don't remember you," he went on. "It's okay. Why don't you, Oak, Spruce, and Jade go fix up four beds, one in the room across from the sickroom, two in the room next to that, and one in the room on the farther side of it. Those should be bedrooms, and if they aren't, I've messed my calculations up and there should be another bedroom around there. Take that one instead." He grinned, a wry little expression that was less comfort now than self-deprication. "I'm a little flustered.
"Okay, go on!"
Still hovering somewhere between understanding and complete bewilderment, Oak, his mate, his brother, and Jade headed out to do as they had been told.
The bedrooms were where Jessamine had said they would be, which was a little comforting. Jade and Sedge went to get the clean sheets out of the cupboard while Oak and Spruce moved as much furniture out as they could - insurance against accidents or more fights like they had watched only moments before, which would be much worse with adults in a roomful of point-edged furniture. Once this was finished, the whole group pitched in to stretch new sheets and quilts over the mattresses.
It felt strangely like a normal day.
Of course, that illusion didn't last long. Before they'd finished tucking in the last sheet Jessamine and Hemlock brought down the hall the new occupants in a train of raw and weary faces: Birch and Topaz's dark and mistrusting with the sickness, Willow's thin and tired from first tending, then falling himself into the almost inevitable, Ginger's pale and worried. Only Mica looked unfazed.
"Put him over there," Jessamine was saying, pointing to beds and directing different people into different rooms, while Mem held things and lifted people and Oak and Spruce and Ginger helped him with varied degrees of incompetency. Why had he wanted to be Spruce when he could just aim to bottle the moon and ask to be Mem?
But that wasn't fair. Hemlock had always been the emotional one of the male cubs, the first, last, and only who didn't try to stifle, stop, or otherwise plug up his feelings. Spruce loved to analyse feelings, whereas Hemlock... Hemlock loved to feel them. It was to be two entirely different creatures.
"Talé Oak?"
That was Mica, his hand on Oak's arm to catch Oak's wandering attention. His eyes were calm as ever, if a little less mischievous and a lot more determined. Their ever-changeable blue tones were closer to the cool grey of fine steel.
"Can we use this bed?"
"Are you sure that's the best thing to do?" he said before he thought the words over. Of course twins would stay together. Amber, twisting between his cousins like a tormented bird between the paws of a cat, and still twins would always stay together. The line that seemed to symbolise human marriages sprang suddenly to mind.
Until death do us part.
Mica smiled, as if to say, 'You're silly today, aren't you?'
"I have to make him get better," the cub-bearer explained, using the same tone in which he had once explained why his father had needed to fix the leaking roof. Back up towards the front of the house, there was a loud knocking on the door, fading into the back of hearing through the distance.
"I'll go get it," Sedge offered tiredly, brushing sweat-damp hair out of his face. He left the room.
"So can we?"
Weary beyond caring, Oak smiled back.
"Sure. Go get your brother."
