"To the river?" Blue inquired, nodding in approval when Eivind confirmed where they were off to. "That's an excellent idea. We're both a bit on the repulsive side." He pushed his paints to the side, hoping the aloe would keep them from drying out while he was gone. Eivind led Blue outside; the sun was warm and bright and eagerly graced Blue's naked body, a far cry from the rainy weather they had experienced the night before. When Blue looked skyward, no clouds could be seen within the entire expanse of blue, and he wondered how long it would be before another storm visited them. A broad, toothy smile blossomed on his face when Eivind shifted into his wolf form and began walking slowly beside him. Although he found Eivind's animal form beautiful, there was still something rather terrifying about him, even as he brushed against Blue's side affectionately. More than twice the size of a normal grey wolf, Blue was sure that Eivind outweighed him in this form by at least sixty or seventy pounds, maybe more. His entire body was made of nothing but muscle; he could feel it as he raked his fingers through Eivind's full coat.<br/><br/>"You're cute like this, you know," Blue said, combing through the dense hair at the back of Eivind's neck as they walked. He knew his lover couldn't reply to him in this state, the anatomy simply didn't exist for it, but he didn't mind so much. "I might be a bit biased, but I truly do think you're the most handsome looking wolf I've seen. All the others? They had such dull, boring coats. Most of them were black or a kind of dingy, ashy gray. Like charcoal, I guess. But yours isn't like that." Without realizing what he was doing, Blue had started scratching behind Eivind's ears, much like he would a dog. "The color is just so lovely, like a kind of chestnut . . . or russet, perhaps. It seems to shift color in the sunlight."<br/><br/>The boy looked down at his fingers and halted his motions when he understood what he had been absentmindedly doing. "I'm sorry," he spat out, embarrassed. "I didn't mean to pet you like a dog." He pulled his hand away and looked down at his dirty bare feet, but his attention was drawn to something else when the sound of the river caressed his ears. "Come on, I want to go to the bank down there," he pointed a few hundred feet down, "the pull will be less strong there, and I don't want to be swept away."<br/><br/><i>Just like those damn pills</i>, he thought bitterly, shuffling his away along as his wolf pattered silently at his side.<br/><br/>The few days they spent in the cave together grew progressively better and worse all at the same time. Blue used his handmade paints to draw elementary images on the wall, mimicking the stylings of ancient wall paintings, his mind trying to remember what Lascaux Cave had looked like in all of his old art history textbooks from school. He drew a hyper-stylized version of Eivind's fight with the moose using only his fingers, then Eivind's wolf form again, this time standing with his head tall and looking skyward. He drew tall trees using the green he had made from all of the foliage Eivind had brought him, and once, when the wolf was sleeping, Blue even painted Lofgren by firelight, the twitching shadows on the cave wall making the dark wolf's image look even more ferocious and haunting than the monsters in Blue's dreams. By the time Eivind awoke, Lofgren's image had been smeared across the wall into something indistinguishable, and when Eivind asked him what had happened, Blue only said that he messed up beyond the point of fixing it, and refused to say anything more on the matter.<br/><br/>The tea seemed to work less and less every time Blue took another sip, and eventually he stopped bothering with it at all, although Eivind still tried to get him to drink it whenever he could. Sometimes he would oblige, for Eivind's sake, while other times he would merely wave his hand dismissively and return to his painting without allowing Eivind to get another word in. Eating became too much of a hassle, and although his partner continued to bring in a string of fresh kills, roots, and edible berries for Blue to enjoy, he wanted very little of it.<br/><br/>Eventually, Eivind put his foot down, saying they needed to go back to the pack; they needed to go see Alaric. Without turning around from his work, Blue shook his head and dragged a finger covered with dark purple paint across the cave wall in a slow, curving arc. "We're not going back," he replied stubbornly.<br/><br/>His lover kept on, and a deep frown twisted Blue's normally pretty face into something unpleasant to look at. "I'm not going to have you pull me around the forest like an invalid. That's insane." He sighed and rubbed the excess paint off on his chest. He turned and took a few steps toward Eivind, but his movements were slow and awkward.<br/><br/>"What's even the point? We just got here. We're going to immediately do the multi-day trek back to your pack just to see if Alaric has some more pills? And what if he doesn't? What then? What if we have to go somewhere else and Sieger decides he doesn't want to let us just waltz out of there again? Just because I smell like your personal cum repository now doesn't mean he's going to like me or treat us with any ounce of respect; he doesn't like either of our asses." He was beginning to get worked up, but he didn't have the strength or lung capacity to really speak as bluntly as he wanted to, thus causing all of his words to come out sounding harsh and labored.<br/><br/>"If we go back there with our tails between our legs, it's going to make all of this pointless. Your pack will receive smug confirmation that I'm a weak little human who doesn't deserve to stay, and we'll be fucked." He let out a hard, rattling breath. "We're not going back. I can't. We won't."