Limerence

an involuntary interpersonal state that involves intrusive, obsessive, and compulsive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that are contingent on perceived emotional reciprocation from the object of interest     - Wakin Vo

an involuntary potentially inspiring state of adoration and attachment to a limerent object involving intrusive and obsessive thoughts, feelings and behaviors from euphoria to despair, contingent on perceived emotional reciprocation   - Lynn Willmott

Part 1: Broken Frame

In the lush rainforest of Tehla, down by the jagged rocks and the mist-covered mountain of Hanha, was a small cleared area. A muted tent, designed to be camouflaged by the forest, was set up and a small fire was stoked and Chanyeol huddled close to it, stealing heat in the chilly weather. A few feet away, across small bushes with thorns and small berries from the tent was a river. It ran presumably from a lake upstream and paved a snaky line down the forest. It was wide enough with boulders just the right size to hold some weight if exerted on them peeking mismatched-ly above the smooth yet still fast night current. To cross the river to the other side would take agility, good reflexes and caution. Looks could be deceiving for the calm river was still dangerous. A wiser eye would say to cross preferably when the tide was low and the water level manageable.

Chanyeol poked at his fire with a soot-covered twig, the remnants of the fish he caught burned slowly. He watched with glazed eye of a sated person as the fire the ashen bones, their sharpness melted and the amber conquered the tiny carcass. There went the last of his dinner. Lazily, he kicked some dirt to douse the flames and stood up stretching his long spine.

It was a cold night and it was only going to get even colder. His fur hood wouldn’t suffice to keep him warm until the morning. The tip of his nose was already touched by stray frosty winds. So no matter how much he tugged his hood over his face, he would rather not suffocate. The only consolation he got was it was not snowing. Yet.

The missing heat from the fire was totally dispersed, even when it was only a moment ago dismissed, so that’s how cold he was feeling by the minute. Into his tent he went and quickly he stripped off of his heavy clothing, the air equally freezing as outside as he felt the air bit at his body. Then he shifted, welcoming the familiar rearrangement of bones and skin.      

He purred.

It was a long awaited relief as warmth covered his entire body. Carelessly, he dropped his flank onto the scattered layers of random clothes and sheets he piled onto the sleeping bag he had as bed and stretched languidly renewing his scent and heat. He rubbed his snout with his paw and then he laid his head on his crossed front legs. His coat was thickening and it was a sweet defense against the winter. It was also very, very comfortable to just sleep all day and if it weren’t for his need to eat to survive, he would do just that. In the back of his mind, he remembered that he barely zipped his tent up fully in his hurry to shift.

He huffed warm air and closed his eyes. He could do that in the morning. There was no one around and he was far removed from any human civilisation. So it was a given that he was in a safe self-imposed exile. He was too confortable to move and nothing could move his huge body without his permission. And as he was alone, he could do whatever he wanted.

Soft rumblings intermittently came from his chest as he breathed softly. His long tail swished lazily around as sleep nipped at the edge of his consciousness. His ears flicked randomly as the sounds from his surrounding – the steady rush of water, cricket-songs overlapping with cicadas - helped lull him.

Before long, he was out.

-II-

His head snapped up and nostrils flared. He didn’t know what woke him up but instincts guided him in a moment of semi-awareness. His hackles rose and body poised in defense, upper body close to ground as he stilled. There was a sound. It was what roused him.

It took him a moment to place the sound. It was faint but when it came it rang long and desperate. As soon as he realised it sounded like a cry of help, he jumped out of his tent and scanned his area frantically for the source. It was silent again before he located where it came from.

It sounded like a kitten meowing desperately in the direction of the river.

Chanyeol’s heartbeat was drumming fast as he ran toward the increasingly pitiful calls. When his head broke through the shrubs and into the open air by the river, he was afraid he was too late. Several scenarios played in his head – the poor thing caught in the current unable to swim, being mauled by other predators of the wild, bleeding profusely on the stones and many other increasingly disturbing images of his making. What he saw wasn’t what he expected. And for that he was glad. He let of an involuntary call of his own and the frantic meowing that answered almost made him cry.

There was a tiny crib-like basket stuck in between two large moss covered rocks almost on the other side of the river. He almost missed it if he wasn’t focusing on the cry. The water lapped at the crib harshly when met by the resistance and Chanyeol didn’t doubt that some of it got inside. His stomach lurched at the thought. Carefully, he leaped at the rocks going steadily toward the soaked basket and tested the river to see if he could place his paw when the stones were far apart. It was cold but he could manage; the kitten was in a lot more danger than his soaked paws.   

Hold on there, buddy, Chanyeol said when the cries sounded tired and not as frantic. God it was freezing and his heart felt heavy. Who the hell abandoned the poor guy here?

It was a relief when he finally got to nose at the basket – he smelled blood - and what he saw almost made him howl in grief. He let out a sad sound as he nosed at two still bodies of kittens. He at them to see if they would wake up but they were already stiff. They were dead long before he arrived.

Newborns they were. Dead newborns, maybe stillborn even. They were still wet with clear liquid and blood. Beside the two was a snuffling sibling of the dead ones that Chanyeol quickly took out the basket. Whoever put the newborns inside the crib placed this one covered by its dead littermates. Chanyeol bit the kitten gingerly around its scruff and brought it back toward his makeshift home. For one, the kit probably survived because of its dead siblings, being protected against the harsh environment. The kitten whimpered sadly when the cold wind blew their way and it was shaking. Chanyeol purred to ease it

We’re almost there, you’re gonna be okay. Please be okay, pleaded Chanyeol.

He wanted to hurry and get the cub to safety but he didn’t want to endanger them both with him falling into the river and drowning them both. Each step he took carefully, pushing at the rocks to ensure they were steady. When he had to wade through the water, he tilted his maw up so the kitten wouldn’t get wet. As soon as he hit land, he rushed into his tent and placed the small body at the centre of his nest. He lay beside it and was glad when the cub nosed at his belly. It was alive and a survivor. Chanyeol would make sure of it. He pawed at his sheets and dragged them closer, cocooning the youngling from the cold.

That was when Chanyeol began to feel weird and there was this urge to knead his belly. When he looked down, the cub was nuzzling one of his s and he chuckled.

You won’t get milk there, buddy.

He’d go out in the morning to see if he could find the closest road and a store to buy some cat food. For now, he hoped he could keep the cub alive until morning came. He looked on amused as the kitten managed to latch onto a and began ling. What took him by surprise was when he realised his body was providing milk for the young. Well, that did it then. That explained some aspects of his form that he didn’t want to think about. He was torn between feeling angry, weirded out, wanting to cry, and relief that he didn’t have to spend his meager amount of money to provide for the cub.

He focused on the ling kitten instead and without knowing what he was really doing, began at the kitten. He was bathing it and was feeling quite happy while doing it. First, he realised that his cat form was able to produce milk like a female now he was peppering the youngling with his saliva like he’d seen a mother cat done to its litter. He figured he would just let nature ed him up some more and take it then thinking about it too much and that would just lead to him being an angry and depressed teenager slash an overgrown cat (sometimes).

The kitten accidentally unlatched from ling and it yowled from the lost of its food. Chanyeol considered pulling away before it could find another leaking – goodness, he was leaking milk now (lactating, his mind supplied and he hated) – before his personal Jiminy Cricket scolded him for trying to starve an innocent little thing. He moved his belly a bit and the kitten didn’t need further instructions when presented with a tit in front of its hungry mouth. Its sharp teeth latched on too strongly and Chanyeol hissed in warning.

Chanyeol sighed and decided it wouldn’t hurt more to just lie comfortably as he feed the newborn. He dropped his head, belly exposed with a kitten softly pushing at his skin as it drink to its heart’s content. It was then he realised he didn’t know the gender of the thing he was feeding. He pawed at it gently and peeked.

It was a baby boy. A progressively healthy male cub that was apparently ling milk like there was no tomorrow. He also knew that the cub was just like him, not a normal cub, his long tail gave his status as a shifter away, and that made him wonder if there were other werecats living in the forest, probably on the other side of the river or up the river because he’d never seen them before. There’s a small tingle in his gut when he thought of others like him and how many there were. This little one he was nursing looked like a little mountain lion, a cougar cub. His coat was tawny (a darker brown than Chanyeol) with black spots, all over his body. He looked nothing like Chanyeol who had sun-coloured pale fur, with white on his underbelly and the diamond-shaped patch of white on his forehead. Further inspection showed that he didn’t have any stripes that adorned Chanyeol’s ankles. They were so different that Chanyeol was surprised his body could biologically even provide for the small man. What he could see in the dim light of dawn (he was a bit surprised he didn’t realise the sun coming up), there were some orange stripes much like crow’s feet adorning the kit’s brow.   

Chanyeol the cub’s head just to amuse himself when its spit-slick hair stood up from his grooming and the youngling didn’t even pay him any heed. He purred in delight as he watched him feed. Here with him, warm and cared for, Chanyeol almost forgot that he rescued the kitten from dying of hypothermia. That brought him back to the two dead newborns in a basket at a river and Chanyeol solemnly reminded himself to bury them when the sun was high up, when he was sure he could leave the kit unattended in his tent. Human or cat, they deserved a proper burial.

For now he had a newborn kitten, still blind and deaf, that needed him. That depended on him, literally, to survive.

When he felt the pressure on his belly stopped, he found that the youngling had fallen asleep; its mouth hanging open in an ugly sight with Chanyeol’s abused hanging abandoned by its cute little mouth. God, he already felt like he loved the little thing. He curled closer around the small snuffling body and tried to resume sleeping. It was still early. He would need to hunt soon – more than fish maybe – so he could compensate his body’s need to provide. Something warm filled him. This was the first time in a long time that he wasn’t alone.

-II-

“Alpha…”

“Not now. I’d like to be… alone for now,” Kris said, tense back to his second in command and he walked away without waiting for the reply.

He wanted to be alone, he was hurt and it never felt this intense before. He knew he should put on a brave face for everyone because that was what he was supposed to do. He was Tehla pride’s leader and he was supposed to be the strongest.

But why did it feel like he failed? That he was the weakest? By the sun, he had failed. And tonight was the worst thing that had happened.

Tonight, his children died.

The children that he had been waiting for a long time to meet and they didn’t even have the chance to see the world that he was going to teach them about. His beautiful daydreams about how they would look like, how many there would be, how they would grow up loved by all most by him, how he would teach them to hunt, how he would be joyous when they would first shift, to be taught their beliefs and to bask in the sun.

Now those dreams were long gone, destroyed when all three of his children were stillborns. It was a hard pregnancy, more so that they were conceived late in the year and to be born in winter. But for them all to not survive, it was crushing him. His first children didn’t get to live and what manner of wrong had he done to be punished this way?

He was there when they were delivered and it was a long labour. He was there with Yoona, soothing her in her pain as she tried to bring lives into the world. He pillowed her head in her ailure form as she birthed them one by one. And one by one, only silence was heard from the kits. Yoona cooed at them first softly that quickly turned distressed, their faces urging them to start breathing but they didn’t. He was there when Yoona was overcome with panic and started begging their children to wake up so she could nurse them.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Alpha, Yoona cried to him when their children refused to listen to their mother and open their mouths to answer her calls. He was there when he realised they would not see their litter move much less twitch to show them signs they were alive. They were still and he was numb. Yoona’s cries were drowned as he fell into an endless abyss of sorrow. Other ailures that were there in the house with them during the birthing slowly nosed him around his leg in a show of condolence and he felt hands pet his shoulders, his chest, his neck in sympathy. He could see when they brushed against Yoona to share her grief of her tragedy. But he needed to get away. 

He silently collected the cubs’ still bodies, refusing to see their gender (he didn’t need a reminder that they were really gone), and carried them out of the main house and he cooed at them in his arms, asking for a miracle that would never come. He sat down somewhere on the pride ground with them in his arms, the numbness spreading. But he didn’t want to dwell longer in the open when he suddenly felt too oppressed that he needed to move. So he moved again.

He needed to bring them their pride’s burial ground but for some reason he didn’t want that. He didn’t want to lay them there along with their ancestors. He didn’t want their ancestors to see that he had failed the pride. He had failed as an Alpha. He had failed Yoona. He failed to have strong litters and their ancestors would frown upon his misgiving.

It was then he decided to turn away. He went into their storage house and looked around hurriedly. His eyes landed on a small basket. He touched it and hunted down some white sheets he could use as padding. When he deemed the basket good enough, he put the dead kittens into it (refusing to linger to touch them even when he desperately wanted to) and knowing almost everyone were at the main house except for the betas patrolling their perimeter, under the cover of the night, the sun’s eye absent, he went in the direction of the river.

He knew what he was doing was wrong but he couldn’t stop. He didn’t want them on the pride ground. He didn’t want to be reminded of his source of grief. He wanted them to be gone. He thought that if they were gone, he could forget that they were ever born in the first place. It was his fault that they died.

“I’m sorry,” he croaked as he put the basket on the water and watched it being brought by the current downstream. He hoped the river would take his grief away but the hole in his chest grew more and more until the drifting basket vanished from his sight. When he died, he would welcome the punishment for his crime.        

His second in command found him by the river, staring unseeingly at the running water.

When he walked away, he vowed to never experience the same grief again. And from that moment on, he would close his heart and lock his feelings away. He chose solitude and that he got with the excuse of grieving.

That night, away from everyone, he grieved alone and had never felt so lonely.