Chapter 2: Chapter Two

After an embarrassing amount of carrying, we’d arrived at Red’s camp where she had the remains of a fire smoldering. Of course, I smelled the coals before we arrived in the clearing hidden by a cluster of bushes covered in some type of berries my wife warned me not to eat. 

“Ate a handful, and my stomach was all stove to hell,” she said. 

She’d constructed a small tent in the dug-out roots of a nearby oak tree so it sunk into the ground by a couple of feet, adding even more cover.  

Setting me down in front of an ash tree, my back against the trunk, Red reached into her tent and pulled out a brown leather pack, the likes of which contained food, a couple of jars, faded parchment, and other odds and ends. 

Pulling out one of the jars and some bandages, Red approached me. Kissing me gently on the forehead, she smiled. 

“I don’t think I’ll ever tire of kissing you. At least, not for the next 200 years,” she said, chuckling and unscrewing a jar. I immediately smelled honey and looked down at the container, which was about half the size of a baseball. 

My stomach made a noise even beluga whales would consider rude, and heat rushed to my cheeks. Reincarnation left a goddess pretty hungry. 

Red laughed and walked back over to her tent, bringing back a small loaf of bread, an apple, and some kind of jerky. I spread honey on the bread and devoured half of it. But the apple and jerky I had even less self-control over. None of what she brought me remained. When I realized this, I flashed my wife a sheepish look. 

“What? You think there’s none left for me? Please. We were married for 50 years, Ruru. I know better than to bring you food without leaving some out for myself. For a goddess, you never had much control where appetite was concerned,” she said, smiling. 

With that, I finished off the loaf of bread. And as I ate, she spread honey over my shoulder wound and lifted my arm to bandage it. 

“Honey on my wound? Are you planning on feeding me to the Bear God?” I asked, taking another oversized bite of bread. 

She rolled her eyes with a snort. 

“I’m not taking any chances of sickness, dear. Until you get more of your power back, I suspect you might be susceptible to infection. And honey keeps wounds from getting infected,” she said. 

I nodded, still feeling a throbbing pain in my shoulder. My leg was in worse shape and removed any preconceived notions I had about being an impervious goddess. 

“So. . . you’re human, right?” I asked, feeling stupid. I should know more about her, but my memories were still a bit hit-and-miss. 

Red nodded. 

“As human as the day we married when you slowed my aging. Do you remember the spell? You worked tirelessly on it for the better part of a decade,” she said, looking over my leg wound. 

I shook my head. 

“I’m. . . sorry. It’s all bits and pieces. Ruka said her memories would become mine, but I guess it takes a while.” 

The woman bandaging my wound looked down at the earth with an expression I couldn’t place. Then she looked at my leg again. 

“I think you told me my aging worked out to basically one day for every year I lived. You said I was to be by your side through the ages. And if we were to be parted, it wouldn’t be by something as mundane as aging. It would be in the heat of battle or the frenzy of a hunt. Little did I know the former is exactly what would take you from me,” she said, tapping my thigh so I was aware and prepared for the arrow to be pulled out. 

I yelled obscenities that would make Sister Marianne slap my wrists with her yardstick for a solid 60 seconds. An owl flew out of the tree I was leaning against, hooting as it flapped its wings, off to find a better perch where proper ladies didn’t curse. But I wasn’t a proper lady anymore. I was a fucking wolf. . . goddess. . . person. 

Looking down at my claws again as Red finished bandaging my leg and bringing over her dinner, I found myself running my fingers over each nail. I caught brief flashes of memory as I did so, claws tearing into flesh, carefully clutching what appeared to be a spellbook, scratching the back of Red as we fucked in all manner of places. In particular, I had memories of being extremely careful when Ruka fingered Red— I stopped that train of thought. 

I was Ruka now. And leaning on my good shoulder was my wife. . . . Ruka’s wife. Shaking my head and sighing, this was all very confusing. Reincarnation. . . gradually becoming someone else. . . memories of a life I didn’t live. Fuck all of it. 

The Wolf Goddess shouldn’t have put a time limit on this thing so I could ask more questions. 

“What’s the matter, dear?” Red asked, looking up at me with eyes full of concern. 

I didn’t even know where to begin. 

“I’m sorry. You saved my life. You carried me to camp. You bandaged my wounds. You kissed me several times all because you see someone that I am only now becoming. I feel guilty, Red.” 

My wife tore off a piece of bread with her teeth and dipped it in honey. She took her time chewing it with her head on my shoulder again. 

“Maybe you’re overcomplicating this,” she said. 

“How do you overcomplicate being reincarnated into a goddess? And then meeting her wife?” I asked. 

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Red thought for another couple of moments while she peeled her apple and bit into it, juices running down her chin. 

“I have these memories of things we’ve done together, and I can’t rationalize them because I know I wasn’t present at the time,” I said, tracing my finger along in the dirt between my legs. 

Silence fell across our camp as the crickets nearby took over making noise. 

“Does it bother you when I call you Ruka?” she finally asked. 

“No. . . that’s my name.” 

“Exactly. Does it bother you when I kiss you and hold you tight?”

Before I could answer, I thought about how it felt when our lips touched. My body and mind told me we had this intense passion and history together. And God knows I would have killed to have even a portion of that with a girl back in Boston without being consumed with that classic Catholic guilt. 

Now I did. Ruka even told me before merging into my soul.

“Between the powers, the new world to explore, and. . . her, you’re gaining so much more than you’ll ever sacrifice here,” her voice echoed in my memory. 

The “her” she was referring to was Red. 

“You really don’t feel disappointed knowing I started as something different?” I asked, raising an eyebrow. 

My wife didn’t think long before answering this time. 

“Not a bit. Look, before we got married, I was engaged to a woman who started life as a boy. If fever hadn’t taken her a month before we were due to exchange vows, I’d have still been with her when you and I met. And we wouldn’t be together now. I don’t care about who people were, but what they are in the present,” Red said. 

She offered me a drink of water from a skin she’d brought over with her meal, and I took it, perhaps drinking a little too greedily. 

“I think. . . you should commit to being the Wolf Goddess. There’s still some part of your mind convinced you’re whoever you were before being reborn here. Discard it. Those memories you have of us? You did those things. The way your body melts into my embrace when we press together? You carry those desires. If you just think of yourself as Ruka and only Ruka now, you’ll have an easier time. After all, did you not agree to leave your prior life behind before you merged with my wife?”

Could I truly do all that? Just tell myself that Lea Trello, the human accountant from Boston, was dead? What other choice did I have? 

“From now on and forever more, you are Ruka the Wolf Goddess,” she’d said back in that bathroom. There was no going back. 

Things became much clearer when I started to process Lea’s death. That human girl living a safe life unhappy in everything she did is no more. She died so that Ruka could live. I was Ruka. I always have been Ruka. The Wolf Goddess in my memories is the same one I am now. 

Wasn’t that what she’d also said? I wouldn’t think anything different of it. I’d just gradually change more and more into the Wolf Goddess, and it’d feel right the entire time. 

“Commit to being my Ruru,” Red said, scratching gently on the back of my head and pulling me down into another deep kiss. “Because that’s who you are to me in this moment. It’s who you were to me each night when I prayed for your return across two centuries. Is that okay? Can you just. . . be her again? The woman I watched die in the grotto at the hands of the Bear God? Is that asking too much?”

She was crying now, two centuries of pain leaking out and falling onto what was left of her bread. Wrinkles spread across her face, and Red’s nose started to run, a dam thrown wide open that could no longer be contained. How does one remove the lid on a jar stuffed with fears and anxieties that originated two centuries ago? They don’t. The lid shoots off when it can no longer seal what it once held in check, and those emotions run wild over the splintered glass. 

That’s what was happening now, what needed to happen. 

“Please. . . tell me you’ll be her. Tell me you’ll be with me for the rest of our days. Tell me I can love you, because, Ruru. . . I don’t think my heart could bear the pain of any alternative.” 

Now I was crying. My wife was hurting. She needed reassurance after centuries of prayer and longing. And fuck the rules. I was the Wolf Goddess. I may not have all my memories or much of my magic. But I had it within my power to reassure Red that I wasn’t going anywhere and that I was exactly the woman she needed me to be. RIP, Lea. Long live Ruka. 

Pulling Red into my arms and whimpering until I could form words, I fed her all the reassurance she needed. 

“I’m back. I’m the woman you’ve always loved and who will love you until our long lives are nothing more than legends written in the storybooks of rabbits. I’m going to put my heart back together with you at my side and more become your Wolf Goddess each day. Red. . . if it truly doesn’t matter to you who I started as, then I am your Ruru. And I will never leave you again.”

My voice was hoarse from struggling not to cry through those five sentences. So we just sat there in silence under the twinkling blue stars which kept the company of a purple moon, the eternal celestial party of Gyrrelle’s night sky. 

At some point, Red and I crawled into her tent, carefully minding my wounds. We fell asleep in each other’s arms, the promise of a past love united with future adoration. The last thing I heard her say before drifting off was, “Welcome home, Ruru.” 

And I closed my eyes with the satisfaction of knowing. . . that was me. It always had been and would continue to be forever more.

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