Chapter Text
Under a big honey-yellow wolf moon, the young royal mates run for the last run of their honeymoon, and their howls are delirious with joy, and with loss at the ending of this hectic, hyper first madness of love and marriage. Their attendants have been sent off, in this remote and obscure little interim land between two kingdoms, and it's just the two of them under the moon, pelted, fanged, wet-nosed and running on eight legs together. Soon this freedom will be over, and the drudgery of royal duty will set its iron chains upon their lithe young selves again. It'll be a harder road than ever before.
But for now, they're free, and they roll and play-fight and nip at each other, caught up in the wonder of a new mating, until the morning comes.
***
Derek and Allison are coming home, to the Hills Nation.
A royal honeymoon, it's all very well, a romantic dream salivated over by the general populace, obsessed over by every village gossip and inky news-sheet in the land. But it's nothing compared to the pomp and drama and pageantry of a royal homecoming. After the honeymoon.
They could easily slip back into the kingdom, from their hinterland break away, via back roads and secret gates, to no fanfare, no official reception. But that wouldn't be playing the game. It would cheat the populace of their eagerly awaited arrival. It seems like hard cheese, a little mean-spirited, perhaps. Especially considering the honeymoon they've had. Why should they grudge anyone anything? They've had bliss, nirvana – occasional bottle-throwing fury and intoxicated recriminations over pre-existing miscreancies – but also joy and warmth and comfort. Security, matedness. A bond that's a gift, that will never break.
So they do it the right way, Allison and Derek – Crown Princess Allison, Crown Prince Derek, the barely-married idols of the common folk – and go in the front door, by the royal road into the capital city. It is what is owed, to the populace, to their royal parents who made a sacrifice of love that has not been required of them. To all those who are taxed and indentured and suffer too little game on too little land, an unnaturally human-style life of farming and business, to enable Allison and Derek to live a life of careful royal duty, that is also plush and comfortable and privileged beyond all the dreams of the proletariat. (That also, by pure chance, happenstance, has all the joys of regular wolf-kin who are granted none of the expensive toys and easy lives of royal folk. That only means they owe their subjects twice over, having not had the price to pay for their lifestyle that is normally exacted. Allison knows it perfectly well. Derek, having behaved rather worse than she in their unconventional 'courtship', knows it still better. They are resolved to be the best newlywed royal couple – the best royal couple – the best lifelong, mated, utterly devoted royal couple – that has ever been, has ever ruled with a passionate gratitude and a careful presentation of formal, stilted devotion, before others.
But it doesn't make the actual processional entrance to the capital city of the Hills Kingdom, Beacon, any less of an ordeal. Oh, hell. In the carriage, during the approach to the city gates, they cling to each other. The city populace roar and howl within, where they have been confined, forbidden to gather outside. The euphoria of the wedding trip still clings: Allison rubs her face into Derek's shoulder, halfway into his armpit, and he laughs and presses his cheek down against the night-dark waves of her hair.