Boyd is unhappy.

Boyd is always fucking unhappy, so Ives really should be used to it by now.

He isn't.

Ives knows precisely how good it can be, how good it is when Boyd manages to rip the fucking plank out of his ass and enjoy himself.

Remembers the way Boyd's eyes had changed in that moment just before he'd taken Ives' wrist...

Anger and guilt and the hunger, so sweet and wild and he'd bitten into the wound on Ives' hand so viciously that the scars are still there, silver pale against pale. Bitten and bitten and chewed and lapped and then they'd been on their knees in the muddy snow that sucked at their legs like some vast, brown mouth.

Consumed.

Known something like surrender in the white-hot flares of pain, in the calm of knowledgeable terror -- Boyd, in that state, could have very easily chewed Ives' hand right off.

Thankfully, the man hadn't started with his fingers.

All of it like some impossibly pure version of sex that had been denied to God's lesser children.

Beauty.

And when Ives had finally thrown Boyd off, the man had just lain there, moaning like a sick calf.

He hadn't fucked him then, though, and sometimes Ives wonders if it would've made a difference.

The Art of War and all that -- strike at your enemy's weakest point, temporally and physically, and Boyd, right then, had been nothing but weak.

Ives hadn't wanted prey, though, and he still doesn't.

Lingering sentiment, perhaps, and all of his research, all of the Natives stewed in the search for information... well, the Wendigo is not a social creature.

But the Wendigo is a predator, he is a predator, and weren't the most successful predators the ones that traveled in packs?

What better than to have a strong right hand, a belly that knew the hunger of your own?

Perfection when Boyd has starved himself to near-insensibility, when they lay in wait for the fatted wagon trains, never guarded by more than a few would-be farmers with cheap rifles.

No match for soldiers.

The children are sweet.

Sweeter when Boyd hovers, bloody-mouthed and feral over whatever old duffer on which he's deigned to dine, watching Ives at his own feast and... wanting.

Sweetest when Boyd challenges him for the rights to muscle marbled with the fat of childhood, to the delicate eyes that crunch and bleed into the mouth.

When they claw at each other to the sound of crackling fires and the wails of those pioneers portable enough for them to carry off.

When Boyd slams him to the ground and enters him, bloody and vicious and it's all so close to what Ives wants.

To what they both need.

And so he placates the man as best he can. They move further and further north against all sense and season.

The wagon trains become sparse, and Ives is not a fool.

Boyd is clearly seeking to remove himself from temptation, but...

He'll be hungry again.

And Ives knows this countryside far better than Boyd has ever cared to. They'll be coming on the trappers soon enough, no matter how decrepit this latest shack of theirs seems.

Ives would like to believe Boyd knows this. Knows and has made peace. Grizzled Frenchmen for his palate. Who knew? Perhaps the man developed a taste for the blubber-smeared Native wenches.

But Boyd is unhappy, just the same, and one of these days Ives may have to admit that the experiment is a failure.

Still, though... the Wendigo has nothing but time.