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The dogs had been making their own preparations. They were standing by the door together, silent and focused.
Ben had already worked out that they had known about the missing rucksack already.
They had witnessed Nikolas leave them.
And it seemed to Ben at that moment, standing for the last time in his beautiful kitchen, that baskets had been neatly arranged and toys left tidily as if for other dogs that might one day need them.
The three stepped into the steadily growing light of this first day of whatever was to come.
Radulf led them.
Ben’s heart ached with the irony. He had not seen this coming, so between him and the old dog, who was the blind one?
As they skirted the old chapel and crossed the dry stone wall boundary of what had once been their home, he knew where they were headed. He should have predicted that Nikolas would want to go there first.
The three of them began to jog towards Drover Tor.
Ben took it steadily. Elderly wolfhounds don't run.
But Radulf's long legs ate up the distance, and at moments when a shaft of morning light cut through the clouds, he appeared more floating than running.
PB had his habitual scowl upon his face, and his acute, icy-blue eyes were fixed upon the distant horizon with an attitude of retribution Ben couldn’t fault. PB liked his toys. Leaving them must have been a wrench. Ben knew how he felt. He'd left a lot more behind him than a few chewed-up squeaking chickens. But he wasn't going to think about her now. There was only so much pain one person could take, and Nikolas was Ben's full quota this day.
PB saw him before Ben did, if the menacing growl was anything to go by.
Ben wasn't far behind recognising the tall, rangy figure standing head bowed in thought—Ben was pretty sure this attitude wasn't prayer; he didn't want to meet the entity Nikolas Mikkelsen prayed to.
Radulf had apparently recognised his favourite before either of his companions, for his tail had been giving odd, uncertain twitches of happiness—or at least glee that he could now thwart his plans—for the last half mile or so.
Nikolas obviously knew they'd found him, but didn't acknowledge their presence.
"Hello, Nikolas."
Nikolas pursed his lips, continued staring at the ground, and didn't give his familiar response. Ben hadn't expected him to. There was very little familiar about this situation, after all.
“I kinda thought you might be waiting for me to get home. All those missed phone calls. Last I counted, thirty. So stupid fucking me—I assumed you had something on your mind. Maybe you wanted to—what’s that thing other people do? Normal people. Oh, yeah, talk. You know. Maybe about the holiday which we were supposed to be leaving on together? Or, huh, I don’t know…Philipa and not playing billiards with her? Or, no, I know! Let’s talk about a fire. How about that, Nikolas, a fire.”
Nikolas totally ignored him.
Ben stepped closer. “Fuck you.”
This was one of Nikolas’s prohibitions—sayingfuck youto him. It’s why Ben had deliberately picked it. The provocation felt great.
He didn’t get the reaction he expected, just a weary, “Aleksey. I’ve always been Aleksey. Just in my head, I suppose. Nikolas isdead. I murdered him. And you didn’t want to talk when I tried to explain. Thirty or so times, as you say. So how aboutyoufuck off, Ben.”
It was enough to make Ben want to kill something. Not Nikolas, not quite yet, but he was getting there. “Uh-huh. So…what? You get to decide everything, do you? Everything is just how you want it to be and fuck what anyone else thinks? Fuck what I think?”
“You should have realised after last night that it’s always been that way. You just didn’t get it.”
Ben had a rare moment of insight then that verbally arguing with Nikolas right now would achieve absolutely nothing. Despite what Nikolas had just asserted, he, Ben, was actually in control of this situation. Nikolas couldn’t outrun him, nor could he fight him and win. There was nothing he could do to actually physically leave him except murder him, and even though this was an unfortunate thought to have at the very place where Nikolas had demonstrated willingness to commit this act when it suited him, Ben did not believe that Nikolas would kill him. If Ben thought that then there wasn’t much point him being there at all. Nikolas might confuse murder and love, but Ben didn’t.
Having this uncharacteristically insightful realisation, therefore, that he was not going to improve this awful situation by arguing, that Nikolas would likely provoke them to spar with words because that was one conflict he could win, Ben only shrugged off his pack and stretched a little, waiting. Stretching anywhere near Nikolas Mikkelsen usually led to there being no need to argue over anything anyway, because they both always agreed wholeheartedly what stretching should always lead to. He wasn’t expecting sex, obviously, but focusing Nikolas’s mind on what he’d be losing by leaving didn’t seem a bad idea to Ben at all.
There was a slight frown from Nikolas, possibly at the shrug and the stretch both, but he turned away and swung his bergen up onto his shoulders. Ben wasn’t bothered. He just re-donned his, too.
Nikolas stopped, his back to Ben, and reiterated, "Fuck off."
"Make me."
