Mona had said three words at the corner table and now she said them everywhere.

Not the words. The choosing.

She had worked out that she was allowed to want a spot and hold it.

The first spot she wanted after the table was the floor by Soren’s side of the bed.

It was the warm stretch the heater vent reached and she took it the second night without asking anyone.

Maren noticed before Soren did.

◆◆◆◆

Maren had her own housing across the green and she had always hated the walk.

She made it anyway most nights.

She came to the dorm because the dorm was where the frequency sat and the fox wanted to be near it.

Maren had stopped pretending she did not want the same thing a long time ago.

She had earned her place at his side.

She fought for it every night.

She walked across the cold green on legs that ached to be near him. She owned this space.

She walked in and saw the mole girl sitting in her spot. Right by his bed.

Maren’s ears went stiff.

They locked forward.

She set her bag down hard.

Soren watched her with a steady gaze. He did not flinch.

"You’re here," he said.

"I’m here," Maren said. She kept her eyes on the floor. She was deciding how to take it back.

Maren ran hot in a way that had nothing to do with the fox and everything to do with how she had been built.

She took the chair by the desk first. She pulled it three inches closer to the bed.

She sat in it sideways with one leg over the arm. This was a posture that put her between Mona and the door without looking like it put her anywhere.

Then she got up and got water she didn’t drink.

Then she sat on the edge of the bed instead of the chair on Soren’s side and let her weight settle there.

Mona watched the whole operation from the floor with the open and untroubled face of someone who had no idea a war was being conducted six inches above her head.

The fox ears stayed forward the whole time. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

◆◆◆◆

Selah was at the desk with a slate she was not reading.

She had been ignoring it for a while.

The cafeteria fork lessons had given her something she liked.

She watched Maren claim the bed-edge.

She watched the fox ears.

She watched Mona not understand that she was supposed to be losing.

Frost came up over Selah’s knuckles but it was not a lot.

A thin glaze along the backs of her fingers where they curled around the slate was the cold leaking out of her own skin because she was enjoying herself and the enjoying had nowhere else to go.

"She got there first," Selah said.

Maren’s ears flicked once.

"She doesn’t know the rules," Maren said.

"Are there rules?"

"There is the rule where I walk across the entire green every night and the floor by his bed is the thing I walk across it for."

Selah’s frost climbed a knuckle higher. "That is a good rule, tell me if you wrote it down anywhere."

Maren did not answer that.

Maren got off the bed-edge, crouched down on the warm floor next to Mona, close, shoulder almost to shoulder, and stayed there.

Not pushing her out. Sitting in.

Claiming the spot by occupying half of it.

◆◆◆◆

Mona turned her head and looked at the new person in her warm place.

She did not read it as a contest.

Soren could see that she did not. Mona did not have a sense of contest yet the same way she had not had frustration over the fork.

What she had was the warm floor and the frequency and now a second body radiating actual heat into the warm floor.

A fox warm body was a strict upgrade on a heater vent.

She leaned into Maren.

This was the unbothered weight of a creature that had decided the new arrival was furniture and the furniture was the good kind.

Maren went very still.

The mole girl had just defeated it by treating her like a place to be warm.

Maren looked down at the weight against her arm.

The fox ears came down out of their forward tilt slowly and lay flat.

On Maren this was not surrender. It was the fox deciding the small warm thing leaning on it was not prey and not rival and could therefore be permitted.

She didn’t move away.

She stayed under the lean and let the mole have the heat and stared straight ahead at the wall like the wall had insulted her.

◆◆◆◆

Soren felt the cost shift while he watched it.

It came every day now since the form held.

It was a degree off the top of him for a thing already done. Having two of them in the warm spot instead of one meant the bond priced the second body the same as the first.

He didn’t say it.

He had a girl who could now choose where to sit and a fox girl who had crossed the green to earn the floor and was currently losing the floor to body heat.

His own self was thinning a quiet degree under both of them while the system measured all of it without holding a single thread of it in place.

He drank the water Maren hadn’t.

Across the desk Selah set down the slate she had never been reading.

The frost on her hands had gone all the way to the second knuckle now. It was clean and bright and coming entirely from her own skin.

It was just Selah cold with how good this was.

"Augh," Mona said, pleased, from the warm floor, into Maren’s arm.

Selah watched her with a quiet and protective warmth.

Selah smiled all the way for once and didn’t catch it, the frost reached her fingertips, and she let it.