Truly, madly, deeply

Just as Venom was feeling her senses heightened by her season, so too was Maverick hyper aware of his lover's fertile condition. The two had spent countless days and nights over the past couple of seasons attempting to recreate Venom's fortune with her first litter conceived out of season, but to no avail. This time though Maverick felt confident in his abilities. There wasn't a shred of doubt in his mind that they would be concluding this season with a family on the way and the wild renegade preparing to become a father. The thought still thrilled and terrified him, but with Venom at his side and her confidence placed in him, Mav felt like he could take on the world—or at least a litter of puppies. Walking side-by-side with his beloved Empress made it challenging for the red-blooded male to keep his attention on their surroundings, but he did his best. He genuinely was interested in Venom's past, her family's history... just maybe not as much as he was pouncing her and mounting her right here and now.

Fortunately for him and his feral instincts, Venom kept their tour and conversation going, expressing her surprise that Plague hadn't told him all about their family's trials. Maverick just shook his head. "No, he didn't. Your brother is actually pretty tightlipped when it comes to your family." Mav didn't know if there was a reason that no one in the Abraxas family chose not to speak of their earlier generations or where they had come from, but he figured it was probably a topic best left alone for the time. Now, however, more than ever it felt like the right time. At least it did with what he had planned for Venom. The shadow and snow fae regaled him with a tale of a volcanic eruption, the abandonment of their home in the wake of the destruction, and how they had come to settle on the island archipelago around the shrine he knew as Ashen now. Mav blinked in surprise. "Y'know, when I heard you'd left your childhood home, an apocalyptic eruption wasn't what I had on my bingo card," he remarked with a stunned sigh. "Is this the first time you've been back since you left?"

Venom led the way for them up to the old Klein palace. The caves were mostly overgrown with the dense vegetation that inhabited the ravine, thick vines draping down its sides to almost obscure the opening to the inside. Maverick did his best to hide the excited smile on his face. Yes, this would do perfectly! "C'mon, let's take a look around. You can show me your room," he said with a gentle yet insistent nudge of his side against Venom's, adding a teasing tail flick across the back of her thigh for good measure just to tempt her along. Grinning his wide smile, Mav traipsed up to the entrance and ducked inside, taking a look around the dim space that had once been Venom's home. It wasn't as grand as the palace in the archipelago, but it did still have that aura of dominance and power to it, like it was always meant to be the home of a powerful family. "Have you ever thought about moving Ashen back here now that it's unclaimed? You could take your family's ancestral home back if you wanted." A gnawing curiosity continued to eat at the back of Mav's mind when he mentioned her family, glancing to Venom with a tilt of his head. "Your mother and father... you don't speak about them much. I haven't seen them around Ashen either. Are they... still living?" Maverick took great care broaching the subject; if it was a sore one for Venom, he didn't want to ruin the moment by bringing up painful memories.

"Maverick & Venom"