It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory. –W. Edwards Deming

The physician left in the coldest hour before dawn. Alice had not meant to be awake. Once Nathaniel finally let them stop, she had fully intended to collapse on the ground just as she had collapsed the night after the assault on the George Road four months earlier.

The air had been stickier then, heavy with the odors of earth and sweat and gunpowder. Duncan had laid a blanket for her on the grass and given her his jacket for a pillow. But tonight Nathaniel had led them into a cave. There was no grass, and she had only her hands and arms to cushion her head. Those she decided to stuff into the sleeves of her chamois shirt to keep warm. Then Alice had shut her eyes and waited for a sweet black vacuum to sweep her away, but it did not come. Instead she listened to Cora and Nathaniel talking late into the night. Mister Phelps' name appeared frequently in the conversation. So did Captain Winthrop, whom they talked about as though he were no longer there.

After a time Cora lay down beside her. Her sister wrapped her arms around her waist, exactly as she had when they were bed companions of nine and five. For a few moments Alice thought it would be nice to pretend they were girls of nine and five, not twenty-two and eighteen, but soon the embrace felt smothering. She waited for her sister's breathing to slow into the soft, steady rhythm of sleep. Then she delicately removed her sister's arms and crept away. Alice spent the rest of the night contemplating a small crack in the ceiling and listening to the sounds of water trickling somewhere far away.

She sat up when she heard the doctor's footsteps creeping towards the entrance. As soon as she reached the mouth of the cave, the cold, crisp air pierced her face like a thousand silver needles. Everyone needs pain, she thought. Pain is the only way we can be sure we're alive. It seemed she had heard those words before. Perhaps from her father. It sounded like something he would say, though not something he would say to her. Perhaps Temakwe had told her during one of the humid mornings they had spent during the summer peeling bark off the eastern trees. If the herbalist had said it, she doubted she would have listened very closely. It would not have been something she would have wanted to hear, back then.

The sky glistened a deep, rich cobalt. Outside a hundred stars winked at her like diamonds in velvet. As she stepped outside, her foot stumbled against something hard and metallic. She glanced down at Nathaniel's musket, which had been propped against the cave wall before she had knocked it to the ground. Mr. Phelps turned at the soft thud. "I thought your sister's fiancé would be wanting that back," he said by way of explanation. He stood with his hands crossed behind him, pondering the canopy as she had. After a while he spoke again. "I don't expect you to forgive me."

There were a hundred things she could have said in response, and she did not feel like saying any of them. That she did not think she forgave him and doubted anyone in her family would was a fact, but it seemed irrelevant. And she did not really want to fixate on questions like forgiving or not forgiving. It was too exhausting. She settled for a simpler reply. "You should go before Cora wakes up." Like all of them, Cora had been too tired to question his presence with them last night, but a Cora well-rested and furious would be another matter entirely. Mr. Phelps nodded.

"When did you start talking like that again?" he asked. Alice blinked. He clarified. "Your voice. Your…accent."

"Oh," she replied. "I don't know. It just happened. He-" Her face began to flush, which usually happened whenever she caught herself inadvertently slipping into a Scottish brogue. "He told me he likes it," she said in a smaller voice.

Mr. Phelps frowned. She wondered if he was about to lecture her on the rashness of her affections. But after a long stretch he nodded again and said, "That's good." He inclined his head thoughtfully. "It never sounded right, you know. It always sounded a bit affected, your trying to speak like all the other English girls."

Alice thought that was rather easy for him to say, considering that he had not been the one who had to deal with all the awkward staring her Scottish accent had provoked, even from the girls who hadn't made fun of her for it. But for some reason it made her smile. "It seemed like the right thing at the time," she said with a light shrug. He returned her smile weakly.

"I…heard Ashby told you about what your father did," he said after another pause. Alice decided to feign interest in the grass. This was not a topic she particularly wanted to revisit, but she supposed as one of her father's oldest friends he felt entitled to bring it up. "Would you believe me if I told you I was proud of him that day?"

"I can't see why," she said.

"Because he went himself," he replied. Personally Alice did not think that made much of a difference, but Mr. Phelps evidently thought it did. She did not have the energy for a debate right now. "I suppose you're not going to tell me where you're going now, are you?" he said.

Alice rubbed her arms. "We haven't decided yet," she answered honestly. Mr. Phelps sighed. He looked as though he thought she was lying but knew better than to expect anything else. Alice discovered she did not care whether he believed her or not.

"He'll let you down too." He nodded vaguely towards the cave. "That boy. He won't want to. But if you put all your trust in him, he'll lose it, or break it, or betray it."

Alice shivered. I know. That isn't why I'm staying, she wanted to say. But explaining why she was would have taken too long, and she did not think he would understand that it wasn't really one reason but hundreds of little ones that by themselves meant nothing at all but taken together made up a person she had decided she would rather not live without. It was not the kind of romance she had dreamed of as a girl. Certainly she did not love Uncas the way she had loved her father, the painful, worshipful love that almost always left her feeling empty. Uncas was no white knight, she did not need Mr. Phelps to tell her that. But white knights could fall. Uncas was dark and quiet and fragile with eyes like a lonely black sea and a voice like distant thunder and all those things made him hers. She did not think she could explain this to the doctor either, so she settled again for the simplest answer. "We'll get by."

"You're young. I suppose it's easier for you," Mr. Phelps said. He looked a little envious.

"It's easier not being alone," Alice admitted. She turned and put on the most cheerful smile she could, more for her sake than for his. "I suppose anything is bearable as long as you can be with the people you care about," she said, with a lightness that was not entirely feigned.

The doctor smiled bitterly. "That would be nice, wouldn't it?"

He shouldered the familiar beige satchel he always carried, with his needles and catgut and the other incisive tools of his trade. "Please tell Cora…" he began, and stopped. "Nothing. Tell her nothing." He adjusted his satchel with another heft and departed without looking back. Alice watched his figure shrink and dissolve into the dark blue shadows of predawn. He stumbled a little before the forest swallowed him.

Uncas woke before dawn, but still he was the last to rise. Nathaniel's heavy footsteps jerked him from slumber. His brother could be as light-footed as a deer when he needed to be, but relaxed he had always tended towards carelessness. The buzzing of whispers, a thousand times more irritating than a single voice, made it impossible for him to remain in the cave. But perhaps he left because he knew she would be waiting for him outside. He was not at all surprised to find her there, tracing circles in the grass with her fingertips. It was impossible to tell if she had been sitting there a few minutes or an hour.

"It's going to snow soon, isn't it?" she asked as he approached, rubbing her arms.

"It already has snowed, little rabbit," he reminded her. Her cheeks colored, and he realized too late that she probably thought he was criticizing her. It made him wonder if they would ever be able to have a complete conversation without one of them misinterpreting the other.

"I know that," she answered in a quiet mumble. She began to massage her hands together in her lap. Uncas reached across and covered her chapped and brittle fingers with his own. So small and so cold, he thought. Like a spring butterfly that lingered too long in autumn. This is no place for one such as you. But then, that was for her to decide.

They had discussed very little regarding their future, such as it was. His brother had broached the possibility of wintering in Pennsylvania with their Mahican kin in one of the Moravian settlements the night before. The Moravian missionaries were used to mixed bloods and cultural misfits like Nathaniel. It would be easier on Alice, too, he knew, as many of the people there were more likely to accept a white girl and an Indian. She could be with her people, and he could be with his. It would not be a bad place to start a life together.

Alice shrugged when he mentioned it. "It's still just talk. They haven't made any decisions yet," she said. Her eyes surveyed his face carefully. "But you have, haven't you?"

He nodded. "I need to find my father. To…explain." She did not ask him what he needed to explain, and he did not elaborate. His mind was already imagining his father's reaction when he learned his only trueborn son had chosen a green-eyed girl with corn silk hair for his companion, a union that offered no guarantee except years of hardship for both of them. His father would be disappointed, that was also a guarantee. Disappointed that his son had opted to ruin his life and the life of the girl he professed to love. But putting it off would only make it more difficult.

Alice nodded. "I won't wait for you," she said. A look of stubborn defiance crossed her face, a look he found all the more enticing for its childishness, though he could never tell her that. He chuckled softly and ran his hand over her hair.

"It's a long walk to Ohio, little rabbit," he told her.

She folded her arms across her chest. "I will not wait," she repeated firmly.

He saw no choice but to accept her proposal, though he wondered if she had thought through all of the consequences. Their problems would not end once they caught up with his father. She already knew some of the migrating Lenape, but the Ohio Lenape were a different sort, and much less likely to harbor goodwill towards the British. His people were not the type to drive out a newcomer, especially on the brink of winter, but he wondered if she would be able to deal with several months of cold and silent stares. He wanted to believe he would be enough for her, as he had already decided she was enough for him.

Yet as he searched through the doubts in his mind, he found apprehension, but not regret. It was strange that all the things that were wrong with her were the things that made being with her feel so right. He needed her sadness and her brokenness and the soft radiance of a smile that would always be tinged with sorrow. Gifts he suspected the frontier had imparted to her, or merely awakened after they had lain dormant during the years spent with her English relations. It occurred to him that he had never known Alice the innocent debutante; he had arrived five minutes too late for that. By the time he first saw her, she was already Alice the scarred child-woman. Would I have cared about her this much if I had run into her six months ago in Albany? Would I have liked her at all? He pondered these questions a moment and then dismissed them. They would have enough to worry about answering the questions that did matter without dealing with the ones that didn't.

She rested her head against his shoulder. "Have you told your sister yet?" he asked.

She groaned softly and shook her head. "She knows, though," she murmured sleepily. "Cora always knows."

He chuckled again and brushed his lips against the side of her face. He supposed some might have called it angelic, even covered with streaks of dirt and a few strands of loose hair. He toyed with the idea for a moment and decided it did not fit. To love an angel, he thought absentmindedly, would be very lonely.

He pulled her closer and thought about the road ahead and the camps of his Ohio kin. For a moment he indulged himself with a picture of her golden hair tied back in braids and a string of blue beads cascading down her neck. Most marriages among his people did not involve a formal ceremony, but Alice would probably prefer one. Chingachgook would smile warmly at her, Nathaniel would clap him on the back with a good-natured jest about his creative method of finding a Delaware-speaking woman, and then they would dance, a wild, whirling dance in defiance of the frost and the winter and the inevitable turning of the world.

He let the vision hover in his mind, and then brushed it aside before it could collapse under its impossibility. Explaining their union to his father would be one of the easier tasks. Chingachgook would accept her as a daughter in time, but there were many more who would never acknowledge a family that included them both.

She turned back to the cave. The first rays of sunrise lit up the side of her face, painting her hair in streaks of amber and strawberry. For all her willowy, ephemeral beauty, there was a certain steel about her. Not the hard, unyielding kind Cora and Nathaniel wore. The frontier was made for people like his brother and his fiancée, people of fire and stone. Alice was all wind and water, light, fleeting and tractable, but quietly determined.

"We should go inside," he told her.

Alice shook her head. "Not yet," she said. "Just a little longer, please." She squeezed his hand and leaned backwards onto the grass. He lay down beside her, observing how their fingers wove in an interplay of copper and cream. Are you the darker one inside? Finding the answer might take a year, or ten, or ninety. He would not mind as long as she would let him share the darkness with her. A chill wind pricked the side of his face, carrying with it a warning of the deeper frost to come. As her gold hair mingled with his black, they stared at the sky in silence and waited for the arrival of the winter and the dawn.

Author's Note: This is not the story I planned to write. When I first envisioned a world where Alice and Uncas had a second chance, they were together for the entirety, and Uncas was able to watch her grow and help her out of her psychotic depression. Then - to be honest - I got scared. I was captivated by the idea that Uncas could see Alice in all her fragile, catatonic glory and love her as she was. But in that state I didn't believe Alice was ready to love anyone, and I worried that she would see Uncas only as a lifeline, or a savior. Alice's life has already been populated with many saviors, who protected her out of either love or duty. I wanted something more for them. I hoped to move Alice from a relationship based on adoration (i.e. her father) to one based on affection – which meant being able to recognize and embrace the weakness in the other. So instead Uncas met her halfway. Because he respected her enough to tell her the truth, he would get to disillusion her but not save her.

If there are any Fruits Basket fans reading this, I would be lying if I didn't admit drawing a great deal of inspiration from the Yuki/Machi dynamic. Most especially Machi's line that so horrified the Prince Yuki fan club: "The president isn't at all like a prince...he makes things lonely." There will be more times when Alice will require saving, and Uncas will have opportunities to prove himself. But she will never see him as the brave hero of a Gothic romance. To her he will always be the lonely-eyed Mahican who once gave her an honest answer.

Thanks to EmeraldCoast, because I was never able to thank you for your reviews personally, and to everyone who stayed with me while writing this.

-bethsaida