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 Posted: Sun May 29, 2011 8:38 pm
 It had taken a while, this time, for all the crashing and burning to not seem so novel. Many parts of the experience were familiar - the constant, crushing anxiety, the disappearance of appetite, the overwhelming shame - but this go-around had brought its own fresh twist on how a breakdown could be had, and Tui had spent many, many, many days unable to live with himself, unable to clear the burning vision from his eyes, of everything that he had held and fumbled. It went in phases, each varying in length, shifting gracefully back and forth between the knowledge that he had utterly ******** over the best relationship he would ever have a chance at and the knowledge that the relationship had been doomed right from the outset. One bleak notion fed the other, like a snake that eats its tail.
It is difficult, however, to maintain such an exhausting level of despair without sustenance, so Tui was more and more often finding himself dead inside than tormented...if not an improvement, then at least a relief. His days were composed of wandering now, picking his way through the raggedy ends of Antianeira's territory, lying low, eating dirt. Now and then, deep inside himself, he would recognize the fact that what he was doing would eventually kill him, but the thought had yet to provoke him into pulling up from this plummet. He'd never been a hardy wolf, and nothing so far had convinced him he could take the vertigo.
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Posted: Sun May 29, 2011 8:47 pm
 Lungaia had a lot of normal, lucid days -- days where she knew who she was, and where she was, and where she had come from. Days where she had no desire to tear open wolves to see their insides, and days where nothing spoke inside of her head but the ghost of her own long-dead conscience.
This was not a day like that.
She had awoken with the overwhelming feeling that she needed to get away. That, if she stayed by Gaspard's side any longer, she might destroy him. It's not that she wanted to hurt him, precisely...but she was hungry, that deep gnawing aching hunger that burned through her insides and consumed her thoughts and made her feel as though something aside from her was living inside of her body. She hated that feeling, that loss of control, that slipping inside of her consciousness, that berserker's switch inside of her head where she lost herself entirely.
Where had this come from? She asked herself that question so often, so desperately. Sure, father had been insane...had been a murderer...and all that time with him and Kaeerah...and all the blood...
...But she was stronger than that, wasn't she?
Her heart thudded faster than it should have and she ran. Running away, or towards -- what difference did it make? This thing inside of her, this coiled demon of madness and hunger and violence and despair, she had to get rid of it, had to escape from it. And so she ran, blind and desperate, a shadow within a shadow, visible only in the flutter of fairy wings in the gloomy undergrowth.
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Posted: Sun May 29, 2011 9:07 pm
Tui heard, and felt the blood go icy in his veins. He had so far managed to avoid all contact with wolves, from Antianeira or otherwise, and in his better moments he had enough sense to know that his relations with his old pack were foreboding at their mildest. He felt the tremor in his paws and crouched against the earth, shuffling his skeletal body into the underbrush, knowing that no wolf was so easy to spot in the summertime. Curiously, he found he could not even muster the energy to pray for his good fortune; he only wondered, was it a Sister? Was it Varia? Would he die?
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Posted: Sun May 29, 2011 9:16 pm
Movement. Prey.
She stopped, that hungry part of her mind whispering orders to her body, a direct link from instinct to movement that her consciousness could only barely follow, much less control.
Tattered shreds of ears flicked, emerald eyes shone, nose twitched. There. In the brush.
She moved toward him, drawn with magnetic force toward his hiding place. She crouched down, coming in for the kill, ears folded back, eyes narrowed, hackles raised, the shadow of death herself approaching...
A flash of white fur. Black stripe. Hiding in the brush. Sleeping -- no, waiting. Waiting for her. But they had never met. Had they met? An image came into her mind, clear and crisp, of a wolf...white fur, black stripe, gaunt and shivering and weeping. The two images collided, overlapped, fused, and she stopped in her tracks and stared.
Had she walked into a memory? And if it was a memory...a memory of what? She had never done this before. She couldn't have.
...but perhaps she had. Sometimes, when the rage took her, there were blackouts, fuzzy patches in the memory, gaps in the picture. Maybe...but...
"...You," she said, her mouth forming the words without intending to say them. Her tone was distinctly one of recognition.
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Posted: Sun May 29, 2011 9:32 pm
As he listened, he felt himself become prey. It was seamless, huddling one moment as an absconded slave, in the next heartbeat a panicking little bird, trying desperately not to bolt. His eyes, very pale and almost colorless, skittered over the forest, seeking death, and when they saw it, he felt himself transfixed. No high drama, then, but a good, clean, animal death. The only thing he wanted.
...Except, it stopped. The look it gave was not an animal look, but a hazy one, and then it spoke. And he did not know what to do, except fall back on the training he had acquired since his sojourn out to the West. He pulled himself up, rickety legs faltering beneath him, and dropped his head; he didn't know her, and he didn't know what that tone could mean, but he had nowhere near the resources required to address that.
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Posted: Sun May 29, 2011 9:38 pm
"Who are you?" She demanded. There was familiarity in her tone -- and also fear, a creeping panic, an insistency, a desperation.
More memories, perhaps from another life. Maybe it was the life of whatever monster lay dormant in her mind. Soft fur and quivering body, whimpers in the night, shared nightmares. Running, chasing, pursuing, capture...he was a deer, he was a rabbit, he was a terrified child, he was this white ghost that lingered in the forefront of her mind and assumed whatever shape it touched.
He was no one, but, somehow, in her hungry and deranged state, he was everyone. She shivered.
"...I know you," she said, in a way that suggested she knew him from the inside -- that she knew not only who he was, but what he was, and how.
He was a wolf-shaped hole in the universe, waiting patiently for her to step inside like a missing puzzle piece.
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Posted: Mon May 30, 2011 6:11 pm
He felt the hair rise all along his back. Beat down as he was, he could still hear something in the way she spoke that was undeniably unbalanced, though he had little enough drive to do anything about it. Keeping his eyes downcast, he listened, and felt himself sway on his feet. It seemed to him...that the words were not important, so much as the feelings that were behind them. He heard her, heard her intent, and could not help his mouth from twisting into a residual snarl of grief. That anyone might truly know him was his deepest, blackest humiliation.
His eyes felt wet, and he became aware that he was being pulled into a bit of psychosis that wasn't even his own; the realization made him feel a little woozy, so he sat again, and searched for a moment to find his voice. "I,", he began, already out of breath, "don't think you do..." He sounded either doubtful or apologetic.
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Posted: Mon May 30, 2011 8:33 pm
She looked at him in confusion. Her head tilted, and her eyes narrowed, and she shook herself all over. "Then why..." she trailed off, feeling suddenly uncomfortable, embarrassed at the weakness she had allowed to envelope her.
She took a hesitant step forward and sniffed, trying to catch his scent, trying to match it against the template in her thoughts, but it was no use. The fog was lifting, and the memories were gone, and now she was just Lungaia: the daughter of a psychic and a sociopath, the sometimes-killer who spent too much time alone. She didn't quite remember having gotten here.
She looked hopelessly at the wolf, and rolled to her haunches. She was befuddled and embarrassed. "....You're sure?" She asked, but knew it was probably hopeless. But she couldn't hold back the tone from her voice, the tone that, as always, betrayed her: I have seen something terrible and wonderful and you're part of it somehow and please please please let me know you, let me make that real, somehow. "I...I thought we'd met, before, a long time ago. I'm sorry. I'll go now."
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Posted: Mon May 30, 2011 9:00 pm
As if tethered to her by an invisible rope, Tui found himself standing again as she sat, creeping forward with a conciliatory glance. Like so much space garbage, he found himself being drawn into her gravitational pull. Please don't, he thought desperately, except had his lips moved along? He wasn't sure. His paws shook, and he was acting so wildly he could not even begin to acknowledge it. "Maybe, you do know me. Please don't leave."
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Posted: Mon May 30, 2011 9:06 pm
That...that was just enough. That was a lifeline, a rope thrown to save her wretched drowning soul from the tumultuous whitewater of her thoughts. "I'm Lungaia," she said, in the way of someone gently reminding an acquaintance of a forgotten name.
"...There's a pack here, isn't there?" She said, then, almost conversationally. "I ran into a member, I think. She's asked me to join. I don't know whether I will or not. Is it your pack?"
Then, because that was quite a lot more to say than she had said in months, she fell silent.
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Posted: Sun Jun 05, 2011 8:04 pm
He took her name like a gentle reprimand, ducking his head in a nod. "I'm Tui," he creaked back, and was duly overwhelmed by all the things she found to say - in the weeks since the raging in his mind had quieted, there had been little enough conversation going on.
He nodded again, instead, giving a small twitch, and then another, as he thought about that pack. "It was my pack," he managed, after summoning all his strength; "I had to leave." Though, of course, he really hadn't quite left - and he really hadn't had to.
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Posted: Sun Jun 05, 2011 8:18 pm
Her tattered ears swept forward, hanging like ribbons from either side of her head. Her eyes narrowed, and something both righteous and infuriated gleamed in their depths. "Had to leave?" She asked, perhaps more sharply than she intended. She thought of the wolf she had met, of the darkness she had seen there -- the darkness that was a near-perfect reflection of what stood in her own heart. Then, more softly, but with an undercurrent of a growl, she added, "....Did they hurt you, Tui?"
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Posted: Thu Jun 09, 2011 8:35 pm
Those ears arrested his attention. They had been savaged, it seemed, torn to shreds - he thought it seemed not to have been in many fights, but in one fight. Or one beating, perhaps. At the thought an old memory thumped at the door of his subconscious and his face went blank for several heartbeats, all his processors slowed, and that helped to take the sharpness out of her words. He came back in to hear her second question, and to see that curious look in her eye: what was that, if it wasn't pity? "Did they," he mumbled, feeling that pull again, the urge to crawl to her and try to lick her cheek. Did they hurt him? They had not, though care and luck on his part. Iosef had hurt him, although he thought maybe the little wolf counted for a self-inflicted injury. He had known better, almost from the start.
"They hurt Slaves sometimes," he finished, "but not me." I had to leave, he finished silently. It was not the kind of thing you wanted to explain to a towering stranger.
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Posted: Thu Jun 09, 2011 10:41 pm
Her eyes narrowed further, mere emerald-toned slits in her dark face. Slaves. They hurt slaves sometimes. That resounded in her thoughts, echoed like words spoken to an empty room.
"I see," she said. She took a tentative step forward, suddenly overcome with a very odd sensation. A maternal feeling, the feeling that the needed to protect this little wolf, no matter the cost. Why would she feel that way? Because some part of her heart recognized her? Or because she was, in some twisted way, a hero, and a hero was nothing without someone to save?
"But you're hurting," she replied, shrewdly. "Inside."
The fact was, she could feel this -- hear this -- as though it were a primal scream that tore apart her own heart.
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Posted: Tue Jun 14, 2011 1:53 pm
He felt his throat go dry, felt an enormous space begin to open in his chest. He found he could not look up. This wolf had walked right up to him and calmly, firmly pressed her nose against the lone exposed nerve that had been with him since his earliest childhood, the hurt that was always there and never, ever talked about. He shuddered, and seemed to wither in front of her, curling into himself like an old, dead leaf, and it took him longer than a minute to find any voice to use. "Always," he choked, finally, his face beginning to contort in grief.
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