Locating one dark pelt in a pride of lions was not any kind of a difficult task. The greater challenge came from locating a particular dark pelt. There were distinguishing characteristics, of course. There always were. But the fact remained that there were a hell of a lot of lions in the pride who had dark pelts, and that made Kazul's current occupation - looking for Ru - more than a little challenging. Within her own family there was her father and her siblings and her half-sisters, all of whom had dark coats, and branching out there were any number of lions not related to her, or related to her more distantly who had dark coats.
It didn't help that she had to look for him in such a way that it wasn't obvious she was looking for him, which meant that she could not simply ask somebody if they had seen him, or where he was. That would mean that she would have to admit that she was looking for him in the first place, and while Kazul had mostly learned not to let her incredible pride prevent her from functioning as a normal person, she still could not bring herself to admit that she wanted anything or anyone badly enough to look for them.
That did not change the fact that Kazul needed to find Ru and talk to him. She had news that she absolutely had to share with him. Tell him. Something. Kazul did not really know what the correct verb choice would be in this situation. She also had no idea how he would take the news that she had for him. It was definitely good news. Except it also was not exactly certain news. However, she thought he ought to know what she suspected was going on.
A part of her was afraid that he would be angry with her if she told him her suspicions and then they came to nothing. That part was afraid that his eyes would flash green and then go dark, and that he would rage at her and tell her he wanted nothing to do with her and never wanted to see her ever again. He might even hurt her, she supposed, but the possibility seemed only distantly there. She doubted Ru would purposefully hurt her - physically - unless she told him it was all right, as she had done in the past. It didn't seem like the sort of reaction he would have, to be honest, if he was disappointed.
Still, she would prefer it to the other possibility, and that was that he would get all that she had expected he might, but that he would then lose interest in her completely once there was no more to be gained by knowing her and being close to her. Ru's potential indifference would be harder for Kazul to endure than his anger. She could no longer tell if he cared about her at all, and so the fact that she still cared deeply about him was a barbed knife directly to her pride. The likelihood that they did not feel the same way about one another made it all the more imperative that no one know she was looking for him.
What Kazul did not know was that Ru was looking for her. He had actually been looking for her for several days, but in much the same way she had been looking for him, which meant that he was encountering similar difficulties in finding her. Ru was at the added disadvantage, though, of Kazul actually not having been living in her father's den, and instead shacking up with her half-brother in the forest because she had not wanted to be around her extraordinarily observant mother or prescient sister.
Ru was a more accomplished tracker and hunter than Kazul was, and he always had been. That being the case, coupled with the fact that he had been looking for her longer than she had been looking for him had lead him to suspect already that she was not within the stronghold, but that was problematic, because the lands outside the stronghold were comparatively vast and with her half-siblings' help he knew Kazul could vanish completely and remain hidden for as long as she chose. He did suspect that she had done something like that, but he was not sure why she would.
The other part of the problem with trying to track a specific lion within the pride using the usual tracking methods was that Kazul had grown up in and around the stronghold. There were traces of her to be found almost everywhere if he cared to look. The same could be said of every lion who had spent any amount of time in the pride though. It was true of Ru himself, and of his former mentor Voldemaras, and even Kazul's half-siblings, even though they made their home in the forest outside the bounds of the stronghold.
It seemed the stars had finally aligned themselves in such a pattern that the two lions who had been simultaneously searching for and avoiding one another at last came into contact on a secluded sandy portion of beach a short distance from where challenges were often fought, but on the pride's side. Technically it was all the pride's land, of course, but rogues and passers through were only permitted so far along the beach.
Ru had stopped to perch on a large rock and look out at the water. When they were younger Kazul had always wanted to spend time on this stretch of beach but Ru had typically resisted. He loved living among the Stormborn, but he was not drawn to the water as Kazul was. He felt far more at home among the trees that surrounded the stronghold and had a tendency to sink like a stone whenever he got into water deeper than he was tall.
Kazul had almost given up her search when she came up on the beach to worry. She did a great deal of worrying, and knowing that it made her unpleasant to be around Kazul preferred to do it in private. She had never been a particularly happy lioness, and she was more deeply unhappy now than she could ever remember being. If only she could find Ru and talk to him. At least then she would have one less thing to worry about.
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