Sometimes it was tempting to find a creek and lay themselves down in it for ages and ages, 'til they grew over with moss and mangroves.

Unlike most temptations that they indulged, this one couldn't be borne. Even when it was safe to be their truest self here -- which was not often, and, really, Alexis had found they liked the anonymity of it; nobody knew they were Rokae, because the populace at large knew so very little -- something was wrong with the water. It choked them to have it in their gills, like any landdweller would choke on water, unable to filter out air from the water in the slightest.

It was a little ember of irritation. Nothing much more. Why would it be? They didn't have the remaining capacity to be truly frustrated or upset by it anymore. It wasn't as if Alexis was unable to swim, now; it took a little bit of practice, some effort to relearn the things that changed when wearing human skin, but their lung capacity was as good as it had ever been. But with humans the way they were, there weren't so many common lakes and ponds and rivers that would be safe to swim in, not without passersby thinking they were mad or fearing for their health.

That, too, was -- it wasn't frustrating. It couldn't be frustrating. But for a flicker of a second, they were aware of the shape of the hole; the fact that, once, it would've hurt them to know this. But they could satisfy that itch, too, for on the outskirts of the city -- in the small pockets of forest, where one might hunt, if they were so inclined -- there was enough water to feel something. Something that was... it abhorred description, avoided it; Alexis would not put a label on it, even if they had known how to. It wasn't a negative emotion, if it was even an emotion at all.

Lately they had been too busy with taking advantage of people's debauchery -- and enabling their own hedonism, in turn -- to slip out to the trees, and watch, and wait. But even that was a self of its own, in its own time; the them that they were in laces and leathers was never quite the them that they were when on a hunt. Hunts were special. Hunts were -- sacred was not the word; nothing at all was sacred, and certainly nothing so banal as killing in a hunt.

It set Alexis' thoughts in alignment. It made them into one efficient action, and nothing more. It was something they were, without doubt, without outside opinion, good at; it was an objective fact, that they had tasked themselves with learning how to hunt, once, and from that they had learned. "Natural talent" was an oblique way to discuss something coming naturally.

This did not need to come naturally. But if it did -- what was more natural than blood and bone, in the middle of the night, even in these foreign lands? What was more natural, more true, more anything, than the language of violence?

[wc: 517]