Blackfeather Woods and you've seen too much

His return to Blackfeather Woods was a little while ago, but Cicero had settled back in well. There were many things that yet haunted him, but all in all he felt much better. He had also fallen in place well enough as scout and spy of Blackfeather Woods, making himself useful to the pack.

Now it was time for him to pick up other trades again, too; such as his poisons. He had slowly started losing interest in healing herbs — perhaps because pain was such an integral and joyful part of Cicero's life that he cared little to eleviate it — but the poisons called for him, and he obeyed their call. He had begun experimenting more again, though often was his own guinea pig. Not that he preferred for anyone to know; they would worry needlessly. He only took small amounts and gradually upped the dose when he did experiment, and so he knew that the poisons would not kill him (in the short term, anyway). A bit more refined than when he was a pup and just ate them all. A bit more brains and calculation involved.

Yesterday he had tried out a mushroom that he did not remember seeing before (perhaps because it grew in this time of year, and this was his first true winter), and it had made him vomit greatly. This morning Cicero, after awakening from an unruly sleep, had expected to feel much better, but he did not. It took a lot of effort to get up, and his mouth felt dry and disgusting from the vomiting. With dreary steps that each vibrated pain through his body, Cicero plodded through Blackfeather Woods, on his way to a stream and hoping he would not lose his stomach contents again. It helped he had little left in there.

Pietro often tried to get up as early as his father did, but mostly he only succeeded in missing him by no less than mere minutes. This morning had been a little longer. A lot longer, actually. Burke had been gone for over an hour, and as Pietro woke and tried following his paling scent, he consequently got bored and decided to explore on his own in the dawnlit fogwoods. He was trotting along, head and tail too high for his own good, before he noticed the slouched, ambling form of his older brother. "Cicero," he called, rather unkindly, trotting towards him stiffly. It was only then that boy began to smell and subsequently notice that something was really wrong with the two-toned wolf. His ears pressed forward, and he followed the skulking scout in sharp attention.

"Cicero?" his tone turned questioning, coming right up to investigate the male boldly, even if it was a detriment to his own health. "What's wrong with you?" 

Pietro's voice caused one ear to slide backwards towards the brother. A thin smile briefly blew across Cicero's face before it faded once more. His sunken darkened eyes turned towards Pietro, who came up to him once he realised that something was amiss. Cicero had hoped that no one would need to see him in his present state, for he knew that others might not agree with the pain he so actively sought in his experiments for knowledge. He did not feel like having discussions about it. It would pass, this, as it always had, and he would know how to recognise this particular mushroom as very potent.

"Pietro," he said and he tensed his stomach muscles as a sting of pain shot through his body. "Cicero will be alright." He was not sure how to really describe what was going on with him; he didn't want to encourage Kendra or Pietro into doing the same, but neither had he ever been one to withhold information or lie. "It is an experiment for poisons." That was the clearest way he could describe what he had done. He just hoped that his little brother would understand in some way.

Pietro was confused. Cicero said he would be alright, but everything about him looked deteriorated, pliable, and all around not alright. The already skeletal wolf had been vomiting; he could smell bile around his mouth and recognized the scent from one of the miscellaneous times his puppy stomach had been upset. Surely if anything else came up out of him, his brother would pass out or die— he didn't look like he could lose much more of himself to... poison.

The boy looked a little perturbed at the wolf's admittance. While Pietro was not unfamiliar with the word or its meaning, he had a hard time trying to understand what had possessed Cicero to ingest anything toxic in the name of discovery. Suddenly the slate child's expression went from worry to condescension. Such stupidity did not deserve sympathy, and he was now quite certain that there was something wrong with his brother, aside from the poison he had taken in. "I would've just given it to someone else to see how it worked." Even the child could rationalize this. "What if you're not gonna be alright, though? Cicero? What if you die soon? What then? What did you do this for?" He had a lot of questions, but most of them came from anger.

Now whether it was because he truly cared for Cicero or he was just trying to understand the situation, was up for debate. "You need water right? Or food?" he asked after a beat, beginning to move in the direction the weakened wolf was originally heading. "I can get my dad..." he offered as well, though this sounded very vaguely like a threat. Maybe he thought Burke would punish his mother's older son for his idiocy. Like he should be.

Perhaps feeding it to another would be amusing enough, but Cicero was not quite that darkened a soul. He shook his head as Pietro suggested this, saying, "Then another would suffer for Cicero's curiosity now." He said it as though it was a bad thing, as though random wolf x didn't deserve such a fate, and he believed that. There was another side to it, however, but it was one that he could not so easily explain to Pietro. The pain that he felt made him feel as alive as when Damien's teeth nipped the edges of his ears. He had always liked the feeling and sensation that pain brought and Cicero had never put much stock in life as a thing. Danger — life and death — he did not care for much, and pain was exhilarating above all other things.

But he could not tell his brother that, for he would not understand. Cicero had never told anyone, although there were wolves that could know, since they had seen the pleasure in his eyes when he was roughed about — Damien, first and foremost.

"Cicero was moving towards the stream to get some water now. Pietro may come, if he wishes." Cicero left it open and for Pietro to decide whether or not he would. Upon the suggestion to get Burke, Cicero shook his head. "No," he said curtly. "There is nothing anyone could do." Perhaps there was, and perhaps that was why he didn't want any interferance from outside. He did not care for repercussions, but a part of him did not want for the pain to stop throbbing in his gut.

"Better them than us," Pietro muttered, as petulantly steadfast as he would always be. He would not yet understand Cicero's fetishes; that he craved these "experiments" as he so naturally craved the chase. The boy swallowed his bitterness, feeling a sense of duty towards Cicero— if only because his Father kept him in the ranks of the Brotherhood. If Pietro had been an adult, this situation would have begun and ended very differently.

He kept pace with his slight brother, keeping close as though prepared to support him at any moment. "Someone could stop you," the stone child rebutted matter-of-factly. "That's what someone could do." And Pietro imagined that the male definitely needed to be stopped. Certainly no one who loved him would want him to continue these sorts of tests when it was such a great shade to his health. "Is this supposed to be a secret or something?" he asked, an unidentifiable edge to his young voice.

Cicero did not expect the child to understand. Perhaps he never would. Cicero doubted that there was anyone who would understand if he were to tell them frankly, wolf to wolf. To be frank, even Cicero himself often did not understand why he did certain things or others. But such was part of life. Of late, another thing had been tacked onto his desire for pain — because it seemed that the intensity of the feelings kept Sheogorath at bay. His darkest secret, the only one about whom he had never told a soul (well, perhaps after his encounter with the white wolf he could add a second secret to the situation); and that was another reason why what he felt was unexplainable. But it helped, and it also helped his research to find more and better poisonous substances. And that helped the pack. Or that was how Cicero justified it to himself, anyway. But he had always been his own wolf, and although he knew that the pack might not agree with what he did would they know (usually on days like these he would simply hide away from the world until the pain passed eventually) Cicero would never change for their sake. This was as much a part of him as his love for Damien — that, too, was a thing that, once Damien accepted the inevitability of their love, Cicero would let no one come between. Not even his pack.

"Perhaps," Cicero answered mysteriously to Pietro's suggestion that someone could stop him. He grimaced at the stabbing pain in his gut while he continued to struggle towards the water. He would be fine, he had been here before, and he would likely be here again... Pack intervention or not. Upon Pietro's question of the secret, Cicero canted his head and glanced sideways at his brother for a moment. He could not decipher how the question was intended, but eventually Cicero decided: "Everything is a secret, and yet nothing at all." He paused briefly before he added: "No. It is not a secret. Meldresi knew." Not that she approved, but it did not matter. If this was as little as it would take to have him removed from his pack and family, then so it would be. Cicero would not conform or bend to anyone's will when it came to his deepest being, so convinced was he that he was the only creature alive to know what was good for himself. Whilst he understood the point of view Pietro took, he did not fight it nor defend himself. There would be little point, and it would be hard to explain the disconnection from tangible things like life and death that he felt. If anything, the pain reminded him of life, death and danger, rather than divert him onto a path of more dangers.

The poetic way Cicero spoke irritated him— and he didn't know why— but his attitude mounted when his brother brought up Meldresi. His mother was a figment of his imagination. And he was starting to hate her, resenting her honored absence. Indigo eyes rolled towards the Gamma, sizing up the older male. Pietro couldn't wait until he was large enough to dominate him. The pompous king'sson snorted, completely ignoring Cicero's inference to the All-Knowing. The absence of any truly kept secrets.

Two may keep a secret, if one of them is dead.

"She's dead, so it's a secret." Pietro frowned, and pulled ahead, leading rather than following now, suddenly impatient with his brother's shaky pace. "Would you like me to keep your secret?" he asked as they reached the water, bending down to take a drink before his poisoned sibling contaminated the run. He assumed that Cicero couldn't honestly care either way it went, but he asked anyway. Any opportunity, the boy would would take.

Ah, it seemed only yesterday that Cicero and Pietro had played a game of hide and seek last, when he had still been a reverent younger brother. It was clear from the tone with which Pietro now spoke that those times were over. Only time would tell what the future would bring between them.

Cicero could not help but allow a grin to slip onto his face at Pietro's words. They were perhaps not meant as such, but they sounded somewhat mysterious. When Pietro asked if his secret needed to be kept, Cicero answered with another question, because direct answers had never been his thing. "Does Pietro wants it to remain a secret?" He did not care much either way, himself. Finally he reached the stream now, and with a contented sigh Cicero reached down to lap up the cool water.

Pietro could just as easily revert to the playful boy that he was at heart, but one could hardly expect him to have any sort of spirit in the face of a sick wolf whose actions he could not presently fathom. He could only treat Cicero as normal as he acted— and this felt incredibly unnatural. He was also getting older, and concerning himself more and more with things beyond the scope of mere puppyhood. The stormy kid looked mildly confused when his own question was turned back to him, and he blinked shaded eyes, wondering at it. While he was not explicitly knowledgeable on the concept of blackmail, it felt exceedingly inborn to want to hold something over another. He liked the feeling of having a secret. He liked the implicated power behind it.

"I think if my father knew, he wouldn't like it. He might even think you shouldn't stay..." he cocked his head at is half-brother, imagining that his mother had been as strange as this, and that was why she had died. "You do want to stay here with us.. don't you Cicero?"

Unfortunately, Cicero was not really a wolf so easily manipulated. A smile twitched at the lips of his weary face as Pietro insinuated telling Burke and having him removed from the pack. Cicero did not care if Burke knew, truthfully, because this was part of his work as a toxicologist and it needed doing as much as all the other things he did for his trade, in Cicero's opinion. Well, yes, perhaps he could have used some guinea pig, but on the other hand, this was the only truly specific way in which to experience and find out what a poison did. Cicero did not trust his guinea pigs to give him the right answers, and besides, it would go against his personality and his work as an ambassador to just pluck random wolves off the plains and feed them poisonous substance.

"Burke needs Cicero too much to kick him out for this," said Cicero. And if he did not, then Cicero had misjudged and would go elsewhere, even though he would always return to see Damien. Yet he did not think much of it, for he didn't think it would happen. "Yet this is also for the furthering of Cicero's work as toxicologist, a more reliable form of testing than using random wolves, as well as better for keeping peace with Blackfeather Woods. And more... humane." Cicero wasn't sure why it was that word that struck him, but he was sure that it meant what he wanted it to; he did not want to press his poisons on unwilling victims not only because of keeping Blackfeather's name clean, but also because he did not generally willingly hurt other wolves, if he could help it.

Pietro was possibly too young to understand all that, and Cicero disliked squashing his dreams of being able to manipulate others. Yet he had always been an honest wolf when it came to Blackfeather Woods. And while he had grown some secrets that he did not want anyone else to know about in the meantime, this most certainly was not one of them. The water cooled his throat and Cicero felt a little more wolf again, though it would probably take a day or two to fully recuperate.

With a grunt Cicero drank some more water and shared, "Cicero will rest now." He turned away, leaving it up to Pietro whether or not the youth would follow, then trailed off.