@Nine Lives; let me know if I need to change anything or repost at a different location! I am happy to do so :)
Now that he had Nine to lean on — or at least the idea of him — letting the other male out of his side made Yosemite terribly nervous. What if he went back to find him and he was just
gone? What would he do? Sure, he was a little stronger for the meal they'd shared, but still useless on his own.
He really,
really didn't want to die. He'd never had to face up to his own mortality before these past few weeks, but now that he'd done it, he couldn't seem to get past the horror.
So he was only gone for about twenty or thirty minutes before he was streaking back to meet up with the older male, light-headed and panting and clutching several red flowers tightly within his jaws. He set these saliva-coated offerings down before his glorious leader, feeling a little giddy both from being able to do something for his new friend and because he'd accidentally ingested some of them while hurrying back.
"This is just poppies," he said with a hopeful wag of his tail.
"If you want it, you should only take just a little — just in case we gotta move real fast." There were pack wolves out here, after all, and other dangers besides. He didn't have much going for him, but he knew to run when he saw scary things coming at him, and he knew that he'd better leave himself with enough wits about him to do so.
"Maybe we can hunt a little, if you're feeling up for it — or try and find something already dead to eat."
He would defer to Nine on whether or not what they found was actually edible; the reason he'd been so starved was that, after carrion had brought on the sickness, he'd been terribly anxious about eating any more of it.
While Yosemite had his perennial existential crisis, Nine was thinking-- a rare occurence that had, for better or for worse, gotten more common after his split with Mollie.
Muggy and quiet, the night was infinitely calmer without Yosemite's frantic anxieties, so he was left to his own devices. He finds, with a vague dismay, that he'd grown to like the boy's chattering. Like playing a vinyl riddled with scratches and letting the stuttering music fill the room, there was a dysfunctional security in not being alone with nothing else to hear.
He returns with poppies in hand. Nine grins, customarily sardonic, and mutters a thanks before tonguing some seeds into his mouth.
Right,
he stretches, shakes out his hands and feet. Let's look for some freshly dead things.
Despite the poppy seeds slowly taking effect, he's careful not to put too much weight on his leg, and so starts their walk into the dawn with a slight limp, grass whispering against his heels.
Yosemite gave a frenetic wiggle of satisfaction when his offering was accepted. He wasn't good at very many things — and especially, he was not good at very many useful things — but he knew a little about plants, and that had been able to help Nine. He hoped. It felt like a small step toward repaying his debt of gratitude, and another small step paved on the road to Everlasting Friendship, which was, of course, the boy's goal.
"Alright," he easily agreed, popping to his paws and swaying slightly as he got his bearings. He was happy with Nine's decision, because dead things could not be scared away by a bit of conversation. Too, he had decided he would trust that, if Nine said something was good to eat, it really was good to eat. No one made it this far without knowing good meat from bad meat, right?
The boy lifted his long, ruddy nose into the breeze and then ended up following after Nine when he seemed quite ready to depart. "How come your nose is all crooked?" he asked guilelessly.
The question strikes him out of nowhere like a freight train smashing through a crossing, and he laughs, a quick and sharp bark of surprise.
Aw, come off it, it can't be that bad,
cross-eyed, he looks down to his nose. He'd prefer to call it aquiline, maybe, or rakish. If you really want to know, I did get the daylights punched out of me.
He doesn't remember much, or he doesn't want to remember much. Everything before Mollie, he hadn't touched in a long time. Those memories sat inconspicuously in an attic, gathering dust, as he shuffled through the same photo albums again and again. Her dark hair, her blue eyes, her severe frown whenever he'd come home with another bruise blooming dark across his cheek, like linocuts or photo negatives, dark and full of contrast.
T'was a fight over a girl,
he muses. Me and this other bloke, we were a bit tipsy.
Then, with a wide smile, I got her, in the end.
Whenever he went, he left a trail of bar fights-- an achievement he was endlessly proud of, though some people might've disagreed.
The question was not taken quite as well as he'd hoped — and when the boy stopped to think about it, he could maybe see why. He gave a few contrite wiggles of his tail, but apparently forgiveness was not necessary, because Nine seemed happy to tell a little of the story.
It didn't seem very fun to him, getting beat into a different shape, but Nine seemed to remember it almost fondly. Perhaps because he'd been tipsy — a little like Yosemite was, now. Perhaps because it had ended with a girl, which made Yosemite's tail wag again in interest and amusement.
"I guess you've been in a lot of fights," he ventured, just going off of the other male's rather raggedly appearance. Oppugno didn't look like that, and neither had his Uncle Enoch. "Is that how you broke your leg?"
Yeah, yeah,
he yawns, rubbing a stubbled cheek. Drove the lady crazy.
Even now, just talking about it, makes him wish he had an arm to drive his teeth into. A storm to look straight in the eye. The goosebumps you got after a brush with death, there was nothing else like it. When faced with danger, his brain turned the chemical valves for exhilaration. Fear-- the kind of deep, soul-shaking fear associated with mortality, wasn't in his arsenal.
He scans the glen and its first tinges of sunrise. You ever get into fights? I could teach you someday.
A quick appraisal of Yosemite would reveal that he was mired in gangly adolescence, though his comically big paws hinted at a larger frame. Nine feels a strange strain of envy, or nostalgia, or both, before it is quickly tamped down by a heel.
At the risk of sounding cliche, the past was the past, after all.
Yosemite wondered where the lady was, if she had apparently been around enough to be bothered by Nine's propensity to fight. He decided that she must be dead, because he'd not yet faced the reality that sometimes wolves left each other; even his own departure from home had not cemented it in his mind. He was a yearling; it was natural that he should disperse. But Shasta and Oppugno had been together forever, hadn't they?
"Only with my brothers and sisters," he replied, edging away from the look in Nine's eyes. On the one hand, he'd like to learn everything he could from the older man, so that he could one day take on the world with the same sort of devil in his eyes. On the other, Nine seemed like a crazy bastard, and he thought he should not like to be on the business end of his crooked maw.
Admiration won out, in the end. "Maybe you can give me some pointers first, and then we could wrestle," he suggested, his tail beginning to wag in anticipation. Nine hadn't hurt him so far; he was sure the older man was really a big softy under all those scars and scary teeth and somewhat creepy gaze.
"Oh — look!" he added, tipping his nose toward the dark shadows of buzzards circling overhead. "That way, I guess?"
Perhaps there had to be something wrong with Kincaid, too, for someone to look at the slightly unhinged fire in Nine's eyes and finding it comforting. It was, after all, quite hard to hold hands with the type of person who'd lean over the edge of a canyon just to see what was at the bottom.
That's a promise,
he says, cocky but jovial, and looks up to whistle a quick tune-- two notes, one short and the other long.
He squints towards the horizon; there were indeed some carrion birds tracing low and lazy circles against a sky that bloomed with purples and pinks. A poet would call it morbidly beautiful, but Nine would call it food. Good eye,
he picks up into a trot, and the summer breeze carries with it the heady smell of meat, tinged with something darker.
The buzzards look at his approach with critical and beady eyes; in true Nine fashion, he launches himself at them, and his bared teeth catch the weak sunlight. There's something surreal to the whole tableau.
Although not very bright, Yosemite was a quick and eager study. He trotted at Nine's heels and lunged right along with him, thinking that a buzzard would be the perfect addition to his meal — . . . or to Nine's meal, since that had sort of been the deal.
All he managed to come away with, however, were a few feathers and a scratch on the bridge of his nose. He noticed neither now that the birds were cleared away, however, to reveal the contents of their meal:
A single fawn, perhaps only a month old, and only dead for a day or so, by the scent of the exposed flesh. It had been picked at by the buzzards, and apart by a family of foxes, but there was still enough for two wolves to tussle over —
or for one wolf to defer and meekly pick at the leftovers.
Yosemite settled off to the side, lowering himself onto his belly and waiting for Nine to either hurry up and eat or invite him to the meal.
The buzzards had been flying too high for Nine to reach them anyways; they let out a series of baleful screams before taking off as one single organism, southbound.
He runs after them for more than he needs to with an erratic and three-legged stride. When he returns to their findings, he's winded but satisfied. There's nothing but the sound of his breathing, and cricket chirping at a slow decrescendo.
A sharp jerk of his chin, a wordless what do we have here? The answer: nothing much. Other scavengers had beaten them to the chase and the remains were, to put it lightly, depressing. He raises his head to look at Yosemite, almost thoughtful, before looking down again. Flies gathered and dispersed along the hollow of the ribcage, and their buzz joined the ambience. They were lucky that it hadn't started to rot quite yet.
You're lucky that I'm not hungry,
he says, churlish and reluctant, before stepping aside to make room for another seat at the table. But don't think you'll be so lucky next time. I got a high metalibolism, or whatever.
At Nine's reluctant invitation, Yosemite felt obliged to move closer, although he did so quite hesitantly. Even though Nine had been quite good to him thus far, he didn't want to overstep any boundries and put himself in the doghouse. If he ended up on the outs with Nine, he'd be all on his own again, and Yosemite just didn't think he could take it.
He snagged a section of ribcage that'd come mostly loose and retreated a few feet away to gnaw at the drying, stringy meat that the buzzards had left for them. With some rabbit still stewing in his stomach, he was able to eat more slowly, and to keep an eye on his surroundings as he did. More specifically, he kept an eye on Nine, knowing that it was important for the other male to eat something now that he'd ingested the poppy seeds.
When the meal seemed mostly to be finished, he sat cleaning his face and paws, still side-eyeing the other wolf.
"Where are we going, anyway?" he asked the older male, wondering where Nine had been heading before they ran into each other. He hoped it was a better answer than the sad east that had been Yosemite's destination ever since leaving home.
They sit and eat in relative silence again, and when he's finished he wipes the blood from his face. Another satisfied belch (there's nothing quite like the camaraderie that comes with burping after a shared meal) breaks the quiet.
Yosemite and his chronic side-glances don't concern him all that much as they would've just an hour ago. He was usually crazy about other people's little ticks— hypocritical, because Nine had his own share of them— but the boy was quickly becoming more endearing than pathetic. It was a fragile balance.
Don't matter,
he says matter-of-factly. The sun reveals a mackerel sky. 'S long as it's away from back there.
He traces a loose line in the air in the direction of where he came and reclines gingerly to the ground.
We'll be lucky to find a pack that won't wanna bite our ears off.
He studies the air motes, floating and lit by a diluted dawn, before turning to raise a brow at Yosemite: 'Less you want to stay a lone wolf.
Rapid-fire questions occurred to the boy:
What's back there?
Who would want to bite our ears off?
How long have you been a lone wolf?
He refrained from bombarding the other man and chose the most pertinent: "D'ya think it'd be worth the risk? J-joining a p-pack?" Shit! He took a few deep breaths and tried not to think about his ears getting bitten off. "Only, it just seems like maybe we're not doing great on our own. Maybe it'll get better now that we're t-teamed, but. . . " He eyed Nine's bum leg apprehensively and asked after all,
"Do packs really bite your ears off?" Nine's looked rather chewed up, now that he thought about it.
Damn, he catches himself and remembers that you could scare Yosemite by breathing too hard in his direction. He sure was a wolf but he had squirrels' eyes, sleepless eyes, crosshairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck eyes.
You're right. 'ts only because it's summer that we aren't getting our asses kicked.
The dire threat is utterly at odds with Nine's demeanor— loose and expansive like an impressionist's brushstrokes. He pretends to think about the question, his freckled face screwed up and sober, but what he's really thinking about is how much he wants Kincaid, that old man, by his side, so much that it scares him, and shames him, and he kicks the thought in the side until it doesn't get back up again.
But I didn't leave him. He did. God, I'm sorry, Molls.
There's a lot of assholes out there,
he scratches his cheek. Let's hope we find some hippie bastards who believe in like, peace n' love.
It had come out much more jaded than he had meant it to be, but the bitterness of it finally broke his rambling thoughts.
Neither sentiment did much to assuage Yosemite's worries, but he figured that, as long as he stuck with Nine, he would probably be alright.
The young male looked to the mountain peak, around the base of which he'd caught the scent of several pack wolves. Too, he knew there was a pack further back the way he'd come, just on the other side of said mountain. Two more coastal packs as well, although he was not at all sure where those packs were located.
"There's a pack right here," he said hesitantly, indicating the mountain rising high above them. "We could try them. Or there's a couple on the coast, but I dunno exactly where."
By all means!
He explodes into the tail end of Yosemite's uncertainty with all the grace of a derailed locomotive, cheeks puffed out in a sigh that would've been pensive on anyone else's face. Lead the way, good sir.
The mountains ahead of them are veiled with muted blues and purples and they blur into the shape of a primordially massive backbone. Underfoot, a sleeping beast.
Nine Lives, intimate with the outdoors, judges it to be about half a day's travel, maybe a bit more with his stiff leg. He raises his snout and takes a deep sniff much like how a hiker would lick his pinkie finger and raise it to the air.
Along the way, he's rehearsing what to say and how to look in front of the supposed mountain wolves. What's going through his head is something like this, repeated over and over: I'm Nine Lives, this is Jojo, we were wonderin'— we were wonderin' if we could maybe...stick around for a while...
The older male's whip-crack interruption spurred Yosemite almost immediately to his paws. There was a wide-eyed look on his face, as though he expected that, at any moment, Nine might do something as strange as turn into a bat or stand on his hind legs and dance the hustle — but he blinked such nonsense quickly out of his eyes and turned to "lead the way" with a sheepish grin on his face.
"Yes sir!" he agreed, and set off toward the high peak spearing upwards into the moon.