out for a cigarette break, he's taking his time leaning against a rock wall when a rain breaks. he sighs and grinds his foot out on the floor before looking around in search of shelter. he is a tall and slender silhouette made even taller and more slender by the way he stands, like he is pulling himself together. it's cold. it's a world of fog and water.
he grunts as a fat raindrop explodes on the back of his neck. he puts his collar up. the ground under him is slippery and unreliable and his calf muscles tense with everytime some mud gives way under his weight. there's a cave up ahead. he picks his way up towards the dark mouth, fingers splayed, and finds that he isn't the only person looking for shelter from the rain.
aside from a deep sigh, he's quiet. the inside of the cave is crystalline. the facets wink at him with the overcast lighting. huh.

whoever the stranger is, he's facing towards the light, and urias gets a good look at him. handsome, he thinks. sure of himself. for a good reason, i'm guessing.
incendiary eyes. like a blast furnace, or the engine of a steam locomotive. you could almost hear the bellows wheezing. he returns the smile with his glasgow scar. very, he says, his gaze flitting back and forth from the geode-like centre and the top of the stranger's head. red hair, almost like a mohawk. he's reminded of those greek helmets and their plumes. ever seen anything like it? he asks, curiosity turning over in his head.

he closes his eyes and tries to visualise it. gnarled branches like arthritic hands grasping at red stone. golden streaks glinting and glimmering from every angle.
i have something like that, he remarks, opening his eyes, the fine muscles twitching as they adapt to the light. it was a big tree. did you know you can transplant any branch to almost any trunk, and it'll grow? a massive, heavy, perverse thing. in spring, it bloomed with a patchwork collection of flowers. the bees went mad with it. just take the branch. gnaw at the bark on the trunk. stick them together with wet moss. rows and rows of branches each with its own color, texture, smell. the closest thing mother nature would ever allow to frankenstein.
he pauses, cocks his head, as if catching himself. shall we go spelunking? he gestures towards the gaping esophagus of the cave. the rain continues to tap out its constant and dense rhythm outside.

urias is one step ahead of him— with cautious strides, he lets the darkness take him. he looks back to glance at the stranger. his eyes glint a perfect yellow and his pupils are white with eyeshine. everytime his nails click on the floor, a faint echo answers him. deep inside a cave, it was easy to go insane. your brain on overdrive manufacturing away whatever it's able to, just to keep your mind off of the pitch-black. how many people had died just a few meters away from the surface?
what's your name? he asks as the weak light dims. the world was in monochrome now. his nocturnal eyes strain to keep up. i'm urias. he gasps as his foot slips into a shallow puddle, and laughs at himself. the cold wetness lingers.

ridgeback. what a fitting name. he's more than willing to bet that he'd picked it out for himself. he stores his face and name in his mind, a card snug inside a wallet's pocket. his ears flick back. he's careful now, not wanting to get his feet more sodden than they already are. he wipes one sole on a patch of grass. there is barely enough light now for the quartz crystals to reflect. well, i'm looking for someone. maybe they're in here, he jokes. have any siblings, ridgeback? if he had street-smarts like urias thought he did, maybe he'd see what was implied by the question, by the half-assed quip.

any of them— he grunts as he rears back on two legs, examining the sloping wall— worth mentioning? he rubs his head over the stone, marking it with his smell. just in case. he was a cautious man. when he had explored caves, he would keep to the right hand side and only turn right at the forks in the road. to leave, he'd only have to turn around and go left. old habits died hard. 
the cave bottlenecks into a smaller corridor, just enough for two people to stand shoulder-to-shoulder. up ahead, the chitter and chatter of bats. these hallways had been carved out by thousands of years of water. ozymandias and his ruined face came to mind.

in the pursed lips, the skeptical brows, the ears folded back. he could feel it without having to see it. in the hesitation, the minced words, the question. why not? he breathes, turned away. his voice, soft as it was, wrests some of the bats from their roosts. the flap of black on black, it brushes his hair off of his face.
littermate. an answer that wasn't really an answer. why wouldn't you be closest with your littermate? he chews at his lip. two trains of thought rattle through his mind. one, don't bullshit a bullshitter. two, this is all just smoke and mirrors.
he walks in silence. the air is damp and occasionally there is a breeze as if the cave is breathing its own laboured breaths. he was never good at small talk.

was it that this place just had a lot of realists living in it? or was it that usually realists were the ones who survived into adulthood? everyone he'd met so far had been the living and breathing equivalent of a swiss-army knife. where did all the young dreams go?
in the end, the onus fell onto his shoulders to guide this hulking conversation where he saw fit. he furrows his brows in the dark. that's ok. the past is the past. i don't even know what the hell that means.
thinking of joining a pack, then? he directs the topic into the future. the smell of bats grows stronger. he coughs, feels a pang in his head. please don't let this be a headache.

once again he'd fished for an answer, a real answer, and he'd come up with nothing. irritation flicks over his face but it's impossible to see in the dark. someone knowing more about him than he did about them, it'd always grated on him.
not so much a pack, he considers. more like a job. he stops and runs his hand over the smooth rock. a draft picks up, bringing the smell of stale air and bats back to him. and like i mentioned, i'm mainly looking for my uh, sister. he turns to ridgeback. the meagre light shades his face.
his forehead, brows, all tense and wrinkled, a tooth snagging on the side of his lip, the textbook expression of a man deep in thought, tortured and conflicted by his own mental loops. he sighs. i'm worried about her. just up and left one day. haven't seen her in months.

mercenary. it was a dirty word, a bloodstained word. he picks it up and examines it in his mind as someone finding a ziplock bag of indeterminate powder would. the pay is decent. he says, after a few moments of deliberation. but one day i'm gonna settle down. start a family.
his ears flick at ridgeback's words of encouragement. he does his best to catch his eye in the dark, smiling and nodding, although he knows its probably invisible. thanks, urias turns back around, walks forwards with his shoulder against the wall. mate. the sound of rain had long since been replaced by the staccato of water dripping off of stalactices.
finding tzila was not a matter of if, but when. she was old enough to know better. everything he'd done, after all, he'd done for family.

ha. you know, you might be onto something there. he swerves and brushes against the wall. it's all very methodical. take care of it until you die...then get your kids to take care of it...then their kids... his voice trickles off into a pensive hum. one day you'll have this massive tree. you could get lost in the branches, even.
it did feel nice.
it felt nice to have a conversation like this. building up from a completely blank slate— it calmed him. unfettered from any previous impressions. seeing how far he could stretch the truth before it broke and snapped back at him.
he's pleased at the fact that ridgeback has remembered his little tale of the patchwork tree. he allows himself the liberty of a single swish of his tail.

deeper and deeper into the caverns, being pushed through an intestinal tract, funneling down a bloodstream as a piece of hemoglobin on a cell— he creates metaphors and crushes them together like it's nothing.
he hums in lieu of an answer, his mouth set in a thin and thoughtful line. these things had always fascinated him. art and science coming together to shake hands, and he's always wondering which one is going to let go first. so many other stories about frankenstein things. but they could wait.
inevitably, hunger and thirst draw the two back up towards the surface. everything is so white-blonde overexposed and it takes a while before he remembers how it feels like to not be squinting.