Wapun Meadow looking to fight, smoking a blunt and a pipe

for @Astyanax and @Ashlar; other tag for reference

He heads toward the area where he'd last seen Polaris, feeling numb for the first part of his journey. But then the sun starts to set, taking with it his handle on whatever emotions still lurk within him. Not many, he knows, but he's done a good enough job of ignoring them that he's oblivious to the depth and nature of them for now. As it grows darker, he starts to find out exactly what they are —
He'd heard once that anger is a secondary emotion; a branch off the tree of a bigger, more deeply-rooted feeling. But when he reaches for something behind that writhing, sizzling mass of rage, he finds... nothing. Emptiness past the curtain of flame, tree hollowed and seething and simmering in the injustice of it all. Or maybe the tree is bullshit altogether. It seems more likely to him that anger doesn't need roots, or else it wouldn't be flickering inside of him when all the roots have been yanked from the depths of his soul and thrown to the fire. Maybe anger only needs fuel to burn — and he's been given plenty.
Restless energy aches in his bones, a pent-up burst of fury waiting for the slightest nudge to set him off. He knows he can't face Polaris in this state. Yet he continues to walk, stiff-legged, toward his destination. He has no outlet. He cannot rage aloud, or cry, or ask a friend to lend an ear; there's nothing in him that desires any of those things. Even if he tried them, he knows he would find no satisfaction. The only thing he can think of that might soothe him is @Phillip — and he'd specifically asked him to go home and stay there, so that's off the table. The only thing he can do is keep walking until he's too tired to walk anymore, and hope the rage dims again when the sun returns.

An unexpected approach interrupts his rage — a child, of all things. The boldness sets him bristling at first, lips peeling back in a brief show of teeth before he abruptly changes his mind. A child — already as big as him, but young, and all alone. The boy smells of pack, but no beloved child of this age would be unaccompanied so far from a pack. Unexpectedly, he sympathizes.
Hey. What are you doing alone out here? He stifles his anger enough to force out the stiff words, still seething with barely-contained emotion but unable to bring himself to vent it on what he sees as a kindred spirit. If anything, he wants to vent his anger a different way now — against the parents of this boy, for allowing him to wander, to be unsupervised and unloved in the middle of a field somewhere far from his home. Where are your parents?