Redtail Rise I wish that I could be like the cool kids

"I'll come back and visit, I promise. I could never forget you, Reek."

"But I probably won't go too far and I'll come see you again someday. Cross my heart."

"Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye. I promise, Reek."

Smash was many things—obnoxious, possibly crazy, a mother—but a flake wasn't one of them. She had promised Reek she would return for a visit someday. He wasn't the only one she wanted or needed to see, either. Had Wynter come home? Did they have pups now? Was Arion still insufferable? How was Saena and the rest of the pack doing? And, of course, what of Luke, her baby daddy...?

That thought made her smirk, though as the small she-wolf drew up beneath Redtail Rise, the sight of its charred remains wiped that look right off her face. Smash's orange eyes bugged out of her head, mouth falling ajar, as she looked up at the burnt slopes. Her heart squeezed in her chest and, after staring dumbly for a solid three minutes, she began to whip her head wildly back and forth, lips moving as she spluttered like a dying fish.

"Uh, what—" she demanded the empty air, "what happened here, guys?! Guys...? Guys!" A bit mindlessly, Smash rocketed up the scorched slopes, crazily hoping that the members of Redtail Rise would be around here somewhere, never mind the fact that the hillock resembled a pot roast left in the oven about twelve hours too long.

Goober awoke with a start. It took him a moment to realize that it was a voice that had roused him from sleep, and another moment to realize that it was possibly a bad sign. He blinked his brown eyes a few times, shook his coat, stretched and began to head toward the voice. There was a very good possibility that the speaker could have been insane, a creeper, a murderer, or any number of horrible things... but he'd take his chances.

He wandered toward the telltale sounds of scrambling feet until he came upon what looked to be a black female. She seemed a bit frantic, and it appeared that she was searching for something (or somebody). "Um, can I help?" he asked, tilting his head to one side as he approached her with caution.

She reached the crest and stood there, panting and out of breath, jerking her head hither and thither as she looked for any sign of Reek, Saena and the others. The slopes appeared absolutely devoid of life. Fortunately, she didn't see anything that looked like remains among the wreckage. Smash sucked in a noisy breath at the thought that the rise's members might have fallen victim to the flames that had wiped out the territory.

When she heard footfalls and then a voice, the she-wolf spun. For a split second, she thought that might be Reek's voice, although the instant her orange eyes clapped upon the stranger, she knew her mistake. Ignoring the jolt of disappointment, she hesitated for only an instant before scrambling closer. He wasn't familiar in any way and an uncharacteristic frown dragged down at Smash's lips.

"Do you know what happened here?" she wanted to know. "And where're the wolves who used to live here?"

For a sliver of a second, it looked as though the dusky female recognized him. That expression quickly changed when she realized her mistake. It would have been odd for him to run into somebody who knew him out here, Goober knew. The female, still nameless, asked what had happened here and where the former residents had gone. "Oh, um," he replied, "I don't know. I just slept here last night."

Realizing his answer wasn't much help, he quickly attempted to make up for it. "I can help you look, though!" Goober wagged his tail, smiled big, and hoped that he'd be able to be of some assistance to his newest acquaintance.

He didn't know, as he had only arrived here last night. Smash's face twisted into an expression that was somehow a bemused smile and a grimace simultaneously. "Well, crap!" she muttered, orange eyes once more scanning across the breadth of Redtail Rise. "This definitely didn't happen overnight," she joked very, very dryly, gaze eventually dragging back to the stranger's face as he cheerfully offered to help her look.

"I'm not sure where to start," she admitted to him, turning to face him more directly, chocolate paws planted firmly. "I'm Smash, by the way. Who're you?" But before he could offer an introduction of his own, a thought struck her and Smash exclaimed, "Oh! I guess I should try howling?"

It might have come out like a question but she didn't wait for an answer. Tossing back her head and shutting her eyes, Smash bayed toward the skies, "Reek! Saena! Anyone, can you hear me?" It was a somewhat inane message, yet she didn't feel an ounce of shame. She would do whatever it took to find out her friends' fates.

Goober's ears flattened when she mentioned that this hadn't happened overnight. She was probably right about that. It looked like it had been burnt to a crisp. Goober wasn't even sure how to check if there were any survivors. He stood quietly, waiting for some kind of answer to his question. The girl introduced herself as Smash, and his tail wagged. It was pretty difficult to keep the grin off of his face for too long.

"I'm Goober!" he exclaimed, perhaps a bit too cheerily for the situation. He nodded excitedly when she thought to howl, and he chimed in with his own voice (though it was more of a general, "hello, anybody out there?!" message). "How long were you gone?" Goober asked, hoping to get an idea of far away Smash's friends could have gotten.

Smash stifled a snort and schooled her face into a politely interested expression when he exuberantly introduced himself as Goober. "That's an excellent name," she said genuinely, still biting back a bit of a laugh. "You and me, we should team up. Smash and Goober. Sounds like the name of the next big hit procedural cop show."

But moving onto real talk... "I left late last spring. Or maybe it was early summer," she said, sticking her tongue between her teeth and screwing up an eyeball as she tried to do the math in her head. All the while, she kept one ear perked for a response to her howl. "I left because I went and got myself knocked up," she shared shamelessly. "I went back to my birth pack to give birth and raise my pup. Pups," she corrected herself, a strangely solemn expression passing over her face very briefly.

In the next instant, a smile wound back onto her lips. "How 'bout you, Goober? What's your story?" As she asked, she silently gestured for him to follow her as she spun and began climbing back down the rise's smoked flank.

Goober listened, nodding happily as she explained when she had left. When she explained why, he cocked his head. Smash looked a little bit sad when she rephrased "pup" to "pups," but Goober knew better than to ask questions about sad things. He found it odd that she would go home to raise her family, and a million billion questions floated to the forefront of his mind. In fact, so many questions were bubbling that he didn't even hear her question at all.

"What about the dad?" he asked, "Is he taking care of your kid...s?" Maybe the dad was here, and Smash was coming back to finally tell him of the kid...s she'd popped out. "Or is that who you're looking for?" Maybe they'd gotten into a fight before she'd known she was pregnant. And maybe he wasn't even aware that his children existed.

Naturally, Goober was curious about the paternity. "Well," she began without hesitation, "it was an accident. He was my friend, sort of, but we weren't together, so I let him off the hook." She licked her lips. Smash hadn't really given him much of a choice in the matter. Her head bobbed in the next instant. "I am hoping to catch up with him too, though he wasn't in my pack." Hopefully he was around here somewhere, finally settled down in that pack of his that had taken ages to set up shop. "I'd like to tell him about them."

How would Luke react when he found out she'd been pregnant after all? And would she even tell him about Chogan, Toni and Crash? Or would she just let him think he'd had the single son, named for him? It was something she thought about from time to time. But Smash didn't know what she would actually tell him when the time came.

"But on the subject," Smash chatted away as they neared the foot of the rise, "I met someone after my litter was born. He helped me raise them and we eventually tied the knot. He's back home now, keeping an eye on Luke for me. That's my son," she shared, then decided to clarify, "The others—I had four—they didn't make it." She shot him a sideways glance, a sad smile, but then looked ahead, not particularly wanting to linger on this subject.

"Maybe they relocated, after the fire or whatever," she mused aloud in the next breath, slowing to a stop at the bottom of Redtail Rise and again glancing at her impromptu companion. Still no howl had come and Smash knew what that meant: nobody of relevance had been around to hear it.

Again, he listened. The story was odd, and he wondered why she would not have just told him about it. Surely he would have understood and either a) been happy to be a father to them or b) been okay to back away if she didn't want it. Then again, Goober didn't know the guy. Maybe he would have gotten possessive or weird about the whole situation. "Huh," was his quiet response when she finished the story about how her kids had come to be and why their real father wasn't around.

Thankfully, it sounded as though she had somebody else to help her raise them. That certainly lifted his spirits. Goober had a tendency to get attached to everybody he met. He just wanted everybody to be happy, like him! When she mentioned the four that didn't make it, he frowned.

"Yeah!" he replied when she offered an explanation as to why her friends weren't here any longer. "Which way do you think they would have gone?"

That was a damn good question, though Smash couldn't even begin to guess. "I'm really not sure," she admitted with a sigh. They could have gone anywhere, really, and locating them might be like finding a needle in a haystack. And trying to drag Goober around on this wild goose chase really wasn't fair to him, no matter how willing he was to help her.

"Y'know, Goobs—can I call you Goobs?—I think this might be something of an epic undertaking. So I appreciate your willingness to help but I should probably go it alone." She gave him a quirky, appreciative smiles. "I'm sure you have better things to do anyway. What's your grand plan?" she asked, her word choice reminding her of Reek, the grand poobah.

"Of course!" he replied when Smash asked if she could call him Goobs. It made him feel like they were a little bit more than acquaintances. However, those words were quickly followed by sentences that implied he should fuck right off. He could take a hint. Goober was silly, but he wasn't stupid, and he wouldn't trouble somebody who clearly had a lot on her mind. It wasn't until she asked him about his grand plan that he perked up again.

"I don't have one!" he answered as if it were the best thing in the whole wide world. "I'm totally one-hundred-percent free," Goober clarified, in case that wasn't blatantly obvious. He had no strings to tie him down, and all he wanted right now was a little bit of company.

Ah, she remembered her own carefree days, before Luke had put several buns in her oven. Smash's lips twitched and she allowed herself to feel a momentary sensation of envy before pushing it aside. Everything had worked out pretty well for her in the end. She was still a free spirit, just maybe not as free as someone like Goober here.

"Well, in that case, you're welcome to tag along. Just don't feel, like, obligated," the she-wolf said, then gestured for him to follow her as she began scouting along the edge of the rise, somehow unwilling to just take off immediately after traveling all this way. Even if nobody was home—and it now resembled a twice-baked moose pie—it still carried quite a few memories for her, after all, many (if not all) of them good ones.

"Maybe there's a clue around here somewhere," she mused, talking mostly to herself but pitching her voice high enough for her companion to overhear. "Like, maybe they thought to leave a 'Smash, we went here' sign, complete with directions?" Smash quipped. "Or maybe the hawks know something." But when she squinted upward, there was no sign of the redtails that used to circle tirelessly over their namesake rise.

"Never!" Goober lied, straight through his teeth. He did feel obligated. But not in a bad way. He just wanted to help Smash find her friends. It wasn't like he had anything better to do. Eventually, he would need to find a permanent place to stay, but there was no rush in that. Besides, if they found Smash's friends, maybe he would like them enough to stay with them... maybe. And maybe Smash would be able to vouch for him in some capacity so he wouldn't have to show up like some random weirdo looking for a handout.

"That's good thinking!" he replied enthusiastically when Smash suggested that they might have left a sign. "Hawks? I don't see any." Goober had no way of knowing the name of the place where they were currently searching, after all.

Goober took her mention of the sign quite literally and Smash shot him an amused glance—man, the music these two could make together if she wasn't so preoccupied—though her face fell into an expression of consternation as he pointed out the lack of hawks. "They used to circle above the rise pretty much all day, every day. Maybe the Roanokians took 'em with them," Smash joked, biting back an uncharacteristic sigh.

Although she was enjoying Goober's company, she had an idea and mentioned, "What if we split up? You could go one way, I'll go the other. Just ask for anyone who knows what happened to Redtail Rise, or mention the names Reek and Saena." She paused, brown tail flicking. "Of course, no obs," she repeated her earlier remark. "But if you give me a hand, I'll do my best to repay you, Goobs. We can meet up somewhere a few days from now. I'll bring the eats."

"The who?" Goober asked, unaware of the reference Smash was trying to make. But either she didn't hear him or she was too preoccupied with the task at hand. Which, really, was probably a perfectly fine way to be. There was no need to explain every little detail, was there? They had important matters to attend to, and Goober was on high alert for any way to find Smash's friends.

"Oh, sure!" he replied with the utmost enthusiasm. "Why don't we just meet here, since we both know this place now? Ten days seems like enough time to cover some serious ground." And that was exactly what Goober planned on doing. He would ask anybody and everybody that he ran into where Smash's friends had gone. Now that he had a mission, Goober felt like he had a real purpose in life.

Goober enthusiastically agreed to her plan and Smash favored him with a broad grin. "'Ppreciate it," she said to him, stepping forward to bump his shoulder with her snout. Stepping back, she nodded in agreement to his timeline. "Definitely." She paused to momentarily consider a strategy, then suggested, "Why don't you go north? And I'll go south? And maybe make a circle, with this place"—she gestured at Redtail Rise—"at the epicenter."

She didn't even have to wait; she knew Goober would go along with it. "See you in ten days, buddy! Thanks again for the help!" Smash hollered over her shoulder as she began to move way, headed toward what looked like nothing more than an endless winter plain. But surely there would be plenty of nooks and crannies to check beyond it.

Goober nodded agreeably when Smash suggested that he go north while she went south. Considering his sense of direction wasn't that great, he probably wouldn't follow the plan to a T, but it would be close enough. And hey, as long as he was looking out for the names mentioned, he'd be fulfilling his half of the deal.

As Smash headed one direction, Goober headed the other. "See you soon!" he hollered as an afterthought, a pep in his step that hadn't been there for quite some time.