Swiftcurrent Creek You Don't Tug on Superman's Cape; You Don't Spit Into the Wind

Following shortly after this thread, for reference! ;) Any who'd like to comfort or commiserate with Talos are welcome...or who'd like to make it worse. *eyebrow waggle* And ignore her stupid snarks about "riffraff," geeze. ...No promises on how the brat might react though because this is totally new territory for her.

Tags are for reference too, although you're welcome to join if you wish and your threadlog has space! And any & all please let me know too if I'm stepping on any toes or should change anything too-PPish up.

Talos had been feeling pretty darn good about herself. She'd snuck off and wandered south of Swiftcurrent, and then to the north, and today following a rousing game of run-rings-around-the-puppysitter—the poor nigh-superfluous creature whom Talos was growing almost total disregard for at whim, nowadays—she was mischievously contemplating her next move, assuming she'd managed to shake both @Akatosh and @Aura off her tail as she'd thought. Good riddance to 'em: they'd likely only get in the way of the rest of today's fun. What exactly that fun might consist of Talos wasn't quite yet sure, but her tail was flagging jauntily high and batting at wayward leaves and her silvern eyes were sparkling with eager anticipation. She was quite sure that so long as no spoilsports stuck their noses in she could find some sort of entertaining trouble to stir up.

So when she first caught wind of her parents' scents nearby, Talos felt a little ordinary alarm and automatically started to swerve wide of them. She'd been pulling away from them in more ways than one, as much as she could, of late, and too caught up in her own concerns to notice any sort of tension between them. Her black ears of not-quite-the-same-shade-as-Constantine pricked at the unexpected noise from that direction, however, and against her better judgment she found herself stealthily creeping a little nearer. Her tail arced nearer earthward and her brow furrowed in puzzlement above her darkening eyes as she cocked her head to listen shamelessly in... And then her eyes widened and her tail tucked closer to her body in confusion, as what she had thought at first had to be the Swiftcurrent alphas sorting out some sort of disagreement among the riffraff turned out instead to be their own furious voices directed at...each other? Talos was certain she had to be mishearing, but the all-too-familiar voices were quite clear, as even the nearby birdsong fell dreadfully silent in their heated vicinity.
"You don't trust me."
"I don't trust her!"

For one shocked moment Talos thought it was her they might be talking about. She was, after all, their only girlchild, so who else could that suspiciously nonspecific "her" be referring to?! But then her mother's voice wafted crystallized and cold: "You love her. ...But you have never said that you love me." A terrible dread had crept into Talos's heart at first, but as she heard those words coming from her mother's mouth the bottom dropped out of her world, and an even worse yawning hollowness opened up inside her instead. Talos wasn't the "her," then; Mother wouldn't get so upset over Constantine's love for his own pup... but then—who?! And how, and when, and...why?! Talos sat there, paralyzed, as Constantine and Durnehviir stomped off in their respective directions. For a minute she couldn't quite remember how to breathe. Then, with her jolting heart caught chokingly in her throat, she whirled away and fled in a blind stumble herself, overwhelmed and lost amidst a sea of raging unfamiliar emotions. Everything she had thought was so solid and certain in her world seemed to be called now into question, and everything she had taken for granted was suddenly disappearing as her whole world was turned upside-down by the horrible shock of revelation.

Her trembling, traitorous paws went stumbling up a small rise as they carried her further from the waters of the Swiftcurrent, and then stuttered to a halt as she stood rooted there and watched the small forms of @Constantine and @Aria traversing the border in the distance below. Talos's jaw hung ajar, and only slowly recalled how to work up and down: but no sound came out, even as she sank to the brown-leaf-littered floor and wished she could disappear into the rotting autumn debris, away from this chaotic emotional storm suddenly raging around and within her.

His trip along the northern border had been a dull one, but he did not once complain. He listened dutifully to what his mother had to say, nodded along in silent acceptance of what was to be expected of he and his siblings as they came of age to have more responsibility among the pack, but she bored him with it all. Durnehviir could tell, after a time, and Viinturuth accepted her dismissal without question.


He ventured deeper into Swiftcurrent territory in search of Akavir, Akatosh or Talos - but found no sign of his litter-mates at the densite. Sniffing at the ground, it was his sister's scent that he found freshest, and pursued her through the foliage. Eventually he caught up to her, and he loped toward her with a mischievous sway of his ivory tail.

Growling playfully, Viinturuth moved in to close the distance between them to press his pale shoulder heavily against her own obsidian, jaws parted to nip at her tufted cheek. In attempt to dodge her in the likely event that she'd clack her teeth in his direction, the gangly youth swung away and rumbled a soft encouragement to chase him.

Peering over a shoulder, his grin dissipated at the emptiness of Talos' expression. "What's up?" Viinturuth asked, confusion and concern on his features.

It took her a moment to register her brother's presence. She stared at Viinturuth in bewildered uncomprehension, offering no resistance, no return of his playfully bantering motions—she let his nip land, and barely even felt the teasing tug upon her fur, when ordinarily that would have been sure cause for swift and vengeful retaliation escalating into all-out puppy war.

Her brother's question fell clear enough upon her ears, but it took Talos a moment to comprehend, and another to remember how to work her own voice. Her habitually lazy elocution was never the clearest, but the emotions throttling her from within made the croaked syllables even more garbled than usual. Viint— dih... didya see... Talos turned her eyes back to whence she had last spotted her father, but he and his companion had disappeared from view. The big pup with the coal fur turned with equally helpless confusion to look back over her shoulder in the direction their mother had stalked off in, next, but of course she was longer gone yet. And Viin hadn't heard...hadn't seen... Talos sat there struggling to find the words to encompass the enormity of it all. As she turned back to her eldest brother a foreign emotion glittered in her eyes amidst the dark maelstrom brewing: fear.

...Therwarra...Mom...Da'... bwehn Ar'ya wennin... A fresh wave of feeling crashed over Talos and she buried her nose between her enormous front paws. It was too much, far too much to try and feel all at once, much less describe. And it hurt to even try, hurt like nothing else she'd ever felt before in her life. Oh sun and moon and stars make it STOP, she pleaded wordlessly. Maybe if all these emotions would just stop for even a few heartbeats she could wrap her mind around what she had seen, and find the right words to match. But no such mercies were offered. She tried miserably anyway, wretchedly thinking that not only was this something her sibling needed to know too, but that perhaps if he too could share in her horrible discovery he might take up his own share of the pain and confusion and thereby lessen the load upon Talos herself, somehow. They lef'! she burst out, squinching her eyes shut and tasting dirt but not caring. They wennan' lef' an' Momma shou'sa Dad don' love er'an'anan Aria— With a throaty and terrible half-sob, half-wail she at last moved toward her brother, to throw herself upon his wintry pelt in weepy distress, for once not aiming for any sort of physical advantage but nonetheless likely to half-smother the poor guy seeing as her weight class remained so much greater than his, despite the teenage lengthening and attenuation her bones too were undergoing.

He stood patiently, pricking his pallid ears to listen intently to the beginning of Talos' rambled words. Blinking in the direction she gazed in, the alabaster boy tried to make sense of what it was he was supposed to have seen, and his eyes narrowed slightly with the beginning of frustrated confusion. He then lifted his dark gaze to meet the frantic mercury of his sister's as she turned her face to look upon him, and Viin furrowed his brow at her.

He softened, however, upon noticing a very unusual glimmer in Talos' wide stare, and found himself slipping with ease into the role of big brother. In attempt to soothe his suddenly fearful littermate who pressed on with muddled talk of their mother, father and Aria, he moved in to close the distance between them. Viinturuth reached out to push his nose among the rugged charcoal guard hairs of his sibling's nape as she buried her muzzle between her paws, but she responded by wailing out that "they left" and threw her weight against him.

"Mmph," he groaned, bracing himself to hold up his weeping sister as she cried into his fur, and his confusion intensified. "What?" Viinturuth managed, shoving his shoulder against Talos' in a reminder that he was there for her, but she needed to pull herself together to explain what the hell was going on. "What are you saying? Who left?"

Viinturuth stood strong, and even shoved his shoulder harder at her in a rough sort of comfort that Talos was desperately grateful to cling to, right now. A-a-a-a-all of them! she yowled, not paying her paws too much mind as they clumsily reached blindly out to grasp her brother's form smotheringly closer yet. The terrible mental images were to horrible to be borne, and yet they kept playing in her mind, over and over and over... Perhaps on some level she was instinctively thinking that with the sights and sounds etched so disturbingly clear in her memories, if she made close enough contact with Viinturuth he could somehow absorb it all through osmosis. Magically.

All of them, she whispered even more intensely. M-m-mom went tha' way 'n' Da' went theh, w-with Ar'ya gon' with him an— Talos literally choked upon her own words for a long moment, unable to get anything further out. The gagging and gasping stuttering attempts at verbiage were likely near as painful to hear as they were to oneself experience. Then, at last, though still half-strangled: MomsehDadin' love her! Talos suddenly went limp, all at once, the enormity of this statement seeming to suck the vitality straight out of her. Her eyes brimmed with misery as they sought out her brother's, to see if he at last understood and what he might be making of all this. Or would he think she was simply imagining things? A smothering additional leaden weight settled onto Talos's heart as the notion crossed her mind: sure, she'd always had a pretty active imagination and been given to a bit of braggadocio and massaging of the truth, but surely her brothers couldn't think she'd be outright making it all up? Not on something as enormous as this.