Blacktail Deer Plateau only you, in the whole wide world

For traumatized @Saena if she has time! :)

It wasn't until much later that Pura understood the value of the rendezvous site. Wolves had flocked to it whether they belonged to the family or not, and there was always someone to play with - or talk to, if that was your thing. Pura did not rank among the pack's top conversationalists, but sometimes, when quiet, sleepy voices exchanged hushed words in the middle of the night, he had listened.

Now, there was no-one to push through his awkwardness. Pura kept to himself, constantly on the move, stopping only to sleep by that little satellite of pack territory where he and Saēna had played 'Affa and Butter'. The original Fairy Kingdom had decayed into a pile of black mulch and fat splinters, but even if it hadn't, the log had never been big enough to house two growing children.

It was Saēna that he sought out now, moving south from a day-trip to northern border, where Plateau met mountain. Rain fell softly through the leaves, pattering against the boy's freckled back and irritating his ears. He kept his nose down, inhaling the smell of wet earth and wolves in long, deep breaths - the catalogue had grown significantly since those first few days, and he was now skilled enough to piece a story together from just a few whiffs. His sister's signature was everywhere, but not strong enough to suggest that she had been there recently. Eventually, he would find her.

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Her thoughts were all a-tumble in her brain, like shirts in a dryer. Some of the flashier ones rattled insistently, bringing her attention back to them time and again—things like her true parentage, and the weird dream she'd had. Others were inconspicuous, floating up only in her deepest musing, like how she should apologize to Blue Willow, but didn't have the courage to seek the Alpha out. She sometimes thought about the brilliant redhead that had been at the rally, but only because she was new and, at least in some of their eyes, unwelcome.

She understood the hierarchy of wolves intimately, given that it was instinctual, and knew on some level that Fox being Beta was wrong. She, however, made no mention of it and probably wouldn't unless she stumbled upon the fiery wolf, and even then, it would only be a statement. Saēna wasn't one to judge... Or, at the very least, she tried not to.

She was so deeply entrenched in these thoughts that she didn't realize she was trailing after Pura, following the winding scent of his paws stamped upon the terrain. It wasn't until she came up behind him and spotted him through a thinning in the trees that she buried her thoughts back into her mind, and returned her attention to the real world.

Pura! she called, picking up her pace to catch up with him. He had become enormous in only a short matter of time, towering much like Junior did, but Saēna wasn't afraid of either of them... Not anymore. Our mom died, she suddenly blurted with a forward twist of her ears in interest of how he would receive this news.

"Pura!"

The boy in question stopped and turned to look over his shoulder - right at the wolf that he was supposed to be tracking, not the other way around. It was difficult to coax straight-forward emotions out of Pura; embarrassment had not even made it into the lesson plans, loitering alongside regret and vindictiveness at the bottom of the pile. He turned slowly, coming face-to-face with Saēna after she sped up to catch him.

"Our mom died," she told him plainly, cupping her rust-coloured ears forward to catch his response. It was slow in coming. Information tended to hit a wall of molasses once it had been physically heard by Pura; he took his time turning her words over in his head, making laboriously slow connections whilst gazing at her kindly with those blank, metallic eyes. Junior had died, once. But their mother? Who was that? Did they have one? It wasn't Blue, even though she occupied top spot once - nor Fox, thankfully. Dad was used interchangeably to mean Kisu and Peregrine, and frankly, Pura did not care. But no-one every said mother.

A though crossed his mind like a passing headlight in the dark. The dead were sacred. Peregrine had told him that when Junior had died and Pura had taken it upon himself to exhume not only the grave of the Alpha's daughter, but also a second, bigger creature. He remembered the strange, leathery taste of her decaying limbs. The two ends of a connection floated in front of his eyes like two halves of a severed worm. Their mother had died. Fine. Then where was she buried? "W-where is h-her sa-..sacred place, then?" he asked his sister, his voice low and soft. She looked.. if not upset, then at least perturbed; a subtlety Pura would not be able to recognize in anyone else. But Saēna, like the wolves in the ground, was sacred.

It was like she could see the slow turning of rusted gears in her brother's face whenever he tried to comprehend a concept, yet Saēna had never commented on it or thought about what it meant. Pura was a unique individual with unique behaviours. Unlike Tytonidae, he wasn't forward about his strangeness, or so it seemed to the young rusted female, and so his strangeness was all right.

He asked about her sacred place, and this made Saēna frown. “What's a s-sacred place?” she wondered, stumbling over the unfamiliar word and twitching her ears toward her neck. She knew where her mother was buried and knew it was called a "grave", but she was unable to make a connection between Pied's "sacred place" and her "grave".

“She's buried where they put Junior,” Saēna said brightly, unwittingly answering her brother's question, “before Junior came back!”

Saēna made the connection whether she realised it or not, and Pura - rather quickly, for him - made his own links between their mother's grave and the sacred place whose seal he had broken and reformed again with Peregrine. The bones he had chewed.

The revelation did not horrify him. Why would it? They has never met Pied, and Puta struggled hard to really feel what it meant when something was sacred. "Are you s-sad?" he asked. Junior's disappearance had ruined many a Plateau wolf - and Pied was really, truly gone.

“No,” the patchwork pup finally replied, after chewing on Pura's question for a long half-minute. She knew nothing of Pura's encounter with their mother's remains, nor would anyone but him ever tell her. Even if he had told her, she might have struggled with whether or not it was wrong as well. It wasn't something she had ever thought about, and she had no concept of morality regarding death.

“Am I 'sposed to be?” she asked, hoping for some wisdom on her brother's part. He seemed to know a little more about the dead than she did, having referred to a sacred place and all.

Pura thought equally hard. Their conversation was like the world's slowest game of tennis, short bursts followed by long, contemplative silences. His freckled brows squeezed together as he considered the question. Convention dictated that they should feel something, but Pura could not summon the energy to fake it. He cleared his throat. "I think.. you can ch-choose," he decided finally. "But I am never sad," he shared in a rare moment of introspection, regarding his sister thoughtfully. "I think .. they don't like it, if you are not sad."

Pura said she could choose whether to be sad or not. Saēna thought it was the more acceptable option to be sad, but try as she might, the girl could summon no ounce of sorrow for her dead mother. She had never met her dam, after all, and couldn't have been expected to know a feeling of loss for that. Hawkeye was the closest that Saēna had to a mother... But they spent little time together nowadays.

“I don't want to be,” she decided with a note of finality. She would never be sad again, at least if she could choose it, like Pura said. He went on to say "they" didn't like it when someone wasn't sad, and this made the youth frown. “Why not?” she asked, hoping her brother would know the answers to that ever-important question. It seemed to her that "they" should want the pups to be happy rather than sad.

"Why not?"

His sister was full of questions, and whilst Pura normally resented prompts to speak, he was happy to share his private musings with her. Contrary to what the pack might think, the awkward pup did a lot of thinking - he just struggled to put it into words.

"Sad is normal," he murmured softly, gazing at Saēna's pale shoulder. There were so many rules. Don't chew on the dead, don't dig up graves, keep Atticus alive even though he wasn't there any more, this is sacred, that is sacred, don't show your penis to anyone. Juggling everything gave Pura a headache. "You h-have to follow lots of other rules." Exasparation bubbled over into a frown that he aimed his sister. "I don't know why there are so many. Pe-Peregrine makes them."

I'd like to finish this thread before finally laying Saena down. ^-^ Sorry for the wait!

“Rules like what?” she prompted, leaving behind talk of their dead mother and what that meant and why they should be upset about it. Sometimes, it was easy for the plateau pups to get caught up in drama that didn't really exist, and Saēna was no exception, so it was probably a good thing that Pura kept her off the topic. Hysterics was something nobody wanted from her right now, and if she'd thought long enough about it, that's what she would have given.

Of course, now she was interested in Peregrine's rules, and why they existed. Little did she know that they involved things like, "don't fuck your sister," and, "don't fuck your aunt," and the fact that those rules even existed was disturbing in and of itself. These concepts and the wrongness of them would have been lost on her, though, which was probably also a good thing.

He didn't tell her much about the rules, though, and eventually their odd conversation swung in a more positive direction when he mentioned he'd recently caught a praying mantis.