Blacktail Deer Plateau I killed Mufasa

Making exactly 252 assumptions here... this takes place the morning after this shit show. Heyo, @Pura! :)

They had bathed her and put her to bed, murmuring sporadically when she drifted close to consciousness. They loomed, keeping watch, whispers exchanged and brows furrowed as they wondered if she would come out of it. Perhaps they thought she had taken a turn for the worse and would go out stark raving mad. Or maybe they kept close, hoping and wishing and praying that the fever would break and Junior would somehow claw her way out of these tangled woods.

In the wee hours of morning, as the eastern sky only just began to lighten, Junior snorted and rolled from her back to her side, scraping her forelegs against the cool den floor. She yipped, startling awake. She was facing the entryway and wasn't aware of those who'd kept vigil over her and eventually fallen asleep nearby. Junior dove out of doors, ignoring the aching in her limbs and the pounding of her head.

There was someone sleeping just outside the den's entrance, presumably to prevent exactly what was happening now. Delirious Junior didn't even bother trying to figure out who it was. She stepped over the prostrate figure and began to lope through the chilly dawn mist, headed once more toward the borders and the blessedly cool river just beyond them with every intention of drowning these fucking flames once and for all.

I love that exact number of assumptions. I made a few too.

Pura hadn't asked for details. His sister still lived on the plateau, and he trusted the wolf that had taken Peregrine's place - that was enough for now. The rest was printed into the air, and he took his time deciphering the change.

Junior rushed straight past the vast, blue-grey figure with his nose in a pile of wet leaves. At the speed she was going, it took Pura a little time to realize that the black blur was a wolf, let alone Junior.

He wasted no time in following her. To Pura's advantage, Junior's delirium affected her speed, allowing her slightly slower cousin to line up behind her.. and eventually pounce. Scar-stylee.

She saw the ledge ahead of her. Junior had no idea that she'd been here just last night, spouting nonsense, urine and vomit everywhere. She made a beeline for it, suddenly certain that she could leap right off it and into the river unharmed. In her current state, she didn't realize that there was a swath of hard ground between the plateau's base and the river, nor that the heights would kill her regardless of her landing pad.

Just as she came within five feet of the precipice, something struck her from behind and to the left, causing her to spin around to face backward even as the momentum from the impact shoved her closer to the edge—and over it. Nothing but open air yawned beneath her and some survival instinct sprang suddenly into action, urging Junior to hook her claws into the rock and hang on for dear life. The end result was that she dangled over the flatlands below, her legs kicking in open space and causing her grip to shift... and begin to slip.

Things didn't go quite as planned. There was less solid ground to play with than Pura had hoped - before he could react, there was nothing, and above that nothing flailed a good 60% of Junior's body. Physics had a serious think about it all, and put the feverish wolf's prognosis at Not So Good.

Thankfully, Pura currently had a better relationship with his senses than Junior did with hers. They returned to him within an instant of the cousins' combined fall (there was the sky, there was the ground, and there was Junior) - without thinking, he locked his jaws hard around one of the girl's black, sinewy legs, and tugged.

Not hind leg wtf.

Her eyes went wide, full of terror as some of her senses abruptly returned to her. They rolled in her head before finding and pinning to Pura's face. It took her a few seconds for recognition to register, then a high-pitched wail of, "Pura!" squeezed up from her lungs, past a rapidly beating heart, rasping off her chapped lips.

What happened next was either very fortunate or very unfortunate, depending on how you looked at it. Pura latched onto one of Junior's mutilated forelegs, causing her to screech like a banshee. Everyone on the plateau surely heard it. Everyone in the Teekon Wilds probably heard it. Just the one scream, then Junior fell into a nearly silent bout of whimpers as tears wobbled in her eyes.

Her instincts warred. On one hand paw, they wanted her to cling to the rock face, lest she fall to her death. On the other, they commanded her to wrench loose from Pura's grip, lest she die from the pain. It was a stalemate and she just went limp, leaving her fate in her younger brother's hands paws.

Junior let loose a noise unlike anything Pura had ever heard. It hit him like a Counter-Strike flashbang, bleaching the world and filling his ears with cotton. Unfortunately, his nose still functioned. The smell of infected flesh reached into his nostrils like a pair of hot pokers - far too close a relative to the familiar scent of wolf to be anything but abhorrent.

"Mmph!" he grunt-squealed (gruealed? sqrunted?), backpedaling with the rotting limb still between his teeth. His primitive mind wanted to let go of the pus-filled, reeking mess, but blind panic had short-circuited his ability to heed good advice. With his mouth now drooling with blood and whatever other hideous juice-creatures Junior was incubating, Pura gave the damaged limb a hard, merciless yank.

When he gave her leg a yank, Junior cried out again, though not quite as loud as before. Every subsequent tug earned a yelp of sheer agony from her, though fortunately it only took three or four before her stomach dragged up and over the plateau's lip. Her back feet scrabbled and found purchase and, together, they finished hoisting her over the escarpment.

For a few minutes, she just lay there, trembling from head to toe, on the verge of passing away out (omg honest first draft typo, LOL) from the pain. Fortunately or unfortunately—again, depending on how you looked at it—her fever flared and she slipped into an unfeeling state. Well, she could feel one thing: the burning. She sat upright and when she looked down, her legs were aflame.

"Just... just chop them off, Grasshopper McProlapse," she muttered to Pura before shaking her head slightly as if to clear it. "No... wait. I just stop, drop and roll. Right?" She stared blankly at Pura. "No. Take me to the river. I just need to use the water. Just baptize me and I'll be okay..." She climbed to all fours, weaving slightly as she took one step, then another. She began to sing, "Over the river and through the woods, to grandmother's den we go..."

Something was very wrong with Junior. The renamed Grasshopper McProlapse stared at her - which wasn't in itself unusual, he did a lot of staring - but this was not of the vacant, disinterested variety. She frightened him. Or rather, the state of her frightened him - darkness made it difficult to see the extent of the damage, but Pura (McProlapse) could smell and still taste that something wasn't as it should be. This wasn't Tytonidae cray-cray.

"OK," he whispered, stepping into the space between Junior and the drop, watching her for any signs that she might randomly bolt into danger again. "OK, I'll take you. Stop singing." Pura looked around the gloom for inspiration - the paths down to the flat-lands were steep, and far from loony-safe. He didn't trust Junior to walk in a straight line in the middle of a field, never mind the narrow, zigzagging route they would have to take. The blue-grey wolf slid onto his belly in front of his gently swaying pack-mate. "You can ride on me," he told her firmly, indicating that she should hop on.

Pura, alias Grasshopper McProlapse, quickly agreed to escort her to the river, if she stopped singing. Junior promptly shut her mouth and looked at him imploringly. Her eyes widened when he lowered himself to the ground, offering his services as a royal steed.

Excitedly but awkwardly, Junior clambered onto her older brother's back, draping herself over his spine like a strangely bony scarf. "Wheeeee..." she breathed into his ear as she wrapped her legs around him, wincing slightly but otherwise not acknowledging the pain. "This is so exciting! I've never had a horsie before!"

Junior was only too happy to clamber on, which she did with about as much grace as a dropping turd. Pura cupped his ears forward to block out future squeals of delight as he got slowly to his feet and took their first careful step in the direction of the river.

Progress was.. well, they progressed. Junior wasn't particularly heavy, but she slipped to and fro as Pura's shoulder's moved beneath her. Sometimes she clung on, sometimes she forgot to, forcing her brother-cousin (crother?) to make some strange-looking maneuvers as horse and rider zigzagged ever downwards.

After what seemed like the entire night, Pura's paws touched flat ground. They crossed the remaining distance to the river at a brisk power-walk, stopping at the edge of the chilly, moonlit water. It wasn't rushing particularly fast, but Pura would still be getting into the water - there was no telling what Junior would do. She might decide that she wanted to be a fish. He eased the dark, burning body onto the grassy ground. "Don't die in the water," he turned around to tell her with complete seriousness, "We already buried you, so there is no space."

She should have been frightened, for falling off might injure her even further. However, Junior could only squeal and laugh as Pura clambered down the towpath, jostling her all the way. When they arrived at the water's edge, she slid off him with a giggling sigh. She almost fell asleep, though Pura's sharp words roused her and she remembered that salvation was at hand.

She wanted to plunge into the water like an Olympic diver. Instead, she oozed toward it, slipping into it like she was some sort of mutant seal. Junior bobbed for a moment, then closed her eyes and let herself sink. The icy water enveloped her, soothing her hot skin and doing its part to drive the fever from her body.

The juvenile resurfaced and floated, her mangled forelegs hooked into the bank to anchor her. "This feels sooo good, Pura McProlapse," she said, her use of her brother's name indicating that she was no longer entirely out of her mind. "It puts the water on its skin or else it gets the hose again," she then whispered, the fever making an encore even as it hit its breaking point.

Junior opted for sea slug rather than fish, with the dexterity to match. Pura followed her to the water's edge and watched apprehensively as she tumbled in, floated for a moment, then disappeared into the dark. Panic swelled in Pura's throat, but she reappeared before he could howl for help or dive in after her. Pura McProlapse. At least she recognized him now - and she had the sense to anchor herself to the edge. Pura exhaled deeply through his nose, creating an icy cloud that matched the size of his relief. It swelled and faded in the pink glare of morning.

Pura sank to his belly in front of Junior, placing his paws on either side of one of hers and his head at an angle across his own undamaged forelegs. "I don't know what a prolapse is," he whispered, staring at her. "And I think you might be crazy."

In response to Pura's allegation, Junior laughed quietly and said a gentle, "Fuck you." She smiled, hoping he knew that was a joke. Then again, Pura had never seemed to compute such subtleties. "That was a joke. And I have no idea what a prolapse is either. I just know your face is one." Her words came out slightly slurred, not because she was sick now but because she was absolutely weary.

She was beginning to really feel the water's icy temperature but Junior wasn't ready to come out yet. She needed to marinate a few more minutes to lock in the juices (and lock out the fever). Meanwhile, the youth stretched a wounded foreleg a bit further and clasped one of her wet black paws over Pura's.

"Never let go, Jack," she murmured. "Never let go."

"Fuck you," Junior swore. Pura frowned at her. Swearing tasted ugly somehow, like chewing on a sea urchin. Before he could tell her as much, she confused him further by clarifying. "Fuck you also?" the befuddled teen returned, searching for a way to connect. He had established, in the earlier half of his childhood, that mimicry was chief among his arsenal of tools to navigate the social landscape.

Junior ebbed in and out of her feverish states, making plenty of sense one second and losing it all moments later. Pura watched her eyes open and shut, sometimes out of sync. They weren't the same colour. Peregrine's eyes were a similar blue-green as one of them, but the indigo was a mystery - as far as Pura could remember, Hawkeye's eyes had been a bright, poisonous green. "Your face is a nice face," he soothed her when she started channeling the final scenes of the Titanic, carefully sandwiching her hot little paw.

My last post, I think; she's gonna sort of conk out for a few 'ere...

When Pura clasped her paw a bit more tightly, Junior smiled lazily at him. Her chin had sunk to the sodden grass at the water's edge, tilted slightly to the left so that her cheek rested there. She rolled it now to look at him straight, staring into his eyes for what might have been an uncomfortably long time were it not feverish Junior and Pura.

"Kiss me, you fool," she purled at length, her eyes drifting shut like a woman prepared to receive a kiss, though the reality was that she had spontaneously begun to drowse.

My last one too!

Not one to be outdone, Pura stared back. It was rare that he was given the opportunity to really look at another wolf's eyes without it being perceived as a challenge or a threat. Eye contact was annoyingly meaningful in the wolf world.

"Kiss me, you fool."

Pura's mouth became suddenly dry, and he suffered his first staring contest loss to a set of rapid, fluttering blinks. "What?" But Junior was unconscious again. "..Junior?" Nothing. The freckled teenager stared at his sister's small, black nose. He had kissed that nose before - as pups, when every solid surface was fair game. Now, especially with Blue Willow's reprimanding voice in his head, it seemed.. off-limits, somehow, and twice as tempting.

Pura gave his head a little shake. No. He put his head down next to Junior's, far enough away to be able to count her breaths. When the sun had climbed a little higher, he would drag her out of the freezing water and keep her warm until she woke up - hopefully, without a fever, and able to explain what she had meant.