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.