Moonspear Caught in all, the stars are hiding

Charon's thoughts dwindled to who he would need to hurt, and he was about ready to ask her who had hurt her when she collapsed like this. Even though the pain was of the emotional kind -- the kind that was a lot harder to fight, especially for someone like Charon -- he folded himself over Maia almost like a shield. Charon moved in close against her and folded his nose across her neck. He didn't even stop to think that they had only met once. Had he had wings, Charon would've folded them around Maia to try and shield her from the big bad outside world.

With uncharacteristic patience he listened to the words she choked out while, if she didn't withdraw from his possibly overbearing touch, nosing the fur in her neck in silent reassurance. His first thought when she mentioned seeing her brother was that he would just have to kill Terance for making his new friend feel this way. But then she mentioned Sarah, and a fire. A fire at Lost Creek Hollow?

But when Maia mentioned home being gone and her parents, Charon's comforting preening stopped abruptly. His muscles stiffened as he froze in place, the touch falling away when Maia buried her face in her legs. Osprey... What? he managed to bring out, though the word was strangled and sounded weird to him. He didn't know what else to say. She had trailed off, her last words muffled, but he didn't need to hear them. Maybe didn't even want to hear them. He didn't want to hear that Osprey was dead. Even if he had made peace with never seeing her again, because she had her responsibilities there and he had his here, the thought that someone who'd been a lot like a cool aunt to him growing up was dead...

A frown crumpled Charon's face. There was nothing to fight, nothing he could do to take the pain away. He looked at the broken down Maia and then he leaned towards her again while he said with uncharacteristic softness: Shh. It's okay to scream or cry, you don't have to hide. Honestly, he wanted to scream and cry, but he also assumed the position he had ever since he was a child: The guardian who would allow others to show their grief, and then pull themselves out of it by looking at his stalwart face and knowing that there was at least someone around who had everything together. Even though inside his brain a tornado raged, a storm that destroyed everything in its path. But Charon had braved this storm ever since he was a child, too, so he knew exactly how to handle it and deal with it: Not at all.