Redhawk Caldera i will sing no requiem

Set May 1st, so Sora has been gone exactly a month. For @Teya, other tags are solely for reference! This is mostly 2am rambling so TL;DR Sora has come to the borders and called for Teya alone.

Out there, she had not found healing, but she had found a kindred spirit.

A lifetime of pain and self-doubt could not be undone in a month, and the Sora who returned to the edge of Brecheliant was not so different from the Sora who had left without a word to anyone but @Jay. The closer she drew to the caldera, the more dread she felt. Not for what was certain to be a difficult conversation, but for the way her mind conjured up the old unwelcome memory of Reyes' death and a half dozen even more unwelcome thoughts. Things she had not thought much about while she was away.

She didn't regret leaving. She didn't regret not saying goodbye. Besides @Bridget and Jay, there wasn't a soul in Brecheliant who had shown Sora they cared for her on anything but a surface level, and so she did not care about any of them, either. Not Maia or Eljay or most of their kids, and certainly not @Bronco. She regretted not seeing her aunt before leaving, but the drive to run had come so suddenly and been so strong, she could only heed it.

It was unfair to leave her mother without a word. On a deep level, Sorana knew Teya had tried to be there for her after Reyes died. Even if it was way too late, she had tried. Sora knew her mom deserved happiness and not the endless misery she herself felt. That knowledge was there, but inextricable from the pain of coming second to a man when she had needed her mama the most, and only seeming to matter to Teya when she was so far gone that there was no fixing any of it. If she had seen Teya before leaving, she would have asked her mother to go with her, and she knew the answer would never be yes.

She was not certain of much, but she was absolutely sure about that.

Sorana pulled a slow breath through her nose. The voice of reason had been an older wolf who, like Sorana, had lost a parent. The circumstances weren't much better than Sora's. Her mother had run away, heavily pregnant, and died far from home, leaving her grieving family to search without knowing what had happened for months afterward. The babies had survived, but were raised by others and did not know their family. She had lost a brother before that, the stranger shared, and she understood how Sora felt.

The stranger had told Sora that she needed to get these things off her chest — whether it be in finality or in forgiveness, it didn't matter, only that she not carry it with her any longer. That was important. There could be no moving forward if she kept that misery like a ball and chain around her ankle. She was only punishing herself if she held onto it. The stranger asked if she had family in the world outside her mother. She urged Sora to seek them out, if so; there was no support system like family, and those not directly involved with the trauma might be able to help her heal from it where those who were could not.

Perhaps because that wolf understood and had experienced similar feelings, she was able to get through to Sora where Bridget had not. So Sorana had practiced what she might say. And when she thought she was ready to speak, she had come home.

It was hard being here without thinking about Reyes. She realized in her time away that she despised her father. None of the rest would have happened if Reyes never left in the first place. She wished she had a dad who cared enough to stay with her. She wished he had never come back after he left. She wished he had died somewhere out there instead. Not knowing what happened to him and assuming he had abandoned her was better than the nightmares she had to live with every day now.

She swallowed the acid creeping up her throat and counted to ten, something the stranger had taught her to do to calm herself down. It didn't matter how she felt about Reyes or Brecheliant or any of that. What mattered was not letting the past keep a death grip on the reins of her future. When she felt as prepared as she ever would, Sorana called for @Teya and Teya alone.