Wapun Meadow bébé ils ne veulent pas de toi

he rolled his shoulders in a pleased shrug at her optimism, and optimism it was. merrick knew the sum of himself. merrick knew what it was he had done. what he had seen. what he had tasted.
belief in him was to put one's faith in a pile of ashes.
but this songbird did not need to know that. she would not understand. and so merrick smiled and nodded and said "i will try to be kinder to myself" and all thr while meant none of it.
he was a monster, and what was more, merrick enjoyed being one.

"You should," she said with a forwardness better left in her by a parent, only to grasp how inappropriate it sounded. “I mean, you should try it at least,” seemed a fair correction, but did little to quell the sense that she could have been walking on eggshells.

Maybe she was, for all she knew.

The newfound sense of hope overrode the miserable notion.

She pressed on, clutching it with a found surge of energy and a smile.

“So in the meantime, I‌ can help you with things here and you can be nicer to yourself. Does that seem fair?”

his single eye glowed a moment. how beautiful she was, this dark seraph come to rescue merrick from himself. would she strive so hard for his goodness if she knew what he had
done?
no.
he breathed a suffering sigh, his mona-lisa mouth deliberately small and tremulous. "i would like that," he murmured in tones that implied he was overcome; but merrick was only cunning, and perhaps in some tiny way he meant to be congenial.

She did not know to be wary of him, that the sum of his whole was a greater and deeper darkness than what was writ in the scarring to his face. No, her own hopefulness may as well have been borne of a necessity purely selfish, a necessity to belong so great that she would bend to whatever will sought first to either break her or mold her. Ignorance may have been bliss in this case, but ignorance itself was a grave thing fraught with many tangible roads of good and bad.

Phoebe believed she had been left to pick through the bad—this must be a wholly good thing, even if she herself had to see to it. His murmuring only pleased her, led her into believing that she was on that road; it bolstered the smile that had settled onto her face, and left the prior scare to be left behind them somewhere in that meadow.

Silence eked in, but it too was a dangerous thing to her, and far more tangible.

“Thank you,” she said, “for giving me a chance.”

"thank you for taking it."
wherever she had come from, merrick saw no reason why she could not one day transform into a dark-hearted valkyrie, like the rest of them. who better for the transformation than the witch at the head of the pack.
he breathed out, leant into the air with a closed eye and relaxed mien. "things are coming together. sometime it feels like i was never away." this land, his land, heartland, her land.
ursus could belong to phoebe as well.
she need only mark what she needed, and take it.

“Were you away for very long?”

The question came right off her lips in the spirit of conversation before she had a chance to let silence fill some imaginary void between them. As though the fear of silence would mean that she was somehow detached from reality as it were; as though in spite of not wanting to pry she found herself filled with an intense curiosity about him.

It must have been nice to go home—she did not imagine what that sort of relief felt like, nor did she wish it upon herself. Surely the guilt from causing worry would mount an attack to the betterment of herself and that was only provided that she did not find seeking teeth to punish her for simply vanishing.

If only she knew.

"too long," merrick murmured in return, thinking of all that had gone on since the last revolvings of the world. "too long. but i learned many things." how to maim. how to torment. how to kill. 
how to take one's mother into an embrace from which she would not escape again.
the single eye blinked, blotting merrick's features into darkness a second. 
what would she think of ursus? would it too be her home? he hoped that she would be able to feel the grate of magick at the edge of his home, in its heart.