Barrow Fields you're gonna keep my soul, it was yours to have long ago.

aw!

he limped out from the tangle, his fur raked by thorns and his hide entangled by burrs and sticks. he kept his course, headed to the barrow fields with their gentle mounds and the easy sweep of hills before coastline. 

thin rags of snow dotted across the saturated ground and he avoided their cold touch by picking carefully along the bare soil. the scent of a rabbit warren uphill gave him pause and he stood still a moment as the seaborne wind scoured down from the hills and rifled his coarse fur.

Dad had told her to stay within shouting distance of Dawn and Adi, and she assumed he knew just how loud she could be, and just how far her voice could carry. He still probably would not have been happy with how far out of their reach she had strayed, but she was a big girl now, already almost at her full adult size, and Daddy wasn't there to say anything.

So Easy trotted on, feeling very grown up out there all on her own, but very small at the same time. Especially when a dark stranger appeared in her line of sight, somehow unnoticed until they were just a hundred yards away from each other. Dawn would've seen him, she thought, feeling foolish all of the sudden. She glanced behind her and thought about screaming when Dawn and Adi where still pinpricks in the distance.

But she was a big girl. Even though she had plenty of reasons to fear a stranger, she knew that Daddy and Dawn would not have been in her place. And so she pushed aside the strangling fear and faced up to the stranger, her posture defensive and her gaze challenging.

from here he could make out the roiling surf - smogged by distance, but there. his sight was on the shoreline as a small shadow approached behind him. the wind roved wildly, every which way, except for in the direction that would do him any favors. he remained unaware of trouble's presence for several moments -- until something prickled on the back of his neck and he drew his gaze from the ocean and cast a glance behind him.

all he saw were two lambent unkind yellow eyes framed by a face of darkness. he leapt in surprise and fear, contorting his body outright like a cat as he spooked in place by her presence. "shit." he exclaimed, still caught in the intensity of her glowing amber eyes. he backpedaled until he was comfortable with the space between them and mirrored her posture slightly, though there was an air of bewilderment about him as he did so -- had he trespassed? was he close to someone's territory? his brow furrowed as he ruminated the reason for her almost-hostile presence -- he certainly hadn't noticed any borders but he wasn't the most observant wolf, either.

The briney scent of the ocean concealed the man's identity. Pack wolf or loner, ravening or healthy - even if Easy's nose had been trained for such things, she could not have discerned them from the breeze. It left her feeling strangely blind, but she was not foolish enough to draw nearer to test his scent. Instead, orange eyes met yellow, and the pair stared each other down, each as anxious about the encounter as the other.

"My sister is right behind me!" she called to the other, thinking that this would sound more threatening if the man knew Dawn. The words sounded silly now that they hung between them, so Easy hurried to back them up.  "So don't think you can bite me or kidnap me or anything. I'm too big, anyway."

the girl remained rooted to the spot and ingram eyed her with a skeptical expression playing clearly across his muzzle. he turned his head to the side as if searching for the wolves she spoke of, yet he held her body clear in his peripherals. his ears pulled back in question as he shifted, uneasy with the proposition of more wolves crawling from the tangle. if they weren't friendly, he might run into a spot of trouble.

the second thing the young girl uttered nearly made ingram laugh - he wrestled to keep a serious decorum about him, but he lost. what started as a giggle turned into a snort (possibly accompanied by a snot bubble out of his left nostril) as he envisioned anyone dragging this girl off. surely she'd set up such a squabble the act would hardly be worth the energy -- and she didn't look like the type a captor could eventually win over.

"um. okay well, i guess that's good cause i wasn't going to bite you or kidnap you anyway." he rejoined in a slightly combative tone -- until he realized his disinterest in kidnapping or biting her might be misconstrued as an insult. girls were good at doing that, ingram observed -- taking every well meaning thing and twisting it the wrong way. "not that... you're not pretty enough to bite or kidnap... i just.. you're not my type." there, that would 100% make it better.

Easy looked briefly confused. "Do you have to be pretty to get attacked?" she asked skeptically, thinking that Dauntless wasn't pretty at all, but he'd been attacked. Maybe it was only girls? But that was beside the point. It looked like she'd been wrong about the man, and she was glad to set aside her suspicion in favor of eager curiosity. "Are you a lone wolf?" she asked excitedly, dancing a few steps closer, ears pushed forward atop her head.

Her dad had told her about lone wolves - how strange and unnatrual they were. He said she should be careful around them, because there was often a good reason no pack wanted them around. But Pema had been a lone wolf before she came to be their mom, and so had Cat, for that matter. She knew not all lone wolves could be bad.

Ingram remained flustered, his brow furrowed and ears askance. He struggled to answer her question - did it have an answer? A lump formed in his throat and his forehead knitted as he committed an uneasy reply: "N-no.. just, I mean.. I don't think you have to be anything except unlucky to be near a bad wolf." A surprisingly astute observation for a cheeky and somewhat propitious individual such as Ingram.

She came closer with an excited wriggle of her body and Ingram cast an uncertain look about them. His opinion, which meant very little, was that she was much younger than he and he wondered truly if her relatives were lying in wait in the bush. Was it some scheme designed to entrap a wolf that was inclined towards such unsightly endeavors? Or was she actually alone, contrary to what she had claimed moments before?

"No, not a lone wolf. Are you?"  He could not possibly see how she was, but thought it would be impolite to not return the inquiry.

Easy peered at the man uncertainly as he explained his reasoning, not quite seeing how her prettiness tied into the equation. But she'd long since learned that trying to pry information out of adults was far more boring and time-consuming than she had the patience for, and thus, allowed the topic to die.

"Of course not," the girl scoffed. "I'm from Morningside. Me and my sister and her mate are looking for a new place to live, since people are going to war and raping each other next to our old territory," she explained, sharing what information she did have about the situation. While much of it had been told to her outright, she'd learned some of it by eavesdropping on her father's conversations with other adults in the pack.

the girl scoffed at his inquiry, a habit that drew a slight smile from ingram. in some small way she reminded him of chusi -- up until she casually dropped information he truly wished he had not heard.

his ears cupped forward in overwrought concern as she mentioned moving, war, and rape. he felt the hackles on his spine lift in alarm and disgust - and he thought of wolves like her or chusi, taken advantage of -- and having unspeakable things done to them -- it caused his heart to quiver and his lips to set in a firm line of hatred.

"what?" he repeated, still shocked by the casual aplomb of her forthright honesty. "are you and... your sister okay?" he hoped truly they had not experienced the graft of the terrible crimes she had just mentioned.

Easy blinked owlishly at the male, clearly not understanding what she'd just told him. She'd never experienced attack and didn't even know the full meaning of words like war and rape - but something in the man's expression told her she'd done something odd.

Her stance shifted at once to defensive. Not the defensive posture of a shewolf defending her person, but the childish hunch of a girl defending her 'honor'. "We're fine. We're warriors," she replied, her voice somewhat sulky. Couldn't he tell?

ingrams' gaze shifted: her claiming they were warriors did not assuage his concern, however slight, for the fact that she appeared to be alone. especially now that she had mentioned something as grim as rape. it caused a sinking in his stomach, a welt of fire in his conscience -- even though she said she wasn't alone, he didn't know if it was true. "oh." he replied, unsure of how to handle that announcement. he was not a warrior, so, he seemed woefully inadequate to handle just about any physical situation.

"you... you mentioned your sister was around? i should walk you back to her.. yeah, i'd like to do that. what's your name, anyway?" he knew it seemed a strange request, but he didn't like the idea of her being alone now that she had revealed the sour characters of the wolves around them.

Easy's heart twisted at the thought of Ingram meeting her sister. The second he met Dawn, he'd probably start ignoring Easy and offering to walk Dawn around. And, while Easy didn't necessarily want Ingram's attention on her, she certainly didn't want any more attention on her older, smarter, prettier sister.

"No," Easy said petulantly. "Why do you want to see her, anyway?"

Daddy liked her best, too. He'd never said so, but Easy knew it to be true.

ingram was exasperated - he had no skills to reconcile the petulant youth's shift in disposition -- and quite truthfully, he was simply baffled.

he looked about them as if some idea hung on the trees that surrounded them, ready to be grasped and thought. as if he could pull from his surroundings the right thing to say to subdue her.

"okay....well, i'll start." he bowled over her question in favor of trying to passively steer her back to the bigger problem at hand - she was at the moment alone, and ingram could -- would -- never live down letting some stranger get raped simply because her attitude seemed dispossessing. "i'm ingram. i don't want to meet your sister.. i just.. don't want something to happen to you? do you have someone else?"

Easy peered at the stranger, sensing an odd mood between the two of them, finally. Ingram was worried about her, apparently, and Easy wasn't exactly sure why. "Why are you worried?" she asked, tilting her head to the side. "We left all the bitey wolve back in the valley. We're going this way to be safe." She wagged her tail. "And hey, you don't seem half bad! Looks like we're going in the right direction!"

She gave a playful little bow, hoping to jar him out of his dumb protective mood. "You don't have to worry about us, anyway. We're tough. And we have my brother-in-law, too, but we don't need him to protect us. Dawn's already a leader, you know."

At this, her expression soured a tiny bit. Even she couldn't help bragging about Dawn, sometimes.

easy's playbow elicited a light smile, but it was short-lived: truly, the prospect of such wolves as his neighbors -- her neighbors -- troubled him. even if they were left behind when they moved - they were still dangerous, and still very much a threat to any wolf that came across them.

he offered a half-hearted playbow in return, but a frown lingered on his darkened muzzle. "can i.. at least like, make sure you're with them before i go?" he didn't think she understood the gravity of her words -- perhaps because she was so young, no one had explained to her the world's iniquities. ingram wasn't going to be the one to do that -- even if he wanted to, it wasn't his place.

Finally, Eay gave up on her exasperation with the fellow. He was so clearly concerned for her safety, and as much as she so didn't need that, it was kind of sweet of him. It was a little lame, of course, that he couldn't just trust in her killer instinct, but still sweet.

"Whatever helps you sleep at night," she finally allowed, a small, shy grin making its way onto her face. "They're right back this way. But you can't meet Dawn - because I met you first, okay?"

The dark girl turned and flounced back toward the pinprick pair in the distance, hoping Dawn would freak out about her saftey as well.

ingram felt a sense of relief flood his tensed muscles as she finally relented -- he was unaware of her inner dialogue, but the smile she held for him compelled a smile of his own in return, and he beat his tail against his hocks. "it would help me sleep at night." he admitted fully, the smile a little wider now -- he could take a joke, even at his own expense.

he excitedly fell in step behind easy's retreating form, but not before offering a cheeky depart: "wait -- is dawn the cute one...? " he grinned ear to ear like a delightful rapscallion, fully expecting a rather hot riposte in return.

Easy froze at Ingram's words, her thoughts whirring at this new piece of information. Shock kept her from seeing that she was being teased - all she could think was duh as the question reverberated in her mind. Is Dawn the cute one? Is Dawn the cute one? Is Dawn the -

With a harsh sniffle, Easy turned from their path and fled, heading up toward the ridge rather than in the direction Dawn and Aditya could be seen.

ok - that was not the reaction ingram anticipated. the frown fell from his face like a stone in a river when he saw what his joke had done -- he really needed to work on his teasing, especially since it was the second time he had said something that caused such an extreme reaction. maybe he wasn't as good talking to girls as he thought he was.

she was already a good distance ahead by the time he finally reacted  -- "hey! wait up!" he called after her retreating form. she had made much more headway than him, and if she did not stop he would lose her relatively quickly. he thought about trailing a distance after her scent anyway just to make sure she made it home -- would that be creepy? it would probably, definitely be creepy.

Easy did not wait up. Shame kept her heavy paws pounding through the snow, away from the boy and her sister and those dumb things she'd said. He probably thought she was such an idiot. He probably wasn't worried about her at all and just wanted to be led to Dawn.

Everyone wanted Dawn. No one cared about Easy.

The dark girl headed into the hills, leaving all this behind in the dust. She would not be returning to the plateau, but would continue on to the taiga without the rest of her party. With any luck, she would meet up with her sister and brother-in-law before too much time had passed.

he trailed after her for but a short while, conflicted by her swift departure. rather than leave her alone as she wanted, he tracked her scent a moment longer as he considered what to do . briefly he scouted the area, and when it appeared no other wolves were following her long gone form he headed for home with his thoughts wrestling in confusion.