Chimera Fields Roast Mutton

His nose was twitching.  There were certainly a number of small prey items that he was contemplating going after, but with that many choices it was leaving him indecisive.  It was still much easier for him to pick a target when it threw itself in front of him.  You know, that whole giving him an opportunity he couldn't pass up.

Mal shifted, pacing a couple of steps as he pondered his next move, not sure which trail to chase as his muzzle swept over the ground.  Maybe it would be too hard to hunt here anyway.  The weather was nice and mild, providing no distraction from the shadow he cast across the grasses or the sounds that were made as he moved.  Why had he even wandered this far?  Now the world beyond the forest felt strange to him.  Too open.  Between his subtle actions and his pattern he looked out of place -- though the latter he could never change.

These unfamiliar lands had Cèilidh keeping low. A mild breeze tickled through her fur and the grasses swayed around her, and she understood the beauty of the fields written in the golden cast of the sun. The way the butterflies danced in the evening air, and the way the warmth pulled a sweetness from the grass she imagined tasted different in the rain. Yet she noted, too, that these grasses were hardly tall enough to conceal her, and the warnings of her parents rang like a mantra through her ears, even though she knew she had left their presence on the island, when she had plunged into the inky sea and had cut through the waves toward the coast.

That world is not safe, and even though she thought them wrong, she felt ashamed at how she scoffed at them now. She turned her thoughts to the present again; she needed her focus here.

The newness overstimulated her - the sights, the scents, the sounds - and she tried to take them in one at a time, but they intermingled and talked over each other, until her gilded eyes drifted a little to late across the likeness of a wolf to her right - and she caught herself inhaling with a sharp, "Oh," and tucked herself nearer to the ground.

Which one? Where?  A few steps one way and then another.  Indecision.  But he should bring something back.  It was just what one?  Oh.  Mal knew.  He'd move over a bit.  Find another path that had something clear.  Simplify.  At leas that was a plan he could easily follow.

He'd been so caught up in his thoughts about what was right around the vicinity of his nose that he didn't even notice the other wolf.  At least not right off the bat.  It was only because he moved that he was going to notice her, wandering in his tunnel-vision state until her scent was too overpowering to ignore.  He hadn't quite stepped on her, but when his conscious mind finally said to snap out of it, he was a little dumbfounded as if he had.  He saw a shadow lurking.  Blink, Um.  Hi?  She wasn't anyone he recognized, but he didn't exactly know a ton of wolves either.

He seemed about as startled as her, and she felt her tail tuck close to her hocks. At home, Cèilidh often found her tongue running easy with banter, comebacks, and quips, but at home, she knew the wolves she rallied with - and here, she was acutely aware to every depth in which she did not know this boy. Her tongue twisted with uneasy silence, only to finally break in a quiet greeting much too like his own.

"Um. Hello," she offered, and inwardly, Cèilidh felt herself cringe. She sounded weak, afraid - and she was and wasn't all the same. "I - um - " Her words felt soft, and so very lost, and she blinked in frustration. Why was this so hard? This wasn't who she was, she knew that, but she shifted her weight and shied her eyes away. A tangible dissonance to the wolf her family knew her to be. "Sorry."

Mal's issue was more just that he was eternally an awkward turtle -- or at least eternally in the scope of his adolescent to young adult life, one of these days he might learn but at least right now he was certainly not gonna win any awards.  And certainly not those for politeness.  Nah, the fact he was easily classified as uncouth once the confusion wore off probably would be the first thing someone trying to drill some manners into the yearling would have to work on.

Why are you just like.. cowering there?  As there was no reason to really do so.  She hadn't wandered into his territory.  There was nothing else out here -- right?  At that thought he looked up sharply and skimmed around, just to be sure.  But he was pretty sure that other than edible things he had been debating about hunting, they were pretty much alone.  Mal looked back to her, tipping his head.

His pointed words fluttered through her like a tongue of fire, and her ears had never felt so flushed. For the truth of things, she had no real answer for the boy - not a good one, anyway, and nothing that would tip this impression in her favour.

"I'm not cowering," she bit back, though any edge she felt to her words probably didn't slip beyond her thoughts. Her voice remained soft, despite any fluster or anxiety she felt within. "You just . . . surprised me. That's all." And stiffly, she tried to raise herself from the ground, but her nerves still quaked. She made progress, yeah, but she still felt small next to him, like a shadow of her usual self - and she wasn't sure all what to say - so she asked, "There. Is that better?" and these words oozed with a sledge of sass - which she honestly felt - but her eyes widened and locked on the boy with a flash of genuine shock, "oh - ah, I didn't mean it like that."

In all honesty he couldn't remember anyone having acted like this. -- No wait, maybe that one chick who was looking at the stars.  Kinda like that.  She was pretty weird too and Mal hadn't been sure what to think of her either.  He hadn't stuck around too long after that so for all  he knew she'd gone back to being a normal person after it... Not that he much cared, she (he'd forgotten her name, if he'd even known it in the first place) had been relegated to the status of blurry memory that would likely fade entirely if given enough time.

She was totally throwing his poor tiny brain for a loop.  She finally acts what he considers normal and then totally backtracks back into the land of Confusing Mal.   He tipped his head the other way, What? Is there something wrong with that?  You're being kind of weird.  You should like.. Be normal or something.  Which to him meant brash, but to be honest his definition of 'normal' was probably not exactly lined up with most.  This was, after all, the kid who knew how to throw tantrums and that was about it.  He had about as much guile as an old shoe.  Being normal was easy, wasn't it?

His response was enough to bring her head back with a swift jerk, an animated motion that expressed her confusion just as well as the deep furrow of her brow. What was he even talking about? "Normal - what - I am being normal." Unless normal meant something different to him, but normal to her and everyone she'd grown up with meant being kind, and owning up to her mistakes when she made them. "I said something that sounded mean, so I apologized. How is that weird?"

No one deserved to be talked to with the kind of rudeness she had started to give him. Of course, she didn't know him in the slightest, and maybe he actually did deserve the very brashness she'd delivered - but even then, she still wouldn't have done anything different. She would have apologized still... and who cared if he thought she was weird... right?

He just kind of stood there like a doofus.  Didn't sound mean to me.  So why would you apologize over nothing?  Which was probably part of Mal's problem -- that divide between polite and rude was all kinds of warped to in some places include different pieces on the wrong side of the line in weird ways.  Definitely unpredictable.  And he probably hadn't apologized for anything in his life.

Now whether or not he'd actually learn to be not a jerk, who knows if that was even possible.  But as long as something couldn't be interpreted as outright attacking him, stuff seemed safe.  Ish.

She might've laughed. Oh, she would've laughed - if he didn't look and sound so genuinely - well, dumbfounded - then she really, truly would've laughed. But that was the problem. He looked and sounded so genuinely dumbfouned; he didn't understand, and from how she could read the whole situation, he was being honest in that.

He really, truly didn't understand.

And she really truly didn't understand how he didn't understand, and she matched him with a furrowed stare, as if that could help her brain make sense of the boy before her. "Well - um - yeah, it turned out to be nothing to you, but I didn't know that. To a lot of wolves I've lived with," to all of them, actually, "what I said would have been taken as very rude. So, like, even if the way I talked was how I was actually feeling, it's usually good not to go around -- uh, smart-mouthing, I guess? -- other wolves, because you could really end up offending a lot of them that way, and that won't get you much more than, well... a life that's friendless and alone, I guess to put it bluntly."

On continued reflection, she seemed pretty sensitive, but he wasn't exactly buying what she was selling at this point.  None of it matched up with the world he knew, which seemed to be decidedly unfriendly, unlucky, and generally not in his favor.  Mal scoffed, Not my experience. People I was nice to were the first to leave.  Or decide they didn't want me in the first place.  It never mattered.  There was no excuse for his father, and his one sister had been abandoned by the adults, the other abandoned him.  He hadn't been mean to them -- or at least not beyond normal childish nonsense.  He'd never had a chance.  I didn't even exist to anyone else.  They'd walk over or through me if they could -- have to yell to maybe make them wake up from their perfect little daydream, and they'd rather not.  Maybe it worked for like three seconds.  It wasn't like any of them really tried to fix anything while he was in Elysium.  They seemed quite happy to just stick their heads in the sand and ignore him.  Only one wolf had followed him, and it hadn't been a prompt chase.  How long had it taken them to notice he'd been gone?

The soft crease of her brow never lifted from her face, all the time as the boy spoke. This boy, whose world seemed so different than her own - and her father's strong voice rumbled through her heart again: that world is not safe - and perhaps even in ways she would have never thought.

Honestly, she didn't know where this boy had come from, but her grandmother had given her a saying once - a snake can only birth a snake. She did not think this boy was a snake - but she believed him, when he spoke so blunt and so cold against the wolves who had really failed to raise him. And a part of her wanted to defend them, give the benefit of a doubt. Like, maybe they had reasons for doing what they did -- reasons for what? For leaving? For ignoring him? For not wanting him at all? And perhaps an adult would have confronted him to look at his story from a different angle, but she was but a teenager herself.

"So you know, that doesn't sound normal," she said, "That's not - that sounds awful, and cruel. And they were your family?" No wonder he was like this - that wasn't what families did - was it? In that moment, her heart genuinely moved for him - felt a tight string of pain for the pain he must have suffered - oh gosh, to be unwanted? She wanted to say sorry, wanted to apologize, but she didn't, didn't think he would understand what she was apologizing for. Didn't really know what she was apologizing for herself. So Ceilidh simply shook her head. "I - gosh, no, they had no right to do that to you! To not want you?" I'm sorry, I'm so sorry - "That's not what a family is supposed to be."

Mal would never miss a chance to badmouth the ones he deemed the witches of Elysium.  Hell, as he went through it, he'd probably wonder if this all had been their plan all along.  He wouldn't put it past them, and the longer he was away from them, the more he could speculate in safety without worrying about them coming after him.  It was also gratifying to have someone actually agreeing that it was wrong, which would have mollified him except he wasn't exactly tantruming away at the moment.  So uh, he'd just be his normal prickly Mal self?  Aside from that slight upward tilt of his head from her affirmation, which was something he would quite greedily devour if he could.

Of course, Mal's take on things wasn't always 100% correct, but it was apparently close enough that nobody had ever bothered to correct him about any of it. But he couldn't talk without being sour about it all, Well, some of them? Two women showed up with their kids, then my mom disappeared.  Everything went downhill from there -- they didn't care when my sisters went missing, moved the pack when my dad was looking for them... If I told their kids no to stuff, I was being bad.  My dad stopped teaching us stuff like a year ago.  Though they were about the same age, he wasn't being too hyperbolic about the dates.  Probably.  But when he became their mate I was so done.  They couldn't even keep my remaining sister safe when I was looking for a new home for us -- she was gone when I got back.  Cliffnotes version.  It was unlikely that their family would have been postcard perfect even if everyone had stuck around, but so far Mal's luck had been pretty much a joke. And depending when this thread actually is in time, there's also the fact Delight might be actually dead instead of just "dead to Mal" but that's a whole different thing that by now would be lesser to the giant chip on his shoulder of every grievance that had never been atoned for.  Lily had kind of realized her errs, Okeanos had seen them and agreed with him -- but what about the rest of that damn pack?

How utterly chaotic -- how neglectful, how lacking of love! She couldn't imagine growing up in a home like his own, and not coming out with a coldness to the world, a stony heart and a jaded eye to the kindness that anyone offered. How dreadful, how awful, how entirely sad - and his story clicked understanding into place, so that where her heart had once turned with frustration, she found in its place a deep pull toward him, and a want to show him that things could be better -- that perhaps she could become to him one small soul who could make things better, could show him that he mattered -- because though she hardly knew him, and he had given her no real reason to stick around, she was certain he mattered.

Maybe that was enough.

"I'm so -- " sorry, but she caught herself again, and she shook her head. "Did you ever - did you ever find your sister? Do you still live with your family now?" Surely not - he looked old enough to be her age, and where she was from, it was expected and celebrated for yearlings to disperse from home, to find themselves, and their place in the world, regardless of whether or not that led them back to the Island. But as she already discovered, and was discovering at rapid speed, things were so very different here.

His world, all things considered, was small.  There were very few wolves he'd really talked to.  For some, yelling was involved, and really the conversation went nowhere.  In other cases, he was just plain wary of them.  Sea wolves were nuts, there was that one chick where he bit her face, he'd randomly hunted with one dude and never seen him again, the list went on, but none of the histories were particularly deep.  The closest thing was the two siblings -- or Okeanos at least -- and he wasn't sure how much he could trust them.

Honestly, he didn't seem super broken up about the whole thing, mostly because it was pretty much old news to him.  It was all he knew.  Never found either of them.  They're gone -- everyone's gone.  Or dead I guess.  Shrug.  That was life, wasn't it?  At least one dead, one returned weird so maybe dead, two just gone like an early snow.  I was gonna make a pack for them.  If they ever come back I got a spot for them. Or something.  What else could he resign himself to at this point?  It wasn't like anything he'd done had made much of a difference, but he had tried.  Now it's just whatever.  Another shrug.  For the most part it's just been him, Okeanos, and Ibis somewhere.  They were not his first choice of packmates -- like at all.  Ibis was unpredictable and seemed to be more like the wolves he left behind the more he ran into her.  Would any of it last?

He said everything so . . . so casually? . . . or was there defeat behind his words? She tried to make sense of him, but in what little she knew, he was unsolvable - and that only made her curiosity grow stronger.

"Making a pack for them is hardly a whatever thing. That's an amazing thing, a thoughtful and loving thing," and surely that notion alone spoke of the heart that must still be buried somewhere deep in this brusque and apathetic young man. Her own heart continued to draw toward him, wanting to understand. To know. "Without your sisters. . . did you make your pack? Or. . . are you alone?"

Cèilidh delivered her final question with a slow sense of caution, hesitant to even ask -- but she asked, because how would she get any answers if she didn't?

*moves thread slightly forward in time to an undetermined point? XD*

You know that whole awkward shuffle foot, stare at the floor thing that's like stereotypical sort of embarrassed kid thing?  Mal sort of shifted to a subdued wolf-version of that.  He did look away, his ears twitched slightly back, but he was quite obviously trying to just be the totally cold-hearted twerp he often was (or pretended to be?) but couldn't entirely keep a cap on it.  He was very good about being loud and angry, not so much about everything else.  Probably why he didn't say anything in reply to her first statement directly.

He tried to refocus.  Trying I guess?  There's another guy from that pack, he agreed with me -- but his sister is around, and she acts like them so she hates me.  She'll probably make him leave. Again, matter of fact.  Ibis sure seemed like she was used to crying and getting her way, at least from Mal's perspective -- that was pretty much all she tried to do around him.  Hopefully Okeanos would see right through it.  He'd been out on some adventures or something a bunch so they had talked less than usual, which still wasn't much.  Who knew what Okeanos was really up to, but really there wasn't anyone else for Mal to count on in the first place.  Digging through the built in distrust wasn't exactly an overnight thing and there was still a whole heaping pile left at Okeanos' feet.

She noticed his change in demeanour. How could she not? He sure wasn't subtle with the sudden lapse in his cooler composure, and Cèilidh's mouth brightened with the tiniest twitch of a smile. Nervous, in his long silence. Not entirely sure if she had said too much, what to do herself...

Good thing Mal continued on, sidestepping whatever that had been, to plunge back into something concrete. Though, what he offered didn't shed much hope on his situation. And y'know, with what little she knew of him, she really wasn't all that surprised that even the wolves he had managed to carry out with him were on the block to leave. But still, she wondered why. What could have made a whole pack turn against this boy? Neglect him so poorly? Be blind to the ways they were so hurting their own? What kind of family did that?

She failed to question, of course, whether he was giving the full, unbiased story. Whether the problem wasn't in the perceived abuser, but in the proclaimed victim himself. And one night, she would return to the conversation of this day - but for now, she simply didn't even know how to handle what he had told her, and her compassion spoke before her sensibility could counter against what her heart had already decided to do.

"Well, trying doesn't mean you've given up." She said, and now it was her time to awkward shuffle her paw across the ground. "And - well, if you're still trying, it sounds like you could use a few more paws around. To help, y'know. With winter's coming, and spring after that... I don't have a pack to call home, either," and she finally looked at him again, and assumed he would simply understand what she was asking him here --

And was this crazy? Yeah, probably - but she had left the coast to find herself, and in searching, she had found this boy. So maybe this was crazy, but maybe this was the exact place she was supposed to be. She really didn't know. At least it was up to the boy to decide that now.

There was no saying Mal was totally innocent in why things ended up the way they did, but he certainly didn't know why they had.  It was much easier to just say screw 'em and prove them wrong by going elsewhere.  At this point there was no reason to think they would have gotten along at all if he'd stayed.  It probably would have ended badly.  And honestly, there were some things that just couldn't be argued, like the fact he oh so rarely saw an adult.

That was all just history at this point.  The present was complicated and uncertain enough for Mal, and he'd have plenty of new and shiny ways to keep screwing that up without involving his old scores.  All things considered, thus far he'd pretty well behaved himself, hadn't he?  This had gone far better than just about every other interaction he'd had.  Certainly if she appeared again in the future, he wouldn't be annoyed about it.

But then, what he wasn't expecting was that she was asking to stay.  That was what she was asking, right? Right?!  That or she was totally trolling him, but she'd been nice so far.  So?! Maybe not that?  Yeah, you can come stay in the forest too.  Again, he's trying to be cool.  So though he wagged his tail wildly a few times and did his best to not sound excessively delighted, he mostly toned it back after that once he realized, Um. I don't think I said?  I'm Mal.  Perhaps in moments like this it was more obvious that he was emotionally still pretty childish -- which probably explained a few things that related to the present, and was the result of things from the past.

It was hard not to smile, when the boy reacted the way he did - a warm reprieve from who he had been thus far - and she decided she liked this side of him better than the other. A genuine smile touched Cèilidh's eyes, and she let her tail wag in tandem with the boy's.

But she couldn't really figure out what to say. Awesome? Thanks? What did you say to someone who gave you access to their budding pack? Her parents hadn't trained her for this - and if only they could see her now! - and what transpired from her lips was the lift of a grateful laugh, a smile, and a simple and easy, "I can't wait."

"Mal," she repeated. What an interesting name. Easy to remember, and unwillingly her mind humored itself with the titles he could take, if he really did manage to establish himself as ruler of the forest. Sovereign Mal of the Highest Order. Mighty Mal, Monarch Supreme. Mal McMalleth, Speaker of the Trees. All ridiculous, of course - but there was no shutting that side of her brain off. She aired the simplest, most normal of thoughts, "I like that. I'm Cèilidh," and she took a confident step toward him, and turned her honeyed eyes to the distant trees which lined the field, "so like, which forest is ours?"

He'd certainly switched to be almost a different wolf than the one she first came across.  At her confirmation, his tail wagged a bit harder and he did actually seem to smile about it.  Mal's default setting had been dour for the majority of his life.  Though the rage had lifted since he got away from those he saw as tormenting him, how long had it been since he'd been actually happy about something?  Could he even remember it?  It wasn't like his puphood had been full of joy either.  

Which forest?  Oh, yeah.  There were others out there.  He turned to point with his nose, then looked back to Cèilidh, The one there to the um.  East.  With all the pines and stuff.  C'mon.  D'you want like.. A tour or something? Or uh. I dunno. What would you wanna see?  He had no idea. What did she want to see?  Obviously he wanted to impress her, but how was a good question.  It wasn't like he had much of a chance to do so before with anyone.  Okeanos' presence was still kind of weird... Maybe Mal would eventually get over the weirdness, but he hadn't yet.  It would take time.  And Ibis was even weirder because he was convinced she hated him... Cam was gone.  Who else was there?  Whatever.  The back of his mind was spinning with a couple dozen questions he needed to untangle about what to do when the answer wasn't something like "I don't trust them, I'll keep my distance."

Either way, she accepted, and Mal lead the way back to the packlands to give his probably garbage attempt at a tour.  Hell, at least he was feeling pretty good about himself -- he could do this!