Whitewater Gorge Floating

Just approaching the gorge, so it isn't too noisy for them!

They'd been outed from the forest by some Fucking random packs that Donovan had apparently wronged.
Oh well, that nay packs being so close would only cause more problems during a famine, which was always bound to happen.

He'd briefly met @Colin, and was sure @Finley Grebe was interested in him.
He may be willing to say more should they decide to talk whilst travelling.
Ahead, Nemesis and Donovan were doing their flirty thing. Gross. Well, what could he say after last night.

Ugh, last night.
How he'd been left hanging like that.
So far, all he could think about was the brindle man.
Not that it was bad...it was just distracting.
So distracting that Derg didn't notice when he stepped in a dumb rabbit hole, falling onto his front like an idiot.

Grumbling, he picked himself up and tried to act like nothing had happened.
How humiliating.

Since setting out, Finley had kept her head forward. She’d allowed herself an entire day to mope and wallow and it had been one day too many. Once they embarked southward, the recruit had no time or interest in bemoaning the Saints’ situation. It was a practical move; they didn’t have the numbers to protect their territory, not yet, and waging war against so many packs would be a suicide mission. Being reasonable was nowhere near a sign of weakness.

Her focus on the move had kept her distant for the past two days, akin to her travels as a lone wolf; any drop of will to socialize had, for the moment, evaporated. They had a new recruit, Colin, and Finley had acknowledged him with little more than curt nods of greeting. She could resume pack-bonding later. For now, they had one objective: forward.

And then Derg fell into a hole.

Finley had been following him at a respectful distance and nearly skidded to a halt when his head dropped, as if taking a nosedive off a cliff. She stayed back, glancing between him and the rabbit hole; had something tripped him up? But he rose, seemingly unphased, and Finley bit back a comment about watching his step. They were approaching a gorge and such clumsiness would serve them poorly.

It'd been a couple of days since he'd joined the ranks of the Saints-- time had blurred itself into a thick, opaque syrup, and he had no desire to clear his mind. They weren't a talkative bunch. Donovan had mired himself into conversation with a flirtatious woman who went by the name of Nemisis. She was a sort of a femme fatale type he thought only existed in movies.

He drifts off into thought, dwelling on old memories like an obsessive-compulsive over a scab, over a certain placement and arrangement of their keys in a bowl. He's vaguely aware of Finley and Derg just ahead of him, but he hears a stumble, the thump of someone hitting the floor. 

"Are you alright," he calls out, brows furrowed. If a paw was twisted or a nail was torn, the walk to their new home would be longer than it had to be. He squints, looks ahead to Donovan. Exodus: nothing more than grit in their mouths and the sun beating down above them. He wonders what they had done to earn the place of total pariahs.

Great, they'd noticed.
He stopped, turning to look back at Colin, and then Finley a little further back.
He waited for them to catch up and perhaps entice them into a conversation, he was pretty bored with all the walking and no Donovan.

"Yeah," he called back. He didn't know if Finley cared, but Colin was good enough to ask.
"So Colin, what's your sad story?" It seemed all their stories were sad. Two had lost packs, Nemisis he had no idea about, Finley just wanted to wander, and Colin looked like the type to have some shit happen to him.

Colin, slightly ahead, had the decency to ask if Derg was alright, to which the latter responded affirmatively and stopped until his trailing companions had caught up. Her trance broken, Finley turned to Colin as Derg asked for the hunched wolf’s story. She’d be lying if she said she wasn’t curious. Donovan: rebuilding his pack of warriors. Nemisis: raised in a violent pack, now poised to lead alongside him. Derg: sad when found, but a guardian in a past life. Finley herself had little tragedy to speak of.

Getting a focused, alert look at Colin now, she got the sense she’d continue to be an outlier in that regard. Between his walk and the vague air of sickness about him, Finley wasn’t going to question Derg for his rather upfront assumption of a “sad story.”

At Derg's yeah, he smiles and nods, an expression which quickly closes off when the next words come out of his mouth: a question about his supposed sad story. For a moment, he's caught off guard, unable to respond, and he notices that Finley had turned around too. All eyes on him. His skin prickles and burns; he's tempted to check for an itch. 

"What I've gone through," he says, after a moment of hesitation. "What I've gone through is that I've lost my family. I've left my home. Donovan has given me a new one. And here I am." He speaks in short, clipped sentences. He describes his past like a coroner would a freshly wheeled-in corpse. Cause of death...time of death...name, age, and birthplace. 

Then, "What made you think I have a sad story?" Perhaps his losses had worn on him more than he thought they did. Perhaps Derg was used to surrounding himself with melancholy people, and assumed the worst out of each blank-faced person, one after the next.

He glanced to Finley, a soft smile.
Last night had put him in a rather good mood, even if it meant prying where he wasn't supposed to.
His tail waved softly, thinking about the words he'd said.

The same as him, and Donovan, really.
Mother nature was really intent on killing everyone, huh.
"I'm sorry to hear," he said quieter. He felt bad about asking but wasn't apologetic.
To build something you have to have it broken down first.

Derg wanted to say there was something special about how he knew Colin was just the same. But that was it. He was just the same.
"You're with us," he replied simply. "You don't follow Donovan if you don't seek something for yourself." 
Finley had ambition, Derg owed Donovan, Nemisis clearly had something to strive for.

Unsurprisingly Colin seemed uncertain in the spotlight; even less surprisingly, despite initial hesitation, his story was familiar. Derg offered some quiet words of consolation, to which Finley blinked slowly in cordial agreement. Again the passivity of the story’s presentation left her wanting more. But if Derg could prove her assumptions wrong with stories of his own sordid scars, Finley had little doubt Colin could do the same.

To her renewed interest, in response to Colin’s subsequent question—perhaps his tone indicated a cool detachment with which he regarded his situation—Derg said “You don’t follow Donovan if you don’t seek something for yourself.” As if having a “sad story” was a Saints’ rite of passage. On one hand, of course a fledgling pack would be composed largely of the lost; they weren’t established enough to attract those directly from other packs, or to have those born and raised among their ranks firsthand. But Finley wouldn’t have phrased her own motivations that way.

“It’s about more than us,” she said, a stately tone hiding questioning intentions. These wolves did want to serve, didn’t they? Then again, was it her place to argue with one who’d been here longer? “I’m rather content just to be in his ranks,” Finley added, with a shrugging tilt of her head, “knowing what’s ahead.” Surely they’d been promised the same.

I'm sorry to hear. He'd heard that many people could tell when there was a widow in the room. Dogs and babies would cringe from her. The unmistakable scent of grieving and loss would cling to her like sweat. He wondered if it was the same for him. If he wore an armband that said sonless and wifeless father. 

Did he seek something for himself? He remembers his anger and frustration. He didn't know whether he wanted anything at all. He tells himself: No. I still haven't lost my faith. Finley cuts in. She is pragmatic and honed, utilitarian compared to Derg's search for his own kind of nirvana. 

"What is your sad story?" He asks Derg, and deja vu hits him. Suddenly he's back in the Word of Life confessional, listening to a stranger's plea of forgiveness through the notched wooden opening. All around the world, everyone was seeking closure or reconciliation, religious or secular. Everyone always wanted to feel complete and whole.

Ah, so he was right bout Finley.
She would be a good high ranking wolf, but not a leader.
She sought stability, and perhaps Derg did too. Maybe he wanted to make sure he wasn't going to lose a pack again.

Finley would be a good pack mate, even if she wasn't sure about Derg herself.
Coil seemed to need somewhere to belong too. He could feel for him.
"The same. I lost my pack, my lover, my ward. Donovan found me with nothin'."
He was more talkative than usual. Perhaps he wanted to show he was part of this pack, he wanted to prove he wasn't the sniveling whelp he was found as.
Perhaps Donovan gave him new life.

Her comment went unaddressed, though not entirely ignored; good enough for Finley. Colin swung the spotlight back to Derg, who had a new detail to share: a lover. He was just full of surprises, wasn’t he?

It was, of course, of little concern to Finley what romantic escapades her packmates had or hadn’t enjoyed the past. What mattered was where they were now. And for that reason, while she half-expected the backstory questioning to fall on her, she wouldn’t volunteer the answer unprompted.

Derg's sad story reflected much of his own, the only difference being that Colin had left of his own admission; the church and his job wasn't taken from him. It had quickly proved to be unbearable: lingering in his own misery, taking the same wretched New England path every day, waking up to the dark stale air in his parsonage. "My condolences."

He knew, and he had been taught that despair was just pride in new clothing. That to let oneself be submerged in his own torture, one had to be sure that their misfortune was immutable. That God would turn a blind eye.

Colin turns to Finley. This felt less like a confessional and more like the youth groups he used to sit in on, only any sense of brazen teenaged idealism had been scrubbed away and replaced by solemn acceptance, the same tight-lipped darkness that existed so densely among soldiers out to war in a foreign land. "And yours, Finley?" He asks, gentle and inflectionless, though doubting that the militant woman would be as willing in conversation as Derg.

Colin too offered his respects.
It didn't matter too much. He was too enthralled by Donovan and starting this new pack to dwell in sadness. Though catching him on a quiet walk of contemplation, they may find him more somber than other times.

His gaze turned to Finley, expectantly but also...feeling for her.
Was she apprehensive? Fearful of what she may feel like she had to share?
She could equally lie, but even so, from what he knew, her life wasn't such a shitstorm as the two males'.

Thus sympathies were swapped and Finley was left wondering if she ought to have said something. When Colin turned the questioning to her, Derg’s focus following suit, she momentarily wondered if he was asking for her condolences. But neither of the males’ eyes betrayed judgment, nor had she detected ulterior motives from either. It seemed some wolves were simply content to pass the time exchanging past trials—and as packmates, she supposed, it wouldn’t hurt to tell.

“Can’t say it’s anything sad,” Finley said, with a casual sway of her tail. “I failed my pack’s initiation spar. I’ve been training since.” She spoke as though the implication of her failure was obvious, and that the loss itself was significant as missing that one deer on a hunt of yore—an unfortunate yet mundane turn of circumstance, and little more.

The way she joins the conversation with a dismissive flick of her tail, she might've been talking about an obtrusive fly or an itch that couldn't quite be scratched. An initiation spar, he thinks to himself. He appraises the way she carries herself, competent and galvanised. Someone who thrived in the rat race of the world, who might feel more at home in the brutality of boot camp training than the langour of domestic life. 

When he thinks of a battlefield, he cannot help but think of Theo. Then of Ruth. He blinks and they're gone. 

"You seem like a capable soldier." He wouldn't be surprised if there were scars under her brown hair. Many people mistakenly thought that scars were a sign of clumsy fighting, of failed dodges. But when airplanes came back, riddled with bullets on their tail, fuselage, wings-- was it not a sign that they had been struck and survived?

Failed? At initiation?
Derg had never heard of anything so useless.
The year of pups he'd been born with all passed.
"You only fail when your teacher fails you."

He looked at her, a soft smirk. That's what he was taught. If you don't have the right training you can't do the right job, and if she was failed to be taught out to take out someone stronger or bigger than her teacher shouldn't have passed that initiation rite either. Not unless they were practically handed the rite.

He shook his head softly.
"I'm sure you've fought him," he gestured to the curled tail ahead, "and if he thought you were beyond help yous wouldn't be walkin' here."
He hoped he gave her confidence. He wanted to help others, just like Donovan helped him.

"Do you fight much, Colin?"
He wasn't sure, but perhaps he'll be surprised.

finley: google what is “sympathy”

The responses to her confession were interesting, to say the least. Colin’s remark had Finley raising her head with fleeting pride; being a “capable soldier” was a baseline minimum, as far as she was concerned, but she wouldn’t turn down external affirmation. But Derg offered a gentle smirk and the implication it was her “teacher’s” fault for… failing her? Nonsense.

Before Finley could figure out how to respond without implying the older wolf was, at best, misguided, Derg continued with a shake of his head and gestured towards Donovan. If Donovan thought… She forced down a scoff. Of course Donovan didn’t think her “beyond help.” Far as Finley knew, anyone had a home with the Saints, if they were willing to fight for it. What was the purpose of Derg’s comments, then? Was he suggesting she’d been taken in out of pity? But then he wouldn’t have assumed, correctly, that she’d fought Donovan—

Pity. Ah, so the tables were turned. Finley would have to challenge Derg on it, but he shifted attention back to Colin and she bit her tongue. Right, yes, back to him; she was already slipping, her tail drawing to a standstill and gait shifting with underlying agitation. Let Colin speak first, tell more of his own history, and then Finley would set the record straight should the opportunity arise.

You only fail when your teacher fails you. There's truth in that statement, but it comes with implications and baggage. He gauges Finley's reaction-- she seemed unimpressed. And had they all sparred with Donovan? 

Colin had served time in the army-- all Forster men did-- though not as a soldier, but as a chaplain. He'd gone through the brutal training that made killers out of young men, the nights inside cramped dens, the constant sparring, but he had never had to go out on active duty. Perhaps Finley could tell. There was a thousand-yard stare in any soldier's face who had glimpsed war, true war. 

The attention is back on him once again, though he's beginning to feel much more comfortable in their presence. "I am a reverend. I keep peace whenever I can." He considers. "Only in self-defence." But whoever strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other to him as well. 

Finley's tail is now drawn in a stiff line, and any casual looseness to her has hardened. He knits his brow, but stays silent.

So, the answer was yes.
Though he preferred not to, which may or may not be useful in the Saints.
Probably useful.

He hummed softly, thinking.
Finley seemed like he'd just shit on her parade for whatever reason. Perhaps she liked him more when he was miserable.
Whatever.
If she wanted to get back at him let it come. He'd see how well they'd match. He almost grinned; but didn't. He didn't offer an apology either -- he didn't feel like it was deserved.

So Colin was a peacekeeper—a “reverend,” who fought only in self-defense. Finley had mixed impressions of such mindsets. Her own time with Helios had been an isolated period, and she’d been taught not to instigate fights without due cause—but “self-defense” suggested the other party was the aggressor, which struck her as a needless concession. Finley wondered about the leaders who’d ganged up on Donovan, several packs against one that’d barely formed; would they have claimed “self-defense” as well?

For now she’d withhold judgment on Colin, individually. A peacekeeper could be an asset in a pack with a wolf prone to bloodshed; with this thought Finley stole a glance at Nemisis, still ahead. She expected the conversation to continue but Derg remained silent; as Finley reeled her attention back in she realized he and Colin seemed to be expecting more from her.

As good a cue as any, then. “Minor clarification,” Finley said, clearing her throat, “on my ‘teacher’: I had none. Youth in my family are taught to fight for their place in the pack. It’s inevitable some will be stronger than others.” She gave her head a quick shake, as if deterring a fly. Colin’s interlude had given her a moment away from her internal grumbling, and she tried to keep her voice level and flat as usual. Her words could speak for themselves, no tonal condescension necessary. “No wolf from their ranks would be beyond help.”

Well, not those who lived to see a new life after Helios, at least. But if anyone had died along the way, that was their own failing. They’d only have been a hindrance to the rest if they’d stayed.

They're silent for a moment. As usual, Finley is largely unreadable. Derg, presumably deep in thought, hums lightly. Colin finds that habit rather sentimental; it stirs an empathy in him. Perhaps it was the scarred face, juxtaposed with such a mild expression. 

Finley's home in some ways is more primal than Donovan and Nemisis, who are still walking ahead. He watches their heads bob up and down, sinuous, before turning his gaze back towards her. He's reminded of a food chain. Survival of the fittest. It sits uncomfortably in his mind, and he examines it with the same skepticism as a veteran pawn shop owner would look at a Rolex replica. He realises that the empathy he'd felt for Derg would be wholly unwelcome in such a place.

"Then if they're born blind, deaf, weak-- a death sentence." He can't help but let bitterness seep into his voice. To have your child die simply because they were unfortunate in some distant genetic dice roll-- he couldn't understand, and it scraped dangerously close to a raw wound. He stops himself from saying anything further, as if already regretting his outburst, shame-faced.

And in comes Finley with the left hook!
Derg didn't see that coming.
He tilted his head to Finley, regarding her carefully, thinking over what he'd said to fuck her off.

He could tell in her voice she was restraining the hot iron of her tone. She had good self control, he gave her that. Derg half grunted, half hummed.
"Sorry for offending you," he replied. Not too sure what else to offer.
She had the courage to confront him in such a manner, he was surprised, and he could give her at least an apology for that.

Though Colin, for some reason, decided to raise his voice with unexpected bitterness. 
"Indeed," was his only somber reply. It was true and wondered what had happened to him to make him so. Had a litter of his been born Wrong?

As far as Finley was concerned, she’d made a good case for herself and her origin. But the others didn’t seem to feel the same.

Derg replied with a grunting hum and an apology for “offending” her. Was she offended? He seemed taken off-guard, and the apology, genuine. Maybe he didn’t realize he’d suggested Finley was beyond help. For this she could sympathize; her own standoffish demeanor had annoyed the scattered traveler, for reasons largely unfathomable. But she found it hard to justify his statement on failing being the fault of the teacher, not the student, and the accompanying implication that Finley’s failure had been anyone’s fault but her own. Still, she relaxed somewhat, content to accept his apology and let the comment slide unremarked—

But Colin was bitter. He spoke with a grave finality, to which Derg agreed without question, and both left Finley baffled. It wasn’t as though she’d said her own family was killed. Colin stopped his rant there, as if ashamed, and Finley was almost disappointed. Where had this come from?

Regardless, she wasn’t here to make enemies. After glancing between the males, and occasionally to the leaders ahead as if hoping for an interjection that wouldn’t happen—she hadn’t gone mad suddenly, had she?—Finley finally spoke again. “I suppose,” she said, hesitation punctuating each word, “when you put it that way, it’s… harsh.” Frankly she hadn’t spared the issue a second thought, or even thought it an issue at all. “The unsuccessful aren’t killed.” Never mind that she’d never heard of a blind, deaf, or naturally weak wolf dragging the ranks down. She was alive. “Nothing stops them from establishing themselves elsewhere.”

There was more to say; Finley decided, at the last moment, against it. She’d tripped down her own rabbit hole already; the details of her upbringing were more irrelevant than ever.

Why couldn't I have just stayed quiet? He lets Finley elaborate, acknowledges her with a nod and a flick of an ear. "I didn't mean to-" Offend? Be so vitriolic? Presumptive? "-I understand now." 

Then what could he say? That her previous remark had hit close to home, that the pain of losing a child would change you forever? If wasn't careful, every conversation he participated in would spoil like a corpse in direct sunlight shot in timelapse. The eyes are the first to go, then the tongue...

He wrests himself from what he thinks is self-pity. Nothing more. This was a conversation with just as many unsaid things as words spoken and left to waste away in the air. The inconsistency of it would unnerve anyone, but Colin has not known anything but that for a long time. So he walks onwards, mute, half-waiting for a dialogue to be struck up again-- the journey ahead would be long and uncompromising.

Derg continued on, in thought.
Colin had some relation to sick children, as did Finley. But Colin was bitter, so he'd lost a child perhaps that was weak, and he supposed Finley was one, from what she'd formerly said and her defense now.

The air felt heavy and tense. Derg couldn't stand it.
The silence stretched on long enough.

He gave a short chuff, half dropping into a play bow to invite his companions into something more lighthearted. A little romp about will be fun.