Swiftcurrent Creek burning a kite; i'm at a funeral, nothing unusual

He sends Phillip away before he moves to bury his mother, determined not to see his love fall sick in the same way she had. He won't lose him, too. So he sets to work alone, dragging the corpse that had once been Alessia to the den she'd birthed him in, their shared home for those first few months. He starts to dig just inside of it, intending to deepen it and drag her in — and then collapse the structure on top of her. A fitting burial, he thinks. This place is the only place he can remember ever seeing her truly happy; the only place he can remember feeling any sort of love from her, save those last fleeting moments of closeness. This is how he wants to remember her, though he'd hated her so bitterly in life. She's gone now, and somehow he can't find the energy to hate her anymore. He simply feels empty.

He could smell the scent of rot and decay and illness. It hung in the air like an omen, and tried to hide beneath the cold, damp, wet, heavy smell of freshly overturned dirt and leaf litter.
 
The air was cold.
 
Tinged with ice and stone.
 
It was the latter smell—familiar and discomforting—that he followed into the woods, and to the creek and the den.
 
He saw the body, lifeless and still, dark and bleak. And he saw the wolf beyond it. He saw her tail, too long by half and oversized, its tip dipped in black, spilling out from the den’s mouth. He saw the dirt being pulled out. And he could smell the scent of decay in the air, the sickeningly sweet, too sharp tinge of illness.
 
It set his teeth on edge.
 
Made the hair along his shoulders, neck, and back stand on edge.
 
He could feel his heart speed up, from where it beat inside his chest.
 
“Did you kill her?” He asked. Demanded to know.
 
He didn’t step closer.

Familiar footsteps, a nagging voice at his back; perhaps not what he'd desired in this moment, yet it draws scant reaction from the wraith. He steps back from his task, eyeing his nameless acquaintance with only mild curiosity, bordering indifference. No. She was sick, He says simply. She was my mother, actually. He says it the way one might say I had pasta for lunch today, or looks like it might rain; a simple fact, an observation without expectation of an answer. He turns back to his task, expecting curses, expecting sullen silence, expecting the other to turn tail and abandon the situation entirely. That's what children do, after all.

He continued to stand, then, still and wary and out of place. His shoulders were tensed and bunched, defensive and uncomfortable, and his posture low and slouching. His ears pressed faintly back against his head and his tail was a leaden, awkward, dead weight behind him, hanging lifeless between his hocks.
 
His hackles bristled as he watched her, his body and mind torn between watching her or the body.
 
‘She was my mother, actually.'
 
He grunted. Nodded. Hovered.
 
Felt awkward and heavy and on edge beneath her lifeless stare. He struggled and failed to fight the urge to bare his teeth, his black upper lip curling and peeling back and up.
 
And then, finally, with a sweeping look away—
 
“Was she sick for long?” His voice was low and rough.

He doesn't expect the question from behind him. He pauses again, deciding he's mostly done anyway, and turns. The blonde-furred wolf is looking away, but he doesn't mind. I don't know, There's little tone coloring the words, but he isn't unfriendly with the other. There's no reason to be. I hadn't seen her in... a long time. A slight pause. I hated her.

‘I hated her.’
 
He thought briefly—briefly—to his own mother. Sharp teeth. Sharper words. And he nodded, in understanding, in misplaced comradery. He found some of his lost confidence, just then, red meeting grey.
 
“So, it’s good, she’s gone.”

The eye contact startles him more than any words ever could, softens him in the slightest ways. Probably, He answers, unaffected by the harshness of the statement. It's logical, after all, from what little information he's given. Unbidden, he offers more, if only to fill the silence. She never seemed to love me. She avoided me, and doted on my siblings. And when I was younger, I thought it was her fault that I was born the way I am — that everyone thinks I'm a girl, when I'm not. He glances briefly toward her corpse, then back to the other living wolf with him, seeking to meet his gaze again. He likes the eye contact, unexpectedly. She never knew that.

‘—that everyone thinks I'm a girl, when I'm not.’
 
She—he—spoke, and Daighre nodded.
 
They were the same, in his mind. Two opposing ends of the same coin. And when he sought eye contact, pale, silver, mercurial grey and now living, no longer quite as dead—
 
Daighre returned it in full.

There it is again — that spark of attraction, the bright flash of desire that had lured him into this boy's orbit in the beginning. His eyes are beautiful; so like Alessia's in a way he would have hated before, yet now he finds it comforting. He lets the silence stretch for a few moments, finding more meaning in that than words.
But eventually, he finds a reason to break it. My name is Zephyr, He introduces himself, doing his best to ignore the presence of the corpse. It nags at him anyway.

He was Zephyr, and he was—
 
“Daighre.” He answered, simply, low but not softly spoken.

Daighre. Putting a name to him makes him feel more real, somehow. It's harder to ignore the guilt of what he'd done to him, now, but the circumstances thankfully provide an easy distraction. I need to bury her, He says, turning toward the corpse. I'm going to collapse the den on top of her. I'd appreciate help, if you can spare it. His tone is cool and polite, without expectation. He doesn't wait for a response. He grasps the cold scruff of what had once been his mother, and drags it to the spot he'd dug out in the den. It feels a little too easy to bundle the body into the hole, where it doesn't quite fill all of the space. Somehow it seems like Alessia would have, in life. Then he backs away, standing up on his hind legs to brace himself against an outer, already-crumbling wall of the den. It'd never been more than glorified hole carved into a glorified hill next to the river, and it's old and neglected now, already falling apart — pushing the dry dirt inward should be child's play for two adult wolves. A little harder, if Daighre refuses to help, but he's confident he can do it.

‘I need to bury her,’ Zephyr said, a small muzzle and smaller teeth already finding purchase on his dead mother’s scruff.
 
He watched as the body was dragged and placed inside the mouth of the den, and then deeper. Her limbs bent unnaturally. Flesh without soul. The scent of decay and illness persisted. It settled heavily in his nostrils, in his lungs, and it made his stomach roll.
 
Uneasiness was an unfamiliar, unwelcome feeling to him.
 
He stood beside Zephyr. Tried to not think too deeply of the body below—
 
And pressed down.

Daighre helps, surprisingly, and the den collapses easily beneath their combined weights — but slowly enough that the crash of dirt into the ground is relatively tame. It crumbles in stages more than anything else, until the ground has almost leveled out where the den once stood. A small mound marks the spot — with his mother somewhere deep below. Thank you, He says quietly, stepping back from the mess of dirt. His gaze finds Daighre again, silent for a moment. When he speaks again, it's with the same tone he's been using, though the words are rather different from anything he's said to the other male so far. I'd like it if you could stay, for a little while. We don't have to talk, or stick around here. In fact, he'd much rather leave — but he lets Daighre take the lead on that one, if he wants to. He isn't even sure the man will agree yet.

‘Thank you,’
 
He grunted.
 
It wasn’t until he spoke, again—emotionless, flat, wrong—did Daighre look up from the ground. He met his searching gaze, his ears angled forward and his body awkward, his posture low and slouching.
 
And then—
 
“Fine.”
 
He looked away and stepped back for him to lead the way.