Wapun Meadow bébé ils ne veulent pas de toi

Solitude was a famliar thing, but it was fleeting.

She did not see him at first, did not see how he barreled across the meadow with enmity writ so cleanly in every movement. A handful of seconds passed; Phoebe was wrapping up her quaint investigation with every intention of moving on when she heard the footfalls. They were thunderous, perhaps wrenching the very soft earth up in their wake.

Time slowed in that moment as she drew her attention towards him and for a moment she mistook him as a spectre from her past. Vasa, maybe, or better yet one of those younger siblings that she hadn't even taken the time to know. She blinked, eyes refocusing and body tensing at the realization that no, it wasn't. They had never come for her and surely, they would not now.

She bristled in an instant, standoffish and perturbed at the rush. She felt her throat seize with an all too familiar wave of anxiety that she had fought so hard to temper and tap down, to smother like embers of a dying fire. But they flared and twisted, a bud of anger coursing into her features by way of a knit brow. Did she stand her ground, or did she run? There wasn't enough time to decide, too late to choose, and the choice would be made for her.

The best she could hope for was to whirl away in that moment to avoid a collision, teeth clicking together not so much in warning as it did ask its own question: what the hell, man.