Redhawk Caldera i will sing no requiem

Set May 1st, so Sora has been gone exactly a month. For @Teya, other tags are solely for reference! This is mostly 2am rambling so TL;DR Sora has come to the borders and called for Teya alone.

Out there, she had not found healing, but she had found a kindred spirit.

A lifetime of pain and self-doubt could not be undone in a month, and the Sora who returned to the edge of Brecheliant was not so different from the Sora who had left without a word to anyone but @Jay. The closer she drew to the caldera, the more dread she felt. Not for what was certain to be a difficult conversation, but for the way her mind conjured up the old unwelcome memory of Reyes' death and a half dozen even more unwelcome thoughts. Things she had not thought much about while she was away.

She didn't regret leaving. She didn't regret not saying goodbye. Besides @Bridget and Jay, there wasn't a soul in Brecheliant who had shown Sora they cared for her on anything but a surface level, and so she did not care about any of them, either. Not Maia or Eljay or most of their kids, and certainly not @Bronco. She regretted not seeing her aunt before leaving, but the drive to run had come so suddenly and been so strong, she could only heed it.

It was unfair to leave her mother without a word. On a deep level, Sorana knew Teya had tried to be there for her after Reyes died. Even if it was way too late, she had tried. Sora knew her mom deserved happiness and not the endless misery she herself felt. That knowledge was there, but inextricable from the pain of coming second to a man when she had needed her mama the most, and only seeming to matter to Teya when she was so far gone that there was no fixing any of it. If she had seen Teya before leaving, she would have asked her mother to go with her, and she knew the answer would never be yes.

She was not certain of much, but she was absolutely sure about that.

Sorana pulled a slow breath through her nose. The voice of reason had been an older wolf who, like Sorana, had lost a parent. The circumstances weren't much better than Sora's. Her mother had run away, heavily pregnant, and died far from home, leaving her grieving family to search without knowing what had happened for months afterward. The babies had survived, but were raised by others and did not know their family. She had lost a brother before that, the stranger shared, and she understood how Sora felt.

The stranger had told Sora that she needed to get these things off her chest — whether it be in finality or in forgiveness, it didn't matter, only that she not carry it with her any longer. That was important. There could be no moving forward if she kept that misery like a ball and chain around her ankle. She was only punishing herself if she held onto it. The stranger asked if she had family in the world outside her mother. She urged Sora to seek them out, if so; there was no support system like family, and those not directly involved with the trauma might be able to help her heal from it where those who were could not.

Perhaps because that wolf understood and had experienced similar feelings, she was able to get through to Sora where Bridget had not. So Sorana had practiced what she might say. And when she thought she was ready to speak, she had come home.

It was hard being here without thinking about Reyes. She realized in her time away that she despised her father. None of the rest would have happened if Reyes never left in the first place. She wished she had a dad who cared enough to stay with her. She wished he had never come back after he left. She wished he had died somewhere out there instead. Not knowing what happened to him and assuming he had abandoned her was better than the nightmares she had to live with every day now.

She swallowed the acid creeping up her throat and counted to ten, something the stranger had taught her to do to calm herself down. It didn't matter how she felt about Reyes or Brecheliant or any of that. What mattered was not letting the past keep a death grip on the reins of her future. When she felt as prepared as she ever would, Sorana called for @Teya and Teya alone.

something had changed in that month, and it was a softening around all the hardbent places that had formed inside teya. her days narrowed to her children, to their gamboling and laughter and their sweet fragrance as they lay curled together in a slumbering heap beside her.
sorana remained a constant on her mind; she could not forget how her daughter had looked that very day of reyes' death, which she replayed in the silence of insomnia.
teya was healing, healing in the way a scar might hurt as its ridgeline of pinked flesh solidified into something always tangible. the guilt would not leave her ever, and with this the raven had tried to seek some semblance of peace.
she withdrew from the pack somewhat, letting life move on without her outside the space of the den. her hours became them because if she let it be more, the old ache of shame and loneliness would eat her alive.
in this month she continued to drift just outside the borders, calling for sorana or visiting for the hundredth time the densite on the lake island, as if she might find the brilliant red form of her child at last returned.
teya had not given up her own hope; she had only devoted herself to such a high level of pragmatism that she no longer expected sorana to come home. therefore when the call rang out, voice somehow changed and yet the same, teya only stared off toward it with surprise.
shaking herself free of the pups and not glancing toward bronco, the raven's feet pounded wildly against the ground as she raced toward where sorana stood.
and when they had finally seen one another, she slowed her approach, halting some space away. her eyes took in all of her daughter, looking for wounds or signs of sickness or anything. she met the beautiful eyes and a thousand words ran to her tongue, all of them sticking and muddling until her face only suffused with desperate relief and she offered a small, tremulous smile. "it very good to see you, sora," teya ventured tentatively.

Her call whisked away on the wind, leaving Sorana with a little time to think. It stretched on forever and yet lasted only a second; she replayed what she wanted to say in her head half a dozen times, but the second her mother’s sunset colours appeared through the screen of trees, all those words went floating away.

Teya stopped before reaching her. Sorana felt like they stood on opposite sides of a vast canyon, close enough to see and maybe hear if they shouted, but with no way to bridge it. She couldn’t identify the exact moment when her relationship with Teya had become so sundered and broken. One moment she had loved her mother like the sun.

The next moment she had forgotten what the sun felt like, and loved it more fiercely in its absence, and grown jealous of those who took its light from her.

She loved Teya like the sun still, but Sorana had become the night, and so she had learned to live without her mother. She had learned to cope with her pain in unhealthy and harmful ways. It was easy to blame Teya for all of this, but the stranger had taught her how it was her fault, as well. She had let the silence continue and fester. She had grown sulky and silent instead of telling Teya how she felt or what she needed when it mattered most. She had not asked about Reyes; she had only let herself suffer from his absence.

She had made a lot of mistakes as well. She was only a young girl with so much left to learn. There rose in her a desperate desire to leap over the space between them and start over, forgive her mother, forgive herself, and maybe if she was a little older and a little more mature and things hadn’t happened so quickly or gone so horribly wrong, she could have done that. She could have ignored the puppy smell and Bronco and everything else.

Instead, she dug her shaking toes into the ground and wrapped her resolve around her like a cloak, and when she cried, hi, mama, it was in the voice of one who was only visiting for a time, for a farewell, and not coming home at all.

hi, mama.
teya clung to that sound, breath flickering in her throat; not a sob, not a gasp, something quiet and throttled between them.
sorana had grown taller, older. now she stood all youthful scarlet, the picture of reyes in the watered place where teya had first met him. and her mother, older also, curved with the remnants of pregnancy, reeking of baby shit and milk.
someone briefly hollowed for an exacting moment. she had waited for their reunion, longed for it. all the things she meant to say, all the ways she meant to say them, now fleeing the raven in a moment of weakness and impulse.
for a long moment, teya only looked at her eldest daughter, and did not call the babies at home with bronco siblings, not begging her as she felt they had asked killdeer. the rejection of that too would be much, and teya found she did not want to speak of them or of anything else.
"hi, baby."
she wanted to ask if sorana meant to stay; wanted to ask the girl to stay. and yet she did not think it possible, and felt that in the requesting she might damage something further.
and so she inched closer, daring at last to reach a questing muzzle toward sorana. she wanted the stories of where her girl had gone, where she had traveled, what she had seen. all this and more.
the coolwater eyes misted. "missed you very much." but teya did not want to cry, to weep; not now, not now.

They stood on opposite ends of a tightrope, each yearning to take a step and each aware of how the rope might buckle and snap under their combined weight. Sorana struggled between the self that wanted to run as far from Brecheliant as her paws would take her and the self that wanted to run to her mama and hide her face in her furs again like she had when she was a little girl. These warring dualities held her fast in place.

It was Teya who took the first step, and Sora felt her resolve beginning to crumble. No no no no, she cried to herself, you have to do this! You will never be happy here! It would be so easy to return to life on the Caldera, but it was a life so caged and tainted by tragedy that it was no life at all.

She broke when Teya reached for her. Sora stretched across the distance for a tight embrace and her breath came in a soft shudder. Missed you too, mama, she sobbed, and wished so badly that was where it could end.

But she could not be happy here, and she could not bear to have to share her mother in a land where unhappiness would rule her.

But I can't stay, she admitted in a fresh wave of tears.

of course she couldn't say. of course — teya fought the urge to question if it was a matter of choice, her own — the alienating decisions that she had made for their family and on behalf of sorana. the things unsaid. the things denied.
but here was her oldest daughter now, living and vital and solid in her arms. the tears too trickled; her breath became soft sobbing.
she wanted to apologize; she wanted to —
but this was made. happening. a final plea might only strain things further. sorana wished to go. teya could not beg her to stay in a place that had not been home for so long.
"where you going to go, 'rana?" the small voice of a worried mother, no utterance of  to remove any focus from sorana, as she held her baby closer and closer and kissed the ears, the cheek, the forehead.
where would joy be for her girl?

She had thought at length about that. Much of Sorana's month away from home had been thinking about where she would go next. The world was unfathomably large and all of it unfolded out in front of her, beckoning her to wander wherever her paws might go. If her foundation was not so chipped and cracked, that was likely just what she would do.

Sorana needed some sort of support system, though. What she needed and wanted most of all was her mother, of course, but she could not ask that. In lieu of Teya... I thought m-maybe I could go m-meet daddy's family. The ones who live by the ocean, she said between sniffles and unstifled sobs. That was all she knew of them.

A part of her wanted nothing to do with the memory of her father or these wolves he had left home for. A part of her wanted to blame them for taking him away from her when she needed him. When they both had needed him. They were family, though, and Sora was now desperate to at least know their faces.

Do... Do you know how to get there, mama?

"i do, sora."
sapphique was a place of cliffs and wild sea, far from brecheliant but not touching the edge of the world. teya described what she remembered of the oceanic pack and its leadership, relaying the route that reyes had taken when he had led them there.
a blink of her coolwater eyes found the face of her daughter.
"do you want me to take you?"
somehow she felt sorana might want to take this journey alone, but wished to ask all the same. the idea of having her girl so far made her dizzy.
the notion that she would know where her daughter had gone was a relief, a small shorting relief she tucked deep inside her chest.