The onset of recent tragedies, though now long past, had stolen from him much of his spirit: The scarred man had lost an arm, forcing him into a life of even more consistent pain with the constant use of the battered remaining limb; Pripyat lurked about Phoenix Valley in a constant state of guilt and displeasure, struggling with the belief that he was at fault for the loss of his father's arm in early February; Lucifer still stalked Valley borders and members, always a shadow in the Patriarch's step, always dodging his one-eyed gaze; Geneva had drifted away to die from the same disease that had claimed the one she loved before he, and preferred the scarred man nor his pack not to be there. Such thoughts sunk his heart, and like he had done so many days before, the cyclops wandered from Valley land to browse his thoughts and the arriving springtime alike elsewhere. He should have been back with his members, still ensuring they were safe from Lucifer, and yet in his heart he knew he could still do nothing.
The male rested for some time during his journey beside the comfort of a waterfall, the sound of rushing water quick to replace the noise of exhaustion and worry storming within his skull. For a while Jefferson sat in a meditative-like state, void of all thoughts and pinned by his weariness; thereafter he leaned back against a rock and dozed, allowing himself a rest much of his insomnia had not.
Bags beneath his eyes, cheers and sputters of another woke him not long later. Jefferson went unnoticed by the obnoxious youth, watching with irritation darkening the green of his eye as the child leapt time and time again from the waterfall's crest and danced down its length. Each time the boy disappeared beneath the surface at the waterfall's end, the cyclops peered over the edge holding his breath, and each time he resurfaced once again the scarred man breathed frustrated relief and sat back once more.
Eventually, when the boy lingered longer than usual at the waterfall's top, the cyclops called out to him from his reclined position off to the side, a third of the way down the falls' length. "You'll lose an arm if you keep that up," he barked, eye glancing briefly at the stump of a shoulder his lost limb had left him, then turned once more to the idiotic boy. Jefferson had made his warning; if the boy killed himself now, the scarred man would be at no fault.
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