What time was it? He hadn't slept that night, nor had he returned to the pack that needed him, either. Jefferson's moods had been torrential for quite some time. He'd met his children over a month before, and yet their eyes, their scowls were still perfectly preserved in his mind, haunting him in ways the cyclops had never expected. He'd argued with both DaVinci and Geneva sometime thereafter and spent at least a couple weeks in such a mood, testy and short-tempered. Yet when the dark-furred Dahlian subleader stood on his lands, his personality had shifted to something unnatural despite his thoughts, somehow managing a good mood to meet poor Cwmfen.
Jefferson did not leave Phoenix Valley for several months before May, always busy with one thing or another, but the past few weeks had driven him away from the sanctuary of the packlands. The waters are Raven Beacon were too familiar to be a comfort from nature. At first, he'd moved to Dahlia de Mai and spoke with Cercelee, then to Crimson Dreams since he and Geneva hadn't spoken since their last meeting and he was more curious as to what she had left behind and refused to return to. And now, though it was unnatural, he had spent the night out in the wilderness somewhere, leaving the pack to DaVinci for an evening. Jefferson's little retreat was spent in the sand, overlooking the ocean with his back against a rock, minutes flying past in the midst of his thoughts and musings. Sleep never reached him.
And yet somewhere in the early hours, when his eye drooped the heaviest and his body ached, the male was alerted to voices. He must have been dozing -- a wolf and pup had stopped at the coast just a short distance away, yet his keen ears had heard nothing of their arrival. The idiot gritted his teeth at the ache in his back from its stiff placement, but he pushed himself up onto his feet and yawned mightily. Jefferson turned to start away, but his eye curiously fell on the wolf and what seemed to be his child. The father was recognized quickly, and although he should have just walked away and gone home to check on his pack, the brute rolled his shoulders and casually approached. "It's sand," the brute said quietly as the child's question distantly reached his ears. "Good to sleep in but bad to eat." Unsurprisingly, the cyclops's rough approach to parenthood became evident, but in the end, at least Addison was turning out all right. Jefferson had met Kansas's mate just a few days prior (and what he could accordingly assume to be his other child). The boy that Savina had been holding was unafraid of the one-eyed idiot's looks and demeanor, thus Jefferson stepped up unafraid to frighten her away if she possessed the same audacity of her siblings and parents. "Your mother would be proud," Jefferson smiled at the father, hand in his pocket.