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Snow swirled around him as he booked it up and over a hunk of broken concrete, long detached from a building. Halifax dared to crumble in light of the horrid weather, but he could hardly blame it. Ice and snow packed into cracks that melted and refroze and melted and refroze did nothing to seal or patch what was broken. It expanded the cracks, it crumbled the structures around him, but only minutely. One could say the same had become of his ties to his past, though he knew he no longer walked where a fog could obscure him (though between the brightness of the sun and the near white out conditions, one would beg otherwise physically), where he could hide behind falsities and be safe.
But honestly that was apart of the thrill, the rush that he was seeking. To come back to the places he had grown up in, the place where he had been born, and like how winter had a habit of transforming the earth, simply to see how it changed. A quick criss-cross the peninsula had revealed to him that his birthplace was still thriving, though he imagined those who were there had long vacated. He had lingered long enough to pick up on the scents, because he had heard commotion from afar. Wolves were social creatures, noisy creatures.
But in the city, there was an eerie silence to be found. Not a true silence, because howling winds and creaking wood, mortar, stone, whatever materials; they made sounds. White noise was abundant. Salem ducked into the first structure that didn't look horrible, choosing the rundown neighbourhoods over the depths of the standing office towers. It was a quaint structure, a house, most likely having belonged to some elder type of man or maybe a younger one. He paid no heed to the pictures on the wall when he forced the door open, and he didn't pick up the ones which hit the ground.
Instead Salem chose to go to the one place he could see his face decently, one room that was always certain to have a mirror. Bathrooms, that's what his father had called them. Houses had bathrooms, houses had many rooms. And he had once lived in a house. But he had grown up and he had left home just like he had left his first home, something that had shone back at him through his eyes when he had found a grimy mirror. His rough hands did little to clear the mirror, though he could garner a few details from it. Scraggily-haired, he had certainly seen better days. Winter had thinned him out a bit, but nothing excessive. But his hair, his disdainfully long hair… Salem sought to cut it on the spot. But he lacked the tools, which without a doubt led him out of the close-quartered room and into the rest of the house, where he absently kicked aside a skeleton.
“Scissors…” he murmured, trying to think of the most logical place they would have been. Should have been, even. Scissors worked, though he found them clumsy in his own hands. But in the cold, with frostbite already tempting to nip at his fingertips and toes, he didn't trust his hands with a knife. Nosily tearing a drawer from a counter in the kitchen, he scattered utensils of all sorts onto the floor and started rummaging through them, never once realising how quiet the house was or how the howling snow was confined now to the outside world where it belonged. But the feeling wasn't coming back to his hands, either.