OOC: ::Word Count:: 619  The words meant nothing to him—the silver-furred coyote watched in horror as the tawny stranger she had known as her son transformed into a creature of pure, burned-black rage, charred and as coal-black as the depths of hell itself. She had fucked up, and she would pay for it. It was good that she'd at least owned up to her mistakes. Some animalistic part of Kaena had convinced her that his anger was at her; she hardly even realized the slip she'd made, the admission of fault that also implicated another. That same part of Kaena twisted his rage to almost devilish levels; she was almost convinced he would turn those razor-sharp fangs on her to tear her throat into ribbons. She'd failed him, she'd failed Inferni, and she deserved every inch of it. Some cowering part of Kaena crept forward, inching closer to Gabriel even as her mind imagined dark flames of rage licking upward toward the sky, exploding outward from his body. The world around him seemed to dim, as if in a tunnel, and suddenly the silver-furred coyote felt as if she could not breathe. It was caught in her lungs, stale air there expanding and choking her. A single word echoed from him, and the hybrid visibly shuddered, the shake starting at her nose and traveling swiftly down to the very tip of her tail. Could she even speak his name? She hadn't in so long, though it had featured prominently in her head these past few weeks, chasing her, haunting her. She'd told Halo, she'd let her know—but even then, she hadn't said Haku. She'd said her it was her half-brother, and that was more than enough for the young Lykoi woman to figure out exactly who Kaena was talking about. The silver-furred woman was practically at the Aquila's feet, now, her quivering black nose inches from his ankles, having drawn herself up from the ground just enough to move closer to him. Now she was as flat as she could make herself again, still wishing she could simply disappear into the ground below and melt away through the eons of history trapped in layers of mud, rock, and mineral. The tears almost stung; they were foreign to the silver-furred woman's eye and their saltiness burned quite a bit, reminding her of just how shameful and low she was to have let him take her. It had been a choice, hadn't it? Kaena had chosen losing her dignity over her life. It wasn't much of a choice, true, but the silver-furred Centurion figured she had gotten the best end of the deal. Or at least, she had. If that was true, though, why did she feel this way? Why did it tear her up inside and ruin her strength, withering it away over the weeks? "H-h-h-Haku," she managed to say, actually stuttering for the first time in nearly ten years. When she was a child, she'd been slow to master speech, and stuttering had plagued her in the early months of her life. Her father had been the one to break her of the habit, though his kind words and encouragment. Hesitantly, slowly, the ashen-hued coyote lifted her head, her muzzle rubbing against the side of Gabriel's neck, close to his shoulder. The conscious mind of Kaena Lykoi was still convinced the rage was for her, still certain she would receive punishment—death, even—for her crime, for her failures, and she simply desired to show affection to her son once more before she passed to the unknown, even if it was the very action to push him into enacting her punishment. "I'm sorry," she said, her voice barely over a whisper. |
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