It had been some time since he had seen the skull lined borders of Inferni, but Laurel had not forgotten them. It was a peculiar place, one he had only visited a time or two and never for any length of time, but that could have been a description to anywhere in his life. Nova Scotia itself had been a brief stop, one laden with more bad than good, so it brought to question what exactly he was doing there, eyeing the pike-and-skull lined borders with a slowly coming-to sense of sobriety. The aging coyote could not have answered the question if it had been posed to him.

Itemless and weary, his ears were drooped just as much as his stance; his eyes threatened not to adjust to the darkness that was beginning to descend to the landscape. Just as well, he supposed. Not wasn't quite like him to be solo, but he had been for quite a while, perhaps giving up the lifestyle he had embraced in adolescence to something else entirely. Inferni had a reputation about it, one that he had encountered here and there from his prior stint in the region. He remembered Dahlia de Mai's uncouth creatures (or creature, it had been) that had once come across him. But the wolves that had been there were gone, he discovered.

Laurel had been around for a few days, no more or less. He had wandered in on memories and liquor, and the liquor was all gone. But the memories burned with such vivid light, and he had never considered himself the type to be sentiment, or the type to be attachments. But what was done was done, wasn't it? His glossy eyes decided to blank involuntary and they stayed closed for a moment. No matter, never you mind. He wasn't intent to destroy himself, but that had been the path lately. He had discarded everything he had once had and now there he was, standing slouched and bare at the borders of the only place he remembered that was still standing in some decent manner.

He could have started laughing, but his tongue was dry. But he swallowed anyway, trying to straighten out his own figure in the dim twilight, trying to regain the composure he had handed off to a long forgotten bottle which now rested at the bottom of some forest creek. But he called for no one where he would have had he wanted something, which wasn't to say he didn't want something. He wanted what everyone wanted, that much he knew in any state. Instead he played at the hand of luck, ticking off minutes he wasn't actually keeping track of and watching as the light crept back past him to the bottom of the unseen sea to his back.

Yet as fate would have it, he was never ever given very much time to compose himself. He had never had the opportunity for a reprieve, for a break, for a moment of rest. Even a life of leisure had it's hardships, and Laurel felt he had seen about all of them. But he could not be too surprised for very long; Inferni had always been vigilant. He had never waited long, either at their doors or for them to come to his. But the reasons between then and now were very different. He saw and heard her long before she ever called out, but he couldn't have been sure if it were one of them as opposed to something else. A deer, a wolf, it could have been anything.

But it had never been hard for him to connect sound with shapes, so he picked out the bits that weren't apart of the trees or the tall grass, that weren't apart of the uneven and listing pikes where the ground had given up their hold. Who was there? He wanted to know too, because the voice was feminine and sharp and for a moment in the stupor hold on his head, he thought maybe it was her. But it couldn't have been, because they had gone in opposite directions, months apart and days ahead of themselves. He swallowed roughly, not realizing he wasn't saying anything at all.

“A coyote?” He ventured to guess with humor, because that's what he was, but at that point silence may as well have been the signature to a death certificate. He still expected them to be all knives out, unaware that the thing before him was actually meek and at one point in her life, mild. She was young. “I came to see Gabriel,” he explained, still feeling the burn of whiskey churn deep and down below. His mouth hadn't betrayed him yet, though his balance threatened to. Yet he knew if it came down to it, he would pull himself together. He always had before and he supposed, always would.

Though they had met once before, Laurel didn't remember it. At best her name may have pulled at a piece of mental string somewhere, but it was a piece far too small to use to tie it to anything. Many of the things that had been there years ago were no longer, but Gabriel being absent was slightly sobering. Maybe he should not have been surprised, but Laurel had always found a certain monotony in the region. But perhaps not, not any more. There had been a monotonous overtime to his life if he thought about it hard enough, which of course he did not.

Still, he made a noncommittal sound over what she told him.

“I suppose you could,” he murmured, more to himself than to her. “I used to live around here, well, not so much around here as many miles to the south and many years ago. I met your father a time or two. His sister too, for that matter,” but those details were neither here nor there; the last thing Laurel wanted to discuss was the sickness that had run them all away so long ago. He shook his head dismissively, sensing tangents coming on and latched onto a moment of clarity. Confidence, if anything. “I came here looking for somewhere to settle.” For now or for permanently, he didn't know. It would always be up to the nature of the beast.