table © Alaine
ooc: i am derp, hear me roar
Down the stairs. Through the hall. Out the door. Through the garden.
The open gate shrieked its banshee dismay as the lone figure, his stride long and desperate, emerged as a ghost from the old hotel and headed in a direct line for the forest. His mind was loud and cluttered, and the breath in his ribcage was short. All he knew was the desperate feeling of claustrophobia, and the need to be gone from this cursed place.
The traitorous trees offered him no solace. Their gnarled, jeering faces snarled down at the poor broken fool. With each step of distance that widened the gap between him and the wretched place, the boy's anger dissipated. He tried desperately to cling it to him, a cover for the swelling maw of pain that otherwise threatened. He felt invisible hands choking his throat, and saw behind shuttered eyelids two glowing emerald orbs filled with fear.
A strangled sound came loose from maw. It sounded small and weak. Caillen didn't know who he was anymore.
The moan didn't seem to come to an end. The slate youth blinked, and then realized that it was his name he could hear, in a voice that had haunted his dreams and nightmares for so long now. His pulse pounded in his ears, and he turned slowly, watching as Sylvie slowed her run and finally came to a stop facing him.
The trees around them whispered. A soft wind toyed with scrappy scarf, the same he had warn since he was a pup. It ran cool fingers through the feathery bangs of the young woman opposite him. She was beautiful, perfect. The hand of loathing tightened around his throat. She spoke between pants, and Caillen's sky-blue eyes kept pinned to her reluctant gaze. His words had clearly hit home, just as hers had. They had wounded each other with memories and infatuation. He remained silent until she had finished, that loud and infuriated voice buried deep down now, so much so that he wondered if he would ever be able to conjure it forth again. All he knew was a fear, a fear that he would never truly be able to explain to her. He feared himself.
He feared what he was fast becoming.
She bowed her head, and turned from him with parting grace. He could smell the salt of the tears she hid. The fever-pitch of voices in his head suddenly became very, very silent, and all he could hear was the pumping of his own blood, and the faint crunch of her feet breaking frosted ground.
Once again, he moved without being entirely sure of why - One second, he was watching her walk away from him, as he had done so many times in so many dreams, and the next, her fur was warm where he held it tightly in his fist, the bones of her arm feeling slender and fragile in his large hand. The connection was momentarily electric, and having tugged her around to face him, Caillen quickly dropped the elegant limb. His eyes looked up to the sky, then to her face, then to the side, the ground; Edgy. Pained. "Sylvie..." Rough voice broke slightly, and he shut his eyes tight, as if searching for whatever specks of inner peace he had left. Absent of its fury, his face looked drained, strangely exhausted.
"I didn't... You just... I... Can't..." His face formed a frustrated snarl. He couldn't look at her tear stained face - It would ruin him. "Take care of her." Came the gravelly but quiet words. Caillen couldn't speak her name, not yet, but they both knew of whom he was referring to. With a jerky movement, he pulled the worn checkered scarf from around his throat and threw it to the ground at her feet. He had worn it since the day Alaine had found it, and Sylvie's yellow bandana, in an old trunk in the Chien Hotel - It smelt strongly of him, a strangely warm smell of clean rain and pine trees. His neck felt exposed without it, but it was a part of his old identity, a part of him that he didn't feel he could reclaim. "I need tae go away for a while." To his ears, Caillen's voice sounded hollow, a false calm he didn't feel. "Take it, give it tae her if you will." Maybe he would come and reclaim it, once he'd sorted out the mess in his own head.
Speak think walk
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