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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.