word count: 500.
“Not at all,” said Endymion, shaking his head. Then, he fell silent, surveying the new fellow. He kept his scrutiny to a minimum, with the intention not to make the grayscale male feel uncomfortable. At least, not yet. He seemed friendly enough, but looks were often deceiving, as the saying went. The Graduierter couldn’t tolerate creeps wandering about freely about the territory while children were underfoot. Then again, if he was accepted into the pack in the first place, it was guaranteed that he wasn’t going to be a nuisance, especially if Fat1n spoke to him and passed judgment on him in good spirit. He knew she was more than capable of sorting out the good from the bad, and the beneficent from the malicious. She was his mother, after all. Why wouldn’t he trust her judgment?
Keeping a reserved smile on his face, the two-year-old pulled his pensive gaze from the other and placed them on the fallen tree, which bore several gashes in its side. The pale yellow inside stood out brightly against the graying, decaying bark. The stranger had done good work on it with the axe. It was a fairly large tree, and would provide firewood not only for that month, but enough tinder to keep them warm until the end of the year. “Looks like you had the same idea as I did,” said Endymion, patting the tree. “I was taking a different course of action, though. But, it’s not easy finding fallen branches I can handle; most of them are pretty big.” The auburn male chuckled, stretching and rubbing the back of his head. This simple movement was the result of nervousness, accompanied by the condition of shyness. Of course, this condition was not as bad as it was when the boy was a child, though it was not squashed out of him yet. Averting his eyes, the Luperci opened his senses to the faint, chilly wind drifting by them. His sensitive nose wiggled slightly as he caught the scents of various pack members, no doubt milling about aimlessly on that uneventful day. The children were probably questioning Fat1n to no end, asking her about the simple wonders of the world, ones which more aged creatures quite ignored. As far as he could tell, no dangers lurked through the trees, or ascended the mountain which he had come to call _home. After a moment, Endymion turned to observe his counterpart once more.
“I’m Endymion Russo, by the way,” the pirate-son stated with a nod of his head. The surname was quite misleading of his nature, which wasn’t as similar to a pirate’s as he liked to imagine. Often he pondered of changing his name to Kali, or even Nakado, to honor his true family. ‘Wick’ was not even considered, due to the injury (both emotionally and physically) to those Endymion loved; and it was also a painful reminder of how much he missed his brother. Yet he tried not to think about those things.
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