private for luka. grandfather's tears. :3 dated january 1st, their birthdays!
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He had a longing for his homeland, a longing whose origin could both be justified and understood; the lands he meandered now were like black and white with Russia and Europe, where the creature coated in his grayscale pelt had spent his childhood years. He hadn't come to Canada looking for family, looking for a home, looking for acceptance or a place to die... none of that. He had wanted to sail the sea between Europe and North America, and his own curiosity had landed him on the other side of the world, alone and grizzly like he had always been. He didn't mind it. He made maps, he traveled places, he met people. Life went on.
He couldn't say what inspired the knack for cartography he had adopted; it was more of a passtime, something he did when he needed excuses for things. Yes, I am in your packlands. I came to draw a map of it. That was hardly the truth; he was a wanderer at heart and knew it, but refused to admit it. He shamelessly invaded packlands for the sake of seeing the nature there, one of few things he'd come to appreciate over the year he'd been alive. It was his birthday. A year spent on the earth, half of it with his family, half of it by his lonesome. None of it particularly happy.
Nikolai didn't know what he was looking for anymore. He'd never really known to begin with, when he had first stepped apart from the gypsy caravan where he had still been under his mother's care. His father and his brother had already run off somewhere; Nikolai hadn't much cared about that. He'd been the quiet child. As a pup, he'd tended to himself, said little, and instead stared out at the sights instead of the women. Nikolai had wondered from time to time where his father and siblings had gone--he couldn't remember how many of them were absent when he left, as he hadn't paid much attention to his family after a while. His mother had been uninteresting. Her caravan, worse. He didn't know exactly what he'd been looking for when he left, but... all he knew is that he hoped it would be more interesting than home. Thousands of miles away on a different continent altogether, he'd found he'd been disappointed.
Nikolai stepped cautiously, barefoot on ice and feeling the sting of cold against the base of his feet. He wasn't properly dressed; the brute had found a liking for the cold and winter, and though the wind had a bite to it that day, it was nothing he wasn't used to already. He'd drank the night before, having snatched some bottles of wine and alcohol from a small village out in the middle of nowhere he'd passed a few nights back, and they had managed to remain chilled but not frozen in the cloth bag that was slung over his shoulder and across his chest. The ice of the frozen rivers here had stopped him in his trek past--even a slightly buzzed, slightly hungover creature would notice their peculiar indigo hue and stop. He'd been all over the world and back, and never before had he seen water freeze to that color. Perhaps he was more drunk than he thought, snorting to himself. Perhaps he should just have another drink.
