06-09-2009, 03:23 PM
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mall-caps;">In Character As she waited, her thoughts turned inward. Kae's mind was messy and blank in spots, swirling black and red anger in others. There was anxiousness in her, a steady, building uneasiness that rose in her and made her heart beat fast. She was worried about how she might be perceived—certainly she didn't want to be thought of as a returning queen; she didn't want to seem as though she had returned to reclaim any thrones. She neither deserved that honor nor did she desire it. She was never made for leadership and now she was simply too old. The sun shone rather merrily, though Kaena could find no happiness to compliment it. There would be time for jubilation later, when she found out whether or not she was welcome home. It wasn't as if she and Gabriel hadn't had problems in the past—there was awkwardness, pain, and spats of violence in their history. Her homecoming wasn't likely to run completely smoothly; though there were few familiar scents on the wind she was sure there would be some who remembered her, some who still had it out for her blood elsewhere. She wondered how many of the wolves and their children whispered her name, if any did at all—certainly she occupied someone's darkest thoughts of revenge, somewhere. The gray hybrid didn't have long to wait—she could smell Gabriel over the wind. At once, she exhaled sharply—both in relief and building nervousness. As her anxiousness over meeting a stranger subsided, the same feeling built over encountering Gabriel again. She braced herself as Gabriel emerged from deeper within the territory. He was the same, yet different—the weight of leadership was clearly on his shoulders, though he seemed to carry it well. He spoke sharply, and Kaena looked away and lowered her head. Those automatic movements were written into her bones and blood. She kept herself smaller than him, as she knew she had to, and drew her knees to her chest. After a moment, her golden eye returned to him, and focused squarely on his forepaws. "I should be," she started. Her face grew distant for a brief moment as her mind flashed to the searing pain, falling into that swirling black hole and waking up half-dead. By all rights, she and Astaroth ought to have killed each other in that small, patchy brown meadow. They should have sprayed each others' arterial blood across the trees and died over each other, and rotted to dust with each other. "Fate has a sense of humor, I guess," she finally said, finding no other reasonable explanation for her continued existence. She should have died several times over in the last year, let alone her whole life—it seemed she'd spent most of it just squeezing past the claws of the reaper. The coyote hybrid quelled her anxiousness and found herself almost zenlike, absolutely calm and numb, though she was dimly aware of emotion happening within her, somewhere outside her current range of feeling. Gabriel's anger was clear, and she wondered vaguely if she ought to run, and decided against it. If death was coming for her today, it would come here and face her now on this border. She would not run, and death would not snap at her heels and pull her down slowly. "I'm sorry," she said, and it was genuine. She wanted to fall toward him and throw her arms around him and run her fingers through his fur—her was her flesh and blood, her son. She had spent the better part of two years in pursuit of another child, and there was an odd sense of loss creeping into Kaena's mind. What had she missed here? |