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indent This place wasn’t just the moaning wood: this was Chimera, though it was but a corpse of the great beast, laying in wait. It called to him as he walked down the old road, hearing not only its voice but the thunder of horses and the faint laughter of all who had lived here. It had not always been a welcoming place—the day he had returned, November seventh, two-thousand and five, anger and hatred boiled over. He had been attacked by his own pack because they knew he was an outsider. Through conspiracy, violence, and sheer force of will Ahren had held onto Chimera for nearly a year. On October first, two-thousand and six, they had walked away from Chimera.
indent It had collapsed sometime after his departure. They had tried to rebuild the cabin he had burnt down, and Ahren had studied this curiously for a moment. Further on, deeper in the woods, a fencepost broke the open land. He smiled a little at it, and trailed it for several minutes. Soon after, an empty barn came into sight. It didn’t smell like horses anymore—just dead leaves and wet hay. With a tug, he opened the door and walked into the dark building. Memories washed over him and for a moment, he could do nothing but stand there and feel a vague sense of regret.
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[html] Assuming that there is a hayloft in th ebarn. Let me know if there is none!
Poe had always been drawn to dead things. Hollow shells and bleached bones, she had even come to carry a small pouch of fragile bird bones when a belt happened to be a part of her haphazardly created ensembles. There had been an old crone on the last ship she had traveled on who had done the same, and whispered they fragmented stories they told to the young lady who still heard them with the ears of a child. They never came to a definite ending, and that one of Poe’s favourite aspects. Because while fascinated with death, she could not take it at face value, as the last word in a complex story. These lands were no exception in her mind.
Memories ran thick on every other step she took, but the barn that she wound up in the end held little in the recesses of her mind. She had never tended to or rode the horses that had resided here once, for lack of opportunity and the love of her own feet’s beat. For this fact, it offered small hints of a piece of her past uninvestigated, which made for a nostalgic little discovery. It hadn’t taken long before she had wound up in the hayloft, gravitating to the dusty untouched, and made herself a bed out of the fragrent, limp straw that remained there. On nature’s duvet, she was allowed to drift in and out of past and present, death and life, lost and found. It all became so compact for her in this forgotten territory, and thoughts blended to dreams, sucking her into their depths, until the muffled sounds of the door below spit her out.
A quiet, languid yawn slid out of her throat and stretched her jaw before she could muster the effort of lifting herself off of her belly and peeking over the loft’s edge to spy the figure below. Dreadlocks and broad shoulders, pale fur and glimpses of hand-made markings, he was very much the same and very different from when she had last seen him. On the docks, surrounded by the buzz of coming change, of new lands and hopes. It was becoming comically typical of her to fall just an inch short of something that she thought was so sure. They were long gone by the time she woke up, drenched in dirty pier water. A small, sleepy smile pushed that memory away, and she pushed herself a little further over the edge with the soft shuffle of her bedding. Her dark mane was decorated with bits of straw, and hung past her face from above. “Hey you,” she said casually, her lingering dreams doing a better job of veiling her true excitement than she normally could on her own accord. She was far from comparable in lies and conspiracy to her mother, even on a small scale.
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indent Over the year he had gone from ship to ship—the first had taken them across the ocean with his family. The second trailed through the Mediterranean; from France to Barcelona, then to Rome. He spent a month roaming the area, exploring the Vatican and museums of the past. At this point, he jumped on board another ship—they went south, picking up cargo in Algeria, and then went north to France again. It was here he had found Misery and they had begun the journey home.
indent The noise from above was not startling; from the size, he guessed it was not large enough to be dangerous. By the scent, he named familiarity. By the face and the voice he found kinship. Poe was the only one they had left behind. He hadn’t even realized it until long after there was no turning back. A smile broke his face, perhaps the first honest smile he had shown since he had returned here. “You going to stay up there or come and greet me proper?”
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[html] Ahren had always carried a calm, collected air to him as far as Poe had come across. She wasn’t very convinced that it was his entirety, but is had a mystery to it that had captured her flirting imagination since the first time she had seen him. Before Chimera, before conspiracy, caught between the dull warmth of a city sunset and the cool dampness of the tunnels below, he was the red-eyed rebel of a nightmare turned daydream. She had been very careful not to flaunt her excitement when she saw him next, when Chimera’s leadership was passed on to him. Now such concerns, both of Ahren’s credibility as well as Poe’s concern for others’ opinions, were things of the long past, and the two smiled openly at each other. “Well now,” she said contemplatively while her smile woke up into the impish little grin that fit the contours of her face most naturally. “If you insist,” she agreed, and with a broad stretch, lifted herself from belly to knees and crawled to the edge of the loft. Hay and dust showered down, a delicate intro to the quick and loud drop of the D’Angelo girl.
She fell into a crouch to absorb the fall, and just as quickly as a ball popped back up again. What sleep had held her a moment before had apparently been quickly discarded for the strong face of history, as she quick-stepped straight for him to toss a pair of dark arms around his torso. Ah, she had never been one for quaint manners, a little too disregardful by many standards, and too long without a pack etiquette had all but forgotten such things existed. A lot of those primal pack rules had been thrown from her behavioural vocabulary. She wore old costumes as clothes (a child’s fairy dress for now), hunted with a pole and lure or small traps, and got smacked around for ignoring the territorial borders these days.
“Fancy seeing you here,” she mused through a half-lidded grin.
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indent She looked like her mother, had her mother not been mad. Edgar was one of the few D’Angelo that Ahren truly respected anymore. Her brother had long ago fallen out of his favor, as had most of that family. Of course, they were related by the twisted branches of their family trees. Like Mab, Ahren might call Edgar his sister-cousin. The only difference was that they were not bound by blood.
indent Her arms grabbed his still lean torso, and he returned the motion around her shoulders. They didn’t need to stand for manners or etiquette here, as he had seen Mab have to perform on nights when she and the other local nobility met to discuss the city and its inhabitants. “Same to you. Last I heard, you had turned buccaneer.”
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[html] Bleh-post. Sorry. :\
The lines between pack and family had always been a little blurred from Poe's angle. For loyalty, or for those tangled blood-ties that knit together the better part of Chimera, their roles in her life had been similar and overlapping. It was a lonely, freeing thing to feel only the memory of those guiding arms around her these days, and in that moment that real flesh and fur wrapped around her, the lonely was accented. Which was was disconcerting in itself, and led her to tighten her hold on that figure of pack-family for a second before throwing herself back from him a step. The muttle of emotion bled into her smile as she examined the face that looked scuffed with age. Or loss, perhaps. The only familiar scent that she had pushed her face into a second before was her haggard mother's, it seemed.
"Buccaneer and Miniature Highness of the Seas!" she accounced with theatrical flare, tossing her long bangs (briefly) from off of her right eye. "It made for a wonderful adventure, but I'm not sure if I can say I'm entirely suited to it. I never tracked down anyone from the old Chimera lot, after all. Well, until coming back here obviously," she said with an amused little smirk that narrowed her eyes into dark, playful slits aimed at Ahren's surreal red gaze. They didn't startle her the way they once had, when he had seemed like a flesh and blood ghost of the under-concrete-world. Despite the buzz of excitement that radiatted from her, his presence was a comforting one to the D'Angelo girl. "And what about you? What's the story between setting sail to France, and wandering into your old barn?" Bedtime, campfire, whispered and shouted, she always wanted stories. They always told more than just a tale, partciularly if you were looking for soemthing more than just that. And when it came to Ahren, she often was. Their lives had for quite soem time, been tied to one another from just beyond arm's length. The family, friends and place that took them from one thing to another were often shared.
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indent He laughed at her display, folding his arms under his chest. The tattooed-scar over his heart had long since faded, and now was a dirty-gold, the color of ruined sunflowers. It was just a little thing he had done to hide something he would never be proud of. They had lived different lives, between the ocean and the shore, the year that split them and the family that bound them. He could remember the time they had met, the time she had seemed like some pixie lost in his drawn-down world.
indent So much had passed he could barely recall all of it. “After we left, we all went west. We planned to settle down there and did for about a month. Somehow Mab found us—don’t ask me how, she has her ways—and offered us a home. Apparently the de le Poer’s are older then we thought; she had inherited a castle. So we shipped off for France.” Shifting his weight and moving to an old bale of hay on the floor, he sat down and inhaled the musky, moldy scent of too long past. “Mab’s mate, Bowie, brought us into the horse trade. He’s brilliant, really—never met anyone as fearless as he is. Matinee and I had some kids. A lot of kids,” he added with a faint laugh. “We all ended up splitting up, though. Matinee and I got into a fight and she left…I went off to find her. That’s how I got into the sailor racket, actually. Spent a few months doing that before I ran into Misery, and we decided to come here.”
indent Leaning back and grinning like a boy, he nodded towards her. “So tell me about your adventures, your Highness.”
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[html] Poe was happy to sit down across from Ahren, and listen to him tell his tale. There was an added age and something missing in him now that did indeed give him a rougher edge, but he didn’t have the same tired heaviness that he had when they and so many others left this land. She had always thought that he had been free of the alpha-weight when they did that, but seeing him now made her think differently. He had still been an alpha, even when he wasn’t ruling in that group. It was like how parents are still parents, even after their children have graduated well into adulthood. But they were truly disbanded, now.
The story was, in part what she expected. Settling until the dramas that orbited them all caught up all that way, and split. More children, the long-gone Queen of something magical that Poe had never placed, and the explanation for Matinee’s absence in Ahren’s scent-aura. Poe had never found reason to believe in love and romance having happy endings, but there was an unexpected little sink of disappointment when she heard this. But as any sorrow was done with, Poe breathed it in and out, leaving just a stain on her insides.
“Oh, my adventures have been spectacular and magical, as per usual,” she replied with her small pixie-grin, rolling her shoulders and arms back to prop herself up on her own bale of hay. “After missing the boat—due to my immense capacity for clumsiness, plus who knows what else—I caught another ship headed overseas. A pirate ship of course, because nothing less would do for my likes. We conquered some islands, saved some whales, raided some pirate booty,”—was one way of explaining it—“and wound up going to Africa. A little off-course, but brilliant no less. I swapped ships to get to Europe, but the closest I could get was Italy.” A reflection on her round-trip unavoidably brought up a number of faces, voices, and hands that made her head spin with closely cherished memories, as well as a handful that were better left in the past. Her face was bright and warm as she spoke to their simplified memory. “When I made it up to France, I only found the wake of our ex-Chimerans. I was told that everyone had split. Which through some strange emotion-logic, made me homesick for this place. For what was left, I suppose, but there is next to nothing these days.” She glanced around them, lingering on the dancing dust that showed up in the light from the open door.
“It’s strange looking around here now, isn’t it?” she asked, turning back to Ahren with a tilted head. “When I came back here from my spill in the west, it seemed like it was full of ghost-memories. But they faded away quickly when I realized how it had just been reincarnated into something else. But it really seems like the Afterworld now.”
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indent The burden of a pack had been a great weight. One year had driven him to the edge, as it had done to his father. Damian fell to madness, as had his father before him, and his father’s father before him. Addicts and deranged men were a pattern in the faulty de le Poer line, the half which had resulted in Ahren and his children. Mab’s half of the family, he had found, were not half so mad—granted, she had not spoken to her parents in years and their grand-aunt was absent (though rumored alive), but he had not once seen any madness in the girl. Of course, he had never seen her during those moments, but it was better that way.
indent At the mention of pirates, and her embellishments of the tale, he grinned boyishly. Africa was another word that caused a reaction, and his eyes twinkled with knowing. He had seen it, though briefly. And he had heard stories—oh he had heard stories. She had crisscrossed the world in a sporadic pattern not unlike his own, and must have seen a world he did not. Her eyes were glistening with memories, as bright and brilliant as the dawn.
indent It was only once she returned to the here and now that his eyes dulled slightly, overburdened with the memories of a place he had helped build. “Whatever it is, we’ve all lost touch with it. We’re ghosts, bad memories, the things that people don’t want to see,” he said heavily, as though he had come here knowing that would occur. “Corona asked me if I was going to reform Chimera,” he said suddenly, eyes on her face, studying the reaction.
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[html] Few familial lines that tangled themselves in these lands had arrived without warps and twists, but Bleeding Souls seemed to have a way with accentuating them. The D';Angelos too, had a darkness to them that beat as a pulse. Caused by incest, religious fanaticism, or the colour-curse they claimed, Poe did not know, and did not care to pinpoint. It ran its course through her own veins, below the skin she wore that was painted by breathtaken smiles and wide, consuming stares. Bruises were kept hidden behind pink gauze and ripped crinoline.
Her sprawling, whimsical story of what was received with more warmth than she expected--from the story itself as well as the one she spoke it to. Ahren had always been the strong, handsome type, but he wore a weight that dragged down his gait and gaze. Simple, boyish smiles and interest seemed to starkly contrast what she had seen from him a year or two past, enough to stir a reaction from her core. There was a certain sadness that came from it, with the notice of its rarity without Matinee's immediate presence, and the realized knowledge that it would only last so long. The conversation changed, and their moods settled back onto the dusty ground again.
"Oh?" was her immediate response, a mixture of blatant surprise and restrained curiosity. It was a loaded statement, and it took her a heartbeat to measure its contents. Chimera, in its many forms, more often shaped by her mind than presence, was her home and family. She had not done so much as attempt to settle into another pack, another home (besides the Concrete Jungle of today, an old dream turned into a temporary solution) with reason beyond idealism or hope; there was no sense in getting into something when her heart wouldn't follow. The spark of recently ignored hope hovered and threatened to blaze, but was held back by the lingering strands of a moment before. The glimpse of a lightness in Ahren, the comfortable freedom in his posture. It would be an exchange of life between him and the Chimera corpse. Poe's face fluttered between the polar reactions, and she took in a steady breath to quiet and collect her mind. "And what do you think about it?" A counter, she then studied him for his own reaction.
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indent He rose, shrugging. “I don’t want it,” he heard himself say. He wanted his family back—not strangers who could leave at any moment, turn against him, tear apart their world. He wanted comfort and quiet and a serenity he had lost over a year ago. He wanted peace and everything to have been different. But what he wanted and what the world offered were two very different things. “I’m glad you’re back,” he said as he made his way towards the door. Without another word, he slipped out, heading away at an easy walk and in quiet dissonance.
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