wish in the well [closed]

Alegria Bethencourt · 05-23-2012, 01:55 AM

She'd been going for a while in hopes of something exciting happening.

Alegria paused briefly to shake her coat and dislodge a small clump of undercoat. Should someone had seen her in the same place five months ago, the chances were that they wouldn't even recognize her, if it wasn't for notable features - the thick charcoal rim all around her ears, the long limbs, the washed-out eyes.

Vesper. The thought of her name seemed like a dream at the tip of your tongue: familiar, yet evading your grasp, all the while being rediscovered like something new and magical you'd lived in a past life. And, truth be told, that wasn't very far from the case. Memories of Oliver, of June, of Vesper herself, drifted past in her mind: the Tyrrany that she hadn't minded, and the end of it, that she hadn't minded either.

A small smile came to hang, like a sickle moon in the sky, across one corner of her lips and she set along on a steady lope as before: she could keep this up forever, yet by the time she came across Inferni lands, clearly marked with a neat scent border, she slowed to a walk and calmly stepped into an unfamiliar land.

OOC - Sorry for the crappy beginning! Didn't really know what else to write.

Vesper · 05-23-2012, 08:24 AM

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300+
It's all goooood.

It had been about three weeks since the attack on the wolf camp, and most of the coywolf’s injuries had healed well enough to be forgotten. Other than the smooth cut on the side of her face and her missing ear, none of her wounds were distinct in the striping of scars that covered the rest of her body. However, if there was one process she was used to, it was healing, and she walked around the clan casually while others were wincing each time their bandages were changed.

Some of her larger wounds were still scabby, however, and they itched like hell. Vesper paused on her usual border patrol, sitting and scratching with a hind paw until she caught herself and marched onward again, pale blue eyes flicking to the undergrowth around the edge of the woods. The land had been quiet since the Boreas wolves came, allowing the clan a time of peace to rest, but she wasn’t going to be any less vigilant.

Four small paws slowed then came to a halt as her nose twitched, and she bristled as she turned. There was a fresh scent close, and while it was not the musky odor of a wolf, it was not that of an Inferni member, either. She broke out into a trot toward the border, where the skulls perched on their stakes and hung off trees—silent, bleached sentinels that proved scary in stories but didn’t seem to stop their living cousins from trespassing.

Sure enough, a coyote hybrid was within the territory. Her lips twitching with annoyance, the Centurion went to accost the dainty thing—but something tickled at her memory. She stopped just when she came into sight, her coal-tipped tail flagging high but her expression far more uncertain than her dominant posture. There was something about this stranger, those impossibly pale eyes in their rim of dark fur…

The memory of the boy sobbing in her jaws came to her suddenly, and Vesper let her tail drop very slowly. She had already seen her sister return to her, but the coyote band had been a very different fragment of her life. Ever since Juniper stared at her with those accusing eyes, memories of it had only brought pain and guilt—but here was one detail from her past, as indistinct as it had been during those teenage days.

“Alegria?” the one-eared fighter asked, her posture strong again but her blue eyes wide and questioning. She had not cared for them, but she had known their names, and this one came in a flicker of intuition: the sister of her first victim.

Alegria Bethencourt · 05-23-2012, 06:47 PM

"Alegria?"

She'd gotten so unused to hearing her name in full - lately others had adopted the shortened version, the brief, hard yet feminine two syllables and three letters of 'Ria. It was an effort to get closer to her, an effort to breach that fronteer of impersonal sarcasm, that dispassionate face she showed the world. It didn't work, because what others didn't realize was that there was no deep, sentimental Alegria hidden under folds of sarcasm. She was as she showed herself. She truly didn't care, it wasn't a game of pretend. What they got was all they'd ever get of her.

Before her stood the coywolf that matched the name she'd been repeating to herself in her head, over and over, yet Vesper the coywolf seemed far more real than Vesper the name had: the canine that stood before her didn't seem dreamlike. Perhaps slightly out of the ordinary, but very much real, the same way she had years ago.

Alegria flicked her left ear, fully conscious of the irony of her movement, cracked a toothy smile at the blue-eyed girl in front of her. "Hallo, Ves," she said, the nickname slipping easily off her tongue. "Been a while, hasn't it?"

She let her eyes trail over where the ear used to be, then back at the blue blue eyes and added, "you haven't changed a bit." Then, after what seemed like a second's worth of reflection, "have I?"

Vesper · 05-23-2012, 07:13 PM

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omg post so full of suck

The petite girl looked at her, smiling with her teeth, and the casual greeting served to give her more of an identity than a face and a name. She hadn’t stood out amongst the other young coyotes in the wannabe gang (not that Ves had eyes for anyone but her lover and her rival), but the near-coldness in her impossibly pale gold eyes brought back other memories, a sense of who exactly she was.

Vesper was almost reminded of herself, of the icy front she offered everyone to shield them from the vesuvian rages within her fighting soul, but she had grown out of it. Ria, on the other hand, looked like she’d only grown up. Her tiny body, though still delicate, had finally been crafted into an adult shape, tender attention given to her ears and sloped back. It was puzzling, and it took the Centurion a moment to recognize the question.

Her lips pulled back for an instant to show sharp teeth beginning to yellow. “You don’t know how I’ve changed,” she answered coldly, Oliver’s cries for mercy still ringing in her skull. All everyone saw were her scars, though once she had been proud of each and every one. “I fight for a reason now,” she went on, the fire dimming down. The flicker of her tail toward the heart of the clan’s land was enough of an explanation.

“And you,” she went on, her old sarcastic smirk beginning to tug at the corner of her lips, “how am I to know that? Are you any different?”

And then her blue eyes grew somber. “Why are you here?”

Alegria Bethencourt · 05-25-2012, 03:09 PM

Alegria didn't shy away with her glance. She rarely did. At first it was out of daring, back when she had a nature that strived to rebel and break away, but soon it became a habit, and before long others' gazes on her - and her gaze on them - no longer bothered Alegria in the least, even at signs of discomfort from those she gazed at. She was quick to pick up on subliminal things like feelings, and found detachedly that she did not care.

Wind brought with it the smell of cold white bone and newly birthed grass. Spring had wrestled winter's claws from the land and was instilling its sickly sweet cover over everything. Alegria wasn't sure which she preferred: she did not belong to those who stoically claimed to love winter, the cold, the bare trees - she listened to her body when it told her, from underneath her relatively thin coat of fur, that it was cold - yet she could do nothing but watch with distaste as other wolves, usually the young females prone to love, pranced about merrily as the weather grew more mild.

Vesper was by now sneering, a distinct expression of pugnacity that Alegria knew was part of her nature. "You don't know how I've changed," Vesper retorted with characteristic frost. "I fight for a reason now."

"Do you?" Alegria responded with evident lack of interest. To be truthful it was not so much a lack of interest but a show. She did not flare up in passion, and she did not hate either. "Always found loyalties a bit overrated." She paused and glanced behind Vesper towards where she indicated - the land that sprawled behind her. Alegria sobered slightly. It was nice land - if Vesper was choosing to tie herself down, here was as good a place as any to do so. She gave a slight nod of understanding now, still tinged with that edge of mirth that coiled the ends of her lips.

"So you're no longer the girl who killed my brother?" she added, offhand as ever, eyes flicking back to Vesper's with a total lack of remorse or anger - yet with a total lack of sympathy, either, and blunt as ever, her voice deadpan.

At Vesper's question, she gave a sort of short-lived, merry laugh. A feminine, warbling note that sang pure and quick. "Oh, no, dear Vesper, you've got it all wrong," she retorted, the laughter still in her voice. "I'm still the nasty bitch who won't give a fuck about anyone." The tone was laughing and honest all at once, a cocktail of delicious, poisonous fruit.

"Why are you here?"

"Heard about you," Ria retorted. "Wanted to see if my Vesper was really the Vesper I'd been hearing about."

Vesper · 05-25-2012, 03:28 PM

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393

Another Infernian might have taken offense at the flippant remark about loyalty, but Vesper could understand the sentiment. She had scoffed at most of the packs in Nova Scotia, especially at those who joined them on a whim. The entire autumn she’d survived as a loner, feeling above all of the wolves she ran into, but when her life was suddenly at stake, she found herself in the care of the clan healer. She still firmly believed that she could skip away from it all and survive on her own at any time—but she didn’t want to.

“I like Inferni,” the coywolf stated simply, knowing that Ria probably wouldn’t care for her to add more than that.

The deadpan remark wiped away nonchalance, and something flashed in her pale blue eyes. She searched momentarily for hate and found none—only the carelessness Alegria had always carried herself with. Then again, even the others could not find hate when they found their tyrant dead on the ground—but the difference was that they feared, and turned away. She didn’t remember if Ria did either, but she wasn’t flinching now, wasn’t regarding Ves like a murderer and monster.

“I shouldn’t have killed your brother,” Vesper said, trying to keep her voice strong. “He was just a stupid kid. I should’ve let him go and driven him off.” Her ear snapped down, and she called up some of her old fire to keep from sounding like a whimpering ball of remorse and weakness. “All of us were stupid kids. I shouldn’t have killed him, but I did, and I did most of you brats a goddamn favor.”

Justification—but a life was a life, and she understood Oliver more than she’d understood the two wolves she’d had a direct hand in killing these past couple of months. She wondered what everyone else would think, to hear her speak like this.

Her smirk returned when the girl stated that she hadn’t changed, and she nodded lightly. Others as sweetly acidic as her feigned ignorance, but Alegria made no apologies, and that was what kept her more interesting than most “nasty bitches” that ran around the earth manipulating and mocking.

She lifted her head as the other concluded. “I am,” she answered, and her blue gaze grew challenging. “So what are you going to do about it?”

Alegria Bethencourt · 05-25-2012, 04:30 PM

"I like Inferni."

The statement was spoken with unerring simplicity and Alegria allowed herself an ambiguous shrug - carelessness, the mark of her usual nonchalance, or something else? Or disregard? Understanding, perhaps, the knowledge there was no other way Vesper would ever have stayed? It was unclear, but Alegria usually was, and she was not about to clarify. But they'd already shifted to another topic, skating over her small gesture. Vesper probably hadn't even noticed - not enough to wonder.

Their eyes met, Alegria's like lightened, bleached-out versions of Vesper's own, the pale ones calm and closed off, walling off nothing, the blue ones vaguely searching for several intense seconds. Alegria regarded her with impassiveness, neither liking nor disliking, an utter lack of bias not out of desire but out of nature.

"I shouldn’t have killed your brother."

Alegria gave another shrug, this time clearly dismissing the statement. It wasn't that she disagreed, for she would not have wished death upon Oliver, yet Vesper's words were uncalled for. "Should, shouldn't, doesn't sound much like how I remember you," she said.

“He was just a stupid kid. I should’ve let him go and driven him off.” Alegria took in the small gesture, the flick of her ear as she laid it against the back of her head, a gesture that stood out grotesquely in the light of the absence of the other one, and did not react, waiting for Vesper to finish. A friend would have cut her off, reassured her and told her it was done anyway. Alegria did not: she let Vesper finish, did not attempt to pull her out of her regret. “All of us were stupid kids. I shouldn’t have killed him, but I did, and I did most of you brats a goddamn favor.” In turn, Alegria did not attempt to dispel the rationalization that Vesper established to counter the rue.

"Bravo! Bravo!" She glanced away now, in musing, shaking her head as if agreeing to a silent thought, breathing the words out like an idea that had clambered across her mind. "You freed us all," she added, still on that hushed, wondered tone, the tone that sounded so thoughtful, so well-meaning. And though in the end there was irony behind it all, that did not stop the statement from sounding, and, when you scrabbled close to the root of it all, true.

Vesper · 05-25-2012, 05:43 PM

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Hooray for introspection. >__>

Even though she had matured greatly since the time she ran with the ragtag gang, Vesper still suffered from her pride. She hated the reminder that she was still young in this world, still learning, still mistaken. She hated her regret and hated how stupid she sounded going back on it. Standing in the face of this young woman, the definition of careless, she felt her weaknesses even more. It was a ridiculous emotion, but letting her guard drop around her newfound comrades had opened her up for those.

The other pointed out that shoulds and shouldn’ts didn’t sound like the old Vesper, and she was almost defensive before she realized that she liked it better that way. She mirrored the other’s shrug, but her coldness was deep and icy rather than the indifference Alegria demonstrated. It was challenging, once more, almost wanting the other to take offense—anything but this front she displayed now. Not that she knew why she cared; it wasn’t like she was trying to bring back Ria’s innocence. She’d always been the same, although less mature just as Ves had been those seasons ago.

The unexpected praise, the breathless wonderment, made the scarred coyote frown sharply. Once again she felt patronized, and she knew she didn’t have to suffer it. The other had ignored her question, which left her brooding on her frustrations and coming at last to a decision.

“Alegria.” Her voice was level, the voice of a subleader that she’d learned to adopt when dealing with the clan. “Do you have any reason for being here, other than finding me? I have more important things to do than chat about whether or not I’ve changed.”

Alegria Bethencourt · 05-26-2012, 05:15 AM

OOC - lolol I actually forgot to make her respond to the question. XDD

Vesper had chosen to ignore all her statements, just as Alegria had chosen to ignore Vesper's own query. In truth, no, she did not know why she'd come so far to see Vesper, but she had, and she did not regret the decision. She scanned the surroundings one more time, keeping her expression clear like cold river water after the first spring thaws.

“Alegria.”

The slim canine turned back to her interlocutor at the sound of her name, the expression remaining the same, cool, composed, the slight edges of a smile in the mellow curve of her lip.

“Do you have any reason for being here, other than finding me? I have more important things to do than chat about whether or not I’ve changed.”

"I see you've gotten yourself quite a rank," Alegria commented, deliberately evading the question for another few seconds, pairing it with a coy flash of her teeth. But she couldn't keep Vesper waiting long, just as she couldn't keep herself without a true answer.

She thought back to the number of groups and packs and clans she'd joined, tore through the ranks (literally or not) before losing interest. The spark of her former wanton curiosity flared up within her, an unusually passionate emotion, and she flicked it away with the twitch of her ear, much like she'd unseat a fly. "Nope." She jerked her chin slightly in direction of the bleached white skulls by the border. "Don't seem to like visitors much, do you?" A generality, or a specific comment? One couldn't be sure, and it was a good gamble to say Alegria wasn't even sure herself.

And then, firmly, with the assertive voice of a female warrior sure of herself, "let me talk to your leader. I want to join."

Vesper · 05-26-2012, 07:01 AM

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422
Epic fail, Atmo. :|

Vesper waited with cold patience for the coywolf to acknowledge her, not sure whether or not she should write off her behavior as insolence. By her standards, it was enough to make her want to reach out and shake the younger hybrid, but she knew that nothing she did would make her change. All she could do was hope Alegria was finished playing games and would leave her the hell alone; she knew she’d be dreaming about Oliver for the next few nights already.

Mention of a rank made the scarred she-yote smirk faintly, but she did not say anything until the female gestured at the skulls. “We don’t like trespassers,” Ves said dully, “wolves.” It was true that quite a few in the clan resented the larger species, especially after the Boreas attacks to justify their fear, but she did not think their lupine cousins were bad. At the same time, she knew the bleached sentinels she walked along every day deserved their seats of honor; she’d heard some of the stories about their brazen assaults on the territory.

Then the demand came, a confident request that had Vesper smirking again. It was more of her old smirk, far from a true smile, arrogant, cold. She took a seat on the earth and patted it with her tail. “I am one of the leaders,” she said.

Despite her tone, she was surprised. She hadn’t expected Alegria to ask that of all the questions, and it made her nervous. She hid this with cold appraisal as she stared back at the pale-eyed coywolf, thinking and speaking at last. “Why would you want to join if loyalties are overrated? What skills do you have to offer Inferni that would make us want to keep you?”

They were very standard questions, asked of any potential joiner that wandered up to their land. Alegria wouldn’t get out of them because they knew each other—especially when Ves was suspicious of her motives and doubtful of her future loyalty. It wasn’t that she feared the dainty creature before her would betray clan secrets or turn on them in a crisis; she just worried that Ria simply wouldn’t care, coasting through the pack like always and leaving when it no longer held an interest for her. While that was unavoidable—many drifted, even long-time former members—it was something that she didn’t want reflected onto her. It would be her decision to bring Ria into their midst, and she didn’t want it to be something she regretted.

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