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Set at the Mansion.
It looked like rain, it smelled like rain, and it even felt like rain. He had a feeling when he had woken up this morning, and it had been confirmed when he peered out of the window of the car he slept in. Clouds were roiling like dueling beasts up above; the thinner areas glowed silver-gray from the sun behind, but the thunderheads were like bruises. They moved quickly as if someone had pressed fast-forward—it almost made him think that time was speeding faster than usual. Sometimes it felt that way to him. Some creatures had the aspects of water, of fire, of wind; they could adapt so quickly to things, or at least change things to suit themselves. Snake was a creature of rock—of metal. Sometimes things happened and he didn't even notice it until later.
The air was a little warmer today. Spring was coming. And yet things were quiet, as if the entire world was holding its breath, waiting for the rain. Snake didn't intend to. He could just say inside all day (because his den was waterproof; he had made sure), but he thought staying inside the car one more day would drive him crazy. He had kept himself here for several days already, focusing on healing. He had always been pretty quick to heal—he remembered how Patriot mentioning it when he had recovered from the knife wound Foxhound had given him. The slashes on his shoulder had already faded somewhat, though the scars were apparent. The fresher wound across his chest was getting there—he could almost feel the scar tissue knitting itself together sometimes. He was gaining more mobility every day. He knew soon he'd be good enough to fight again. That was good. Things had been still for so long; sooner or later the storm would break and hell would be back to stay.
He left a few hours after daybreak, meandering towards the forests. Rain started to fall when he had entered the folds of trees, and he soon found himself gravitating towards the mansion. He walked up and stepped onto the broad sheltered front porch. He did not want to enter the building—he disliked enclosures like that. So he sat in one of the chairs, lighting a cigarette with a match (he had not had the luck of finding a functioning lighter yet). Being out in the open air was better than being in his den, even though he didn't really want to run about in the rain. So the green-eyed coyote sat and waited it out, watching the rain as it fell.
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[html] It was unsurprising that one of the first things that Corona did was go back to the mansion. It was perhaps said that she had what she considered refined tastes, at least in the sense that she preferred a bed to the ground, when she had spent the most earliest of times in such a place. In some ways, it was a spoiled sort of thing; France had been good to her, as had South America. Portions of North America were privy to the same tastes, although most of the creatures that inhabited what had been Canada and the United States were more pioneer than revolutionary — they didn’t mind roughing it.
But after months of roughing it, she had definitely had enough. It was easy to come back and go back to the same room that she had occupied before, easy to seal herself away there when nothing else was to disturb her and easy enough to listen to what went on in the house around her. It was how Corona had operated for the majority of her life. For the most part, she was not unlike the rest of Inferni for that reason. But even the interior grew a little too dreary for her; the colours a little too drab even though outside wasn’t much better.
Outside however, she could hear what was going on much, much better. Her senses fine attuned, body slightly tense with the ever anticipation that warning bells would go off — she was certainly aware that Inferni was in arms. Yet it was the strike of a match and the sharp hint of cinder and flame that drew her round the worn corner of the tudor-style structure. The coyote who was hanging around was the spitting image of someone she had met well over a year ago, but they were not the same.
The concept that this one was of any relation to him crossed her mind, but she didn’t think anything of it. Appearances were deceiving. It was easy to see what wasn’t there as well and she had come to often distrust what she had seen after spending enough time in her own head. But he had it rough already, had already gone out looking for trouble with the way that the wounds were scattered against his torso. That didn’t trouble her nearly as much as the fact that he was young did; she thought him much too little in age to have been out there fighting what would always be an endless war.
“I guess I don’t have to ask what happened to you.” [/html]
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It wasn't even as much that he went out looking for trouble—trouble always seemed to come looking for him. It didn't even surprise him anymore, really. He had been told long ago that there was a dictation which decided where you were to be born, and that same force decided what you would be throughout your life. Snake had been born in New Haven, and he had been placed under the sway of Patriot in his revenge toward Snake's mother. Some are taught to read when they are kids, others to write or to philosophize or to charm or to hunt. Snake had been trained to fight. It was probably only fitting that he got into his fair share of conflict without really doing much to aggravate it. His personality was a little too bland for that. He just had a bad habit of getting in the way.
He watched the rain and thought about little more than nothing, all the way up until she arrived. He looked over with little inclination in his glance—interest, but nothing else there. She was older than he was by a good deal, he estimated, but he couldn't tell how old for certain. The golden tone to her fur was brighter than that of his own sandy-colored coat—different enough, as most coyotes had more brown tones. Her eyes were a clear blue, he could see that from here, a clear kind of sky blue. He hadn't seen a blue sky in a while, at least not one choked by storm clouds or made feeble by winter. He nodded his head in greeting; he could tell that she was taking stock of him in a similar way and even before she spoke he had a pretty good idea of what it would be about.
"No, you don't." He didn't have much of a sense of humor. Sigint had always told him that life was a Goddamn catastrophe, and if you wanted to make it through without going insane, you had to find the funny side of things. Sigint was always laughing. People had thought him crazy. Snake wondered if he ever figured out the paradox in all of that. If he did have a sense of humor he might have said something like: "I could surprise you and say that it is a shark-bite" or something, but he knew that was idiotic. There were no sharks here.
He paused before continuing, "My name's Snake." Usually when he did introductions it was more out of obligation than manners. He knew it had to happen eventually, so why not get it over with? He was not much of a conversationalist, at least not on matters that seemed petty to him. Which was, unfortunately, most normal things.
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[html] He spoke with false age to his voice, something which didn’t surprise her. Ahren had always had some tinge of age in his voice, even though there had been scarcely a year between her herself and her father. But it was that and the experiences in their lives that made a gap seem like the one she had with her mother, and somewhere in the back of her mind she heard herself remark internally again that he was too young to seem that way. Regardless of any familiarity there was about him, this Snake as he introduced himself as, Corona was left to shove the thoughts elsewhere. It mattered not that he was young, he was there and he had been in the thick of war where lives had already been lost.
At least this time, they didn’t have to worry about making an exchange for her niece. To her, there were far few things worse than trying to barter blood for blood. “Corona,” she offered in return, adding, “has someone had a look at that?” She may not have been much of a fighter, but she had long marketed herself in the steps of an apothecary. Wherever the spark had began was beyond her, whether it had come from whatever Misery dabbled in or the first few grasps of first aid she had ever watched her father administer to himself, it was there. It had a beat like that of her heart, but a pulse not found and unexpected in the likes of their kind. Inferni fought to kill and died for it more often than they ever saved.
Perhaps that was why she always had a tendency of walking back in the door the moment the bugle bellowed and the smoke arose on distant border — this was the second—maybe the third, who was she to know—time this had happened. [/html]
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Age meant next to nothing to Snake. He had met those who were several times his own age and acted as though they were still children, and he himself had always felt as though his months had been years instead. Though he personally despised it, he never ceased to take advantage of those who underestimated him for his age. It was a part of Snake's individual style when it came to fighting—he would remain still, goading the opponent to think of him as slow or weak or too young, and wait for the proper moment to strike. Usually by that time, it was too late for whoever it was to take back their preconceptions and make any defense. And that was why Snake was still alive today.
He dipped his head when she mentioned her name—Corona—and he could tell by her line of sight that she was looking at the half-healed scar across his chest. He shook his head, replying, "No. But I've had wounds like this one before; I think I can handle it." It was virtually a larger scale of the smaller slash across his ribs, that one faded with months of time between its creation and now. But with the way she said it, he guessed that her intention was perhaps a little deeper than just base concern. Figuring that he might as well say something about this suspicion, he continued quietly, "But I never refuse any advice. My knowledge of medicine is limited to first aid." Snake knew that he should keep the wound clean and not let it get infected. Anything else was far beyond him.
And besides, he needed to heal as swiftly as he could. He could not allow himself to be compromised when the time came that he was called to defend Inferni, its leaders and its people. Snake knew that his utility was linked directly with his own health, which was why he generally obsessed over maintaining it. It was perhaps ironic that he didn't know anything more about healing arts, but in his own defense he could say he had never been around any apothecaries, healers, or doctors before.
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