occam's razor
#1
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I've got to remember this is just a game

     Draco had been on the continent for over a month. He had not stayed in one place very long—he had wandered through the burnt forest on the far side of the mountain and looked for the things he could remember being told about. Everything had burnt down, though vegetation was starting to grow back. It would take years before it fully recovered, though he doubted anyone would want to return. The ash had become a remarkably accurate physical representation of everything bad in the world, and in one fell swoop it had gone up in flames. Even the falcon realized this, and they had made a point to leave the area each night, unwilling to sleep in such a place.
     Now, though, Draco had settled for returning to what he had come to do. The scent had been varying and weak in the Dampwoods, and he had followed it south. To his right, the sun was setting, and his hair had picked up the burning red hue. He didn’t know exactly where this was leading him, but he kept walking. Now and again, the falcon’s shadow passed him, and Draco knew he would have to stop soon. Though he was comfortable in the dark, the bird’s eyesight was ruined and he became remarkably vulnerable.
     Still, he had some time—and he was getting closer. He knew that. He could feel it.





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#2
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_____With the sun setting, she was setting off once again for the open borders of Esper Hollow. This time she had something to at least give them, even though it was only collectively treating a few symptoms instead of fixing the entire problem. She hadn't gotten to the root of it yet, but she had out ruled a few things thus so far. Thinking about Talitha had slid to the back burner since she had assessed what was going on with her father and brother; there was simply not a whole lot she could do about her niece being held hostage. Talking with Anselm had given her a little piece of mind that he thought things could be negotiated and Dahlia de Mai hadn't been back to pick another fight since.


_____So while the two respective sides licked their wounds and buried their dead, she took whatever free time there was and headed off. The winding trails of the Dampwoods were getting easier to navigate, though she did go a little bit out of her way simply out of the fact that the more room between herself and “trouble” (that being of course, the Dahlians), the better. However, around the next bend in the path, she heard someone approaching. And really, it wasn't the approach that got her attention first, it was the falcon in the sky; too large to be Marlowe.


_____Instead, the figure wasn't someone she expected to see at all. No, in fact it was one of the least likely faces that she had expected to see when she came down the path a bit more, and at first she bristled simply out of surprise. How long had it been? Just how long had it really been? Squinting at his figure for a moment, Corona stopped in her tracks. “Draco?” It had been too long, but it was hard to mistake someone she had spent several months around, she just didn't forget what her younger siblings looked like so easily (or however much she had wanted to, at one point).

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#3
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I've got to remember this is just a game

     Only two people had, thus far, identified him. Both times, Draco had been struck with the impulse to hide whom he was—and with Jasper he had tried, but as dumb as he liked to imagine his siblings were, they knew him. With Corona, Draco recognized her eyes and her necklace before anything else. Those two things had always been a constant—her eyes were so bright it was almost unnatural, blue in a way similar (though at the same time, very different) then the blue of his eyes. He mirrored her action, and stared ahead blankly. Of course, she should be here too.
    
“So I guess you all went here,” he said flatly, doing his best to keep the frustration out of his voice.




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#4
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_____To say that he hadn't grown into quite a handsome young man would have been wrong. He had and in a sense, resembled both of his parents very much in the way that she did. Of course, she didn't know very much of what had become of him or the others after she had left France; which ultimately was before her father and step-mother had gone their separate ways. Curiously she couldn't help but wonder how that had affected all of them, but it was only now that she had interest in them. But it was hard to make up for lost time, perhaps too hard to do it now.


_____“I've only been here a few days,” she said, caught a little off-guard by his statement as she closed the distance between them. Though he tried to keep the frustration from his voice, she knew the sound. She had made use of that tone for quite a while herself. “How long have you been here? And how have you been?” She hadn't seen him since for what had to have been over a year. Maybe longer, if that. But she wasn't about to shower him in a flurry of questions, unsure of what his next actions would be.

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#5
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I've got to remember this is just a game

     All of the elder siblings had left before their parents. And after that it had been a trickle—first some of his siblings, then Misery and Gin, and then Mab had forced his father to go. Ahren had been a wreck, and in some way, Draco was glad no one else was there. He hadn’t even wanted to hear what the two cousins had said to each other (none of which was good) and hadn’t wanted to watch his father stagger off. It was only in those last few days that he had started to hate the man, though Draco truly doubted this was an accurate statement. He disliked his father.
     He didn’t want to kill him, as so many others had. “Maybe a month,” he said. He ignored her second question completely. “I guess crazy Aunt Misery was right about this place,” he continued, letting a vague smile cross his face, though it did not meet his eyes. “You people just can’t get away from it.”



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#6
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_____He had been there longer, so there was no doubt in her mind that he could have possibly known more about what was going on. Though just from the way he acted and the way he looked, she also had to doubt her own confidence. Rachias hadn't wanted much to do with Inferni, and Corona had no idea how Gabriel would have reacted if she told him about what was going on in another pack. It was his next statement from there that wiped it from her mind, finding a familiar sting in the truth of that sentence. Conversations of the past wanted to sound in her head, the memories wanted to flood back and say that she was back there because of a much bigger reason; not just because her brother's bird had asked her to come back.


_____“It's home. Or at least, the place on the other side of the mountain was.” Just like that little neck of the woods they had belonged to in France would be his. “There isn't anything left of it any more, it's all burnt to the ground. I'm only here because I heard about it and I wanted to make sure everyone was all right.” But it had become much more than that, since she had gotten there. “Why are you here, anyway? Did Mab come with you?” She presumed that if anyone had brought him there or tagged along with him, it was her.


_____God forbid it be his mother.

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#7
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I've got to remember this is just a game

     Those older times did not bother him much anymore. Mab had seen to it that he had lived a normal childhood (mostly) and worked him so hard he didn’t have much time to brood about his tragic past as had seemed common here. Desperate girls trying to find a new father, masked bandits fighting for justice, it was all too much. He was ready to go home, get back to the normalcy that came with their small family over there. In honesty, they might have been the black sheep—just a little too sane for the rest of their family. A little, but just enough. They were all damaged, dangerous people.
     He looked down at her words, smiling still.
“No,” he said, and then looked back up. Something in his eyes had changed.
“She’s back home. She sent me here to finish my training.” That something became cruel and vicious.
“Why? You worried my mother might have come back from the dead?”







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#8
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_____Her dislike for Matinee had never really been hidden that well. Corona hadn't liked her from day one and even though, she felt the prickle of hot fire rush her veins at the sneering tone in his voice. In the end, her hunches about the gypsy had it been right, and Matinee had outcast Ahren faster than a piece of bad food in a supermarket deli. She had disappeared on her children, she had turned her back on the family that she had been taken into. Perhaps in time Corona would have come to tolerate her in the way that she had finally come to tolerate (and eventually accept) her younger siblings, but it hadn't come. It would never come.


_____Still, she kept her aggression in check, trying to conceal the fact that he had gotten a rise out of her with such a thing. “Oh, she's dead is she?” Corona wasn't convinced, maybe because Matinee was partly a D'Angelo. Misery wasn't dead yet despite all of the things that she had been through, despite how crippled and mangled she was, so why would Matinee be? It seemed like the same sense that they all avoided eating a bullet, so did she. “Did you come over here to rub that in your father's face?” Matinee had hurt Ahren in a way that Corona could not forgive her, and the gold Lykoi had little desire to let go of the intentions to do harm the next time she ever saw her.

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#9
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I've got to remember this is just a game

     There was no given response to her first question. In his true heart, Draco knew his mother was very much alive. He knew that she was out there and that she would find them, eventually. This of course, he did not want only because he felt such displeasure for both parents—they had walked away, and they had put themselves before their children. For that reason alone, Draco no longer considered them such. Even those people in Europe had accepted his lies when he said they were dead; they were half dead anyway, and dead to him at length.
     A chunk of his red-black hair fell in his face, and he grinned in a way that made him look just a little too much like his father. “No, not at all,” he said, though this sounded like a lie. It was, but it was not. He had other reasons for being here. “What about you? What dragged you all the way across the sea?”






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#10
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_____“I was in South America, or whatever is left of it. My brother, Gabriel, has a bird like yours and he turned up there after a couple of months and told me about the fire that happened in the north.” Even if he couldn't muster the desire to be honest with her, she didn't have many reasons not to be that way with him. Maybe it was some sort of mentality that said she owed him that much. “So I came back because I wanted to make sure that he and his family were okay.” Which they had been, save for Talitha. Corona didn't even know if that was something she wanted to get into. He probably wouldn't have cared, she assumed.

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#11
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I've got to remember this is just a game

     He understood what she meant by South America, and found the distance remarkable. If she had come here on foot, it would have taken weeks, maybe months. The useless information about his half-brother meant nothing, as Draco didn’t even know who he was. Pushing his hair out of his face, he frowned a little, as if the idea of his family (even a part he did not belong to) offended him. “Do you know where Ahren is?” Now he cut to the chase; he was wasting his time talking with someone who had never cared about him.





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#12
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_____As much as she wanted to fix things, there was some things that would simply not be fixed. She could see that resentment more and more in the moments that she and Draco conversed and wasn't all that surprised that he would cut to the quick of things, however, she felt a bit apprehensive in giving him that kind of information. If he was going to end up harassing Ahren, she wanted to avoid that. There was a little she could do about caring whether or not he hated all of them (after all, one sibling already did, if not more), but she wouldn't let him take it out on anyone so easily. But at the same time, he wasn't himself either. He spoke of things that didn't make any sense to her, so maybe he'd only do the same to him. Letting her gaze drop a little bit, she decided to tell him, if only because she knew that he would find him otherwise if she didn't. That was just how they all were. “He's in a place called Esper Hollow. It's south of here, west of the city along the shore. I don't know why you'd want to go and see him, but I will tell you that he's sick. Really sick, actually. The pack there has him and few others quarantined because they don't know what's wrong with them.”

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#13
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I've got to remember this is just a game

     For the most part, Draco was unarmed. He carried nothing on his person except the deep rooted instincts and training embedded in his blood. Only the hawk, George, was an outside factor. Still, a bird was only useful as long as it was alive. In close quarters, it would be struck down in one blow. If he had really come here to kill his father, he would have done so by now. He would have cut his throat and watched the light fade from his eyes, and he would have felt nothing.
     At least, he believed that. “I have to see him,” he said, for once being completely honest. “I’m leaving, and I need to see him before I go.” The signs were all around him, reminding him his time was up. He had come here for what he had needed to learn, found nothing of worth, and now had one final task to complete. “I won’t be there long enough to catch it,” he added, smiling faintly.





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#14
Even if I have to be out the door in less than ten minutes to catch a ride, MUST ANSWER POST. XD; *retarded*
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_____Corona nodded, understanding that simple reason to see him. Whether it was to reconcile something, retrieve something, or simply get some sort of blessing or even just to say goodbye, she could understand that. So she knew that their meeting would be coming to end and very possibly, she would never see him again. Which for both of them was probably fine; their siblings were scattered to the four winds and so were they. “I know I was never a good sibling to you,” she said, levelling out her gaze with him, “but take care of yourself, Draco.” And she was truly sorry that things didn't have turned out different, for both of them.

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#15
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I've got to remember this is just a game

    
He smiled thinly, feeling nothing. Corona was a stranger who shared his blood, his father’s blood, but after tonight his father would be dead and gone. Draco would never see him again. That much, he realized, would be enough. That would let everything fall into its rightful place and leave him as an orphan, as Mab’s charge and apprentice forever more (though when he returned, he would gain his proper title and no long be a child to her). “You too,” he said, and began to head off. “Hopefully things will work out for you here.” And he was walking away, towards the father who he would never call as such.






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