It took what felt an awful lot like forever for Draven to finally start regaining control of himself, and even then any progress he made was fought for tooth and nail. It was hard enough that he didn't feel like he was calming down so much as he was dragging himself through cold, heavy, slimy muck with no way of knowing how far he still was from solid ground. He was aware of Raela and Calanthe there with him and sort of understood that they were both saying stuff that was probably supposed to make him feel a little less terrible, but as long as he was busy trying to stop crying so much, there was no way he was ever going to hear a word they said.

He was limp with exhaustion by the time his sobs finally started turning into quiet, randomly spaced snuffles. If he had been standing up, he knew he would probably have fallen over by now. His throat hurt from crying; his face felt sticky with the tears drying on his fur. His lungs felt wobbly like the rest of him, making breathing slowly and calmly too much of a challenge. Gasping was the only way for them to drag air back into him, and every gasp made the muscles in his back and chest hurt all over again. It would take too much to move yet, and he was warm and felt shielded from the world as long as he stayed still. It was easier to just relax and try to breathe. It was easier to stop thinking and stare off across the shelter at nothing in particular.

It took longer than it had for him to stop crying before something like strength started coming back to the boy's limbs - like strength, but not, because it wasn't so much that his body had recovered as it was that he was laying awkwardly and his legs were cramped and sore. It was more necessary effort that made him finally shift around a bit until blood started flowing back to his toes again and the stiffness in his muscles began to fade.

He thought for a moment that maybe he should say something to either Raela or Calanthe - or maybe to them both. But he didn't know exactly what he should say, and trying to think of why he needed to say anything in order to get some inspiration was too much work still. It also wasn't at all worth another breakdown just to figure out what to say, so just for now anyway, he said nothing.

He desperately wanted to sleep, but his hungry stomach was still gnawing on itself and the thunder was still roaring outside. He figured he should try to eat, then, while he was thinking about it. His half-eaten rabbit was just a few inches away from his nose... but that was really, really far away. He didn't know if he could stretch that far right now, so he lay there still, eyes locked disinterestedly on the carcass. He'd get to it once he stopped feeling quite so much like a boneless pile of jelly.

Raela's words sank in slowly, sluggishly, as though each syllable was a drop of water dribbling down through his fur to land against his skin. The worst of his emotional turmoil was gone, though only for the moment; he knew it would probably come back again, like it did in the mornings when he woke up feeling relatively normal and then slowly sank down into depression as the day wore on. But it didn't cloud his mind just at the moment, and that left him better able to listen to Raela and try to understand this time what she was trying to tell him.

That didn't make it make any more sense. If he didn't deserve to have been treated the way he was that night, then why had it happened at all? The Kino and Ari he knew wouldn't just go after somebody the way they went after him for no reason at all. Min-- ...They had been raised better than that, all three of them had, and so had @Kova before them. If he didn't deserve to be treated that way, why had Draven gotten picked on and yelled at so much for crying?

"But I did deserve it." His voice came out bland and without any inflection to speak of. He felt more like he was reading lines than saying the things he really felt - but it was both at the same time, wasn't it? "People didn't start crying until I did. I made people upset when they weren't already." His eyes stung with new tears that he didn't have the energy to try to wipe away. "Kino and Ari were right, because if I hadn't said or done anything, nobody else would have started crying, either. I made everything all about me, and started acting like it was my fault..."

His voice choked off again as he squeezed his eyes shut and tried not to remember. Wasn't it his fault? Wasn't there something better he could have done? Nobody knew what exactly had happened. Maybe it was stress. Maybe Mi-- Maybe she had been upset because Draven wasn't as playful or adventurous or smart as Kino and Ari. Maybe she was so sad about that that she couldn't bear being around it anymore. Maybe she wasn't taken away, but left all on her own, because Draven wasn't smart or strong or talented enough and it made her so sad that she d--

"It's my fault," he choked out. "It's all my fault, and I can't do anything to fix it, and if I say it's my fault then I'm even worse then when I say nothing at all, because no matter what I do I can't stop thinking about myself long enough to help anybody else!" He covered his muzzle with his paws, trying his best to hide underneath them as another high whine dragged out through his teeth. "All I can do is hurt people..."

It took more time and much more strength than he thought he had, but somehow he cried again, for just a little while this time thankfully. He calmed down faster, drowsy and feeling even weaker this time than he had before, but this time he hardly felt any better for all the effort he'd put in.

"Why would anybody wanna help me?" he asked when he'd caught his breath again. "All I do is hurt people... When's it gonna end?"

Draven didn't know what to believe. He wanted to believe Calanthe and Raela had the right of it, and that he had done nothing wrong after all... but how could he? Didn't his siblings know better than they did? Weren't they all just like him, because wasn't that how families worked? They were litter mates. They'd literally known each other their whole lives. Who would know better than his own siblings whether or not he had been selfish?

But here was Raela, telling him that he hadn't hurt anybody at all - that he'd been brave for crying before anybody else - and here was Calanthe telling him that he hadn't been weak, and that if anyone should be in trouble it was his siblings. How could crying and making other people feel badly make him brave? How could being yelled at for upsetting everybody else make the ones who yelled at him for it in the wrong? It didn't make any sense to the boy. People started crying after he did, so how could he have not been the reason they were upset? And since he was what started everybody else crying, how could he have not hurt them at all? People only cried when they were hurt or upset, and nobody was crying until he did...

The darkling boy let out an exhausted grunt and rested his head between his paws again, too tired to cry any more over this endless circular argument with himself. He wanted the thinking and the worrying and the confusion to just stop. He just wanted to be able to sleep for a little while and wake up and be normal for more than a few minutes before going dark again...

"I don't know what to think," he finally mumbled. "I don't know what's right. I made people cry, or start, and that means it was my fault and they were right..." He lifted his eyes to look up at Raela; he didn't have the strength to lift his whole head, not even a little bit, not right now. "I just want to stop hurting."