Spectral Woods cigarette burns

this thread is backdated to sometime after aponi's challenge and more specifically right after sahalie's discussion with serach. Would give links/dates but I am on mobile so will have to edit in later

In the chaos of the event Sahalie, who had been trying so hard to think of everyone—Spieden, Mako, Marina, Serach, Alastor, her father, her biological siblings, heck she had even considered, for a moment, the woman's health—but as her paws moved closer and closer from the boundary she felt her heart snag on another name, like a knotted root, that she had somehow forgotten. Larkspur. He had not been there, at the challenge, and her eyes bulged at the idea that maybe, even in the hours that had passed, the man might still be unaware of the madness all around him. Her head swept about, as if just by thinking about him the grumpy old male might appear, but she was alone in the fading light. A whine slipped through her mouth: she was supposed to be meeting Spieden and the others, but while they would be anxious for her return Sahalie was not in any immediate danger. There was nothing keeping her in the Bend anymore, but she needed to find Larkspur. At least he, in all his years and bitter knowledge, would be some sort of comfort—Sahalie was the only one who could think the man a comfort.

She traced her steps back to the worn, warped tree that Larkspur had claimed for himself and felt her heart beat in her throat, choked by the idea that she might not see it ever again. Before even rounding the tree to see if he was there she called out his name, "@Larkspur"

With Snippet's disappearance, Lark was mostly alone again. As alone as he could be when surrounded by a pack, he guessed. Part of him wanted to go searching for the girl and either reel her back to him or steer her back home. Maybe she'd wisened up and done the latter without his assistance. The thought made him feel a small twinge of guilt, but he let it slide by. He hadn't been that awful to the girl. She'd find her way, eventually. Or end up dead. Whichever came first.

Plus, he had something else more pressing. It wasn't that he was blissfully aware of what had gone on in the Bend; he was willingly unaware. Something had caused a rift and Lark had managed to keep himself out of it. Not because he didn't care for the Bend (he did), but he felt a familiar fear creep up on him. For as long as he could put off, he didn't want to know what was about to disrupt his mostly-peaceful, mostly-happy life of hunting small game and living in a sad oak tree.

But then @Sahalie showed up. His gut sank, and for a moment he didn't respond. As futile as it was, he wished her away. When the girl didn't run off, he got up. "What?" There wasn't any reason to let on that he was a coward. He liked being the grumpy old wolf that mostly slept. That was easier. Larkspur stepped out with confidence, finding Sahalie nearing. He glared at her, "Out with it." Which was sort of funny, because he never really had to wait long for her to chat his ears off.

@Larkspur

"Oh good, you're here. I was worried, worried you be..." Somewhere else? Gone? The girl was pacing a little, her words spilling out hapazzardly. Sahalie wasn't sure, and didn't want to linger on the thought of having to search the miles of forest surrounding her pack—her former pack?—now that he wasn't here. And she was sure that when Larkspur had demanded she get on with it he hadn't wanted any flowery proclamations of relief. She huffed, her ears twitching anxiously as she started again. "I don't...know how much you know..."

Deep breath, "But we're leaving. A lot of us are. Not all together..." She had no idea where her father was going, and apparently he liked it that way. "Spieden is... bad off and I'm going to take care of her. Somewhere else, anywhere else. I don't know." It made her heart ache that it couldn't be here, in Oak Tree Bend, in the thick mists of her childhood, "I don't know where we're going." Her eyes began to water and she closed them, hoping that if she kept them tightly shut long enough she might go to sleep and wake up to find that this was all a dream.

"You know what happened, right?" Maybe she should have started there. Her chest heaved.

Sahalie assumed he knew, and at first he just let the girl talk. He had hoped to try and get something from her words, but instead found himself more in the dark. That sickly feeling in his stomach twisted up his insides, more questions popping up as the girl went on. Us? Who was included in this, and maybe more importantly: who was in charge.

He was about to snap at the girl to get her back on track (her rambling wasn't getting him anywhere), but he realized @Sahalie was on the verge of tears. He pulled his head out of his own worries and got a better look at her. Typically Sahalie was perky, or even when she had something she needed advice with, didn't seem so distraught.

He let her keep her eyes closed for only a moment before stepping forward and giving her a good, firm nudge. "If you're going to cry, do it now and get it over with. And stop pacing. And relax." Lark almost told,her it was going to be okay, but somehow the words didn't feel right. Maybe he'd save them for after he figured out what was going on. He sat next to her then, offering as much comfort as could be expected from the white wolf.

"And when you're good and ready, tell me what happened, because I don't know shit."

derp derp how do you do @Larkspur

Her head whipped in his direction and the girl stopped in her tracks, her chin tipped up bravely—braver than she felt, anyway— "I'm not going to cry." But she knew that this was Larkspur trying to be nice—Larkspur of all the wolves, in his own gruff way. Taking a shaky breath the girl sat down beside him in a bit of a heap, trying not to lean on him so much, but her dark fur still wove itself into the grey ticking of his shoulders. Briefly, she considered draping her head over the dark black mark but figured she would not be allowed that much comfort. Instead, her buttercup eyes stared down at her paws and she tried to find a good place to start, or a better place to start that was not going to cause more of a scene than she already had.

"I guess for awhile now Serach has been talking to Aponi about, like, encouraging her to challenge Spieden," though she figured it would be a good idea to leave out all the hard feelings Serach had, about Spieden's lies, "Because... they, they thought she didn't want it. Or something. So... Idunno, Aponi challenged her. And Spieden just sort of...lost it." Literally. "Lost her mind, lost the challenge. She bolted."

"She won't come back Larkspur. She's afraid for her life, even if no one's gunna hurt her. And...and I have to go take care of her. I can't stay here knowing she's taken Mako and Marina into the wilderness in the middle of winter. And I'm just," she sighed, "It's all a mess." Her head hung even closer to the dirt. She knew that she was not entirely responsible, but she felt defeated anyway.

Lark snorted when the girl bravely held back her tears and was thankful when she stopped all of her walking around. Only moments later, @Sahalie began to explain what he had been avoiding. He was quiet, not thinking Serach as the sort of man to plot behind someone's back. Maybe he'd thought too highly of the man. Not to say that Larkspur was any better, because he was positive the exact opposite was true. And you could never tell what someone's real intentions were; not everyone was as easy to read as his brown-furred companion was.


The idea of leaving a pack that had rejected you (rejected may not have been the right term, but it was probably what Spieden felt) wasn't really that farfetched to him. His own pack hadn't loved him, at least not in the end. He hadn't been oblivious to it, but ignoring it was much easier.

When she had finished, Larkspur just huffed as if it was no big deal. The whole mess, or as Sahalie spoke of it, seemed to weigh on the girl. She had come running to him teary-eyed and with her head hanging, but mostly for nothing. To her it could have meant the world, but her problems seemed so small and pointless in his eyes.

"You're wasting your energy being upset," he didn't say it accusingly, but just as a simple fact. "If you have to go, then it's an opportunity. You would have to say goodbye to someone, or someplace, eventually." Lark looked down at the defeated girl and sort of wished his problems were so easy to fix. "If you're going to be a leader, then you go with the wolves you care about. Your pack'll be stronger that way," Spieden was her mom (he thought? He couldn't recall the whole story) and had clearly meant a lot to her. It made sense that Sahalie would run off to protect her if she needed to. He could also almost be certain her boyfriend would be tagging along as well. Then the two pups, and whoever else felt attached to either Sahalie, or Spieden, or Kino.

"I need a change of scenery anyways," he dismissively said. Larkspur hadn't even considered not leaving with Sahalie, not even for a brief second. He had feared change, and it was clear that Oak Tree Bend was quickly splitting up. Even the idea of staying with Sahalie made him feel a little more grounded and secure. Not to say he didn't feel anxious, because already that heart-quenching feeling crept in him. He'd try to remain calm and aloof. When he was more alone, he could do his own teary-eyed pacing.

He was going to miss his tree.

Her eyes hung on to the drooping boughs of Larkspur's tree as she tried to get a grip on herself. It was a waste of time and energy being upset—maybe less a waste if she could channel her feelings into changing the situation, but she had tried and failed already. Serach would not budge, Spieden would not budge. They were two adults and they wanted things their way. But Sahalie cared about them all and it was so painful to feel them all hurting, to think of this as an opportunity. Her dad certainly saw it that way. Leaving Oak Tree Bend had never occurred to her, she assumed that she would lead it somehow, some day. Oak Tree Bend was the only home she had ever known, and she could not discard it as easily as the rest of them could. A sigh wracked her small body.

As casually as ever, Larkspur pledged his allegiance to her. Her head turned towards him now, staring up at him through her grateful, watery eyes. The white man was her trusted advisor, a counterpoint to Alastor's gentle idealism, and she would have been so lost without him beside her. "I know," she sighed again, her eyes turning down to her paws, "I just didn't want it to be this way." But she was powerless.

"I wanna be strong but I feel like this place is my weakness," she had handled having no mother, her father leaving, her brother disappearing, Drestig, everyone everyone always leaving, but never with grace. Was home supposed to feel like this? The bare branches rattled around her, and she urged herself to soak in the last of it, the good things, before it was all gone. "You said you were a leader before, what happened to you?" Was Spieden just an echo of his past life?

He wanted to tell her that things didn't just get to be her way. The world didn't work like that, and more often than not, it didn't go the way you wanted it to. Somehow it felt like telling her that would just be kicking her when she was down, so kept his mouth shut. "You're a lot stronger than you're giving yourself credit for." But Sahalie was a baby, and the world she'd known all of her life was changing in the way it didn't want to. He sort of knew how she felt, but somehow thought the girl was stronger than him to deal with the change. Sure, she'd come to him all teary-eyed, but he was certain in a few days she'd be back to her talkative, peppy self.


Her question caught him so off guard that Larkspur pulled away from her. Suddenly he wasn't the man she had come to know, but instead that terrified loner that she'd met months before. His eyes were wide with fear and guilt and rage, lips pulled all the way back to show the girl all of his teeth. Then he was on her, shoving her to the ground and pressing all of his weight on her.

Then he seemed to realize what exactly he was doing and instantly got off of her. "I- I'm sorry," his voice was shaking, more guilt wrapped around his heart. Larkspur turned away from her. He said it again and sat down to resist the growing urge to run away. "I can't tell you," or rather, he wouldn't.

He felt like an idiot for lashing out at Sahalie like he had. "I can't be forgiven for what I did and telling you won't solve any of your problems," he tried to find some confidence in his voice, but it felt fake. He wasn't sitting up straight, and instead tried to take up as little space as he could.

She would have responded to tell Larkspur that he was going soft, but when she turned to look at him she saw that old face again. He was just like the day they day they had met: full of fury, distrust, and running solely on survival instinct. There wasn't enough time to react, and how could she have predicted the white man to lash out like this? "Mind your own business" was what she expected to hear from his choked, raspy throat through his snarling, dirty teeth but instead he was coming at her and she was on the ground. All the air in her lungs was pushed out by the force of hitting the frozen ground.

If she couldn't breath with his paw on her chest but she wouldn't have dared to anyway. She was frozen. She was shocked, and ashamed to discover she was more than a little afraid. Afraid of her friend. She had known Larkspur was dangerous, wild from the moment they had met but somewhere along the line she had assumed she tamed him.

But he was still a wild animal.

As quickly as it manifested the beast in his eyes disappeared. Sahalie was not sure what vanquished it. She coughed once, rolling slowly to her side but not rolling away from him. Her heart gave several lurching thumps against her sore chest as she wondered why, why couldn't he tell her? It was something very bad. How ironic it was that Larkspur's reaction nearly mirrored Spieden's own: something traumatic, something concealed, something unleashed. "Well, I can't forgive you," she said quietly, "Cause it has nothing to do with me. But you can do better now. Things will be..." Would they be better for him? Sahalie had no idea where they were going and no idea what would happen. She was no longer the daughter of a leader—hadn't been for awhile, really—or the darling child of Oak Tree Bend and she had no means of protecting him.

Her. Protect a fully grown man.

"C'mon," she hoisted herself to her feet. "I told Spieden I'd meet her at Vanishing Pines. Less we make her wait the better." Spieden was probably beside herself already with anxiety.

Larkspur firmly believed that he could not do better.


He had successfully destroyed the world around him, and even now he wasn't attempting to do any better. He had consigned himself to who he was, which was easier. Sahalie believed differently, but even so she seemed uncertain. He looked at her and felt foolish for swearing his loyalty to a child. Despite that, Larkspur believed in her. He believed Sahalie would do and be better than he ever could. He was a lost cause, but through her he had hope.

She had trailed off, so Lark finished her sentence for her. "Things will be better." Even if he wasn't so sure himself, he at least as good at pretending to be.

Then Sahalie revealed their next destination, and with that they were abandoning Oak Tree Bend. It felt sort of weird, how easy it was to just up and leave. Sort of like when they'd left to venture up north, except this time they weren't going to come back. At least not with welcome arms, anyways. Lark got up and knowing where he was going, took the lead. For a moment, he stopped beside his tree to look at it, but then continued on.

It wasn't his tree anymore, now was it?