Vigils Keep How Can I Forget

For @Aytigin . Set directly after this thread.

 

She shook her head. "No, I'm not. Maybe we can find a bite later." She shook out her coat, no worse for wear. This had been her first rank challenge, and it ended as she had expected. Neha wasn't sure whether to be glad to no longer have to bear the burden of leadership, or disappointed. She was probably feeling a little bit of both. She knew this was bound not to last, but once in her life when she was young, she had wanted something like this.

There were no hard feelings, but as she moved aside to drink from the lake, one could tell that her mind was drifting. A calm had settled over her, a kind of thoughtfulness. Quite the far cry from the emotional train wreck she had been moments earlier. "I should apologize...for acting so recklessly. For...causing more harm than good. That was never my intention." She said nothing in regards to her stormy emotions prior. Not yet. In her mind, she was entitled to how she felt, and with good reason. She sat down at the waters edge, calm but attentive. "There's bad blood between you and Driftwood, isn't there? I could see it, that day they trespassed..." She turned her head towards him, brows pinched curiously. "Why?" She asked in low, quiet voice.

Ayti didn’t blame her for not being hungry. Their previous fight had been chaotic, and he didn’t think he really wanted to eat either. He felt more worn out - less triumphant than he imagined he would. Perhaps it was because of the fact that he hadn’t gotten to fight Nineva for co-lead, and he felt as powerless as he had been before he challenged.

But it was okay. Things were just shitty now, and it would be better in the future, when he could do things on more of an official level.

”I’m sorry for challenging you in the first place,” he admitted. ”Honestly, you reminded me of someone that I used to know, and it kind of clouded my judgment for a minute there.” Not that that changed the outcome of the situation. He was still the new alpha of Vigil’s Keep - an alpha that none of the wolves would end up following. It kind of sucked.

And there was another wolf prying into his personal life and intentions. He supposed it didn’t really matter now. ”I was the second in command of Driftwood - Hearthwood before we moved - for a long time. But I made a mistake last spring. I don’t even know who with - some lone female, maybe? I was high and I didn’t really know what was happening. You know Dari? I think he might have been the result of that union. But who knows - my dad was around at the time.” The whole thing was kinda screwed up. ”I guess Lach smelled it on me and kicked me out with no questions asked.”

An ear flicked towards him, while her brown eyes remained fixated ahead. "Don't worry about it. Not like I really wanted the job to begin with." Silent, she listened towards his short version of his history in Driftwood. Of how in the past breeding season, he had gotten high and romanced some female. She nodded at the mention of Dari's name. Softly, she swallowed a lump in her throat. It all sounded so similar. So he too, had been careless like she once had. She wondered if he regretted his actions. "That's...pretty cold. Unreasonable." She stated, unsure of what else to say just yet.

Neha lapsed into silence again. Briefly she dipped her head down and heaved a long, soft sigh. When she looked back up, it was out towards the vast expanse of the lake. Her eyes were distant, even as she spoke. "You know...I wasn't always this way." No semblance of emotion crept to her features. She wasn't even sure if she was more so talking to herself than him now. "Far from it, in fact." She took a small step forward, just enough to immerse her front paws in the water, and resumed her seated position. "I was born and raised in the Lore. By a lake, like this one. Sometimes this place reminds me of home..."

Neha can often be found close to Aleister's side and therefore may appear in any of his threads.

Ayti nodded his head. He didn't really want it either... not in the way most ambitious wolves wanted leadership. He simply wanted freedom to choose. Freedom to have a family. Freedom to not. Freedom to run his life the way he wanted, without needing to worry about being removed from the pack should he set one hair out of line - as had happened in Driftwood. He relaxed a bit at her calm acceptance of his screw up from in the Surge - that she actually agreed that Lachesis had been cold and unreasonable. "I thought he was my friend," he admitted quietly, his ears pressing back with residual hurt. "And now he talks to me like I'm the most disgusting creature in the world." Hell, he had been the first wolf since Ayti's mother that he had told he loved.

It was fucking ridiculous.

He sighed heftily and stretched, settling to lay beside the water. "I wasn't always like this, either," he responded, hazel eyes flicking over toward her. So they were really going to do this little heart-to-heart. Maybe... maybe it would be better for both of them to get it all out in the open. It'd be nice to have someone other than @Yuka who trusted him within the pack. "The lake is beautiful, even though we're too close to the Surge. I didn't want to leave it." He looked across the expanse of water. "There's more than one lake in the Lore, then?"