Just as long as you don't leave me. She sighed as the thought rippled through her distilled body. She was once just a swift river, coursing with the liveliness of sharp white water. Somehow in this one year of life she felt the banks of childhood recede with the floods, her family sprawling out distant like grains of blackened silt. There was nothing she could say to make him see that. Nothing she could tell him would be convincing enough to truly retain. He couldn't see himself as a grain of fertile land, hell he was the whole earth to himself. She knew Darrah now as a selfish creature, one that always prided himself on how good he was or how veridical he was for ratting her out when she was really the one seeking truth here. Zera could imagine being lost like this forever. Someplace long gone, but familiar in that it was dark and smelled like family. But family was a word for redefinition, something intangible and always bitter on the back of your tongue when you said it. Not because you didn't know what it meant, but because if you said what it meant, it'd be that final breath to you.
She listened to him talk in one ear, and overheard her own ideas in the other. She already knew how he felt, just by the muted tone in his eyes at the gathering. The way he refused to speak with anything familiar, how even his voice was censored and calloused by that little shard of guilt in his heart. Yeah, that must be what he felt. She quieted herself. Brought her eyes back alive upon him like twin suns. Blinding in the way she held him on him. But he blinded her at 'I think she was careless in her actions and that in itself brought disaster.'
How could he say that? Zera drew her head in, hit wholly by the anxious force that compelled his words. It was funny how the world could be so tired and suddenly so awake at the utterance of a few small words. They charged her as he rambled on, vexing her somewhere deep where a flame burned. Smoke built in her body, rising up through the channels of her throat, threatening to spill past a guilded tongue until she heard the finality of his stupidity, the brink of her tolerance: 'that's something she will never be able to make up for.'
"Darrah, what are you talking about," she lashed, the heat swelling in plumes of angry air. "You, you think she did this on purpose? Because she asked for it?" Her tail lashed as she stood onto all fours, aiming to grow over him in defense of her mother. "I don't care what your logic is, but she did not ask to be kidnapped," she hissed from the back of her whispered throat. His words still settled in her flesh, like the heaviest of boulders, smothering everything she was worth. Was he trying to say something about how she'd been wrapped in the vacancy of detachment, scouring every nuance of the woods for some unknown sign of a woman who shadowed her earliest days for what he believed to be nothing? What kind of lie was he living in? She was beginning to feel bad for him, sitting there in the dark so alone, so mistaken. Her hard eyes tried to soften. She backed down. She of all wolves should know how fragile this kind of person is.
She looked into her brother's eyes as though she could find the written word there. She could only imagine what it felt like to be him, to be something not as great as what everyone else expected. Then it began. The empathy. Zera lowered her pose, felt the wave of wildness wash over, rushing back into the woods. "Darrah, I don't know what you mean by that. It's late, and all I can say is the least you can do is recreate those moments. Yeah, there were three months of our pathetic lives where she was gone. But at least she's here, safe. Alive. Darrah, what would you be saying if she was dead?" And her heart was numb by the last question, it came like a slow, dull punch to herself. She couldn't even think of what she'd do. And that was her reason for forgiving Nayeli.
zera
Sex: Female
