Quaking Vale The Only Boy Awake

 @Sahalie

If I ever leave I could learn to miss you

Alastor had been mulling over his thoughts for a few days now, trying to decide what it was that he wanted to say to Hal or if he wanted to say anything at all. He knew he needed to, but the fear of her anger or disappointment was like a heavyweight strapped to his legs. Luckily those weights kept him from running, but they also made it hard to move forward. They had a pack now to think about, though, and if there was anything that required them to try and immediately rectify any differences it was that simple fact. No longer was Alastor a lone wolf or a part of his self-made one man band. He was the male leader of a pack and thus he needed to grow some balls and do something instead of sitting biting his nails.

The silver man caught her scent and followed it, catching sight of her brown rump as he went. He offered a woof in greeting, moving to stand in front of her. His topaz gave lowered to the ground and he cleared his throat, tail hanging at his ankles. “Ah, can we talk?” he asked with a small smile.

With sentimental boy as my nom de plume

The girl was, for no reason in particular, sitting against one of the slender shaking aspens as the twilight had settled around her and eventually faded into early evening. Sometimes it was just fun to watch this forest that her friends had claimed for themselves, because it was a novelty and a wonder that she couldn't shake. She wondered if her father, Ice, Corinna, and Fenru had felt like this still weeks after moving into Oak Tree Bend, their own refuge from the painful memories of Rissa and Swift River. A place to start again. Sahalie had never been looking for a place to start again: she didn't have anything to run from. The pathway to her dream had simply ended in Oak Tree Bend, and following it had required her to go elsewhere and that meant starting all over again regardless. To the others, though, like Alastor and possibly Niles, and maybe everyone else that would come after, this would be what they were after: a new beginning. The forest would always be new and wondrous to someone. She hoped.


He appeared as though he could hear Sahalie calling her name in her thoughts. "Mmm?" her response was a little dreamy as she withdrew from her musing. "Yeah, of course." If she were in Alastor's paws she would have just started talking. Only when a topic was sensitive did either of them ask for permission to open a conversation. She could only guess at what this was about: everything; her way of leading; his way of leading; what they were doing; where this was heading. 

Instead she said opened with the scripted response, "What about?" There was no point in guessing where he would start off, or ambushing him with her own thoughts. Alastor could have the first move, he had come to her after all.

There is a moose carcass that has been scavenged by coyotes nearby. +15 Health

If I ever leave I could learn to miss you

When he approached she seemed to be in some sort of a daydream. He wondered what she had been thinking about but of course he would never know. Normally he might have joked with her about it, said something like “If you keep going like that you’re going to run into a tree” but at the moment he had no muse for sarcasm. This was serious, at least to him anyways. He needed to fix anything he’d done and it seemed Hal was willing to listen.

She didn’t ask him questions or something like she normally would. Perhaps she could sense the atmosphere. Then again, he supposed it wasn’t often that he was the one asking questions first. And since that was the case he should just cut to the chase. “Have I been being a jerk lately?” He asked point blank. His brows knit into a guilty expression, an openness with his emotions that he seemed to be only able to show with the dark girl. The silver man knew well that he could be a jackass but it was never an intentional thing. Well...almost never but definitely never to her.

With sentimental boy as my nom de plume

(This post was last modified: Apr 27, 2017, 12:27 AM by Kino.)

e___e i will be better about replying now I PROMISE

Her eyebrows rose. Alastor wasted no time in getting to the heart of things. "Jerk?" she stammered. This was a particularly harsh word to a girl that never used them. Sahalie only swore very rarely, and while she had been known to insinuate unkind things about the woman in particular she had never called her bad words or anything. "I mean..." She had to stop and consider it. Jerk? Maybe. But that word meant so much and so little. "No. Not really." It didn't exactly capture how she felt in some aspects, and then in others it went too far. Her ears twisted when she realized how awful this waffling must sound to him.

"I mean. I'm just gunna be honest. Have you done some things that annoyed me lately? Yeah sure but like... Idunno that doesn't make you a jerk." The word still sounded foreign in her mouth. She followed it up with some nervous laughter, "I'm always annoyed at something, aren't I? I guess I just have high standards." 

"When you don't take my opinion into consideration it hurts and it devalues my position in the pack. But that's just a behavior it's not you. Like.... yeah I'm still kind of upset about it but I guess I was being silly if I thought that all of our disagreements were just going to magically vanish when we started a pack. Or that they wouldn't matter to anyone besides us. But I guess it does matter, because then everyone else is gunna look at us and say 'Jeez, these kids are too dumb and too young to be doing this,' and they'll leave. And I know we're dumb but we're not too dumb." The only form of punctuation was her rapid blinking at the end, realizing she had said quite enough at this point to get the ball rolling. Her lips tightened as if that would help her put a lid on it.

If I ever leave I could learn to miss you

He watched the emotions display across her beautiful face and his auds flickered down at what he saw. Indecision, but also a bit of agreement. Just what he’d been afraid of. He bit back a curse. She fiddled around a bit nervously, tiptoeing over her word choice and he wondered why she was doing that now. Normally she was never so hesitant with branding him with what she thought, so why had that changed? Had he done something to make her think he was volatile? Was it because they were alphas now? Why did everything feel so...different? “You don’t have high standards. More just, normal standards. You just want the best out of others,” he said, attempting to reassure her that he wasn’t mad. No, he was far from mad. More at a loss.

Hal leapt into a mantra and he listened, his heart giving a squeeze every time she mentioned that his decisions had hurt her. He’d been so dumb to think that things would change even in a place that was created to be their home. Had his hopes been too high? Had his confidence grown too much? Obviously if it seemed that he was only trampling those in his path, including the one he cared for most. He paused, searching for the right words to say. His mouth opened a few times as he thought, his mind a whirlwind. “I’m sorry,” there, that was a good starting point. “I know this place means a lot to you, I don’t want to ruin that. I want this place to be a home too because…” because it’s been so long since I’ve had a home he thought, but couldn’t find himself with the ability to force the words out. “But you’ve been phenomenal, you know that? When @Kuwindwa joined you were the one to convince her. I could see it in her eyes that you were the one to give her hope. Hal, you were born for this. I’m just justifying myself but I’m just...not. I’m going to stutter all over myself and look like a big jerky idiot and I’ll apologize every time but I’m learning. Can you...can you be patient with me while I do that?” he asked, exhaling a big breath at the end.

With sentimental boy as my nom de plume

Normal wolves weren't always annoyed with Al. Maybe Larkspur was, but that was a different sort of annoyed. But she smiled weakly at his insistence, it took the edge off of her frustration and guilty because truly she did want the best out of others. Just, normally that was what she saw, what she saw that others couldn't see. But with Alastor she was always looking for it, flipping over the stones in his mind and declaring "not good enough" when she found a worm poking out of the soil. Really, if anyone she was the jerk in the most general sense. "I'm too hard on you," she pouted at the ground. Out of the corner of her eye she watched his lower jaw flap open and close, waiting for him to speak.

Her head jumped up when the silence left him. Even if there were worms she still always held him close when they were kids. They came back together stronger every time they fought. He was her partner, and he reaffirmed it with every word with slowly mounting confidence that made her heart ache to see the man he had become. "Alastor it doesn't matter to me if you were born for this. You're the one I want next to me. If I haven't let you know that enough it's my fault. I have just as much to learn about it as all you do. Because born to it or not, none of it matters if we don't work together and we don't depend on each other. I can be the hope and you can be the rock. But we have to talk about things before we make decisions because that's what's gunna make a difference in the end."

"I know we're going to make mistakes. And I'll try not... to air too much of our shedding fur in the wind." Because now she was starting to suspect that he might have figured this all out from Castel. Or someone. Maybe on his own. "I want us to work."

If I ever leave I could learn to miss you

“I’m too hard on you,” she pouted and a small smile passed over his lips. Yes, she was hard on him and even if it was frustrating sometimes at the end of the day he had to be thankful for it. He had to be thankful to her for having hope in him, for thinking that he could be better. She was what made him better, her incessant pushing him. He shuddered to think of what he might have become without her presence, the memory of just how dark his heart had been before and the first few months into their relationship. He’d had no one, and now he had someone.

She began to speak and he listened with rapt attention, every word causing his body to warm. She didn’t care that he wasn’t perfect, that he was a hurricane that blew over everything in his path. No, she’d always walked through the storm with her sunshine eyes lighting the path like a beacon. And when he’d come down she was there waiting to hold him tight with her reassurances and further away than he’d like affections. His lips turned up into a warmer smirk, his tail waving behind his large silver frame. “I can’t imagine anyone else to make a mess with. As long as we clean up our messes together I think everything will be alright,” he said, affirming his agreement that they do things together from now on.

With sentimental boy as my nom de plume