Silent Moon Plateau When I close my eyes

Set late evening 9/30

Night was falling and she really should be getting back, but Di couldn't bring herself to climb the mountain again. There was no sign of @Galen and the yearling absolutely refused to accept that he might be gone. Her only remaining littermate hadn't left her. He just wouldn't. They'd promised. It wasn't fair.

Di stopped on the plateau, glancing between the mountain rising above her, and the expanse of the plateau itself. She turned away from home and padded out toward the drop off, looking out over the Lore stretching before her, shadows growing ever longer as the sun sank below the distant horizon. She dropped with a huff, resting her chin on her paws and fighting back tears.

Magg was searching too, hurting too. She'd really thought that maybe he'd stay, that life wouldn't take him away too. Then it did and now she felt... empty, kind of? Like there was a chasm, but like how air filled the space around them, it wasn't really as bottomless as it felt. There was anger down there, and despair, and longing.

Maybe they'd had the right idea in leaving, all of her friends. Well, not all, right? She stopped in her tracks, Diantha's scent meeting her nostrils. It was easy to guess what the young Vuesain might be up to out here. With a soft frown on her features, Magg tracked after her trail.

She was resting at the edge of some kind of cliff, with sadness practically radiating off her fur. The scarred youth hesitated a moment, then continued forward.

"Di... ?"

She hadn't heard the pawsteps coming up behind her, despite how quiet the night was. She startled, head snapping around at the sound of her friend's voice, and relief washed through her. Di hadn't been looking for company out here, but if anyone was going to find her... she was glad it was Magg. "Hey," she said quietly, turning her eyes back toward the valley and once again resting her had on her legs. "What're you doing out so late?" It wasn't accusatory; surely the answer was 'the same thing as you', but it was a conversation starter that Magg could accept or decline.

Magg and Galen had been close - sometimes Di thought they were closer than she'd ever been with her brother. It made her jealous, sometimes, because Magg still had her family. They were all still home; except Mona, but at least the little jerk had said bye before taking off, and none of them really liked her much anyway.

Magg did not leap to answer the query, her paws bringing her closer step by step first. She settled down next to Diantha, belly against the cold ledge and brown eyes lifting to the horizon far in the distance. There were several reasons why she didn't want to say aloud the simple truth.

"Just, lookin'," she settled on, voice quiet and small. Did Di even really want to talk? She didn't seem offended by Magg's presence, but... the girl couldn't help but worry about doing the wrong thing. For a moment, she thought about Adora instead, a brief and bittersweet respite.

"... they ask you want you wanna be as a grownup too?"

Random maybe, but innocuous, right?

Magg settled beside her and they sat in quiet for a moment before the other yearling answered her question. It certainly was a good view, which was part of why Di had settled here anyway. She didn't mind that Magg was here; the warmth of her next to her on the cold stone was actually a comfort. Magg asked a question of her own and Di glanced at her before shaking her head. "They asked you?" She hadn't heard much from her leaders over the last months, especially since their field trip to the old Cove.

Di was feeling very alone, even surrounded by packmates.

Magg might not have thought so much of it herself, were it not for those three words Diantha chose to sacrifice breath for. It told her this was significant to the sole-remaining Vuesain daughter, and she naturally made to mirror it. Her brows crumpled together with confusion, head tilting.

"Well... yeah..." a brief pause for thought, and then her voice took on a lilt of indignance.

"They didn't ask you?"

For all she knew, @Matos hadn't even gotten that talk yet either. The point was (subconsciously, it was all reactive, it wasn't like Magg planned these things, it was just... how she was...) to convince Di that whatever the others had or had not done, they were still completely on the same side. ... weren't they?

Anyways, it wasn't right. Her parents knew that Di and Galen's were gone, why wouldn't they take those steps with the Vuesain siblings as well?

(This post was last modified: Mar 02, 2024, 03:39 AM by Magg.)

Di watched as Magg grew confused, and then upset. Di glanced away again, looking out over the valley. She mulled this over for a moment. "...Maybe they just haven't got around to me yet," she said quietly, almost like she was trying to convince herself of that fact. Had @Aquene and Nash asked Matos? Asked Galen? Was she the only one left out? She had to fight a rising tide of emotion, the welling tears in her eyes.

She blinked rapidly, turning her face from Magg in the hopes she wouldn't see the defeat in her gaze. She missed her parents. She missed her siblings. She wondered where her mom could have gone, and why she took the other girls but not her. What was so wrong with her, that they would all abandon her here?

Diantha gave the benefit of the doubt aloud, but didn't sound so confident in it herself. Then she made a kind of look before turning away that Magg felt down into her bones, and she recognized that her friend wanted to cry. She felt a rare kind of empathy then, and while it had been her chameleon instincts that got her there, she began to really see pieces of what the other young girl was dealing with. Her own brown eyes were expressive of this as she leaned gently into Di in a way she hoped would be comforting.

"Well, I'd like to know," she said, and would give her friend a small, reassuring smile if her gaze could be caught, "what would you like to be?"

She would need to have a talk with her parents later, though. Maybe by the time the conversation happened she'd lose a bit of her fire and no longer have the courage to be accusatory with them, but they definitely needed to know that Diantha was having a hard time and they needed to give her more support, needed to be her parents too now that her real ones were gone. @Galen too, if he ever came back...

(@Aquene for mention)

(This post was last modified: Mar 02, 2024, 03:59 AM by Magg.)