Sex: MaleWritten sometime after Aesire's death/meeting with Aponi. Read only. Will archive eventually.
He had to get away from the pack. A tightness that had persisted in his chest for years now, having taken over sometime after his birthday, now threatened to tear his heart from the strain and he could hardly breath. He knew what it was, and he had known this was coming. His paws had been so long ago set on this path by his ancestors, the other Aquilas who had come before him, who had been kept from him and stolen from him by circumstance. But he knew, oh he still knew.
He took air in without it ever reaching his lungs. As he stumbled through the hapless pile of rocks he kept his body pressed against the cliff-side for support, for something more solid than his own crumbling principles. For the first time in the longest time he felt his body yearning for physical contact, for reassurance from someone who was unyielding. But he could never admit this, just as he could not admit that he wanted to simply press harder until he became part of the mountain. He did not want to see the qualities that he was seeing. He wanted the mountains to remain the inert collection of rocks that they had been in his childhood. He just wanted their lifelessness, he convinced himself. He could have wanted to be a tree or a blade of grass or just anything as long as it was not alive.
He looked over the edge of the cliff. Wind blasted his face.
- - -
There was no way to explain what force had brought his paws to the shaman. This had been some time before arriving in White Goat, before meeting Gilligan. Datura was not a religious man, but he was deeply entrenched in a world of superstitions. He did not like things he could not explain, but he could not deny the zombies he had seen in his childhood. He liked to contain his superstitions to these zombies, these few moments when he was young. He did not like the things he heard about this shaman. But what he felt in his soul was troubling, there were things he could not explain about himself. The golden man did not think it was right for parts of his own nature to be as unknowable as the things that other people claimed about the natural world. And yet there were. There were hours, days, sometimes weeks that were darker, murkier. He could not explain the things he saw in his memories, but he could not shake the reality of them. He saw corpses of animals left to rot, he saw corpses of wolves left to rot. He saw the face of his sister. She had been left to rot too.
Belladonna.
He had told no one of her, not even Taima. But the haunting image of her dark mask had burned into his retina so that when he slept she was always there. Just a broken body by a lake that whispered things he could not here. He had to go, he had to talk to this shaman.
"I do things that I should not," he mumbled at the paws of the priest, "I know what is right in my heart, I live by a code. But my body does not. My body betrays me." Silently he begged the man to tell him he was being childish, he begged him to tell him that his code was right and true, that he was the good man he had always thought himself to be. Datura was good. His ideals would lead to a better world, one without pain or suffering. He only needed to bend others to it. If they could only see—
He had assumed the way the wolves around these parts had spoken about the wolf that he would have been old, but this wolf was not. Somehow he had earned and commanded the respect of a lifetime. Datura thought that the man's clear eyes looked old, though. Grey was the color of age. Vaguely disconcerted, Datura wondered if this man had perhaps stolen the eyes from some older wise man. Did they just pass them down like this? The shiver, like a fork of lightning, ran all the way through his spine and forked through his heart.
For someone so concerned with the metaphysical, the mystic spent an awful lot of time with his ear to Datura's chest. He said he was listening to his heartbeat, but Datura was not so sure. He tried not to squirm. The shaman snapped at the golden boy several times, not liking how fast the discomfort had made his heartbeat.
"You are sick," the young wolf whispered, his ear still resting lightly against the honeyed fur of Datura's chest. Datura pulled away, eyeing the man distrustfully. But he felt his heartbeat in ascent. You are sick, you are sick, you are sick. He was afraid, but could not shake the relief that flooded through his veins. The diagnosis felt like vindication.
"Your ancestors, what do you know of them?"
Datura shrugged and shook his head sadly. He explained what little he knew of the Aquilas— which was, so say, nothing at all. But this wolf thought he knew. He thought he knew very well.
"Your ancestors were sick in the same way as you. And it will only get worse. There is a poison in your lineage. Do you understand?" Datura nodded but he did not understand. And he and the shaman talked at length about this sickness, about his ancestors. He had never felt so free in his life. They laughed and spoke of other things: the salmon returning to the river, the lack of beauty in Datura's world, the things that the golden boy could never forgive himself for. Datura spoke of his first mother, his adopted mother that he had lost. How unloved he had been. And the young-old wolf had shared some secrets about himself in turn.
And when the sun had risen, Datura tore himself from the side of the silver eyed mystic.
- - -
Datura knew now that he should not have returned to the lands of his birth. He should have stayed with the shaman and found a cure for the curse of his family. But his own sick heart had torn him away, had taken him selfishly back to a place by appealing to the ambitions that he and his forefathers had obsessed over. He would take his homeland back, he would save his homeland. He was good.
But he was not good.
He choked on his own sobs. His world was falling apart. He did not want to be a part of this life, the life Aponi was settings their paws on, but his heart was growing darker. There were things he could not turn away from.