Wait, What?
The two just stood in silence for a while, staring. But when Ricochet moved forward Mortar seemed to snap out of his trance and the two of them moved closer to each other, two pairs of mismatched eyes still wide with the shock and relief of finally finding each other. Ricochet listened to every word her brother had to say, about how he'd hid and run like a coward when he'd had the chance. But Ricochet didn't think of it as cowardice. She thought of it as self-preservation. And she, being the selfish brute she was, would have done the same. And so, she held no ill feelings toward her brother. She was just so surprised and so happy to see that he hadn't died like everyone had thought.
She wanted to ask more questions, how he had made it to this place and who had taken him in? They'd been helpless pups when everything had happened. When they had been separated. There was no way Mortar could have hunted for himself or defended a kill. Someone had to have taken care of him. But before the beastly woman could ask anything else, Mortar put forth questions of his own. She licked her lips and nodded a bit to show him she would answer, and then tried to form words into a coherent response. She was still so... so shocked about all of this.
"Don't be sorry," she said first of all. He didn't need to feel guilty about what had happened. Maybe if all of his siblings had perished like he believed they had, then a little guilt would make sense. After all, his fleeing would have made him the only survivor. But that wasn't the case. They were all alive. And he needed to know, so he wouldn't beat himself up over it anymore. "We survived," she said, giving her brother a small reassuring smile. "All of us did. You disappeared, and then not long after rescue came for us. Members from our pack came and dealt with the kidnappers, and they brought us home." Ricochet sighed as she tried to gather her thoughts again. She needed to catch him up on everything else that had happened.
"I don't... I don't know..." There was so much to say. And yet so little had happened after the incident, in her opinion. "Things were pretty shitty after that, if I'm being honest. For a little while the pack watched us all like hawks, pitying us and always asking if we were okay. But they must not have cared enough to notice... what was happening to Caliber," she said in a slightly quieter voice, meeting the mismatched eyes of her long lost brother.
"He kind of lost it, after mom and dad died. He practically stopped talking to us completely. It took a lot of effort to get anything out of him, and I'll admit I was the first to give up. Arsenal tried to help him as much as he could, but," she shrugged a little, and then sighed. Time to tell him the most exciting piece of family drama. "Then one day, Caliber really snapped. He and another pack member got into it, and he ended up killing the guy. Everyone was horrified; I wasn't, it was the most interesting thing to happen to us since the siege and that idiot had it coming anyway. But they exiled Caliber and he took off, Arsenal following close behind to try and find him and help him. That's how they ended up here, and how I ended up here too. I followed, mostly to find something new. I don't know about the others. But Caliber, Arsenal, and I... we're all here." |