Kindred spirits

Kaneonuskatew · 05-12-2021, 11:40 PM

Kane couldn't keep the wide smile off his face when Tamsyn proudly boasted of her family of seven, five blood and two by choice. So many children for a family! He had been wondering where her mate was to help her in all this, until she referred to the wolf as her late mate. Kane's smile faltered, an empathy evident in his eyes. "I'm so sorry," he spoke with a solemn reverence for the departed. He didn't know how recent or sore the wound on her heart would still be, and was careful not to offer too many sympathies. He wasn't overly fond of them himself, and she didn't seem like the type to care for them either. "I was right though: you were made to be a mother. Seven little fur balls?" He let out a whistle and chuckled. "You had your paws full, huh?" While his words were lighthearted, there was an underlying respect for the wolf lying across from him. It took a special kind of soul to be a parent, an even more special one to be a good parent, but to do that for seven pups? Tamsyn might as well have been a goddess of virtue and patience.

It didn't go unnoticed by the perceptive wolf how Tamsyn was looking at him, paying attention to him, hanging off every word he said as he told her about how he viewed scars. He could see the intrigue in her mint-green gaze, see the gears turning in her head. Something he had said had gotten her mind working, though he couldn't immediately tell why. It was only once he'd finished and she held his gaze for a long moment before turning away shyly to look down at her scarred foreleg did he begin to put the pieces together. Nobody had ever given her a positive way to look at the marks that painted the canvas of her body until now. After a few moments she began to shift, Kane watching with a curious expression while she extended her foreleg towards him. She detailed the old wounds, all coming from her father and brother. He glanced from her foreleg up to her as he reached a slow, tentative paw out toward her, giving her ample time to pull away if she didn't want him to touch her. If she didn't, his bigger paw would take hers ever so gingerly in his grasp, turning her leg this way and that with such care as if she were made of porcelain, inspecting the marks on her leg and running a paw over each one like he were inspecting an assortment of precious stones.

Kane listened with rapt attention while Tamsyn told him of her pack's culture, and how she had been as a youngling: rebellious and disobedient. It brought a devilish grin back to his face when he pictured her, this sweet, motherly wolf as a rowdy adolescent. He released her paw once she retracted it, then showed him another scar just below her jaw that had been all but obscured by her thick, black fur. His expression darkened again when she showed it to him and revealed how it had been given to her. He visibly cringed, doing his best not to think about just how close that scar ran to her jugular, and how close she would have come to dying from it. Her father really had tried to kill her. But she survived, survived long enough to move her story on to the most obvious scars around the right side of her visage. Those had been the first he had noticed, and also the freshest, the ones he was most curious about. Had she gotten into a fight with a bear? A shark? A tiger?

The answer was far darker than any big predator. Tamsyn's own mate had attacked her in a hysterical fit during a nightmare while her mind deteriorated. Kane's expression soured while he listened to the trauma and horrors Tamsyn had endured at the paws of her own ailing mate, and how her children had saved her. He silently wondered if the sickness was what had ultimately claimed her life, though the subject was obviously too sore and recent to ask. When she drifted off, Kane also remained quiet, letting only the sound of the snapping fire keep silence at bay until the jet black fae chuckled and stated Death had it out for her. Kane smirked and chuckled as well, his hazel eyes having never left Tamsyn's face the entire time. "Hmm, maybe... He's probably after you because you keep proving how strong you are. I don't know of any other wolves that could not only survive what you have, but to thrive in the aftermath." His smirk turned into another grin, a deeper chuckle rumbling in his chest and eyes flashing mischievously. "I bet Death's actually afraid of you, Tamsyn. I would be if I had to try and take you on."

Since Tamsyn had been open about her scars and he had seen her eyeing his own, Kane shifted to lift himself up a little more on the bed, the firelight and moonlight casting silver and orange across his body, over muscles and through fur to highlight every scar he bore. "This one—" He pointed to a set of four thin scars along the side of his neck. "—was from a mountain lion when I was very young. My first hunt as part of a rite of passage in my tribe was to track and kill a predator. I was cocky, I thought I could take a mountain lion with ease. After all, I had these—" He snapped his jaws to show off his saber fangs. "—and I felt invincible. The cat nearly nicked my jugular during the fight, missed by a hair. That was my first run-in with Death, the first time I saw him." He held out his left foreleg for her to inspect the large scar that cut through the teal banded fur on the leg. "This was from a fight with an invading pack that tried to raid us one night. I don't enjoy hurting other wolves, but I won't let anyone hurt my family, so I helped fight them off. One of the other wolves had a dagger, cut me right down my leg when I blocked him from going for my chest. Got the blade lodged about halfway up the muscle."

Laughing softly under his breath, Kane glanced over at his shoulder to his fresh injury. "This saber cat bite is definitely going to be another one worth telling, but you know that one already," he said, then glanced down at the three large scars across the breadth of his chest. "Heh... This was a bear. I think that one kinda speaks for itself." He glanced back at his rear end, continuing on, "I've got a couple smaller ones on my left thigh where a wild boar tried to gore me. The pig ended up just getting my leg and flipping me through the air! You can't really see them too well unless you get really close to my rump though." Kane's smile slowly slipped from his face, his eyes growing dimmer while he turned back to Tamsyn so she could see the scars across the bridge of his muzzle and over his right eye. "These..." he started, running a slow paw over the one that slashed neatly across his eye, "...are why I'm here in Auster. They were given to me by a massive wolf, bigger than me. Violent, deadly, evil... He killed someone close to me, so I've vowed he will be my final hunt. And I'm a damn good hunter."

The corners of Kane's mouth twitched into the ghost of a smirk, still trying to salvage the humor he had been trying to bring back to their conversation. "So it looks like Death has it out for both of us then, Tamsyn..." He drifted off, leaving an open space for Tamsyn to ask any questions she had about his scars, or fill the quiet with whatever she wanted to say.

"Kane"

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Kindred spirits

Kane

Kaneonuskatew