After Indigo had caught her at the tail end of an emotional breakdown, Cosette had made a promise to herself not to hold herself at such a distance from everyone. She was going to throw herself into training, and force herself to meet his new friend. Since then, things had gotten complicated for her, though. Indigo had been travelling a lot since receiving some difficult news about his family, and his group and grown. She wasn’t even sure anymore who all he had under his care now, but she couldn’t help but feel a small twinge of both jealousy and guilt. There were so many others now it seemed, but if he was going to lead a band she knew there would be even more at some point down the line. It was good he had others willing to follow him, and she was happy for him, but it didn’t stop her from feeling lost. She had never quite managed to find her place among her family when she was young, and that, among many other things, had resulted in her being ousted and left to die. She didn’t think that would happen with Indigo, but she still felt helpless.
As if all of that hadn’t been enough, though, she had encountered a ghost from her own past. Only a short while after her break down, her mother appeared. She had been waiting in the same clearing that Cosette had broken down in, looking as though she knew Cosette would arrive. There had been no surprise on her face when she saw her long lost daughter, just a cold assessing expression. She must not have expected her smallest child to make it so far when she had originally abandoned her though. Cosette’s ability to survive on her own long enough to find a place seemed to have impressed the woman. Or at least it made her willing to give her child a second chance to prove herself. She wasn’t sure she really wanted to prove herself to her mother, but she had always been obedient, and when her mother made demands, she listened. The duty of showing her mother around this place had fallen to her, despite the fact that she barely knew the landscape herself. It had kept her away from the Hallows most days, and the tiny healer in training was exhausted.
Night had fallen and she had left Adhira to return home. Luckily her mother understood she had an obligation to her new pack and had not yet tried to pry her away from it fully. Her sisters were apparently around somewhere nearby, but she was letting them all work out their own paths now, confident that the others would bring glory to her name and bloodline. Cosette suspected that the only real reason Adhira paid any attention to her was because she didn’t want her weakest child building any kind of reputation that could be tied to her if she didn’t have a paw in building that reputation herself. She shook the thoughts from her head though, finding a quiet spot away from everyone else to lay down. Indigo had enough going on and she didn’t want to burden him with her problems again, and she didn’t know anyone else well enough to discuss it with them. She did wonder how her friend might react to knowing her mother was back in her life after the picture she had painted for him. For the sake of her sanity, she hoped her mother would never run into anyone from her new life.
"Speech" || Thoughts
