Never thought I'd find you here

Kichi turned to face him when the deer sounded the alarm. In the young wolf's blue eyes, Alastor saw anger and violence and pain. The lad was littered with scars from an arduous life. Seeing the boy he had come to love like his own son twisted up his heart in ways Alastor never expected to feel. He'd long thought Kichi dead along with Lurid. He'd found their home empty, abandoned, and he had assumed that traitorous bitch had taken him away with her when she left him behind. But now here he was, grown and angry with the world. Alastor couldn't blame him—but he could empathize with the silver-gray yearling. Alastor saw a lot of himself in young Kichi. It meant he had failed to protect the pup from the harsh cruelties of the world.

As recognition began to set in, Alastor watched Kichi's hardened expression relax some, but his guard was still up. Fangs retreated behind his jowls, but the coldness in his eyes didn't disappear. The question stung, but not as much as Al had thought it would. He mostly just felt numbness all over, his mind still trying to process how his body should feel. "It's me," he responded in a gentle husk of voice. "Least as far as I know I'm not dead yet." Obsidian eyes moved over to the deer that had been only a foot tall when he'd last seen it. How much the two of them had grown... How long had it been? Three seasons? A year?

Alastor took a couple slow steps closer to Kichi, his eyes never straying from the young wolf. He looked him over as if trying to determine if he was real as well. So many questions ran rampant through his mind. But the first priority was sorting through the emotions and figuring out how to react. He wanted to run and embrace the boy who was no longer a pup, to demand to know where he'd been or why he'd disappeared with Lurid, to laugh and to cry and to scream. "Lurid...?" he asked, the unspoken question left in the name he spoke. Was she with him, or was she totally and completely gone?


"Alastor"