Far From Home

Quote:Her confusion was practically a physical thing by the way it manifested itself upon her soft, gentle features, her brow puckered slightly as she attempted to work things out for herself while she listened avidly as Scipio tried to explain things to best of his ability. Still, it was not something that she picked up on quickly. Having little knowledge of humans or their terms that this wolf seemed to have picked up, or at least learned to recognize, she did her best to understand what he was saying, surmising that, for whatever reason, it was best for him to sleep during travel. But...how did one travel if they were sleeping?

Kindly, the golden wolf offered to explain his origins, and in doing so hopefully clear up everything that he had so far said to confuse the timid wolf. Surprised that he should feel so easy telling his story when they were still practically strangers with each other, Merci did not decline or complain. She merely turned a little where she sat and regarded the wolf with a silent, patient stare, her head only slightly tilted toward the right. And with his audience awaiting his tale, Scipio began.

His tale was not a happy one. Wracked with death and illness, his beginning sounded even worse than her own. To be stolen from your parents was one thing; to lose them completely in death was something else entirely. Even so soon into the story, Mercianne felt grateful that Scipio should still have had his brother through all of this, a single other soul to cling to and guard against the evils of the world. Still unsure about what a "human" was, she listened closely to his descriptions of them and their world, finding them to be strange and foreign creatures with inexplicable motives. The pack he had been introduced to because of them hardly sounded welcoming either. But were it not for them, he might have died because of his illness, and certainly never reentered the wild as he claimed to have. It was just a shame he had lost his brother in the process.

Eventually he fell silent, apparently reaching the end of his story and giving Mercianne time enough to make sense of it all. It was certainly quite a bit to take in, though one thing that stood out prominently to her was his relationship with his brother. She had always longed for a similar relationship with her own, so that the blood ties that connected them would have meant something, but with as driven and ambitious as he was they had amounted to nothing. He had gone on to prove himself in the eyes of their ruthless leader, leaving Merci to fend for herself.

Now that Scipio had stopped talking, the creamy white wolf found herself at a loss for what to say. There were plenty of areas of his story that she could have commented one, plenty more questions that she could have asked to learn the small details of his life, but she chose to comment on the one that mattered the most. "I hope you find him. Your brother," Mercianne murmured, reassuring as she let a little smile slip upon her face so that she might be able to bolster whatever hope he held in his search.

-- mercianne