EYES OVER EASY

Walk | Talk | Think

She had heard but she had not believed. It had been so long since she had heard that voice... A year? More? And it had changed so much from what she recalled. It had deepened, matured, reflecting her own growth over the past year. She had never expected to hear it again, had written him off as disappeared like their mother - dead for all she knew - and had tried not to think too much about it. He had been a living terror, after all, her personal adversary if ever she had one. She should have been content with life without him, should have convinced herself that the howl that beckoned her to it was actually meant for someone else, that it was not her brother returned from the void he had disappeared into.

And yet she answered it.

Maybe it was some masochistic perversion that drove her from the Steppe and over its borders, away from safety, and into the Thicket that bordered Ebony. It certainly was not an unwavering sibling affection. No, she just had to see, with her own eyes, whether Severus was truly alive, whether her mind was not simply playing tricks on her and feeding her some leftover vision from her sickness. It could be possible, right? But it had sounded real, so real... A voice from her memory said she would not like who she found, not if he was anything as he had been as a child, but if any of her family lived...she had a right to know.

The terrain here was tricky, a mixture of tall, brittle grass and snow mounds, but she wound her way through, her quick grey paws only slowing when she spotted him. Well. He was taller than she remembered. And bigger. Neither were exactly suited toward her favor considering she still had the mouth she had been born with, and if his temper was anything as it had been then there was a chance she could be in trouble. But, so close to her pack, would he chance it? Drawing a subtle confidence from her position in Ebony Callisto walked the rest of the distance to him in silence, her curious, silvery blue eyes staring his way out of a face that was emotionless and indifferent. No sense letting him see that his very presence made her reconsider everything she knew about her family and their whereabouts. Him being here changed nothing in her life.

Spindly legs slowed further and then stopped, leaving the shadowy girl standing before her sibling. For a moment she merely stared, confirming in those initial moments, as she breathed in his scent, that he did live, and after she addressed him in her neutral, flat tone that was as telling as her blank expression. "So you're not dead." The single goading phrase - pity - was on the tip of her tongue, ready to be given voice, but Callisto held back. Not out of courtesy, no; she was ready to exchange barbs, but only if he began.