On Distant Shores

[Stan]

The Story So Far…
Gabe and Raphael are a pair of foxes recently escaped from a nearby fur farm. Gabe had lost his mate before the escape, and Raphael believes her mate died soon after; what’s more, they are both emotionally crippled from their time in captivity. The two meet in Gallop Free, both just out of the river, and on the bank begin to forge a bond.
Original Thread

Last Two Posts:
> From the ashes stood a golden demigod with eyes as cold as the river, and all she could do was quake. Was this his land, she wondered, his boundary the great mountains and the swift river? Was his sadness wrought of its ruin? And now she smelt man on the burnt grasses, as all things of great destruction smelt of man to her. A cry lodged in her throat and choked her, and she took a step back from this creature, too divine for her, too pained, and too much like her mate with his red-to-black coat -- but her mate was not this, had died as easily as any mortal.
> Her ears pinned and her nostrils pinched that she did not have to hear his words or smell his scent, that she did not have to sully him with her knowledge of him. Her, man's production, and him the wild in a fox's form, and she knew then this meeting shouldn't be. She would have run then, had her legs not ached with miles and hardship and the cold, and her heart not hurt with the strain of too little rest and too much emotion.
> Then he spoke, and her breath came out of her in a rasp. A mortal's voice, and the world fit back into its orderly slots, and she saw nothing but a tired tod as haggard as her and with the same inescapable death-scent on him; a fellow victim then, and no failed guardian of this land. She dipped her head, ears coming forward in a drooping, vague way, her eyes locked on him but no longer with the awe, or the fright -- empty, now. Watchful, but not wary. His steps did not shake the land or quake revelation from the minds of those who saw him move; he did not have the swiftness of the wind or the lightness of sun on water. Just a tod.
> "Thank you," she murmured, and came forward with her head still down and her ears still forward in that half-perked way, but then she blinked and they came more forward, and the look she gave him was shy and nervous. She stopped close to him, lifted her head and stretched out her muzzle. "You're --" not him. From there. Obvious things. "name?" Although it sounded odd, because the first word had not been accented as a question and there was the subtle difference between the contraction and the possessive.

[Stan]

___She was tentative, terrified, awe-struck - or perhaps shell shocked - as she stood before him, her form so frail in the cold wind and softly falling snow. Like the intricate snowflakes trickling down from the sky, she looked delicate and beautiful, and fragile - ready to melt away at the slightest touch of warmth in her cold, lonely world. He could see pain in her eyes as plainly as he saw the ashen fields around him. And what reason was there for joy? Here they were, so far from "home," strangers in a strange land. They had left one wasteland to greet another, a proximal hell on distant shores. But they did not have to be here alone.
___She spoke like a creature defeated, voice broken and head hanging low. Her posture drooped as though she were being crushed under the weight of sorrow. But she accepted his offer quietly, her cat-like black paws sending up small clouds of ash in her wake. Her visage tentative and withdrawn, she began to ask a question, and instead asked another. There was an almost-dissapointment behind her words, which puzzled him, but he dared not pursue it. They were both fragile like the thin matrix of fine ice forming at the fringes of the now-distant river; dredging up a painful and recent past could shatter them with ease.
___"My name is Gabriel, but my ma...," he winced visibly. "Those who know me call me Gabe, and you may as well."
___A smile, soft but contrived, momentarily flitted across the thin blackness of his lips. His pale gold eyes flicked upwards to meet the fae's amber gaze, and he scrutinized her face briefly to see if he recognized her. No.
___"How are you called?"

[Raphael]

– Raphael smiled – surprised, honest, but not wide – caught by the coincidence of their names. The amusement did not survive long, as Gabriel winced. He reminded her of too-fresh wounds, so that she looked aside from his pain, into the burnt grasses, automatic cowardice. She could easily fill in what word he’d stopped himself from completing, and might have thanked him for not letting it slip off his tongue even though he’d not done it for her benefit. When she ached from a single syllable and the bare thought of it, she could not say what the whole utterance would have done to her heart. Shattered it -- and perhaps he had known, this injured tod.
– But no matter – keep moving, were those not the words she had lived by, through near-starvation and deadly flights of fancy? And Gabe waited for her name. “Raphael,” she told him. “Just–” that, she meant to say, but the cold wind hissed through the clattering grass and ran its fingers across her damp pelt like the men’s gloved hands come to rend coat from flesh, and it seemed every one of her muscles spasmed in the shiver that wind prompted. “Excuse me,” she murmured. “Please.” And slipped past him, into the windbreak made of the trees and raised earth.
– Immediately, then, came awareness of the heat of another’s body, ever-present in the fur cages and so long absent since– then. Gabe was thin, near as thin as her under the luxury of his pelt, and not all dry. Which made sense – he’d come the same way as her, from the same place, and crossed the same boundaries. If he’d been– a better-known tod, she might have presumed to curl close to him, warmth for warmth. But a stranger, no matter how similar their wounds – no, because of those wounds – she would not presume with. She shivered, although she had begun to warm, and lay down with her feet tucked under her belly and chest and her tail wrapped round her body. She glanced up at Gabe, then, an offer in her eyes – she’d leave it to him.
– More than warmth, she wished, desperately, for conversation. She had a palpable pain where once she’d had companionship, a pain that had started as a benign yearning for connectedness, and had since bloomed into this mad social beast – but, no, that was fancy. She wanted conversation, was all. Yet she could find no neutral matter to speak on. She supposed they shared too much, and that nothing they shared might be idly spoken of.

[Gabe]

___Gabe recognized the rawness in the fae's eyes at his near-gaffe in explaining his nickname. Injured souls could recognize one another as plainly as one knew his own species by scent, sight, or sound; there was no question that she, too, was missing someone dear to her. Though he sorrow seemed different from his all the same, something in its infancy, fragile like a still-damp fawn. Had this vix's mate been left behind in the cages? Drowned in the river? He shuddered a bit at the thought of its frigid, ash-tainted waters. Cold, wet, and hungry though he may have been, at least he'd survived the crossing. He wondered how many other creatures over the years had not been so lucky, dragged below by the icy claws of the unforgiving current.
___Raphael; this is what she called herself. Like her, there was a glint of recognition in the names, though mercifully enough for him it did not run on the heels of a reminder of sorrow. She did add an awkward "Just," as though wanting to imply that no one called her anything but that, or perhaps that there was no one left to her who knew to call her otherwise. He might have said a pleased to meet you had the cold wind not encouraged the vixen to enter the gnarled shelter of the roots. He was too tired to rise and greet her properly, but leaned forward to sniff her as she strode by. Closer up, smell confirmed his suspicion: all of the sparkling waters of the world would ever wash away so much suffering and death. She was from the same farm as him.
___Once within the haphazard shelter, the female hunkered down. She looked miserably cold, being thinner and more freshly soaked than him. He wondered if he should offer his side to her, but felt it a bit forward given their unfamiliar status. Of course, his social instincts were numbed; he'd been thrown in with a number of foxes over the years as they came and went. Ever since her, they never kept a female in with him for more than a month or two; the humans constantly searched for a female he would produce with, as though merely throwing any vixen at his feet would reawaken his urge to mate while his dearest lay rotting and skeletal at the bottom of the...
___Squeezing his eyes shut for a long moment then exhaling sharply, Gabe cleared his thoughts. His eyelids wished to stay closed, to rest, to drown out the world around him, but he forced them open all the same, directing his gaze to the gravid gray clouds above. He needed to make his mind just as cold and blank if he was ever going to banish the memory of that horrible place. Taking a breath, the fox turned his golden pate in the direction of his new companion, relaxing his posture and moving his tail to cover his opposite haunch now. The female was looking his direction, but was clearly contemplative at the moment. He might have remained quiet, but found the silence daunting in the vast new landscape. With only the howl of the wind and the distant trickle of the river, he felt isolated and out of place compared to the more familiar and constant din of pacing, wailing foxes. And so he spoke, tritely but perhaps not uselessly.
___"I think once I've rested, I might try to see what the forest has to offer. It isn't far from here, and there must be more prey and shelter there." He paused awkwardly, not really knowing what to say beyond that. "Maybe... maybe we could both go. You know, safety in numbers."

[Raphael]

– Could any moment pass for such as they without a reminder of pain -- that familiar flicker of hurt prompted by the most obscure, the least things? It seemed to Raphael, as she watched Gabe’s face pinch and turn away, that even the deepest wilderness would remind them of what they’d lost at man’s hands -- and surely keeping company with those who would break open wounds with their mere presence, who smelled of that place… was not wise. Yet it could not be more foolish than seeking to sully the clean conscience of a wild fox, who would never know when they tread upon tender places left by the farm’s twisted metal cages.
– She shivered at the thoughts, her mind spiraling down a fatalistic path -- might she never find another fox with whom she could be at ease? With her ears full of natural sounds and the snow coming down in sudden icy blasts and delicate flakes, she found herself bewildered and unable to find an answer. But -- hope, sudden hope in an idea repulsive and offering salvation at once. Perhaps those tender places could only be numbed if over-stimulated, like the ravaged forelimbs of the mad foxes for whom pain had become relief…
– Gabe pulled her from her macabre thoughts with his words. He talked of practical issues, and their solutions, and the future: such things as Raphael knew were best to focus on. She looked away, embarrassed by her grisly wool-gathering, and cast him a thankful look from the corner of her eye, although she knew he would not understand her reason for it. Even in his pain -- he found pragmatism; a trick she’d never conquered. She drew breath to speak, but he broke from silence before she -- and offered companionship. Safety. The air staggered from her lungs without words, had to struggle past an inexplicable constriction in the back of her throat. Travel with another fox? Share the burden of the wilderness with another soul? Share -- the joy, the brief, rare joy?
– The idea seemed fraught with trouble and half-seen complexities, in the first moment after it was spoken -- but, pragmatism, Raphael reminded herself. Told it to herself in Timoti’s firm, warm voice, although he’d never uttered such words against her. His voice worked as a shock of cold water, brought her mind back to the earth -- and to him. She never intended to forget it, un-fox-like though that was -- romantic, to think it did anything to remember him but hurt her. Naïve to think she might divorce the idea of him from that of the farm. Stupid to think down this tangent when Gabe had started a much hoped-for conversation, and might take her pause as a preliminary to refusal.
– Raphael scrambled for time-sense, could not figure how long it had been since he’d spoken -- how long she’d stared at him with a taken-aback, perplexed expression, heaven help her and her social maladjustment. She dropped her gaze, skin prickling hot under her fur. “That sounds wise,” she agreed, speaking fast as if she could make up for lost time. She took a breath and gathered in her composure with the frigid air. “Both the forest and -- going together.” She paused, thought, A conversation haunted by awkward pauses, slapped her mind back into useful tracks. “Thank you.”

[Gabe]

___Snow had begun to fall freely from the sky by then, the cold wind howling around the foxes' retreat sending the flakes into furious airborne acrobatics on their journey to the parched earth. Gabe cast his eyes upwards with a concerned frown, feeling a degree of trepidation upon seeing the clouds so thick and heavy overhead. The crisp scent in the air suggested that the snow was here to stay; these were no passing flurries. Though both he and the female were in good enough pelt to avoid succumbing to the cold, would they be able to find nourishment in an unforgiving landscape, especially considering their exhausted and weakened physical state? It took him a while to realize that he was thinking in terms of us, not me.
___Speaking of the female, she was oddly silent since his comment, and he wondered if he'd been to forward or given the wrong impression. His intentions were strictly practical, only hoping that they might have better success together than alone as they adjusted. It wasn't exactly standard for an unmated pair to cooperate, but they were not foxes yielding from a typical situation. Her face was very unrevealing, not actively expressing distaste, but confused and lost in thought. Ears drooping a bit, he was relieved when at last she did respond - affirmatively. He didn't know why, but he was oddly relieved by what should have been a somewhat daunting situation. Perhaps it was just a refreshing change from the unrelenting boredom of the fur farm.
___"I'm glad," he said, quite genuinely, the faintest hint of a smile creeping at the corners of his maw for perhaps the first time in years.

((This is a HORRIBLE post, I am so sorry. I guess I really can't RP well when my brain is this train-wrecked with sleepy))

[Stanly]

Well, your writing’s not bad, so I’m thinking the shortness is more a sign that the thread has run its course? I can’t think of anything more for them to do until they get to the forest, anyway.

[RandomWiktor]

Possible! Shall we fast forward, then?

[Raphael]

When the mulch had taken the last clinging ash from her paws, and the wind carried only forest scents to her nose, Raphael first felt the stirrings of a strange feeling. Here, where the trees went on until they broke against the mountains like some verdant sea, where a wolf’s mark meant the highest predator was near, where strange birds called in the trees – songbirds, not vultures or crows – here, the only hint of man was carried on her own fur. This is nature, she thought, and considered sitting down; but she didn’t want Gabe’s worry, or conversation – not now, when she couldn’t say if she was frightened or exultant. She put down her dark head and paid particular attention to the steady beat of her forefeet.

Perhaps it was foolish not to keep her eyes ahead, but the posture did put her nose close to the ground; and otherwise she never would’ve smelled the hint of terror and blood on the ground, like some predator had managed to clip his prey’s flesh but hadn’t got a good hold. The fox’s tail flicked once as she shoved her muzzle into the brittle leaves of fall. She smelled the prey, but no predator. With the trail obvious to her senses and dinner a clear vision in her mind, she bolted into the undergrowth without a thought to her companion. Foxes were not made to hunt together, and she had not yet readapted to traveling with another.

Her steps turned stealthy as the heady scent of rabbit filled her nostrils; her muscles quivered with her need to pounce, but she had learned enough to keep her pace steady. She saw the rabbit before it caught sight of her; its long ears laid back with annoyance, it nestled among a loose tangle of roots and licked at a small wound on its shoulder. Saliva trickled from the edge of the fox’s mouth; the prey came alert, nose twitching. Raphael pounced; she could not fit into the rabbit’s hiding place, but her jaws could, and she required nothing more. Her teeth closed on the rabbit’s neck; the animal squealed once, kicked spasmodically, and died in a gush of warmth across her tongue.

Raphael dragged the carcass free from the tree, worrying contentedly at its neck; but then she froze, her eyes gone wide and guilty. Gabe! She dropped the rabbit and looked rather hopelessly around; but of course the male wasn’t in sight. Probably they’d been far enough apart that he hadn’t been able to follow her when she bolted off into the trees like a loon. She gave the carcass a withering stare, as if it had been its fault that she’d lost her traveling companion; it wasn’t even a particularly remarkable individual, gone scrawny from living in the wrong habitat – it had probably retreated here due to the fire.

Raphael hesitated, jaws hovering over the rabbit, before she seized it by the scruff and trotted back the way she had come. If she startled (and possibly worried?) Gabe with her behavior, she could at least share the boons of her labor with him, and pay no mind to what her instincts were screaming in the back of her mind. The fragrant copper scent of blood in her nose prevented the fox from following her own trail back; she went by sight alone, and found herself by a stream she’d heard in the distance, but which they had not yet reached. She dropped the carcass and glanced about with her ears laid anxiously back. Gabe’s brilliant ruddy coat should have been visible among the dull browns and greys of this landscape, she thought.

Well, he couldn’t have gotten out of earshot. Her first attempt to call his name died in her throat for fear of predators; her lip twitched with self-disgust, and her next cry rang clear through the chill dank air. Suddenly aware of her heart beating in her breast, she crouched low to the ground over her prey and awaited a reply.

((For the record, that wasn't Breeze's character Raphael just chomped, lol.))

[Gabe]

((Pfft, Breeze's character? It wasn't my Tomar, was it? Might as well be with my utter lack of playing him, haha. Anyways...))
Not proof read yet so, y'know - if it's pretty jacked up, sorry. You can bear it and reply or wait until I have more time to fix typos.

___The forest was, to Gabe, very much like a blissful dream from which he was yet to awaken - though this comparison ignored the fact that his only dreams to date had been haunted by images of death and devastation from his life on the fur farm. While he probably should have been frightened and wary, jumping at the snap of twigs lest a hungry wolf or mountain lion stalk in his midst, the fox was too distracted and enchanted by the plethora of sights and smells around him. It stood in sharp contrast to both of his previous environments - the farm, and then the meadow - which had both consisted primarily of gloom and the pervasive suggestion of suffering and terror. Even in winter, with the evergreens resiliently holding their green hue even after the deciduous trees had long shed their fragile leaves, the place seemed too vibrant and alive to fit into his world view.
___It made Gabe unfocused like a kit at times, wasting energy following long-past scent trails of prey animals, rustling carelessly through brush just to feel thorns dragging through his fur. It should come as no surprise, then, that he'd taken notice to a sluggish minnow trapped beneath the ice in the shallows of one of the many creeks that snaked through the forest. He smelled it more than saw it, a strong odor wholly unfamiliar to him, and veered off of the path he and Raphael loosely shared on their journey. The ground dipped to the water's edge here in a squat gully of sorts, but the change in elevation was significant enough to cut his sight from Raphael and hers from him.
___He probably should have noted her abscence, or caught the scent of wounded quarry himself, but the fish captivated him. He scratched at the ice with his claws, sniffing the thin layer of frozen water with intensity. The fish gave a thrash below the surface, too paralyzed by cold to move lithely like it would in the spring. The sudden movement startled the curious fox and he sprung back daintily, tail rattling and ears perched with excitement. He pawed at the ice once more, this time from a safer distance, and again the fish flailed. The smell may have been foreign but the movement was not: this was a prey-thing.
___Instinct spoke to Gabe from some dark recess of his mind, a part of him largely shut down by blood lines and years under man's oppression. It trigged a response to the prospect of prey below a crust of ice: it told him to break through, to snatch up the hiding quarry before it could evade him. The move was better suited for rodents and snow, but Gabe's primal urges did not differentiate between the two. He rearing onto his hindquarters and slammed his forepaws down hard, the ice's surface errupting with a starburst of hair line fractures upon impact. The fish wiggled helplessly in the shallow, frigid water. Gabe repeated the move, and this time his paws pushed through, plunging both feet and his tender nose into frigid water.
___The fox jumped back, sputtering and sneezing, damp paws clinging to the ice from the cold. He looked down into the water, its depths made murky by his intrusion. The fish had rolled onto its side, stricken and in shock, and its silvery sides seemed to match the surrounding ice. Gabe poked at its rigid body a few times with his forepaw until it finally gave another thrash, confirming its potential as edible. The fox snatched the small fish up in his jaws, pulling it free of the almost painfully chilly water onto the bank where he felt more secure. Its flesh was smooth and slimey in his jaws, but firmer than the half-decayed raw meat they'd been offered as food at the fur farm. He bit into the cold body of the fish and found the flavor less satisfactory than mammalian meat, but definitely food - fatty and metallic with blood. It was not a large meal; he swallowed it in only a few bites, but was proud of his new found skill.
___Then he heard Raphael cry out for him, her voice nervous, and his ears drooped with a profound sense of failure. In addition to forgetting his compatriot, he'd glommed down this rare winter meal without so much of thinking of her. She was not his mate nor in heat, and their kind was not a social hunter like the wolves that prowled Gallop Free, so there was no reason for why he should have offered her part of his meal, but still he felt plauged by a guilty conscience.
___He let out a short bark and climbed the crest of the embankment, sniffing the cool winter air and finding her scent down stream and westwards. He could hear the faint rush of water suggesting she had found either a different branch of this creek, or else one that ran to or from it. Moreover, however, he smelled the scent of blood - of a prey animal, rabbit by the scent of it. His breath huffed out in a little cloud of condensation; good, at least she'd found something for herself to eat. This might have allayed his guilty conscience longer had the thought that she'd not eaten it yet suggested that she, unlike him, had actually considered the other's welfare. Ears and tail cast low, the fox trotted off in the direction of Raphael's scent.

[Raphael]

Raphael waited a moment stretched long and thin by anxiety before the sound of Gabe’s voice reached her. She relaxed with a small smile, content to know she wouldn’t be forced into lonesomeness within this unsettling landscape. The tod may be no Timoti nor a fox useful for his knowledge of the land, but she had to admit he was a steadying presence – a constant reminder of the here and now. The thought of losing his company put her ears back. All such worries being in the past and pragmatism being something of a goal for Raphael, however, she forcefully pulled herself from the beckoning doldrums and turned a fierce, intent stare on the rabbi carcass.

If it were still alive, the creature would have shivered with a premonition of bad things to come. Lacking the vital spark, it lay inert until Raphael’s fangs sank into its belly, tearing through thin skin and stringy muscle to spill forth steaming organ meat. A rough shake of her head sent the thing into a macabre limp dance; the fox delighted in the different textures against her tongue – perhaps it made her strange to enjoy the stifling prickle of fur, the stab of bone, but they’d never had anything but the one sort of meat, always pungent and slick, bloodless and red between her gums, in the cages of the fur farm.

She bolted a few bites before she belatedly remembered why she hadn’t eaten it at the feet of the tree it had been killed beneath. Raphael raised her blood-slick jowls, ears perked, the lines of her body loosening as tension from the hunt and the brief lonesome scare eased away. By the time Gabe came through the trees, she had regained some of the slump which characterized her posture; the sight of the male fox’s dejected expression further lowered Raphael’s stance, as she misinterpreted his guilt as underhanded remonstration. She’d become accustomed to picking up on the gentle chiding of her more survival-savvy mate, and although a moment of logical thought and observation would have cleared up her misunderstanding, she was far too engrossed by her own guilt to see Gabe's.

She stepped forward, abandoning the half-eaten rabbit carcass in favor of approaching Gabe with drooping posture and an apologetic smile. "Sorry about running off," she mumbled, not being particularly inclined to dwell on this failure. She perked up, although she felt far more inclined to slouch closer to the ground to make her apology clear. "I left you some of the rabbit I caught."

Through the cloying scent of innards, she caught a faint whiff of the deceased fish from Gabe’s jaws; she did not recognize its source, and her eyes brightened. For all her fear, Raphael had several years of repetitive life behind her, and she intended to make up every inch of lost experience. Her nose worked, trying to figure something out about this new smell before she inquired further; it had something of prey to it, which made her wonder what the other fox had gotten into. She gave him an inquisitive look, briefly freed from the gloom which overhung her at nearly all other times for curiosity over this new – and unthreatening – scent.