01-20-2018, 02:48 PM
Merida
from the ashes, a fire shall be awoken
For what seems like hours, the red-eyed fox watches him, her lips curling and twitching into snarls of distraught, then calming as a whine would leave her mouth. There is nothing she can do besides wait, and it made her anxious. Her tail flips behind her back and forth, ears bending back and then forward again listening to the sounds of the forest and of his ragged, tired breathing. Then, finally, a sound comes from him that is not just the sound of his ribcage falling and rising, and her chin lifts from her paws, her head tilting. He groans - a sign of life! She yips out of excitement and relief (not dead!), and is met with flashing teeth and a demand that causes her to bare her own, crouching below his massive jaws with a sneer. And then, as his eyes adjust and open slowly, blinking as if to clear them, he recognizes her.She is still on her belly, her front paws outstretched in a perfectly poised position, and raises her head as his voice mutters her name, a scoff leaving her lips. “Were you expecting me to be?” She answers with a curl of her black-lined lips, thumping her tail in what would appear as frustration but inwardly, she knows she is anything but. She reaches towards him slightly, nipping at the air between her and his mountain of bulk, not yet sure if she would be allowed to touch him without a swift bite to her neck.
“I’m a scavenger,” she replies matter-of-factly with a flick of her tail, recalling the name he used to describe her and her kin, “and scavengers survive.” There is a hint of a laugh on her voice, but it does not dilute the concern that glistens in the fiery-red of her irises. Her gaze traces the gratuitous amounts of blackness that still lay in heaps across his body, ears flicking back warily. She did not like the way he appears, nor the way he smells. Something has happened.
But Merida is not the one to ask, and Crevan isn’t the one to explain. At least, not in this moment.
“You, on the other hand, look dead.”
She pauses after this comment, and then with a decisive huff, leaps up from her lying position and flits off into the forest.
The fox does not return for some time, and perhaps he has fallen back asleep. When she creeps into the openness of the clearing, it is with a dangling hare in her mouth. She drops it before him, and though it is small in comparison to him, the young hare that she had caught was quite the endeavor for her. Normally she wouldn’t try to hunt after such prey - she kept herself busy with the quick swipe of her paw to a mouse, or finding insects or nuts to satisfy her hunger, but those would not nourish him, she knows. It had taken a good amount of skill and luck, placing herself downwind and sneaking close enough to it to grab it before it took off.
She had been successful.
She walks past him a few steps and sits on her haunches, the snow-white of her chest brilliantly bright against the darkness of Sylva.