RP Where The Wild Things Are

[Katpride]

Barclay had the main threat in his periphery, still well within the sight of his featureless white eyes, but in his distraction he’d let more slip than he thought. It was… difficult, after so long moving between the fringes of civilization, to remember what could be excused for normal human behavior and what would out him. He hadn’t thought much of the rumbling growl the Beast had stirred in his throat - it was a familiar sound, now, after so long in this form, and though it was a passing annoyance at the best of times, it was certainly nothing unusual. For him.

It all happened so quickly. One second, he was wrapping his fingers around the boy’s coat, and the next-

(The Wolf’s attention never wavers from the boy. It knows a threat when it sees one, even if its charge refuses to acknowledge the warnings it’s sending him. It catches the flicker of muscles bunching, predator-coiling, predator moving-

It throws itself against the bars of the cage Barclay has tried to trap it in, breaking through and slamming its whole body harshly against his legs. The Wolf knows that, once, it was domesticated by man, turned into a protector for the weakest among the pack. It knows this, and does not forget. It will protect-)

-he was dropping the coat and lunging forward, the sudden movement tearing the clumsily-wound scarf away from his face. He didn’t have the time or the spare neurons to catch the piece of fabric as it fluttered away - for some reason, his whole being had been turned to the task of tackling the boy into the snow.

He didn’t even notice the stranger running until he was halfway through the motion, but by then it was too late to save face. The Beast was growling through his throat once more, snapping his jaws and pulling his lips back to show sharp teeth bared in a snarl, white eyes squinted not out of a desire to hide but with the force of the expression wrinkling his snout.

 

[Wendigo]

It happened too fast for Lyle to properly register until he was flat on his back on the ground.

There’d been another growl. Deeper this time, more feral. All the air escaped from his lungs as his back hit the snow, and a yelp came out. Then there was a mouth full of sharp teeth in his face, and he was looking up into pale white eyes. And then all the familiarity came crashing down at once.

The barely human scent. The growls. The way his instincts buckled at the sight of this person. At his scent.

Aspen.

There was no question about it, in his mind. His wide blue eyes were staring up at an adult Aspen, with almost all of the humanity stripped from his face. The family that his Aspen, his bear-wolf-rat-cat-bearagain Aspen, had been looking for for so long. A panic surged through him with that realization, the panic of a fox faced with the guard-dog at a henhouse.

Without thinking, Lyle bared his teeth back up at the other man, though his snarl was completely human. His heart raced, as did his mind, even in his position trying to determine if he could eat this, or if he should run.

Run where? If he ran, the wolf above him would chase. If he ran back to Aspen – his Aspen, the snack he was so desperate to save until she was just a little bigger – the bigger Aspen would take her away. He couldn’t let that happen, but then again, with a wolf’s snout, would he just scent the littler Aspen on his skin? That was just as bad.

He listened to the crunch of the other man escaping. Oddly, it was the reality of the failed hunt that pulled him away from the edge of the huntsong. There hadn’t been the blood for it to come up in full, but he stopped straining and caught his breath, relaxing under the weight of the other man. He needed to think, or at least to talk his way out of this. Even with his strength, he could tell that fighting his way out of this might not be worth it.

Words, then. He had a human throat still. And the man hadn’t broken and run away from him.

“He’s going to tell about you.” Talking. Talking almost faster than he could think of the words, of the best way to get his dinner. “Let me have him. Please. I don’t want to fight you.”

Mostly true. He wanted to fight to keep this bigger Aspen away from his future snack, but even that wasn’t as important as dinner tonight. Surely the bigger Aspen would see that, would see that letting the stranger die would be best for both of them.

 

[Katpride]

It was an awkward, last-minute lunge, but the boy was a tiny thing, all skin and bones and not much else - he went down like a sack of flour, and when they hit the ground Barclay finally managed to wrest control back from the Beast, stopping it before it could go for his throat. Instead, he pinned the boy, even though some part of him still thought it felt like overkill; the Beast wouldn’t settle for anything less. It would hardly settle for this, still straining at the end of the leash and insisting that he end the threat right now before it ended him, but he wasn’t going to let it kill a child.

Not even a child that was snarling back at him, fierce and defiant and - disappointed, he realized, confusion and wariness flickering through his eyes even as his own snarl faded into little more than gritted teeth.

He had one forearm braced across the boy’s chest and one hand buried in the snow, but he realized with a jolt that couldn’t tell which was colder. The boy felt like winter, sharp and cold and biting, and Barclay could feel the chill even through his fur, even through the ever-present warmth of the Beast flickering its warnings through his blood. That was wrong, all wrong; wolves weren’t arctic, but they had thick fur, and it took a real persistent chill to cut through that insulation. His first instincts (its first instincts, the Beast reminds him, sullen) had been right. There was definitely something wrong with this kid.

He took a long breath through his nose, sifting through the cold and the forest to get at the fainter, clingier scents underneath. Mint; teenager; deer; and something else, something strange - animal, and dirt, and unwashed hair, but beneath that, drawing his attention away: blood. Raw meat, without the touch of fire, faint but present and definitely not just coming from Barclay.

That, paired with the strange request - ‘let me have him’, not ‘let me talk to him’ - painted a picture that Barclay wasn’t so eager to uncover. Even without the Beast growling its own denial, he didn’t have to think about it for very long before shaking his head ‘no’.

“Nope. I don’t know what yer plannin’, but you’re not getting him. He can rat on me all he likes.” Even though Barclay had saved his ungrateful ass, and that should’ve earned him more than a clean pair of heels and a new entry in his ongoing ghost story.

This was just the way things went, it seemed. He couldn’t toss a log on a campfire without being accused of arson, but he knew a few things about staying a step ahead of the law. A murdered man, no matter if he’d killed him or not, would bring it all crashing down. If he was seen anywhere in the area, the price on his head would double, and they’d add ‘dangerous’ to the list of adjectives they no doubt had written somewhere in his dubiously accurate (dubiously-his) file.

He couldn’t let that happen. He wasn’t done with this area yet, wasn’t done with his search. Not until he found Adelyn.

So, he settled down to wait, still pinning the boy with an arm and a leg and the threat of snapping teeth (though that last one wasn’t fully his doing). And, while the stranger escaped, he considered the boy for a long moment before asking a question, almost hesitant despite himself. “You seen a little girl in these woods? She’d be… eleven or twelve, brown hair, pale eyes.”

The kid had come from the forest. If he knew anything about his niece, she’d be in the forest, too. It was worth a shot.