Anchor On My Chest

I

t is easy to imagine this moment when you've recreated it in your mind a thousand times before the past year. Fickle and cruel, a year can be. Not long enough to mourn, and too short to make apologies. Rigor mortis takes less. They're lucky. The barest itch of spring has already begun to crawl beneath his pelt when he emerges from the lowest warren. Ostara lays her head on Rionnach, warmth on a still water and still he craves the prickling chill of a winter like the one he was born to.

Gingerly, he steps from the dank cover and shakes his body beneath the shimmer of light through crown-shy trees. Kazuya, the last living Procession, has never known a scent more pure... It catches him on the wind so sudden he thinks maybe something has shifted from the sea. It shakes him so suddenly he is no longer sleep walking. For the first time, he feels wide open. Every sense, on edge.

The scent takes him to the quiet reaches of the Mirror Lake. He shouldn't follow... the dredges and ghosts of his past are cruel and misleading, and nothing could prepare his heart for a trick of the wind on his nose. The scent, though, coats his throat like a syrup. The sweet, phantom promise of him... that when he stumbles upon the sleeping body of a boy he almost distrusts even the image of it.

He wants to weep. He wants to tear in to it. He wants to clean the very fallows beneath him because it does not deserve to embrace what he so brazenly craved. He shakes his head and approaches, like a hare sound and silent of foot til he stands above the sleeping form of him, caged on either side of Kazuya's massive haunches. The black wolf lowers his nose behind the boy's soft ear and breathes him, just a while before he breathes out to speak.

"Have I taught you nothing, sweet boy? Slumbering like a fawn in the open," he whispers, the barest of his deep voice above the sound of the wind through the grass and the trees. "If this is a dream, it is a very good dream. Wake slow."

He's ready for a struggle, but Alexei wont get far.

@Alexei