There’s this pervasive scent of death, and Delya doesn’t know how to handle that. The steward doesn’t know how to help. At a loss. That’s all, at a loss as she sits beside Seamus. The man had gone quiet, but he breathed still. She’d always been too light to do any hunting, too fragile to deal the necessary damage, so she laid beside the shadow grin. It’s a settling that she hopes will settle her own churning stomach, and a moment that she needs to take. Surveying the situation, taking a careful look at the carnage that had befallen the group itself. What a strange, strange thing. What a strange place for them to now all be in.
She takes another long moment to be sure that her aunt’s mate (her uncle, she decides then, her uncle, this would be as good a reason to make them family as any) is breathing. The bear appeared to have gotten two of the brothers, but Delya is trying to ground herself in the moment. She’s trying so hard to get herself back into her head, and so she sits. It’s best not to approach the situation before her… she has no place in it. It’s something that she doesn’t have any experience with, so she looks to the matriarchs she recognizes. The figures that Delya knows and respects. Alice and Rhae—they would know what to do. They always knew what to do. For now, she would watch and she would wait, and she would quiet her nervous energy by taking to clean the bloody wound at the back of her uncle’s neck.
Alice sits victoriously next to the bear, but she realizes that there’s a loss of life around her. She doesn’t dwell… and… and yet everyone else does. She knows that there are feelings of grief all around, and the grey female is spattered with the blood of the creature that lays slain before them. It’s huge. It’s massive, and Alice takes a moment to clear the red spatters from her gaze and watch the group as they react accordingly. The clockwork angel has always had her hardest moments at times like these. She doesn’t feel in the same way they do, and that leaves her carefully removed. That’s the way she’s always been, of course—carefully removed. She turns her head away, peering now at Seamus.
It is not Alice’s say to dwell on the living or the dead, as it’s not her show. The mates of the two slain by the bear are the ones that should be allowed to steer the process, but moments pass before she remembers—Neirin sleeps alone. The only one that sleeps alone, and the clockwork angel moves to look at his broken body. It’s clinical, watching carefully, moving with her ticking paws and rusting joints. All this rust, and there’s nothing she can do for them. Certainly not for Ifrit, not for his daughter and his mate that now have their initial moments of striking grief. The song of those that worry about the souls departed rising to whatever lay above them… fair enough.
Her eyes flicker to the alpha of the pack, looking for what to do next. What the next step should be in the field of mass carnage, what on earth they should be doing. Moving the bodies is among the first things, putting them somewhere that was more… fitting. More fitting than here, where everything had all happened. There was the bear, the bear that shouldn’t be wasted, a fresh kill when there were so many mouths to feed. It wasn’t healthy to leave them all so… close together. There would be time and space for everything, but this was one she wouldn’t know how to handle. Yes, for now she stands, decorated by the mark of the hunter, to peer at the man who had no one to mourn for him. Oddly detached as ever, the clockwork angel just breathes.
alice & delya
the clockwork angel & the russian dancer
all we've got is this family unbroke |