the price of progress [ whitewolf ]

she never faced circumstances that have ever made her feel self-conscious, though the way those golden eyes stay locked on her, stronger than the boughs of trees in deadly storms, pearl swallows the urge to draw into herself. he echoes the word and pearl gives a tinkling, 'mmhmm, in response. she's a mix of emotions, eyes glimmering with fervent hope and joy, dimmed by a tight lipped smile that fails to radiate the same warmth. her pelt prickles beneath her own scrutiny ( regret was exhausting and not worth all that she was to find beneath the open sky! ) and her face grows hot as whitewolf appears almost amused at her offer to find him shelter. her head tilts only slightly as he urges her not to worry about him and despite the nicks and scrapes and the characteristic scar that he carries, pearl cannot help but to notice the lean muscle beneath his pelt and the healthy glean in his gaze. "are you sure? i-" the she-cat's rounded eyes widen even further and she looks around her as if being stalked before she stretched her neck slowly towards whitewolf, like kits sharing secrets in the dawn light, "i've been told there are some mean cats out here." not that she doubted whitewolf couldn't take care of himself! "with thorns for fangs and nettles for claws."

just thinking about the tales weaved in the twoleg gardens causes her heart to race with some odd mixture of fear and excitement. she never wanted to run into any of these fierce cats, but what she would give to see them in action, leaping through the treetops and racing through the bramble with power that could only be harnessed from lions and tiger themselves! if whitewolf doesn't believe her, she'll tell him a story of her own with a few added twists and turns -- nothing too far fetched though, she wouldn't want to be heard by them. she squints for good measure, peering over his shoulder and into the distance at .... nothing.

oh! and then, he asks about her housefolk. it isn't a question that she was expecting and pearl finds herself glancing fondly at the earth in remembrance. her housefolk had been nothing but nice to her from the time she was kitted to the time that she slipped outside of the doors and into the open despite her mother's yowls for her to come back. "can you see yourself facing the same things everyday? you wake to the same smells, you toss around the same feathers, and you hear the same stories." it wasn't a bad life, but she was terribly unsatisfied. "i wanted to discover things for myself and go places that no cat has ever seen." pearl wonders if she sounds crazy, but whitewolf has yet to scold or shun her so she continues, "my dad told me about something called mountains but he's never seen them. how could i know they were real?" or maybe his imagination was just as large as hers. after learning the gardens like the back of his paw, perhaps there was nothing left to do than to dream up fanciful places he would never venture to. that would explain quite a few things. "everything out here is so different and ...change is nice. i like change."

this change was not easy by no stretch of the imagination, but pearl knew that already, it had been for the better. no more white walls, no more velvet box, and no more guaranteed food but she was living. could she really save she was alive stuck in the confines of her twoleg nest? and soon as she's done, she looks to whitewolf from staring off into the sky, hoping to find some sort of approval or affirmation there in his gilded stare. "that isn't too much to want, right?"

// lord wolfscream✰ //