"This isn't a home. This is nowhere." He could not say he had been expecting her to appear, but his heightened senses had at least caught the telltale approach of feet. He lived now eternally on-edge, hyper-aware of each sound, of each smell, of each sensation. He lived on the edge itself, jutting branches and wilting grass giving way to impenetrable fog, lost to woods that may or may not have waited beyond. Another mist clung to his mind, a barrier of his own making, useless and crude, a psychic embankment that left him cold, numb, and dull. It had not helped.
JC's half-dressed body ached, fractured, bones broken again and again and again, each time he gave into something like anger or worry or frustration or fear. Jagged claw marks tore their way down the trunk of a tree, splintered open as if by lightning. The ground was torn in half by teeth. Nearby lay the remnants of a fire he had not tried to light in several days.
"I don't have many more answers right now than I did when we last spoke. I'm sorry. I tried to text you," JC said softly, stepping out into the open, gait lumbering. A hand came up to point.
"The trees are broken all down that way. I don't know how far I went the other night. But there were white flowers. Mountain Ash? Maybe not. Maybe just looked it. Enough to turn me around, I think. I'm not really completely aware during it," he explained, shrugging his shoulders.
He cleared his throat. "And you? How are you feeling? I'm...trying to work through this. So I can come back better. But...the longer it goes on, the angrier I get. It's all a circle."
"Then why torture yourself?" The question was no louder than a breath as it broke from her lips. He may see it differently. She was sure he thought that this self-opposed isolation was for her own good and the good of his pack, and, maybe in some twisted sort of way, she understood why he might want to vanish off the map. It had been easy for her to give herself over to the talons and the fangs. It had been far easier than she'd ever anticipated to abandon the duties that had curated the past handful of centuries of her life up until this point. Sure, it may have only been for a week, but she couldn't say she entirely hated the monster that she had become as much as it would've been easier if she did.
"I'm not having this conversation over text," She stated quietly, her voice fraying once more as her own fingers traced along the splintered section of the fractured tree. "I... I wrecked the house. The ground floor, anyhow, which I am sorry for, but..." Meena let out a shaky breath as she resisted any urge to fold back inside of herself. Instead, she stared vulnerably up at him. Her eyes encompassed the hundred emotions she had allowed herself to feel fully over the past few days, still swirling just beneath her skin as she slowly brought herself to admit, "I can't do this. I told you, Júlio César, that this isn't a solution that works for me." She had wanted to figure out whatever new hell they had found themselves in together, but he was so adamant about working through it by himself. "I've been in a relationship with a ghost before and I can't... I can't do it again." She'd spent centuries down the hall from a man she'd been driven to hate. She'd done separate bedrooms. They'd had entire wings to themselves under the same roof, never knowing when the other was passing through or going. And while the man before her was hardly her ex-husband- JC and Theodore hardly had one recognizable trait in common, nor would she ever think to compare the two of them- she had been in a relationship before with a person whom she barely ever saw, and JC choosing to now live in the remote parts of the woods in Echo Acres, wanting to communicate with her from afar over text rather than face to face, couldn't help, but bring old memories to the surface. Old wounds she had thought she'd long licked clean. "I've been wanting to be there for you, through this. To help each other through this. But, if you're adamant about working through it on your own out here and can't bear to even be in the same place as me, then... then where does that leave us?"
