Wolves Without Teeth :: [ Day 3 // Denali Oneshot ]

and I run from wolves
tearing into me without teeth

The palm trees only block out a fraction of the glow from the HO WOO spotlights up on the hill and even when she gets comfortable enough with an arm thrown over her eyes, the birds still seem to wake her every fifteen minutes or so. Although the swelling of her black eye is going down as it begins healing, her under eyes only seem to become more purple as the restless days wear on. At least if she can't sleep properly then she can't dream either. Surely no good would come of that.

She thought time would feel shorter here, but the nights stretch long and lonely as her ally dozes without difficulty and Denali... continues doodling the hours away with her own blood upon the dwindling stack of postcards. At some point after putting the finishing touches on a self-deprecating joke for Bette, she takes a break to work on the embroidery of her battle jacket. Six of the skulls making up the morbid mountain her lion stands upon are filled in — four white and two colored in red. (Faux. Sable.) She didn't know their names when she saw them die, but she won't forget them now. The other deaths are easier — (Carter. Yusei. Oliver. Larceny.) — killing wounds unseen and abstract within her mind.

(Deep breath.)

HO WOO is stitched onto one side of the jacket's collar and an awkward attempt at palm trees and a black lake are sewn upon one of the chest pockets below. A little fern grows out from a seam with a muddled blob huddled into it —

(Now breathe all of your worries out. Clear your mind.)

Biting her lip, Denali sets the jacket aside, unable to look away from the spot where she saw Minx earlier. He shouldn't be her concern; she didn't know him before all of this and it's not as if she knows him now. And yet, she can't help wondering if he has a sister at home who screams at the television each time someone raises a hand against him and cries when he's forced to fight back. She hopes he does. She hopes he doesn't. She tells herself not to hope anything at all for him.

Finally she gets to her feet and holds her breath as she creeps over to to where he sleeps. There is no breathing in. There is no breathing out. An undeniable feeling within her bones tells her that tonight is the space between many things. Yesterday Denali was allowed to think Minx harmless and to silently hope that the blades of his attackers might miss him, that he might have just a little more time before lighting up the sky, but when the sun rises she'll only be allowed to stand behind him if she's stabbing her knife into his back. With each cannon that sounds, she must deafen her heart until it can't even hear its own cries.

When she reaches him, curled up in a soft bed of ferns, she holds down the flash on her camera so as not to wake him and snaps a photo. There's enough light pollution to capture a washed out image, as if he is already a ghost in this place. She lies to herself and says that she doesn't know why she would take a picture of him, that she doesn't know why she would want to steal a piece of his soul to keep with her as she fights for the chance to go home. Maybe he'll wake up a killer, but the boy in this photograph will remain innocent.

Unable to hold her breath any longer, Denali tucks a postcard beneath his hand and turns her back on him, walking away as a new day begins to rise.