he looked out

                               from the centre of the earth

                                         through the                f i r e

                                                   he was becoming

Independent Original Character for AMC’s The Walking Dead

             Gaze falls on his friend that he’s known forever it seems like. So much adoration and trust go into their bond that Jake doesn’t know what he would do without his friend. With the impending war Jacoby has come to terms with losing people, but there are a couple he isn’t sure he would survive losing. Sawyer is one of them. “Promise me we’ll stick together, Saw. If shit goes sour we need to be close to each other.”

For Sawyer, going to war was like going home. A home whose walls he had spent years trying to forget, whose front door he’d hoped to keep locked behind him forever. His hands remembered the shape and weight of assault rifles better than dirt. Better than water. 

He tried not to resent the advantage his combat experience gave him. It didn’t feel like an advantage so much as a target on his back for the others to pin their hopes and expectations on. Especially for quiet side-missions like this, the kind that demanded precision work in a mine field of variables. All the while worrying about the man who had insisted -- forced his way into coming with him. 

Feeling Jake’s unease at his side, he busied himself checking the mag to gauge the rounds he already knew were there. It was not reassuring so much as it was grounding. Familiar. A deep breath before plunging into unknown depths. 

“I hear you, brother,” he said quietly, casting his friend a measured look. “But if anything happens to me -- if I go down -- you need to promise me you’ll stay focused and keep moving.”

Everyone is counting on us, he didn’t need to add. And I’m counting on you.

The World Will Know

His hand – steadied by a lifetime of practice – drew a sharpening stone down the length of his blade. Each smooth glide scattered sparks into the air and in the way only a swordsman could understand it sang to his blood. Arthur listened to the sound of the camp stirring in even the quiet of the night: the low murmur of voices as soldiers spoke among themselves, the tamed crackle of the camp fires, the grate of steel as men readjusted their armors. His eyes lifted over the fire to his companion. He and Sawyer had known one another since they were little more than children practicing with wooden swords and dreaming of dragons of their own. Tonight his expression was distant and his blue eyes were distracted. He followed his line of sight to a silent young woman.

Arthur interrupted the quiet. “Is that her?” He had heard the rumors. The king had leashed the most fearsome of hounds to the throne. Those whispers had reached across the sea and far from home but even he hadn’t paid them much heed. Except he would soon learn after the completion of his assignment two months later her presence wasn’t a thing of rumors. Arthur had trouble reconciling all the hushed whispers surrounding her with the young woman herself. She was smaller – more slender, more elegant – than he had thought she would be. He had expected someone as intimidating and commanding in appearance as she was rumored to be in strength. She however looked more like a woman of the courts than the battlefield.

In the three days since he had landed he had not once seen her with a dragon he did not recognize. No hulking creature as tall as the mountains themselves with obsidian scales impervious to the sharpest blades and wings as long as the tallest tree leered over her shoulder with pearl white teeth bared. Cinders the Demon was nowhere to be found. “What is she like?” Arthur tossed the sharpening stone out and watched with an amused smile as one of the dragons woke from her nap and began to snap at her new plaything. He kept a close eye on her to make sure she didn’t try to swallow the stone as he sheathed his sword. A single-noted whistle drew his attention and he watched with some surprise as the dragon swept past him and approached the woman.

Her mouth moved and she offered her open palm to the wild dragon. Even though the creature couldn’t have been more than a child in relation to its species it towered over her. The wyvern cocked its head and then to his surprise dropped the stone into her open palm. On her haunches she sat and watched the woman as she took her massive scaled claw into one hand and began sharpening her talons. “She’s good with them,” he remarked before looking back to his friend. “Are they all like that with her?” For as friendly as the small dragon might be her blood was still that of the wilds. Those sort came and went as they pleased and none could convince them to do anything they did not want to do themselves.

As difficult as it would have been to believe two months ago, the Regiment resumed a normal pulse in the wake of its new arrival. 

Veata Aydelotte and her massive fire-breathing demon Cinders had arrived like a desert storm in the night, swift and without warning. The tremours they sent rippling through the ranks had echoed across the continent, across oceans, igniting the empire with gossip and speculation unlike anything it had known in years. It seemed impossible then to think the strange, inscrutable woman and her hulking dragon could ever become a commonplace presence amongst them. Even Cinders’ frequent disappearances took on a rhythm of normalcy, despite the breach in protocol. General Gannon had answered his superiors’ criticism about a lack of discipline with a glib shrug, inviting them to “wrangle in the beast” at their own leisure. For his part, he was content to let the dragon come and go as he pleased. Few were in a position to argue. 

But it was not the massive creature that held Sawyer’s fascination. His attention was invariably drawn to the woman commanding it, pulled like gravity in her wake whenever she crossed his line of sight. Perhaps ‘command’ was not the right word for it. She no more commanded Cinders than one might a mountain, or the wind itself; rather they seemed to complement, even complete each other. There was an unspoken balance between them, an affinity and mutual respect that was almost preternatural. 

Sawyer spent an undue amount of time thinking about it. About her. Wondering if her bond with Cinders is what granted her such an uncanny way with other dragons, even the wild ones that seemed to gravitate towards their camp. He had been raised by renowned dragon hunters, instilled with a profound respect for them that even some of his fellow riders found excessive, but he felt dwarfed by her ability to charm the beasts. Even the wild ones that normally kept their distance had been unusually curious and...friendly of late. Friendly enough to prance through camp as if they were Imperial mounts, free to help themselves to any treats and playthings lying around. Gannon found it a nuisance, of course, but it kept the riders amused in their downtime. With war brewing on the horizon, there were precious few other things to occupy the mind.

He had almost forgotten that Arthur would have little way of knowing that. Having just returned from an extended assignment, his friend was relatively uninformed about the latest recruit and her legendary monster. 

Roused from thought, Sawyer smiled thinly at his boyhood companion, now fellow soldier, and nodded. “That’s her. Not quite what you pictured, I expect.” He paused, watching as the whetstone was commandeered by one of the wild dragons making a home of their camp and brought to the woman in question. He had seen similar offerings to her before, but Arthur doubtless had not. 

His question earned a shrug laced with feigned indifference. “Seems that way. I think she is more comfortable with them than people.” 

Ezekiel 37:13 || Daryl & Sawyer

Baffled by the sudden bashful and awkward natured displayed by the young girl, Daryl wasn’t quite sure how to react to the curtsey. Weren’t ever a time where he encountered a woman to be so abashedly polite to him in such a manner. Most women found him STUBBORNLY charming and callous– by accident. Never intentioned as Daryl wasn’t one to go out of his way to chase skirts. Sighing heavily with a quick roll of his eyes, he caught Sawyer’s shit-eating grin and waved him off, following along after little Lucy.

As the group entered the hotel, the bounty hunter’s prior reservations were tested. It looked like a house of horrors with all the blood soaked wood and scattered footprints SULLYING the sparse rugs. This yarn Lucy spun seemed very much accurate the further into the building they continued. Low groans echoed eerily through the corridor of the second floor, and for a moment Daryl wasn’t sure if the doc was still inside working on whatever fate the poor bastard met.

But the pungent smell that smacked him full force in the gut, rendered the bounty hunter still, nose wrinkled and hand clamped over his mouth. The stench was vastly more putrid than back at Sawyer’s farm and it CONCERNED him that maybe all the shit he’d warned about maybe true. “If they ain’t already. Christ, ain’t no window open to let that shit air out?” He asked aloud to no one in particular, not even feigning to stifle the filter on his vocabulary. Daryl was damned sure this girl heard a few more slurs than he’d conjured in the last few minutes.

Already he was feeling UNEASY about the situation and quite close to calling their march through the hotel to a screeching halt. If what Lucy spoke about were true, then Sawyer and himself were stuck in a building with a few of the undead.

As they neared the door, Sawyer felt his hand unconsciously drifting to the revolver holstered at his hip. Suddenly he wasn’t so sure those were moans of pain, or indeed even the moans of a live human being. His nerves sharpened to a knifepoint, keeping one finger poised over the trigger while the other reached for the doorknob and twisted. 

Doctor Clayton turned to give him a bleary-eyed glare. A fat and squat little troll of a man, the doctor was perched precariously on a wooden stool next to a bed where one of two men still lived. Barely. The motionless figure under a white sheet across the room was likely the other, less fortunate visitor to town. 

“Whatever the fuck your emergency is,” Clayton growled, apparently sober for once, “it can fuckin’ wait. I got one dead patient over there not ten minutes cold, an’ another one ‘bout to join ‘im.” 

Lucy coughed nervously beside Sawyer. The farmer raised an eyebrow, wondering if there was genuine concern under Clayton’s belligerence. He looked as though he hadn’t slept in days, and his white shirt was soaked through with sickly, blackish blood. His arms were similarly coated from elbow to fingertip, each hand occupied by a surgical tool. The man moaning and writhing in his care was about as close to death as one could get without being tossed in a grave. Sunken eyes, hollowed cheeks, dripping with sweat and reeking as though decay had already set in. The source was likely the enormous wound gaping in his neck and shoulder, black at the edges and weeping black, sludgy discharge. The sight of it nearly made Sawyer gag on the spot. He couldn’t believe Clayton was sitting that close to it and still conscious, never mind cutting away at its rotted trim.

Clearing her throat again, Lucy motioned towards the bounty hunter. “Uh, Doc? This gentleman here is --”

The doctor turned his haggard, red-rimmed eyes towards her. “Girl, if I wanted a titless bag o’ bones naggin’ me ‘bout shit I don’t care ‘bout, I’da stayed married to that whore from Montreal. Now I sent you to get water, so git an’ don’t come back again without it.” 

Lucy seemed to wilt a little in place, but scampered off practically before the doc finished barking at her. Sawyer bristled at her treatment, and used the spike of anger to fuel his words.

“Look,” he snapped, “my friend here an’ I have had a bit of an odd night to say the least. We rode in looking for some help, an’ --”

The wounded man lurched suddenly, as if life spasmed stubbornly through his limbs. His eyes seemed to focus back into the present, locking on Sawyer and Daryl with feverish zeal. 

“We killed ‘em,” he rasped, insensate to the doc’s placating hand on his chest. “Me an’ Gibbs, we killed those fuckin’ Indians ourselves. Shot ‘em all down like dogs. They was dead, we made sure ‘fore we went through their stuff. But they came back in the night an’ followed us, came through the trees like...like fuckin’ ghosts...just...they was dead, I know they was dead, but they just kept coming’ --”

Clayton turned another sour look in Sawyer’s direction. “See? You gone and unsettled my patient.”

“ -- have to burn ‘em,” the man rambled on deliriously, sinking back down to his pillows. “Even Gibbs o’er there, he’ll be back too. Fuckin’ Indian curse. Devil’s curse. Burn ‘em all, or they’ll keep comin’ back...”

While the doctor tried to calm him, Sawyer turned to Daryl with a pensive frown. “Any o’ that make a lick o’ sense to you?”

From The Shadows

It was a quiet night in Boston, much like it always was. Kyleigh was sitting on the edge of an old dock, her feet swinging in the air as she listened to soft sounds of the water lapping against the shore underneath her. It was where she always ended up after a day of working at the diner. The library where she loved to go and read after work had closed two hours ago, so this was her way of trying to wind down and quite the wolf inside. Stars were shinning bright in the sky above and all was peaceful. Her eyes were closed until an unfamiliar scent hit her nose and instantly she was on guard. It wasn’t like the normal stench of human or even the smell of the salt in the water, and after she looked around in the dark, she was satisfied with not seeing anything out of the ordinary.

A few minutes later she decided it was time for her to head home and started making her way back to her car. That odd scent still lingered in the air and it did make her put a little bit of a faster step in her walk. The fact that she couldn’t identify what it was had her a little on edge, and she pulled her jacket closer to her as she walked through the empty parking lot. Normally nothing scared her, but that smell had the wolf all stirred up and the moment she thought she heard footsteps behind her, she stopped. Of the course the sound stopped too, so maybe it was just her overactive imagination getting the best of her. Her Aunt had always warned her not to go down there at night by herself, but really what did she have to fear? She was half a monster with fangs and claws, so in her mind nothing could hurt her.

Something like a low growl came to her ears and she spun around to find nothing there. Okay Ky, get it together. Get in your car and go home, you’re just tired. Rolling her eyes, she continued moving towards her car, completely ignoring the small warning bells that were going off in her head. Nothing was there. Nothing could be. At least that was what she kept telling herself.

@anarchyoutthere

The beast was smart, coming to a city like this. Tracking his scent was almost impossible with the urban chaos obscuring Sawyer’s senses. The lights, the noise, the smells, the closeness of everything; it was suffocating. There was no room to think, to fresh air to clear his head, and he was fast running out of time. If the beast’s habit of avoiding full moons held true, another half-breed would be dead before morning. He had been too slow, too stupid to save the first five. Only found them on the evening news like everyone else did, washed up along a river bank or floating in some harbour. He hadn’t seen the pattern, couldn’t make sense of the beats’s movements. 

His family sent him, amongst other reasons, because he was the best tracker. So they said, anyway. But this wasn’t the Alaskan wilderness. This wasn’t a mountain forest or the wide open tundra. This was a sprawling nest of human decay, and he was vastly out of his depth. It had taken him awhile to set aside his pride and preconceptions, to recognize that tracking a beast like this required more than a good sense of smell and direction. It took days of pouring over maps and piecing together a rough timeline for him to see it. Water. Waning crescent. Beyond, that, he had nothing to go on but the victims themselves. Nothing connected them aside from the fact that they were all half-Lycan, half-human. Different ages, different skin colours, different sexes. Different towns. If not for the scant network called Lycan word-of-mouth, he wouldn’t even know which towns to check.

Boston was by far the biggest he'd been to thus far. With an ocean on one side and handful of rivers carving through it, he had spent the last three days stalking every bridge, port, and canal in sight. The only lead he had to go on was a diner, where a couple of Lycans might be employed. One of them was reportedly a half-breed, though nobody had been able to give him a definitive answer. Nobody could even guess which diner he should start with. He had no choice but to check as many as he could while there was still time. By his calculations, the beast was planning to strike in the next day or two. Perhaps he already had. 

Ah. There you are. It was faint, like distant starlight, but the scent of Lycan blood -- thankfully unspilled -- pulled Sawyer’s attention towards the harbour. The stench of low tide and sea water made it difficult to tell for sure, but he was fairly certain it was a female. Very likely only a half-breed. Any other details would have to wait until they were face to face. He wasted no more time in following the lead, ducking down a couple of side alleys before reaching the parking lot by the pier. He only just made out a young woman’s shape under the light of a street lamp when he felt it. A nerve-like awareness of another presence, his presence, shooting up his spine like an electric current. Before he smelled him, even heard him, the awareness made him pivot sharply and alter his course. Now he was on intercept trajectory.

The beast moved fast for one so large. He’d had considerable practice, before and after becoming a psychopathic menace to his own people, whether he saw them as such or not. But Sawyer had grown up with him, and knew the way he moved. The way he thought. He knew how solid the beast’s bulk would be when his shoulder slammed into it, and how much force it would take to knock him off balance.

He felt the beast’s weight shift upon impact, staggering to stay upright with a surprised snarl of irritation. A thick, shaggy arm curved with muscle lashed out, tipped with claws that could disembowel him with ease. Ready for it, Sawyer jerked backwards out of reach and circled around to bar the beast’s path to the woman in the parking lot. He made out a gleam of black eyes and bared fangs, slick with saliva.

“Run,” Sawyer barked, barely turning his head to acknowledge her. 

The beast roared and charged forward, a shadow that light from the street lamps couldn’t seem to touch. Claws scraped on the pavement, scattering chunks of asphalt as the shadow rushed in for a killing blow. Sawyer dropped to a ready crouch, feeling his own inner wolf bristling to the surface. Clothes ripped from his shifting form, bones cracked through the transition, and by the time the beast slammed into him, it was not a man but a creature lying in wait for it.

As Atlas said to Zeus when he made him hold the world on his shoulders as a punishment (via provst)