Dedicated to Valerie and Caitlin, two of the most un-speciesist people I know.
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Wolf Eyes
I come to you often. I do not know quite why, though, even now. Perhaps I am not meant to.
Your cage disgusts me, filthy and far too small for a creature like yourself. Could there ever be a crueler insult than a cage?
You are the color of shadow and mist and a silver sky. a creature out of myth and legend. A full-grown female wolf.
You would be a beautiful creature, were it not for the terrible sadness in your eyes and the cold steel that locks you in.
Humans seem so fond of this sort of thing, don't they, wolf? They've caged both you and I.
You pace, back and forth, back and forth, as if trying to remember your freedom. You don't sit or sleep, or howl, or even eat or drink. You just pace. And there is something infinitely sad in that pacing. It is perpetual, ceaseless, never-ending. You'll pace 'till the day you die.
You did not always live this way, though; I can see it in your eyes. You were born to a life of freedom, of earth and wind and rain; a life beautiful and brief as a mist on the mountains, a sparrow's zigzag flight. And instead you will spend it in a cage, an exhibit on display, a sight for tourists to ooh and ahh over.
A slight smile (it might well be a frown, for all the mirth it holds) turns up the corner of my lips. Yes, imprisonment is bitter after one has tasted freedom, is it not?
You look right at me for just a second, as if you could read my thoughts, with eyes fierce and brilliant as lanterns in the night - wild things, wolf eyes. And for a heartbeat, you halt in your pacing and we stand together, bound by shared hurt and separated by a hundred thousand years of speciesism and human evolution, so close and yet with the walls of the world between us.
Then your pacing resumes, and your eyes return to their focus point; a place past your cage, its bars, its walls, beyond to the forests and the mountains and the fields - the free world.
As do my own. For even now, even after HIM, I am still caged.
Would you have killed him, wolf, had you been in my position? I didn't have a choice, not really. I had to, or let him do to Mokuba what he had done to me.
And you know what that is. I can see it in your eyes.
I thought I had saved myself when he died - when I killed him - but in truth I only traded one cage for another. The master is gone, but the cage remains. It has changed and turned unseen, but still it remains. It's my memories now, and myself. Ironic, is it not; there's no one who can imprison you as well as yourself.
It all hurts, but the loneliness is the worst, isn't it? The hunger and the rage and the abuse wear down your soul, but the loneliness can kill it faster than all of them together. Living alone day in and day out, always alone. You have nothing and no one left to you - they tore it all away.
We're both alone, wolf. Both hated, both alone....
Death (real, physical death) would be a mercy. You lost all you ever had that really mattered. Your life has become a wasteland, rolling on and on into infinity. Better you die than keep living this way. There is a kind of freedom in dying, or so I have heard.
And still you survive. God knows why, but you do. Perhaps it is the same reason I did for all those long years, the reason I still do.
It makes me hate them, though. For caging you, for killing you in every sense that mattered. I hate them because I know what it's like to be caged and killed.
My rage, though never really gone (such hatred never is), returns. They fucked you over good, didn't they, wolf? They stole your freedom, and all you might have been.
What gives them the right? Do they think just because you're not human they can lock you in a cage and leave you to die?! Do they think you're too stupid to comprehend the insult?!
Nothing, nothing deserves to be caged.
I can see the pain in your eyes. Eyes more compassionate and intelligent than those of most humans I have known.
You belong in your prison no more than I belong in mine, but there is no help for either of us. We'll remain in our little personal hells. We'll live here, we'll die here. If we aren't really dead already.
I would free you, wolf. I would, but I can't. Fuck, I cannot even free myself.
~*FINIS*~