Disclaimer: I do not claim ownership over Wolf's Rain, any cannon characters who may make an appearance or the Wolf's Rain universe. Any characters who are created in this story are strictly figments created for this story.
Notes: This story takes place after the conclusion of the anime Wolf's Rain and in the modern suburban time period.
I took out the songs for this chapter to get it up faster, however, if you would like me to continue putting songs in then I will.
Chapter Four
Beware of the Boys
"Where are we?" Cailean grumbled. A bird twittered in the overhead canopy. Trapped within the emerald leaves that glowed from the golden light of a high noon sun, the sound echoed as if produced from every direction. It hadn't been the first time he had heard a bird in the forest, and yet his skin crawled as he glanced over his shoulder yet again. It only served to remind him of how vulnerable he was; how out of his element this wilderness was from the one he had been pulled out of.
"Would you just relax? We're almost to the river," Tate replied. She paused long enough to tug a rubber band off of her wrist and pull her hair out of her face—long, brown and straight; it reminded him somehow of 'liver chestnut', which he had heard people use before to describe a similar shade.
She was the contrast to him—vivid, colorful. Even her hair caught the sun and held on to it, like the cut facet of a greedy gem. While she seemed neat and tidy, everything about him was scruffy. He cut his hair with his knife, she probably had a barber. He had seen his own hair in the shop windows not broken or plastered with pink and yellow foreclosure notices. He hadn't known what color to call it because everything in the city looked grey to him, even his own translucent reflection.
"Ash brown," Neil had said. "Maybe a little black, too. Maybe we can get you a mirror sometime." They didn't keep mirrors in the lair for the same reason that all of the dishes were made of plastic.
Jay had a bad temper.
He caught the slightest whiff of water, then, and the gentlest murmurs of a rippling river crept against the edge of his senses. Even the dirt path of the game trail Tate had picked up changed in texture from a dusty feeling to the slight firmness of wet soil.
"And that would be the river?" he wondered out loud, though the question was more to himself than Tate. She glanced back at him, but didn't bother answering.
"You look like one," she said. Her voice caught him off of his guard, but not so much as what she had said. Cailean furrowed his brow and scratched absently at the stiff feeling in his shoulder.
"One what?"
"Someone from the city," she replied. Cailean lifted a brow, prompting her to continue and when she caught the expression she hurried to explain. "I've never seen one before. I mean, the town has its own power station and everything, so we don't need to have anyone come in from the city. Not that we'd want them to any anyways. Dad says they're all troublemakers…" Tate let the thought hang in the air and Cailean shifted uncomfortably.
"He's probably right. I don't think I've met one who has good intentions," he added dryly. Tate paused at a break in the trail, where the road diverged. One side slithered away into the forest, the other twisted away and disappeared into waist-high shrubs.
"Yah, me neither," Tate said, and set off down the forested trail.
There was someone out there in the wide world who once found something interesting—that every human beings' fingerprints are unique to them and them alone.
He pressed his hands into the clay, shaping, molding it to try to find something recognizable in its midst. What would Jay like for a gift? He was a man who looked for the use in everything, so perhaps an item that would be useful to him would make a suitable present? And so he set about to molding his plate, leaving his little fingerprints in the colorless dough.
They say that fingerprints wear off with age, as though they slowly forget who they are, who they're meant to be. Like people, time wears them down until the ridges vanish; until they're smooth, flat and undefined.
He waited for it to dry, painted it with his silly scribbles and signed his name with a flourish. If Cailean could make Jay proud with his art, then so could he, right?
Caleb clutched his art to his chest and tapped lightly on the office door. When there was no response he pushed on it gently, sliding it open to see Jay sitting at his desk, his face folded in his hands. An envelope sat, freshly opened, at his elbow, the contents spread before him. But he wasn't looking at the papers. He wasn't looking at anything.
Caleb crept forward, knowing he should run. "Jay, sir?" He was just tall enough to see over the desk and read the heading line: Final Notice.
"Not now, Caleb."
"I just wanted to give this to you." He settled the lumpy clay plate onto the desk, scooting it forward amicably. Jay didn't bother to look up at the work he had done, and Caleb felt his heart sink. It wasn't Cailean's art, and it wasn't nearly as good. Jay wouldn't look at it—Jay wouldn't look at anything he had done. Caleb frowned, backing up to the doorway to pause in its frame. "Happy father's day, daddy" he murmured, and slipped away from the room.
Imprisoned by the knowledge that he could not afford to give his family the home they deserved, Jay peered at the gift from between his fingers. He was a man of unfathomable strength, unbridled power, unwavering respect.
Which is why he could not have let Caleb see him cry.
Jay reached forward with trembling fingers to touch the rough edge of the makeshift little plate. Tiny fingerprints glowed in the dim light, trapped in the artwork for as long as it remained, like a little imprint of Caleb's innocence.
Jay smiled.
"I'm kind of jealous." Tate was the first to prompt conversation, as per the usual. Cailean pushed through the last of the scrub and glanced at her, eyes narrowing in contemplation of what she had said.
"Of what?" he ventured cautiously.
"Your eyes." He felt his tongue slide into a series of slippery knots, his jaw working to form an answer to what she had said. She heard his silence and turned back, unabashed to stare him in the face. He glowered at her to hide his confusion, hoping she had not seen his uncertainty. "No one in our town has blue eyes. There's green and hazel. Oh, yah, lots of brown." Tate harrumphed noisily as she picked a rock off of the riverbank and hopped onto it, catching her balance quickly lest she splash into the fresh mountain river.
Cailean paused at the edge of the water and stared down at it, at once alarmed and intrigued.
"It's so clear," he mumbled, reaching down to brush his fingers into the chilly depths.
"Yah, most of the rivers are like that," Tate said.
"Not where I come from." She stopped in her tracks, and backtracked on her path to pause and kneel down beside him on the riverbank.
"What's it like?" she asked. He turned to stare at her, his eyes blank as he waited for her to clarify. "The city, I mean. What's the city like?"
"Oh, that? It's dirty," Cailean said, turning back to the river. "Everything's dirty. The buildings, the water, the people." Even the art. He should come to expect that, though. If art was meant to reflect the people who made it then he should come to recognize the fact that none of the art in a city of unclean people could be anything but.
"That sounds terrible. Why would you want to go back?"
"There are people there…" he didn't bother to finish.
"Who love you?" she asked.
"No, they're my family." Tate furrowed her brow and stared at him incredulously.
"I don't get it. Isn't family supposed to love you?" Cailean turned to meet her eyes—wide, brown, a naiveté unsurpassed by anyone he had met in the untamed depths of the city. For a moment she seemed to stare at him through a tunnel, from a world beyond the roots of a tree, in a thought lost to memory. Then she was there again, on the bank of the river, waiting for his answer.
"The people who love you aren't always the same as your family."
There were people in the house, and they weren't the people who belonged.
Cailean could feel it in the most remote corners of his mind and in the prickling sensation of his hair rising on end. Then came the strange scent of tobacco smoke and gunpowder.
They were playing cops and robbers in the back of the shop with Neil just barely finishing the code to crack the safe when the front door opened, bringing with it the foreign smell and a tension that crackled along the ceiling and followed in their waking steps. Their heavy boots resounded on the hardwood floors, giving off the soft creak of new leather and shoe polish.
"Isn't the shop closed?" Neil asked, dropping the stethoscope they had robbed from a back drawer, thinking it had looked like an ideal prop for breaking into a bank.
"I don't know, let's check it out," Cailean said, following the trail of curiosity that lead him to the back door to the shop's storeroom.
"You guys, we should stay here," Caleb interjected. He spread his hands across their makeshift bank safe and slid behind it, as though the cardboard box between him and the door would do him much good in the event of an emergency.
"You're such a pussy," Neil scoffed. Cailean glowered at him and kicked him in the shin. "Ow! What was that for?" Neil snapped, clutching at his leg.
"Jay said not to use words like that."
"Well, maybe he shouldn't act like one," Neil countered.
"Come on, let's go," Cailean said, grabbing Neil by the sleeve and tugging him through the swinging door.
Outside in the shop, surrounded by a colorful array of blues, reds and pinks and the sweet fragrance of flower pollen, Jay stood by a group of men, speaking hotly and gesturing widely. The men leaned in, interested in, as though interested in his broad gesticulation. The smell of tobacco smoke and gunpowder was stronger out here, out competing and overpowering the perfume of the flowers and it was starting to make Cailean feel a bit dizzy.
And then one of the men seemed to separate himself from the conversation, like a radio that had suddenly received a different signal, turning his attention on the two boys huddled by the store room door.
"He's seen us!" Neil cried and ducked back through the door. But Cailean stood, locking eyes with his opponent, feeling the challenge in that stare. There was something musky about his smell—something feral that did not belong in the business suit that did little to trap him inside its threads.
He was jostled by something, breaking his concentration on the man, and Neil pulled him back inside the safety of the back room.
"Are you crazy?" he snapped at Cailean. "What were you thinking? Those guys are bad news." Cailean glanced up at Neil and blinked, trying to steady himself back into reality.
"You think so?"
"Yah, but don't worry. Jay will take care of them. He always does." But from that day the smell of tobacco smoke and gunpowder lingered, like the sweat on your sheets after a bad dream. In the house, in the shop—wherever Cailean went, somehow he could still smell it.
"Look! There's the road!" Tate broke into a jog, jostling through underbrush and young saplings to reach the path. It was little more than a dirt trail, not even fit for someone to bike on, but it was better than the unpleasant trail blazing that they had undertaken for the past few hours after she had lost the road.
Or the road had lost her, as she claimed.
"Go where no one else has gone and leave a trail," she had chirped happily to his disgruntled aching. "Or something like that."
At least he could agree with part of her theory. If they were going to go where no one else had gone, it would be best to leave a trail. That way someone could find their mangled corpses and bring them back.
Now Tate hovered on the trail, looking one way and the next like a broken wind up toy. Finally, she sighed and turned back to him, spreading her hands out wide.
"Well, I know that if we go to the right we'll get to the town within an hour," she said.
"And the left?" Tate shrugged, scrunching her mouth on one side as she furrowed her brow into a disgruntled little 'v' shape.
"I've never gone that way before. But listen—maybe they'll understand if we go back to the town? They're nice people. If I explain, maybe they'll even help you get back to the city?"
"Not a chance," he snapped, turning on his heel to start down the path to the left.
"No, wait! We can figure something out!" Tate cried, jogging lightly behind him to catch up.
Cailean opened his mouth to tell her exactly what he thought of her plan, but the words never found their way out. A low growl filled the forest, and he stopped so suddenly that she bounced off of his back and stumbled, nearly falling in the process of regaining her compromised balance.
"What is it?" she asked, watching him quirk his head to the side and listen intently to the woods. It came again, this time louder and given strength by the rise of more than one voice. It was all the warning they got before the dogs leapt from the brush, teeth catching the last dappled rays of sunlight.
Note: I hope you guys enjoyed Chapter 4! I'll continue answering some of the questions asked in the next chapter as well!