Into the Wild, }Open{

[Keira]

The alleyway was not well-lit, and shadows reigned. The cat’s eyes flashed a brilliant gold. She watched from the shadows, her claws flexing in and out. Her unblinking eyes settled on nothing and yet on everything. She was the hunter, she was hunting her prey. Sleek muscles slid underneath her grey-spotted coat. She could feel them tense as she did, her brain sending signals through her body, telling it when to strike. Her ears plastered forward, her tail low to the ground, the cat wiggled her butt slightly, waiting for the correct moment to strike.

The leaf fluttered in the wind.

The cat, taking that movement as a signal, struck quickly. She pounced, sending the leaf up into the air. In the darkened alleyway, her silver pelt shone in the sun. She looked like a kitten then, as mindless as any other young cat when playing with anything that moved. She wanted to be a kitten again, careless, free. The cat watched the leaf flutter back down to the ground, and let an all-too-human sigh escape her cat-like maw. Nothing was never as it seemed.

Not even hunger. The cat’s stomach growled and the tip of her tail twitched in embarrassment. She stretched quickly, and gave the leaf a last glance before padding toward an open door. The alleyways had many open doors, but the cat knew her way around every alleyway, and knew the doors she should approach and the ones she should steer clear of. This was one of the ones she could approach. She walked into the back of a restaurant, where a kindly old lady—she had no idea if the lady was human or something else—was cooking. The Egyptian Mau-colored cat mewed for attention. She got it, and, only five minutes later she exited the doorway with a plump cooked fish.

The cat raced to the wild tree line that would house her from prying eyes. She leapt gracefully into the branches of a low-lying tree, and settled down to eat her fish. It was her fish, and she was hungry. Anyone who’d come to steal it would sorely wish they hadn’t.

[Noah]

Noah had taken to sleeping in boxes. It was not glamorous or comfortable, but it kept him dry (mostly). He always kept one ear perked into the wind, listening for any sound. He'd drifted into a lazy snooze for only fifteen minutes before the dancing footfalls of another feline stirred in the dark alley. He raised his head from his large paws and peeked out from his box. Another werecat, this one more domestic in appearance than he, was playing with a leaf. He might have mistaken her for a regular cat, but her smell was distinctly were. He ducked back into his shelter as she darted past and into an open doorway.

He could smell the wonderful aromas drifting out of that place, and every once in a while he'd have the good fortune to pick a freshly rejected meal out of the garbage before anyone noticed. But he'd never gone inside. He was too large to play the domestic role...

A moment later, the werecat reappeared with a delicious, cooked fish dangling from her maw. Noah glared silently from his box and contemplated following. Couldn't hurt. He'd done nothing interesting all day.

His large paws allowed him to creep soundlessly after her, keeping to the shadows. He struck out across the street in a silvery blur and, in moments, had scaled the wall. He spotted the other werecat in a nearby tree, licking her prize meal. He continued to glower, his thick tail flicking back and forth. After a moment's pause, he leaped nimbly into a nearby tree branch and bounced from limb to limb. When he came close enough, he pounced, sinking his teeth into the prey and bumping heads with the Egyptian mau. He sprung away, into a separate tree. He lay the fish down and, with his hooked claws keeping it in place, pulled a strip of flesh away. He ate it quickly, growing under his breath and glaring at the cat. He knew that it wasn't his place to steal her meal. It was petty, cruel even. She was likely just as starving as he. But she had an advantage, looking small and cute instead of large and deadly. Noah wasn't even as large as his breed could come, but he still didn't pass as a domestic cat...

"Sorry, finder's keepers," he cajoled, licking the scales from his fangs. "I'm sure the human back there would give you another one. She wouldn't look twice at me before grabbing a butcher knife."

ooc~ sorry he's such a jerk, feel free to retaliate >_< biff 'im on the head

[Keira]

If it weren’t for the fish, she would have smelled him. She would have been able to save her meal. But she hadn’t thought something so large could come at her so fast. And, when he did come at her, she had been frightened. She had been terrified.

See, she was accustomed to only humans—or humanoids, it didn’t matter much—being the only specimens she worked around. She rarely, if ever, saw another werecat, and in those rare instances in which she did see a werecat, it skirted out of her sight as soon as she could catch a glance of it. Therefore, because, though rogues were common in these parts, she hadn’t realized that another werecat would come out of nowhere to steal her catch. No, it wasn’t her catch, she hadn’t caught it.

So when this giant snow leopard came out of nowhere—or, rather, right above her—she dropped her mouthful of fish and jumped in surprise. It hadn’t helped that he had touched her, she became scared if someone even looked her way in a hostile way. She cowered, her tail wrapped around her body, her fur fluffed out, making her seem larger than she really was. Her ears were plastered to her head, and her mouth parted slightly to show her fangs.

She watched as the fish found its way into the leopard’s mouth. Her stomach grumbled softly, but she could tell that the other werecat needed the food more than she. She did not mind, not one bit, even if she was hungry. Well, she’d been hungry before, and hungrier than this, too. She could always, as that werecat stated, go back and ask. And that werecat was definitely not like her—he could not go and ask for food. He was undeniably a male, too. His pheromones were stinking up the air—or maybe he hadn’t washed in a good while.

It took a considerable amount of time before Keira could get her furiously beating heart and tense muscles under her control again. She pried herself into a sitting position, and forced her fur to lie flat. Her ears flicked forward curiously, her nose quivered with his scent. He was older than her, that was for sure. “You c-could have asked.”

[Noah]

Noah flicked an ear, giving Keira a wrinkled expression. "Ask?" he repeated, a strip of fish skin hanging from his jowls. He licked it up and chewed, looking as perplexed as his feline face could manage. "The few times I've asked for food I've been shot at or chased. I nearly lost one of my lives playing the beggar role." He considered her a second. She looked startled, still composing herself. Her fur started to lie flatter, but she still had an unsettled shake to her poise.

It made him feel a little guilty. It was easier to steal and feel no remorse when they snarled and swore at his retreating back, but she just looked kind of sad and shaken. "Er..." He didn't know what to say. He took another bite of the fish, tail hanging from the branch and flicking back and forth. After a minute of chewing, he swallowed, picked up the fish, and leapt back to her branch. He dropped the fish in front of her. "Um, sorry," he said lamely. Quite the change in attitude, but he wasn't used to people reacting to his thievery with kindness.

He sat, hunched and awkward, violet blue eyes flicking between the fish and Keira's face. His stomach was growling contentedly. It hadn't been fed anything so delicious in weeks, maybe months. Noah had lost track of the time. Finally, he spoke up, deciding that this awkward silence needed breaking. "I'm Noah..."

[Keira]

Keira continued to force herself to relax. It wasn’t happening with someone so dratted close! She opened her mouth slightly to cool her overheating body—she was positively burning with embarrassment. This werecat was cool, collected, and Keira sorely wished she could be the same. Unfortunately, she knew that, unless she got a complete personality change, she would never be less shy. Her golden eyes glistened in what could have easily been mistaken as fear—and what sort of was fear—but was actually curiosity now that she had gotten over her initial shock.

The male did a strange thing next. He finished chewing the piece of fish he had been chewing on, and then picked the rest of it up, jumped onto the branch she was on, and set it down in front of her. He told her he was sorry, but she couldn’t respond. She had involuntarily locked her muscles when he jumped. Now she was working furiously just to unclench her jaw, let alone the rest of her body. She was still furiously chipping away at her own fear when the cat said his name. Noah.

The ice wall broke.

Keira could feel her tail tip twitch, her face muscles relax. She sighed, and patted the fish toward Noah. Even though her stomach growled, Keira didn’t need the food. Her kindness won over both her fear and her shyness. “No, you take it.” She whispered, knowing she couldn’t speak any louder than that. “A-as you said, I-I can get food. You c-can’t.”

She uncurled her tail from its iron-clasp grip around her hunched body and let it fall over the side of the tree limb. She sat up carefully, and drew herself to her almost full height. “I’m Keira.” She whispered further. Anywhere else, a house cat and a leopard would have looked a strange pairing… but not here, not in Eterna.

[Noah]

Noah sat, hunched over a bit. He looked ashamed, and he was. He didn't like stealing from nice people, he just hadn't known they existed in Eterno.

Keira seemed to relax a little at his introduction. Initially, she'd looked petrified. Was he really that awful? A phoenix or two had referred to him as 'adorable' on a few occasions. He wasn't so keen on that description, but he didn't like 'horrifying monster' either.

Keira refused his offer and apology, instead nudging the fish back in his direction. He looked at her quizzically, as though to say 'really?' His stomach overcame his attempt to be generous though. It gurgled hungrily and he took another greedy bite to quell the starvation. "Keira?" he repeated the name. "Uh, nice to meet you," he said, still awkward. He wasn't sure how to react to this werecat. He'd encountered other werecats before, and they'd been less than friendly toward him. In fact, most had been downright rude.

"You should eat something anyway. I can hear your stomach rumbling," he said. He wondered if she could introduce him to some of the generous people who gave hand outs to poor street cats. But then, they'd probably stop giving her food if she came with a larger, wild cat with five inch fangs and such. "We could go looking now. I could help a bit. Or just hang back... Thank you, though. For the fish." He took a final bite, stripping the last chunk of meat off the bones. It would keep him full for the rest of the day at least. By tomorrow his stomach would be back to its usual song and dance. "Or we could go exploring..." His pathetic attempt to make friends was falling flat, but at least he was trying...