the frigid water sloshes underneath heavy hooves, flecking the thick hair of his ankles. his pace is slow, ambling - ignoring the biting cold of the water below. it is an easy thing to push past, and as his feet numb further with each stride, it's almost easy to forget the ice. it'd be an easy enough thing to stray back onto dry land and try his luck there but howl does no such thing - instead he sticks to his path in the shallow water. the afternoon is still and quiet, the biting cold lessened a bit by the lack of breeze. the air instead remains calm, fluffing up his tail only every few minutes rather than every few steps. he ignores this, too, along with the painfully bright reflection of the snow. any fish that dwell here are surely hurting from the half-iced lake, but they are not any of his concern. howl's concern is only to walk, to roam, to - to - to -
do.
and, god, it's been so often since he was able to do anything.
idleness fits him awkwardly, a sweater a few sizes too small, and it weighs heavily upon maimed shoulders. and this, this pacing - it does little to settle the frenzied thrumming of his heart. it does little to burn off the manic, excess energy that dwells inside him, hovers just above his skin like static electricity. he feels it hum in the air around him, louder than birdsong and the crickets. that, at least, is somewhat reassuring - that, at least, feels almost right. he doesn't know what else to do, right now or with himself, and so he simply continues - plodding through the water and pushing on past the cold. he'll shiver and shake eventually, but surely it won't stop him until his mind finally quiets.
He’d never be able to outrun the feelings that gnawed at a him, a messy rats-nest of fury and want that rode low in his belly and in his mind, and he knew it but didn’t let it stop him from trying.
Acton had started out from Denocte just before dawn, when the latest of the bonfires were burning to cinders and the smoke of what was left hung low in the winter air. There was no moon but the reflection off the snow was enough to see by, and he followed the silver of his breath. He wanted nothing but the burn of his muscles from exertion and the burn of his veins from drink, and slowly as the sun rose the one gave way to the other.
It was past noon by the time he saw the lake, less like a mirror now that its edges were frozen over. The sun arced low and weak and made it seem later than it was. Even so it was bright enough to make the day a flat white, and when Acton’s amber-eyed gaze marked the stranger he saw the bay clearly.
Still, for the span of a few heartbeats, Acton thought his sleepless nights were catching up to him. Only a hallucination could have a stallion trudging through a lake in the depths of midwinter.
When the figure didn’t vanish after a blink or two – when the buckskin could hear his breathing and the slosh of the water with each step – he went to investigate.
“What are you, some sort of masochist?” Acton snorted from his place on the shore where he kept pace stride for stride with the stranger (his much the easier time of it, with no need to break through the skein of ice on the water). His breath was a plume that vanished to nothing. “Rather feel frigid than nothing at all?”
It’s no way to make friends, and Reichenbach would tell him it was no way to greet strangers, either. But the cold had a bite that played badly with his boredom and it put the buckskin in the taut kind of mood that had to be attended to, like bleeding the lines before something went badly wrong. Even so he didn’t say it cruelly; his gaze on the stallion, keen as a crows, was almost admiring.
Acton, unlike most, didn’t mind most fools or madmen.
