Wildfire~The Dark Forest (Book One)

Chapter Twenty-Two~I Hate Weakness That Come Back To Haunt Me

Thunderblood's tone now had a note of snidness, "oh Sophia. What was that pause about? Am I your match? I'm honestly flattered." 

I rolled my eyes the best a cat could roll her eyes, "first of all, I get to be snide. You know what? You can have snide. I'm takin' snarky. Let me give you a little refresher on some vocabulary. I mean, you should have learnt this in English Language Arts. Snide means being derogatory or mocking in an indirect way while snarky means extremely critical or snide. Most likely directly. In other words, you get to be mocking, or showy off-y. While I get to be highly critical." 

"You said being snide is being indirect. I'm not being indirect quite frankly." 

"You're not wrong," I paused. "You're direct, I have to say I like that. But you're hiding something I know it." 

"It's funny how you say 'you're not wrong' instead of saying 'you're right'. You don't like being wrong, do you?" 

"You're avoiding me saying that you're hiding something, aren't you?" 

The psychopathic fox shook her head back and forth gently, then looked back at me with her eyes that always seemed to be blazing an evil fire. A Wildfire... "You don't seem to understand, imbecile." 

"We're crystal clear, Thunderblood," said I with a note of being offended in my voice. She called me an imbecile which was far from the truth, and she knew that. That's why I'm still talking about it. 

"Are we? Beg my pardon in saying this, but I have a theory that you aren't being transparent. In fact, I'm being more transparent than you are." 

"Oh really? Then tell me this, what is your gun? I ask this because you told me where you put the gun, in your burrows. Oh wait. Wait... I forgot a question to ask you. When are you going to use your gun? 'Never put a gun in a room if you're not going to use it.' Hmm..." I paused to think about what I was going to say. I surely needed to choose my words wisely, and for my age I wasn't as wise as I had liked to be. I was just clever. Pixels would have probably sternly glared at me. Hazel would have said something like, "are you really gonna let a daft old fox beat you?" I could hear her in my head, I could imagine her standing there in my head, in such a dark room. "I'm not letting her win, she just is." Hazel rolled her hazel eyes, "who ever said she was winning? You're the only one who said that." I started to walk away from Hazel in my head, but she followed, now at my side. "You didn't win, did you Hazel? You perished in a fire, and it's all my fault. And after you died, I keep losing." She sighed softly. "Just because you lose someone, doesn't mean you've lost everything. I know it feels like it, but you have other friends, and if they're your true friends, they'll help you through your loss." 

I lightly chortled, still in my head. I couldn't bear look at Hazel, even if she was in my imagination. In my head. If I had looked at her, she might have seen something along the lines of sadness, and hurt. But not fear... Never fear. "Who ever said I have or had friends? I only have a few allies." 

She paused, "any ol' idiot can be an ally, but only a select few can be your friend." 

I gently chuckled, "I'm closer to two-thousand than to one thousand these days, do you really think I have friends? Did you ever wonder, when you were alive? Did you ever wonder why I never had friends? I'll never know if you ever wondered because your dead. And you'll never know the answer because guess what! You're dead." 

Hazel sighed, and I blinked, coming back to the real world to see Cinnamon waving a paw in front of my face. It was his paw, of course. He didn't have a severed fox leg, and was waving that severed paw in my face now. Just his paw. 

"Sophia...?" Cinnamon asked in a tone that seemed so far away to me. I felt light-headed, as if I wanted to faint. Don't faint. Fainting is bad. I need to have my bearings when Thunderblood show me what her "gun" is. My voice was ever so slightly slurred, "when are you going to show me your gun? That's the final question that I missed, correct?"