[SON OF A PREACHER MAN | PRIVATE FOR NOW]

[GABRIEL]

[align=center][div style="width: 500px; text-align: justify; font-size: 9.4pt; line-height: 1.4;"]Lazarus hadn't had as much time as Gabe did to grow accustomed to people who hadn't fought for their food the same way, who hadn't defended what they caught tooth and nail because if they didn't, someone else would surely steal it. Once his sisters were old enough, when they started taking care of each other better than Gabriel ever had, he left. Wound up with a small band of folks with big ideas, and he realized many of their perspectives were based from the outside-in, not the inside-out like Gabe's had been. They saw suffering, saw starvation, but hadn't felt it the way the people they pitied did. Gabriel had. It was why he understood Laz so well, how he kept from tripping over the barbwire the kid wrapped around his perimeter; the few times he did catch at the fence he didn't panic or lash out, reacting calmly so as to keep from pushing Lazarus one way or another the way others inadvertently did when growing angry or fearful. They didn't know better, most of them. It wasn't as though Gabriel could hang a sign around Laz's neck that read, "beware: raised to viciously fight for food and shelter because of a shitty world."

Or maybe he could.

At the moment, though, he was asleep, not scheming of ways to acclimate his mutated Cane Corso child. His sleeping schedule was a mess of feline and avian habits, sometimes overlapping and sometimes switching; there were days when he could barely rest at all, and days where he couldn't seem to stop sleeping. Today was a happy medium, the hybrid bedding down in one of the trees, draped across a sturdy branch with his head on his toes, blissfully free of strangers and making certain his son didn't skewer anyone. Of course, nothing good could last, as so many people knew, and so he was roused from slumber by growling nearby. Familiar growling. The "don't come near or so help me" growling. Gabe's onyx gaze took a moment to adjust, and then he was peering down, where a jaguar -lean from not enough hearty meals- approached Lazarus, a deceased antelope the focus.

He didn't intervene, not yet. The jaguar wasn't from here, and if they attacked, Gabriel wasn't going to separate the pair. Which was, naturally, exactly what happened, and he observed with dark eyes as Lazarus pinned the smaller creature, death inevitable, and when the canine seemed to snap out of his mineprotectmine haze, the hybrid leaped out of the tree, gliding down to land with a thump a short distance away. "Bien hecho. ¿Acabaste?" His tone was a bit dry, and he cocked his head, then sighed, slowly approaching to nudge the jaguar's corpse. "Ganaste, mijo. Es hora de limpiar." They could dig a hole, he supposed. Or ditch the body somewhere for the buzzards. Gabriel didn't want this to be twisted on his son in any fashion; the jaguar was a stranger, from over the border, but he wouldn't risk it.
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