ToTT: Human Scavenger Hunt? (Ch. 6)

Chapter 6
'''July 16th X791. 8:43pm'''

''Hayden mumbled like a grumpy toddler. "How come it's Eugene that Sif marries and not  MEEEEEEEEEEEEE?!", the sorrowed man howled into the night sky, earning a few chuckles from the group and a blush from Sif.''

Ezra approached his wolf friend and patted the man's shoulder, as an attempt at consolation. The group proceeded to start getting ready to go and find Brooke and Violet's friends, meanwhile a slightly-flushed Sif trapped Hayden on the shoulder. "Can I borrow you for a minute?", she asks as she walks down a narrow path towards a cliffedge. Hayden follows, his bushy grey tail hanging down motionless as he walked.

Sif stopped in front of a large rock, and went quiet. Hayden stood behind her, waiting to hear what she wanted to talk about. No response. She was silent for at least two minutes before Hayden tried to speak. "Sif, what's--", he was interrupted by a slap from his female companion. As Hayden rubbed his cheek and looked down at her in shock, her face was clearly a mix of a wide variety of emotions. Her cheeks were red, yet her lip was quivering and her eyes were becoming misty. "Sif..?", the man asked with a gentle tone.

"Shut up and let me talk.", she responded angrily yet shakily. "I've known you for over ten years of my life. Tell me, have you always felt like this?", she said to him while looking at the ground. He nodded with a simple hum of approval. Sif clenched her fists. "If you have then...", she gritted her teeth, "Then why didn't you at least be up front with me from the beginning?!", she yelled as she looked up, tears sitting on the edges of her eyes nearly.

Hayden witnessed this expression with surprise, breathing quietly as he thought of a response. "I..", he stuttered on the first syllable. "Truthfully? I've always been terrifed you'd reject me and shut me out if I came up front with it. I've wanted to tell you ever since the day we meet, ever since the day you joined Sabertooth...", Hayden gritted his teeth too as his bangs drooped over his eyes. "That I loved you..Sif.", he admitted directly at last, as tears began to stream down Sif's reddening cheeks.

That was when Sif broke down and began weakly pounding Hayden's chest with her fists as she let her emotions run free, screaming in sorrow. Hayden's arms moved around her as comfort, a tear dropping from his own eye onto Sif's bare shoulder, causing her to stop beating his chest, and look up at him.

"If I'm being honest as well...", she whispered as Hayden wiped the girl's tears away with his sleeve, "I'd always secretly hoped that you liked me the way I like you...", a small smile creeped onto her face for half a second. That half a second that Hayden decided to look down. He saw the smile.

"Really?", he responded with a gulp of nervousness, "Then how come you didn't say anything either?", he continued as he stared down at Sif.

"You were always hitting on other women..it made me think you wouldn't want to be tied down to one girl.", she said with obvious sadness at this point.

"Sif...", Hayden said with the gentlest tone he's ever used behind his voice, causin the girl to look up at him. Their misty eyes reflected the moonlight like beautiful lakes, and both of them went redfaced as they never broke eye contact. And their heads began gravitating towards each other, Hayden's going down, Sif's going up. Until their lips met in the middle, their joined frames outlined perfectly by the moonlight as they stood on the cliff, the wind blowing at them, shaking their hair and clothing, until Hayden, surprisingly, broke off from the kiss.

"As much as I love you Sif...I have to accept that you'll never be mine.", he said with a lump in his throat. It felt like acid. His heart was breaking the more he thought about how Sif would never be able to be with him, without risking the future, and the life of those innocent children back at camp.

Sif understood the dangers of changing the past. She simply nodded, and turned on her heels, moving back to camp. Hayden watched as she walked into the darkness that shrouded the narrow stone path that led them here. Unbeknownst to Hayden, Sif was now streaming tears from her eyes, weeping in heartbroken silence, using her hand to conceal her cries of despair as she returned to camp.

Hayden put his hands in his pockets and turned to face the glorious moon that was rising into the sky. "I know you're there, dragon child.", he snarled after taking a sniff of the air.

"As expected of you Wolf, it seems even I can't hide from your senses so easily." Eugene said standing back to back with Hayden, calling him by the new nickname he had just recently thought of. He had a small bitter smile on his face due to what he just witnessed. "I'll apologize I guess since I'm sort of the indirect cause of all this. And now..... grit your teeth!" Eugene then suddenly turned his body swung his fist into Hayden's face, launching him quite a distance as Eugene summoned a vine like plant that hit Hayden into the ground hard before he would go too far.

"The first hit was for making my friend cry." Eugene said as he walked over to Hayden. "The second hit was for being an idiot who's giving up because he thinks that the future that we were shown is the only path to take! Even with all that's happened, I don't think that's any reason to just give up and accept something I know you don't like without even putting up a fight!"

Hayden lay there for a few seconds before he simply got off the ground, his fanged canine teeth on display as he glared darkly at the Dragon Slayer. "You think I'm giving up on her? You couldn't be more wrong! As much as I love Sif, I refuse to be the cause of the existance-wipe of two innocent little girls!!", he snarled to the raven-haired male.

Elsewhere.....

At the same time, the clone Eugene made had caught up to Sif. Well, he was already standing there in wait in the middle of the pathway, out of view from both Hayden and those at the camp. "Need a handkerchief?" He asked as he approached the crying Sif with said handkerchief.

She looked up at the clone, with one or two tears still resting on the edge of her eyes. Taking the handkerchief, she nodded a thank you his way as she dabbed the remaining tears away. "Thank you..", she said delicately as she offered him the handkerchief back when she was done with it.