Who I am - How I came to Be

[STARLING]

This'll be Drift's story!

(it's kinda in anthro, but it can be a quad version too)

I'm gonna make it in seperate chapters (aka posts) and it will be summarized at first, but I'll edit/add more detail, etc as soon as I come up with it :3

So keep checking in!

Oh, PS - As far as content, if I put this on his page, i'll have to make it neo-appropriate. There's just blood, mentions of drugs,violence, etc in it now. So yeah. Nothing too bad XD

[STARLING]

DriftFern Louden's life began in the streets of an old city, weakened from multiple depressions and the ebb and flow of gang activity, steadily falling into corruption. The city itself was like a weakened, diseased beast, left to stumble blindly about because no-one could... or would put it out of its misery.

His mother was a creature with kind eyes, her fur yellow, the color of mustard. She had the fragile beauty of a lone wildflower that had dared to spring up and exist in the barren cracks of a sidewalk. Born into limiting circumstance, she was a good student, striving to build something better out of her desolate existence. She worked hard at her school, earning top marks, and worked several jobs to save for further education.

She was going to make it, they said.
If anyone was going to make it, let it be that sweet girl.
And then she met him.

His father was a bad boy. Your typical, cut-and-paste, bad boy; cigarette spilling from his lip, can or glass or bottle of something in his clenched fist, worse things at home..., parties in warehouses, girls, fighting with teachers, students, anyone....
Never at school, always suspended or skipping, or both.

It is unsure how they met. But both fell fast.
It was a big city, uncaring of the destruction of two young lives. Things like that happened every day... In places like this....
Her family had bigger problems on their mind - they didn't care.
Neither did his.

It was only a matter of time before it would happen. And it did.
He may have died, or joined the army... or just fled...
But it was the same thing when you come down to it - another Romeo leaving his pregnant Juliet behind.

[STARLING]

By the time Drift was born, his father was long gone. He inherited his father's piercing, bright green eyes, and his fur was a seafoam green.

His mother struggled to take care of him, working full time and having to resort to leaving her dream of college behind. They did okay for six, maybe seven years, renting out a shabby apartment and just managing to eke by.

But a dream deferred simply does not curl up and die - it began to eat away at her. And eventually, even the promise of her young son could not keep her on the straightpath. She turned to substance.

The "family"'s already pathetic money supply began to dry up rapidly. They began to rely on relatives for loans... and when the relatives wouldn't give them any more money, his mother resorted to "favors" and "odd jobs" for her "friends" she told him. He was young, and did not understand...

The situation got progressively worse and worse, until one day, there was a drugbust. His mother lost her jobs. She frantically searched for another one for weeks, to only realize that no one would hire her.
She gave up.

That was when he first noticed the change - his mother, with all her flowery prettiness, had apparantly dried up. She was broken and empty.

They existed on the kindness of the landowner and his mother's "friends" for some months.
But the ending was inevitable.


Drift was 12 years old when they became homeless.

[STARLING]

They lived on the street for a little over a year. It was anything but pleasant, but had it's highs...And lows.
His mother stopped abusing for almost eight months, shocked into sobriety by the landcrashing fact, that her and her child were truly at rock bottom.

Those months were almost...nice..., Drift often thought. He wasn't so young anymore and understood some things about their situation. They had no house, and while he was never truly full, he wasn't starving, either - there were a few homeless shelters around the area. The city had gone through one of it's neverending cycles - after a long tide of bleakness, things would get better for a time.

They just weren't prepared for the next tide. It seeminly happened on the same day - though he knew that was impossible. She relapsed. The gangs started up again. The city began to suffer. The shelters closed. "Rock-bottom" was not merely being homeless. This was rock bottom, and Drift learned the lesson that you can always sink farther.

It was a week from his 13th birthday on that night that everything changed.
The gangs ran high in the city that night, robbing and smashing up storefronts. Presumably, they found a liquor store, and with that, gaining followers and drukenness, proceeded to do what they did best - destroy.

Drift had been dozing on a bench infront of the laundromat, the halogen bulb casting a glow about him, where his mother had left him while she presumably got food. Suddenly, she was shaking him.
"Drift! Get up, we have to go!"
He sat up, looking around with alert eyes. The street was far too empty, even at this late hour. Shouts were in the distance.

"Wha-?"
"Sweetheart, it's them. We have to go, fast." Grabbing him by the hand, she raced off, half dragging him through the street as they fled.
They had been running for what seemed like forever, dodging cars and skirting crosswalks, but then again it all felt like some fuzzy dream. The shouts didn't fade though, only grew closer, despite the fact that they were headed for the nicer, safer parts of the city. This was verified when his mother gasped suddenly.

There they were.
She didn't run, only stood there gripping his arm as the great milling crowd slowly became aware of their prescence, then headed toward them. They had no quarrel with the mob - but the mob was a mob, and all who stand in their way...

She glanced around, coming to a decision. "Drift, I want you to run across that street when I- GO!" She suddenly shoved him as the mob began moving, without warning, and he staggered forward, losing his balance, before desperately looking back.

Mistake.
His?

His mother was screaming, and he turned to sprint across the road. The sound went off then, as if someone turned the volume down - he always remembered it this way.

He had the sudden vision of LIGHTS, and turned to look, still running and then something struck him, dragging him down. That was nothing compared to the second thing that struck him, which made the world go black and fuzzy (except for the lights) and devoid of pain and life and noise but there was the sensation of flying and hitting and bouncing, knocking the breath out of him, and making him choke on something that was wet and coppery.
He was spinning in the air and something was grabbing onto him, oh god, get it off! then as soon as it had started, it ended, with a wet and heavy THUD followed by a painful crack as all the sensation in the world came back.

That's when the sound returned, too, and more slowly, his vision trickled in - he was staring at an alleyway, and something was screeching off in the near distance. Car.

Something wet and heavy was still on him, pushing him down, and he stirred, then fought for what seemed like hours but could only be seconds as he dragged himself out from under it, laying in the gutter several feet away, and looking back, abruptly realized what it was; His mother.

Drift stared at her in horror for several seconds, but the image was locked in his mind - her yellow fur was orange in places from the blood, deep red in others. Her eyes were wide and vacant, and her mouth was trickling blood. Some teeth were broken, and her neck and one leg was at a weird angle.

The crowd, who had been watching was starting to trickle over, and with a final horrified glance at his mother, Drift crawled towards the mouth of the alleyway, barely able to move, numbly hoping they wouldn't see him. He couldn't go much farther, so he crawled into an overturned trash can, among the refuse, and watched as the mob first inspected and then lost interest in his mother's body, wandering off to continue their mayhem.

It was a very very long time before an ambulance showed up, and he watched through blurry eyes filled with sadness and pain tears as they loaded her onto a stretcher, a white sheet covering her, tho were in no hurry, as she was obviously dead.

That was the last time he would cry for a long long time. He cried for his dead mother and himself and his wounds and this city and the car, before finally drifting into an unrestless stupor.

[STARLING]

Over the next few years, Drift himself is not sure how he functioned. Small, young, weak, and unexperienced in all manners of independant living, he barely scraped a living, mostly by theivery. Once he was a full "member" of the city's underworld, instead of clinging feebly to the semblance of normal living, he was far outmatched.

Their were other pets. Most notably, other gelerts. The gangs ruled the streets, their henchmen and wannabe's dealing none too kindly to an underling. Everything he stole, was subject to being taken from him. More times than he could count, he was beaten, tormented, chased, forever looking over his shoulder and receiving sharp reminders of why he had to do this constantly, forever, when he did.

Drift's ears, once standing proud and erect, like any other gelert, lost some vital nerve connection as a result of these years due to the many times he was grabbed, picked up, and often thrown by them.

But as with anything that does not kill you...
it only makes you stronger....
And as the years slowly wore on, he did get bigger, stronger, faster, smarter... better. His stomach did not growl as much, there were times when he couldn't see his ribs, and while he could certainly not strut in the streets without fear of harm, things were getting better.