A/N: WELL. I am back. Sort of. With Solitude! ARE YOU READY PEOPLE!

(PS: Don't say "Aye Aye Captain!" . Make the "Aye" joke if you must but PLEASE don't pull a SPONGE on me.)

The poem in this chapter is by ME. I wrote it when thinking over this, and... yeah. Anyway.

Alone With The Fire

Flickering flames light his face,
His gleaming eye,
His dark brown fur;

Alone in a world that shows no trace,
Of his existence,
As it were.

No one knows the things he's seen,
The experiences had,
The horrors viewed;

His solemn gaze with fire's gleam,
Tells that he knows,
True Solitude.

He stared blankly at the dancing light in front of him, his thoughts wandering. He hadn't thought about it much, but now that he was alone he had turned his thoughts on his feelings. Things that lay buried beneath his insanity were stirring.

He was still somewhat confused about everything, as he had a right to be. He had had his breakdown earlier that morning, and the questions were still lingering on the edge of his thoughts. But the silence around him was almost enough to quell the questions… for now.

He let out a low sigh, leaning back against the rock while he thought. His head was telling him his protectiveness of Rudy was not normal, but his instincts… they told him that Rudy needed to be protected, just as he himself was a thing to be protected to Rudy.

He let out a soft snort. His instincts were hypocrites. And he highly doubted that Rudy wanted to protect him from harm, especially since the dinosaur had chased him consistently for months now.

Not this last week, though.

No, don't think about that, he told himself, shaking his head sharply. That pain could be dealt with after he found Rudy. Finding Rudy was all that mattered now.

Being alone like this was… almost nice, he had to admit. The quiet that pushed around him and held him close like a blanket was soft and almost comforting. The gleaming light of the small fire was just enough to fill the clearing he found himself in with dancing light, and calmness hung around him like something he had never felt he had known.

It was silent around him, excluding the loud crackling sound of the flames. There was no wind tonight. Sound seemed magnified, no matter how small it really was. He let out a soft exhalation of air and lay his head back on the rock and staring upward at his 'sky'. A pale light show of auroras was winding its way along the ice above him.

Pretty… he thought idly, staring up at them. His eye half-closed as he let his mind wander once again. So what if Rudy wasn't around? He was looking for him, and that was all that mattered. All that mattered…

His eye opened again. Why was he so dependent on Rudy chasing him? The big dinosaur wasn't anything special, not really. He was in a world of dinosaurs.

The answer hit him quite suddenly, and he sat up, returning his gaze to the fire. It flickered weakly, sending dancing light across his face. His blue eye gleamed with an orange glow as it half closed. He glanced at the tooth.

Anchor. He's my anchor. Buck sighed; He's a constant thing in my otherwise chaotic life.

He's my last real tie to sanity.

My last proof that I'm really alive.

And sitting there, alone, Buck could feel his sanity slipping away faster than it had before. His thoughts were getting disjointed. He was afraid.

And not of dinosaurs, not of being eaten.

Of solitude. Of being alone.

The fire flickered weakly once more before fizzling out, leaving him in the dark.

He closed his eye.

AN: Okay. Yeah. This took FOREVER.

Author's blockage plus my main focus story being finished and it's sequel being started, equals me being very busy outside of the Ice Age section.

So what brought me back to this, you ask? Well, what else, my parents got Dawn of the Dinosaurs on Netflix. I watched it. I remembered all of Buck's lines by heart. And I realized that I NEEDED to finish this oneshot before it killed me. It didn't kill me, thankfully. So you know what to do.

Review!