12-04-2018, 04:31 PM
She measures the time that passed differently than he did. Not in the hurried starts and stops of the world around them, but in the way the wind sang through their hair and blew through the trees. Sometimes it sang and other times, it whistled. It even howled and groaned when it chose to. Her ears moved to the noise of it of their own volition, her brain catching up later and marking the passage of time.
Usually these became long wilderness-wandering stretches of time that passed for her. Time in which she thought of three stallions and attributed each to a phase in her life that held deep meaning for her. Keeper loved each of them in their own right, and even found one of them far aside the lands of the sunrise. Far out there, on the fringes of it all - she’d had a daughter. But she doesn’t bring that up.
Not to Ryan, one of her dearest friends that at times, she knew she thought of as something more than that. She hasn’t ever said a thing to him about it. Keeping her own secrets closer to her heart. Hoarding them like mushrooms and nuts as if she was some secretive squirrel and not a huge lumbering bear most of the time.
Keeper knew that he knew what it was like - that other self that beckoned so alluringly, that it was easy to get lost in their other shape. She never had to ask him those questions because she’d seen it in his eyes before. That was probably why she always so comfortable around him, he just knew the way that few others could.
She notes the quiet and how they stand so wrapped up in other. It’s perfect. Just perfect. She doesn’t want it to end even as he pulls away with that lovely smile on his face. Keeper almost reaches out to reassure him that she’s still there. For how long, she cannot promise as she’ll be no oathbreaker but for now is enough, for her at least.
He surprises her as he dismisses the apology and speaks from a well of understanding and affection. “I missed you too.” and others, but it goes unsaid because these are his hours and she hoards them selfishly for him and no one else. “Oh Ryan…” she sighs and trails off; how can a panther and a bear ever make it here? But she knows that stranger things have happened. So she smiles at him and reaches out to bump her nose against his.
“I like that idea though, of home being wherever you are.”
@[Ryan] ❤️ I’m sloooooower