hold my hand, it's a long way down to the bottom of the river
She burns beneath his kisses, like a hundred suns pressed against the brown dapples glowing on her skin. It is not a traditional warmth in this cold, wintry bite of the Tundra, but admittedly it is the one she prefers. Each kiss feels like a promise, eager and urgent and she bends pliant beneath them with her breath hot and sweet where it stays trapped in her throat. “Offspring,” she breathes against his chest, against the pink puckered scars, and her voice catches each time he touches her. It feels wholly impossible in this moment that she could have ever doubted that he would love their child, that he would want it. She would feel more foolish if it weren’t for how distracting it was to feel the heat of his mouth along the curve of trembling back.
Her ears flick to catch his words and it takes a moment to shrug out of the fog that fills her thoughts. But when she does she feels instantly quieted, shamed by the joy that radiates from him. She hunches a little in his embrace, pulling her chin close to the curve of her narrow chest. “I should have told you sooner.” She admits, apologizes, wants to trace her lips across the smile etched into his face but finds she cannot bring herself to do so now. She pauses for a heartbeat and the silence feels corrosive, chewing unhappy holes in the pit of her belly. “I didn’t want to bother you with it, you’re so busy right now.” Her restraint fades a little and this time she does reach up to touch her nose to his imploringly, ruefully. “Next time I’ll-” her dark eyes flash wide with sudden, distressed clarity as she realizes what she was about to say.
Next time I’ll tell you as soon as I know.
Next time.
It was so impossibly easy to forget that they had not known each-other forever, that they had not lived and loved for entire, repeating lifetimes. In some ways, yes, it did feel new. There was a balance Isle struggled to find between clinging to the solitude she had known for years and opening her whole heart to him. It was the friction that sometimes came between them, the wedge she sometimes shoved between them when she thought about how it would kill her to lose him like she had lost everyone else in her life. It was so easy to forget the newness that, for a moment, she had imagined their family growing, another child, another version of them even after this one. And it had felt like the most natural thing in the world.
Her eyes slip away from his face, dark and bright and wide with a quiet kind of confusion that etches the angles of her dark head like brittle stone. She would have sunk further into the quiet, subdued by the uncertain hands that seemed to be struggling to pull her back away into the shadow from which she had escaped if not for the way Offspring had burst in winter. There is frost and ice stretched like a constantly breaking and growing armor across the dark of his skin, ice rattling like glass beads in the tangles of his mane and tail. He touches her belly again and she is immediately undone, all worries breaking apart from her in the same way winter shed from his skin. “Offspring!” She murmured incredulously, surging forward to touch the winter encrusted on his skin. She traced a line from his shoulder to his ribcage and up towards the point of his hip with curious lips, pausing only as he circled around again to press his cold mouth against the delicate curve of her jaw. “My beautiful snowman.” She says with a laugh, shivering a little where the ice touched her dappled coat.
Even despite the snow and slush and ice on his skin, she settled back against him, ignoring the chill that drew shivers along her narrow spine. She picked carefully at the beads of ice, alternating between melting them with the warmth of her lips and crackling them between gentle teeth. “I don’t know if it is a boy or a girl,” she muses quietly, “I’ve thought about trying to read its mind though, I know there wouldn’t be thoughts like ours, but-” she falls silent and shakes her head a little, then rests her shivering cheek against a neck that radiated both cold and warmth “I’m just eager to know them, whoever he or she may be.”
And with a smile whose softness rivaled that of the snowflakes that fell suspended in the cold morning air around them, “I know you’ll be here, I trust you.”
Isle
