She knows it is morning by the sound of the world coming alive around them - the rustle of waking wildlife, the tentative birdsong from the branches above in their tree. Except it isn’t quite a tree anymore, not in a living sense. It is more like an artifact from an old, ruined world, so out of place among the new and the green. The enormous trunk is hollowed out and empty, with old scorch marks along the walls and ceiling. But from the outside it looks plain, like a mess of earth and wood and knotted roots.
It is home though, wholly theirs.
She shifts and stirs, not rising from where she lays curled up around the small, dark and white boy. But her lips find the smooth of his cheek, press smiling little kisses against fur that feels like velvet. “Good morning, my Merry.” She tells him with a whisper, breathing into his sweet skin and shifting to take a tendril of his downy forelock between her lips with a soft, playful tug. Her voice doesn’t climb past a whisper though, so soft and sleepy and full of dark. Neither does she stand and nudge him awake, or draw the morning light into their den to chase away the fading dawn.
Instead she is still again, curled so safely around him with her nose buried in the impossible soft of a cornsilk mane. Her eyes are at the mouth of their den though, a tangle of bright and dark brown and patient curiosity. There is a small little piece of her that rebels against this new day, that knows when they leave to go off on whichever adventure the day brings, she’ll be watching every face. Waiting for someone, someones, who even now grow hazy at the edges in her memories. She blinks - flinches softly at the direction of her thoughts - and drops her delicate blue and white head across his withers again.
@[Cimmerian]