so pay attention now; daemron

[Daemron]

‘Around,’ she murmurs, causing a wry half-smile to answer hers. The sensation about his mouth feels odd after years of disuse, and yet with Pyxis settling into him – with the way she looks at him, her ice-blue eyes as clear and unimpeded as he’s ever seen – Daemron finds himself being mollified despite his lurking fears. He listens to her as though drinking her in, a dying man whose thirst has suddenly been slaked. After hearing her concession however, he hesitates, feeling compelled to respond with one of his own. “I… didn’t come after you. Not at first, and not soon enough afterward.” He remembers letting the days drag past, caught in a prideful smoke that cloyed and festered after the burn of their heated encounter. Alone, he had brooded in anger at the disappearance of both wolf and woman until it was far too late. “You were long gone by the time I got over myself. I tried to find you through Red, but I’d lost all sense of her, too.” Huffing a breath, he watches its vapour rising briefly into the cool air between them. He smirks. “You must run pretty damn fast.” The reassuring touch the maned wolf had given Pyxis earlier is mirrored in the way Daemron nudges into the slope of her shoulder. His lips wander then, trailing tenderly against the soft curve of her withers before coming to rest amidst dark locks of mane. He can’t help but take pause there simply to breathe her in. “You smell good,” he murmurs offhandedly against mahogany skin, though they both grow more sombre at the mention of family. Daemron shakes his willowed head. It still pains him to think of the rifts among his own kin. “I haven’t, but then again, I’ve been a bit of a recluse these past years,” he allows gruffly, thinking of his self-imposed solitude among the wolves. “I don’t know where they are or what they’re up to anymore.” A thought begins brewing in his mind, and he adjusts his position in order to better meet her gaze. “Do you want to track them down? Your sisters… your parents?” He ventures. daemron lost to the hunt as I was to you