i'm told that to be human i must stand still
you can try your hardest, but i never will
It’s exhilarating, this world. Bright and heavy and slightly uncomfortable, but still so thrilling. So much more than the endless warmth and dark, the soft weight of her brother pressed against her. Too many things to see and feel and touch. Overwhelming, but in the most glorious of ways.
She squirms against her mother’s touch, a wildness in her breast she can’t quite name. An impatience she doesn’t have the words for yet. Ferran, she calls her, and she can feel it settle in her bones. It sounds right. It sounds like her.
She recognizes her mother, soft and gentle and fearful. She doesn’t understand it, fear such a foreign concept to one who has never known anything but safety. She recognizes her brother. Her Firen. And her father, she knows him too. Recognizes the familiarity of his heat and the low rumble of his voice.
When he comes closer, she wiggles impatiently against the sandy earth, tilting her small head to peer up at his flame-licked visage. She squirms until she has managed to pull herself sternal, her nose coming to the curve her father’s cheek even as he lips playfully at her own. She’s wobbly still, but she pokes at him, lips tickling the red and white of his sleek coat as she explores the hollows of his face, She grows bolder with each passing moment, until she bites him, toothless and gummy. Gnawing harmlessly, almost experimentally, on the angle of his cheek.
She’s hungry, she realizes. She doesn’t know how much time has passed, but enough for her empty belly to assert itself.
Ears flattening, she shifts, nearly toppling over in her gangly clumsiness. But she catches herself, instead stretching around to nose insistently at her mother. Brows furrowed, she tries to collect her feet, to pull herself into a standing position. Her legs shake madly as she struggles, and after a futile moment, she topples heavily against Rapture.
Mother stirs at that, head lifting groggily as she brings her nose around to steady her daughter.
She tries her back legs this time, drawing them unsteadily beneath her as she lifts her rump, tail bobbing irritably against her haunches. She trembles as she slowly draws her front legs beneath her, small features stubbornly determined. Finally she is standing, limbs splayed wide as she struggles to keep her balance.
She had made it. Now she only needs to figure out what comes next.
ferran