His smile is a match lit and thrown into the tinder of her chest. It is something warm and bright and more earnest than she can possibly fathom, and it is there on his face entirely for her sake, entirely because she is there at all. It creates some kind of war inside her, some kind of nameless tempest as her own pale blue eyes flash with something vulnerable and then darken again with a wariness she drags up around herself like armor.
She wants to be braver than that, than this creature who guards herself against smiles, but her heart stays clenched like a stone fist inside her chest reminding her that she shouldn’t care.
Scolding her, because she does care.
Winslow! He says, and her ears flatten for one uncertain heartbeat because she does not understand why her heart leapt inside her chest at being named, being remembered. Being more than the nameless wolf she had lived as for years, a face easily unnoticed and even more easily forgotten. Yet here he is with it like a gift on his tongue and delivered with a smile that makes those soft brown eyes so oddly endearing.
She stands, needing movement to hide the way he has her feeling so unsteady, but the moment she does there is something in the air that shifts between them, a tang of magic that has her delicate ears flicking back uncertainly. For a moment she does not recognize that this tawny wolf-pup is still her Tamlin, and there is an uneasy snarl that creeps soundlessly across her mouth as she eases a few steps closer to understand.
But this laugh and the way he spins as though he is bounding and weightless, made so by the joy he seems to keep trapped inside his chest, it could be no one else. She frowns and sits, and everything about her steel and powder blue face is a scowl. Her eyes, her brow, her delicate ears - even the crinkle of her dark nose as he looks up at her and speaks with amused eyes that resonate differently on a face so young. A moment ago she had thought him handsome. Now he is a child and this tangle in her chest is something confusing.
She reaches out with a heavy paw to knock him over, letting the gangly weight of his young body do most of the tipping work. With that frown still etched into every inch of her expression, she stands again to reach out and sniff him. He still smells like Tamlin, but a boy Tamlin, a young Tamlin. “I liked it better when you were bigger.” She says, her muzzle in the thick fur of his neck, her breath against his cheek. She nuzzles him, and the movement is born of a kind of uncertainty that has her pulling back again to watch him with a new wariness she wears like armor. “I don’t understand. Are you a child?”
the devil in my arms said feed me to the wolves tonight
@Tamlin