come sing down the moon; Argo

[keeper]

throw me to the wolves & i will return leading the pack.

She had no idea that he’d come; that their paths should be fit to cross again and on a night like this, when she could say his name to the small fierce fires in the sky and think that maybe, just maybe, they had something to do with this. It is a silly thought to think that she had but to breath his name and the stars would conjure him out of the darkness for her. If so, why this night and none of the others? So many other times his name had come to her lips only to be swallowed back on a thick knot of foolishness and girlishness, but not tonight. No, not tonight!

It is her name on his breath that brings her head round and down from the constellations and her foolish thoughts to look at him with her black eyes from inside that pale dun face of hers. He is the same, but older - like she is, though she has never given age much thought or to how either of them could have changed. It just never occurred to her that there could be differences. She was naive enough to believe they were the same, unchanged, just older. He still smelled like wild things, just as she did, more like a lake though - cool deep water and the night, and she… well, just look at her! Sticks and bones in her hair, she looks like something dredged up from some obscure corner of the forest!

There is no surprise in her eyes. She knew he’d come, one day. One day was now though and all that shone in her eyes was a happiness that Keeper didn’t know she could feel. It kept her quieter that she ought to have been to see him in that moment, but between his face and the stars behind his beautiful head, she turned over this new feeling inside of herself that she had never known. Her own slim neck stretches out like his does, until they are almost nose to nose and he breathes in pine and sage as she breathes in lakewater and moonlight. Keeper cannot stop herself from smiling as he plucks a dandelion out of nowhere (her hair most likely, she accrued all kinds of woodland and meadow trinkets in her travels) and lets it loose to the wind.

She can feel her heart blowing away with it, going right out of her like a hushed breath of awe. Keeper is only awestruck because he came to her, the one time she allows herself to say his name out loud and not just in the back of her mind as it becomes a companion to the fleet-footed quietness of the deer she follows. Keeper belonged with wild things, least of all her own kind but she could never quite go far enough to escape them - him, his name on her lips, moonlight and shadow, and the awe mixes with the happiness in her eyes that she cannot seem to take off him after the dandelion drifted by, gone with the wind.

“You came,” and she could not help the incredulous way it left her still smiling mouth. The disbelief was a truth she could not hide from him like the way she could not hide the fact that he had had some lasting impact on her from their first meeting until now, though she could not say what it was about him that left him running through her mind. She hadn’t expected him to be there, not on the same night as her - chance never favored her, not like this.

But here he is…

Argo.

Keeper cannot help the silly way the sight of him makes her heart flip-flop inside her narrow breast.

Keeper