[open] I need a reason to keep on living in the city

[Tantalize]

tantalize

I make excuses to stay away from home

I'm looking for an answer in my heart

I'm looking for a fresh start

I need a reason to keep on living in the city

Ever since her daughter had found her deep in the humid depths of the jungle, she had been unable to fall back into her half-life hermitage as she had before. When she closed her eyes at night all she could see was Bardot’s disappointment and the hurt red eyes of the son she had walked away from when Offspring had disappeared. These children... It had never been their fault, casualties in the fallout from her war with love. It hadn’t been Cersei’s fault for looking so much like Lion. Just as it hadn’t been Obscene’s fault that he had looked so much like his father. It had never hurt this bad before. The loneliness, the guilt, the grief. She had lived with it for so long that she had grown use to it but seeing her second-oldest had stirred something within the jaguar mare.

Had reminded her of the life outside of her quiet jungle.

Her heart still aches for the heat of the once Overseer, the fire that had once burned her clean. The stallion who had once lit Sylva on fire to save her. She knows he is gone for good, perhaps waiting for her in a life past this one, and while the jagged pieces of her broken heart still cut into her hands where she grips them tightly, she feels a stirring of restlessness somewhere beneath it all. A feeling she had forgotten after years of shutting herself off from the world.

Now the days don’t seem to blur all together anymore and she can’t tell if that’s a good or bad thing. The jaguar mare moves quietly through the thick vegetation, slinking easily over gnarled roots and snagging thorns. She moves like the cat whose spots speckle parts of her russet coat, a freckled ghost who prowls in the suffocating darkness. The restlessness is stronger today and for a moment she wonders what it might be like to step free from the jungle and see the sun in all its glory instead of snatching glimpses of it from where it falls through the thick canopy. What it might feel like to unfurl her wings and feel the breeze beneath her feathers again.

Her golden eyes look towards the trees where the volcano lays beyond and wonders what it might be like to leave. And then she remembers those red eyes of all those she had loved and her heart painfully flutters as she turns away. Maybe another day, she tells herself and turns to move further into the rainforest to disappear again.

Open to any!