that's all there is
She’s meandering, daydreaming, and so she doesn’t see them overhead. She’s still scanning Loess with half of her attention, watching for any flash of gold or blue, and it takes his shout to draw her attention upward, as he shoots overhead. Her legs still and she waits, watching them move gracefully through the air and then across the ground towards her. Wolfbane is exuberant, bright like the sun, his words coming fast on the tail of his sudden landing. Not a sloppy landing, but one with more power behind it than anything else. Lepis, landing behind him, handles it with the poise and grace that Noah has come to expect of her. Noah is a flyer too, but she always sees others as more adept at it than her.
It feels a little like coming home, the two of them together, and she returns his smile with one of her own, turning it on both of them. “Hi,” she murmurs, and maybe it’s stupid, but it’s what she can manage at the moment with the surge of warmth that comes over her at seeing them. She’s never been a creature of many words, a hazard of the way she was raised, but the look in her eyes says a lot. She listens to the silence between them for a moment and doesn’t fill it. She doesn’t need to fill it – it’s a comfortable silence, not a lonely one, and for one heartbeat she wonders what it would have been like to share a home with them for more than just a refuge – they are regal, even just standing here, and she doesn’t even question why she had trusted him from the start.
“It’s hard to keep up against the cold in the winter, but I’ve been doing my best,” she answers Lepis first, thinking about how it feels, to be plague-free. To have so much energy to devote to raising gardens, creating a safe haven, rather than curing an incurable disease. “But spring is almost here, and I can’t wait. You should visit,” She is already dreaming of the fields of wildflowers that won’t fade each night against the bite of the cold. “I came to see you,” she glances back at Wolfbane to include him in the statement, her voice dropping even more into a whisper with the hint of shyness creeping back in. “I heard you might be back in Loess.” She doesn’t say ‘I missed you guys’, because at this point she doesn’t think she has to. Yes, she’s worried about a lot of things, but maybe she can have a personal moment first.
noah
