She hates the way her body responds to him. Hates the way it warms beneath his attention, the way she wants to purr with pleasure. The first time she had given into him, it had been something new and adventurous, something rebellious and bold. She had been taken by the excitement of it. The way they had been able to discover one another, peeling back secrets and distance to find what lie beneath.
But now—now, it is something else entirely.
Something familiar.
Something altogether more dangerous for it.
She shivers where he presses tender kisses into her skin and curses herself for it, curses herself for the way that he knows all of her secret places. She steels herself against it and melts into it, depending on the day, depending on her mood. She wants to grow icy beneath his attention now, but he begins to fuss around her stomach and something flutters within her—something maternal and warm—and she softens.
“I don’t know,” she breathes, her voice quieter and stripped of her usual steel. “Do you have ideas?”
She ignores the way that the flutters in her stomach begin to bite, begin to move through her with a more rhythmic pain. “Fox, ah—” her voice breaks off as she swallows, pressing firmly into him. “It may be sooner than you think.” She grits her teeth as a foreign pain begins to grip her and she closes her eyes, riding out the wave of it. She opens her mouth to say something further, but it is ripped from her.
She lowers herself to the ground, shivering and growing damp with sweat at the same time.
And what passes next happens quicker than she could have imagined.
It is smooth. Relatively smooth. And she is thankful for the quickness of it, the smoothness of it. She grits her teeth and groans with each push but it does not take long before the life that has been growing within her slips from her and onto the soft Tephra ground. It doesn’t take long for Lynx to make her way to her feet, to find her daughter, to feel something entirely new blossom in her chest as she takes her in.
She can feel the ripples of her mind pressing into the air as she sorts through them.
When she realizes that she can feel her own thoughts echoed back at her, she cannot hide the delight and concern that sweeps through her with equal measure. “She’s a mind reader too,” she breathes as she leans down and begins to clean their precious daughter. “She’s perfect. Absolutely perfect.”
and all of us, we’re meant for the fire, but we keep rising up and walking the wires