one warm day is all I really need; Mazikeen

[Barrow]

* * * * * * * * * * *

She shoves him playfully away, and the quick happiness he’s slipped on elicits a rumbling chuckle in response.  Sadness simply doesn’t stick to him, he finds, not for long anyway.  There is too much joy to be found, too much light and laughter to fill the air to ever let darkness linger.  

He doesn’t know how important this fact will be soon.  He can’t imagine how vital his ability to bend towards any scrap of light will bolster his mood when the black takes the place of the sun.

For now at least, the sunlight streams down and pools in the smalls of their backs and refracts off of the water droplets clinging to their whiskers.  Soon winter will come and make everything as white and stark as the coat of the dog in front of him.  Barrow remembers his first attempt at making an ice tree for Maze and thinks he will be able to make an entire grove of firs or spruces for her this year.  She has her shifting; he will show her what he can do with the snow and ice.  He will do whatever he can to keep her sorrows long behind her.  Because more than anything else he can make, crafting her smile is his favorite.

“You should be proud.  I am proud of you.”  Though he doesn’t understand the appeal, he knows it is a grand thing to take part in the Alliance.  “I would crack a hoof and be down for months.”  He wonders how many lake-baths she’d had to take to get all the bloodstains out of her pale coat and shudders again.  And then the matter is dropped.  The change in the conversation is nearly seamless on her end, but he suspects her feelings are not so quick to change on the matter.  Like light though, he knows when to bend to pressure and follows her obediently out of the water.

“I wouldn’t say stinky,” he says, shaking off from snout to tail.  “Perhaps you simply cannot handle my masculine musk, Maze.  I’m very tough and strong, as you well know.”  Barrow waggles his brows at her before he can no longer contain a grin.  She asks him about his living situation just after, and his smile slips marginally.  It’s not something he’s thought about often, his future.  He’s not ambitious in the way that some are, in the way that Mazikeen is.  “I don’t know.  Nowhere now, really.”  He looks away as if there will be an answer waiting for him in the distant foothills.  Finding none, his blue eyes settle back on the other dog’s.  “I guess I should figure that out though, huh?”

Barrow

photo by: Jorge Alcala

@[Mazikeen]

[Mazikeen]

Barrow says that he’s proud of her and it warms her smile that turns into a laugh at his mention of a cracked hoof taking him out for months. But the laugh doesn’t last long because she replies sincerely to his words, and that’s nothing to laugh about. Because it does matter. She didn't think she'd hear anyone say that to her. “Thank you.” As they move out of the lake she laughs again, a full bright noise, when Barrow talks about his musk but her only response is to shake her head before she sits down in the sand, feeling utterly relaxed and eager to dry out in the sun. It can evaporate the water while Barrow’s presence has the same effect on her worries. She shrugs a little when he says he guesses he should figure out where he’s living, even though she’s the one who had just asked where. “Only if you want to. It’s not the worst thing in the world, to not have an official home. I didn’t, when we first met.” And it hadn’t bothered her at all. She does like Hyaline, likes the fact that the pack has settled here for now, and there’s a security to having official borders. But she thinks she’d wander anywhere if she had her friends with her. She smiles at this thought and it brings her back to the present. “You can stay here, if you want. That’s a shifter exclusive invitation.” Mazikeen feels a little embarrassed about this, about how if Barrow hadn’t been able to shift he wouldn’t have been welcome to stay - no matter how much she cared for him. But she reasons with herself that it's not a problem anymore.

@[Barrow]