[private] wait until you see the new me - Pteron

[Pteron]

finger trips across my cheek----------------
----------------kiss me until i can't speak

He’s shaking his head as soon as she says it is not enough; as the holder of the debt he considers it his choice as to what constitutes adequate repayment. Her experience is a foreign one, and the tale is novel enough that he considers them even with the retelling. More than even, truly, as she continues to tell a tale of missing family and lost children. The charming smile he’d worn softens as she speaks, and fades away at the idea of not knowing where he children are. Pteron cannot even imagine misplacing Adarra. Her children are older, he realizes; he’s made the mistake of assuming her smooth features are indicative of youth. How much older, he finds himself wondering? His age, older? He nearly asks her – or at least makes a comment about well she looks for a mother many times over – but Vastra’s story is not over and so he holds his tongue.

No home, she says, and her elaboration answers his unspoken question. Before the world changed? She is ancient then, thinks the stallion whose family has spent three generations here since the Reckoning. Pteron is quiet again, imagining life in a world he did not know. How strange it must be to live in a place that is the same and yet entirely different. What would Beqanna be like without the Hyaline mountains or the red hills of Loess? Strange, he decides, and Vastra’s lack of a home feels somehow the worse for it.

Her gaze has turned to the forest, and Pteron follows it, his olive gaze flicking across the broad trunks and shaded canopy that he has called his home for the past five years. Five years; how has time passed so quickly and so slowly?

“Taiga?” he asks, not thinking how that might sound. Of course she means Taiga. “Taiga is where my family lives.” He adds, and that he knows is not an answer. “When my daughter is old enough to leave her mother, I plan to find a new home for us.” He’s not admitted this aloud before, but it is true. It feels freeing to say it, and yet it is a struggle to not look around to ensure that his wife is not near enough to hear. Why he admits this to Vastra he is not certain. Perhaps because she happens to be here, on yet another morning he has failed to leave his wife, perhaps because he remembers her vulnerability at their last meeting and attempts to balance it with this one.

-- pteron --

@[Vastra]