[private] your heart, it's like a drum; Firen

[Firen]

There is a comfort in the way she greets him, an easiness he has not felt in the presence of others since his heart had been irrevocably damaged.  She touches her snout to his whiskers, huffing and exchanging scents, and he pushes his muzzle into the thick collar of fur around her neck, letting his senses overflow with her and the feelings of home.

When they withdraw her eyes find his scars. She is full of questions and something close to guilt, but he just shrugs. She hadn't been there for him, it was true. But it just as easily could have been she who was hurt and he who was missing. If somehow he had been given that choice, it always would be he who took the bullet.

And anyway, she would have only gotten herself killed if she had tried to fight the creature that attacked him.

But he wouldn't tell her that.

She wants to know more and he won't defy her. He opens his mouth, speckled-black tongue sliding over even blacker lips as he prepares to use his voice for the first time in weeks. In his mind, this was his largest flaw,  that he had to use his voice to speak at all.

"It's not much of a story." He begins, reaching back into his memory with a scowl, sifting through the jumble of days and faces around that event. "It was on Icicle Isle, a monster." He didn't have the words to properly describe the xenomorph who had pulled him from the sky like a cat with a songbird. But he would never forget her face.

"I woke up days later, and a strange stallion had kept me alive. He sealed the wound with ice magic," It was a cruel irony, the man had saved his life but still Firen harbored something resembling resentment for him.  "but I'm not sure he did it right."