How sweetly she says his name. Tunnel’s gaze had sharpened when heat had flared in Bardot’s eyes, alight just long enough at the sound of her name rolling off his dark lips. The sweetness and the coy femininity does not further incite his interest, in fact he exhales with restrained impatience at the same time as a simper tugs at her lips.
He could turn back toward the forest without a word and never think or feel a single thing about having done so. It’s been a long time of just being on his own, so he lingers and is thereby forced to think beyond the initial impulse to drift back toward the river and the trees beyond.
Tunnel has set eyes on many pretty things and he knows almost none of them stand up to more than a cursory inspection. Everything is rotting somewhere underneath, fear or pain festering in every idyllic scene. He himself is so often featured in that part of the scene, the shadows bleeding out from between whatever lovely things first catch the eye. Bardot is bound to have shadows he might decide he needs to see. He could inflict some on her, though he hasn’t a mind to just now, to harm her. She smells like flowers, not like fear. Of course he’s lent his own shadows before, put a sharp edge on someone who had only been simple, soft, and brave before she’d learned his name. Anything could be taught.
“You live in one of those crowded lands, then.” Taiga, he’s never ventured there but looks in the direction of the place where the massive redwoods grow. He takes a few steps nearer to Bardot while letting his massive head swing back towards Bardot. “I live in the forest, across the river.” He doesn’t know anything about jungles that once were, and even if he were aware of this history it would not have mattered to him. The scent of her jungle-born flowers is stronger the closer he draws and he rumbles softly displeased with the floral camouflage that clouds around her and effectively hides her from the part of his brain that would recognize her as something to consume.
“Do you like it there? A pause, referring to her Taiga home without pulling his flat-grey eyes from her own golden ones. How bright and eager those eyes look. There’s only a space between them the width of his own broad shoulders. “I expect you do, you are a gregarious thing it seems.” He, on the other hand, is not. Really not.
