He tries in the days that follow the Bardot day to disappear into the forest in his usual way. It should be as easy as standing eerily still in the darkness and waiting for his mind to grow quiet, and his body to make it's demands. Eat, sleep, or even just wait and listen like a coiled snake.
None of this happens. Oh he does stand as quietly as a stone, but his mind never stills. In it are once delicious pictures gone sepia and moth eaten until they taste of dust. Up until now he has not even bothered to remember these things, his moments have been just moments passing and gone and mattering not at all because he was alive only in the next violence and the next.
Now there is time all around him, the before, the now, and the question of what comes next. It unsettles and enrages him, the loss of the simplicity of earlier days when he only needed to take, consume, conquer. He was changed already when he made the decision to walk out into the meadow but he might have returned to the darkness and himself if she…
He does try to remove her from his thoughts, even going so far as to look for someone else to break, certain that it would send him back to the quiet hedonism of his former days. The potential victims he does come across do not spark his interest, though he hunts in the forest for days and lays eyes on more than one who would have served… he finds his craving too specific for these, and stalks further and further out toward the edge of the forest.
If only it could be said that he has caught the scent of her floral perfume once or twice and moved on. It might be a balm to his pride to have forced it out of his nostrils and moved on. That has not happened. A breeze over the water carries their heavy tropical fragrance to him in the trees and he turns toward it immediately
The first thing he's done without thought all day.
Tunnel is on the bank before he knows it, looking out at her in the current. He hardly notices the sun beyond the way it glows against her damp skin. Her mane is curling again at the ends where it has been wet. He lowers his head to drink from the river's quiet edge. The forest shadows cling to him but the sunlight that reaches him makes his blue black coat brilliant and distinctly out of place beside the river.
He could say something to her, her name perhaps or the phrase that he knew might turn her warm and needy. Instead he stays silent, pushes into the river upstream of her but not close enough to again shelter her from the force of the water. What about her bothers him? The way she disrupts the intractable violent storm that he has for so long embodied? Could it have been anyone or is she exactly the woman, the one he should have avoided without knowing it.
Tunnel still hasn't said anything as he drifts closer to her, his hooves deft on the stony riverbed until he is close enough to reach out and groom her, his body following much more slowly, drifting closer. She might spurn him but he recognizes his marks on her skin and wets his muzzle, smooths his lips against her skin. He doesn't say a word, just helps her bathe with a slow and deliberate touch, his eyes intent and dark as he smoothes tangles in her black mane and drips cooling water over her withers.
@Bardot
