A peaceful sound, without menace - Woodrow; birthing

[Longear]

“Woodrow,” she invites him in, soft-tongued and damp, reaching her nose out to touch his shoulder – the hard muscles and woody scent; buried somewhere deep below, the agouti fur she finds so frightening and lovely all at once. It is as much his fold as it is theirs, even as something possessive and rankled creeps up her spine, asks her to step in front of them and halt his approach. ‘Nature’, her mother’s voice whispers, and she knows it is so.

The harvest.

(In the same way she did not let Longear come to her when Fang was born and the other was left unceremoniously to the tigers.

The rabbit would have left them – dug them a hollow in the earth and covered them with hair plucked from the fold of skin on her neck and dead grass – coming back only to feed them. So as not to lead predators…)

Nature.

Longear was borne of a ransacked nest. It is written into her like the jungle and the plains; the sowing and the reaping. Even without the second soul, she knows all too intimately the fragile nature of their existences. Their long legs and knobbly knees, wavering like whip-thin saplings in a gale as they try and take their stands; the unclean and fleshy scent of their delivery, even as she had made a meal of the afterbirth with sharp precision.

(To the mountain.)

“Woodrow,” she whispers softly, ears tucking back into the wild mop of grey mane, anxiety wresting the soft maternity from her eyes and muscles. (If she could, she would thump. She would dig them a hollow in the earth.) “...we have to bring them to the Mountain.” (‘We have to get them somewhere safe,’ she means to say, but something mad and clawed has made it’s way in.)

She is as fit to climb that rock as the day she was forced down it. Then, she had been heavy and overripe. Now, she is shaky and bleary-eyed – they are just standing, splay-legged, thinking next of milk and then of sleep. And yet, panic finds her again, feverish and strong as it had before she was forced to surrender to her body. “They need to know who they are,” behind and below, they bump her stomach and groin, and then latch on. “I could feel it, Woodrow. They are trapped up there, too.” She thought tears would come, but frustration had run them dry.

Hopelessness can be an arid land, especially when mated with exhaustion.

(@[Kristin] - this took way too long.. but lie.. I always knew HOW I was going to respond, I just couldn't write. To here it the partial mental breakdown. It needed to be written. I was DETERMINED.)