09-24-2018, 11:22 AM
Keeper has a heavy-hoofed unusual step. It comes from being a bear most of the time. Her hooves slap the earth in the same gruff manner that her large paws do. She cannot help it but this horseflesh has become cumbersome and too small. There is a fragility to it that she never noticed before until now.
She sticks her nose straight up in the air and sucks in a lungful. It smells of panther and stallion and a million things unsaid. Things that probably don’t really have a smell to them but she thinks they do all the same. One more sniff and one more lonesome call into the daylight as if she had enough magic to make his name burn the air that much brighter over her head.
But that’s not the kind of magic that she has. Keeper only has the kind that lets her think of mushrooms and honey with the same kind of delight that pools deliciously in her stomach. The kind that lets her be bear or mare and love with a long capacity for it despite how her heart hibernates inside her dunskin chest.
But her name hangs in the air now and she turns her face in the direction of it. She’d know that voice anywhere, full of manly burrs and cougar purrs - a voice that even as a bear, she’d know it and heed it. Before she can even snort-squeal in happiness or smile, he’s on and against her and she’s not sure where she ends and he begins.
Keeper is smiling and whuffling deep into his neck and the mulberry mane that hangs from it as he murmurs into her. She nuzzles an apology down the length of his crest to end up chafing his withers with her teeth. Between this grooming act of companionship and something else that she doesn’t investigate too closely, she responds back to him in hushed assurance.
“You are never alone, never.”
then —
“I’m sorry.”
She is but it’s easy to bury the tears that crowd her eyes in his mulberry mane as she buries her face there.
@[Ryan] d’awww ❤️