maybe you were the ocean
When is it that the lines of her face rearranged and became synonymous with ‘home’?
Because, suddenly, her face is the lighthouse that leads him to shore. Because even though she snakes out of the cave with a flash of teeth, pinned ears, and the low whisper of a hiss falling out between her parted lips he has never felt relief quite like this. He laughs, and the sound is throaty and unexpected. He can’t help himself, and as an easy smile finds his mouth even after miles on miles of walking his shoulders seem to drop an invisible anchor he had been carrying across them since he’d first discovered Khuma missing from Nerine.
This meeting, this moment, is the culmination of all of his dramatic efforts seeing fruition at last.
At home on those kingdom shores he’d been unsure, smothered even, and he had grown resentful for it. He hadn’t liked catering to anyone beyond himself, and especially not someone with such a tendency towards carnivory. That all melts away as Khuma bumps his nose in a way he hadn’t realised he’d been missing until now.
“It’s hatching,” she says, and Wane at last remembers the egg (surprisingly he had forgotten, despite its contents leaving him reeling awake a thousand nights before this one). When she turns to lead him back into the cave and cranes her neck to look at him from across her shoulders he is drinking the sight of her in like wine. He remembers the rain in the meadow; empires rising and falling.
Of course he follows her.
He would have followed her anywhere.
Wane arrives at the cave’s cradle just in time to see the last pieces of shell fall from the slick side of their newly born child. A horse, he is thrilled to discover, though there are parts of him that are still wondering if the teeth inside its mouth are sharp or blunted (and, consequently, what that means it will eat). There is no great wave of paternal instinct that washes over him. He isn’t like Khuma, who wraps around the fragile being like she was made for it (and she is; a devoted mother from the second they learned she was to be one — even he can acknowledge the magnitude of that).
“Salvage, my perfect son,” he listens to her say against a tiny cheek.
“You’re as handsome as I always imagined.”
Still, there is a small something in him that blooms for the foal. A fondness, perhaps, because while the child looked like Khuma in colouring his build was lanky and angular like Wane’s. Perhaps it is only his ego at play again, nonetheless, he is proud.
“You’re more handsome than I imagined,” Wane quips with a crooked grin, thinking again of all the moments he had wondered what exactly (eggsactly?) that egg had contained. Suddenly sober, he looks up at Khuma again, the smile dead on his lips and the gravity of his failure showing in his shoulders. He found them, certainly, but they weren’t safe. They were still so far from safe.
“Khuma,” he says, quietly, as though if he is too loud the sound of his voice will shatter the beauty of this calm moment.
“I came as quickly as I could. The world’s falling apart out there.”
@[Khuma]