[private] hear the rumble in the cage; Sam pony

[dear]

careful, child, light the fuse and get away—

Were she something sterner, she might have admonished him. She might have set her brow and told him that it didn’t matter if it had been her that he’d been chasing or one of the actual deer she’d come to love as family, that he shouldn’t have been chasing them regardless of who it had been. 

But she is a small, soft thing, and instead of chastising him for his reckless behavior, she swallows a giggle. Because her worry has dissolved around the edges of a kind of amusement. Because he staggers to his feet, muttering a coarse word, exhaling a breath of smoke.

(She has never seen a dragon this close before, she realizes, and she watches with a kind of wonder-struck expression as he rises to his full height. And then… and then the dragon is gone, replaced instead by the gold-dappled stallion and she wonders which form he considers his truest. Does he prefer the dragon or the horse? Does he feel most at home with scales or with horse-flesh?)

She is smiling still when he glances at her, offering up his own grin. “No,” she assures him, taking a half-step closer, “it wasn’t me that you were chasing.” She shakes her antlered head, acutely aware that it doesn’t matter, that she’d forgive him even if it had been.

“Are you all right?” she asks again. “That was quite a nasty fall,” she points out, glancing past him to the disturbed earth where he had crashed into the dirt. 

— cause happiness throws a shower of sparks

@Roué