feel the heart underneath my skin; dara/sam-pony

[keeper]

throw me to the wolves & i will return leading the pack.

Keeper is the last in the Mandan-brood; for now.

She is unaware that her father has sowed his seed again this season; she thought him entirely too sad, too lonely, and she loved him but could not stand to be so near to him. He tried though, to keep the bitterness from his face when they were around but it shadowed his every look or word. It hurt her very heart but he refused to cure himself of this illness, stewing in his misery rather than conquering it and it was this that eventually drove Keeper away.

(She misses the shelter of Yellowstone’s wings; she often ran and hid beneath one of them, tucked up against his pale yellow-and-white side. The feathers of his wings fluttered and spoke of birds and flight until she dreamed of soaring the skies herself, but she never envied his ability to do so as she could not.)

(She even missed Ceremony bossing her around, all green and black like a beetle’s back, and large like their father - like Keeper was not, small but hardy, despite her ordinariness that kept her apart from all of them - the entire family, except for aunt Americus…)

Keeper hardly thinks of them now; she listens to the howl of wolves as they try to sing down the light of the moon each night. She looks for the liquid shine of animal eyes in the shadows - be it squirrel or deer, preferrably the latter, as she trails them time after time, her own eyes similiar in their shine, wild and dark. Her eyes now cannot look away from the mare; it is the roaned black of her shot through with silver, like granite, she muses to herself. Granite beneath moonlight, or water, all lovely and veined; Keeper wants to say as much but the mare is speaking and her ears crane forward to hear her.

“Why would that have been a shame?” she asks, curious as to why Dara attributes an importance to her already - she’s just Keeper, nothing and no one special, just herself and she nearly says so but decides to continue the introductions to one another. “I’m Keeper, from nowhere and now here.” and she knows it almost makes no sense to be from nowhere but somehow here - it just is, and for now, she’ll have it no other way because the Forest is fast becoming home to her and she cannot imagine being somewhere that has no trees to block out the sky.

Keeper likes to hide, like a secret - like a thing that should not be.

Keeper