"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
He has never been as adventurous as Anaise.
He sticks close to their father instead, laughing brightly as Gulliver twists vines through his mane and tail, eyes wide with wonder when Gulliver makes flowers bloom in the dead of winter.
But he emerges a yearling as the snow melts into spring, wandering further from his father’s side than he ever has before. Even though his sister has come back with her head full of stories. How she had become the sun one night without even having to think it and he had tried to hide the way this made his heart twinge with fear but he never could keep anything from her and she had teased him relentlessly for it.
He has no desire to be the sun.
He wanders now to the meadow, heart pounding. And he wishes that Anaise were here to lend him some courage because she seemed to have inherited all of it. She’d tease him mercilessly for this, too, if she knew.
He stands there in the meadow with his heart in his throat, watching birds flit in and out of shafts of sunlight and he smiles, just barely, a kind of experimental thing as he turns his face into the light, too. It warms him down to the bone and then he remembers how Anaise had turned into the sun by accident and he abruptly turns his face away from the heat, his pulse accelerating.
Should he find cover in a nearby copse of trees? Is this how it happens?
(But she had said it had been dark when she’d started to glow so brightly that she couldn’t even stand to look at herself.)
There are so many magics that he does not understand. Truly the only thing he does understand is his father’s ability to manipulate plants like the vines still tangled up in his mane and tail and his mother’s ability to become something Other and his and Anaise’s ability to communicate with their minds.
In the end, he stays where he is, teeth gritted with determination and looks out at all the unfamiliar faces, wondering if he should go and say hello.
i see that scene, i hear that voice
Hearts and flowers: my drugs of choice
Sokali’s excitement over becoming a big sister had resulted in such an abundance of energy that, today, she had been gently encouraged to go find someone else to pester play with so that her mom could get some rest. So soon to the baby’s arrival? There were names to discuss! Sokali had a great number of suggestions, most of which were absurd but she enjoyed watching her parents pretend to take them under consideration while their faces slowly twisted with the effort of sparing her feelings.
Maybe she’d say the right combination of nonsense one day to earn an outright scowl.
Being ushered away was a small victory (though she did enjoy spending time with her parents) and this pink yearling trots into the meadow with a spring in her step. If nothing else, she’d be sure to find more inspiration for names here. Unless her siblings happened to be born while she was gone! That thought was nearly enough to get her to turn right around. But her attention snags on a boy standing out in the open.
And she’s not sure why but all she can think about, since he’s standing so still, is whether or not she’d be able to jump onto his back in her fox form.
Not seeing any reason why not to give it a go, Sokali becomes a dusty pink, two-tailed fox and slinks around in the grass, looking for the perfect angle. The silver tips of her tails twitch in excitement once she's found it and she crouches. A deep, steadying breath like she's about to perform something life-or-death and then she shoots into a run. Shouting "Hey hold still!!" at him just as she launches out of the grass towards his deep green side.
Or, more specifically, he hears her thoughts before he sees her. They are a jumble he does not quite know how to translate because he’s never been as good at this as Anaise is either.
But when she shifts, his head goes quiet and his heart immediately jumps into overdrive. He scans the immediate area, eyes white enough to show the whites, and braces himself—for what, he’s unsure.
And then he sees her bounding toward him, a pale pink fox, and she’s shouting at him to hold still. He is momentarily torn before obeying her command and flinging himself out of her path. His muscles tremble with indecision before, just as she leaps for his shoulder, he lurches out of her way.
There are several retorts that clamber up his throat, things he would have hurled at Anaise if it had been her flinging herself at him, but he swallows them all down around the lump in his throat. He sucks in a sharp breath, wheeling around to face the fox. He is not brave, do not mistake this for courage, but adrenaline spirals through his veins so fast that it strobes his vision.
“What are you doing?” he asks, more incredulous than demanding. And then he feels silly for talking to a two-tailed fox because maybe it hadn’t been her voice that had echoed across the sea of meadow grass as she’d bounded toward him. Maybe it had been someone else and he’d only thought it was the fox. But a cursory glance around the immediate area shows that they are alone, just the two of them here, and it had to have been her.
i see that scene, i hear that voice
Hearts and flowers: my drugs of choice
Her instructions had been pretty basic and clear, hadn't they? For a single glorious second it looks like the colt is going to actually listen to her and she'll be able to sail right over him in a moment of triumph. Instead, disappointment is thick in Sokali’s mouth when he moves out of her way and she catches nothing but air.
Though she supposes she should thank him - because she would have smacked her nose right into his shoulder otherwise. The height that she got from her launch was not nearly what she would have needed to go clear over his back. It didn’t seem very fair that her dad could change into animals with wings and she was stuck with just two little tails. But she was still young and had been told on a few occasions that just because she could only take one shape now didn’t mean that there weren’t others waiting to be explored.
For now, though, she remains a two-tailed fox that cannot jump over a foal. Yet.
Her landing is rough and involves several somersaults, having expected it at a different height, but she is back on her paws and ready to try again when her would-be-landing-pad turns around and asks her what she’s doing. “Trying to see how high I can jump, duh.” Sokali replies as though this is the most obvious thing in the world.
In a flash, she’s a filly again - her grey eyes bright with a grin as she offers the only explanation she really has. “You were standing so still, I couldn’t resist.”
And then a question of her own. “What were you doing just standing around doing nothing for anyway?”
The boy’s heart shifts and spasms as the fox hits the ground and rolls several times before finally coming to a stop. He knows it’s his fault and concern immediately darkens his brow. His breathing accelerates and he takes a single, shuffling step toward the creature as it springs back to its feet and he stops abruptly.
She sounds like Anaise when she answers. He can practically hear her rolling her eyes, as if he should have puzzled that out on his own. Even though it makes no sense to him, a boy who has never once wondered how high he might be able to jump. He’s just a plain old colt, nothing in his legs that suggests he’d be any good at it anyway.
And then, before he knows it, she is a girl. A filly forming right before his eyes. The fox is gone and, if she were not the same color the fox had been, he might have thought them two different things. But there is no mistaking it and he stares at her, dumbfounded. He knows the magic exists, of course, knows that his own mother is capable of turning herself into other things, but he’s never seen anything like this.
But he blinks at her question, shaking his head to clear the fog collecting between his ears. He can’t tell her the truth, he knows that, not with the way she had sounded so much like his sister when he’d asked what she’d been doing in the first place. There is no way he’ll admit that he’d been standing there because he’d been afraid of taking a single step further.
So, he lifts his head and summons all the courage in his little body and says, “I was just looking,” he says and it sounds lame, even to him. He grimaces and shakes his head, realizing that he’ll have to tell the truth. “I was a little bit scared,” he admits. “I’ve never been out here before and my sister told me she turned into the sun when she came.”
i see that scene, i hear that voice
Hearts and flowers: my drugs of choice
10-14-2021, 06:33 PM (This post was last modified: 10-14-2021, 06:35 PM by Sokali.)
Sokali
She waits with some amusement as the silence after her question stretches a little bit - just like her instructions, she hadn’t thought that this question would’ve been particularly hard to answer. Her pink head tilts to the side as she considers him and the first answer he gives. It’s not a very interesting one, though it’s answer enough she supposes.
What he says after grimacing makes more sense and is very interesting. “Turned into the sun?” Sokali repeats, her grey eyes widening a little. She looks up at the sun, wondering if his sister was it now. Or if it just happened sometimes. And could she see from that high up?
Sokali liked the idea of flying but the sun seemed very far away from all the wonderful things down here on the earth. “Well I’d be scared of that too.” She says seriously, nodding as the thought solidifies in her mind. At least a dozen follow up questions buzz around her head and she asks a few of them when her gaze flicks down to the green colt and away from his (maybe) sun-sister. “Do you think it’s gonna happen? Could it happen to anyone?”
She might have just been complaining in her own mind about only being able to turn into a two-tailed fox but Sokali definitely preferred that over being the sun. She was pretty sure.
He braces himself.
Someone so full of life and wonder and courage will likely think he’s silly for being afraid. He expects her to laugh in his face as Anaise so often does, tell him not to be such a worry wart, live a little.
But she does not laugh. No, she accepts this as a very real danger and he releases the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. She looks up to the sun but he does not follow her gaze, just studies her as she contemplates it.
Not only does she not laugh or accept this as truth, she looks to him and gravely says she’d be afraid, too. And his taut, trembling muscles begin to relax. Because he has only ever been frightened alone—Anaise does not seem to be afraid of anything—but this fox-turned-filly is looking at him and there’s no hint of a joke in her expression.
His heart brims with a strange fondness for the girl despite the fact that she had tried to jump on him. (And there is only the hint of a new seizing when she asks him two questions he doesn’t know how to answer. But the thought that she is not immune to fear the way Anaise seems to be lends itself to a strange sort of calm. Or perhaps it is resignation.)
He swallows thickly and glances quickly up at the sun and then back again. “I don’t know if it’s gonna happen, but I hope it doesn’t.” He could likely ask his mother what she thought of the phenomenon but he doesn’t want to get Anaise in trouble. Maybe it means something bigger than either of them realizes.
He rolls one shoulder in a kind of shrug then. “I don’t know that either. I’ve never seen anyone else turn into the sun.” But he is young and hasn’t seen much of anyone at all, if he’s being honest. “She could have been lying,” he says after a moment, a relucant confession. “She likes to tease me.”
i see that scene, i hear that voice
Hearts and flowers: my drugs of choice
For such a pretty big thing - turning into the sun - her new friend is a little short on the details. Sokali could think of at least a dozen questions she would want to know immediately - starting with those that she had already asked. But since he is the only one who’s ever mentioned this as a possibility to her so far, she isn’t sure who else to ask since he doesn’t know. Maybe her parents? Her dad could turn into a lot of different things but as far as she knew the sun wasn’t one of them. Still, she would do her best to remember to find out.
So while she’s a little disappointed that there aren’t many answers coming her way, the disappointment is easy to brush off. “I hope it doesn’t either.” She agrees with a nod. “I’ll let you know if I notice you looking a little sun-ish, though.” And though she means this entirely sincerely, she cannot quite help the way the corner of her mouth tugs upwards a little more.
It falls again as she continues sharing all her thoughts with this boy, even though he hadn’t asked. The fact that his sister could be lying doesn’t, for Sokali, negate anything. Even if it was a tease, it wasn’t a very nice one. “I’m going to be a big sister soon and I’m going to remember to not tease them so much.” She didn’t want her little brother or sister having these worries.
Of course, she would still be a sister though so she adds as her smile grows once more - brightening her grey eyes. “Well, maybe just a little. On special occasions.”
He trusts her, this fox-turned-filly, because trust comes to him like a reflex.
(And perhaps this is why he had not initially thought to doubt his sister when she’d told him that she’d turned into the sun in the middle of the night. Because it has never occurred to him that anyone would lie to him.)
Whatever the reason, he trusts that she will not tease him the way Anaise does. She will not throw her eyes open wide and tell him that he’s beginning to glow a vibrant yellow when he’s not. He lets her assurance further relax him, soothe his troubles, and he manages to summon up a breathless sort of grin. A grateful grin.
“Thanks,” he says and he says it earnestly because he does not know yet how these things can be weaponized. (Though he has no reason to suspect that she might turn his sincerity against him anyway.) “I’ll let you know if you do, too,” he adds because the least he can do is return the favor.
He perks up at the mention of a younger sibling, his ears flicking forward and his expression brightening. Because, for all the grief his twin causes him, he cannot imagine what it would be like to wander the world alone. And maybe the fox-turned-filly prefers to be alone, but she speaks fondly of her impending sibling already and this softens him to her even further.
(For a moment, he even allows himself to wonder what it might be like to be her twin instead.)
He exhales a shaky kind of laugh and tries to seem more laidback than he actually is when he says, “I think it’ll be okay if it’s only on special occasions.” There is nothing convincing in this charade, especially not when he rolls one shoulder in a kind of shoulder that he works hard to make look unaffected.
“They’ll probably think it’s funny, maybe,” he adds, as if he has any authority to make any assumptions about her sibling and how they’ll react to friendly teasing.
i see that scene, i hear that voice
Hearts and flowers: my drugs of choice
Sokali beams when the boy tells her he’ll keep an eye out for if she’s going to turn into the sun too - though this only encourages more questions to form in her mind. Is there something she can do to stop it once it starts? Will calling attention to it even help at all? Is it contagious?
These questions swirl inside of her mind and she keeps them in there this time, determined to ask her parents once she got back home to see why they hadn’t warned her about this phenomenon before.
It was going to bother her until she got some answers. Or so she thinks, anyway, until she’s effectively distracted by the green colt’s laugh. Shaky or not, she’s delighted that he agrees with her statement to only tease her new sibling on special occasions - and delighted even more to have won a laugh out of him.
When he adds that they might think it’s funny, she considers this only for a moment before responding gravely. “Maybe, but I wouldn’t want to make them feel bad either.” Sokali would like very much to do a good job at being a big sister - and there seemed to be a growing list of things she should do to prepare herself.
Figuring out this sun business was one of them.
For now, though, that moves to the back of her head as she focuses on what else she’ll be able to do - reaching a resolve to not let her sibling go into the world and be as unsure as her new friend is. “So I’ll only play nice games with them.” Her attention focuses on him again, having made this internal decision. “Do you and your sister have any nicer games?” Or did she only ever tease him?
