Keeper listens to reason and instinct, but is blind in the face of his snarled threat. Or maybe it was an assurance? She ignored it; obstinate and determined to behold the face of her friend and to almost touch him but she remembered she was in grizzly shape and he’d not know her like this. Then embarrassment hits her hard and the bear pulls back, managing to look chagrined.
How could she have forgotten that he’d never seen this side of her? She had done so well to keep it hidden - to keep herself hidden whenever she was a bear instead of a mare. Keeper gnashed her teeth together as her fore paws kneaded the earth in a not so nice manner. Small breathy snorts and grunts push their way out of her nostrils and mouth that become a kind of song to her embarrassment.
Until —
He doesn’t know her but he changes, softens, subsides back into that same sad self that she had known and tried to free from other different demons at the time. She’s not certain of these new ones or how he came to be so harsh and hidden, and it makes her sad in turn too. Then again, her heart often bruised easily when it came to him and how the world kept trying to break him.
She can tell he’s trying to figure out who she is through smell and sight. It almost makes her laugh aloud but her laughter in a bear’s mouth is harsh and unbecoming, so she smiles instead not realizing that her smile is probably not much better coming from a predator’s toothy jaws. Instantly, she brightens at his question and finally laughs, a guttural growl of a thing that shakes her great round bear-belly;
“Why, it’s me silly - Keeper!”
Then she recovers, sobering and almost lifts a paw to him in offering before thinking better of it. Instead, she lumbers a few paces back from the cave and wills herself into that old shape she has spent so little time in. Before she knows it, with a pop and a crunch and a small cry of pain - she’s back to being a plump but lovely little mare. “I’m more familiar this way aren’t I?” she calls out to him before walking back over so he can get a better look.
Her dark eyes find his face for but a moment before her head drops, bashful and apologetic. “I - I wanted to show you before but I went away for a while and when I came back, you weren’t here.” Keeper doesn’t ask where he went, or further explain how she almost lost herself to the bear and it’s needs. She just inches that much closer, extending her muzzle towards him until they can almost touch… and she wants to touch him so badly!
The mottled blue of him has never lost its allure to her; neither has his eyes and his face. She contents herself with just breathing him and tells herself that that will just have to be enough, for now.
@[Balto] eeeeee me too! missed you! <3