The laughs that come from Firion help ease the shocking jolt in her heart whenever his flying isn’t smooth. Even believing there were no limits to the things he could do, including heal and stop himself from falling, she can’t help that flicker of fear for him that appears every time. Smaller echos of the way she had once been filled with shock and dread when he had dropped dead in front of her just to be a jerk.
(It still wasn’t a funny joke, though now she could actually name the reason why Firion dying bothered her so much.)
And she appreciates that the learning process doesn’t frustrate him to the point of fury. There's no anger radiating from him when they land - just that laugh she loves so much and the thrill of exertion.
She hopes she will stop looking for these darker reactions, the ones that don't belong to the golden stallion she's with - the ones she had learned to expect and sometimes needed to actively squash and remind herself they had no place in her life anymore.
Her pale skin twitches beneath his touch as he joins her, words and smile and teasing bites spreading heat through her - like the soft glow he radiates is the sun itself. “The answer to that is not a new story, but it is a good one.” It’s an answer both honest and a little embarrassing to say out loud so she doesn’t look at him as she says it. She leans in close, a lingering touch against his skin and a smile accompanying the quiet words. “My favourite place I’ve lived is with you.” Hyaline, yes, but though Mazikeen had many ties to the mountain kingdom it was this time she had been given with Firion that was her real favourite. The changing of the tides that his presence marked.
And though when she was alone she feared they would run out of that time, it didn’t feel that way right now. It feels, as it always does when he was close, like this was still just a part of their beginning and there was so much more to come.
It would be incredibly easy to just linger in those thoughts but Mazikeen does resolve to try to come up with an actual story he doesn’t know while her grin still burns bright with the fluttering heat inside her.
She thinks of the Cove here with Breach and Daye and Sochi, of Hyaline with Sabal before the darkness had come - both metaphorically and with the eclipse. And though she loves so much about these lands she’s lived in, it’s another answer that she gives Firion.
“But I guess second to that… I think it'd be the short time when both my parents raised me. We didn’t live anywhere specific - somewhere around the forest and the meadow. And even though I felt restless, even though I ended up finding a different family in the pack… I had a good beginning with my mom and dad, all things considered.” She hadn’t appreciated it at the time and it hadn’t lasted. Her mother’s sadness, the duplicity of the lives she was living, had torn that small bubble apart before it could really form. Mazikeen leans into Firion and tells him all these things about her family she often lets herself forget - and of how she didn’t really know any of her siblings, or how many there even were, except for a pair of twins born a year or two after her.
@firion