even after they have been stepped on
Two days. Ipomoea doesn’t need to wander at the sort of anxiety or fear that must have consumed her in that time - his own heart is already constricting painfully at the reminder of his own experience. And it’s a struggle to not let his mind wander to the fragile bird stature still keeping a silent watch over his desk, to not think of his own lost bonded (even if Odet was lost in a different way than this stranger’s bonded.)
But he doesn’t need to tell her what the chances of finding her bonded again are (especially today, especially in these woods, especially with so many other animals turning up dead each morning-). It’s written already in the lines of her face, in the uneasy way that she paws at the ground and glances too quickly back at the sky. He knows that feeling, he knows that haunted look; it makes his heart twist like something dying in his chest.
The flowers are still blooming, pressing their trembling petals against his heels and his fetlocks, but he does not feel them. If it had been another day, if they had been standing together a year ago, he might have plucked one to give to her (flowers had always been a symbol of hope, hadn’t they? Even when he stopped feeling it himself?).
“I do,” he finds himself telling her instead, but had his words ever had the same effect as a flower? “These woods are my friend; I did not see anything unusual on the way here, she may be deeper in the forest.”
All around them are waving trees, and soft sighs of the forest, and frost creeping over the blades of grass sprouting around him. The forest feels cold, and he does not like it.
But there’s something there still, running like a tremor beneath his hooves, something not-yet-dead. And Ipomoea, while his heart trembles like something that is afraid of the death it knows to be inevitable, steps forward to the nearest tree. The bark is cool and rough against his shoulder, scraping a line into his red skin, but he doesn’t mind. Because somewhere, deep in the sap-filled veins of the tree, he can feel something stirring for the first time all winter.
“This way,” he whispers to her, as he starts to follow a path he knows she wouldn’t understand. But the trees know the path the crow’s wings traced through the air, and he knows it because of them - and for the first time in a long time, he is speaking the same language again.
@corrdelia
