in sunshine and in shadow
He is never prepared for her grin - he wasn’t then, in his own halls, with candlelight thick and dandelion wine like starlight in his veins, and he isn’t now, with magic thick around them and their last conversation echoing in his mind like rolling thunder always at the horizon.
Oh, but he should know better - isn’t her wild joy the reason she’d snagged him from the first? But Asterion doesn’t hold her gaze for long, as the tiger steps forward and his dark gaze falls to meet one of striking, improbable blue. Maybe he should laugh, at the tug Moira gives the big cat’s tail, and the tiger’s answering roar; instead he stops, only watching. Asterion is not concerned for his own safety (foolishly, he never is), instead grateful for the tiger, for the whims of whatever power bound two creatures together.
She is still laughing, despite the way the birds all take off from the canopy around them at the sight of the roar, crying terror in a hundred strange tongues. What attention might it draw? But perhaps she isn’t wrong, to find wonder even here - and she doesn’t know what he searches for, in the dark and thick and wild forest.
“It’s a ghost I’m hunting,” he says at last, and nods in acknowledgement of her explanation. “I was distracted, then,” he allows, and does not elaborate. How to tell her that he wasn’t sure what they would meet, at the end? How he thought he might have to use up every ounce of his magic to protect every soul on the bridge, so vulnerable suspended above the sea?
The bay has yet to move when Neerja stalks forward again, muscles rippling beneath her richly colored coat, languid and strong. When she bares her teeth at him - as he flicks an ear at Moira’s words of doubtful truth - Asterion extends his muzzle toward the tiger, the way he would greet any wild thing with an exchange of breath, though he is not so foolish as to touch her.
“Neerja,” he says, and then drops his voice low, so only the tiger can make out the words. “I am so glad you’re here with her. Keep her safe.” (Oh, if only he knew his family’s history, how his own father faced his mate’s tiger in much the same way - maybe it is genetic, the way he has fallen for a girl who burns so hot, so fiercely.)
When he lifts his head that startled look, that tharn look, has bled away from him. His expression is somber, and her question - however lighthearted - changes nothing in it; all the while he is listening to the jungle around them, and the sky above, waiting for anything that sounds deadly or wrong.
“I suppose both,” he says, and when he smiles at last there is no joy in it. Still his voice is low, as though the island may be listening - as though a ghost may be listening. “I’m looking for Raum.”
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