Wheeling Gull Isle a place called kokomo

@Komodo ♥

The encounter with Dakarai had shaken Coelacanth badly, and she’d taken to actively avoiding even the wolves she’d come to trust. It was on a cool, dew-laden morning that she broke this self-imposed period of isolation, and the first wolf she sought out was the Earthstalker. Delicate paws traced an unerring path through the island’s untamed foliage; like her sheepdog brethren, Seelie kept a nearly obsessive eye on her flock and this instinctive desire ironically made her a better wolf. When she came upon Komodo’s sleeping form, her tufted ears fanned cautiously forward, and she slunk out of the shadows with timorous care.

The little wolfdog nosed at the angakkuq’s cheek, but the solid warmth of him was too tempting to leave alone. For the first time since the last time they’d lain together on this island, she tiptoed nearer and fitted her body against his, resting her muzzle across his outstretched forelegs to look beseechingly at his sleeping face. Half of her wanted him to wake up and look at her, to smile at her and call her “big ears” — but the other half was afraid that he would be offended with her recent avoidance.

Komodo did not dream often, and when he did, there were few things he dreamed about.

The man was an adept hunter, so sometimes his unconscious mind regaled him with scenes of great hunts and big game. His thickset limbs would twitch and jaws would press tightly together without reason and when he awoke, his heart would be left pounding from the thrill of it. Other times, the legends of the gods replayed themselves in his mind; perhaps a ceremony he once witnessed during his wayfaring, or the relics he encountered on holy sites and holy people. Since the hurricane, though, the earthstalker’s dreams had been dark and nightmarish, of imprisonment and stagnation, of the madness that set in when wanderlust was stifled and confined by impassible, invisible walls.

and, often, he would awake to find that he was indeed imprisoned by walls of water. The island’s tides proved to be a barrier he could not cross — not yet, at least. The last remnant of the hurricane’s fury, perhaps. Komodo did not know why the gods chose this fate for him; a fate which was so contrary to the one they had groomed him for. How could he be a faithful servant upon this island? Spreading the holy word — and now his preaching were only to be heard by the limited audience brought to this island.  Maybe it was divine providence, as Axolotl believed; if it were true, Komodo could but understand it but it was something Komodo could resign himself to — but while the Atlanian was content with marking borders and claiming territory, there was something in Komodo that panicked.

The brute roused when a weight placed itself across his forelimbs. Blinking in the heavy, sonorous rays of the summertime sun, the inkblot came into view and materialized as Coelacanth. He could immediately see that it was the girl and not the feral thing that sometimes lived in her skin — knew it was her, indeed, with the familiar glint in her skybright gaze. A smile crept upon his lips, quite pleased with this turn of events, and stretched out all his limbs to rid them of sleep. Hoping he had not jostled her, the brute released his stretch and fell back languidly against the toasted, sandy terrain. After a moment, words came. “ ‘ow’re you feelin’? ” he burred slowly, bringing himself to a stake of wakefulness.

A small sigh gusted from Coelacanth’s lips. There was a sticky-sweet gloss upon them and a lightly fruity scent to her breath that suggested she’d been eating fresh strawberries; and this became more apparent as she nosed insistently at the corner of the Earthstalker’s mouth to feel his smile. An answering one danced in her eyes, though the set of her mouth was solemn, as she burrowed still closer and nosed at the hollow of his axilla. “Wake up!” she begged him inwardly, tiptoeing her dainty paws up the great barrel of his chest until she almost lay atop him. Her elbows drew even with his sternum, the very tips of her toes tangling in the thick fur of his withers to pillow the pert curve of her chin.

He spoke to her, sending a shiver of delight through her gamine musculature, and she opened her mouth to close the very tips of her incisors over the tip of his ear. Playfully, she tugged, her grip controlled and her touch as fragile as a promise. A kittenish growl fluttered in her throat, utterly playful and completely without rancor. She, too, stretched; her inky toes splayed and her finely sculpted head tipped back into the feathered ruff of her neck that had grown glossy and soft once more. “Sleepyhead!” she thought, and tried to fit speech to her fond teasing: “S-S-S — ” Her encounter with Atshen, however painful and distressing, had given her the idea that she could learn how to communicate verbally in time.

To be able to speak to Komodo, Axolotl, Cascada, and King instead of having them guess what she meant — it was somehow both exciting and terrifying. “S-S-S — ahh — eee — ” she whispered to him, brow furrowing as she worked out the vowel sounds.

Sweet puffs of her breath elicited a rumble of beatitude from his barrel-shaped chest. His eyes slipped shut again in a feigned sleep, he took a deep breath and exhaled sharply, blowing up a small cloud of dust around his pale mouth. Then he relaxed and settled into the ground as would a wolf in the throes of sublime sleep, blissfully unaware of the inkblot that crawled around and upon him. The more she moved, the less he moved and once or twice he threw a snore in there [for good measure].

Things such as this were the only reason the angakkuq hadn’t already said "fuck it" and attempted to swim across the war-torn channel to the mainland. 

Though Coelacanth was in high spirits that day, he knew her to still be a creature plagued by her recent past, though Komodo resigned himself to never truly knowing what horrors befell her. But he didn’t need to know — wasn’t sure he wanted to know, considering he could exact no vengeance while confined upon the spit of land. All the medicine man knew was that the girl was safe now, safe with him, far away from whatever beguiled her on the mainland.

Even if the island choked him, it nurtured her, and that alone was worth it.

Then, a sound! His ear fluttered against the sibilant noise that danced upon the sheepdog’s lips and at once his feigned sleep was abandoned. The girl could growl, the girl could huff, but he had never before heard that. "Yeah?” He questioned incredulously, notching up one eyebrowsteasingly. The earthstalker attempted to remain chill despite his sudden and profound awakeness, as he did not lose this opportunity by drawing sobered attention to it. Instead, he let her decide what to do next.

Neptune eyes widened at Komodo’s incredulous inquiry, and Coelacanth poked the wet of her nose rather insistently into the convex swell of his thickly-furred ear to fight the rush of heat that crept invisible into the hollows of her cheeks. She remained there for a heartbeat or two, then drew back and drew breath. “See,” she uttered solemnly, trying to remember the way his mouth moved when he talked. The little Groenendael had spent most of her youth not talking, and as she could hear perfectly she had no reason to pay special attention to the way a wolf’s mouth might shape certain syllables. “Big ears,” she knew, started off with the lips tightly pressed together; and her expression was quite possibly comical as she tried to look down the tapered bridge of her own nose — crossing her lovely cerulean eyes in the process. “Seebee,” she whispered, shaking her head at the wrongness of it.

Her expression was sweetly bashful, and if she’d been human, Coelacanth would have ducked her head and twisted her fingers together in a fit of nervousness — but she could see it now, the word produced with infinite care. Without looking at Komodo, she buried her face in his ruff and her mouth against the base of his ear. Then, very softly, so softly he might not have heard it if she’d not said it directly into his ear, “Sleepy,” she whispered slowly, the first consonant blend falling with odd hesitation from her virginal lips. “Sleepy — sleepyhet.”

Komodo wasn’t sure that anything had ever commanded his attention as strongly as the inksodden girl did at that very moment. The brute pushed himself upon a burly elbow, attempting to keep the rest of his body in place so that the girl would not have to reposition herself — how fine a thing it was, to have her lay upon him in such a way, clearly attempting to produce words. They were mere inches away from each other but still his ears pressed forward with gusto, straining to hear every rise and fall of her frail voice and shallow breath. It was clear the girl had little control over her tongue and lips, and it reminded him of a cub learning to make sounds. Only — Komodo did not understand how this was happening; as he had never known the girl to talk and figured he never would.

This was quite a momentous occasion and his heartbeat rose to task, thump thump thumping heavily against his ribcage as wind whistled through her teeth.

Her delicate head buried into his scruff, her movements featherlight against the solidarity of his frame. At first he did not know the meaning of the sound she spoke, but even still a shiver climbed up his spine. He struggled in the weight of the moment, not sure what the next right move now was. Oh, the man’s adrenaline thrummed through his veins despite his unconscious state just moments prior; he wanted to yell out and celebrate even such a small achievement — but he would not. Coelacanth needed a gentler touch. 

“Woah, woah,” he chuckled as the meaning of her fricative terminology dawned upon him. He leaned away from her embrace in order to extricate her visage from the crook of his ear… though she did fit there quiet nicely. “Y’can’t just go ‘round callin’ people sleepyhead.” His baritone was kept low and easy [allowing her to follow the position of his mouth, if she wished] but his eyebrow remained raised and a crooked smile came to match it.

“Not polite, y'know?”

Coelacanth felt the thrum of Komodo’s chuckle before she heard it; it traversed with a ripple of his cavernous flanks into the great barrel of his chest, then bubbled up through the strong column of his throat like dragonsfire. When it emerged from him in a series of low, sonorous huffs, Seelie thought of her draconic twin and her heart clenched painfully. Neither she nor Amoxtli had been expected to survive — Corten’s bloodline had produced two pairs of twins thus far, but only in the colloquial sense of the word. Crosscurrent and Selkie’s children were true twins, born from one sac and possessed of identical DNA despite their vividly different appearances, and they had been so small and frail at birth that their sire had quietly given up on them. It was Selkie’s obsessive maternal instinct that had ultimately saved them.

Komodo drew back slightly then, and although it may not have been his intention to produce such a response, Coelacanth withdrew from him fully. She settled her weight on her haunches, inky plume pooling in a feather-edged crescent around her, and watched him with a curious tilt of her delicate head. “Y’can’t just go ‘round callin’ people ‘sleepyhead’,” Komodo told her, his gravelly baritone rollicking unhurriedly from his smiling mouth.

The sheepdog tossed her head, a Coelacanthism that loosely translated to, “Pff!”

“Sleepyhead,” she insisted in a halting, breathlike whisper. Pronouncing “Komodo” was more difficult, as the first consonant was utterly unfathomable to her — a disadvantage, given her closest companions were currently Komodo, King, and Cascada — so she whispered shyly an abbreviation of his moniker: “Modo.” She wrinkled a nose at his quip in mute skepticism — she was almost always polite! — and then she remembered with a start that the creature wasn’t. She stopped just short of falling into a quagmire of self-consciousness, though, and changed the subject accordingly by nudging the bridge of her nose against one heavy paw.

Coelacanth backed away from her protector with a meaningful quirk of her muzzle. “Come on!” was her meaning, and she made a dancing sidestep to urge him on.

The girl pulled back fully and allowed Komodo to take on a more distingué posture. As he pushed himself into a sitting position to match her own, a stretch overtook each limb once more and his breath huffed in his body’s wakefulness. Komodo gathered himself, haunches placed upon the earth and his barreled chest rolling forward to support his full height. He somewhat had wished to stay that way, cuddled up against the girl who [for the moment] seemed to have broken her feral fugue state — but it would not be the last time, just as it had not been the first. He was loathe to let her disappear again, to slip right out from under his nose as she had before, so the angakkuq liked to keep her close at night. The fact that they were on an island did nothing to stymie his possessive tendencies, though their times together were often punctuated by several days of solitude. The sheepdog needed her space just as much as the vagrant needed his.

 A final toss of his thick pelt rid every bit of somnolence from his being. When he settled, his heavy-handed gaze found hers and he smoldered in the anticipation. Yes. Keep trying.

Seelie was not the only one lamenting the harsh sounds involved in speaking the word Komodo — the man suddenly had a very intense desire to hear her speak his name — and Earthstalker was not much better. But the girl tried anyways, and the result was nothing but satisfactory. “Mmm,” the man rumbled as would a pleased tutor to its pupil.  “That’s more like it.”  But they couldn’t stop there! With haste, he flipped through the lexicon he had learned over his many years to find a word that could suit their purposes — but could not find one that seemed to uphold the magnitude of sleepyhead.

When she spoke not with words, but once again with gestures, he responded with a chuckle, a grin, and a shrug. “Alright,” he drawled, all too happy to let her take the reigns. He was interested in her next moves — he never could accurately predict what she would do next, even as a cub. “You lead the way, peach.”

Delighted, “Peash,” Coelacanth parroted in a breathlike whisper, the bridge of her muzzle furrowing in a funny little expression of displeasure at her inability to copy him more accurately. “Peash?” She mouthed the word a few times to herself, but resigned herself to failure — for now. She didn’t want to lose the morning hours, as the surprise she’d prepared for him would look magnificent in the soft, muted colors of the rising sun.

Slim legs flowed into a graceful, fluid lope as the atramentous sheepdog made her way to the coast, frequently checking over her shoulder or double backing to encourage @Komodo onward. Now and again, her excitement got the better of her and she was forced to spin a quick circle or dance a ring around the Earthstalker — and when they reached the shoreline at last, she sprang into the air for the sheer joy of it, kicking up her feathered heels and bouncing about like an overexuberant baby goat. Dipping her toes in the lapping wavelets, Seelie blew out a soft, snuffling sigh. “Modo,” she whispered shyly, though her voice was likely drowned out by even the hushed murmur of low tide.

After a moment of wordless rhapsodizing about the beauty of the morning and the ocean and Komodo’s fiery eyes, she turned abruptly and veered inland, angling westward. She led the angakkuq to a hollow log, then wedged herself inside — it was too small for the medicine man to fit, but she shimmied out easily with a pearl-and-citrine nautilus shell grasped carefully between her incisors. She tucked it against one silky flank, then repeated the process several more times. All in all, she stood and backed away to reveal a collection of gifts for the medicine man: the nautilus shell, a few pristine steel-and-white gull feathers, and a sizable rib bone of unknown origin. Then she sat beside them, her cerulean eyes alight with love as she waited, clearly, to be praised.

As he always did, the Earthstalker indulged her — and she basked in the attention he showered her with before the capricious whims of her heart drew her up and away.