@Kove :D Are you okay with backdating this to around the 5th or so? I'm hoping to jump in on Xan's thread as well, so that is why (: also, long title is long, but I really liked it, so... there we go... haha!
The forest was alive with sound and, being herself a creature of the night, she could name them for what they were. Foxes, and many. They struck more of a curiosity in her than a fear, and when each cry went up, Nanook tried to distinguish the voices apart. Over the nights with no one else to keep her company, she had found that like wolves, the collective of all creatures were made of individuals. When she had come to see that, she had come to see that like wolves, too, each individual had their own look, their own noise, their own self, and the revelation made her wonder what else they shared in common.
These thoughts busied her mind, while she kept the rest of herself occupied by snailing along the mountainside that hugged the forest's western edge. She had been near mountains times enough to know the secrets of some - the hidden labyrinths and dark corridors she'd sometimes called home - and she wondered if she would find any here. The peek of dawn filtered through the thick canopy above, but in the shade of the forest, the vagrant, save for the twin fires scoring every crevice of stone, melted with the shadows of the rock.
It's all good! <3
After an incalculable amount of time, Nanook stopped, backtracked, and slowed to press her snout against the jagged face of stone. A thin crevice scored the mountainside, so small she had missed seeing the gap completely, but her nose hadn't been so careless. A cold, dank smell rose from the opening, different than the warm and earthy smell of the stone around it. Something more like what she'd expect to find near a lake or a bog, but certainly not in a mountain. A thrill ran through her, and when she moved again to carry on her scouting, an eagerness brisked her step.
But she hardly took more than five steps when a voice - masculine and near - stole her ears. The fur along her neck bristled, and her first thought went to the foxes. They were her only company out here - had one come to speak with her? Her heart fluttered with like fear and curiosity, and she turned, but who she saw was no fox, and her veins ran with ice.
The branches above swayed draping shadow across the wolf, but even in the darkness, his fur glowed paler than moonlight and the Northern snow. Something all too familiar, and not at all. Nanook flinched a paw across the ground and shifted away - but she met the ghost with eyes of like fire, and a simple and parroted,
"Hello."
She stared, for his name wouldn't leave her, and she feared if she turned, his face would disappear to the shadows of the dawn. He wasn't real - couldn't be - because finding Desna had been impossibile enough. No, for all the times she'd dreamt of finding him, that was what this was - a dream. He hadn't changed from what she remembered - only that he seemed somehow smaller now - or maybe she had simply grown. He held her with a bright and copper stare, too much like her own, and when he spoke, his voice rang with a softer edge she dimly remembered, a familiar note that charged every inch of her spine.
She had to get out of here. She needed to run, to bar herself behind the walls of her youth, the ones she'd constructed and so carefully preserved - the ones that could still protect her. She needed to go - but she found herself speaking, a simple and quiet exhale. She hadn't realized she'd been holding her breath. "Nanook." And the polar girl matched the flames of his eyes.
<333
Her legs froze like a creature of ice for every fraction his eyes widened. She couldn't look away - and, so it seemed, neither could he. Their silence stretched, and the forest, so frequented by the shrieks and wails of the foxes who lived here, seemed to deaden. Nanook did not register the time that passed, whether seconds or minutes or hours or years, for her mind busied with her more pressing concern: what to do with the crack his ghost nailed against her floodgates; how to hold back the waters that pushed against the thinnest walls of the heart he'd helped to freeze.
And he ran to her, and she did not move because she could not move, and the touch of his chin upon her head, his softest utterance, they consumed her like a dream -
I've missed you - you've grown - I've missed so much -
I'm sorry -
And as he pulled away, fixed her with those words, and reflected his heart upon his lips in the slightest curve and fall, the ice dislodged, and wave after wave crashed over the Apaata, and she remained frozen, unable to speak. Unable to move, to say I missed you.
I missed you. He missed her -
He loved her.
The thought tipped her headfirst, and her movement came in a heavy and consuming shiver that heaved her shoulders uncontrollably, and wretched hot and ugly tears down her cheeks.
@Kove tagging, because I'm terrible and take forever ;_; I do want to keep going with this, though <3 For hopefully obvious reasons haha!
He said nothing, and her ears buzzed with the silence. Even her heavy tears ran without a noise - but she was used to the quiet now. But when she felt the warm press of his head against hers, his firm and gentle touch crashed her back to the surreal reality she found herself in. Nanook made a sloppy reel forward and, with the gravity of everything, pushed her forehead past her father's so she collapsed into the strength of his shoulders, and there, she wept.
"I'm sorry too." Her words choked through the thick clutch of her throat, and muffled into his fur. Why did he have to see her like this? She was supposed to be strong, like the ice bears he'd named her for. But all at once her defences fell - those she had built up to protect her from everything like this, those she had thought impenetrable - but they had always been cracked, hadn't they? Her heart had always leaked through, and that was why she ran. Deep guilt crept through her heart with long, dark fingers, scratching at the memories she had tried so hard to suppress.
"Was it my fault?" She whispered.
"That you and ma..." her breath caught, and she could only finish in hoarse repetition,
"was it my fault?"