Emberflame Ridge I sold my soul for this?

The silence is strange. It is worse than when he speaks her name, so she hides within him, presses herself in to his thick fur as if to hide away forever. The moments of quiet are punctuated by his heartbeat, which she listens to with a sense of fondness, of familiarity, but that dwindles the longer they are silent together; and she burns, oh how she burns, because the wanting is still there, and Tavi drifts between thoughts of her beloved boys. The problem with having a type, she thought with sudden lucidity, is you can never tell them apart. This voice in her head is different; it isn't her own, it isn't something she recognizes, and then even her brain is silent, and Tavi forgets.

What's wrong? says the dark man, and his voice drapes across her like a blanket, warm and comforting, with the irregular beat of his heart in the background. She hums something useless and monosyllabic, nibbles softly at his fur like a child might grasp for their mother, and then Tavi sinks to her haunches, content to just linger as a piece of him. He offers her help, and that sets her off again — laughter peals out of her in waves, suffocated by his pelt at first, and then she rolls back, nearly falling away from him in a neat little pile, and Tavi is laughing like she used to.

She snorts, and the overwhelmingly obnoxious sound of her hearty, big-bellied glee overtakes the cliffside. She gets to her feet and staggers around Ukko, her head slouching between her shoulder blades at first, and then her shoulders stoop down as she smacks the earth and invites him to play, because for a second she is a little girl again and this isn't Ukko, but her brother — but that doesn't last either. She feels the wind course across her scruff and twists on the spot, addled by the sensation, and catches sight of him over the small of her own back. Mmn, take me, she purrs, and bats her tail at his chin before sauntering away a few steps.

As a gap forms between them, she is laughing again, the tittering rat-infested laughter that was so unnerving the first time around. Tavi has become uncoordinated and reacts as if she's drunk when her paws catch upon a small ledge, and she has to correct her movement in haste lest she fall on her face — and as she stands up properly, she scoffs, staring down at the dirt with a dumb smile, but the laughter has faded.