Cerulean Cape she don’t got a lot to say but there’s something about her

Once she was assured of his wellbeing, Coelacanth laughed with Aditya. Slim jaws parted and velveteen flews drew upward in a shy smile, tufted ears folding and oceanbright eyes arching in an unmistakable expression of pure joy. The flash of his fangs gave her pause, but the kneejerk reaction of fear was so fleeting and so swiftly overwritten by love for him that it was gone, quite literally, in the blink of an eye. Her own muzzle wrinkled playfully, revealing a mouthful of scythelike cutlery, and she “barked” wildly as he lunged forward; a soft snort of alarm plumed from her curving mouth and quivering nose in a crystalline plume. More kitten than canid, she bounced from side to side, snapping harmlessly at him as she erratically sidestepped and backpedaled.

The quick boop of his cool, leathery paw dappled her aphotic fur with motes of silver sand; it made her sneeze! She tossed the sand from her nose with a second airy snort, flinging up her head like a spirited filly, but when he gently nudged her shoulder it elicited an entirely different reaction.

Coelacanth melted at his touch, stretching out on the sand like a swath of blue-black silk. Languidly, she rolled onto her back with her feathered tail swept up against her abdomen and her forepaws tucked neatly against the arch of her rib cage. “Adi,” she wheedled in a shy susurrus, rolling to lay on her side and stretching out a paw to him with beseeching eyes. She searched for the words, trying to figure out how to shape what she wanted into speech. It was so frustrating, sometimes! She knew what she wanted and would have understood immediately if someone had intimated such desires to her, but for the life of her she couldn’t figure out how to say it.

“Snow?” she attempted, but the furrow of her brow said she wasn’t pleased with it. It took a few more false starts before she came close to what she wanted: “S-Soft?” Neptune eyes darkened as she looked inward, twin storms in Charybdis’ waters. “Adi here,” she explained, patting the sand beside her, “I soft — small, soft touch.” Parceling out each word carefully, she looked in embarrassment at the water, feeling very stupid and very small in the face of her impediment.