Firefly Glen the finite and the infinite

He didn't make her wait. When their eyes met, Meerkat didn't smile. Her gaze gently probed his face, reading it in the flurried darkness, recognizing the grief and sorrow etched there. So much had changed since their last snowy rendezvous. Everything had changed, in a way. There was one thing that hadn't changed at all, though.

"I want you to be my husband," she said into the silent stillness of the night, apropos of nothing. She took a soft step toward him, paws crunching lightly in the snow, then several more to close the space between them. There was no merry sparkle in her eye, no upturn of her mouth. She was gravely serious.

Toad had wanted such simple things out of life: a husband and children. She would never get to have these things now because she'd died before her time. She'd died suddenly and without warning, ripping a hole in Meerkat's life and forcing her to stare into the chasm of grief it left behind. And it shifted a lot of things inside her, made her aware of her own fragile mortality.

What if she died tonight? Tomorrow? Meerkat realized now that life was short. Any day could be her last. Her paw shot out to grasp at Atlas's as she tipped back her head to look him in the eye. Toad had died but Meerkat was still alive. She wanted to make the most of it, live every day like it was her last if it came right down to it.

And she'd decided, at some point while staring off into space in the hours past: she wanted to grab life by the balls and live it with this man by her side.