Wheeling Gull Isle treibloka

map for ref!

heda and @Daniil had caught two gannets and an otter on that cape. she slung the mammal's slim body over her red-striped shoulders and guided her new companion to the length of sand that bridged the ocean from the island to mainland.
she trotted delicately along it, mouthful of birds dangling from her mouth. and when at last sweetharbor spread good and wonderfully before them, she set down the offerings she carried and looked with radiant love at the place she had made her home. "i'll take you to the greenhills first, all the way up there," heda said, motioning to the seacarved rise that might have been a mountain anywhere else.

She carried the gannets despite his offers to help. Their pale plumage and eyes reminded him of her.

Greenhills. His echolalia was at first a matter of practicality in the training grounds, where voices often mingled with each other, where commands of patchwork languages failed to reach ears. By now it was merely a compulsion. 

You look like snegurochka with this otter scarf, he teased. She is girl made of snow from childrens' stories.

The wind gently combed through the grass, undulating in slow ripples up the slope. Reeds shook and bowed against it, the heavy heads of cattails flicking against his stomach. It felt a world away from the austere and bleak landscapes of his childhood and adolescence. He could see why she had invoked god.

It is so beautiful here, he wanted to say. But any sentence he could form felt hollow and useless compared to what he saw in front of him, a manifestation of the utopia he had always scoffed at. He broke into a jog, wanting to witness and feel more of it, to convince himself of its dayglow reality.

a little gasp, stuttering; a laugh that flew free into the inches of beloved brine-sweet air. "maybe i am made of snow!" she sent back, hopping onto a ridge still slick with an unmelted drift. 
danill moved at a smooth pace upward, and heda followed, leaving their kills where they lay. if someone came to find them, or if a gull ate part of one — that was only giving back, wasn't it? and the young wolf was too enamoured with showing her compatriot all parts of the island.
the skies were a fathomless grey-blue, gulls wheeling high in the warmer currents. her eyes watched them, head tilted back. 
the very top of the greenhills was a small plateau that treated its climber to a detailed view of how the gradients in sweetharbor glisten through terrain that changed, for each might choose to look in a different direction.
heda, as always, fell into a breathtaken and pious silence, bracing herself with an unconscious grace against the mad buffeting of the wind, flattening pale coat to a whippet-muscled elegance made for traveling in her holy places.

Tss! he hushed. Bart'olomew going to be cross with me if you melt away, spurred on by her laughter, he flashed a crooked smile and ground his heel into the dirt at the hill's apex.

But she stilled again, and there was that look on her face— something reverent and faraway. All she was missing was a wafer on her tongue. He thought her the most fascinating girl he had ever seen, even as the wind whipped her fur every which way and revealed glimpses of the rosy scalp beneath.

Her silence touched him. He felt like a rambunctious child that had just stumbled upon the bewildering, mortifying realization that everyone around him had long since fallen quiet.

Where your favorite place? He asked in a half-whisper, scarcely able to hear himself over his own rushed heartbeat.

"the lavender fields," heda breathed without hesitation, gesturing to where the fallow stalks bobbed emptily for now, save for a faint mist of promising purple still pulsing here and there. "when late spring and summer comes, the sun shines through them and that whole part of sweetharbor smells wonderful for months."
she wore none of her trinkets now, no lacings of salt or dry petals saved from the hot times tangled in her fur. but the next morning she would, lover to the island itself.
heda turned the gold of her eyes to the soft darkness of his own. "what about you, daniil? tell me what you see first, and we'll go there."

She answered, quick and firm. La-van-da. He knew its scent, its gentle color. He could imagine her standing in a field of them, standing with an armful of the flowers.

He thought of himself still on the island for summer, in a few moon's time. And then the summer after that. The thought came with a surge of uneasiness and excitement that filled the empty spaces inside of him.

There. Next to your fields. He gestured with his whittled face to the squat, winding stream that seemed to stem from a rocky reservoir, flowing into the ocean.

Half-stepping, half-sliding his way down the hill with tumbling steps, he swallowed and tried to think of the island as home. The enormity of starting a new life was enough to inspire real vertigo. He was nobody here— a thought that brought him close, but not all the way, to tears of relief.

during his descent, heda came quietly, a young hind following an elk along the lushness of the greenhills. "i never asked, daniil. how did you know sweetharbor?" she liked the idea of someone out there who knew about them, but infinitely curious besides.
the sluicing water was brakish. heda drank anyway, moving deeper to wash her legs and shoulders into a snow-paleness once more. droplets framed her face as she arched a brow — then shook! showering danill in an arch of freshness.
her laughter sparked again.

From red girl on the beach. He chuffed through a flat, humorless smile. She was furious. I yielded, else she would have cut me.

He hadn't fought, really fought anyone in so long. He was afraid of what he might be brought to do. He wanted to think that he would have just taken her blows. That all the abstinence and self-discipline amounted to a real change within himself.

Grains of sand between his toes were being whisked away by the current. His fur was slicked close against skin, revealing a silhouette rail-thin and bounded with lean muscle. More of a vector than what could be called a flesh-and-blood body.

Ah! he exclaimed at the sudden coldness. Goosepimples raced up his arms, down his neck.

You... He whipped his face to her, his features arranged in an exaggerated how could you hang-dog expression— before it broke apart into laughter as he lunged towards her, chest-deep in water, paws outstretched to push her off her feet.

a fierce red girl on the beach? heda knew one individual by that description, and might have asked next after her accent.
his body was much like her own, and heda shyly found herself examining the arches and angularities which made him so familiar.
"daniil!" only time to gasp his name in playful shock before he sent her bowling down into the water. silverwisp bubbles burst in lightrays all around her, and she kicked away from him.
having learned to pry clams from their rock shelves beneath the surface, heda had become a decent swimmer. she would never have the natural ease of her favorite mireille, but she swam around daniil, trying to avoid any more underwater tackling with teasing eyes, trying to keep laughter from erupting once more.

His momentum carried him under too. The chill seeped into his bones. For a moment he was deaf and blind, the world nothing more than flurries of bubbles (from his laughter, he realized) and the slimy feel of river rocks beneath his feet. He arose, water streaming down his forehead, beading on the ends of his whiskers, his nose. She had looked beatified.

But now she was nowhere.

Хэда! Heda, the aitch hissing past a palate constricted with sudden fear. His eyes were impossibly opaque and dark. They looked like hagioscopes pointing to blackness.

Despair had been a living thing inside of him, then. He remembered the moans of pain in his ears, and not knowing if they were his own or from the man in his arms. He dragged them through the ocean. His arms and legs ached, burned beyond his comprehension. He felt one long inflamed nerve that coursed through him like a poisoned taproot, a filament charged with cruel light. The memory tired him as if it were an embedded bullet leeching lead into his body.

When she resurfaced she would see a smile on his face, somehow existing in a vacuum and not touching the rest of his features.

Ha. I thought I pushed you too deep. You are good swimmer. Woodenly, he waded back to the riverbank.

when heda surfaced, it was to see such a tight look on daniil's face that she almost flinched in the frigid current. before her confused golden eyes he decamped back to the saltweave shore.
at once she followed, picking her way across barnacle-encrusted boulders and the soft sea moss of gentle sand. "hey."
the girl with red hackles thought nothing of pressing her dampened waistline to his right flank. "hey, did i say something?" heda was concerned, but less for herself, she discovered, and far more for daniil.

He steadied himself so he could meet her eyes without misgivings.

No, he replied easily, his mouth lapsing back into a real, but faint smile. You are good to me. Is not your fault.

This didn't happen often. For a moment the filament in him glowed with a sullen, self-directed anger. What a critical weakness this was -- something that he would have to rectify. In his mind's eye, he caulked over the gaping memory with furious, stiff strokes. Had it not been a reason for celebration? The recognition of his valor? What was it that caused him such fear, here and now? 

At her touch, he softened.

Sometimes I feel myself strange. His eyes narrowed into sloe slivers. I lie down and it always goes away. He let his head fall back on the sparse grass. His nostrils flared with the smell of soil. Here he was, belly-up again, though this time he was loose and ragdollish, the water on his fur like dew.

his explanation was brief, but brevity did not hide the nuance of the words he spoke. heda realized his accent reminded her a little of slavuj, and enjoyed the connection for a second.
paws crooked to chest, she too spined down into the welcoming land of sweetharbor, the scent of rich loam and seaflowers rising softly around she and daniil.
the sun slowly dried the rivulets in her white fur to the confectionary salt-glittering.
"i do a lot of this, actually." two ospreys, calling to one another, courting in the air where pockets of warmth brightened their plumage to daring colors.
for a long moment heda only watched them, heart aching up into her throat for reasons she both understood and did not.
"it's when i come to talk to god. i lay here, and i ask him just to speak to me. and i —" the young wolf closed her eyes and inhaled, body relaxing into moonbeam winter. "i hear him, in the surf not far away, and the wind, and the birds calling. in the breeze. he's in the waves."
silence now, silence so maybe daniil might hear the voice of god as well.

I cannot hear him, he admitted through a wan grin. I have never heard him speak to me. At this, sharp self-loathing thrilled through him like sparks off of a welder's torch. He shirked judgement as well as praise. He wished to go unnoticed at the margins of the world because he was ashamed, and ashamed of the very shame.

He had been drawn to a military lifestyle because the arbiters of right and wrong were simply whoever stood above you in the ladder. There was no god but your commandant.

At times he would lay in the dark and listen to his comrades saying prayers before sleep. Their voices came to him as if through a homemade radio, different cadences, languages, frequencies, religions, all blurring into white noise.

How did people like Heda stand to remain in light without fear of catching flame?

Her face was childlike. The peace it displayed was something that he wanted but knew that would never belong to him. so he viewed it with awe and the absinthe-tinge of envy, and then denial of that envy.

He felt as if his whole life had been spent trawling through an oil slick, but there would be nothing cleansing about his immolation. But he speaks to you, he said, after a spell. I am glad for that.

ah! he knew her god! something like elation began soft in her belly, something low and daring that spiraled out to tingling limbs and beating heart.
"he didn't always speak to me," heda began softly, the goldenrod of her gaze soft against the swart of his own. "when i first came here, when i was younger, i was filled with anger. couldn't let it go, couldn't put it down."
her eyes now, turned back to the skies which mirrored the great spread of saltwater and darkened waves all around their home, for it she knew it would become danill's too, surely it would.
"many people left me. family. mentors. i wasn't able to hear anything past the rage in my heart. then i met bartholomew," heda said, unable to keep the morning glory smile from climbing the trellis of her mouth. "i was mean to him at first. but he was kind to me. and slowly, very slowly, he began to teach me how god's voice is different for all of us. how he shows us his love is different also."
heda would never have the howling and blind passion of a pentecostal worker but there was an intensity in her, streaming like fiber optic beneath the gentler insistence of her testimony.
"i sought him out first," heda said, moving toward a finish, turning her cheek against the earth until she was watching daniil once more. "when i surrendered all my anger, that was when i found the peace of his voice."

She spoke of anger in her heart. Of Bartholomew. Of the peace in god's voice. He listened to every word and tried to imagine this Heda of the past, a girl and her fury living in parasitic symbiosis. He was quiet for a long time.

Surrender, he finally said. That is... very difficult.

Physical submission to him was unthinking, immediate, limbic. Spiritual submission another matter entirely. Maybe it was pride that kept him from it. A deep trust for himself that obscured the view of any greater power. He had not always been so solipsistic but days spent among the Soldiers had made him withdraw into himself. The aura of repressed emotions shimmered around him like heat off of tarmac. But still he lay dormant, a clinical voyeur, a deer head mounted on the wall.

He had surrendered once before -- had given into something that had seemed larger-than-life. He thought, never again. In the end, yielding had granted him nothing but pain. Like the blind man suddenly cured, he had stared uncomprehending at a world ignorant of the miracle. Do you want to pray with me? Just for a moment, he assured. He rolled over onto his stomach and propped himself up on his elbows.

now that bartholomew had entered her mind she could not quit the thoughts. he had wanted this to be a place of optional faith, healing, guidance. but in the next moments heda would feel the pointed flashing of a paladin's heart, the need to protect her island by guiding its inhabitants into the arms of god.
danill rolled up and easily, quick movements her eyes did not truly register because heda was listening, translating.
"surrender is difficult when we fight against comfort," the salt-laced devotee mimicking his position against the green arch of the shore. first daniil had said that god did not talk to him; now he asked for that thread of speech;
without hesitation heda put out her paws, hoping to hold his own, to give them a gentle press as she gazed into his face with a silent fervency. "speak, danill. he'll hear you "
and heda shut her eyes, face upturned to the cold coastal sun.

Link to the Old Slavonic prayer, if you're curious as to what it sounds like :)

She held his paws. Her palms were streaked with salt, but the sandpaperish feel of them was comforting. They faced each other like two sphinxes against the soft blue smear of ocean, as if age and wear had softened the vigilant postures so that they bowed inwards, malleable and familiar.

I only know prayer in old language, he admitted. It is like song.

He gathered himself, trying to remember the first few words. Her closed eyes lessened his swell of self-consciousness. He took a breath, his voice tracing a firm, funereal note whose tail-end wavered gently in his throat:

Otche nash, izhe yesi na nebesech',
Our father, thou who art in heaven,

Da svatitsya imya tvoye... da pridyet' tsarstviye tvoye...
May hallowed be thy name... may come thy kingdom...

Beneath his voice the river murmured on and on. He trailed off, having forgotten the last few lines, but he took comfort in Heda's presence. The expected spark of frustration did not appear. He felt like he only existed in the few square inches of warmth on his cheeks, and where he and Heda's paws touched.

i loved it <3

daniil's grasp was strong; heda could sense the breaking ability of his digits but here he was at peace, all the hardness of his body slipping into something like peace as his voice lifted to the sea-hills and waves with a song that touched deep places inside her spirit.
heda did not know the words, and yet she did; she heard the proverb and hymn of them, as daniil's voice rose to soft crescendo and then back down into a flowing reverence; 
her eyes shut! and though it was not yet the season, heda caught the tendriling peaceful scent of azalia and moonflowers and citrus fruits and lavender, filling the island with a summer perfume that she knew would come again. daniil's song felt old as it was, and reminded heda that peace could be kept forever, as far back in knowing as these words.
even when the rich depth of his canticle had fallen away into the soft drifting of the sea across sand and into tide-pool, against the stone cliffs of sweethabor and softer organs of coral forest and kelp netting;
she found she was crying, and smiled self-deprecatingly at herself. heda, opening eyes of gold and not caring that glass globules flowed into crystal upon her saltspot cheeks; affixing them to the cimmerian pull of his; "he's in your voice, daniil."
for how could he have asked to prayer and then found the very thing burnt as sweet incense in the senses of god?

<3

Is he? Beneath the fur his face was aflame, but still it lit up with an incandescent smile of relief. To have sung in the old ecclesiastical language unearthed memories of his desolate childhood but he did not look back on them with unhappiness, not now. Those bleak days felt far removed from him. In this moment he was Theseus's ship, restored.

I am glad. Do not cry, snegurochka. If she let him he would swipe the tears off of her cheeks with gentle swipes of his wrist.

This girl who was so much wiser than him, yet still so young, scarcely old enough to have dispersed from family. She had mentioned that everyone had left her until she had found Bartholomew. And god, of course. His heart twinged at the thought. He wondered, was it better to be born with nothing at all, or to be born with something and then have that taken away from you?

A pointless question. Silently he berated himself for it.

He buried his face in his hands and closed his eyes as tightly as he could, his neck, shoulders, and arms all knotted with emotion, an intense puckering before a release.

drying her tears as if he were magdalene, heda could not help the darting little laugh that thrust from her throat, nor the way she leaned minutely into the allowance of his touch, eyes joyed though mouth said no more as heda sought composure and breath and her god.
his smile was as though a volcanic-wrought vent had opened far beneath the surface of dark water, at last giving entry to sunray and sunshine.
and then danill was bending away from her, a stone rising roughly and unmovingly, moored in those same blackening waves. so few words, until that song; until that song.
heda's slender limbs went around that contrivance of rock where a man had just been. she felt on some level as if he and she both moved underwater, felt her fur raise with the sensation of waves; heda wound her arms about his shoulders and lay her sea-softened cheek just over his forehead.
"let it go," snegurochka whispered, urging and care in her tones.
she would not guess at what daniil was carrying, only that surely it must be a millstone like the one she had cut loose in the stillness around sweetharbor.

If he was Magdalene, that made her Christ.

And though she was no prophet, nor a god-man, nor the messiah of a downtrodden people, he wept mutely and without tears at her feet. She embraced him as the father did his prodigal son.

He breathed shakily into her collarbone, undone. What was it that had broken the dam? The prayer perhaps, or her own tears, or what she had said -

he's in your voice, daniil,

- and that he had never thought that he could be the conduit of anything greater than himself? All the years he had spent, yoked to his own wretchedness. He had hoped for a fresh start among the Soldiers -- but what a cruel joke. He thought if only he could rebuild himself from nothing he could make it right. But he had had nothing before, and only knew to squander it. All the years spent retreating inside his own head and feeling proud to be untouchable, of the distance between himself and the world he had meted out with great effort.

For some unnameable reason a memory revealed itself to him then, as vivid as the moment he had lived it: he was spitting up blood in the rarefied light of dawn, the physical stress of their constant marching having given him an ulcer.

Now he watched himself with horror and revulsion as he pressed his cheek to her neck so that he would think of and hear nothing more than her heartbeat, the connection between them almost umbilical.

heda's breath, a soaring outtake of emotion in audible breath that rendered her many things at one time. but the first and the last of these was the tightening of her arms around him. she felt in that moment and on this day that she had become a healer, or that the tendriling of ivy to come was only just out of reach; she pushed into him with her greening spirit and the dizzy force of her love for god, willing danill to mend beneath the soft touch of her hunter's body.
the intimacy of prayer had never ceased to dazzle. the intimacy of prayer had never failed to cause an entire flush of pinked piety through all her singing flesh.
heda did not think of what eyes might be on her or on them!
she considered only danill, weeping in her arms and all the long muscles of him gone to trembling; she breathed out again as she clutched him close and felt some deep horrid tear within her knit.
let it go, she had said, and now he did, and heda would hold him all through the gaol of the holy night and his own reckoning w unseen things.