The child is still a mystery to her, one as impenetrable and timeless as the night sky above. The girl danced through the jungle as though she belonged here, utterly unafraid of anything or anyone. She did not shy away from the shrieks of the unknown monsters in the trees above, but stood her ground and shouted back at them in defiance like some sort of tiny valkyrie. Even when the storms pounded against the jungle and the distant shore, leaving her mother a nervous wreck that huddled miserably in whatever shelter she could find, the girl slept soundly, oblivious to the storm raging above.
Even their conversations were strange, on the rare occasion that her daughter sought her out for company. She was filled with questions that Sonorae had no answer to - like why the butterflies were the color that they were or how the birds managed to stay in the air or why the clouds sometimes looked like horses and sometimes didn't.
In truth, most of mothering came awkwardly to Sonorae, if it came at all. She still fed the girl, of course. And protected her from the monsters that they could see, but the rest of it felt like a foreign language. Disciplining her, encouraging her, instructing her. All of it felt like some big play in which she had been erroneously cast as a lead, when she was far more comfortable as a background actor portraying some sort of tree. She had watched Monster surreptitiously from afar, attempting to glean some sort of secret to the whole thing. The magic answer that would make all of it make sense. She still didn't understand.
In the rush of care-not caring for the infant, she had withdrawn further into the jungle, ashamed to seek Rougaru out. She had not been brave enough to ask Monster what he thought of her pregnancy, or to do the unthinkable and ask him herself. Even though the Drappa had assured her that it was not her fault, that the stallion had been in the wrong, not her, Rae still felt the heavy weight of shame. Although much of how herd hierarchy and the societal rules of these islands remained murky for her, she had come to understand that having a child by a stallion outside of your herd was bad, and that it was probably the reason that Rougaru had not sought her out.
She had done something worthy of censure, and it was only because he was a sweet man that he had not come to yell at her for what she had done.
He found them in a rare quiet moment. For once, the gold-dusted filly had worn herself out with her relentless exploring and lay prone at her mother's hooves, the small slope of her ribcage set to a steady rhythm. Sonorae has spent the better part of an hour staring at her slumbering figure, wondering where the mythical mothering instinct was supposed to come from. Would she just one day get it? Or was she just not meant to be a mother at all?
She smells Rougaru before she sees him and she turns toward him with wide-eyes, half expecting him to begin yelling immediately, while the other half of her is near delirious with the desire to fold against him as she had that first night. She is beautiful, he says and she frowns, her gaze parting from him reluctantly to look down upon the sleeping filly. Perhaps she was, but all Rae could see each time she looked at the girl was the stranger's golden coat. The stranger's dorsal stripe. The spotting of the stranger across her hips. The girl had nothing to do with her, and she would be lying if she said that Rougaru's praise of her didn't sting… just a little.
Just like her mother, he says, as if he has a direct line to her thoughts and something deep within her belly warms. A shy smile slips across her lips and she looses the breath she hadn't known she was holding. Has she a name yet, he asks, and her brow knits. Wordlessly, the speckled mare shakes her head no. She knew it was another failure on top of all of the others that she had inflicted upon the girl, but the prospect of doing something as monumental as naming her seemed absurd. She couldn't even remember her own name, so how was she to pick something fitting for the small child?
Throwing caution to the wind, Rae tiptoed away from the sleeping filly and aligned herself with his body. She still wasn't sure if he would forgive her for what had happened in the meadow, but right now all she wanted to do was curl up in his embrace. Regardless of all the bad in the world, Rougaru was one of the few good things and she missed being at his side. "I'm sorry," she whispered into the hollow of his chest, her head hung below his and her gaze trained nervously on the base of his neck. If she simply doesn't look him in the eye, then she won't have to see the disappointment she imagines will be there. "I'm no good at this."
Anxiously her ears tip back and she worries the inside of her cheek in indecision before her voice rises softly again in a question she's not sure is fair to ask. "Would you want to name her?" Worriedly, her gaze flicks up to his, searching for any sort of reaction in his beautiful green eyes.
