▻ thirteen years - 15.2 hh - arabian mutt - dominant black - No Home ◅
He catches her scent on the warm breeze and it burns down his throat. It enters into his lungs and fills them, causing his chest to tighten up. There is something sour to her scent, like fermented apples or persimmons left to ripen too long under the sun.
Not that he is looking for company exactly, but still, he edges towards the scent without truly realizing it. Like the ghost he has been for so long, ever in the shadows looking out. Towards something no one else can quite see, some distant point on the horizon. Hers is not the scent he longs to breathe in, there is no allure to it like it might have had once when he was much younger. If she is a heat-seeking missile, then he is a lazy drone. Surveying everything with a keen eye but keeping out of the way.
And it isn’t his plan to find her but he does, he sees the scent become something tangible. She stands there among the grass and fireflies and the pale moonlit sky. She stands there looking at something big and wonderful—looking at nothing at all. Her mouth is cloying and her eyes are dripping pools and he tilts his face towards her. An inky black mass coming at her from the edge of the trees, the tickle of pine against his spine causing his ears to twitch in strange directions.
Gael is not fooled, at least not now. He can see her and she can no doubt see him, though he imagines he must be fading softly into the world. The black stallion comes near her but not too close, he lips the grass brushing against his knees and thinks about the oncoming winter. It would be hard, much like it always has been, and he would survive.
“Did they say something funny?” His voice is like rock against rock, like thunder, like hoof and bone. Like teeth gnashing. Like a heart breaking. Gael stays away from her. His dark eyes roam the plains of her face and her back and her legs until he is tired of traveling. “The fireflies, I mean, did they say something funny?”
Gael dips his head again. His eyes are humorless, flat. Almost lost in the stark black of his homely face. If she thought the bugs so brilliantly humorous maybe she would share their antics and he could smile for the first time in a lifetime.
Gael