unshattered | (no subject)

(no subject)

At some point, she stops at a tree with large roots that wrap around its trunk and spider across the soil. Abigail doesn't know how long she's been walking. Time doesn't feel the way she knows it did once before. The thing she thinks of as the sun, can be midway in the sky and then at dusk when she blinks. Though there's always been light through the leaves above her, Abigail has a certain feeling that days have passed while she's been walking.

It's cold. She should be colder in her small brown jacked and red scarf. Abigail crouches by the tree, and then slips between the roots. The space isn't big enough to fall through, but enough for her to lean back against the trunk, cradled in the roots along the tree.

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Raven laughs.

"Girl or deer or teacup, then. Which are you?"

She draws up her knees, but keeps her eyes closed, and stays quiet long enough that she might just be waiting it out.

But -

"Only girls can talk."

Raven snorts.

"You are, I think, not for watching many movies."

And then she is a bird again.

"Or, perhaps, for paying attention. Still. Girl is not so bad a thing."

She wraps her arms around her knees, and her eyes flit open, glancing over.

"You're not really a bird."

"I am. But I am also other things."

The bird caws out a rough laugh, wings flaring a bit as it resettles on a nearby root.

"It is for keeping the world entertaining. So."

A little flat, "Are you entertained?"

"You would, I think, be more uncomfortable if I were bored."

Raven is just saying.

Abigail unlocks her hands, placing on the root again. Moving slowly, she shifts her legs, and rises out from the tree.

She takes two steps, but stops, and turns back to snap at the bird -

(- it's not a bird but she still feels weird yelling at a bird -)

"I'm not a toy."

"It is a useful thing to remember, that."

And the bird is a woman again, sitting cross-legged on the ground.

"For you. There are, I am thinking, people here who will try. So."

Best to be prepared.

She folds her arms.

"I know."

Again, Raven tilts her head.

"It is why you are wandering out here, perhaps?"

"Do you need to ask that?"

It's not rhetorical, where there are already deer and teacups involved.

Raven wrinkles her nose.

"If you are not for being certain, perhaps."

Eventually -

"Trees are better than walls."

"The sky is better than both, I am thinking."

There is a feather resting neatly on her out-thrust palm.

"If you are for being brave."

She blinks down.

"What is it?"

- she asks, now feeling weird for asking this about what is obviously a feather.

"A chance to change, for a time."

Raven grins, wild and bright.

"And fly."

Abigail isn't feeling particularly brave.

What she is feeling is that she has nothing to lose.

So this time, she doesn't hesitate before reaching out toward Raven's hand.

The feather, when she takes it, feels just like a normal feather.

Though there is a tangled set of knots of blue thread at the base.

"Think bird."

Raven is still grinning. Some might call her pleased as punch.

"To change. And think of yourself to come back. Landing first will be better, I am thinking. Still."

She rolls the feather between her fingers; her mind flickers to the sound of bird calls in the forest, the names her father identified: crow and bluebird, loon and shrike. Spots of light slip along the forest floor, leaves murmur and the cold breeze seems to lift her with it.

The feather blows up toward the trees. A small bird, with smooth spotted with white and shaded with green and gold, darts down toward Raven's hand.

Raven holds her hand -- and arm -- still so as to make a fine perch for so small a bird.

"It is not so inappropriate, this."

The feather Abigail was holding has returned to Raven's hand again.

Her smile remains no less wild.

"Shall we?"

And then she is flinging Abigail's bird-body skyward, leaping into the air in her own bird shape to follow.

Tag is best when it is not played alone.

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