Beauties and Beasts

Chapter 80: brought to you by bleeding hearts

Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around and desert you.

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Shay had been originally planning to stay in the Hobbit Hole with Neara and go into hermit shut-down mode on the rest of the bunnies, Vincent excluded. She found herself liking the bunny more and more, on a friendship level, if nothing else.

So he had dropped her off with the promise of returning with food. When she had yelled out the door for him, she had been depending on his amazing bunny hearing. What she hadn't expected was for him to run to her so quickly, and in bunny form no less. But it certainly helped with cinematics. She felt unbearably cool.

Just a salute and a mounting of the bunny steed, she thought to herself from beneath the amazing umbrella of bunny ears.

The coolness then led to her first spark of delight since the kidnapping as soft as silk warm bunny fur encased her, completing the shelter and ride. Sure the bucking as the rabbit hopped around gave the back and forth jitter of an off balanced horse, but this fuzz...

Within a minute, Vincent had reached his own burrow on the edge of the village, a bit farther away from the cluster. She had asked him to take her there for dinner in order to give Aetius and Neara privacy.

She slid off her bunny ride, holding in a squeal at the slide of fuzz. She thought about burrowing herself into his side then and there for a nap, but the creaky cries of the little snake or dragon, as she had come to think of it, moved her towards the door in the grown over hill. Only once she was inside and out of the rain did Vincent transform back, girdled about before she'd even had a chance to look (not that she was).

Inside, coals glowed from beneath a blanket of ash, giving a soft warm glow to something soft on the floor.

She stepped in, giving Vincent room to enter with the arm full of tubers and berries he had managed to gather in his pouch, the strap of which had somehow stretched as he transformed.

As he closed the door and knelt before the fire to blow it back into being, she thought she'd ask.

"How does the strap for your bag transform with you?"

He created a little bundle of dried grass and twigs on the coals and blew. "Items made from one's own body shrink and expand with it. The strap is made from our fur and whiskers."

"Ho. That's so cool." Ryan had also had a pouch he always wore with him strapped about his thigh over one of his stripes. However, his panther thigh and his human (read Greek God) thigh had been similar enough in size she had never thought about it, but now she wondered if they were the same thing. His panther form was still much larger, after all.

Thinking of her fuzzy pather sent a painful ping through her chest. Without thinking, she put a fist against her breast, as though to press it back in.

She'd had her time to cry. It was time to pick herself up.

At another plaintive, squeaky croak from the dragon, Vincent glanced up, his poorly lidded bad eye reflecting yellow in the growing firelight.

"Is that...?"

"Yes, the other thing in the bag with the crystals." She pet the soft tuft of hair on the dragon's head. "It's another thing I wanted to ask your help for, if it's okay. Though I'm also worried about you transforming. Where's the bandages for your face?"

He gave her a small smile. "I'm okay. What do you need?"

"I'll be the judge of that," and without asking, she strode forward and caught up his face. At his flinch, she apologized, but brought it up to get a good look, especially at his bad eye, the barely healed over hole over his nose, and the dip between his chin and bottom lip.