Warning: Very brief mature content! 🔞
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It was some weeks later, the cusp of April into May, temperatures mellowing as last lingering icicles dripped to join fluid, flowing friends in babbling brooks below - jubilant, rushing waters unchained at last from frigid imprisonment when the golden sun climbed higher across the sky each noon.
Sil met Red from his train - their weekly ritual those days - arriving man hanging out of the window, childlike excitement as the antique, mechanical dragon approached, earning himself a piercing whistle and waggling finger from the balding, officious guard on the platform. Sanctimonious blast lost amidst the heavy clunks and judders and screeches as the beast reached her resting place for the remains of the day: Bang Haeng, end of the line.
Not that Red would have heeded such words anyway, boyish grin stretching ear to ear as he leapt, long-limbed, into the waiting arms of his love. Tightest, folding embrace, then lowered gently for feet to touch ground, and Sil's hands cupping his cheeks as he kissed him, kissed him - over and over and never minding who saw.
It pained them to part each week for Red's work - a cycle of pining that made each reunion all the sweeter, yet frayed with the tugging melancholia of knowledge that it would be but brief as that cycle rotated its way round again...
"Leave this job, stay with me..."
"And how could my mother afford rent from just her tailoring? The greed of landlords only grows year on year"
"I'll get the money - the wolves hold the forest core's old gold, you know?"
"No, this is for my shoulders. I need to find a better way"
...The battlefield exchange that spun back on the spokes of each weekly farewell too.
But not time yet: Bag hastily discarded into the condo - pause for a butterfly's kiss for Mae, of course - then they had turned to the forest with a picnic basket in the crook of Sil's elbow, designs to bask together in the final hours of pastel rays. A streamside spot not far from the gorge where they first met, the fateful day Red had snarled down an alpha wolf to ignite a process of change within - and beyond.
That same wolf-man's head resting upon his lap, then, as they regaled and laughed and devoured hearty snacks of smoked salmon blinis and apples from the wicker carrier.
Them being them, conversation touring at pace across grievances with a work superior to titters at P'Saksit and Yaai Chanthira's blossoming friendship, jogging around increased eagle sightings before a quick, sharp sprint through spiking jealousy towards a female wolf confidante, then reversing round Red being "Absolutely a million times sexier than her, na khrab", before slowing at last to take a stroll about the term 'revolution'.
"So does the prophecy actually tell us just how we go about building this revolution? Or is it all as vague as it seems..."
"Your grandmother is the all-seeing sorcerer, shouldn't you know?"
"I'm serious, Sil. What happens next?"
Smile fading to thought as the elder pondered his response in earnest.
"Well, it's not something that will just happen, right away. Us meeting one another at that exact given moment, the union of our bodies and fated souls, it's the catalyst that pours river onto the ancient water wheel to begin its turning"
"And what comes first?"
The question posed innocently enough, but Sil's gaze suddenly deflecting, evasive, as he pretended - a brave and undeniably determined theatrical performance - to be wholly distracted by the coos of a wood pigeon in the branches of a pine tree above.
YOU ARE READING
Si Daeng
Fanfiction'If you go down to the woods today...' Red is being watched by wolf eyes, but does the beast even know who he's f*cking with? A MewGulf reworking of Little Red Riding Hood: In a shifting world where not everything is as it seems, borders between myt...
