Book Two: KOTLC One-shots and More

Stellarlune 40: part 1 (Keefe POV)

A/N: @Alexloel12 requested this one! It ended up being really long so I made it two chapters. Also, this is the first Keefe POV I've written after finishing "Unraveled", so if you haven't read it yet, beware of potential spoilers moving forward!

After spending a few hours trying to train with Grady, Keefe grabbed his notebooks and pencils and settled under the Panakes tree.

He'd missed Calla's Panakes. He'd missed Havenfield.

He'd really missed Foster.

Being back felt surreal. Somehow, a lot had changed in just a few weeks. He had changed. He'd thought he was gaining control of his abilities, but...now he wasn't so sure. All he knew for sure was that he was sitting in his favorite place, and would have a perfect view of Foster when she leaped home from Foxfire.

So he sat under the tree, feeling the tranquility of the Panakes wash over him as he drew more memories and tried to think of all of the editing and downright lying he was going to have to do from now on.

He had secrets, and they weren't his to tell. But keeping them was going to be hard. He had to make sure it all felt as seamless and as close to the truth as possible.

But his mind kept wandering back to Foster.

How adorable she'd looked, even soaking wet, when she'd shown up at his hotel room.

And how different she seemed, though he couldn't quite figure out what it was that seemed so different. Unless it really was just that she didn't know how to act after he'd confessed his feelings in a goodbye note like a total loser.

That was probably it.

Great.

They probably needed to talk it out, but that sounded about a thousand different shades of humiliating.

So instead, he'd sit there and think about how pretty she'd been in her Foxfire uniform, and all the memories he had of them at school. Back when life was...not normal, necessarily, but less complicated than it was now.

He couldn't imagine things ever feeling that normal again, but he hoped he was wrong.

On that cheerful note, his attention was diverted by Foster's reappearance in the pastures. She spotted him right away and began to approach him. He snapped his notebook shut and set his pencils aside and stared as she grew closer.

He'd done a really good job of not falling apart while he'd been living in London, but the truth was, he'd missed her desperately. More than he wanted to admit. More than he had any right to. But looking at her now, he couldn't deny it.

"Well...you're not barricaded inside any of the animal enclosures, so maybe training with Grady didn't go as bad as I feared?" She asked as she approached him.

He snorted. "Very funny."

Grady had actually been pretty nice to him, all things considered.

"What?" She asked. "I'm serious! I half expected to come home and find that Grady had mesmerized you to do an embarrassing wiggle dance over and over because you kept trying to convince him to call you Sir Smirks-a-Lot--and honestly, I wouldn't have minded seeing that."

She wanted to watch him dance?

He didn't know what to make of that.

"Wow, someone's full of jokes today," he noted.

"Is that bad?"

"Not at all. You just seem...I don't know." He tilted his head as he studied her, but try as he might, he couldn't discern her emotions. She'd had a strange expression on her face when she'd walked up, and hadn't taken her eyes off of him for a second. All he knew for sure was... "You're different somehow..."