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“So everything’s in place then? You checked?”
“Yes, Bloommaster.” As Wuvvy opened her mouth to follow up, the attendant cut in with a premonitory smile, “And double-checked. And triple-, quadruple-, quintuple-”
Wuvvy shook her head and waved the rest of her list away. “Okay, okay. Your thoroughness is known and appreciated by now, Wannessa.”
The girl’s smile only brightened. “I learned from the best.”
“Now you’re schmoozing,” Wuvvy warned, and Wannessa threw her hands up innocently.
“I don’t know the meaning of the word!”
Rolling her eyes, Wuvvy turned away and paced toward the tall, ornately carved mirror set into the far wall of her quarters. The steps of her cloven hooves were soundless on the bare peat floor. “The arrival banquet will begin soon. I’m sure there’s a disaster brewing out there you can occupy yourself with preventing until it does. I’ll be there shortly.”
“Yes, Bloommaster.”
Wuvvy cast a long-suffering look toward Wanessa through the mirror. The little human stood innocently by the door, her hands clasped behind her back. “You don’t have to call me that,” she reminded her, not for the first time.
Wanessa only shrugged. “I know. But you earned it.”
Wuvvy’s lips pinned back against her cheeks in a thin, involuntary smile, as she tore her gaze away. Earned, she thought. Maybe she had earned something, but in the end, she was given this. “I’ll be out shortly,” she said, and Wanessa took this for the dismissal that it was, hesitating only momentarily before closing the door behind herself softly and without another word.
As her pattering footsteps faded with distance, Wuvvy slid her hands over the many details of her outfit, carefully fixing them. She refolded the pressed collars of her cream white button down; adjusted the part of its loose top buttons; inspected the tailored fit of her vivid emerald vest; buffed a shine back into the delicate feathered wings of her golden broach with the smooth flat of her fingernail.
Once there was nothing left to pretend to do, Wuvvy’s hands fell, as they often did, into place at her waist, the fingers of each hand stilled in the tense grip of her own palms. Her hands were always smoother than she expected them to be these days, lacking the calluses that had been part of them for as long as she could remember. She would be lying if she said it didn’t unsettle her, but things change. Bodies change. Somehow she had forgotten that. This was, in and of itself, probably a form of blasphemy, given her former place in the court that had raised her - the very same one that hosted her for the Bloom now.
It was strange, being back in the Court of Hoof and Claw. It had been a long time since they had last hosted the Bloom - not that the Red Stag hadn’t vied for the honor in his own right, but the Grounds were fickle, and they went where they went. She couldn’t remember the last time the Bloom had taken her there. Taking her first step back onto Hoof and Claw soil, she had felt an immediate foreignness in her body that settled deep into her bones, silently reminding her that she was returning only as a guest.
Form-shifting was a practical, biological, and largely unconscious phenomenon in the Court of Hoof and Claw, barring in the cases of battle-forms and other similar specificities. Being that she was no longer an assistant that needed to run around managing hundreds of simultaneous processes at once, nor a Champion warrior in constant display of her physical power, she looked very different now than she used to, and she wondered, not for the first time, to what extent she was even recognizable as the person she had been for so many thousands of years, let alone the person she had been before then. She wished she had kept portraits of herself, if only to have something to reference, a waypoint to draw herself back to. Of course, past wasn’t necessarily truth, either.
The curly fringe of her tailtip hooked absently around the base of her ankle as she inspected herself in the mirror. Her legs, long and lean, were neither lightweight nor visibly muscled. Her back was straight, her shoulders at level rest, her horns curling overgrown in an elegant twist around her long, jeweled ears. She reached up and tucked a lock of hair into place. The long tumble of her white curls falling down and down and down between the pinch of her shoulder blades was perhaps the only thing she knew had never changed once.
But it wasn’t just her body that had changed. She had left a Champion and returned a creature still learning not to call herself an assistant, and now, just in time for the Bloom, she had become… she wasn’t yet sure. The lanky branches of familiar forests parted suspiciously over Wuvvy’s head when she walked through them at night, and Wuvvy, lacking an answer, held her gaze askance from the peering eyes of ancient birch trees. What could she tell them?
“Your adoring public is waiting for you.”
An unexpected voice from behind made Wuvvy jump considerably. She turned around, only to find Theodore leaning in the jamb of the door, his straight white grin wide with amusement at her startled reaction. Wuvvy opened her mouth to snap at him, at which point she felt wetness gathering in her eyes, and she realized she had been about to cry.
Turning away, she disguised holding back her tears as an exaggerated roll of her eyes toward the ceiling. “Holy fuck, Theo,” she sighed, shaking her head. “What the hell. How did you even get in here?”
“Your assistant held the door for me. Figured I’d just wait here until you noticed, but you took too long. Your skills are getting rusty, Champion.”
Wuvvy’s nose crinkled disdainfully. “I haven’t been a Champion in eons. Don’t call me that.”
“Ah, sorry.” Theo’s blurry form in the mirror nodded in her periphery. “Bloommaster these days, isn’t it?”
“Don’t call me that either.”
“I get it - tough act to follow. But not for nothing, you’re the better part of why that act was so good anyway.”
Wuvvy’s ears pinned back instinctively against her head, batting up against the inside shell of her overgrown horns. “Maybe,” she hedged.
“You’ve got dozens of assistants running around right now doing the same amount of work you handled solo before.”
“I had a lot of practice. They’ll get there,” Wuvvy said immediately.
Theodore only hummed noncommittally behind her. Satisfied of her regained composure, Wuvvy chanced a glance at him in the mirror, only for her eyes to deflect as he caught her gaze. Somehow, despite them being the only two people in the room at the moment, she hadn’t expected him to be looking at her already, at least not the way that he was, his sharp yellow eyes saying things he didn’t need to say out loud.
That they’d only spoken a handful of times in the time between this Bloom and the prior, even though she had obviously been here the entire time. That she’d been like a ghost across the grounds, that even her own family hadn’t seen much of her, that she was different now, that she didn’t hold sunlight as easily as she used to. That, even though they hadn’t been that close before she’d left the Court of Hoof and Claw, they had been close enough that he could see it - that something about her had gone strange.
“Wuvvy.”
She returned her eyes to him in the mirror, and he was still looking, just patiently looking. She looked away again.
“It’s harder than I thought,” she admitted to the filigree on the mirror. “Being outside of all of it. I have so much energy in my body and nothing to do with it. Sure, the work was exhausting, but it was the good kind - worthwhile. Now I just feel like…” It was strange and beyond expression, the idea that her skin felt more hers when only one person had seen her than she did now that she was actually being recognized. How could a former Champion shy away from center stage? Her eyes slid over her surroundings as she cast them around the room, lost for a sufficient analogy. “I don’t know,” she sighed. “I’m just restless.”
Theodore received this for a moment in silence. Then, shrugging, he said, “We could spar.”
Wuvvy’s brow furrowed. She turned to look at him. “Now?”
Theodore held his palms out at his sides. “It’s been boring out here!”
“The banquet is literally about to start.”
“You haven’t seemed bothered by that up until now,” he replied pointedly. “Seriously, what’s up with you? It’s not like you to be holded up like this.”
Wuvvy scoffed, crossing her arms. Nevermind that he was probably right, but what did anyone really know about what was really “not like her” anymore? And why was Theodore asking her this - why had he been the one to come find her, out of everyone? Had she really left the Court on such bad terms that the only person who came after her was her former teammate?
“Just nerves, I guess. It’s weird being back here again,” she answered blandly. She meant to leave it at that, but Theodore just waited her out, and somehow his expectant silence compelled her. She sighed and ran a hand over her face. “I haven’t seen Rue since the last Bloom. I didn’t even respond to their wedding invitation,” she continued, and still he was quiet, motionless in her periphery. She shifted on her hooves. “Obviously I’m different now than when I was a Champion, and I have been for millennia now, but even just the time since the prior Bloom… I’ve changed.”
“You’re worried,” Theodore offered. His voice was soft behind her as she nodded. “About what?”
“That they won’t recognize me,” she admitted. “That I’ll be so different they won’t know what to do with me. Or that I won’t recognize them, or that both of us will have changed so much that we’re like strangers to each other.”
“Well,” Theodore began, “I don’t think that will happen,” and Wuvvy resisted the urge to roll her eyes at the platitude, “but… forgive me, if it did, wouldn’t that be a little exciting?”
It was a ridiculous sentiment, but Wuvvy didn’t laugh until she looked up and saw he was serious. Then she snorted openly. “You’re such a shapeshifter. No wonder the Red Stag loves you.”
“Can’t be helped,” he agreed readily. “I mean it, though. There’s two options here: either all your fears are unfounded, or you get the chance to meet each other all over again. Not the end of the world either way.” Reading reluctance in her expression, Theodore shrugged and added, “Also, if it goes that terribly, you could always kick them out, which would be the funniest way to start off the Bloom as the new Master of Ceremonies.”
In spite of herself, a genuine laugh broke through Wuvvy’s lips. She covered her mouth, caught off guard not only by the volume and the suddenness of it, but by the realization that she hadn’t laughed like that in months. “I’m not doing that.”
“I’m just saying!” Theodore said, but she could hear the smile in his voice. “I meant it when I said it’s been boring out here. The Courts could use some new drama that won't start another war.”
Wuvvy smiled, letting out a thin laugh through her nose. She reached up, subconsciously fiddling with her hair, pulling curls from her bangs down just to release them and let them bounce up again. She was quiet for some time before she finally asked, so softly, almost not wanting him to hear, “What if they don’t come?”
“Then they’re missing out,” Theodore said simply. “And fuck them.”
Wuvvy snorted but said nothing, surprised less by his characteristic glibness than by the fact that it was actually doing something for her poor mood. She heard the soft, crackling shift of the moss floor behind her and turned around to find Theodore moving toward her. “Your braid went crooked,” he explained.
As he reached forward, Wuvvy found herself struck sideways by a memory from her time as a Champion, preparing for a match where they were partnered. He had done the same thing then, reached up in the dark before the stadium doors opened and unraveled her loose braid just to retie it himself with a delicacy and precision that surprised her. It occurred to her now, just as it had then, that she knew really very little about him. She watched his expression bloom into satisfaction as he finished, laying the braid across her shoulder just so. “There,” he smiled.
Wuvvy blinked. “Thanks.”
From outside, suddenly, music. Wuvvy started slightly, and she thought maybe Theodore did too. She hadn’t realized how quiet it had been in her quarters until it was disrupted, but now that the world outside was calling again, she was very aware of the briefly peaceful present she had experienced, and of the fact that a dreaded future was about to take its place.
“I’d wager you’ve about -” Theodore’s face scrunched up as he calculated “- one minute, maybe two, before your attendants send out a search party.”
Wuvvy stared at him. “That’s maybe the least comforting thing you could’ve said to me.”
“I know. But what am I to do, lie to you?” Theodore leaned into the mirror, carefully smoothing out his beard, then turned to Wuvvy and held out his hand. Wuvvy looked down at it blankly. “Ready?” he asked her.
Again this strange nostalgia in her chest, memories of walking out into stadiums with Theodore at her side, a champion duo undefeated. Many things were different now, but some things weren’t: the fight ahead, the adrenaline teeming in the back of her skull, the need to perform in the face of the crowd outside… and neither was Theodore, standing right there, waiting, as ever, for his opportunity to tag in. She took his hand in her own, laughing when he began to step forward in a parody of a courtly walk, and allowed herself to be led through the door, out of the tower, into the open air of the courtyard, music moving all around her.