ORIGIN

She agreed with him that the plants needed good earth to rest in, her home was nothing but good earth, rich and loamy and always smelling of life and mud and moss. She wondered where Eridanus was. Was that another room with lots of plants? Or..was that the name of her home?

She pondered that. She really liked the sound of it. It didn't quite beat the name Orion in terms of grandness, but just matched it, she thought. Cayenne looked around the room and noticed the bare dusty ground and the scorch marks everywhere, wondering ambiguously where they came from. The question wasn't nearly as interesting as what Tenn was suggesting. "Baskets? Weaving? Maybe we could get a friend of ours to carry them. I know two giants that look like those cave deer over there that would be happy to help carry the earth. We would need a lot, though...." She looked over the ground. "It would take an incredibly long time to cover the area to a good degree for the plants to take hold. We would need a lot of help. And a lot of baskets."

She brightened. "But, at the same time, we could continue cataloging as we go back and forth! Gather seeds and ideas and keep writing in that book of yours."

He mentioned teaching her how to write and draw, saying that it wasn't too hard, and she smiled. She would take his word for it, remembering his beautiful drawings of the plants she recognized.

Then he was looking at her and her wounds in a worried way, and he frantically ran around and grabbed something for her to rest on. She felt her face growing warm. "I'm not- I'm not hurt that badly, Tenn," She said quietly with her raspy voice. "They're only flesh wounds. Skin. But....thank you." No one had considered her like that before, as someone to take care of. It was nice, like hugging. She saw him sitting down next to her with his book and suddenly really wanted another hug.

But she kept that to herself, instead focusing on his book and his question. She took one of the flowers from her satchel and started at it, twisting it around in her fingers. "Well, it's a sleepy one, a calm one. How about the Dormire flower? That sounds pretty, I think. How would you write that, Tenn?" She leaned in and half-rested on his shoulder to better see him with his feather and berry juice.

@Tennessee

He liked the name she gave it! She grinned at him and grabbed her tail, feeling embarrassed and proud at the same time. Then he took out his book and she leaned in more.

She watched intently as Tenn pointed to each letter and sounded them out, frowning. She mouthed the sound of the letter after him, slow and clumsy, and probably getting a few of them wrong. With a worried look, she took the book from him, and the feather and berry juice, and started to write out each letter that he had pointed out. Her D was shaky and wobbly, her O was lopsided and incomplete, and she refused to look at her R after she made it. Her progress was incredibly slow, and he had to remind her which one was which, patiently pointing them out again and helping her when she made a mistake. The M looked too much like an N, so she did it again after scribbling the M out, but after that, she got fairly better. The rest of the two words were still shaky and painstakingly written, but they kept getting clearer as her hand steadied.

It took even less time to write it again underneath, and the difference was enough to make her blink and shake her head. "Who taught you how to write, Tenn?" She asked after the third try, which she tried to make smaller so she wouldn't take up the entire page. "Did it just come to you? How long did it take?"

@Tennessee

They both sat there peacefully, and she felt....content, at peace, wanted, and happy with his arm wrapped around her like that while they sat hip to hip on the flat rock, just pouring over the book, speaking softly to one another. With the brilliant crystals casting beautiful light and the gentle sounds of the cave deer nearby, she felt warm inside, inside this intimate embrace.

She laughed. "Tenn, I don't think muscle memory works like that. But I have to agree...I know things that no one's explained to me - speaking, vocabulary, basic facts about our anatomy..." She looked off to the distance, smiling and thinking. "Where does this memory come from? Why is it so easy?"

She looked back at Tenn, who was staring at her with a funny expression, his eyes bright, his smile odd. Cayenne blinked, waiting for an answer, and said softly, "Tenn?"

He laughed and fidgeted with his hat, and he started to remove his arm from her shoulder, but she touched it, making it stay there. "What do you mean?" She asked. "I'm not pretty, Tenn. I'm the ugliest cat in existence." Her voice said this as a fact, nothing more, nothing less. With a smile, she teased, "You're much prettier than I am, Tenn. With your pretty blue eyes and your red fur."

@Tennessee

He took her hand and looked her right in the eye, and she frowned at his serious tone. "Tenn, I don't know what a lemur is, but I'm a cat. Dove told me, when I woke up for the first time in Eridanus that I was sick and twisted and wrong. I'm an ugly cat. I mean, have you met a cat, Tenn? My head is too small, my ears look like their bitten off, my eyes are way too big for my head - I don't even want to look in water, it makes me feel terrible." The more she spoke, the more bitter she felt, and suddenly his embrace was too much, and she stood up, leaving the intimate embrace.

Doing so felt like exactly when she ripped a plant out of her skin, and she winced, but she kept going, ignoring it like she ignored the pain at the time. "Sure I might have nice fur and nicely colored eyes, Tenn, but I am wrong. I'm not pretty. Dove said I was a cat, and that's what I am. I've....accepted it by now."

She took one look at that intense, pure look in his eyes, like he was offering his heart in his hands, and she turned away, her mouth twisting, looking at the ground. "I don't know what you see, but it's not what I see."

@Tennessee