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She prefers the body of the wolf these days, far more comfortable in her fur than she is in the body that once was hers. Waka doesn’t really miss her old form – he can see her as she was, as she is and as she will be if he looks hard enough, and her body may be different but she is the same. She may bark instead of talk, she may howl instead of sing and she may snarl instead of shout, but it’s still her.
Besides, she is not so very different. She dances with him just as she always did, only now their dances are conducted between wolf and man. He can hold her up on two legs for a few moments here and there, but she drops back to four soon enough, and their dance shifts to one more reminiscent of play fighting. She even suggests, through a complicated sequence of gestures, that she prefers play fighting to dancing anyway – don’t have the feet for it – and then they rough and tumble on the soft grass of the celestial plain.
And then one day, Waka wakes up and she is there, dressed in loose clothes and with her feet bare. She tilts her head back and howls, and her voice is still the wolf’s even if her body is not.
She turns to him with a smile on her face, grabs his hands and spins him around – she’s stronger than him, always has been, as is to be expected of a goddess – before abruptly dropping him and running away, across the celestial plain. She’s as swift as the wolf, and flowers bloom behind her; she turns back to him and pulls him into a dance. He kicks off his shoes and laughs with her – he has missed her laugh, even if her bark is just as beautiful – and they dance across the dew covered grass under the light of the full moon.
She’s the wolf again the next day, and she yawns and rolls onto her back, begging for a tummy rub and he blows raspberries in her fur.
They dance again when the moon is full, and they dance again after that, until one day she rolls over and her belly is swollen and sore and she looks at him with accusing eyes. Your fault, she says, over and over again. Entirely your fault, she repeats when she’s licking her puppy clean.
“Mon cherie,” he replies. “All we did was dance.”
She snorts and guides her pup to nestle against her stomach, and her eyes tell him that he shouldn’t expect to be dancing again any time soon.