She'd changed since she cut her hair, Navarre mused. It wasn't until his showdown with His Holiness, the Bishop of Aquila that he'd noticed. They'd been too wrapped up in the sheer bliss of seeing each other again, in human flesh, to make very much of it, but he'd noticed.
He'd brought the subject up again after a week or two, once they'd had a chance to re-settle in his ancestral manor and get back to a somewhat normal life together. To his queries, Isabeau had replied, "Well, it was just easier. Being a hawk by day and a woman by night just didn't give me much time to bathe regularly or focus much on my looks, period." Then she paused and added, "And then there was the matter of looking after you at night, which meant I really didn't have time to focus on myself at all."
"What do you mean by that?" he'd snapped, with hurt evident in his eyes.
"Well don't take this the wrong way, love, but honestly, just how often do wolves bathe or go near water, for that matter?" she'd flippantly replied.
They'd both laughed then, relieved that they'd averted their first fight since becoming fully human again. But sometimes he wondered just how much their transformation had changed them both.
She'd become more practical, he noticed, different from the sighing, fanciful girl he'd originally been attracted to. He could put most of that down to having to fend for not just herself, but for the both of them. Of course the necessities of finding food, shelter, clothing, warmth, etc. would have taken precedence over all else.
'I guess I just imagined that she'd have stayed the same all these years, underneath it all,' he thought to himself. 'That she would have reverted back to her old self once the need for such rampant self-preservation had passed.'
But it was more than that, he'd surmised. Sometimes, when she'd be brushing her hair, getting dressed in the morning, or working in the kitchen, he'd see a wild look in her eyes that hadn't been there before the Bishop's curse. Once or twice he'd tried to get her attention when it happened, but it had been several minutes before she'd snapped out of whatever trance or daydream she'd been in. Her eyes had held such a look of longing and bewilderment at that moment that he'd almost felt sorry for dragging her away from wherever she'd gone mentally.
In all other ways, she was truly his, finally. They'd been wed as soon as was decently possible after their re-transformation. He suspected they would start a family soon, from hints she'd dropped in conversation recently.
But the wild, unaccountable look in her eyes now and then still made him shiver…
A/N: Standard disclaimer applies. I do not own the rights to this movie or the characters in it.