I love the way you rake my skin, I feel the hate you place inside.
Femur wakens;She is not quick to blink the sleep from her eyes. Is trying to savor the sensation of the dream that is something between floating weightlessly and gasping for air. Like drowning and orgasming at the same time. It felt a little like flying and she went up, up and up through the air and the clouds until she was on a level with the stars then she hurtled forward with the speed and grace of a comet until smashing up against a brilliant barrier of stardust. Beyond it lay a nebula of blue and purple that seethed and writhed as if with a life all its own. Mesmerized, she could not look away even as she began to fall back into herself from a very great height.
When she woke, she was alone as usual - he had his patrols to do and she never accompanied him on these. He’d slip away and slip into his wolf shape and the shadows would take him from her sight until she was left with the afterimage of blue burned against her retinas - like staring too long at a flame, and she’d stare long after to make sure he’d gone for sure. But after a few moments of gathered thought and repeated breath, she’d find herself and hoist herself up from the ground to feel a strange itch lick along her bones.
It seemed to be a remnant of the dream and she thought maybe she had tiny comets racing through her bloodstream. If so, it was the kind of disease she’d love to have - fireballs singing through every artery and vein. Really, it was just how on fire and restless she felt. Which was something she resolved to remedy as soon as possible so she sought the shore as she often did and noticed the tide was high which meant a challenging swim to get to the other side. She met that challenge head on and flung herself into the fierce waves that sought to fling her back upon the shore she ached to leave behind.
Femur ground her teeth together, the tip of her fangs mashing into the corners of her bottom lip and drawing tiny beads of blood to the surface of her skin. The tide took them away, as if these minute offerings could calm the sea’s rage and indeed it seemed to do as the waves delivered her upon that opposing shore with a much gentler grace than before. She was swept up and carried then deposited upon shaking legs onto the sand that grew firmer and firmer the farther from the sea she stepped. But where to go from here? That was the question that pawed at her soul and her brain as her black gaze cast about for some sign of what next.
Then she began walking, still not sure of the direction but somehow guided or shunted forth by bursts of warm wind that blew smells into her nostrils - smells of babies and despair that caused her to snort back in distaste. This isn’t what she had come here for but the moment she caught sight of it, she knew her purpose. Divined it from the glimpse of blue roan and purple that moaned and shuddered in the grass just ahead of her. Whatever it was looked like it was dying as she crept close, turning invisible at the last possible moment before the thing could catch sight of her.
It was a colt!
Left alone!
The shock ripped through her --
Not because it was alone or small enough to stomp the brains out of with her hooves but because it looked in her direction as if it knew. Seemed to pin her there with a stare that she knew, the green of it too familiar to discount - his eyes, Longclaw’s. She had known he’d had others beneath him, had tastes that needed to be sated and she did not begrudge him this one bit as she looked upon this colt that could only be his from the blue of his speckled skin to the green of his eyes that swam inside her skull and knocked around, looking to get further inside her until she could not get the colt out of her mind.
She sniffed the air; any scent of a mother had long since cooled and gone stale.
How could a mother leave her child like that? Curled up, unprotected, expossed to the elements like an offering…
Take him.
Came the whisper into her brain. Loud enough to shock her out of her invisible state though it seemed not to matter, he knew she was there though how he knew, she did not know. He seemed hyper aware, perhaps because he was alone? Perhaps because he knew that if he stayed like this, he’d be no better than a meal for the wolves if wolves were the first thing to find him. Other terrors lurked about, could make him into piecemeal for the worms and the dirt at their feet.
Take him.
Femur looked warily around her, saw no mare in the vicinity of the colt that might impede her from her task at hand. (The longer she stared at him, the longer she saw the nebula in her dream - purple and blue, blue and purple, stars bursting in her brain that made her do what she did - take him! Take him! Take him!) So the overo stole over the grass towards him, lowered her head to his purple-tipped ear and whatever she said to him went unchallenged, made him get up and cling to her side, swaying from his want of milk and mothering.
With a nip from her teeth that meant they had no time here in this place to linger lest his mother discovered him at her side, she hastened him off and led him back to the shoreline. The sea still roared but had drawn back a bit, enough so that she shunted him forth and harried him across the lowering tide until she had to drag him up onto the sands of Tephra with her teeth snagged tight in his mane. “Get up.” she said, no love lost there though it had eaten a wormhole into her heart the moment she’d seen him and realized he was Claw’s, that he was her last night’s dream come to fruition and form in a way that she had not expected.
“Get up.” she implores him, gentler now as the colt struggles to his feet and shakes the salt and sea off his skin. Femur does not shake these things from her skin - the hot air will dry her, stiffening her fur that neither the fingers of the wind nor the teeth of her mate can comb through but she has no care for that, not as the colt looks at her with his green eyes and she herds him onward, towards the wolf’s den in the meranti tree. She’ll hide him there, until Claw comes back from his daily patrols then reveal to him her dream - the child that did not take in her belly but another’s, the child that is now theirs, for Femur has stolen him from the place in which he lay, awaiting his mother.
Even now, she is certain that mother is becoming but a memory as the colt looks back at her over his thin speckled blue shoulder with the beginnings of trust in his gaze. The only thought she has left in her brain is this, he looks like a wildling. Unbeknownst to her, Femur has just named their newfound (stolen!) son.
Femur
@[Longclaw] didn't come out as I had planned but it's better than nothing! <3