He is breathless with wonder, with amazement, his grey eyes taking in all of the otherworldly richness of the world. It is enough that he can feel the worries of the real world slowly begin to fade away; it is enough that he can only feel them like a phantom pain—soft and low in the background of his mind. Just a faint buzzing instead of the all-consuming roar they had been when she had first found him there.
His dark lips nearly quirk into an appreciative smile as he continues to study around them.
Then a small curve of lip when he looks down to watch her transform.
“You’re beautiful,” he says without thinking, although she had not needed such a change for him to think such a thing. In response, he shifts his own wings to match her own and is surprised to find that he still can. Glancing back, he looks at them his back and frowns slightly. “They don’t look as good on me.”
This is followed by a ripple of laughter, a churning of water over river rocks, the rareness of it making it all the more beautiful in his throat as he glances up. Her question catches him off guard and he can only think on it for a moment—his face breaking into a frown as his brow furrows, his mouth pinching.
He has never been a particularly clever man, but the answer comes to him, eventually.
“Can you make us both wolves?” he asks and his heart pounds in his chest as he thinks about the wolves of his childhood—the way they had followed at his heels. The wildness and the freedom that he could feel just by watching them tip back their heads and howl at the moon slung low over the Tephran horizon.
There is almost a blush creeping behind his merlot cheeks.
“It’s not anything fantastical, but I have always wondered what it might be like.”
BRIGADE
when I was a man I thought it ended when I knew love's perfect ache
but my peace has always depended on all the ashes in my wake