— I'll break you a hundred different ways —
He should have known, of course, that his peace and happiness would not last.
He should be grateful, he supposes, that it lasted as long as it did. That he has spent these last several years at Wonder’s side, watching their children grow within the protective borders of a kingdom that he now considered home. He still despised the nights – still grew tense and silent when the sun would dip lower, still hated the feeling of skin and muscle falling away to stained-bone beneath. He hated, too, seeing how many of their children had inherited this from him, and the only relief in this was that none of them seemed to mind. He envied them, in a way, especially the ones that seemed to be able to control it – the ones like Rosine that could shift from skeleton and back as she pleased during the night.
His has always been uncontrolled, a curse that strikes as soon as the sun is out of the sky.
But his nights always relented to the dawn, eventually, when he would again be whole and could relish in the feeling of Wonder's warm body against his skin.
The end in sight, the literal light at the end of a dark tunnel, was nearly the only thing that kept him from surrendering to the frustration and fury that he still kept locked inside.
It’s why when the moon first inched its way in front of the sun he had to fight the panic away, but he held fast to the notion that the night always ended.
It’s why during that first night – and he counted the hours, he stared at the horizon and willed the sun to crest it – he refused to believe that this was actually happening.
And when he finally accepted it, when the hours stretched on and on into days and the sun never returned and his muscle and skin never reformed, he no longer denied it.
The fury rises in him with nothing to contain it. It bleeds out between his bare ribs, and it echoes in the sound of his bone-wings clacking as he hastily abandons the cove his family frequented. He walks until he is far enough away that the waves that crash against the shore don't sound like the same ones that roll against the sands of their home.
And yet, no matter how far he goes, there is still the same all-consuming darkness and the same shadowy moon greedily blocking out the key to his release from this skeletal prison that he found himself trapped in.
— and I'll make you remember my face —
