oh, this my weapon, this my loam. this my blood, this my bone.
There is a piece of Brigade that is a possessive thing.
It is a vulnerable piece of him—something that he does his best to tuck away, to hide, to protect. It is a softness that lives beneath the surface, a desire for things that the rest of him resents. It is the part that looks at her with something like a want, something like a desire to tuck her away and keep her for himself. It is a part that he does his best to resist, that makes him almost angry in the realizing, but it is the part that keeps his ears flicked forward and his stubborn grey eyes trained on her as she speaks.
“I cannot imagine what it is like to live within a dream,” and the words are both a soft confession and one that is ripped from him. His lips almost pull back in a snarl, nearly reveal themselves, but he keeps them hidden for now. Instead he just straightens himself, his back rigid and his muscles tense beneath the rich red of his coat. “I am glad you didn’t go,” he says suddenly and he is enraged with himself for the way that it slips so easily from his tongue. He opens his mouth to say more, but he chokes it back instead.
“I do,” he says, terse, perhaps harsher as if it could balance the earlier admission. “I don’t know for how much longer though.” Tephra has already begun to feel small, the edges of it feeling more and more claustrophobic, despite the deep love he holds for the wolves and his family and the pack. “I just don’t know where I would go if it wasn’t there.” A shrug. “Perhaps it doesn’t matter where I would go.”
But she’s talking again, and he finds himself enchanted once more by the flow of her words.
He grits his teeth to control his words, to leash his desire to say more, and he is silent but it shows in flashes in the steely waves of his gaze, the turbulent stormy ocean beneath his forelock. “Perhaps you will have your own world one day,” he says, and he hates that strange desire to be the one that finds it for her.
