BRIGADE
She is a delicate thing and has no business setting forest fires in his chest, but he finds that she does and he can only breathe in the smoke. It is a feeling like being drugged, confusing and disorienting and he can only fight against it—fight against the tightness in his chest and the dryness of his mouth. He can only fight against the way that his head swims underneath her constant, clear eyed gaze, the way that even the wind seems to curl through her mane, framing her face in a way that leaves him aching and hungry.
The longer that he stands here, the angrier he becomes—at himself, at her, at the world.
It feels like quicksand and the muscles in his jaw jump at everything that sparks to life in him. She repeats him on his transition and it sets his teeth on edge, just waiting for her to piece together the sins of his past. “Yes,” he confirms and the word is terse, angry. Yes, he was the boy who left Tephra for Loess—trading himself so that Castile would send a healer back to fix his father’s wolf. He was the man who lived in the warmonger kingdom and did nothing when they set their sights on his previous home.
He did not stand against them. He did not stand with them.
He just observed and now has to live with the guilt that curdles within him.
But she doesn’t force the subject and he breathes a sigh of relief, the knot in his chest loosening just slightly. When she begins to talk about his home—speaking of it in such poetic terms that he nearly can see it for himself—he relaxes further, never losing that edge, but softening around the edges just slightly.
“It sounds beautiful,” he admits, feeling that wanderlust tug at his heart—that constant need to travel and wander and see all of Beqanna for himself. It makes him ache for the wolf’s body that he has never known and yet feels like his own all the same. It makes him angry for everything that should have, could have, been his own and yet was stripped from him. It distracts him enough that he is caught off guard by her offer and his grey eyes snap back to her, studying her with a returned ferocity that lines his face.
For a second, he is silent, and when he speaks again his voice is quieter, the intensity amplified.
“Would you want me to?”
the world was on fire and no one could save me but you
it's strange what desire will make foolish people do
@[Kensa]