She had doubted she would know when it was time, that the moment would sneak up on her like a creeping shadow in the dark and find her unprepared, unready. But in recent days she had found herself unwilling to be far from Tamlin, far from this place that had, against all odds, become the home she never thought she would want. Roots she thought herself incapable of putting down. It is still strange to her, though the strangeness comes less and less often, to wake up beside him and find that he has not disappeared with the wisps of other dreams - because how could he be anything less than that, less than a dream.
Her lips reach to his neck, already soft and warm and entirely flesh beneath the early morning light, tracing a kiss to a place she has touched now at least a thousand times. Unlike his, her neck is damp. Sweat stretches over the whole length of it and down to her shoulders, darkening again in her hips as her breathing comes a little more heavily. “Tamlin?” Fear is what makes her voice soft - not fear of the life she understands is about to join them, but fear of what will come afterwards. Will she be able to protect this child, keep them safe from a world she knows can be something cruel and ugly? But even if this is something she cannot do, something she falls short of despite this ache inside her chest to be better than what she herself knew, she knows Tamlin will be enough, will be everything their child would ever need.
Birth is something that comes whether she is ready for it or not, and after another hour of straining and aching and wordless struggle, they are four instead of two. Four. Her thoughts shatter the moment she sees their faces - one equine, though there are faint points of color that remind Winslow of wolf, and the other wholly canine. She had not expected it, but when her eyes lift to find Tamlin’s face, there is nothing but joyful reassurance waiting there for her. “Shifter?” She asks, soft and unsure, reaching out to touch the little pup with lips that clean and a tongue that dries with instincts she did not know she had. “She looks exactly like you.” A smile as the wariness wanes, a moment of amusement, of unmatchable affection because it is of Tamlin’s very specific kind of shifting to which she alludes.
When the pup is dried and soft, a wiggling shade of pale, dusky lilac that reminds Winslow of the wildflowers that bend beneath evening skies, she nudges the girl closer to Tamlin. “I’ll have to shift to feed her.” She says, but it is a question and there is worry in her eyes, gentle uncertainty because all of this is so new and so strange and this fear that she will be too much like her mother is a darkness that churns inside her chest. “She’s so small.” So fragile, so perfect - and when the girl reaches out with tiny paws and even tinier claws, Winslow thinks she catches a glimpse of opal on the curve of those nails. “Are they always this perfect?” The question comes as a whisper, as a flare of doubt because with it is the reminder that she had not been. Her mother had seen her in this way once, but she had not looked at Winslow with love. She had seen something unworthy, a burden instead of a gift, and these old wounds that never heal remind Winslow that it is because even as a newborn she had been wrong in some way she will never escape.
“She looks like you too.” She murmurs, taking the pain and pushing it somewhere deep while she turns back to their second, the pale filly a shade of blue so light it seems just barely not purple, just barely not identical to her wolf sister. But it’s the delicate wings folded at even more delicate shoulders, the soft whisper of feather as the girl leans up on unsteady elbows to look at the world around them, and the way, braced like this, it is easy to see the gleam of opal on hooves that seem so impossibly small. “There is so much of you in both of them.” Her voice is something of a whisper, something soft but uneasy in that way it always is when there is such a vast tangle of love trying to unravel inside her chest. “It’s no wonder they’re so perfect.”
the devil in my arms said feed me to the wolves tonight
