"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
A smile brightens Tamlin’s already shining expression as he watches colours play across Winslow’s skin where he touches - and it only encourages him further. He wonders if she’s doing this on purpose but he’s too distracted to string together coherent thoughts, never mind coherent words. Her proximity, the press of her lips against his neck, it is overwhelming in such a wildly pleasant way.
When she pulls away after his kiss, Tamlin wonders if he had done it wrong. The distance, small as it is, feels chilly after their proximity a moment ago but it’s only concern that steals away his smile, not disappointment. His eyes are intent on hers - seeing something of that same expression she had worn before she had turned into a mare. And though Tamlin wishes to spend his life making sure she never has to feel whatever that fear is again, he knows he will not move from this spot if she takes more space. He’ll give her whatever she needs - even distance.
But, though he’d give her distance if he had to, he’s still glad when she moves closer again. Hope dances with that concern as he listens patiently to her quiet words and feels his heart ache. It makes no sense to him what she says - because how could anyone see her and not ask her to stay? How could anyone not absolutely fall for how fierce and strong she is? He doesn’t move to touch her just yet - the warmth of his eyes tracing the way soft pink and blue and black mix and finally focusing on her bright gaze when he finds his voice again. “I want you to stay, Winslow. I will want you to stay every day.” This truth is so easy to admit, and how can he help but smile once again as he looks at her. “And more than that I want you to be happy. Whatever that means.”
Even if it means leaving - because who would he be if he forced her to stay? What would his parents think if he forced her to stay?!
If she needed time to sort out her thoughts he couldn’t begrudge her that. Tamlin’s heart feels sure, the nervous flutter of his pulse easing into a steady pace as he acknowledges that he would wait for her. And if she chose to find him again he would be there.
“We could just take it one day at a time?” He offers quietly, the words punctuated with a soft brush of his muzzle against her cheek before he pulls back again, watching her eyes carefully for any sign he's saying the wrong thing.
He watches her in a way that makes it feel like he is trying to know her, trying to understand how all these pieces inside her chest fit together to make her whole, to make her Winslow. It is a very vulnerable kind of feeling, like he has seen all these cracks inside her, all these jagged edges she tries so hard to conceal behind this mask of stoicism she wears like armor. But in the same way that it makes her feel laid bare to him, it also makes her feel seen. Like she is someone worth wondering about, someone worth learning.
Maybe this is the thing that keeps her tethered here to him, the thing that binds her wandering heart.
She is still a thing of fierceness watching him, more wolf than equine, more jagged than not. But her eyes spill secrets like they are tears, staying soft and uncertain in their shade of pale, watery blue. “Every day is a lot of days.” She points out, frowning as though it is her job to remind him how soon that might come to feel like a burden to him. But he is smiling in that way that traps sunshine inside her chest, traps light inside the dark, heat where she is made of stone.
But what is happiness? Is it the solitude of the forest she knows she well, living on the outskirts of a pack that only barely tolerates her company but all the same allows her the space she craves? Or is it this pale and chestnut pegasus always so ready with his smiles and his levity and those dark eyes that seem to know her better than she even knows herself.
His nose reaches out again, soft and heather grey, like velvet where it touches the line of her cheek and the coiled muscle beneath. But when he pulls back again to watch her, she is pulled in on the tide of him, drawn into his gravity like a falling star. “One day at a time.” She repeats, and even she is not entirely sure if she says it in question or confirmation.
“What does staying look like?” She says it in a near whisper and with a frown that creases the corners of her pale blue mouth as she studies him. She knows what the alternative is, knows her place in the pack or in the flock or in whoever allows her to revolve around their gravity, but she does not know what it might mean to stay here with him. With Tamlin, who is gentle and kind and touches her skin like maybe it is something he enjoys, who watches her like her secrets are treasures instead of hidden flaws.
She takes the final step that draws her face alongside his, so close that it takes no effort to reach out and trace her lips along the undercurve of a pale grey jaw and to the quiet pulse at his throat where he nose rests a moment to breathe in the scent of him. “I care about your happiness too.” His mane is a tangle of sandy red and pale flowers, and she notices that the ones buried deeply in the tangles seem to glow within that delicate dark. “And I want to be part of that happiness, this smile.” Her lips drop again to find his, touch that crease at the corner of his mouth that appears so often. “But I am not so sure I will get it right, and I do not want to be the reason for your unhappiness.”
the devil in my arms said feed me to the wolves tonight
Every day is a lot of days, Winslow points out as if this is a bad thing - but Tamlin only smiles brightly and nods. It was a lot of days - days they could spend with her tucked beneath his wing to avoid rain or snow, days they could race and laugh, days they could run with the pack (though he’d be running on small stubby puppy legs), days they could spend in peaceful silence he’d undoubtedly break with a stupid joke.
He wanted them all. And his hope flares when she moves towards him again, and just like with his wing he tilts his head up slightly so she can trace his jaw. And that easy heartbeat he had just a moment ago now races as Winslow places her nose on his throat and he feels a pleasant tremble trace through his body at that contact.
The rest of the world ceases to exist for him and if only she knew, he didn’t think she could ever think she’d be a reason for his unhappiness. His warm eyes close when her lips find the corner of his mouth and he can only just manage a breathy whisper over the lump of nerves and happiness in his throat. “I don’t think that’s possible.” Tamlin’s eyes open and he smiles with her muzzle there on the crease of it. “But if it is, I can promise to be honest - and I hope you’ll do the same.”
He inhales to steady himself but the breath he drags in is full of her scent. And he knows that even though he would let her go, he would not chase her, it would break his heart. How could her absence do anything else when he’s surrounded by her now? There is at least enough sense to not say this. If she stays, it needs to be because it’s what she wants - and not just to protect his heart that is already hers.
“Maybe it’s okay if we get it wrong sometimes. I’m going to be learning as we go too, Winslow. I don’t know what staying will look like all the time but I think it’ll have a lot more of this.” And his soft muzzle moves across her cheek, his continued words quiet closer to her ear. “And even if we need or take space we’ll always find each other again.” Because as lost as Tamlin is in her right now he knows that, realistically, staying does not mean sticking together absolutely all the time. There will be days when they drift one way or another but maybe they’ll drift back together again at night.
Or… maybe they should drift apart during the night. For once in his life, Tamlin finds a reason to despise the fact that he will become a skeleton when the sun goes down. Winslow deserved more than cuddling up to a pile of bones every night or to be touched by one on her soft cheek like she was staying with an animated corpse. Was this why his father disliked it so much? It is an odd feeling, being so troubled by something he’s been his whole life, and he’s thankful that his nose is pushed gently into her mane again because there would certainly be a frown if it weren’t for her proximity.
He speaks of his honesty and she does not try to tell him how such a thing would be like fingers wedged into all her broken places, forcing cracks into fissures and fissures into pieces that splinter completely apart. What a loss it would be to have someone like him, someone with that absolutely ridiculous smile that makes her heart ache inside her chest and every inch of her soul burn for him. Someone who shifts, but into a puppy of all things, something small and squirming and noisy. Something she would covet until her last breath. She could never love him and then lose him, could never survive something so catastrophic.
But she doesn’t tell him because she is sure he will not understand. For her it is his gravity, his magnetism, the way she leaves and always returns back here to wherever he is. She knows she holds no such gravity, that if he is the sun, then she is just the dark that burns in perpetuity at the edges of him.
She makes no promise to be honest with him, because if that honesty would wound him, then it would live forever as a secret inside the empty space of her chest.
His muzzle moves across her cheek with a promise of whispered words, and she cannot help but close her eyes and lean into him, into whatever this moment is. It feels strangely surreal, like something she has dreamed rather than something that is truth, and when her eyes open again so suddenly it is because for one fearful instant she is afraid he will be gone. But he is still there, still close, still pressed to her skin in a way that makes her want more than this, more of him and of them. “We’re good at that.” She says, and her face is something softer now as she speaks of always finding their way back to one another.
If she knew of his doubts she would fight them away, soothe whatever wounds they left on his heart with the stubbornness of a promise that these feelings inside her chest did not come conditionally. Flesh or bone or rotting in-between, she would choose to be nowhere but here, nowhere except beside her mate.
Because that was what he would be, wouldn’t it?
There is a frown on her lips too, but in the closeness of their embrace hers is also lost in the softness of his flowered mane. “Tamlin,” but she pauses, unsure, and in this moment there is a fear that this is something she could so easily break without meaning to, a realization that she does not want to break this at all, “I don’t want space.” She can imagine his frown, his confusion, his doubt, because a moment ago she had been on the verge of leaving him again. Of disappearing. She presses her lips to his shoulder, presses her cheek to the same place and closes her eyes. “My whole life has been built on broken moments and reasons to leave. But I don’t want that.” She has never been this honest before, never this bare. “I want a reason to stay.”
She pulls back to look at him, to search his face and his eyes and the shape of his mouth - frown or smile or maybe something new? But her face is something fragile in the way glass is fragile, in the way it cracks and fissures in the moments before a new impact shatters it. She lifts her chin, and she is aware in the periphery how her horn glints like the ice inside her chest, ice that only Tamlin has been able to thaw. “I choose you. You’ve made that easy enough.” A flicker of fondness in her eyes, in this strange resolute armor she wears while she tries to be less clumsy in showing him her heart. “But no one chooses me. Not even my own mother.” These words are like broken glass on her tongue and she speaks them so carefully, so warily. “I’m going to get it wrong all the time. I don’t know how to be a family, not beyond the wolves. The teeth and the snarls and the promise-bond of mates.” Mates, that word again that makes something inside her chest hurt, a tether pulled too tight. “And I think you deserve more than I know how to give you. But I would give it all to you.”
the devil in my arms said feed me to the wolves tonight
It took longer than it should have for Tamlin to realize not everyone had the same near-perfect childhood, raised by caring parents. It’s a relatively new discovery for him and it fills him with a strange, aching sense of guilt every time - as he is now when Winslow confesses not even her mother had chosen her.
That wasn’t right. Fortunately, his response is quick - his usually-jovial voice absolutely filled with his certainty.
“I do, Winslow. I choose you.” It was a remarkably easy thing to do and Tamlin wishes he could speak to Winslow’s mother and anyone else that might have been foolish enough to let her go in the past. He would let her go too, he knows, but only if that was what she asked him for. And since she says she doesn’t want space - something he is incredibly thankful for - he’s hopeful that is a problem he will not have to face anytime soon, if at all.
“Teeth aren’t going to scare me off. My best friends have always been wolves. It makes sense that I would fall for one.” Once these words are out, though, Tamlin frowns because they don’t sound as romantic as he had intended. It makes him sound like he was in love with a wolf-wolf and, uh, that was just crossing a line. He laughs softly at himself, feeling a little embarrassed and he reaches out to touch his muzzle to her again - just a soft brush of a kiss before pulling back. “Well… you know what I mean.”
The laughter fades but his warm eyes stay bright as he looks at her. “I’m not worried about you getting it wrong at all, you know. It’s okay if you are, just know that I’m not. I think you’ll be surprised how often you get things right with me.” Tamlin was remarkably easy to please, after all. One of the benefits of having an aversion to thinking too deeply. So he is not worried because as far as he is concerned, just having Winslow around is getting it right.
So, hey. Might as well let her know that - as his grin brightens even more, a feeling far shinier than happiness radiating in his chest. “Like right now. You being here? Close enough to touch and talking about staying? An absolute win for me.”
