with her sweetened breath and her tongue so mean
she's the angel of small death and the codeine scene
Curled as she is with only the naked ground beneath her, Bright, too, feels the cold. Sharp as it is, like teeth peeling away at the rich purple of her still-damp fur, it isn’t enough to draw her focus from the energy humming like electricity beneath her quivering skin. She doesn’t move, doesn’t open those pale violet eyes; there is too much happening inside to bother with the world waiting patiently for her on the other side of her eyelids. She breathes inwardly and it is a tremulous sound, a whisper of life that collects like a ghost around her whiskered lips. Somewhere, somewhere nearby, something calls to her like a beacon and the energy beneath her skin, that feral magic bleeding in her veins, responds so sharply that for a long moment she cannot breathe. For a moment, she doesn’t need to breathe. And in that instant she can feel herself suspended, indistinguishable from any other star hanging bright and cold in a void, black sky, and it isn’t until she can untangle her lungs from those crushing bones and take another trembling breath that she feels herself flung across the universe.
There is a pause before they do, a hesitation etched into every tiny quiver of that gem-bright purple skin, but her violet eyes fling open to swallow this new world. Her world. The first thing she notices is that it looks just as cold as it feels, a cloudless steel sky like the edge of a blade, flat and metallic. Beneath it she traces the branches, bone-bare and empty except for a large black cat staring back at her. He is the second thing she notices. The third, when her eyes drift from him unconcerned to trace the shape of her mulberry twin, is that mother isn’t here. A feeling flutters at her consciousness, one she would later come to know as surprise, but it passes almost immediately when the panther leaps from his branch to touch his nose to her skin.
She doesn’t rise at first, instead choosing to acknowledge Atrox with a flicker of electricity, like tiny luminescent worms wiggling harmlessly over the white and purple of her skin. It won’t hurt him though, the magic is too young to be cruel, and it disappears nearly as soon as it comes. Her eyes flicker to Woolf as he rises and shifts, instantly a perfect reflection of the panther standing between them. She isn’t surprised, is neither impressed nor unimpressed in the same way she would feel about him using his legs to walk. This strangeness, this feral magic shared between them, between their family, between life and death itself, was entirely expected. Their dreams had been filled with this stuff just as soon as their minds had shaped in the womb, grand adventures in a world far less tangible than this one – though the magic had been easier there, without consequence.
Again though, the panther draws her attention back to him and she can feel the magic pooling beneath her skin. But the only answer she has for him, so very unlike Woolf, is a question. “What aren’t we?” She says as she, too, rises from the cold ground to tilt her delicate purple face up to him with bright, bright eyes. “Maybe we’re everything.”
bright