but she bites like loveless ice {dark kingdoms}

[Ribcage]

He wakes up in a lather.
If he could, he would be as steeled as her. If he could, he’d subsume himself to that carnivor fully. Happily, as he once had. Now he wears that other skin like the patterned pelt of something endangered – guilty, arrogant; heavily, comfortably. But he can never hate it. When he is one, he longs to be the other, until he wears out his welcome and becomes over-friendly. He forgets how to eat something without bones; he forgets how to sink his teeth just where he needs to. It gives him his independence, most of all. He no longer has to trail sister and mother like a hopeless duckling.

Remorse eats away at his quiet thoughts and dreams. He is harrowed, deeply shaken – yet he remembers the taste of blood too fondly on his lips. 
It shouldn’t have been her, rather anyone that did not have sister’s shape.
Some semblance of that girl clings to his brain like a vice. When he drifts off, finally, he sees her there, surprised and fringed in flame. She is spotted and then blue (blue-tongued, blue-bodied), red (red-throated and red-eyed) and then impossibly dark. Only a silhouette, fringed in flame.

Sometimes, when it is not her, it is sand and bedrock come alive, suffocating him. It is war.

He awakes on cold, hard stone. Nearby, he knows sister and brother are asleep and somewhere mother is circling like something hungry around a wounded thing. He lifts himself up, stretching his front paws out before him, bending and lengthening his wiry body; he yawns widely, bearing sharp, white, tearing dentition and rough tongue.
“Where are you going?” she is tired, foggy. Sweet. Always sweet.
He moves towards her, smooth and dangerous (but not to her – never to her). She offers her forehead and he meets it with his own rub. She giggles. ‘Out,’ he chuffs and sister rolls back over, neck hung over brother’s black body.

He is over-reliant on this striped self. One day he must learn to navigate the pinewood and beyond without it. Not because he anticipates losing it – it is him – but because he knows this body may not be particularly conducive to duty. It is violent looking thing. Capable. Sinewy and uncomfortably athletic. If he were a warrior, he would be a formidable one. Except when he is himself, he cannot see, and if he cannot see, he cannot fight. 

He paces on the edge of the Field, low in the tangle of thorn bushes and nearly naked trees. He watches them with darting, wide eyes. He licks his lips now and then and jerks at quick movement, until he finds where he wants to go and holds his breath. In a moment, he is in darkness, his ears whirling around to orient himself. But he gets to her with relative ease, stopping too far away (too close it worse in situations like this, he plays it safe). He is thin and young, black and it would be fine, if he had been made whole by a caring maker. He is strange and unsettling. Unfortunate, at first glance. 
“Hello,” he turns his head this way and that, as if trying to spy her with his empty, smooth sockets, “I come from the Chamber.”