She is fast, he has always known that.
Strong, too.
Still, he is surprised by the ferocity with which she fights him now, when his only purpose is to slow her down, to ease her pain, to stay her hand. Had this happened in the first month that the magic had found him, he is not certain he would have held on for more than a shift. Had it happened in the first few months, he would have perhaps managed to hold on for two. But he has had several years to settle into his new power now. Years that have allowed him to explore the edges of it—let it sink into the core of him.
So he is not so easily rattled.
He clings to her every curve, every roping muscle, as she shifts and shifts and shifts. But he feels it begin to exhaust him. Physically, but even more so mentally. To know how ferociously she would fight to rid herself of him. How desperately she would try to keep him from touching her.
(And yet she returns to him. She does not fight him, he thinks.)
Sorrow slices through him. Guilt. Shame. Confusion. It blends into a heady mixture of agony and this is what finally lets him relax his grip. When she takes the shape of wings, he releases her, content that she at least is fleeing and no longer trying to tear herself apart. He falls to the earth as shadow and rises as himself once more, his body now drenched in sweat and his eyes turned a darkened, crushed gold.
His mouth settles into a frown as he watches her fly away and he ignores the thumping in his chest, the way that his head has begun to pound as though he had spent too many hours in the sun.
Before he turns to leave though, he spears one final thought to her.
“You need only think it, and I’ll be there to help.”
A trip wire buried in the golden sun planted in her mind.
A final, parting gift.
so as our grief falls flat and hollow upon a billion blooded seas
all our worst ideas are borrowed (you do and don't belong to me)
@Mazikeen