"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
Bound for trouble from the start I've been walking through this old world in the dark
There is no spite as he writhes in his own turmoil. He does not want her burdened with the pain that courses through his chest, doesn’t want her to know how badly she has wounded him. However he had never been good at hiding his feelings, was a terrible liar. The bear within him is pressing so hard on his ribcage he feels like his sides might explode. It’s unruly, angry with her betrayal. It was before we knew her, he reasons anxiously to the beast but it does not heed him. Refuses to acknowledge any sort of logic in his words.
Claws rip at his insides as she gently shakes her head, sadness caressing each syllable as she confirms what he already knew. His lips are sealed, pressed firmly against each other as he looks at her and tries so hard to pull himself together. Gold flecks darken, a strange intensity in their depths as he battles with himself. But the arrows keep coming, piercing into his soul. Dahmer, she names the home wrecker and instantly he hates this man he has never seen. Envy, ugly and green, wraps thorny vines around the bear within and he wears the feeling like a cloak. It spurs him as he begins to press hard against it’s cage and the chestnut stallion merely groans softly, eyelid fluttering.
Her plea that it means nothing should soothe him. As she presses against him, speaking the words he had wanted so badly to hear, it should calm him. The mixture of anger at the situation boiling with the desire of wanting to hold her again, take her as his own and restake his claim... It’s too much. There is a growl in the back of his throat, seeping between the edge of his lips that are curling into a snarl. It is too late.
His muzzle pushes her roughly back as it begins to shorten. His hooves shuffle backwards, trying to put space between them even as his neck arches downward and he cries out with the pain of the shift. His cry never reaches the air, instead a heavy angry roar thunders around them. The reddish hue of his coat fades as long straggly strands of white take it’s place. Curved lobes become smaller and rounder, hooves stretch into paws. Long claws force their way out, so strikingly familiar to the many old wounds that still mark his body even now. The eye remains missing, it always would. When the shift is done the only hint of the stallion that had once stood before her is the single beady gold flecked eye that painful, guiltily, stares out at her.
The polar bear stretches, pleased to be free. As much as he thought he had managed the beast, he had not truly accepted it. Until he did, they would forever be two separate entities linked by a single voice. The bear snuffles at the ashen dirt before it starts to move longingly towards the ocean, wondering if the water was cold. Ledger forces his beast self to not follow instinct and when the bear speaks, it’s still his voice that wavers slightly out of it. Tongue wanders over unfamiliar canines, shuddering as he realizes he's not repelled by the sensation.
I know some things that you don't; I've done things that you won't there's nothing like a trail of blood to find your way back home
She can feel the atmosphere shifting and changing long before the slim, gaunt line of his spine mutates and alters before her very eyes – he is forceful, pushing her away and causing her rapidly beating heart to skip a beat within the tight confinement of her chest. There is an old, familiar ache bubbling like hot magma through her veins, swathing her in the darkness of her own uncertainty – he had pushed her away, and she is recoiling, curling into herself and seeking the solitude and isolation of her own mind. She had reached out to him, vulnerable and as honest as she had ever been, but spurned, she began to recede.
Her silence is interrupted by a hitch of her breath in her suddenly constricted throat – her eyes widen, startled and stricken by the sight before her. His body is twisting and reshaping itself before her, and the adrenaline is coursing through her, while a stirring emerges within the pit of her belly (a far cry from the giddiness she had felt earlier). The muscles lining the rigid bone and its tender marrow become tense and taut, and the surface of the pallid skin that lay along her shoulders is soon split, bone sliding past the sinewy tendons and soft tissue, bristling in long, languishing lines of sharpened osseous matter.
Spikes carved out of her own bone contour her shoulders, trailing down along her breastplate, and back towards her withers – coursing down the length of her spine.
Defensive, she is standing before the hefty mass of ursine fury, the golden flecks of her watchful stare tracing the rounded curve of his rump and the large, behemoth paws attached to each individual limb – with long, dangerous talons raking the soft and fertile soil beneath his weight. Her heart is racing so loudly, it would be impossible for him not to hear it – she can hardly hear herself think, her thoughts rampant and running wild.
She was no fool – his change had been birthed in anger; an unreasonable anger. She had not betrayed him, nor had she meant any harm – and though it was conceived of undesirable circumstances, the unborn son or daughter stirring and shifting inside of her (stimulated, no doubt, by her ragged heartbeat and heavy breathing) meant more to her than the air she breathed. Though she is stunned by his carefully concealed secret (and a small part of her, despite any ire harbored, is in awe), she is wary – armored and protective of the child she bore for a stranger.
The bear is rumbling, its voice quivering as its tongue rakes over the gleaming, sharpened edges of its jagged teeth. I don’t know what to say.
Breathlessly, her voice rife with fury and heartache, glowering with a darkness that had never seen the light in his presence, she growls to him, her stance firm and unyielding.
”When you have contained your jealousy, you can apologize,” she utters, the ridge of her brow furrowed – pain evident beneath her scowl. ”I meant what I said, Ledger – it meant nothing. Nothing in comparison to what I felt with you, but I,” she breathes, searching. ”I cannot change what happened.”
And then, softly, so softly, pushing the words from her throat even as her heart aches and protests, ”Come find me when you’ve had time to process – and then we can see what is left to salvage.”
