"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
He is breathless with wonder, with amazement, his grey eyes taking in all of the otherworldly richness of the world. It is enough that he can feel the worries of the real world slowly begin to fade away; it is enough that he can only feel them like a phantom pain—soft and low in the background of his mind. Just a faint buzzing instead of the all-consuming roar they had been when she had first found him there.
His dark lips nearly quirk into an appreciative smile as he continues to study around them.
Then a small curve of lip when he looks down to watch her transform.
“You’re beautiful,” he says without thinking, although she had not needed such a change for him to think such a thing. In response, he shifts his own wings to match her own and is surprised to find that he still can. Glancing back, he looks at them his back and frowns slightly. “They don’t look as good on me.”
This is followed by a ripple of laughter, a churning of water over river rocks, the rareness of it making it all the more beautiful in his throat as he glances up. Her question catches him off guard and he can only think on it for a moment—his face breaking into a frown as his brow furrows, his mouth pinching.
He has never been a particularly clever man, but the answer comes to him, eventually.
“Can you make us both wolves?” he asks and his heart pounds in his chest as he thinks about the wolves of his childhood—the way they had followed at his heels. The wildness and the freedom that he could feel just by watching them tip back their heads and howl at the moon slung low over the Tephran horizon.
There is almost a blush creeping behind his merlot cheeks.
“It’s not anything fantastical, but I have always wondered what it might be like.”
BRIGADE
when I was a man I thought it ended when I knew love's perfect ache but my peace has always depended on all the ashes in my wake
and the walls kept tumbling down in this city that we love
Her face flushes hot when he calls her beautiful, and she looks away, afraid of how she might feel should she meet his gaze directly. But when she does look back and sees how his wings mimic hers, she smiles, laughs softly, her laughter enriched by his. It distracts from the strange world, the brief moment of honest joy, and she is overwhelmed with gratitude that he came through to join her in this strange world that is not of her making.
She blinks when he replies to her question, taking it in a direction she hadn’t anticipated. She knows she can manipulate her own body here, but his?
(She tries not to dwell too much on the thought of his body. The smooth red skin, the velvet antlers, the ever-changing wings --)
“I-…I can try.”
She reaches her mind out to him again, unsure how to begin such a process. She is not inside his mind, after all, it’s not like when she’s manipulated her own body, where she could feel the way her body changed. She senses something, tries to grasp it, but it flits away.
So, just as she put him to sleep, she reaches out, again touching him, thinking maybe it will be easier to manipulate this way, or maybe she just wants and excuse to touch him.
It is easier, this way. She imagines fur growing, teeth sharpening, body shrinking. She pulls the feeling into her own body, mirroring, and their limbs contort, bodies changing, from equine to canine, she blinks and her vision’s changed, forward now, and the world is alive in a thousand scents she had no idea existed.
She laughs, delighted at the new sensory world, delighted that it worked – indeed, for both of them, for through her wolf-eyes she sees a red wolf before her.
“Come on,” she says, shifting her weight, feeling her claws sink into the dirt, “I’ll show you the river.”
He doesn’t expect it to happen as quickly as it does.
She reaches over to touch him and he feels the hooks of her magic sink into him, catching the edges of him, and he exhales slowly as it seeps throughout him. He curls his neck and lets his nose brush against her own—just for a second, a moment—before he feels the cells of him stretch and collapse.
When he blinks, he notices that he is smaller.
That he is more compact, closer to the earth, more wild.
He lifts his head and stretches, flexes his paws and feels the dirt shifting underneath him. He grins and it is wolfish, bright and sharp-toothed, his grey eyes nearly hidden from shaggy red fur. Something like a yelp escapes him as he bounds forward, his bushy tail dragging slightly behind him.
“Let’s go,” he growls and is nearly surprised to find that his voice sounds the same. The same rocks and gravel that deepens the edges of it, turns it stormy and dark on the corner of his tongue.
Then, without needing any more encouraging, he pushes off and forward.
It feels somehow completely right, this body, in this world. It is not his own—has never been his own—and yet it feels almost more his than his equine form. He can feel the wildness around him with more ease. He can taste the pine on his tongue and hear the wild calls of the jungle. It becomes visceral and vibrant and his heart pounds in his chest with something like joy, uncaged and uncontained.
Grinning still, he levels out, letting his muscles warm up and then setting himself loose.
BRIGADE
when I was a man I thought it ended when I knew love's perfect ache but my peace has always depended on all the ashes in my wake
and the walls kept tumbling down in this city that we love
She moves at a run, on different limbs, but the gait’s similar enough. The world has erupted in new scents, things her equine senses had not been privy to. She can smell the forest all around her, the scent-trails of the animals that had been there before. She can smell the river, too, long before they come to it, a fresh scent that she cannot quite describe.
They spill out from the depths of the forest to the river’s edge, two rangy, wild things. The river itself is exquisite – of course it is, everything here is, mother built it that way, and Irisa has only begun to learn how to change it. The river crashes over rocks, and diamonds, a gluttony of magnificence that could not exist in the real world. The water itself is crystalline, and Irisa is rocketed with the memory of the water – she’d played in it, as a child, it had burst cool and sweet on her tongue, splashed against her legs and belly.
(Heartworm had never let her go too deep. Even in a land of her own making, caution clutched her by the throat.)
She halts by its edge, her strange paws sinking into the soft earth. She risks a glance at him – he seems at home, in this body, and she wishes she could give it to him as a more permanent thing, but her powers only exist here. In waking, she is all but useless.
Still – they have this. She will give him this, and whatever else he might ask for. She realizes this and something inside of her aches, and she forces her gaze back to the river, to the things that sparkle and shine beneath the water.
“We came here often,” she says, the words a bit slow – she’s still adjusting to this lengthened jaw, the sharpness of the teeth in her mouth – “I always thought it beautiful. She made sure most things were beautiful.”
She doesn’t remember a time when they weren’t. She only knows the dreamworld as it is – she was not present when it decayed, as her mother’s world fell apart. She only knows the beauty of it.
“It fits you,” she says, then, because she has looked to him again, his crimson fur, his gleaming fangs, “being a wolf, I mean.”
This body feels whole and right and with each step, he is amazed that these are not his bones. Not his fur. Not the muscle and flesh. Because it feels so incredibly his and he wishes he had words to tell her just how much joy can be found in stepping into a body that feels like it was designed for you. How relieving it is to know that, somewhere, everything you have been looking for actually exists.
But he has never been a particularly good with his words.
He has never been particularly well-versed with his heart.
Still, he finds that his heart thunders as they come up out of the forest toward the river. Where the colors are so bright that it nearly hurts his eyes, where the scents are so powerful they don’t even feel real.
He angles his wolfish head to her, grey eyes bright against the red of his coat and he gives her the closest thing to a smile that he can manage. He is surprised to find that the ache in his bones has dulled with each moment that they are here. That the pain that feels so visceral when she had first happened up on him does not hurt quite so bad; that he is able to breathe around the pain, that he can nearly ignore it.
His attention is caught by her though, her voice still hers despite the alien mouth she says it with, and he steps forward to convey his interest. “It is beautiful,” he affirms, glancing up and then back toward her. “But I imagine that it can get lonely here when you are by yourself.” He smiles again, just a quirk of his canine mouth at her observation. “I dreamt of being a wolf as a boy. My father’s pack used to run with me and my sister and the only thing I ever wanted was to be one of them—so thank you.”
BRIGADE
when I was a man I thought it ended when I knew love's perfect ache but my peace has always depended on all the ashes in my wake
and the walls kept tumbling down in this city that we love
“Lonely, yes,” she agrees, but the loneliness isn’t so much what bothers her. She is used to loneliness, it has been a near-constant companion since she left her mother, broken only by brief meetings with strangers whose paths she had not crossed again – save for him. A sole connection in the loneliness, but this is not something she shares, as it is a weighty thing, and she knows he bears enough.
“It’s not mine, though,” she says, “I come here, and it is as mother left it. And I think she’ll return, and she doesn’t. If I change things – break them, mostly – they’re the same when I come back. I don’t know how to change it. Or how to make my own kingdom.”
She doesn’t know if that’s what her wants. She knows the lure of the dreamworld, where one can be a god – or a wolf – and she knows how it drove mother to madness. Why suffer at all in the waking world when a dream kingdom waits?
It’s tempting, and dangerous – a drug, bright and bursting on the tongue. Perhaps it is for the best that she does not know how to build her own world, only to inhabit this one.
“Of course,” she says, warmed by his gratefulness, by the fact she has been able to give him something, “anytime you wish.”
