"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
To say Roue’s transition into his draconic nature had been graceful would be a lie. Not just a tiny, innocent little white lie either, but a giant, honkin’ stinker of a lie. He can’t really remember when he had gone from being perpetually stuck somewhere in between to being able to exist in both forms of his nature. He can however, distinctly recall the first moment he had embraced the change.
It was a wildly embarrassing moment he greatly prefers to forget. Unfortunately for him, getting trapped in a strange and awkward amalgamation of horse and dragon for days is not something one can easily erase from one’s memories. To this day, he gets nervous when he transitions despite the fact that he hasn’t gotten stuck in ages.
Another thing no one ever mentions is the learning curve. He still struggles to remember to compensate for his size. Which he is reminded of today. Quite forcefully.
He had gotten hungry, you see. And, not wanting to shift for reasons previously mentioned, he decided to hunt instead of graze. Much to his delight, he had found a deer quite quickly while scouting from above. He had dove for it, and, much less to his delight, it had noticed him and ran. Roue had then attempted to correct his course and shift from dive to chase.
You might be able to guess where this is going.
He did manage to make the midair twist, but his momentum, having brought closer to the ground than he anticipated, caused him to clip his wing against that unforgiving surface. This had, quite unfortunately, thrown his careful balance off and sent him tumbling. A bit of frantic flapping and graceless scrabbling of his talons had allowed him to slow himself down, but he had still crashed. Hard.
Which brings us to the present. With Roue lying in a splayed heap at the end of a short runway of freshly bared dirt and a single toppled sapling. A groan escapes him as his tail thumps belatedly to the ground, the sad finale of a very awkward comedy of errors.
The herd had all given a violent start, scattering, and she among them. A slight, fawn-spotted thing, sprinting hard away from a threat she had not seen but knew to fear simply because the rest of them did. Heart pounding, she runs. They all run. Most of them make for the edge of the wood, the cover of tree and shadow, and she makes to follow.
(She is not a deer, Dear, though she resembles one. Her predators are not the same as theirs. Even the monstrous things tend to be equine at their hearts, their cores, and they do not present the same danger to other equine things. But she counts herself among them, the deer, thinks that she identifies with them more than Beqanna’s other inhabitants. And yet, she too is an equine at her core. So she does not need to fear things the way they do but she has not quite yet worked out how to stop.)
She is not the one being pursued, Dear, but she flees all the same.
Until she hears the beginnings of some tremendous crash and she slows, stops, turns toward the source of the sound.
She watches, cringing away from the perceived pain of it, as the dragon crashes back to earth. There is a moment of complete stillness as she watches, heart hammering in the cage of her ribs. She draws in a quivering breath, trembling with the adrenaline surging through her. The deer are prey, she knows, but she also knows that she is not. So, she takes a cautious step toward him.
“Hello?” she calls out, “are you okay?” He had been in pursuit of a creature she considers family, she should hold a grudge, but she is a kind thing at the root of it. Dear does not know how to hold a grudge.
The sound of a soft voice draws another wretched groan from him, though this is not a sound of pain. No, this is a sound of pure embarrassment. Apparently his wishes had not been answered, and his spectacular failure had in fact been witnessed.
For a moment, he imagines that if he were to remain very still, the stranger might give up and go away. Might forget they had ever witnessed a dragon fall so clumsily from the sky. Alas, Roue’s optimism had largely vanished long ago, and it didn’t take him longer than that moment to come to the conclusion this notion was also little more than a fantasy.
Gingerly, Roue begins to collect himself, assessing his body for injury as he does so. He has little doubt there would be some lingering soreness, but at least nothing feels broken. Finally, he lifts his head, swiveling his long neck until his gaze catches on the small… mare? He winces at the sight of her, and before he can think better of it, he blurts, “I wasn’t chasing you, was I?”
Belatedly, he realizes how bad that must sound. He is certainly not in the habit of chasing horses around for lunch, and the thought that he might have, even by accident, makes him vaguely nauseous.
“Shit,” he mutters under his breath. Exhaling a smokey breath, he draws his feet beneath him, barely suppressing a wince as he does so. Normally he would never even consider transitioning in front of someone else, but he also really didn’t want to contemplate the notion he might have tried to eat a horse, no matter how deer-like she may be.
So he transitions.
It must be an awkward thing to watch. He has never gotten to a point of graceful transformation, so however uncomfortable it might feel for him, it must be doubly so to see. Eventually, however, he manages to stand on four hooved feet as he shakes out leathery wings and settles them at his sides. His equine coat looks much the same as his draconic, shimmering gold sprinkled over black with a smattering of graying circles across his shoulders and hips.
Returning his attention to the antlered woman nearby, he offers her a faintly chagrined grin. As though that would be apology enough for the spectacle she had just witnessed.
Were she something sterner, she might have admonished him. She might have set her brow and told him that it didn’t matter if it had been her that he’d been chasing or one of the actual deer she’d come to love as family, that he shouldn’t have been chasing them regardless of who it had been.
But she is a small, soft thing, and instead of chastising him for his reckless behavior, she swallows a giggle. Because her worry has dissolved around the edges of a kind of amusement. Because he staggers to his feet, muttering a coarse word, exhaling a breath of smoke.
(She has never seen a dragon this close before, she realizes, and she watches with a kind of wonder-struck expression as he rises to his full height. And then… and then the dragon is gone, replaced instead by the gold-dappled stallion and she wonders which form he considers his truest. Does he prefer the dragon or the horse? Does he feel most at home with scales or with horse-flesh?)
She is smiling still when he glances at her, offering up his own grin. “No,” she assures him, taking a half-step closer, “it wasn’t me that you were chasing.” She shakes her antlered head, acutely aware that it doesn’t matter, that she’d forgive him even if it had been.
“Are you all right?” she asks again. “That was quite a nasty fall,” she points out, glancing past him to the disturbed earth where he had crashed into the dirt.
“Oh good,” he breathes, features brightening as the tension he hadn’t known he’d been holding dissipates. The relief is both immediate and immense when she tells him it had not been her he had been chasing. Of course, it doesn’t occur to him that the deer he had been chasing might be a creature she knew. One she cared about as he did for all his siblings. One she identified with on a deeply intrinsic level.
Once, he might have been able to read all of that in her thoughts. Now though? Now his own thoughts bleed briefly into the ground around him, a shimmering wash of navy that stains everything around him before disappearing just as quickly. He doesn’t notice it. Had stopped noticing it some time ago much in the same way he’d once ignored the chatter surrounding him.
'Are you all right?' she asks, and he immediately dips his head, embarrassment rushing through him in a wave of hot pink. Clearing his throat, he manages to reply, a bit gruffly, with, “I’m fine.”
It’s mostly true. Nothing is broken. He can walk, though he immediately tries to hide the slight stiffness in his gait. He also certainly wouldn’t mention the bruises already beginning to blossom. Instead, he offers her a faintly forced grin. “I’ve had worse.”
Which is at least mostly true. Of course, he wasn’t about to tell her just how many times he’s been bitten on the nose for sticking it places it shouldn’t be. Or the time he’d nearly drowned himself in the ocean because he’d just had to investigate what was causing a weird flash.
One embarrassing story at a time.
Clearing his throat again, he does his best to change to the subject. “Maybe we can pretend that never happened?” His smile is more natural this time, a bit lopsided with a dash of the roguish charm that had gotten him out of trouble more than once. “I’m Roue.”
