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    COTY

    Assailant -- Year 226

    QOTY

    "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


    [private]  i know the rules, the weaker trees bend
    #1
    Winslow

    She had doubted she would know when it was time, that the moment would sneak up on her like a creeping shadow in the dark and find her unprepared, unready. But in recent days she had found herself unwilling to be far from Tamlin, far from this place that had, against all odds, become the home she never thought she would want. Roots she thought herself incapable of putting down. It is still strange to her, though the strangeness comes less and less often, to wake up beside him and find that he has not disappeared with the wisps of other dreams - because how could he be anything less than that, less than a dream.

    Her lips reach to his neck, already soft and warm and entirely flesh beneath the early morning light, tracing a kiss to a place she has touched now at least a thousand times. Unlike his, her neck is damp. Sweat stretches over the whole length of it and down to her shoulders, darkening again in her hips as her breathing comes a little more heavily. “Tamlin?” Fear is what makes her voice soft - not fear of the life she understands is about to join them, but fear of what will come afterwards. Will she be able to protect this child, keep them safe from a world she knows can be something cruel and ugly? But even if this is something she cannot do, something she falls short of despite this ache inside her chest to be better than what she herself knew, she knows Tamlin will be enough, will be everything their child would ever need.

    Birth is something that comes whether she is ready for it or not, and after another hour of straining and aching and wordless struggle, they are four instead of two. Four. Her thoughts shatter the moment she sees their faces - one equine, though there are faint points of color that remind Winslow of wolf, and the other wholly canine. She had not expected it, but when her eyes lift to find Tamlin’s face, there is nothing but joyful reassurance waiting there for her. “Shifter?” She asks, soft and unsure, reaching out to touch the little pup with lips that clean and a tongue that dries with instincts she did not know she had. “She looks exactly like you.” A smile as the wariness wanes, a moment of amusement, of unmatchable affection because it is of Tamlin’s very specific kind of shifting to which she alludes.

    When the pup is dried and soft, a wiggling shade of pale, dusky lilac that reminds Winslow of the wildflowers that bend beneath evening skies, she nudges the girl closer to Tamlin. “I’ll have to shift to feed her.” She says, but it is a question and there is worry in her eyes, gentle uncertainty because all of this is so new and so strange and this fear that she will be too much like her mother is a darkness that churns inside her chest. “She’s so small.” So fragile, so perfect - and when the girl reaches out with tiny paws and even tinier claws, Winslow thinks she catches a glimpse of opal on the curve of those nails. “Are they always this perfect?” The question comes as a whisper, as a flare of doubt because with it is the reminder that she had not been. Her mother had seen her in this way once, but she had not looked at Winslow with love. She had seen something unworthy, a burden instead of a gift, and these old wounds that never heal remind Winslow that it is because even as a newborn she had been wrong in some way she will never escape.

    “She looks like you too.” She murmurs, taking the pain and pushing it somewhere deep while she turns back to their second, the pale filly a shade of blue so light it seems just barely not purple, just barely not identical to her wolf sister. But it’s the delicate wings folded at even more delicate shoulders, the soft whisper of feather as the girl leans up on unsteady elbows to look at the world around them, and the way, braced like this, it is easy to see the gleam of opal on hooves that seem so impossibly small. “There is so much of you in both of them.” Her voice is something of a whisper, something soft but uneasy in that way it always is when there is such a vast tangle of love trying to unravel inside her chest. “It’s no wonder they’re so perfect.”

    the devil in my arms said feed me to the wolves tonight




    @Tamlin
    #2

    T a m l i n


    Becoming a dad had felt like a certainty for Tamlin - an eventual one. He had never worried over it, not even when Thorn seemed to be following in their parent’s footsteps for numbers - had known it would happen when things were right. When he found that someone who was right.

    And he had. Winslow had stayed and not even the temporary relocation out of Tephra to avoid the nightmares could dampen the constant happiness that had descended in his mind. The pleasant bliss of waking up next to her and having her close enough that all it often took was a short reach to bridge the gap between them.

    As she does now and whatever sleep had been creating a fog in his mind dissipates when he hears the soft fear in her voice. His eyes widen and sharpen on her and his reassurances come both gently and immediately. “It’s going to be okay, Winslow. I’m here.”

    When Winslow had first started showing signs of being pregnant he had been thrilled - the only concern housed inside of this grey stallion’s mind had been whether they would be foals or puppies - because his experience told him both were completely possible.

    He had asked Isilya and the magician had just laughed. Not in a mean way - but he hadn’t been able to get any actual answers out of her.

    Other worries creep in on his mind as he stays close, ones he had been warned about. Concern for both Winslow and the somewhere-between-one-to-four babies he is expecting to arrive. He knows that help will not be far if they need it, and it is so strange to feel the twist of fear in his gut.

    But it is not hard to keep it off of his face, to only have more reassurances for Winslow and then - finally - when their children arrive that grin brightens into something radiate. He nods, slightly distracted, when Winslow asks about the pup - if she is a shifter. He doesn’t mean to not give her his full attention it’s just…

    They’re so perfect. Such a pure joy shines through him and it takes a minute to realize that the twins and their mother aren't shimmering - there are tears in his eyes.

    Winslow draws his attention with the comment of how the pup looks just like him and he laughs softly, reaching out to nuzzle her sweat-soaked black and blue skin. “Are you telling me this whole time you’ve thought I was purple?” But he is glad that his ability to shift into baby animals will, for a time, finally be at least a little useful. On the matter of shifting to feed that wolf-daughter, he tries to remember if that had been part of the story of his birth. “I didn’t stay a pup very long when I was born. Maybe she won’t either.”

    He had warned Winslow it was a possibility, right?

    Once the pup is cleaned, Tamlin lowers his head to greet her - his daughter, and then does the same with the winged filly when it is her turn. All of his certainty that he would be a dad one day hadn’t prepared him for what it would feel like to greet these soft lilac and periwinkle twins. Will the wolf pup have wings when she's in her equine form or will she be like her mom? His own siblings came in such a wide variety there's no way to guess - and they'll still be perfect no matter what.

    Winslow with her whisper-soft voice pulls his attention away from the twins and he is next to her again, his lips moving gently against her skin. “You stole my line, I was going to tell you that they're perfect because I see you in them.” He smiles but doesn't pull away, placing another kiss and adding with absolute sincerity. “You’re incredible, Winslow.”

    Art Credit


    @winslow




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