some ancient call that I've answered before; birthing

[sochi]

there are wolves in my head and their howling
there was a garden of evil in the palm of my hand

Sochi watches with pride as Reia reaches for her father, something warm twisting in her belly as the filly touches her father’s nose, as Castile murmurs to her in kind. Her stomach clenches with the emotion, and she nearly snorts with fear from the overwhelming nature of it, something that rises and crashes in her like the tide overtaking the shore. It is immediate and powerful and she averts her silver eyes for a moment, letting herself find some common ground within herself, some moment of calm before she looks for him again. She has not expected to be someone softened by motherhood, someone to be taken by the sight of the father caring so deeply for her daughter, and the fact that she is unsettles her to core.

Still, her muscles relax, her breath loosening when the moment fades and Reia lowers herself to the ground. She leans down, brushing scarred lips over her daughter’s forehead, a moment of tenderness as her daughter slips into sleep—a proactive growl buried deep in her throat. Whatever she has experienced, whatever she has felt during the last few years, she would split herself open before she let such horrors touch her daughter’s life. She would bleed herself dry before one ounce of pain befell her daughter.

The fierceness of the need to protect sharpens her gaze, lingers in the angles of her face when she meets Castile again, and she doesn’t bother to hide this emotion, doesn’t shy away from the smoke that simmers within it. He tells her to embrace it and her laugh is fog in response, deep and low and unfurling between them. “Who is to say I have not already embraced it?” She tilts her head to the side, studying him.

“Some men may not like blood on the hands of their daughter’s mother,” she muses. “But you are not most men,” she says simply. He is not, she thinks. He is something different entirely—something dark and angry and powerful. Something noble beneath it all. Something she doesn’t quite understand and is yet entirely intrigued by. At his offer to hunt, her smile turns wolfish, teeth sharpening, lips peeling back over her suddenly canine ivory teeth. “It has been too long since I’ve hunted with another.”

She thinks back to the first time, when Daye had given her permission to be herself, to hunt without the guilt, to let herself not only shift into her predator form but to fully become it. To, as Castile said, embrace it. She hungers for that sense of companionship, that ease with which the two of them had woven through the forest and, although she had been the larger of the predator that day, she does not think the same will hold true should she hunt next to Castile. Something tells her he is something different entirely.

When he confides in her, she cannot suppress the spark in her eye that rises to meet that of his own, the understanding that blossoms between them. “Good. There are some where you cannot make the death slow enough,” she says quietly, imagining the breaking of bones and the suffering—the necessary affliction of justice through the spilling of blood. Curiosity grows beneath her flesh, but she doesn’t press her questions into him. Instead she just watches him quietly, wondering what the other had done to draw forth such rage from him and wishing, whatever it was, that she had been there to see him sate it.

now I'm broken and bleeding, I’ll never find my way

S

OCHI

stranger in this land

@[Castile]