— I'll break you a hundred different ways —
Her chest feels so small in comparison to his, and he is surprised at how clearly he can feel the rhythmic beat of her heart against his skin. He had never paid much attention to heartbeats. Not to his, and not to anyone else’s. If the previous mares he had taken beneath him had had racing hearts, he hadn’t taken the time to notice. He isn’t sure, then, why he is so aware of every move she makes, every sound that whispers from her lips. He isn’t sure why it sends a strange sensation that rides the ridge of his spine when he feels her caressing and nosing at the feathers of his wing, and the way that he almost forgets he’s suppose to be planning his escape before night falls.
She says that she trusts him, and he wants to correct her, even though it was exactly what he had just asked her to do. Of anyone that she should trust, it wasn’t him. He didn’t know how to be what she surely wanted; what she needed. He had lived too long on his own, buried away in solitude, until any softness he had ever learned from his mother was long forgotten. Even though Wonder managed to unearth so much of what was lost, he doesn’t think he could ever be something she deserved.
But it didn’t keep him from staying.
It didn’t keep him from continuing to caress his lips along her smooth cheek and the delicate curve of her jaw, to continue to breathe in how she smells of Tephra and blood and the sea. Her own lips feel like sparks against his mouth, and for a long moment he is quiet, with the soft inhale and exhale of their breaths mingling. “I’m trying to,” He finally says, with his muzzle resting against her cheek. He doesn’t know how to trust, but with the last threads of light illuminating that line between the sea and the sky, he realizes he has, essentially, forced himself into trying with her.
He offers no explanation when he separates himself from her, but the way the darkness of his eyes locks with hers even through the waning twilight, he hopes will be enough reassurance, until he eventually is swallowed by the thick brush and trees that flanked the beach.
The transformation is never a pretty one, and he spares her that much, at least. Immersed by the darkness, he remains out of sight as the flesh begins to fall away, a quickened display of rot and decay. The minutes tick by, and the sharp angles of skeletal bone emerges in place of what had been dappled skin and supple muscle. Dark and still stained with blood from the freshly torn mass and sinew, he looks nothing like the bleached bones that lay scattered in the sun.
It is tempting to simply remain here, in this sanctuary of shadow and trees. But he slips through the night anyway, his steps not nearly as fluid as they had been before, but mechanical and rigid. He can still see the glow of her bones and the way they jut so harshly from her skin, and the way her pale, ocean-colored eyes somehow seem softer in the ribbons of moonlight that stream from above. He stops once he is a little more than halfway to her, hollowed and empty sockets seeming to stare at nothing, and simultaneously appearing to see through her. “You aren’t terrible at all, Wonder,” comes his seemingly detached voice; still the same in some ways, deep and flat, but also somehow emptier. The bare bones of his wings no longer sit clamped to his sides, but instead clatter like the empty limbs of trees in the autumn. There is nothing for her to read on the plain, expressionless bones of his face, and so she will never realize how carefully he is watching her.
— and I'll make you remember my face —
