always

oh your hands can heal, your hands can bruise. I don't have a choice but I'd still choose you.

It was not irregular for Alcide to wake in the middle of the night. In fact, it was more normal for him to stir frequently throughout the hours of darkness than for him to lay his head down at dusk and not lift it until dawn. But for the past couple of nights, he had felt increasingly restless. He woke with his heart racing, fearing for his life. Deep within him he knew it was not his own life in danger. There was only one wolf in the world whose impending peril would cause such terror to rise within him. And so he had been sleepless for three nights, barely able to doze off before he was pitched back to reality by the gut wrenching possibility that something had happened to her. On this evening he did not even bother to return to the den that they had once shared. Instead, he trudged through the forest, head carried low with matching tail carriage. He did not jog over the chilled landscape as he might when he was on patrol. He simply walked, head down and focused on where each paw would meet the earth next.

The dead leaves that littered the ground crunched beneath his footfalls, and he cared not for the noise that he made. Worry riddled his face as his deep brown eyes searched the darkness before him. The instinctual knowledge that something ailed her caused him such turmoil. He could not go to her, aid her in whatever danger she faced, for he knew not where she was. And deep down he knew that she would not want him to abandon the pack. This was her pack more than it had ever been or ever would be his, and that was why he fought so diligently to keep it. In the hopes that someday she would return to it. The sizable male had all but refused to let himself feel the pain of losing her, doing his best to hide his sorrow from the pack and most importantly from his daughters. Daenerys and Ceal were both still young; they did not need to bear the burden of their father’s broken heart. Sleekwing knew, especially now that he had imprinted himself, but whenever the lad had tried to broach the subject Alcide had always changed topics.

As he wandered aimlessly through the slopes of Spirane’s forestest mountains, he lifted his gaze and slowed to a stop. He stared up at the moon, shining brightly now and casting her brilliant hue across the mountain. And perhaps it was a trick of the light or his own mind, but he could have swore a white raven passed across the moon. Alcide’s heart leapt into his throat at the memory of Orba, how she had disapproved of him so greatly when the fates had tied the two wolves together. Even her cry echoed in his thoughts, and a small smile pulled at the grimace that had held his face for the past few days. Lowering his gaze from the glow of the moon, he sees her. She is a dream, a hallucination caused by his days gone without sleep. But she stands there in the moon’s flooding light, and it causes certain warmth to burn in his chest. His vision goes blurry from tears that cannot be shed, and he moved towards this mirage that rests on the hill above him. He climbs to her, a labored gait but one of determination, and he wishes only that he could reach out and touch her.

It was only when he stretched his nose forward and touched it to hers that his eyes grew wide. Blinking away the dampness in his eyes, his vision focuses on her and he is stunned. Even in his dreams, he had never been able to touch her. He withdrew slightly, unable to wrap his mind around the possibility that it was truly her standing before him. Tentatively, he reached forward once more, touching his scarred muzzle to her bright white snout. A sharp intake of breath is heard, and only when the oxygen inflates his lungs does he realize that the sound was made by him. His eyes searched hers, hoping and wishing that this was reality; squeezing his eyes shut before opening them again and she was still standing there. His gaze quickly roams her bodice and takes in the tattered ear, the cuts on her chest, the bleeding wound on her hindquarter. His own body is not as she would remember it – his face marred from Tesseract’s teeth and his own ear shredded at the top half, and more scars litter his legs and body. But her marks, these are fresh, these were recently inflicted. A fire blazes in his chest, the want to seek out whoever caused harm against her and bring them to justice. His eyes return to hers, and when he opens his mouth, he is only able to breathe one word, that is neither question nor statement. It is simply his whole heart bursting at the seams with a range of emotion so great it cannot be defined. “MoonGlow.”

alcide | seventeen | moonglow | polaris of spirane
sleekwing, swallowbane, orca, daenerys, ceal, taliesin | ♥