Dream me oh dreamer
down to the floor
open my hands and let them
weave onto yours
They streak through the night, twin blurs flying over hills and slipping between trees so fluidly the branches barely quake. Most of the time it's tough to say which one of them is faster — that depends on the phase of the moon, on who's angrier, on whether the thing chasing them is a monster or a memory.
Tonight it's unequivocally Emma. The muscles of her shoulders flex and retract at a blinding pace, enough to hurt if it weren't for the adrenaline the moon brings. A dim part of her is aware she'll feel it later, when she's not walking around on all fours, but right now she's chasing a stronger instinct than the one that recognizes pain. The urge to run has never quite left her system, but then isn't that why she's here?
Her eyes flick back at a black blur, invisible except for the shards of moonlight that fall on him when they pass a break in the tree line and the blue eyes that always seem to be on her before she looks at him. Emma pushes herself harder, wondering whether tonight is one of the nights that he lets her take the lead or if she's genuinely running faster. She's still getting used to how it feels to run alongside someone. A pack of two isn't much of a pack at all, but she's felt stronger every moon she's endured beside him. Emma isn't sure she'll like that feeling later, either.
In the two or three seconds her attention is off the path in front of her, Emma loses concentration, and it's this mistake that sends her crashing into a bend of earth she would have otherwise seen. The exposed rock face juts out sharp, scraping a tear in her side from the bottom of her shoulder to her hip. Pain erupts like fireworks behind her eyes, sending her tumbling right into the tightest corner of the bend. She can hear Killian running for a quarter mile, oblivious, before he senses her absence and turns back.
There's worry blooming in his stance, even if he won't let it show on his face as he approaches. He's standing up in front of her, two blue human eyes replacing the wolf's stare she'd seen a moment ago. The pain has turned her human too — God, does it sting like a bitch — but she still refuses to focus on that. She needs to bring her walls up high and fast, strong enough that he can't stare through her.
But then she fights that instinct, too, because he is her pack.
"We're a half-mile from the house." His voice is rough from disuse, from running ten miles at near-sprint at her side, and his accent falls thick between the syllables he speaks. "I thought you knew that bend was there."
"I did know it was there," she hisses. Emma refuses to put up with this kind of scolding, not when the fabric of her shirt is soaking up so much blood. She tries to stand once and falters, pressing a fist into the ground when her side screams protest. She's supposed to be stronger than this, she's supposed to have control, especially when he's here. Every stab of pain is just a reminder that she can't handle what she ought to be able to, and it's a bit late for her to start down that trail of thought. "I didn't see it."
"Can you stand?"
"Yes," she lies, staggering to her feet. She feels dizzy even as her skin begins to knit itself back together, but Emma refuses to let that stop her. "Why didn't you take the trail back the way we came?"
"I wasn't taking any trail. I was following you," he snaps back, refusing to let her put this on him. Emma half-wishes for a fight, knowing the anger will help her turn again, but the thought tastes sour the moment it forms in her mind. She won't blame him for this; blaming him never takes the sting away like she wants it to.
She stays where she is when he steps closer, well aware the both of them can smell her blood in the air. His face is as impossible to read as it was before, when he was all dark fur and silence, and he might as well have changed back again the way he sniffs the air.
"Don't do that," she warns him, watching his hand lower back down to his side. "I can walk myself back."
It takes longer than she wants it to, so Emma doesn't look at the clock when she gets in. She's half-healed, well-acquainted to the burning ache in her side that seems to be traveling down to her hipbone, more than ready for his questions when she walks through the door. He'll want to know why she really missed the bend, what was on her mind for the miles that she tore ahead in front of him.
On full moons, he'll argue, she usually lets him run at her side, gauging her pace and her control over her direction. They map a course by day and test it three nights in a row, Killian prompting her to change at different intervals of the run every time. She'd been doing so well up until now, he'll say, and that'll trigger even more worry, because he's right. She has been better, stronger, more in control of her emotions when he pushes her past her comfort zone. Emma fights her way through the answers she doesn't want to give him as she inspects his medicine cabinet, coming up empty in the search for cotton balls and hydrogen peroxide. It's all for show, of course. Emma knows the reason they aren't in the cabinet is because he has them, because he wants her to talk to him. She pretends to search for them as long as she can just to be difficult, only giving in because she knows the sooner she finds him the sooner she can sit down.
But he doesn't ask her to talk when she first walks in. Killian only moves off the edge of the bar to have her sit on it, dutifully ignoring the way a hiss breaks past her teeth when she slides atop the granite. He finds himself a barstool that has seen better days and sits as well, dousing several cotton balls at once.
"Lift your shirt up," he says, quieter than before, his voice carefully free of emotion. Emma peels the soaked shirt from her body; the blood drying against her ribs leaves her skin regretfully, and the fabric unfortunate enough to have rested against the wound itself fights even harder to keep its place. Ignoring the shake in her fingers, Emma tears it away, flinging the entire thing into some dark corner of the room and leaving her clad in her sports bra and shorts.
"This is going to hurt," he informs her, swiping away at her side. Hurt is the understatement of the century — Emma's human nails tear into the skin of her palms as she fights back a whine of pain — but at least he's getting the pieces of rubble out of her side. She pictures herself taking an hour-long shower, running up his water bill while she washes blood out from beneath her fingernails, and only leaves the daydream when she feels the last inch of skin healing. The scar that would have lingered for months disappears before she can run her fingers along its grooves, and then the quiet bears down on her, reminding her who's sitting on a barstool between her knees.
"I'm going to shower," she informs him, before he can try and ask the questions that have already made their way to his eyes. He lets her slip away from his hands again.
Emma doesn't make her shower a long one, despite all the intentions she'd felt before. The absence of pain has left her with a restlessness the heat of the water can't wash away, and she has a feeling it is his fault this time. She always feels a bit of what he does whether either of them want to or not, and she's learned it's easier to deal with if she doesn't avoid him entirely. She meets him at the window that faces out over the city and toward the forest, water from her hair plinking down onto her feet and the floor.
"It's my birthday today," she mutters, not quite explaining why she's starting here. It's an anniversary of loss and pain the world's inflicted on her, of the figurative bite of a mother that didn't seem to want her and the literal bite of an alpha who abandoned her, too. She says it all on the last exhaled syllable of her words, and he doesn't press her for more. He turns to his side, fingers sliding up under her clean shirt so they skim along the place where her newest scar would have been, and the last of the fight in her ebbs away. The moon falls behind a cloud that isn't quite opaque enough to block it entirely, but she still closes her eyes at the softness of the dark. She always forgets the peace that he can bring, when he feels like it. She always forgets to let him until she feels she has no other choice, no matter how often he shows her otherwise.
"It's an early morning tomorrow," he reminds her, and it's a promise to leave this discussion on the windowsill until she wants to pick it back up again. "Let's sleep."
Emma doesn't fight the instinct to follow him beneath dark sheets and let him tug her to him. She doesn't hesitate when he presses his cool hand against the middle of her back. She doesn't move an inch when his legs tangle with hers in the dark — not in the slightest.