Beneath The Tryst.
This Part's Notes: This part has violence in it. Not detailed, but I thought I should note it. And thanks, as always, to Jenni, for her checking, encouragement and rant-putting-up-with-ness.
A/N: Okay, I hadn't intended to write any more for this one. But I just had the strange notion that I needed to do one to bring it together in a way. I'm really not sure about this part. If this is one part too far, comment and lemme know. I'll take it down, we'll pretend I didn't, and I'll skip off merrily in the other direction.
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Part 4: Irreparably Together.
Finally the dawn begins to break. The lovers move apart. He is free to breathe again, and simply watch the thing no more.
Inside, his heart beats faster, in his head lives disgust, and hate and rage. On four stiff, seized up, huge black paws, with hollowed, sick stomach dropped to someplace else outside himself, all logic gone, all his old love lost, he bounds haphazardly towards the other pair.
One man, up in front, draped in tattered robes, has almost reached the door. The safety of the castle looms, but for now his haven sits, horribly, too far away. Before he reaches the diminishing loving warmth of the glow of fire embers dying with the morning light, the scorned one timely leaps.
In flash of fur and teeth and with the amber, tearless eyes, full of burning rage, he takes the ragged man down to roll on unforgiving ground. This betrayer stands no chance at all against the one betrayed. With all the strength of dog, with all the rage and hate of cruelly broken love, he bites and rips and tears. The flesh beneath his onslaught breaks, and splits, then bleeds.
The man in black, stood merely steps away, at first cannot bring himself to move. Held too tightly within the grip of horror-tainted shock, his only moves towards his wand are clumsy, jerked and all too slow.
By the time his tangled wand is freed, he sees the damage on his lover grow to almost mortal wounds. It slows him down another notch, till finally he shouts.
With one screamed word, and pointed wand, a flash flies straight into the beast, and it sends him reeling back. In mess of limbs, of paws askew, of black fur tinged with blood, the dog spins through empty air, to crash down hard upon the frosted, dew soaked earth.
When it stands again, it bares its teeth, and then it changes stance. It stands as if ready to strike, to bite, to rip, and bleed anew. Its shoulders shift, visibly, beneath its skin, it voices threatening growls. But then from nearby ground, the now injured man moves as best he can.
He moves in pain, and bleeding, stretching on the ground. He lifts a pleading hand towards the dog, and as it seems to see the matching pleading eyes, it stops. At once it relaxes its stiff, yet ready stance, and then it turns to leave. Just like that it pads away. But, before it turned, the dark cloaked figure is sure he saw both great regret and sadness, buried in the beast. It walked as if it knew, as if it were a person, desperately sorry, and irreparably, grotesquely hurt.
In that one moment, in one indefinable amount of time, the darkest figure knows the beast. He knows - he's felt - that pain, all too much himself. In weird understanding, but lost within complete confusion, he lets the animal escape. He lets it walk away. He turns then, quickly, to the fallen man where he still sits and bleeds.
As he walks away, the dog turns one last time to look. He thought, he wished, he might have stopped it all, ended it right there. But kneeling on the ground again, locked now in an act of love, and not in throws of near excusable, dark passion, were the two figures, once again embracing. The darker of the two, with wand raised and waving neatly through the air, gently healed the other.
Now he knew, as he skulked away, alone, his one true love was lost to him, forever gone away. But twisted mind and battered heart said with bitter voice, not simply gone away, but forever somehow led astray.