✶ a li’l sunday something for @vulpesse
Spring did not arrive gently in the wilds of Skyrim.
Snowmelt ran loud and swollen through the ravines, clawing at stone. Softening earth breathed a dark, loamy scent – rich, almost sweet, rot turned fertile. Pines shuddered in the wind, shedding old needles to make way for the new. Everything strained, broke, bled itself into life.
The wolf stirred early that season. Farkas’ hands trembled with it, nails biting crescents into his palms. His breath came heavier, deeper, her scent reaching him on the wind.
Flowers. Fox fur warmed by the pale sun. Something sharp beneath it all, something that made the back of his throat prickle and his teeth ache.
Then he was gone, the forest swallowing him whole.
By the time the change took him, he did not resist it. Bone cracked. Flesh tore and was remade. The world sharpened into edges and scent and sound so bright it hurt. The wolf surged up, vast and hungry, his mind thinning to something leaner.
He ran. Through brush that snapped beneath him. Through streams that splashed cold against his underbelly. Over roots and stone and soft, yielding earth. He ran until the world was nothing but her trail, her presence threading through everything.
She wanted him to find her.
A clearing opened like a wound in the woods, ringed with hawthorn and low, tangled growth. Flowers had forced their way up through the thawed soil – white, violet, gold – bursting into being all at once.
Ahri stood at its blossoming heart.
Too perfect, too sharp. Her shape caught the eye and held it, bent it, held it. The tails – gods, the tails – moved behind her like living things, brushing the blooms, stirring them without breaking a single stem.
Flowers leaned towards her, and so did he.
A growl of recognition rumbled out of him, deep and involuntary. His claws pressed into the earth as he approached, pulled closer by that golden gaze – bright, knowing.
Their coupling was not a clean thing. Not gentle, not civil. Instinct answering instinct.
Fur against skin. Teeth that did not quite bite. Hands – when had there been hands? – clutching, grasping, dragging. The world narrowed to heat and scent and the violent, aching need to be closer, closer still.
Somewhere in it, the wolf faltered. Too much. Too much sensation. The shift came ragged and unbidden. Bone bent again. The great weight of the beast collapsed inwards. Breath tore from him as lungs reshaped, as limbs shortened, as the world dulled.
Farkas fell into himself.
Naked, mud-smeared. Breath heaving as if he had run for miles – because he had, because he exerted himself still, his body driving forwards into hers.
His hands found her before his mind could catch up. Rough hands, scarred, human. They trembled where they touched her, as if uncertain now, as if the loss of the wolf had made him clumsy in his own skin.
“… you,” he rasped, voice thick, dragged up from somewhere deep.
His forehead pressed briefly to her shoulder, a gesture almost soft despite the way his body still burned with that same feral urgency. He breathed her in again, slower this time, though no less hungry for it.
Wind moved through the clearing, stirring her hair, her tails, the riot of blossoms around them. Farkas’ grip tightened. There was no shame in him. Not here, not with her. Others flinched from what he was. Or pretended it could be made into something clean.
She met it. Matched it. Understood it.
His thumb brushed along her jaw, rough but careful.
Every sinew of him sang. Every instinct urged him closer, to keep her, to remain, to lose himself in her until the world beyond this clearing ceased to matter. The thought came to him not as words but as something deeper, rooted in blood and bone and season.
He would not leave her. Not while the scent of her intoxicated him, not while spring still worked to awaken the earth.
