It just keeps struggling. The idiot beast just won't stay down, but John could put it down thoroughly, with his talons through the hollows of its eyes—
No. No, fuck, no, what is he doing? Jack, that's Jack. Jack who smiled at him that very first night, Jack whose hands are very warm. John can't just... He can't kill him like this. Not like they're prisoners in a filthy pit.
"Enough," pants John, voice ragged, streaming ichor. Ugly strips of flesh drag in the grass when he twists his tentacles, and it hurts with a livid pain that cannot map onto Arthur's human body. Arthur is not here now, not even in the smallest way, and that is almost enough to drown him. But Jack might still be here, under the wolf. He might not be broken beyond repair.
John isn't. He can't be. He has already reached his lowest depths, and this is the escape he was given. He will wring every drop of freedom from it.
"Jack," he says, more to center himself than the wolf. "Listen to me. You are under a curse." His tentacles wind tighter, choking collar and muzzle both. It mats the fur with ugly ichor as the beast struggles anew. "The moon is above us, spread across the sky in impossible fragments... They fell in a glory of terrible light. Even now the fields and forest are lit with its unearthly hue."
The rhythm of his voice is steadying, familiar. It settles his attention upon the grove: those snaring vines, those dark and sleeping boughs. That place of slowing and binding. Oh.
"We shouldn't stay out in this light. I... I'm bringing us to the shade." John begins to drag them both, inch by bloody inch, to the welcoming darkness of those trees.
cw: gore
No. No, fuck, no, what is he doing? Jack, that's Jack. Jack who smiled at him that very first night, Jack whose hands are very warm. John can't just... He can't kill him like this. Not like they're prisoners in a filthy pit.
"Enough," pants John, voice ragged, streaming ichor. Ugly strips of flesh drag in the grass when he twists his tentacles, and it hurts with a livid pain that cannot map onto Arthur's human body. Arthur is not here now, not even in the smallest way, and that is almost enough to drown him. But Jack might still be here, under the wolf. He might not be broken beyond repair.
John isn't. He can't be. He has already reached his lowest depths, and this is the escape he was given. He will wring every drop of freedom from it.
"Jack," he says, more to center himself than the wolf. "Listen to me. You are under a curse." His tentacles wind tighter, choking collar and muzzle both. It mats the fur with ugly ichor as the beast struggles anew. "The moon is above us, spread across the sky in impossible fragments... They fell in a glory of terrible light. Even now the fields and forest are lit with its unearthly hue."
The rhythm of his voice is steadying, familiar. It settles his attention upon the grove: those snaring vines, those dark and sleeping boughs. That place of slowing and binding. Oh.
"We shouldn't stay out in this light. I... I'm bringing us to the shade." John begins to drag them both, inch by bloody inch, to the welcoming darkness of those trees.