Hushed Willows mama, please—let me back inside

cw: gore

it is all so fast.

he's just at lily's flank, his heart squeezed tight in his chest, thinking almost hysterically, i wish queenie were here for this,
  and then the bear is moving and so is his pack and then there is blood, sharp, stinging, and he does not need to turn and look to know -- to know --

oh, lily. grief surges through him, grief and fear as he flings himself into the fray. only, only: ariel is not a fighter. ariel is small and delicate, the sort who has throughout his life turned from conflict, hidden from it, behind those stronger and more capable than he. someone has gotten their teeth in the beast and it roars and lashes forward as ariel comes to meet it.

--

atwood had not minded ariel, too frightened and awestruck. rooted to the spot he watches as first an aunt he would never get to know is struck; he would not remember her but for the uncanny brightness of her blood, the most vibrant color his young eyes have ever seen.

and then a shriek, a sound he can barely process, as the strange, alien creature strikes true for the second time. his eyesight is not nearly developed enough for him to make out the details in the fray, but that shriek, oh, he knows who it belongs to, and terror takes over his tiny heart.

still, he does not move, even as he sees his mother fall back, sees the strange way the skin of his belly hangs, wrong, funny-wrong, only he doesn't understand what he is seeing, only that it is funny and wrong --

--

the ground is heavy and wet beneath him, and if he looks -- he shouldn't look -- if he looks he knows he will see himself, all inside-out, all wrong. it is not quick, as lily's was, his attempt to throw himself back had only guaranteed his death would be drawn out. 

yet. it is not painful as the world grows blurry around him. instintively he scrabbled back, desperate to stay out of range of the bear, even as his eviscerated interior remains where he fell. he thinks, mildly, queenie will be mad, and, oh, olive, but nothing will stick for longer than a few seconds, a rotating cast of all he's loved and failed and loved again. 

he does not go. he lays on the ground and bleeds slowly and thinks of silver and gold and earth and stars, and wonders about time, the nature of it, and if he had done enough with his.