tonight i'm so alone / this sorrow takes a hold

[impudentsongbird]

The mountain-lion was skittish. He leapt from rock to rock, ducked under the trees, peered through the foliage as if searching. His fur bristled with anxiety, the feeling of wrongness.

And there was something wrong. Something it couldn't comprehend. As if, when that human had touched him, it had shifted something--ruffled his fur all up the wrong way, and he couldn't get it to settle. And there was something else, too; something he couldn't quite remember which had happened at the same time. His instincts wondered why he let the humans go.

But mostly, there was something wrong, and the mountain-lion fled from being seen.

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[machaseh]

Michael's heart sank like a stone the instant he felt the lion begin to move. Its muscles bunched in panic and he knew, he knew he had expected too much. His brother, nigh-demonic, could not stand to feel his touch anymore.

But he had no choice but to put that aside, and so he tamped the fear and the emotion down and hardened, the eyes of his physical form bright and hard as flint. Moving as quickly as he could, he managed to catch up to Gabriel just as he shot between him and Merlin's net, turning and chasing after him with something that was more than speed and less than instantaneous travel, a way of flitting between molecules of air, of making them irrelevant.

Merlin might have been an ancient, but this even his old eyes could not follow; in this he was as human as anyone else. He came as fast as he could, pulling Swami limply along with him. The boy had to be the conduit. He wondered if Michael was forgetting that.