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It comes in fits and bursts, like a dying heart trying to cling to life. The memories of thick forests and bone chilling cold, paws pounding against the freshly fallen snow - when the entirety of existence can be drawn in one clean breath. The call of the pack had been smothered long ago, a combination of distance and self-denial carefully crafted in self-imposed exile.
Until the dreams started. In the waking hours, Skali could avoid the wicked call of the prince's presence here on Midgard. Eventually though, even gods must sleep. As soon as unconsciousness fell like a dark curtain, she was swept underneath the battering current of a call to open forests, chorus sung on the tongues of a shared pulse, a promise of the home she abandoned for solitude.
Clawing back into the present world, she would shake away the lingering sensation of fur pressed against the inside of her skin with the blast of cold wind whipping past her seemingly ageless flesh. The motorcycle took her out of the crush of the city, the thousands of insects called humans she played at being a part of. She rode until the gas ran low, and then she ran until her bloodied feet could run no more.
Only then did she kneel in the sand strewn remote stretches coastline flung far North of the city, and collapse in the numbing silence of solitude while trying to remember how to breathe.
*
"Sssskaliiiii…" he said, the name dripping off his teeth like blood from fresh kill. He emerged from the water, letting it peel off of him in a slow yawning drag across the sand; the entire worlds oceans where his regal cloak of station in that moment
Then he released his command of the water and it crashed down gently behind him. He was all but naked but it seemed somehow fitting. Webs in his fingers and toes, webbed wings visible as he let his arms down to his sides. His eyes where all white, the membranes that protected them in the water where taught across them.
*
There was nothing left in her. Every last sinew had been spent before she reached this place, save those in the form that called to her like the siren being rising out of the waves now. Otherwise, she would have found her feet. Otherwise, she would have met him defiant of how unsettled she was by his sudden appearance. Otherwise, she would have bared her teeth in a smile.
As it was, she snarled. It was an inhuman, strained noise formed in the back of her throat and carried into her eyes with a baleful intensity. How dare he intrude upon this moment of vulnerability? How dare he see even the faintest suggestion of what she was? Voyeur into this moment where she ran herself prone with homesick desperation to escape what she was; he would pay.
But not yet.
Skali regarded him in lingering silence that she let stretch long, the spray of the falling waves misting the exhale that steamed from her lips. Genuflected like a subject under his rule, she finally spoke.
"Do you mind?"
*
He could see she was hurting, white eyes flicked and flicked to blue-grey orbs as he reached down and laced his fingers into her hair, twisted his grip and jerked her face to his very suddenly. "You know what you need" he said, a hard smile crept minutely into his features.
"A little distraction."
Now she was flying through the air, Namor was below her and getting smaller, the beach moving away. At the turn of the parabola the water approached fast, and then crashed around her in a numbing cold, her ears muted by the boxed in sound.
He had flung her, like a ragdoll, into the sea. So swiftly and effortlessly she almost didn't see him dot it. She was a good hundred or so feet out in the surf now, and he was walking slowly out to 'greet' her.
*
Everything went wrong too suddenly for Skali to react. A tongue drew over her lips as her neck stretched, and whatever lurked behind her pupils opened its maw to swallow the sun of her iris'. The musculature tensed, energy already replenished by inhuman metabolism to show this menace that no one laid a hand on her, regardless of what kingdom they lay claim to. Then the world opened underneath her and the beast inside her sang.
A distraction was exactly what she needed.
The thousand fold weight of water should have liquefied her bones, and yet as it thinned, she hovered soaked by the onslaught just over the lapping waters. A moment spared to give him that devious smile, and then flesh blurred as she hurtled towards him. A deft twist, a shift of weight at the last possible moment, arresting her direction from collision course into curvature. She circled him, the speed adjusting in fits and starts, disjointed enough that she never came into focus properly for more than a moment.
"You don't-"
Bipedalism abandoned, she hunched in a crouch, something about her smile unhinged and hungry.
"-get to tell me-"
Her hair was plastered to her flushed cheeks, not winded from exertion but the thrill that filled her eyes.
"-what I need."
She didn't strike. The creeping unease of being hunted sank into the sense. Every time she paused long enough to meet his eyes, her gaze was molten heat - the humanity in her expressions burned to ash.
*
"No…" he hissed sharply, "Don't reckon I do." seeming now disquieted by the fight he'd just started. He reached into the air where there was nothing and then stabbed his trident into existence and into the sand before him. He followed her around with his gaze, tired of it, and then charged in after her fists in flight and muscles churning under a layer of fat that made everything smooth, round, and beautiful; no taught skin and veiny sinew.
There was no way to belie the strength with which he had flung her, and he knew now once of his best cards was on the table. She was a harrier, an opportunist, waiting for him to fuck up; so he fucked up good and proper to show his raw aggression. "Come on, Skali!" he said loudly, inviting her to join him in the fight.
*
It quickly became apparent she was playing with him. Though he may join her in the whirl of wind and water their motions stirred, she stayed ahead of him. Close to striking her once, twice, and then she would slip away. Eventually, she laughed, and his fingertips barely graced the whip of her hair. She could fight him; she could devour him, but why? The question kept her just out of reach, wild and opening her stride only to slow it when he fell too far behind. He was on her heels and she was moving across the waters until all she could smell and taste was salt and the unsatisfied need ripping apart the ocean behind her.
Only when the need to make contact with the specter dancing just ahead of his trident tips threatened to burst within his chest did she stop. And if he did not arrest his attack, he would collide with the waiting woman who offered no defense save laughter still on her lips and the haunting words.
"Little Prince, Little Prince, didn't they tell you to stay in the castle after dark?"
*
"Aye…" he said, having collided with her and seen no fight, and twisted awkwardly off to one side to land on his back, confused but briefly soothed. "Many, many times." he leaned up, careful to keep eyes on her not sure if the mere moment he'd make himself vulnerable in getting to his feet was worth the loss of a defensive posture of being able to foot her off. "Even misbehaving goes stale after a while." he said grimly, "Now I do their bidding for the novelty of being a good son."
*
"How dull."
Her body folded slowly, a leisurely sprawl that luxuriated in the sensation of the waves lapping against her back. She regarded him from this level, curiosity getting the better of her as her palms came to rest under her chin and she studied him unabashed. There was no threat in her posture but violence still lingered in her eyes.
"Do you want to fight me, Namor?"
It was the first time she had said his name, and it sounded like her tongue had been crafted for the sole purpose of savoring every syllable. There was an echo to the question, as if the earth itself was whispering, "Do you?"
*
"No." he said, watching her for a moment of inward discussion. "I don't know." he admitted. He took in a breath and let it out with a wide open mouth so it made a soft 'haaaa' sound. "Why, do you?" he wondered, his demeanor taking on that of an unsure but hopeful teen who'd just been murkily propositioned by a girl far out of his league. For a moment he was gawping and dumbstruck at what an idiot he sounded like, then he scowled at himself and pinched a tiny sea-shell out of the sand beside him and flicked it into her hair. "Stop that." he said imperiously, "Who's the merman here?" as if she had no right to be disarming with him.
*
Skali grins as she crawls forward the few places to settle on the sand beside him, looking over a soaked shoulder at his discomfort. The pupils were bleeding back into the center of her gaze, hair plastered against her skin that prickled in the night cold. She drew in an answering deep sigh, and distracted to the heavens over their heads.
"I do not have reason to kill you. My pride is far too old to feel slighted by your show. Do you even know what I am?"
The smile broadened, the teeth sharpened, they were too large to fit in her mouth forcing a disjointed nature into an expression that should have been appeasing. It wasn't. If he fought her, she wouldn't stop until his flesh was being pulled off of bones by those jaws. He would likely still be alive when she did it. Like a man pulling clothing off of a vision of feminine beauty with eyes alone, she vivisected him and her mouth watered.
*
Namor watched on, paralyzed for the moment; fear and fascination lashing him to the sand. "I do now." he said grimly, holding his ground and her gaze as if this were some inward contest and he would not be found wanting. "One of the old ones." he explained, as if she didn't know. "Not of this world but marooned on it all the same." he barred his teeth reflexively, nothing so impressive though; his eyebrows where sharper. "Home sick, heart sick." and he didn't know any of this, but she'd been spoon feeding it to him somehow in thick syrupy gulps. He'd been tuned into her even in the office, and when he'd followed her after. When he lept out of the sea in graceful arcs, tracking the yellow beam of her cycle headlight on the long New England highway. When he'd torn himself out of the sea and found her crushed into a little ball on the shore. "Thought maybe I'd let you knock me around, forget about it for a bit." and there it was, a glimmer of compassion.
*
The hunger arrested as if choked by some unseen chain tightening around her neck, the honesty in his words widening her eyes and forcing her to recoil. He may just as well have struck her, her body tensing as if he had. Gone was the arrogant dissonance from the present moment, the deific regard of ultimate predator considering her next meal, replaced instead by marked confusion that he would see through her escapism. Her head tilted to one side and her body shivered, though not from the cold.
"I chose your world."
To make room for the words, her jaws rearranged, humanity reclaimed as she stood slowly with arms clasped around her chest, continuing to speak though she dared not look at him once more for fear she see that dreaded compassion.
"But it cannot be what it is not. No matter how far you are flung from the ocean, does it not call you back every time? Do you not hate it for this? Do you not wonder what it would be like? True freedom? The humans are ants, easily crushed to a pulp between my claws and yet-"
The fist formed as she had spoken to emphasize her words slowly uncurled, and she looked at the sand crusted palm,
"-to be so inconsequential."
*
Namor had no such curse to claim, his life was easy, things came easily to him. "I am…" he looked for the words, "…half ant.", he conceded for the sake of her amusement. "Half ant and half free. Its why I venture out. Things are always breaking, people are always pissed. Plenty to do." and he seemed affably frank. "Back home, its a big game. Who will spend us into oblivion first? Who will poison whom? Who is bearing false witness against whom in which clever four staged plan. Who will ascend when I am ultimately killed or overthrown or exiled?" he seemed to ease somewhat now that her jaw had re-aligned. "Jokes on them, I'll be out here chasing you, won't I."
*
Skali chanced a glance down at him as he spoke, hearing the same stories being told once more. In a bemused tone, she interjected,
"I am afraid it is the same everywhere. Stretched across different lifespans, but structured around the acquisition of two things. Power and knowledge."
A surprisingly human hand extended to him, offering to help him to his feet. The breeze nipped at her wet hair and teased it into the sea-soaked mists, crafting a vision of something both as beautiful and powerful as the ocean he commanded.
"Do you think you could catch me, Prince? Would you like to try?"
And her gaze turned to the stars wheeling above them once more, mischief glimmering in the corners of her smile.
*
Namor took the hand and rose, his beautiful body reconstructing itself in height and form, sand casted on his back and sides. "Go." he urged her, "Run, Skali. Run your fastest. Run till you see the dawn."
He meant to chase her for that long, if that's what it took, oblivious to the legends of Arvakr and Alsvior, oblivious that her name was treachery, oblivious that she was the daughter of Fenrir. She was in his eyes now, and games where afoot, and that was plenty fine with him.
*
The hand that had taken his own twitched in sudden spasm, the digits twisted, popping and rearranging as the woman smiled. Her fingers spread, her nails lengthening while joints snapped out of place and her figure crumpled to the ground. The shoulders poured into the lengthening spine, the neck twisting as the jaws spread in a grotesque figment of what had been human expression.
The teeth were jagged points on mountains long left sacred, and they turned to sink into flesh and fabric, pulling the falsified form from the black fur and muscle that manifested before this prince of the waves, this Halfling fish that played with gods. The tail lashed as hot breath pooled from the Cheshire grin of interlocking fangs, something in the eyes that bore down on him unrecognizing for a moment that stretched too long. An insatiable hunger pulled at her gut, and she turned massive head to the sky and let loose a song she had forgotten how to sing.
Then she launched after the echo into the heavens above, that blur of heat and wild song destined to quickly outpace him. Until she stopped just at the horizon line, and looked over a shoulder with eyes the color of the sun she was forever destined to chase. And she waited for him with an unmistakable smile on those inhuman features. Are you coming?
*