The Wolves in the Woods

Terror for Beauty

Go into the depths of your longing. Let it fill you with awe and tear you apart with terror for beauty comes with fright as light with darkness, drought with rain. This is the grand, sublime, powerful force of life where dreams and despair coexist filling life with aliveness and meaning, youth and ripeness. It is then that beauty and terror interplay to transcend life's storms, pulling into light something so utterly beautiful...

— Jayita Bhattacharjee

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Tikki's despair fuels her resolve to save Marinette.

***

            Various whims and notions passed through Amaia's head when Marinette quite literally threw her out the window of her sanctuary. Something akin to her life flashing before her eyes, so the saying goes. Whatever about it she liked, anyway. There wasn't much she liked to talk about. Or think. Thanks a lot, egg and sperm donors. And thanks a lot, vertigo, for disrupting her train of thought. It had a perfectly good trail and the damn vertigo just had to be a jerk and toss the whole carriage off to the side like a toddler throwing a temper tantrum because they were told no.

On top of that, everything hurt like hell.

What... she thought within the depths of her consciousness. What's... going on?... All around her, people were bawling their eyes out, clinging to one another at some monstrous sight taking place before them. Thousands upon thousands of tiny scratches littered her back. Some of them came from the window. Others were from that punk who tried to kill Marinette. Wherever he landed, anyway. She distantly hoped Botere was around to nip his tail.

I... the little voice in her head mouthed (did internal voices even have visible mouths?) I... can't hear anything... Save for an acute and sharp whistling stinging her ears. The frigid wind brushed past her face, tickling her face with scores of tiny needles made of ice. Her tail flapped uselessly against the updraft. Her paws flailed. Her spinning vision flashed between black and white, the abrupt oscillation disrupting the stability in her brain. Squeezing her eyes shut didn't do anything to dull the heavy throbbing in her skull. Did someone turn on a jackhammer on max and leave it running? Her teeth and claws wanted to have a little word for whoever was responsible.

It's too bad... she whispered. That I'm gonna die.

Down and down she fell. Down past the floors of the castle (when did Marinette turn it into a castle?). Down past the windows where people frightened out of their senses watched. Once or twice, she thought she saw her boyfriend, paralyzed with shock and horror. Watching her through a high window while she tumbled through the air. Once or twice, she thought she saw her brother. Racing to punch a thick glass window to pieces only to be held back by a girl with red hair in a pixie cut. Her vision spun. Glass floated around her. Was this the "bullet time" people liked to talk about in video games? Now she understood exactly what went down when those characters Andres liked to play entered "bullet time" mode.

Too bad it had to be because of this.

THUD!!!

Amaia's body landed on the pavement with a rough splat, which was soon followed by a pair of girlish shrieks sounding off behind her. And someone swearing up a storm. No, nothing spilled onto the ground, that she knew of. But with how her insides churned and twisted, she may as well have burst open like an overstuffed garbage bag.

Okay... she growled to herself. That hurts. Her lungs screamed, the cold December air needling them enough she was more surprised they weren't bleeding. Her head pounded, the dizziness worsening her spinning vision when she tried to open her eyes. Her tail lay against the asphalt. Her paws lay limp against the asphalt that served as her landing (it didn't even break her fall, the jackass). The ringing in her ears drowned out the voices bellowing to each other about a wolf.