she has mostly drowned him out. he means only to make her a fool, to stoke the anger he knows is buried under the scowl on her face. he almost succeeds, when she tunes into his monotonous ramblings, but her breath rises and falls in tandem with lyune's slumbering form. 

at once, when her breath catches, he blinks away the sleep. gravity is a cruel weight to the enormous beast, but his legs do not buckle.

a forked tongue flicks out. freya hears fernando's last claim. her muscles tense. the dragon bristles. a mortal man's lifetime spent walking in a hardened shell, an impatient hatchling with dreams of flight, and he thinks he can best him by clipping his wings?

wings that have been clipped for years. every surge through the air a straining pain. freya's own heart, severed by pink, indulging her fantasies of becoming a monster. she used to utter fernando's name as she might a prayer.

"lyune," she says, "close the distance."

hind legs create new fissures in the earth as he lurches forward. claws scramble over the rough terrain he's created. his wings are folded flat against his back and he's nothing but a blue-silver blur as he closes the gap between them. 

molten fire sprays from his mouth, billowing toward the pudgy fairy. tendrils snake and snap near the trainer behind it. 

FERNANDO SILPH

salamence uses flamethrower

☉

soft eep eeps and chuffs blow out from the wigglytuff as it draws power around itself. lyune rages forward. they are a mirror of their past selves, but furious mega energy no longer swathes the beast, painfully dragging out the most violent and primal parts of him. this is not a stuttering, clumsy barrage of malice. 

this is not an explosive display of strength. 

freya shifts her hips, raising a hand and reaching for one of the tera shards wrapped in her braids. lyune does not fear the strike. he does not fear a fairy's retribution as his master orders him to stand and take the hit head-on. 

the fire expels and the air balloons. flames crawl inward, swirling into the vacuum of space, and lyune's claws rip up the ground as he's forced back several yards. but the wrought iron crown twisting from his brow, the silver shudder over his scales, holds him steady. his draconic spirit is snuffed, blanketed - once, she'd considered it sacrilege. 

in that vortex of space, as flames still lap meaninglessly at air, a silver tera blast races back in kind.

FERNANDO SILPH
SILPH BADGE

salamence/tera blast is steel-type

☉

the tera blast strikes dead-on, tearing into fur and fluff and sending the wigglytuff head over heels. the spongey body rolls over the ground pitifully and lyune raises his head, frills fanning in a show of dominance. freya is quick to sputter a command; fernando's tactics are as predictable as her own. 

he will attempt to strip her of her advantage as quickly as possible. 

and with a show of psychic powers, she has a feeling as to what he'll try next. smoke and ash falls around him, twisting as the last of the flames die out. molten liquid drips out of the corner of his maw, sputtering by the curve of his lips. 

it passes through a shimmering hexagonal barrier. psychic energy warbles against it, applying a pressure that makes lyune's tail flick. but when the barrier breaks, the dragon roars in a show of defiance. 

FERNANDO SILPH

salamence uses protect

☉

it was never an outward horror, those manipulations. there were never marks or blemishes made upon her skin. save for the bullet she took in that tree, courtesy of one Lulu Flint . despite her hunger for the pyre, he never strung her up with rope. never lashed her. never so much as looked at her the wrong way. 

save when she bit into his arm, when he forced her under the water, kicking and thrashing, but that, that, was self-preservation. she would have eaten his arm whole. 

but the fairy's disarming voice is a dissonant cry that shakes her core, that picks apart all the lesions left behind in the wake of her deadliest addiction. her jaw sets. lyune's nostrils flare as his emotions are dragged to the surface, raw and shivering. 

shame flushes hot on freya's cheeks. "end this, lyune. end it now," she snarls, inhibitions stripping away the layers protecting her from her own anger. the vampiric marks on her neck twinge.

with a clear shot, the wigglytuff's voice nothing more than a pitiful growl, he fires another angry silver beam at the fae.

FERNANDO SILPH
SILPH BADGE

salamence/tera blast is steel-type

☉

the steel scales molt off of lyune. he shakes out his body and they spin out from him in a cloud. the wrought crown melts, bleeding down the front of his snout in a garish mask, and then dissipates as the rest of the energy fades away. his exhaustion is palpable by the hanging of his head, the anxious ruffle of his wings. 

freya returns him to his ball and fits it neatly back into her choker. 

"you planned for everything. all of this. and you still failed," she says, unmoving. 

"did you plan for me to turn my back on you?"

FERNANDO SILPH
SILPH BADGE

☉

she is grateful, then, that he doesn't deem her worthy of even looking at her. triumph bleeds away and freezes over. her hands shake, nails biting into the flesh of her palms, and the murderous look on her face is marred by smarting eyes and a quivering lip. 

you don't own me, she wants to say, but her mouth won't form the words and even if it could, she knows they'd come out strangled. 

FERNANDO SILPH

☉