Title: Molt
Fandom: Actor RPF (Snow White & the Huntsman: Kristen Stewart/Charlize Theron)
Rating: R
Length: 575 words
Challenge: "Transformation"
Content notes: some body horror; oblique sex and drug references
Author notes: yeah, IDK. I wrote this for a friend but I am not sure she'd want to be named.
Summary: Kristen comes into herself.



A rare afternoon off, waiting on the horse wranglers, so they went for a walk down Marloes Sands. Maybe all the Welsh ghosts, centuries of heroes confronting the uncanny, called her forth finally. Maybe she was enjoying some halfway decent weed for the first time in months.

Hell, maybe it was true love. Who the hell knew.

Kristen stumbled, the ground pitching up hard, before Charlize caught her.

The last human thing she saw was Charlize's face. Her smile, wide as the horizon, welcoming. Her tan glowed, her hair burned bright, streaming back. Everything went molten and vital; a ripple moved across reality's liquid surface, then caught and hesitated before dissolving.

Kristen twisted, spine cracking as it elongated, her skin swelling and tessellating.

All she knew, caught against Charlize, was want, need and greed, hunger for all that glowing, beckoning gold. Wanting spread her wide, buoyed her up, stretching her full to bursting.

Around her, beneath her, the burning gold shimmered, strong and steady as a heart. It lifted her, surrounded her, held her safe against the endless sky as she shook and shrieked through the change.

Her neck stretched out long, and twisted, head thrown back, jaws snapping. Her shoulders, thrown back, pulled up through tough hide and unfolded into bright wings, beating painfully against the cold air. Her arms reached out with claws, tail curled and slapped the sky.

Her howl went fiery, streaming sparks and dimming the sun. Her gold companion, the one best known as beautifulloveneedmine, joined in, a helix of flame pulling them to the heavens.

*

"It happens," Charlize told her later. She stroked damp hair back from Kristen's face and hauled her clammy, clinging body even closer until Kristen was half-sprawled atop her, face buried against her armpit.

Kristen lifted her head - it was simultaneously too light and too heavy; gravity had shifted, left her confused. "You knew?"

Charlize smiled, traced her finger across one of Kristen's eyebrows. "Of course."

"Oh." She probably should be embarrassed or something, but she was so tired, bone-cracked and shrunken back to human. "How?"

"I can see." Charlize touched Kristen's mouth, thrust her finger in and out softly. "It only works in person, the sight."

"No, like. How long did you know? About me or whatev."

She cupped the back of Kristen's skull (so round now, and fragile) and kissed her, slow and deep and thorough. Their mouths were all human, but all the same, Kristen felt the kiss against fangs, tasted cinders and steam off a forked, flickering tongue.

Within the kiss, inside the yearning need it relit (a need that was Charlize and for Charlize, to have and to hoard, to consume and to shelter), a thought trembled to form. It grew, clarified, until Kristen saw herself through Charlize's eyes - scrawny weirdo girl, shoulders up to her ears, lank hair in her eyes, and around her, through her, the half-grown dragon, marble blue, scales peeling dry, shivering to be shed.

Kristen kissed harder, pushing herself up on one arm, driving her knee between Charlize's, thrusting everything forward and in.

Her scales ached, shiny in the sharp air, the gold beneath her tangled around her and tugged her down.

They were both now (always have been), the shine that shudders, wings and snout and fire, around a small monkey's frame. Heat off a desert highway, dreams three seconds after waking, everything that was and might be and could never quite hold in the here and now.