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He isn’t usually one for wondering – if there’s anything he believes in and doesn’t rebuke it’s doing and seeing things for what they are without the florid imagery and supposed heartache he’s never felt before. They tell him it’s worthless to be so distant, but when he Changes, he laughs at how they all back off and hide. Some worth, he thinks, scoffing at the fact that if they didn’t have feelings they wouldn’t have to run.

So when he feels his blood turn to water and his steps quicken, there is no second thought as the velvet swallows his being and his vision refocuses into a sharper distillation of the tremors of life. Fauve, wild, expressional -  he revels in the tread of the leaves underfoot, sounding richer than they did before the Changing. He sees the Spirit of everything in that little glade, throbbing and tripping and dancing in little whispers of gold, buzzing to a stop as a small life ends in the dense carpet of leaves and another begins somewhere halfway up a bronzed redwood.

He spends the nights by the stream when the moon is up, dipping a lean limb into the pool of silver and watching the ripples bounce from the narrow banks back into the centre, unceasing, restless. Sometimes he’ll sense the Spirit of a deer through the spiny silhouettes of the trees and stretch out to the luxuriously thick, cool air whooshing through his every heightened nerve as he speeds through the darkness as part of it, bounding from rock to rock where the glade slopes up into the mountains and stopping the deer in its tracks only to sink his teeth into the soft flesh and rejoice in the cold, tender meat. It’s graceful even as it goes down, silent and almost compliant – because Spirit will Change it into something beyond what it was, for its departure.

‘Hello? Hello? ’

His eyes open with a start, blurred green and gold and brown focusing to only half an extent in front of him. There’s warm breath on his forehead and when turns his head to straight above him there’s someone there, looking straight into his Spirit – was it ever there - with an illuminated darkness which makes it spin in dizzying rondos without rest.

So he sits up, stands up, shaking a leg out because of the fatigue of Changing back.

‘Yes?’

‘Oh, you’re alright. I saw you asleep here - I was wondering whether you were okay.’

‘You were wondering.’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, I’m alright, you don’t need to worry about me.’

He stands there for what seems like an aeon before he’s sure the stranger has traveled far from him before willing himself into Changing again, the sensation unfamiliar at an hour so early in the morning. It’s almost like the first time it happened, somewhat painful as he feels a sharp jolt and a flash of hot red behind his eyes. But it’s over as soon as it begins and he stretches his glossy limbs before taking off into the forest.

And he doesn’t know for how long he runs but it’s only when his lungs are on fire and their taut skins feel ready to burst, and the golden Spirits of the creatures of the glade seem to shimmer in the afternoon heat, that he finds himself Changing back into what people know him as, Kim Jongin. It’s a name, a mask, because his real self is what he Changes into; that is his Unchanged. Not the two-limbed, not the eloquent. He is the raw, the instinctual, the daring and the passionate, not some flimsy human.

His head hits the bed of fallen foliage with a muffled thud and stays there till sunset. It’s in that time that he finds himself wondering – the feeling is hateful, he despises thinking, it’s all about the now, but he can’t stop it and knows he never will. It’s a fatal lock, a grille slammed and padlocked on his conscience, and there is no way to find that key.

The next nights when he Changes he follows the stranger silently through the glade, letting the coppery Spirit of him pulse through his thinned bloodstream as well, feeling alive and insomniacal as the black of the new moon night casting light on the porcelain-pale skin, arched lips and tousled hair the shade of a charred Autumn leaf. Sometimes he stays for hours, darting back only when rays start to pierce through the geometric canopy the redwoods form, triangles and hexagons and diamonds amess in the chilly breeze.

But it’s only a month after the first Incident that he hears the stranger’s footsteps thud with alarming frequency through the glade. He’s already Changed by then, it must be well into the mezzanine hours of the night, so hesitates for no time as he pads after him to the very edge of the forest basin, willing his natural body past its limits as he grapples with the rocks to mount the cliff the stranger seems to be trekking upwards.

He’s not sure when he lets the growl escape him but knows that it’s when he sees the slight figure take tentative steps closer, and closer to the edge that his Spirit is screaming through his bones, rattling his consciousness and telling him that he needs to stop this, now.

So he lets it go.

The stranger turns. Takes one look at the amber eyes and black sheen of the panther that is Jongin’s Unchanged self, glowing in the absence of daylight, and makes a run for it.

Needless to say he doesn’t return. And Jongin wonders every day, whether he will, but knows he won’t, but wonders nevertheless. He doesn’t Change into stranger-form for weeks on end, only when his front limbs are tired and he needs to rest them in favour of his hind ones. Deer are killed, claws are sharpened and scratched on wood, glistening in the moon.

He wouldn’t say he’s hurting, because broken creatures don’t say at all.

FINITE