I have to learn to change without the lunar mother. He had wanted nothing more than to change in that first confrontation with Ares in the tower. He had been angry and that had given him the adrenaline boost he had needed to land those few blows before he passed out from exhaustion. Yeah, but even though I was pissed I hadn’t felt anything that might be construed as my transformation.
He continued to swim through the black water. His body was beginning to feel some warmth again. He could feel that his toes and feet were still where they were supposed to be. The cold water ran all around him. Even though he could feel life return to his body, whatever warmth he generated was taken away by the constant flow of cold water around him. William knew that the lake was winning and, a lot sooner than he wanted to admit, he was going to pass out from hypothermia.
I’ve been in here too long.
William couldn’t help a laugh escape from his lips. As he did so the cold lake water rushed into his mouth. The water was clean and cold, and he drank it. I never thought that I would die in water. His thoughts drifted back to days at an indoor pool. How he would watch children and toddlers wear those ridiculous ‘water wings’ splash around. Why would anyone let their kids wear those things? The idea behind them was stupid. They fit right next to the child’s shoulder. How can you move your arms and teach yourself how to swim if you can’t move your arms properly?
He couldn’t really blame lazy parents for wanting to cop out that way to keep their kids afloat though. Who has the time to teach their kids how to swim properly when you have a social circle and ‘friends’ to keep track of and talk to? He had seen firsthand how panicked kids would get and how scared kids were of the water.
He had been swimming laps in the deep end of the pool on a Friday afternoon. He was in the middle of a two hundred yard I.M. He had just finished the backstroke leg of the event and was flipping himself around to begin the breaststroke. Just as he kicked off the wall the loudest, bloodcurdling scream he had ever heard ripped through the room. He immediately jabbed his head out of the water and looked to where the scream had come from.
A little boy, maybe five years old, was being lowered into the water by his father. It appeared that as soon as the boy’s foot touched the water he had screamed, because the boy was now being lifted hastily out of the water to be held by the man who had tried to lower him into the pool in the first place. William would have liked to finish his event but he couldn’t pull his eyes away from the side show of this man trying to reason with a five-year-old about water.
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The man tried to lower his son into the water again and as soon as the kid’s toes touched water the boy screamed again. The man ripped him out of the water and hugged him to his chest. He remembered thinking that that kid must be part cat. William could never understand people’s intrinsic fear of the water, children especially.
He used to laugh at kids that had just started learning how to swim. They would push and contort their body so that their faces would be out of the water. They would fight the water instead of using it. Try explaining to anybody who doesn’t understand water to let the water support you. If you trust the water and give in to it you can have true freedom of movement, the kind of freedom that only astronauts in space can feel.
Give in to it?
William swam through the water, but his mind caught on that singular thought. Give in to it to experience that freedom of movement. The freedom of movement or is it the freedom of choice? The freedom to choose where to go and how to get there. The hardest thing to teach someone about swimming was to get their face wet. You have to surrender to water and let it have some control over your body. He had learned a long time ago that to move through the water effectively you had to give up a little bit of control, breathing was a big one. If you wanted to swim you have to let the water dictate how and when to breathe. The need to have air around you is an instinctive one that can be controlled. People are so afraid to give up that control that they never learn the truth of what swimming is. To have the freedom that water allows you to have, you have to learn how to move the way water wants you to move. Water can bring down mountains and rivers run where they want. Who are humans to try and dictate what water can and can’t do? Only the arrogance of people would allow the thought that swimming and water is just something else that you can exert your full influence over. Water has a will of its own and only a fool tries to fight against it for very long.
Instead of fighting and straining against water you had to give in to it. Maybe he had been fighting against the change as well and maybe all he had to do was surrender to it and allow it to happen. Give the monster some control over his body so he could experience the true freedom of being a shape shifter.
He smiled to himself. Surrender to the monster. Will, you’re crazy, you remember what happens when you let him get too much control, you almost lost yourself once. You want to be a mindless instinctive wolf creature for the rest of your life? He considered that for a time. He remembered many times letting his other half, his alter ego, take too much control and it was a battle for him to regain his humanity. The change and the beast that was awakened every full moon in him was powerful and dangerous that was driven by his appetite for the hunt and running with his pack.