a bond that can't be broken @itsashyanshame - Tumblr Blog

Apr 13, 2024

Circles

for @popkin16

Funny thing about being a skeptic, Shane thinks. When you run into something inexplicable it is, oddly enough, impossible to explain it.

Title: Circles Author: @liminalweirdo Pairing: shyan Rating: Mature

Funny thing about being a skeptic, Shane thinks. When you run into something inexplicable it is, oddly enough, impossible to explain it.

But maybe he’s getting ahead of himself.

~°~

He’s gotta be honest, he likes looking for cryptids better than looking for ghosts. At least with cryptids there’s more walking around outside in nature, and less standing around inside dusty buildings. And Vermont is a beautiful state. It’s a beautiful state and it certainly won’t be difficult to get those spooky shots that can be a little harder to come by in sunny California.

It’s been misting since they arrived, sleepy and disheveled, at Burlington International Airport the day before, and Shane had just been happy to stretch his legs for a few minutes before they piled into the rental car that would take them to the middle of fucking nowhere.

They’re actually camping and so the mist, while spooky and atmospheric, becomes more of a nuisance when they remember that they’re basically going to be sleeping on the ground. But it’s not all bad. Once they get the tents set up; he and Ryan in one, TJ, Mark, and Devon in the other, they light up the interior with camping lanterns, and there’s not much that’s eerie about a nice yellow glow, and the voices of their friends not even three yards away. He and Ryan just shoot the shit for a little while. The cameras are off, so they don’t talk about ghosts or ghouls or anything else that might be lurking out there in the dark, and the tent is surprisingly cozy enough, with the whisper of the lightest rain against its sides, that it’s actually almost peaceful and warm when they eventually shut out their light and settle in for the night.

~°~

Shane thinks, afterwards, that the creepiest part was that there was no sounds from the darkness, and everything happened so fast — the tearing of the vinyl siding, the sharp snapdrag sensation of the whole tent being pulled, and then the chaos and confusion of things rolling, falling, he and Ryan finding one another in the dark and Ryan’s sharp “What the fuck?” before something catches Shane around the shin like a steel trap and yanks him out of the tent and into the chill night dark.

There’s a moment of weightlessness, then impact, and all the air whooshes from his lungs. He remembers looking up and seeing that bright, full moon, hung directly above him like a beacon, a spotlight. Something heavy steps onto his chest and Shane thinks wolvescoyotesbears thinks fuckfuckfuck as something heaves hotly into his face, all copper and dying leaves. And then a light snaps on and someone shouts “Hey!” and Shane honest to god almost laughs, because he doesn’t think he’s ever heard Mark yell before.

The weight presses down, crushing his ribs. There’s a shuffle, a tearing up of the earth around him, and then it’s gone, and he gets his breath. Air rushes into his lungs harshly like he’s been drowning and he rolls over onto his stomach, instinctively curling up — basic instinct — to protect his throat, his internal organs, but whatever it was is far away from them now.

“What the fuck?” TJ says, and then all four of them are around him, and he doesn’t think he’s ever seen Ryan’s face so pale or his eyes so enormous. They’re a contradiction to the full moon above, huge and impossibly dark in the soft lantern light

Shane sits up “I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m okay,” and he is, really, except for the high pitched whining in his ears and the burning pain around his leg. His sweats are all bloodied, and when they ease them up to below his knee it’s bad enough that they say fuck it to filming in the morning, pack up, and drive to ER where Shane’s treated for the bites, for rabies, and fuck knows what else. It’s morning by the time they all walk out of there, and Shane keeps saying “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” keeps having to repeat himself, but he knows there’s going to be paperwork, and filming is kind of ruined, but once everyone’s calmed down they do a little bit in the hospital. Who knows, some of this experience might be salvageable. Shane makes jokes about them exploiting his injuries for profit.

It's only Ryan who doesn’t laugh.

~°~

They all go back to the hotel. TJ disappears to make phone calls and Ryan and Shane sit down on opposite beds and a weird silence settles in.

“Shane, I—” Ryan begins, and Shane feels his stomach do that thing it does every time Ryan addresses him by name. It doesn’t happen all that often. He is ‘Shane’ to other people. To Ryan, he is Big Guy, fucking bastard, son of a bitch, disaster.

“Come on, Ryan,” Shane says, stomach knotting unpleasantly, “No one’s dead.”

“But it could’ve been so much worse—”

“But it wasn’t. Hey.” Shane snaps his fingers until Ryan looks up, meets his eyes. “It’s fine. We’re all fine. It’s gonna be a great story,” he says. “I’m so upset we didn’t catch it on film.”

“You getting maimed by some huge ass wild animal, yeah, no thanks,” Ryan says.

“Hey, what happened to your promise to keep rolling if I died?”

“I never promised that,” Ryan says, but he’s cracked a smile now. There he is, Shane thinks. They’re all okay, they’re both here, and Ryan’s smiling. All’s right with the world.

~°~

The rabies jokes get old pretty fast, especially when Shane has to go get three more shots over the course of the next two weeks and, to be honest, he chalks a lot of the weird things his body is doing up to side effects. He’d been warned about headaches and nausea and sore muscles. He tells himself he’s lucky not to get the fever and hives.

And it could be worse, he supposes. Besides, it’s a fucking fantastic story, and he likes telling it. He’s also going to have a scar for sure, he thinks, except when he unwinds the bandages on day seven so that he can shower, clean, and re-wrap them he notices they’re pretty healed up. Soft silvery scar-tissue is already growing, and it holds when he touches it. Funny, but it barely even hurts anymore.

~°~

He gets his last dose of the shot exactly fourteen days after whatever it was attacked him in the woods. And it’s weird, he keeps thinking about it. He wonders if animal control had to go in and put it down, or not. He doesn’t think they’d find it. Whatever it was was fucking fast, quiet as hell. There’s a part of him that wants to go back and see if he can find any tracks, as unrealistic as that is. They’re back in LA, now, and Vermont is another world — one with rain and cryptids they never find and heaving, snarling things in the woods.

He doesn’t have nightmares.

~°~

He and Ryan and the crew go out for drinks to celebrate Shane being cured of maybe-rabies (jesus christ), but he doesn’t have to buy a single drink. And Shane loves his friends, and he really likes his job even when it involves excruciatingly long nights, even when the spirit box makes his ears bleed. And he loves, especially, the way Ryan becomes looser, freer with every beer he drinks. He loves the way Ryan’s knee presses to his, and Ryan’s shoulder — he’s much broader now than what they were when they met, (and Shane does not stare. He doesn’t). He brushes Shane’s arm. He loves the way Ryan forgets the precautions he has in place, or maybe the ones the alcohol allows him to just say fuck it to, and touches Shane’s wrist, his arm, knuckles him in the ribs to get his attention. And Shane pretends like it doesn’t make his heart soar in his chest every time it happens. Every time Ryan wants him to listen, wants him to see.

Like he doesn’t.

As though Shane hasn’t been looking at Ryan for the last five years.

They spill out onto the street, holding on and hilarious, both of them pretending to be a little drunker than they are, because then the way Ryan gets a fistful of Shane’s hoodie at the waist doesn’t seem weird; and the way Shane loops a long arm around Ryan’s strong shoulders doesn’t seem weird, and they’re laughing so hard Shane thinks he might puke, and that eliminates any possibility for awkwardness. So when Ryan tells him just to crash at his place so that Shane’s not paying the cab twenty dollars extra to get home, he says yes.

~°~

Shane likes Ryan’s place. It’s more spacious than his own apartment, where the front door opens into the hallway, peeling off to the living room on the right and the kitchen further down on the left — rooms scatted almost haphazardly so he is constantly banging his elbows off of doorframes and his hips off of the jutting countertops in the kitchen but it’s home, he guesses.

Ryan’s place is small but feels airy because it’s bright. He gets sunrises to the right of his living room window and sunsets to the left of his bedroom while Shane has to settle with north-facing windows and barely gets any sun at all. At the moment, though, it’s dark, and he and Ryan stumble out of their shoes and trip over more shoes on their way to the living room where they collapse onto the couch. Shane knows this rhythm. Eventually it will be popcorn or nacho fries from the place up the street. It will be water and conversation, made easy and familiar by years of friendship.

And by now Shane has mapped out the routes expertly — what not to say, what makes it awkward, when it’s safe to look at Ryan’s soft hair and soft eyes and brilliant mouth and when it’s safer to look away. When it’s safe to touch, to laugh, to needle until they’re just teetering on the the edge of genuine passion and genuine upset in their arguments. He predicts the moment that Ryan will retreat to his room, mumbling and grumbling about how hungover he’s going to be in the morning, and Shane will crash on the couch that smells almost as familiar as home.

Except tonight rides a little differently. Shane somehow manages to spill his water onto his chest and into his lap before the cup rolls from the coffee table and onto the floor in an explosion of glass and a cascade of water droplets and he’s apologizing and Ryan’s laughing “what the fuck, you absolute madman,” and then “Wait— don’t pick it up with your fingers, jesus, Shane,” and there’s his name again, in Ryan’s mouth.

When all the water and glass is cleaned up, Ryan lends Shane a shirt and a pair of pants to wear that fit him, even if they’re too short. “Nice,” Ryan says, grinning hugely as Shane pushes open the door of the bathroom where he’d changed with his toothbrush in his mouth. “Nice high water pants.”

And Shane says “Hey, fuck you,” through a mouthful of foam and sounds dead serious, which means that he isn’t. Ryan cackles and joins him at the sink, taking turns to spit and run the water, playfully jostling each other at the shoulders, knocking one another brushes out of the way of the tap like kids.

Sometimes Shane misses Ryan so much it actually physically fucking hurts, but that’s not the sort of thing you just out and tell your buddies. And he sleeps on the couch like he always does, and he doesn’t think of Ryan on the other side of the wall, already fast a sleep and on the way to hangover town.

He never drinks enough of the water. His cup sits nearly full next to Shane’s empty one, so Shane drinks some of Ryan’s, too, rolls over, and goes to sleep.

~°~

In the morning they’re both a little hungover. Ryan is worse, but after breakfast and coffee, he’s good to drive Shane home with his plastic bag of still-wet clothes — probably would’ve helped if he actually hung them up or something, he thinks, instead of leaving them kind of crumpled on the edge of Ryan’s tub but there it is. — And he lets Ryan laugh at him all the way up the walk to his door in Ryan’s too-short pants. He shuts the door on Ryan laughing so hard he’s wiping his eyes, bent with his forehead against the steering wheel and Shane makes a show of sauntering with exaggerated confidence into his building and letting the door fall shut behind him. He’s smiling to himself, though, as he climbs the stairs to his apartment door and lets himself in.

~°~

Looking back, there were probably clues. Like how the joint pain kept getting worse, even after he’d gotten his last rabies vaccine. (Now he really can say he’s got the gut of a raccoon… oh christ, now he’s the one making the rabies jokes). His fingers hurt when he flexes them. Strange, sharp, aching pains along his tendons that he tells himself might not be related to the shots at all, but are maybe just carpal tunnel or tendonitis or something.

And there’s the way he feels… what is it? It’s like this… this waiting. This sense of something impending, but he doesn’t know what. It makes him restless. He paces his apartment, then finally goes out for a run as soon as the sun goes down. It helps with the antsiness but not the joint pain that, weirdly, sits all along his forearms, and the backs of his legs. Shane opens his mouth beneath the shower spray, afterwards, and feels his jaw click.

The restlessness only intensifies over the weekend. Normally Shane loves the weekend; days when he can spend time home by himself, wind down, watch movies he’s already seen a thousand times. But he doesn’t want to do any of that. He doesn’t know what he wants, just that it’s something visceral; a longing, almost an ache…

So he runs some errands. Traipsing all the way down to the grocery store on a Saturday, where he can get cut off by women in their fifties who wield their shopping carts like jousting steeds and stand behind the guy who has to touch every single peach and put it back before he finally chooses one. On top of all of that, lugging home three bags in each hand is usually enough to kill any kind of enthusiasm he feels, so he figures it’ll work for whatever this is, too. And it stinks, it really does, but once he’s back home, standing in front of the open fridge and staring into its fluorescent depths and still feeling like he doesn’t know what he wants, he decides on making some pasta.

With noodles cooking on the stove and vegetables cut, Shane has just peeled open the ground beef to fry up with the onions when something stops him. His jaw goes tight, salivary glands contracting so hard that his jaw pops again when he tries to ease the ache. Before he knows what’s happened he’s brought a handful of the red meat to his mouth, biting into it like it’s an apple.

It’s not the strangest thing he’s ever done — he thinks, probably, the raw pumpkin was probably weirder, but it’s definitely one of the least sanitary. And yet he’s swallowed about half of the mess in his hand, swallowing like he’s starved before he realizes what exactly he’s doing and turns to the sink to spit it out. He runs the tap water and drinks and spits, drinks and spits while the pasta boils over on the stove. Panting softly, Shane looks down at his hand, bits of gristle still hanging from his fingers. This, he thinks is probably not what an iron deficiency feels like.

~°~

So, something’s wrong. Shane ends up Googling rabies symptoms but he doesn’t have any of those. This is something else. As he stands up to pace anxiously around his apartment for the tenth time, he ends up slamming to a dead halt halfway out of his chair and then sits back down again, hard. His eyes drop to his leg, and he reaches, pulling the cloth of his jeans up, rucking the hem up around his calf to look at the bite marks which are, somehow, almost completely healed.

In less than three weeks. Which bring him right around to that funny little thing about being a skeptic. Because if all of this tracks, and he’s about to pull some kind of American Werewolf in London crap, he kind of wants to prepare. Obviously, he tells himself, as he searches werewolf mythology well into the night — obviously this can’t be happening. Maybe he should just go to bed, and in the morning the fact that he shoved a bunch of raw hamburger into his face like it was a handful of popcorn might all be a dream.

It isn’t though, and Sunday has him waking up with his joins so stiff and painful that it takes him several minutes to roll out of bed. In the bathroom he takes a hot shower and hopes to god this isn’t the start of arthritis or something. He finished brushing his teeth and, as he’s leaning towards the mirror to slip his contacts in notices something—

Huh.

His eye, his left, is certainly more golden than brown today. Would you look at that, Shane thinks, with extraordinary calm. It’s also in that moment that he realizes that he doesn’t need his glasses to see — well — actually quite clearly this morning.

So keyed up he’s practically shaking he decides that he needs to get out of the house. He needs to do what any other skeptic in his (probably perfectly explainable) situation would do which is call his weird little ghost-believing friend and ask him what he thinks about all of this. He texts him — casual. What’re you up to? and Ryan eventually tells him to come over.

None of his clothes are clean so he turns to the laundry basket and grabs the first thing he touches which happens to be Ryan’s shirt. Panic hits right around that moment, and Shane, dizzy, white spots swimming at the edges of his vision sits down on the bed and drops his face into his hands to breathe. The soft white material of Ryan’s shirt still hanging from one tight fist fills Shane with such a sudden, overwhelming sense of relief that he turns his face into the fabric with his eyes closed, and breathes it in. And, god, the smell of him, of Ryan, is just so powerful. And it’s Ryan’s smell, not his deodorant or his aftershave or his soap. Holding it in both hands over his nose and mouth like a chloroform rag, Shane leans over his knees and just breathes, breathes, until the panic and the nausea slowly ebbs away.

So that’s encouraging. He pulls Ryan’s shirt on over his head, enveloped in that scent. And it helps, genuinely, especially out on the streets where everything is weirdly loud and bright and smells like smog and exhaust fumes and hot concrete. All of it combines to makes his skin itch, and he runs his hands down over his arms hoping he doesn’t look like an addict or something as he winces and skitters away from a couple of screaming kids at a patio restaurant the sound of it, high pitched, ringing in his ears and clenching something in his gut.

Ryan pulls the door open to him and the look on his face tells Shane more or less what he needs to know. “Holy shit, dude,” Ryan says, “Your eyes.”

“Yeah, I know,” Shane says, shouldering his way, gently, past him. Ryan shuts the door and turns to face him.

“Listen, I…” Shane begins, but it all feels so goddamn dramatic, and the smell, the scent of Ryan, Ryan’s space all around him is making his blood feel electric in his veins. “You want to have a beer or something?” he asks, a little desperately, and so they do, cracking open a couple of cold ones and going outside to sit in the shade of Ryan’s balcony, several stories above the rest of the city, and where the wind sweeps most of that overwhelming Ryanness of everything away.

Ryan’s eyes get wider and wider as Shane tells him about his wild Saturday night. He can’t help but notice the way his gaze settles on him, and where: it’s on the gold circle that’s slowly swallowing the brown in Shane’s left eye.

“I know what you’re going to settle on, here, Ryan,” Shane says, half-swallowing the last syllable of Ryan’s name so that it’s almost a nickname. Almost. “We’ve got the whole package: full moon, animal attack, a bite…”

“Is this— this is a bit right?” Ryan says, but he doesn’t look convinced.

“Not a bit,” Shane tells him.

“And now you’ve got— you ate raw meat, dude,” Ryan adds, “from the discount grocery store. By rights, that alone should’ve killed you.”

“Oh, it’s not that bad,” Shane scoffs.

“Shane. Not the point.”

“You brought it up!”

“We’re really not just going to sit here bantering while you might have a feral, bloodthirsty demon growing inside you, are you?” Ryan asks. “Is that really what we’re doing here?”

“It just can’t be that, Ryan. Also, I’m not sure werewolves are demons, are they?”

“You’re not going to— when’s the next full moon?” Ryan asks, already barrelling ahead. They both pull out their phones, but Shane stars laughing because it’s impossible. Right? All of this is impossible. He chuckles to himself and pockets his phone and lets Ryan look while he looks at Ryan.

Ryan is so goddamn earnest, Shane thinks. He’s thirty years old and looking up werewolf folklore on the internet like it means something, and it can’t, Shane thinks. It just can’t.

The next full moon is on June 24th. Twelve days.

They agree to disagree on whether Shane really is or isn’t turning into a werewolf, (it even sounds like a scoff in Shane’s head) and start devising a plan for all possible situations. The first being that Shane should go back to the doctor’s, which is vetoed because Ryan is certain that they’ll send him off to a special laboratory for testing or something — and as convinced as Shane is that it wouldn't happen that way, he can’t say that he’s entirely trustful of their government these days — so he concedes. No doctors. At least not until after the full moon, when they should have a better idea of what’s actually happening.

“I mean, either you’ll turn into a giant, bloodthirsty disgusting beast, or you won’t,” Ryan says. “Those are the only two options.”

“They can’t be the only two options—”

And weirdly enough it’s a pleasant afternoon, out there on the balcony. Because, Shane thinks, no matter what happens, Ryan’s not just going to abandon him. That’s not what friends like Ryan’s do, and he is impossibly, profoundly grateful for him. He thinks that he doesn’t tell him that enough, but can never quite think of how to say it.

Honestly, aside from the ache in his limbs, and the click in his jaw, Shane almost could feel normal.

Almost.

~°~

In the end, there’s really nothing to do but wait. They can’t make the moon come faster. Eventually it starts getting dark on the balcony, and they’re both hungry, and Ryan starts making jokes about seeing if he has any doggie treats he can give him while Shane glares and maybe they’re making it funny because there’s no denying the bizarreness of all of it. Because Ryan was there that night, Ryan saw the attack. Something’s changing.

If Ryan has noticed that Shane is wearing his shirt he hasn’t said anything.

They make a plan. It involves driving out to the hardware store the next day and picking up some lumber, and some strong iron nails. Shane is having visceral PTSD flashbacks to being stuck in hardware stores for what felt like hours as a kid, while his father wandered the aisles. Luckily Ryan’s not really a hardware store guy either, and so they kind of wander along the mouths of aisles together, squinting at signs and looking lost.

“Shouldn’t we be getting silver nails?”

“No, it has to be iron,” Ryan says, very seriously. “Silver’s just in movies and stuff.”

Shane pulls a face. “Mm, I dunno Ryan. I’m pretty sure it’s silver,” he says, just to be difficult.

“Look around, idiot, d’you see any silver nails here? Somehow I don’t think silver plating’s going to cut it,” Ryan says, and Shane puts his hands up in surrender, laughing a little.

“This is serious,” Ryan says. He is so very earnest and, oh, Shane loves him a lot.

“No, I know,” Shane tells him, voice going softer without his consent, forcing himself to stop smiling. “I know, sorry. It’s… okay. Iron nails.”

It’s just so ludicrous.

~°~

It’s later, when they’ve leaned the lumber against the wall to the bathroom that it all starts to feel a little more real. The plan, of course, is to lock Shane in there on the full moon if anything starts to seem a little iffy. And there’s something about all the wood, the dark iron that make them both realize that they look absolutely fucking insane. It’s the sight of all of it there, so innocent, like it’s not going to be used to board the door shut in less than two weeks time, that makes them realize, perhaps for the first time, that they really can’t tell anyone else about this. And Shane doesn’t like the nails. That smell, Shane thinks, like blood and hot metal — and he knows for certain that that’s something he shouldn’t notice, but maybe his mind is playing tricks.

Later on, Shane will text Ryan about the possibility that this is some kind of folie à deux but Ryan isn’t convinced that that’s the case. Neither, if he’s honest, is Shane. But, he thinks, maybe it would be easier. He’s already put the nails into a tupperware dish so that he can’t smell the iron anymore.

~°~

The days pass at varying degrees of weirdness. The pain in his joints, which had settled down to almost nothing at the fourteen-day mark start ratcheting back up again. It’s not unmanageable, he thinks. He can still go for runs in the evenings like he always does, it’s just… it’s always there. Almost a buzzing, a vibration in his bones that’s older, somehow that Shane is. That’s maybe even ancient. It’s something inside him that responds to the moon and the tides and confuses the modernity of his flesh.

He doesn’t eat any more raw meat. He also doesn’t order steak tartar which is very expensive, but he fucking dreams about it. He eventually goes out and buys some higher quality meat and just barely sears it on both sides (like a goddamn adult) before he wolfs it down (no pun intended.)

The next morning Shane spits the sharp thing on his tongue out into the sink as he’s brushing his teeth, and sticks his finger into the foam to fish out a sharp little piece of bone. He runs his tongue along his molars and feels a bright flash of pain and the next time he spits, there’s blood.

~°~

The night before the full moon, Ryan comes to stay over.

“Remind me again why we’re locking you in the bathroom?” Ryan asks.

“Because I like the things in my bedroom, “ Shane says. “I don’t want to break them.”

“What if you break the toilet?” Ryan asks.

Shane laughs a little. “I don’t think toilets generally look very chewable to doggies,”

Ryan squints at him. “What do you know, you don’t even like dogs,”

“That’s not true! I like some dogs.”

“No, you’re a freak who only pretends to like dogs.”

“I dunno man,” Shane says, squeezing the bridge of his nose like he’s got a headache coming on, only he doesn’t. It’s just that they haven’t seen actually seen each other in a handful of days and the moment that Ryan had come in here tonight the scent of him was overwhelming. And it’s not, Shane thinks, cologne or aftershave this time. It’s not his laundry detergent or the particular way that people always smell like their houses — it’s a skin smell. A thrumming, vibrant alive smell that made Shane back away from him at once — fleeing into the kitchen before Ryan had even gotten his sneakers off, pretending that he left the stove on or something. And it doesn’t get better. He doesn’t get used to it the way that you usually can get used to smells. It just varies in degrees of intensity and Shane can’t even sit near him on the couch. He takes the uncomfortable armchair instead and hopes Ryan doesn’t say anything because having to explain that he can smell him is fucking awkward to say the least. Especially when it’s got Shane jittery with something he can’t quite name. “Thanks for… all this,” Shane says. “I’ll call you in the morning I guess… tell you how it went.”

“Oh, I thought…” Ryan looks at him and Shane sees the moment that his eyes shutter, and he already feels guilty. “No, forget it, it’s nothing,” Ryan says quickly and Shane has to take a breath.

“No, tell me. What did you think?”

“I just thought— that maybe I should stay, that’s all. I would want someone to stay. If it was me. I’d be fucking terrified, dude. What if you need help or something?”

“I…” Shane swallows. He still doesn’t actually think he’s going to turn into a fucking werewolf. Really, he doesn’t, but the idea of being alone if he does…? Yeah, terrifying. And through all of this he still has to worry about real things! Like whether or not he’s going to be able to get his damage deposit back if he does turn into a giant, slobbering monster. “I mean I will definitely need help getting out of this fucking bathroom—”

“No, obviously. I wasn’t just going to leave you in there.”

“I mean, if this is… if this is what’s happening, and it’s going to be dangerous, I think you should go. Go home,” Shane says. “Come back when the sun’s up, you know. Right?”

Ryan says nothing, surveying him with serious eyes.

“Ryan, c’mon, please. If I— if it is—”

“Stop— just stop being skeptical for five seconds,” Ryan says. “If it is, which, I mean, look at you, I think it’s safe to say that it is… then I’m staying.”

And Shane’s touched. Genuinely. Enough that he has to change the vibe, the energy suddenly shimmering between them. “You just want to film my monstrous transformation,” he jokes.

“Oh shit, you’re onto me,” Ryan picks up on the bit immediately. Because he’s Ryan. And the twist in Shane’s chest has nothing to do with the way he smells, it’s because he fucking loves him so goddamn much, in every sense of the word.

“You can’t film it,” Shane says. “No cameras allowed.”

“Oh no, that was my whole plan!” Ryan says, levity creeping into his voice, into his eyes. “You know what? On second thought, I’m gonna dip.”

And Shane laughs hard enough that he doesn’t notice the moment when Ryan moves to pass him, just that when he inhales, his scent is all he can focus on — his mind does something strange — pops like a flashbulb, all white and heat, and before he knows what’s happened he’s got Ryan’s wrist circled in his fingers and Ryan’s gone still as a hare in a meadow.

Shane goes still too, every muscle in his body shaking with tension until his stillness turns to a full-bodied quiver. And Ryan, all watchful eyes, holds his own for a moment and that, Shane thinks, is what grounds him. They wait, watching one another, and then Ryan slowly turns his face away, slowly drops his gaze the way people do with aggressive dogs.

“Shane,” Ryan whispers, and it’s soft, but not exactly afraid. Shane can’t let go — physically can’t, but it’s strange because he’s not holding onto him particularly tight. He’s not cornering. It’s like they’ve both snared one another in Shane’s narrow railroad-apartment hallway.

Shane takes a breath that shudders in his chest. “It’s okay,” he says. He can barely hear it over the pounding of his heart. “I—”

“It’s okay,” Ryan echoes back.

And Shane’s heart counts out the seconds, and then the minutes. It slows until he whispers “Hey,” and Ryan looks back to him, and whatever’s darkening Ryan’s eyes isn’t fear.

It’s Ryan who kisses him. Closes the distance, pushes up onto his toes and presses his mouth to Shane’s, and Shane’s whole fucking world goes glittering at the seams. He gasps and then says “oh,” or “ah” against Ryan’s mouth — just a soft, wanting sound, and when he lets go of Ryan’s wrist and pushes him back against the wall Ryan doesn’t complain. He doesn’t get scared. His hands find Shane’s shoulders and when Shane steps into him, Ryan’s still on his toes so their hips meet a little too sharply and they both hiss because it’s like live wires. Shane’s so warm that the back of his neck is damp, and that restless, aching thing inside him rumbles out of his chest in a groan against Ryan’s mouth; against his teeth.

Shane thinks that there was a point of no return, and they’ve passed it. And not in this hallway, or in this weird fucking month, they’ve passed it, maybe, years ago. Maybe the first time Ryan laughed himself breathless at something Shane said. Maybe when he started pressing the heat of his thigh up against the heat of Shane’s beneath the table at bars. Maybe the first time they shared a bed with the pillows shoved between them, maybe, maybe. And Shane is so overwhelmed, now, that he could cry. He thinks that that would probably kill the mood though, and so instead he pulls at Ryan’s arms, at his shoulders, pulls him closer and presses into him — presses him into the wall and Ryan — oh — Ryan presses back, Ryan opens his mouth to him, Ryan, fuck, oh, Shane thinks, as his brain swirls away into nonsensical.

And they’re careening forward, until their shirts are rucked up, jeans undone. The moment Ryan wraps his fingers around him, Shane’s fucking undone. He makes a sound like a sob and Ryan echoes it against his mouth, and they lapse into this impossible collection of suspended time, of breathing together — uneven at first, strange hocketting rhythm of inhale inhale, exhale exhale as they stroke each other closer and closer to that impossible crest—

Shane presses his hand to the wall next to Ryan’s head. Breathes with his mouth pressed, open, to Ryan’s open mouth and when Ryan starts to shake bodily Shane feels it in his breath first, the shiver of it against his lips, and he makes a soft sound.

Ryan comes first, and Shane’s seconds behind and finally, finally, their breath becomes one single breathe in together, together breathe out. When Shane meets Ryan’s eyes, both of his are golden and rich, like precious objects left in forests for a long time, infused with the soil and the sounds and things, everywhere, living and dying in beautiful, endless circles.

This is an ancient thing, and it’s in Shane who was, already (Ryan thinks) like an ancient thing — ageless eyes.

“I’m staying,” Ryan says, into the silence that follows, his voice hoarse and soft and Shane says. “Shit,” and then, “I love you,” and it comes out like a question. “Not because of this—” he waves his hand at them, Ryan’s fingers still wrapped around his softening cock, the mess on the floor.

Ryan lets out a hysterical giggle and Shane sucks in a sharp, soft breath. Twice, Ryan tries to say something, but then he just meets Shane’s eyes and nods in a way that means yes.

~°~

And he does stay. That night, and the one that follows. He stays to nail the boards in place, and he stays to sit with Shane on the floor, on either side of the bathroom door while they wait and wait for the moon.

He stays with his face pressed into his hands while Shane’s body tears itself apart and rebuilds itself again into something wilder, stronger. He stays with only two inches of wood between them, and a couple of handfuls of iron nails holding the boards in place like they’re in a zombie movie — stays even when the door shudders with the force of the animal body thrown against it.

Minutes turn into an hour and Ryan can’t. He can’t anymore. “Shane,” he pleads, “Shane, stop, Shane,” and the sounds do stop. The scraping, clicking claws on linoleum stop. Ryan takes a deep breath. “It’s okay. I’m here. You’re okay. I’m right here.”

Ryan talks, talks until he’s hoarse and the wild thrashing settles.

Before dawn, Ryan knows what he has to do. He pries the iron nails from the boards one by one by one and touches the doorknob softly with fingers that do not shake, and whatever is on the other side — what must still be Shane — waits for him.

Ryan opens the door to darkness. Shane must have turned the light off so that he couldn’t see his reflection. And the beast stands, huge and lanky in the corner. Ryan catches the glint of its eyes before he can make out its shape. When he reaches out a hand, it — Shane — comes to him and presses the long hard line of its mouth against Ryan’s palm and breathes, breathes, and Ryan matches its breath.

And Shane will be angry with him when the sun comes up, but at least they know, now. At least they know that he can.

~°~

After the sun comes up, Shane opens eyes that have turned back to brown and focused myopically on Ryan before he sees anything else. Ryan is sitting, unharmed, on the peeling linoleum, and his fingers are warm where they touch Shane’s forearm.

“Oh,” Shane says, “you fucking idiot,” and Ryan smiles beautifully at him.

Sometimes, Shane thinks, even the strangest things are not as strange as they initially appear. After all, what is the reality of everything but a circle? Circles within circles — the earth revolving around the sun, and the sun itself a circle. The growth and death of perennials plants and the rise and fall of the tide. There is, of course, the cycles of the moon, and there are, in Shane, new circles: Life to death to life again, and in the mean time — Shane births the wolf and kills it again each time the moon is full. Circles within circles.

And through all of it, there is Ryan. Because Ryan doesn’t leave. Not that night, and not in the morning. Or the next morning, or the one that follows that.

#reblogging again because it's SO GOOD

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a bond that can't be broken