Chapter 1: Recovery
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An unknown caller lights up your phone, and something about it makes you pick up. You expect a spam caller, eager to sell you some new electronic snake oil, but a calm and steady voice comes through with practice, but not disinterest. He tells you about your sister, who you hadn’t heard from since she went off hiking with some friends earlier, who had ended up in the emergency room at the hospital nearby you. He has some additional information he’d like to share in person, a sentence that has a segment cut out of the middle as your phone switches away from speaker and connects to the car’s bluetooth.
You arrive, and are guided to a specific room in the building where your sister rests, unconscious and with a relatively small patch of bandages around her left forearm. She looks peaceful, not in pain, and that’s enough to settle you until the doctor who called you enters the room.
“Ah, Ivy, hello. Heard you had arrived, how are you feeling?”
“Anxious,” You respond, “About the other information you didn’t share. But she looks okay.”
“Of course. I told you it was lycanthropy, but what we couldn’t discuss was what type it was. Are you familiar with the differences?” You shake your head at him. “Alpha-, beta-, and gamma-lycanthropy all exhibit different symptoms but the one we were focusing mostly on was alpha, as that’s the only type that is infectious. Once we could rule that out, Sofia needed much less immediate attention.”
“Which does she have, then?”
“We’ve said ‘unstable beta-expression’ for now, as there’s at least three different types of beta out there, but as she is she’s not at risk to herself or anyone else. If she exhibits any of the other symptom types-” He hands you a pamphlet of specific, but otherwise bare, information on lycanthropy symptoms, “-let either the hospital or a GP know. There’s a good chance she won’t ever change, but you should be prepared for the possibility it does. As for the bandages on her forearm, it was barely a scrape and is all clean now, but that was enough.”
You’re silent for a moment, looking over Sofia as she sleeps, wondering how much of her life had changed in a moment you weren’t there for.
“I’ll leave you some space to think about everything.”
Processing everything took a while, and then getting the green light to take her home once she woke up took even longer, but you got her into your car and bundled all the paperwork and information into one of the piles in the back seat. The drive home was stress-relieving, as Sofia was awake enough to talk and answer anything you wanted to ask. It had been a stray dog, out in the bush, maybe something like a dingo or a blended up mutt breed that was able to know how to survive like some european breeds or ‘house safe’ pets would have struggled with. But there was that one sausage dog who survived for over a year on Kangaroo Island…
Sofia laughs at the thought of catching lycanthropy from a dachshund, and then sobers, more of the inevitable realisation settling on her shoulders.
You reach over to- you’re not sure, grab her hand, pat her hair? That doesn’t sound like something a sister would do. You go to half-ass it and she latches onto your arm, clinging to it like it’s one of her plushies. You realise you should’ve brought one of them, but if your arm is working, who are you to take it back for anything but the most difficult turns.
You get her back to your shared apartment and get her up to bed, exhaustion finding her easily, and you go about using the chemical tester the hospital gave you in your pile of paperwork and miscellaneous items to check all the cutlery and anything possible for the presence of silver. It’s a tedious job that keeps your hands occupied as you read through the information.
You’re surprised to see that Sofia’s emergency contact is you. Yeah your parents live on the other side of the country, and would have a five hour drive and five hour flight at minimum to arrive anywhere close to you, but you would have assumed… You’re her little sister after all. You just assumed they called mum and dad and they directed the hospital to call you. Wait, does that mean they don’t know?
You finish off all the items in the house during a long, and badly needed phone call with your parents who help you dissect all the thoughts in your head and the information you will need to take care of Sofia in the days to come. You end up only needing to throw away a thrifted tablespoon you and Sofia only bought because of how ugly it was, and pack away about a third of your jewellery. Some of your favourites were gone now, but that would have to be okay. Your big sis would be safe in the home you two had built over the past few years.
Mum jokes with you about how beneficial it is that everything but Sofia’s nose ring healed over.
That night, the different types sift through your head, and cultural understanding slots into the more accurate descriptions. Alpha-lycanthropy is the one from the old horror movies, and the one that kept being drawn attention to by Reagan in the 80’s. It’s the one that held all the stigma, for being infectious and somewhat uncontrollable on a monthly basis. What it did to the body was painful, and came with exacerbated mood swings during a woman’s period. The association with full moons is simply that most of the research on alphas was done on men, and full moon was a vague bias in the distribution of ‘monthly’ episodes.
Betas were relatively benign. They had the highest allergic reaction to silver, mildly extended canine teeth, and mild changes to body hair. If that was the most of it, beta-lycanthropy would almost be benign, but quite a lot of the beta patients transition slowly into alpha-expression or gamma-expression.
Gamma-lycanthropy was the strangest in your head. Both because calling it omega might have had a better ring to it, if scientists weren’t so obsessed with naming things badly, but also because of the thought of tiny, green, glowing werewolves running at a wall made of lead and bouncing off. The thing that sticks in your head, though, is that all the symptoms say that your senses get more sensitive, and sometimes to a detrimental and overwhelming degree. That’s… how you live anyway, what’s so bad with that?
You decide to go to sleep in protest.
The next morning started late, and without Sofia awake. You let yourself sleep in after the stressful day, but as it got past mid-afternoon and there was no sign of your sister you knocked on her door, and got a very weak response.
Entering her room you found Sofia wrapped up in her blankets, sheets twisted, shivering like she had hypothermia.
“Oh, Sofia…” You got to the edge of her bed and sat down with her, immediately checking for a fever and finding only a mild one. But when she cracked an eyelid and looked at you, you could see a lot of fear in her eyes.
“Hey Ivy.”
You kept your hand on her forehead, feeling how much you were calming her. “I didn’t think you’d be like this or I’d have kept a closer eye on you…”
She gave you a weak smile. “You’re here now! That’s enough, for me.”
“What can I get you?” You look around her bedside table, picking out an empty water bottle and snack wrappers amidst the adhd clutter. “You need some food and water, but anything else?”
“Company…”
“Of course, sis, let’s get something up on the tv we can watch together.”
As you kept Sofia company you saw the panic and the fever both fade away. She eventually sat up next to you, resting on the head of her bed and revealing the pastel pink and bright red strawberry pyjamas you had bought her a couple years ago, right at the start of her transition. Seeing how much she enjoyed them, and wore them around you, made you happy. Made you want to buy her more things, to spoil her. You barely paid attention to the tv, distracted in halves by keeping an eye on Sofia and keeping your eyes off her.
You got her an oversized set, after a little advice from friends who knew better to account for how her body would change, but you maybe went a little overboard, and all that the loose fabric tended to do now was draw attention to those changes. To the curves that made you so ashamed to notice so clearly.
What else would change, now that she’s a werewolf?
At one point, when the conversation lulled, you could feel her panic rising again. You grabbed a small plush, one she tended to carry with her outside of her room if she wanted to bring that comfort with her, and pressed it to her chest. Right above her heart. Sofia clamped down on it and your hand, not letting you go. The panic took a while to quiet, but once it did the question that had obviously been rattling around in her mind spilled free.
“What if I’m dangerous now?”
“Dangerous? My plushie of a sister? Never.”
“What if I’m a danger to-” She swallowed a word or a breath or a moment of panic. “to Mads.”
Mads, the crush she had followed out rock climbing. “Why? Has something happened?”
“I got lycanthropy!” The events in her head spun up faster and stronger. However detailed they were, the predictions terrified her.
“No, I know, sorry sis.” You breathed evenly for her. “No. I don’t think you’re a danger.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because you’re a big soft plushie of a woman who’s struggling with internalised transphobia. You’re just dressing it up in wolves’ clothing.”
“Yeah, but-”
“Was it right to say about you before?” She moved to answer and you cut her off, not liking the vibe she was giving off. “No. It wasn’t. And it’s not right to say about you now.”
“What if I’m infectious?”
“Then we get that special toothpaste. The silver fluoride stuff.”
“Aren’t I allergic?”
“Apparently not to silver ions. The infectious bacteria, though, still is.” You moved to lighten the mood. “All you’ll have to do with it is brush every morning and evening. That’s all you’ll have to do.”
Sofia made a face. You were happy to see anything but panic. “Ugh, that’s gonna suck.”
“Better than being this scared, though, hey?”
“Yeah, you’re right Ivy.”
After that you grew a lot more protective of your big sister. You came in when you woke up, so make sure she wasn’t in a similar position or pulling her out of her spiral if she was. You came in with breakfast and lunch on days you were home throughout. You kept her company.
Sofia was scared of being seen by anyone but you. Even video calls with your parents were a struggle: she’d love the conversation the entire time she was out of frame; she’d shy away if she saw she was accidentally in it. She talked about it all, shared her experience with friends over tumblr and with mum and dad while she wasn’t visible. She wasn’t shying away from the disability, just the fact that she had it. But you: you she let see her. You watched her with all the carefully placed respect that trust demanded.
You’re not sure when it happened, but over the course of a few weeks she got closer to you. Every time you were nearby she would hold onto a bit of your clothing or lean her head against you. Every time you were in her bed you would be almost dragged into a cuddle you knew you shouldn’t have enjoyed as much as you did. She needed comfort, to know you won’t vanish from her life. She picked you to start with, and has been slowly expanding from there. You encouraged it. You need to be immovable in her life. So you’ve been pushing aside how good she smells - especially with her werewolf changes - and how soft she is, and how much you just want to pull her closer, in order to not get in the way of her recovery.
You try not to read it as clingy, and give her the company and encouragement she needs. You feel a sense of pride as she tells you of ways she’s opening up to her friends about the experience, and a very selfish pride when she says you’re still the only one who knows the extent of it. You like being her rock, her point of reference. You like the feeling you get when she turns to you first to figure out what she’s thinking. She smiles more, and you fall in love just a little harder each time.
Then she started getting more unstable very suddenly. You’d realise later that the coincidence of it happening around the start of your period was less of a coincidence, but you knew in the moment that it was part of lycanthropy’s monthly cycle of extreme mood swings. You kept a closer eye on her, and dealt with everything about her being exaggerated. That mood you could not let yourself see as clingy turned fully cuddly, and the sudden proximity had a tendency to spike your body temperature and hammer away at your heart.
She was soft, and stable, in those moments, which made you happy, but burst the prison bars around your yearning and flashed it into full, bonfire-scale burn.
You shouldn’t think about her like this. You’re sisters, they don’t do things like what you want. But you can’t help but get wet every time she grips you so hard you wonder where she got the strength, or stares you down with the intensity of an unleashed predator.
But she’s asleep now. Calm as she’ll get for a while. She asked you to sleep in her bed tonight, as today was the roughest so far. She fell asleep soon after you agreed to stay and got comfortable. Proof of how well she trusts you.
You’re still awake, though. There’s too many thoughts, too many obsessions and concerns and plans running through your head, so you’re watching her sleep while you let your mind unwind. It’s been a little under two months, and she’s done really well to recover, considering everything. But those two months have basically locked you in the apartment together, and that’s done nothing to help your feelings.
You reach out with a hand to cup her cheek before you can realise what you’re doing. She’s soft, and warm. Her breaths rise and fall steadily and calmly, and a part of you reads her as leaning into your touch. You shouldn’t be doing this, but you can’t help yourself. You tease your thumb across her lips, marvelling at just how much softer they are than her cheeks, and feeling the shape of her fang beneath. It kept growing after the hospital, showed no sign of stopping until it was about two centimetres longer than it had started as, and then settled. You remember Sofia being grateful the pain had stopped, and then being obsessed with the new shape of her smile.
You admit to yourself, in this vulnerable moment, that you are obsessed as well. Every flash of teeth brings something sharp in it, and it gives your big sister a menacing appearance that fits her kindness like a glove. It makes you imagine her doing wild and dangerous things to you.
You parted her lips at some point, exposing her canines to the world, to your eyes, for better study. You begin tracing the shape of her top fang with your thumb, memorising the shape and how far it sticks out from the teeth surrounding it. You feel Sofia’s breathing grow a little harsher, and the breath sliding over your palm grows more humid, but she seems asleep enough so you don’t stop. You should, but you can’t.
You were pressing your thumb ever so gently into the tip of her fang, imagining how blissfully painful they would be if Sofia ever chose to sink them into your shoulder, when she bit down. Not hard, not purposefully, just a jaw twitch that could happen at any point in the night, but you feel a slight cut open up on your thumb as her bottom fang closes in. Sofia stays asleep.
You pull your hand back, heart hammering from the near discovery, and tending to the wound. It was enough to draw blood, and you would need a bandaid soon if you didn’t want to leave stains in her sheets, but for now you lick the cut to give it a good enough clean. As the moment continues your eyes drift back to Sofia. She’s still calm and asleep, curled up around one of her plushies. There’s a red streak on her bottom fang, glistening wet in the dim light. You watch as your sister’s tongue drifts out and cleans her tooth of your blood, before letting out a strange, animalistic noise in her sleep as she swallows.
You’ve crossed a boundary. You shouldn’t have been touching her in the first place. If you stay, who knows how long you’ll be able to resist the urge to throw yourself at your big sister, who knows what you would do. She asked you to stay with her tonight, but you can’t let yourself. You pull yourself away, still cradling the gift of the cut on your thumb, and head back to your room, falling asleep after the best, most guilt-ridden orgasm you’ve ever had while thinking about your big sis.
