how easy you are to need (redux) (3)
warnings: injury, blood, violence mention, fear, unreliable narrator, ptsd, negative thinking
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Virgil woke up surrounded by warmth and the smell of sugar.
It was nice for about as long as it took him to fully drag himself from the depths of his exhausted slumber, at which point it became terrifying.
He jerked half-upright in a blind panic, heart racing, and tried to lift his arms up to see how bad the restraints were. He was pinned under heavy layers of thick fabric, and he wasted a few precious moments silently wrestling against them before he was finally free, his fingers instantly flying to his face and seeking out the familiar bite of leather and silver.
There was none. The only thing that caught against his fingers was old scar tissue along the underside of his jaw.
The echo of old memories faded into the background, his mind slowly replacing them with the reality of his surroundings.
Rather than some cold stone basement or a silver cage, he was in what appeared to be the living room of the cabin. As though to add to the surreal nature of it all, he had been laid out on a couch and swathed with warm fur blankets and hand-patched quilts. His hands weren’t even cuffed.
He stared down at his bare wrists, turning them over and inspecting them as though some binding rune would reveal itself if he squinted hard enough.
Maybe this was a dream. Some dragged-out hallucination the forest was granting him as a parting kindness, offering him warmth and calm in his last few moments before he bled out for real.
The idea wasn’t as reassuring as he wanted it to be. How would he know when it was time for the dream to end?
Feeling a few steps removed from his body, Virgil attempted to push himself fully upright, swing his legs to the side and stand, with some vague idea of exploring the rest of the cabin to see what his faltering mind had conjured up.
The moment he tried to sit up properly, however, a wave of dull pain crashed through him, stealing the breath from his lungs as every muscle in his torso tensed up in a harsh response.
He sucked in one shallow breath after another, all semblance of calm suddenly out of his reach. There was nothing fake about that pain, radiating from where the bear’s heaviest strike had landed. The edge of it had been blunted– medicine?-- but it would have jarred him from even the deepest dream regardless.
This was real. He was alive. The humans– the hunters had taken pains to make it so, when they could have just left him to his end and let his flesh return to the soil.
They’d seen him shift, they knew what he was, and they’d kept him alive.
A cold certainty settled into him, chasing the warmth from his bones. There was only one reason hunters kept monsters alive. These humans weren’t so different from the ones he’d known, after all. Not in the end. Not where it mattered.
Virgil shook his head once, sharply, ignoring the way it made his vision throb. There wasn’t time for the gut-wrenching betrayal churning within him. No space to mourn what he’d only ever imagined for himself in the first place.
He pushed himself free of the blankets, this time braced for the pain as he stumbled to his feet. His vision was swimming, his balance unsteady; they must have drugged him. It explained the lack of restraints well enough: they simply hadn’t expected him to be awake at this point. They couldn’t have anticipated that his body had already built up a resistance to most of the tranquilizers commonly used for shifters.
A resistance was far from an immunity, though, and going by the way he wavered with every step, he wasn’t going to be able to stay on his feet for long.
There were slow footsteps in the hall. Virgil scrambled the last few steps to the wall, the pain of injuries suddenly secondary to the rapid pulsing of his heartbeat urging him on. He held himself still, waiting as they drew closer and closer–
The moment Patton passed the corner into the room, he lunged, one hand clapped over the human’s mouth and the other arm shoved against his throat. The plan had been to pin him against the wall as quietly as possible and get answers on where the others were and how to avoid them.
The plan was immediately and thoroughly derailed by the wood-carved crutch that Patton had been leaning on, which slipped free and fell to the hardwood floor with a distinct, noisy clatter.
“Patton?” Roman’s voice called from a room away. “Are you alright?”
When there was no response– for Patton’s mouth was still covered and Virgil had wasted a long moment staring down at the fallen crutch blankly– another pair of footsteps hurried down the hall.
Virgil jolted back into action, spinning Patton around in front of him so that he was between Virgil and any other humans. He twisted one of his impromptu hostage’s arms behind his back and then wrapped an elbow around his throat to keep him still. Patton made a little choked noise, his free hand tapping politely at the arm around his throat, and Virgil hurriedly loosened his hold a bit.
Now that he thought about it, Patton was still injured, wasn’t he? He shifted back slightly so he was bearing most of the human’s weight, keeping him from putting too much pressure on his wounded leg. His bruised torso shrieked at the extra effort for a moment, but then faded into the background with the rest of the sharp aches he was ignoring.
Keeping track of his own strength was considerably harder in his current state, and he was focusing so hard on keeping his hold steady instead of strangling that he nearly missed the second pair of footsteps charging into the room.
He snapped his gaze up to where Roman had stopped short, wide brown eyes flickering between Patton and Virgil. His sword was sheathed and strapped to his belt, but the presence of it still made Virgil’s hair stand on end.
“What’s– What are you doing?” Roman finally asked. His voice was incredulous, as though he’d walked in to find something ridiculous instead of a monster threatening the life of his loved one.
A shiver worked its way down Virgil’s spine. It couldn’t have all been a lie. They cared about each other, he knew, he’d seen it– but Roman took another step forward like he wasn’t worried at all.
“Don’t come any closer,” Virgil snapped, baring his teeth in threat above Patton’s shoulder. “I’ll bite him. I’ll– I’ll turn him.”
Patton went a little tense under his grip and Roman froze immediately, his expression darkening like an approaching thunderstorm. Virgil felt oddly relieved at the sight of it.
“Let him go,” the hunter demanded, and his hand had yet to settle on the hilt of his sword, but it was only a matter of time. His voice went lower, quieter, an order and a plea all in one. “Don’t hurt him.”
There was a nausea building in him, and he couldn’t tell if it was because of the drugs or the situation. “Tell me– Tell me how to get out of here, and I– I won’t have to.”
“Kiddo,” Patton started, and Virgil growled deep in his throat before the human could get out another word in that sickeningly faux-worried tone. Roman twitched, his gaze still locked on Virgil’s bared teeth.
“No, no talking. None of– Just let me go.” It was supposed to come out as a demand, but somewhere along the way, the words became edged with a thin, high whine. It was a show of weakness he couldn’t afford.
Roman’s brow furrowed, but before he could speak, there was the long creak of old hinges. Virgil recognized the noise from months of stalking: it was the back door swinging open.
His way out.
He didn’t waste a second, hefting Patton up just slightly more before practically tossing him at Roman. The hunter dove to catch him, and Virgil took full advantage of the distraction to dart past him, down the hall and through the kitchen to where the noise had come from, and at the other end of the kitchen–
Wrapped up in a thick coat and his arms full of vision-obstructing firewood, Logan didn’t even realize Virgil was in the room with him until he was already clumsily ducking under his arm and through the open back door.
The outside air was cool against his face and smelled of damp earth.
A cacophony of overlapping voices rang out from the cabin as he fled, but he wasn’t listening, too busy focusing on putting one foot in front of the other and feeling a faint hope began to spark in his chest.
He’d made it out. He’d gotten free, all on his own.
Sure, he was exhausted, wounded, and burning through the last of his energy, but it didn’t matter. He just had to get past the edges of the clearing and he’d be back in his forest. It would hide him away while he slept off the rest of the drug and recovered, and then he could run or fight or call for help.
It was the forest’s utter lack of response that tipped him off.
There was no breeze dragging through his hair or leaves rustling in greeting as he drew closer to the treeline, only a muted silence that put him so on edge that he slowed down despite the blood rushing in his ears.
He reached out, and the air in front of him sparked. His heart sank heavily in his chest.
Looking down, he could see the lodestones set into the earth, engraved circular rocks placed in carefully even intervals along the border between the forest and the cabin’s clearing.
It was a ward. A strong one, no doubt placed by Logan.
He couldn’t get past it. He was still trapped. Far more than before, even.
His legs finally gave out, as though the knowledge had turned into a physical burden weighing him down, and he sat back in the grass and the mud, his eyes burning.
Knowing this could be the last time he spent outside, he felt the urge to sink into the comfort of his wolf form and savor the thousand little details that his human senses were too dull to pick up on. The temptation was strong, but he took a deep breath and forced it back, keeping his fingers dull and his face flat.
They wouldn’t get what they wanted from him. Not without a fight.
By the time soft, hurried footsteps approached him, he’d lost all of the desperate energy pushing him forward and was sinking back into the haze of the drugs in his system. Whatever tranq they’d used must have been seriously good quality, because it dulled the pain of his freshly-reopened injuries, too.
Whichever human had come to retrieve him seemed to have spotted the injuries as well, going by the sharp inhale that cut through the air.
“Hello? Are you conscious?” a familiar voice asked, and Virgil cracked an eye open to confirm that it was Logan now crouched next to him. He looked paler than normal. “Oh, thank the stars. Can you shift?”
The attempt was transparent enough to earn him a low snort from Virgil. They were going to have to try harder than that.
“Please, you’ve lost a lot of blood. You could suffer serious side effects,” Logan continued, his voice oddly strained. “I’m aware that shifters have more enhanced healing in their nonhuman forms. If you’re able to access your other form for even a short time, it would be in your best interest to shift.”
It was a weak threat; Virgil already knew that his ‘best interest’ would be to cooperate in hopes of a quicker death. He just didn’t care.
After a long, expectant pause, Logan seemed to grasp that Virgil wasn’t going to give in. He sighed shortly, and Virgil’s body turned rigid, waiting for a blow.
Instead, Logan said, “I am going to pick you up now, so we can return home. Please don’t be alarmed,” and wrapped one arm solidly around his back, the other curling under the crook of his legs.
Virgil snarled on instinct, more surprised than angry, but Logan didn’t even flinch as he lifted him up into the air. Virgil’s first thought was that he was about to be dropped as punishment, but Logan’s hold remained stable and steady around him.
“I know it must hurt, but please try to hold on,” he said gently, as though he really believed it was the pain that was behind the low growl rumbling in Virgil’s chest. “We’ll be back to the cabin soon.”
With that, he curled Virgil even closer against himself and set off.
Each jarring step caused little flare ups of pain from his injuries, but he could hardly focus on that, because his head was resting on Logan’s shoulder, mere inches away from the human’s jugular.
Logan kept his pace steady, as though he wasn’t holding a monster right next to the most vulnerable point of his body. As though Virgil couldn’t lunge forward and tear out his trachea in a heartbeat.
And he was right, wasn’t he? Because Virgil couldn’t. He should, he really should, even if it took harnessing all the spite and fear building within him, as a last act of defiance. Even if just to hurt them the way they were going to hurt him, to vent how unfair it was that he saved them and ended up captured.
He didn’t even have to kill him. He could close the gap between them and turn Logan with a single bite. See how he liked being a valuable monster in the grasp of hunters.
Maybe the others would just put him down instead, out of respect for their former bond. The thought was bitter and sickening, and it made something in Virgil recoil sharply.
He couldn’t do it.
It wasn’t worth it. It wouldn’t save him. It would only destroy the three of them, and despite everything, there was still a part of him that was attached, a part that had watched their care for each other with a desperate longing. He didn’t want to be the one responsible for tearing them apart, even if that was exactly what they were planning to do to him.
Virgil wondered if this convoluted tangle of hatred and loyalty was what it meant to have a pack, after all. If there was something intrinsically broken about him that always led to this.
He tore his eyes away from Logan’s neck, letting the vicious urge seep out of him along with the last of his energy. He wouldn’t give in, wouldn’t shift for them, but he wouldn’t hurt them either.
He wouldn’t be responsible for the destruction of another pack.
