TIMING: Current LOCATION: The Woods. PARTIES: @incatsclothing & @howlinjack SUMMARY: Two very lost werewolves meet each other in the woods. CONTENT WARNINGS: none!
Three wolves howled up at Jackie and he frowned back. Joanie really had to stop doing this, he thought. It was sweet, in its own way, the way she tried to help him feel okay. But okay was the last thing he felt as he shrugged it on and looked at himself in his rearview mirror. Whatever this thing was behind his eyes that woke up when he slept, it’d need more than a wolf t-shirt to get him through. He shut his car door behind him and stared at the treeline. It didn’t feel safe. Then again, he wasn’t exactly safe either.
He rolled his shoulders, his wrists. Cracked his neck. A pre-fight ritual warmup that felt wholly different as Jackie passed through the trees and into the thick of the woods. Was he supposed to feel more natural in places like this? Nowhere felt natural anymore. He didn’t. Hadn’t for days, weeks, months. But throwing jabs and crosses at the shadows did. Shoulders loose, arms warmed up, he fell into a rhythm. Woke up a part of him that was familiar before he tried to draw out the part of him that wasn’t.
‘Jackie, have you tried?’ Joanie had asked during their call earlier that day. ‘Have you tried, I don’t know, seeing if you can…wake it up? Channel it? Or something? I mean, it’s part of…’
She had wanted to say something else but she stopped. He wasn’t sure if he was thankful or annoyed by that. The feeling that question brought up in him snagged in his throat.
‘No, I haven’t,’ he had finally said. ‘I gotta go, Joan. Got practice. Love you, talk to you later, alright? Make sure you hydrate.’
She had laughed and he had tried to laugh too. It was true. Jackie hadn’t tried. Over the last year, he hadn’t tried to look that beast in the eye and meet it on level ground. Because he was too fucking scared of what he would see and the earth was too cracked beneath him. His foot snagged on a root and he stumbled, righted himself.
“Alright, come on,” he muttered to himself as he rolled his shoulders back and held his head up high. “Come on, we’re trying here. We’re trying.”
Another jab, another cross. A spike of frustration to the back of Jackie’s neck sent a fist into the nearest tree. He had the wherewithal to pull his punch but that didn’t make it suck any less. An annoyed growl turned into a howl. Inhuman. Something shifted behind his ribs, pressed at his nailbeds. He was getting somewhere. Maybe. He hesitated, his breath quickening with a panic he wouldn’t address. Whatever shifted had settled down. He shook out his hand and glared at the half-moon overhead. Started back up with punching shadows.
“Okay, you fucker, okay, where are you?”
—
She used to try to make herself like the outdoors more, when she was younger. Some part of her had thought that maybe that was part of her problem, that the fact that she enjoyed air conditioning and internet and flipping through the channels on cable was part of why she had more trouble than her siblings did accessing the wildcat spirit she’d been so sure lived somewhere in her chest. Looking back now, it was somewhat laughable. Her sister had never cared for the trees or the forest, and she’d shifted as easily as she’d breathed. Her brother would have spent twelve hours a day on his gaming console if no one had stepped in to drag him away from it, and he could achieve a partial shift without even thinking about it. But Rory had wanted an easy answer, had wanted a problem with a solution she could accomplish, and so she'd made herself sit out in the summer heat and she’d told herself she enjoyed it even when she was panting like a dog and aching for the cool air inside.
She guessed she didn’t really have to pretend anymore. She knew now what she hadn’t known all those years, understood that her problem was never that she spent too much time indoors, or that her ocelot spirit was shy, or that her mother had less attention to pay Rory than she’d had to offer the six children raised before her. The problem with the wildcat spirit that lived in Rory’s chest was that there was no wildcat spirit at all. There never had been. Rory was not a balam, though she had spent all her life certain that this was the case. Rory was something different; Rory was something wrong. An anomaly, a blip, a mistake. Whatever had happened to make her what she was, it wasn’t something she understood. It wasn’t something she knew what to do with.
She didn’t really know why she was outside, then. She didn’t know why she was wandering through the woods the way she used to when she was trying to coax the ocelot to the surface, didn’t know why she was trudging through bright green grass and pale flowers. A force of habit, maybe; she’d done this for so long, spent so much of her life trying to convince herself into being something she wasn’t, that maybe she didn’t know how to be what she actually was anymore. Maybe she’d broken something somewhere along the way, made her life into some impossible thing that no one could make sense of, even Rory herself. Or maybe if you pretended to like something for long enough, it eventually became the truth. Maybe she did kind of like the outdoors now; the fact that she didn’t know for certain felt like a physical blow.
At least it was quiet. She thought she liked that, though even that felt somewhat uncertain. Last night had found her working a longer than usual shift, still trying to make up for the work and paychecks she’d missed while stuck on Talia’s couch trying to heal. Her body felt sore, but it had for a while now. The silver Daiyu had shot her with had left an ache in her gut that lasted long after it was removed. She thought maybe it would always be there now, some permanent reminder of what had happened to her. She almost didn’t hate the thought. At least the reminder meant it was real.
A sound ahead of her pulled Rory from her thoughts, and her head tilted slightly to the side as she tried to place it. Heavy breathing, the dull impact of something hitting a tree, a howl that sounded mostly human. There was someone else out here. Breeze wafted a scent her way, and her nose wrinkled with the familiarity of it. Human, but not. Canine, but not. Like Talia, like Clem. Like Rory. There was a werewolf in the woods.
Just a heartbeat after the thought registered, a voice cut through the trees. Was he… mad? At her? For what? A little annoyed, Rory shuffled forward. “Dude, I’m literally just going for a walk,” she griped. “You don’t have to get all — were you punching a tree?” She studied his posture, the tree in front of him, the way he was looking up at the sky. Maybe he hadn’t been addressing her. Maybe he was pissed at the tree. “Uh… Hey.”
—
Jackie’s fist stopped just short of tree bark. He wasn’t alone anymore. He should’ve known. There were more things in the woods than just him with sharp hearing. Animals. Like him. He shook his head, relaxed his fist, and half-turned. Stared into the long dark ahead as he took in slow breaths. A quiet wind brushed through the leaves and carried a smell, familiar and alarming, right to him. He tempered his reaction, rolled with the hit of it.
Beast.
Monster.
Werewolf.
Like him.
Was it her? The scent was all over Wicked’s Rest. Joanie had been right, but Jackie had done almost all he could to avoid it. Not ready to face it, not ready to face anyone. He considered her question. Kept his eyes ahead for another long moment before he finally looked at her. In the place of words, a low huff of a laugh.
Yeah, Jackie had been punching a tree. He could pull his punches there. He was terrified of where he couldn’t. The familiar motions of his father’s insistent manufacturing of perfection was all he had to fall back on when he couldn’t sit with himself. It was what he knew. What he was good at. And he couldn’t even say for certain that he was good anymore and he couldn’t even say for certain if he liked it. If he ever had. Something his mind and body debated on but came to a compromise on when that bell rang.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
But Jackie was and his hands shook all the time lately and he needed to say something because that was what a normal person did. Normal. That had been left behind when he put on the stupid three wolf shirt and tried to go play at person in the woods. He took a moment to work his jaw to speak, then lowered his hands by his sides.
“Huh? Oh, sorry, yeah, I was punching around the tree, just, uh, clipped it by accident,” he said. Jackie looked back at the tree, unbothered by him or her or anything around it. “Wasn’t yelling at you or it, promise, just…working through some shit, I guess.”
That heavy canine smell lingered.The thing in Jackie’s chest turned over again, its claws catching on his lungs. It was laughing at him, he just knew it. And it laughed like his brother. He couldn’t bring himself to ask the question that pressed at the backs of his teeth. The panic from before had formed itself into a hockey puck-sized blockage that only let a few words slip by. He shifted his weight between his feet uneasily and looked at her again.
“Sorry if I scared you. You, uh, you good?”
—
She took in the scene, which was hardly the strangest thing she’d ever happened upon in the woods even if it wasn’t what she’d consider to be normal, either. There was no way the guy’s knuckles were in top shape after hitting the tree bark over and over; if she concentrated, she could smell the faint scent of blood where they’d split in some places, lurking beneath the canine-like scent that had become all-too-familiar to her. She thought both seemed to be originating from the same place, which meant both were originating from him. This meant he was the werewolf she’d sniffed out. It was hard not to stare at him a little.
She’d met other werewolves before, of course. She’d spent enough time with Talia to pull her scent out of a crowd, knew when she smelled Clem in the Wormhole when their shifts almost intercepted but didn’t quite overlap enough for them to see one another in person, had smelled it on Jasper the first time she’d met her in the mill. But this was the first time Rory had met another wolf with the knowledge that she was like him. This was the first time she’d gotten a first impression of another wolf while knowing that she was a wolf herself.
It felt different than she thought it would. The only experience she had to compare it with was balam she’d met when she was still under the impression that she, too, was a balam, and this didn’t feel like that. The first time she’d met Guillermo, she’d been excited. There had been a thrill that vibrated through her chest like a musical note, a sense of camaraderie that clung to her like rain. She’d felt pleased and a bit anxious, had felt hope that he might be able to help her sort out whatever was wrong with her so that she could be a better balam.
She didn’t feel any of that now. She didn’t feel an immediate kinship with this werewolf because she still didn’t feel like a werewolf herself. There was still something in the back of her mind clinging to the hope that this was all some kind of mistake, that the truth was still what she’d thought it was for the first twenty-three years of her life. She was like him, but she didn’t want to be. She was like him, but she wished she weren’t. There was nothing she could do to change it, of course. She ached for a better story.
“Maybe you should apologize to the tree,” she said dryly, trying to fall into the same demeanor she would have taken if she didn’t sniff him out like some kind of a fucking weirdo. “If it’s the one you were yelling at.” She kind of got it, though. Going out into the middle of the woods to scream wasn’t something that sounded entirely unappealing lately. “You didn’t scare me or anything, though. I’m good. Are… you good? Because no offense, but you don’t really seem good.”
—
She was staring at him and Jackie busied himself with looking anywhere else. Now that he had noticed the smell, like him but not, he couldn’t shake it. Couldn’t pretend it was something else when it, she, was staring him in the face. It was different from the way his students looked at him when he walked them through what went wrong in a fight. In the woods, in the dark, what was wrong was them. It felt cruel to think of her in that way too but he couldn’t help it. It felt like sickness, smelled like a disease. Carried itself under their skin. She seemed to recognize what was wrong with him because whatever it was, maybe it was wrong with her too.
What he had tried to run from was there, staring at him, and Jackie wanted to flee again but he kept his feet rooted where he was. He promised Joanie that he would try. There he was, trying, and it felt like a slow crush. It should have felt like relief, to know that he wasn’t alone in the hell he’d been dragged into, yet it felt like anything but. He didn’t wish this for anyone. He didn’t want anyone to be like him. To be what he was now. Lost to something that lived inside of him that he couldn’t understand. Most days, he couldn’t recognize his own skin. His own teeth, his own heart. When would they stop being his, when would they always be monstrous? When would he no longer recognize his own eyes?
It waited to feast on all the parts of him that were soft.
His fist curled by his side and blood dripped from the open wound along his knuckles. His eyes slammed shut. Jackie should say something. He should try to make this better, to make things feel normal but he couldn’t and he sighed in frustration. He didn’t know how to make things better. Blood dripped down his left hand and he wiped at it with his right. Hands that only made things worse. That strangled the moon and drew crimson. The compulsion to tell her that he was sorry tasted like copper on his tongue. Sorry that it clung to her, that it was under her skin too. That she was sick like him and he wasn’t sure how to shake it off. That he couldn’t help.
“Yeah, probably,” he agreed. “That’s good. I, uh, don’t really want to scare anyone. Glad I didn’t.”
A nervous laugh bubbled out of him at her question and Jackie shook his head.
“No, not really, but…getting there.”
He wasn’t.
Jackie glanced up and sighed, flexed his hands by his sides and rolled his shoulders. Then looked at her with uncertain eyes as he forced himself to speak.
“Hey, I’m sorry–fuck–sorry, this is weird. All of it is, uh…” He scrubbed a hand across his face then gestured vaguely. “Do you smell…that? Y’know, that. The smell.”
—
If her nose weren’t what it was, she might have assumed the guy was drunk. He was definitely acting a bit off, all unsteady and frustrated and nervous in a way that was almost familiar. Didn’t Rory feel the same discomfort deep down in her gut? Hadn’t it lived there for a while now? It had been clawing at her since long before those shifted memories had come crawling to the surface, there every time she ran into someone else who smelled the way he smelled, the way she smelled. It used to make hanging out with Talia an unsteady thing, had been part of what had shattered her friendship with Clem. Maybe this man was some version of what Rory had been, some version of what she still was: a person trapped in quiet denial.
The thought made her uneasy, like something churning in her gut. She wanted to be the sort of person who could do for him what Talia was doing for her. She wanted to be able to talk to him in soft tones and offer words of comfort, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t make him feel better, if that was what he needed; she couldn’t even make herself feel better. Telling a stranger it was okay to accept what he was when she hadn’t done that herself felt a little too much like lying for Rory’s tastes.
She watched the blood drip from his knuckles, nostrils flaring absently at the metallic scent. “If you don’t want to scare people, you should probably try to do less bleeding in the woods,” she said. It was a joke, or it was supposed to be. That, too, was something that felt harder to hold onto now than it once had. She thought she might get it back, someday. She hoped it was someday soon, at least.
He said he wasn’t good, which was at least an honest answer. And then he asked a question, and Rory’s eyes darted from the bloody knuckles to his expression, trying to figure out what he was thinking. It was an impossible thing to uncover; she didn’t know him at all, so the lines on his face were written in a language she’d never even seen before. She could lie, she knew. She could make up something he might be smelling, and he might believe her. But lying to someone else after learning that she’d been lied to all her life left a bad taste in her life, and so she shrugged instead. “Yeah, dude,” she replied, “I smell that. It’s, uh… I mean. It’s us. You and me. We’re… That’s what it is.” She lowered her voice a little. “You… know about this kind of thing, right? I don’t want to blow your mind, or whatever.”
—
The adrenaline of annoyance and frustration wore off as Jackie let himself breathe in the night air. Maybe he did feel more at ease out there. Plenty of people enjoyed nature. He had been one of them once, as much as he could be in a city of concrete and glass. Then the thought that it wasn’t him but the thing within him that breathed easier rattled him out of that wishful thinking and back into shifting from heel to heel. She seemed to be handling the absurdity of the situation well. Joanie was right. This place was odd, strange. He didn’t want to think that it could be what he needed now that he was odd himself.
Jackie laughed. A real one. ‘You ever tried bleeding less, Jameson?’ It had always been easy for him to bleed. Once the bite had torn into his side, it was like a cut always lingered above his eyes. Drowned his world in red.
“Yeah, probably. Working on it,” he said as he unwound the wraps from his non-bleeding hand and slowly wound them around his scraped knuckles. He didn’t want to worry her, scare her. Scare anyone. “Guess it comes with the territory.”
His question lingered uncomfortably between them and Jackie wanted to apologize for asking it. They could have gone on not knowing a thing about each other and he would have just been some weird ass in the woods to her. But the smell and the blood and the brief moment of not wanting to be alone in misery kept him from running away again. He was alone. Apart from the world and what he knew and sure, being in this strange place with his own strangeness was maybe good for him in a way he wanted to remain blind to, but he was suffocating.
“Okay, yeah, it’s, uh, us,” he said, uncertain. As painful as it was, as much as his chest constricted, the admittance of it felt like breathing. Two breaths in, one long one out. “Right, it’s us. And we’re…we’re not like…We’re different, right? Things are different about us.”
He didn’t miss the way her voice lowered and he nodded.
“I don’t…I don’t know much. Not really. I know that we’re…” Jackie started, pressed the knuckles of his unbloodied hand hard into his opposing shoulder joint to center himself. “I don’t really know what I am anymore but I know I’m not human and that I’m something else. Some kind of…monster, I guess.”
He looked at her after he said it. Frowned and hesitated.
“Can I…I’m sorry to ask, I am, really. How did it…what happened?”
—
She’d never been afraid of strangers before. She didn’t always like them, of course — she wasn’t the type of person to strike up conversation with the person next to her on public transport, didn’t tend to force small talk with her patrons at the bar or comment on every record a customer was flipping through at Echo — but she was never afraid of them, either. She’d never really had any reason to be. She was from a place where nothing ever really happened, a family nothing ever happened to. Why would Rory, or any of her siblings for that matter, be afraid of strangers when they could push claws from their fingertips on command? Why would they fear humans when their teeth were sharper? Strangers were no threat to Rory.
At least… they didn’t used to be.
She knew now that there was more to the world than what she’d been taught. A silver bullet had torn through her and left her whimpering on someone else’s couch, and it hadn’t been a stranger who’d fired it but it just as well could have been. She’d really only learned of the existence of hunters a few weeks before she’d had the point driven home with that silver bullet in the woods, but it had been the latter of those two events that made her more apprehensive. Strangers were something that she thought probably ought to scare her now, something that should at least give her pause.
But she felt no hesitation towards this man, with his bleeding knuckles. Part of it was because of the scent of him, the stench that was so familiar to her now. She wondered, sometimes, how she’d missed it for so long, how she’d let herself believe that the smell that clung to her body was the same as what clung to her siblings. Had she really just been stupid for years and years and years? Or had the smell somehow disguised itself, hidden itself under everything else? She knew he smelled it, too. She wondered if he smelled it on himself, the way she had. She wondered if he was as good as she used to be at ignoring it.
“Comes with the territory,” she agreed, though she wasn’t sure what territory he meant. It was easier just to nod. Rory had never defaulted to doing what was easier before. Lately, though, it seemed to be all she could manage.
She watched him breathe, watched the anxious rise and fall of his chest as he seemed to take in her words and swallow their meaning. We’re different. Things are different about us. He had no way of knowing how true that was for Rory, who had spent all her life knowing something was different about her but ignoring it steadfastly. She wanted to be the same as her siblings, and she wasn’t. She wanted to be who she thought she was supposed to be, and she wasn’t. Something was different about her, and she hated it. She wondered if he hated it, too.
He called himself some kind of monster, and Rory flinched. If he was a monster, didn’t that make her one, too? She didn’t think it was an unfair description. She thought of those hazy memories that kept swimming to the surface, the ones of people torn to shreds by her hungry teeth. What else did you call something like that?
“Yeah,” she said, swallowing a grief she wasn’t sure she was allowed to feel. You’re not human. You’re — We’re werewolves.” The word tasted like ash on her tongue. She swallowed, anyway. “What happened to me?” She gestured to herself, brow furrowing. “I was… I mean, I was born like this. Were you… I’m guessing that’s not how it happened to you?” Werewolves could be turned. She knew that. They could start off as normal humans in a field, and have their humanity snatched away by teeth and claws.
(She tried not to think about Clementine; it was hard to think about anything else.)
—
Jackie knew what it was to take a hit, a glancing blow, and pretend you didn’t. That it didn’t affect you even though the impact rippled below the skin. A later problem. Immediately, he regretted saying monster. It was what he thought of himself, without question, but to put that on someone else, a stranger in the woods…It was a misery, a bruise, he didn’t want to inflict. If this was the one place where he couldn’t hurt someone, a young girl maybe just as lost as he was, he would try to be better. Try to be something else other than taped knuckles and killing intent.
“I’m sorry,” he started, held an apologetic hand up. “You’re not–I was just talking about me and…”
But what else were they? She was born to it the way Jackie had been almost killed into it. A forced rebirth into a life that wasn’t his anymore, skin that didn’t feel like his own. That shredded apart every time the full moon crested the sky. Did she kill like he did and not remember any of it? Was it worse if she did? He wondered how long it would take until the ground beneath them was red with blood that they couldn’t even remember spilling but it was on their teeth and their hands and it was their fault.
He took in another grounding breath. Maybe she wasn’t like him. Maybe it was better for her. Jackie wanted that to be true. Which likely meant it wasn’t.
“Werewolves,” he repeated. Scrubbed a hand over his face. He heard his sister’s voice in his head again, telling him oh so casually what he was now. A werewolf. “You were born one? You mean there’s…families like this? Like us? That’s…Wow.” A melancholic wanting rose up in Jackie that he couldn’t place, couldn’t make sense of right then. Maybe if his family had been born monsters, they wouldn’t have torn each other apart in their becoming one. He wanted to ask her if those families stayed together. If those families didn’t tear each other apart.
He shook his head at her question.
“It didn’t, nah,” Jackie said. He hadn’t told anyone what happened to him. Joanie got the barest of details and he knew that killed her. He feared that her knowing would kill her. But this girl was a stranger in the woods that smelled like him, bore the same burden and curse that he did. His jaw felt looser because of it. “My…Someone close to me tried to have me killed. I think. It didn’t take, but this…” He held a hand over his clothed side, where the bite still felt fresh. Like he would always bleed out no matter what he did. “This did. And now I’m this and I don’t know what to do with it but I’m still here, for what that’s worth.”
He tried to withhold the bitterness behind his teeth. The fist pressed tight into his shoulder fell to his side. The night seemed still and created an unease in his chest.
“It’s worth something that we’re here, right? That we got this far and we’re ourselves. At least right now. Whatever that means.”
He hesitated. He didn’t know if he believed that but it felt like the right thing to say.
“I’m Jackie, by the way. Sorry I didn’t say that before.”
—
She wanted to laugh at his apology, at the notion that he was a monster but she wasn’t. Would he still think that if he knew the first thing about her? She thought of the hazy memories that had surfaced as she’d writhed on Talia’s couch, the pain of the silver bullet in her gut pulling every other painful thing to the surface with it. She thought of the memory of someone else’s blood on her tongue, of the way she could recall the wolf — her wolf, the thing that was a part of her, the thing that was her in some way or another — trying to determine the most entertaining way to rip someone to shreds. What did you call something like that if not a monster? What other word could you apply to it?
“Don’t be,” she said, shrugging as if she was physically tossing his apology to the side. “It is what it is, right?” She was a monster, and maybe he was one, too. Or maybe, if he knew the sort of things she got up to, it would put things into perspective for him. Maybe he was not the biggest monster in these woods. Hadn’t Rory always worked best when used as a bad example? The burnout kid teachers warned classmates about, the thing pointed to in ‘you don’t want to end up like this’ speeches. It was probably even more true now than it had been back then. She was everything a person should strive not to be; she was the kind of werewolf that made the rest of them look bad. She could hardly blame this guy for calling her a monster, just as she could hardly blame Daiyu for taking a shot at her.
She hated the word when he said it just like she’d hated it when she had, just like she’d hated hearing it on Talia’s tongue, or Daniel’s. Rory didn’t want to be this, and it was difficult to talk to Talia about that because she couldn’t relate. Talia was what she was, and she was proud of it. Rory was what she was, and she wanted to claw it out from under her skin. She wanted to shed it, wanted to get rid of it. Maybe this guy could relate to that. She felt something stir in her chest.
“Yeah,” she confirmed, “I was born one. There are families.” Just not her family. She didn’t say that, though, didn’t want to try to explain it when she still didn’t understand it herself. She was half embarrassed by it, still, ashamed that she wasn’t what she was supposed to be and ashamed that it had taken her so long to realize that. She could hardly bear it with Talia or Daniel or Owen. She couldn’t even begin to imagine it with a stranger.
Of course, maybe that wasn’t the worst case scenario. What he was describing — someone close to him trying to kill him and making him into this instead — sounded jarring in its own sort of way. Rory wondered what was worse: to be so sure of what you were all your life only to be proven wrong about it, or to have what you were stripped away from you against your will. Neither seemed fun.
“That sucks,” she acknowledged. “I’m sorry. It’s… I can’t imagine that. But it is worth something. Being here, and… figuring it out. It has to be worth something.” For Rory, too. She was trying, and so was he. And it had to mean something. She couldn’t bear to imagine a world where it didn’t.
“I’m Rory. How long have you, uh… been like this? If that’s… you know, an okay thing to ask. You can totally tell me to fuck off or whatever if it’s not.”
—
Jackie nodded and didn’t offer another apology. He got it. Understood that there was no real way of talking around it. They were what they were and he hated it. Loathed every second of it, almost loathed every second of himself but he managed to tread water on that front. He didn’t know if that was how it was for her. He also didn’t know if it was unfair to assume that everyone who lived with a monster inside of them hated it or if there were some who embraced it. And how could they manage that? Did they remember what they did and held it close anyway? How did they sleep?
The day he embraced it, the thing under his skin, he’d pull his own teeth out.
“Ah, yeah,” he huffed, a sound close to a laugh. “It is what it is.”
Did she remember what she did? When the moon took over the sky, did the monster take over her the way it took over him? Like a blight that blocked out the sun and woke up a nightmare in him that took over while Jackie slept. Remembered nothing and woke up with the blood of dead strangers between his teeth. He hoped it wasn’t like that for her. That her monster was kinder to her. All he could hold onto was that dim hope that illuminated what little it could reach. Fragments of him from before that believed and hoped and reached for the good. They were still there, stuck in his hands like glass.
“I hope…I hope that things are okay,” Jackie said, a bit wary but sincere. He couldn’t wrap his head around it, whole families of werewolves. How did they hold it all together? Did they exist within their own cages when the moon went up? Did they run free? Was freedom what they felt? He looked at her. She was young, younger than his sister he figured, and she had made it that far. Was she okay? Was her family okay? “For them. Those families.”
Even before, Jackie didn’t take easily to talking about himself. He could talk about his accomplishments, how he spent his time, whatever else would pad out an interview to the point of bloated. But to talk beyond that, underneath it, it wasn’t instinctive. Maybe rock bottom made it easier. What would it matter now to talk about loss to a stranger when it was all gone anyway? She was like him. Maybe, to some degree, she understood it.
“Yeah, it’s pretty shit,” he said with a loose shrug. Another sound like a distant, hollow laugh. Jackie couldn’t bring himself to tell her that the last face he saw before he had been shredded in two was one like his own. Sickeningly so. The monster turned over lazily in his gut, hardly satiated by the warm, living anger attached to the thought. “That’s something we gotta do, right? Try. Keep fighting to figure all this shit out.”
At her question, he glanced skywards in thought.
“About a year or so now, give or take,” Jackie admitted. “I was sort of getting it together, I had some help but, uh, home wasn’t the best place for me anymore. So now I’m…” He gestured lazily towards the trees, the town beyond it. “Here. Things feel…” Worse. So much worse. “Different. But it’s not so bad.” It was hell. “Just trying to figure this out.”
A quiet, tired smile warmed his face.
“You’re the first person like me that I’ve really talked to about this,” Jackie said. “You made it this far, Rory. And you’re gonna make it farther. Maybe there’s hope for me too.”
—
Were things okay? They certainly weren’t for Rory, who felt ten shades of wrong even if every cliche and story she knew seemed to imply that learning the truth about who you were was meant to make you feel better instead of worse. Part of her — a selfish, childish part — wanted nothing more than to go back to not knowing that she was more wolf than ocelot, wanted to return to the ignorance that had made her feel as though she still belonged to the family she loved. But she knew that that hadn’t been a feasible thing. So many of the people who’d been hurt — who’d been killed — by the beast inside of her probably wouldn’t have ended up that way if she’d known, from the beginning, what that beast was. So many people might be alive now if not for her ignorance.
But Rory’s story was not universal. She thought of Talia, who loved the life she was born to. The way she spoke about her wolf with such reverence, like it was something she was proud of… It reminded Rory of how she’d once spoken about the ocelot spirit that hadn’t existed within her, of how her parents and siblings talked of their own experiences as balam. It was possible to be this thing that they were and to love it. Even Clem, who had been turned with bloody teeth that Rory tried desperately not to remember, didn’t seem to dislike what she was. There were ways to be this and to be okay with it. There were ways to love the monster under your skin. Rory just hadn’t figured it out yet. She wasn’t sure she ever would.
It didn’t seem like Jackie had, either. “I don’t know,” she shrugged. “Some of them are, I guess. It — It’s different for everybody. Right? Most things are. Some people have it, and they love it. Some people have it, and they hate it. Some people are just… indifferent, maybe. I don’t know. It’s okay for some of them.” It had to be. There had to be families out there who were born this way and were fine with it, ones that existed in a state somewhere between Rory’s family, who had either not known or chosen not to tell her what she was for two decades, and Talia’s family, who tore people apart with their teeth and enjoyed it. Somewhere out in the suburbs, there must have been a family of werewolves just living their lives, normal and free. Rory hoped so, anyway. She hoped someone could have a normal experience with this kind of thing, something she and Jackie and Talia and even Clem had all been denied.
Jackie was right, of course. Regardless of how shit things were — and things were pretty shit — they didn’t have much of a choice but to figure them out. They couldn’t trade this life away, even if parts of them might have wanted to. Rory couldn’t make herself a balam, no matter how thoroughly she believed she was meant to be one. Jackie couldn’t go back to being human, even if he probably wanted to. It was what it was. Their lives were this, and their lives would be this until they were over. So eventually, they were going to have to figure this shit out.
“A year’s not very long,” she commented, though a year was far longer than the amount of time she’d known she was a werewolf. “Sucks that you had to leave home, though. I, um… I left home, too.” Not entirely by choice. She would have stayed forever, if she could have, fighting to fit in and never knowing why she hadn’t. But she was here now, and home was somewhere else. She wasn’t sure how to find it again. “I’ve been… kind of on my own for a year. Not, like, entirely. There are people here who…” She paused, thinking of Guillermo who had helped her and then died on her, of Talia who had ruined her life by showing her the truth, of Owen who let her bury herself in her lies for just a little while longer, of Mickey who gave her a place to stay and Oliver and Cleo and Harvey who gave her places to work. “There are people here who have helped me, but, you know, I’ve been away from my family and stuff. But, like, you don’t have to figure this out on your own, either. There are people, you know?”
She returned his smile hesitantly, like she wasn’t entirely certain about it. “You’ll figure it out,” she assured him. “I mean, I know we just met or whatever, but you seem like… you’re probably not the worst person ever or anything, so I bet you’ll be fine.”
—
Hope wasn’t much to cling to these days. Jackie tried but the hands weren’t his own, misshapen and murderous. Yet they were. So to hope that things were okay for anyone felt childish, like something he kept safe and away from the world in a too small tent in the living room that was his and his alone. Even when Julian would break into it to scare him. The thought cast a shadow over him.
It was still his, goddamn it.
Like bees for blooms, creatures with knives for mouths had to have something to look towards too. Hope had to be something that even monsters felt. The world could allow them that. With blood in their eyes, their teeth, there had to be some light saved for them too. Some patches of gentleness for them to find before they continued along broken glass. Jackie was sure there were people like them that didn’t feel brokenness when they walked. That embraced and were okay with what they were, either born to it or confirmed by blood. What Rory said confirmed that.
“Right, yeah,” Jackie said as he tugged at the end of his sleeve. “Guess it’s like anything, really. No two roads are the same or whatever…” He hated it. Every time the moon crossed the sky, he wanted to hide it between his hands before the monster’s teeth could find it. Sometimes he wanted to tear it apart himself. Tear himself apart if it meant the monster was denied. But he was afraid and wanted to live. His expression went unchanged as he looked at Rory, listened to her. She had been born to it, lived with it. It felt wrong to complain. “That’s good, though. Kind of…promising, right? That there’s a way to okay for people like us, maybe.”
There was a wall between Jackie and being okay with what he was. One made of brick and blood and bone that stretched further every time the moon called and the monster picked up, left Jackie on hold. Did Rory see it that way for her too? Maybe she didn’t have a blood trail between the days and nights. It was foolish, childish, but he hoped the moon was kinder to her. That her road to okay didn’t tear her, and others, up so much.
“Feels like the longest year of my life,” he said with a tired laugh, then went quiet as he listened. That night, the woods seemed to harbor the people that either left their homes behind or their homes left them. A comfort could be found in that, Jackie supposed. If he thought that was something he could still have. Rory could though. “I’m sorry you had to leave home too. It’s hard. Sometimes it’s necessary, we’re better or can know ourselves better away from it in a way, whatever people say but…still, it’s home. Still yours, wherever you are.”
He wouldn’t say that he was better away from it, necessarily, but it was better without him. That thought weighed too heavily and Jackie shifted his feet to carry it better. Rory had people that helped her, that helped her carry whatever it was that she did. That word again in his head. Promising. That hope he kept shut away in his tent flickered brighter, softened the grip that fear had on keeping it closed.
“Really? That’s–” His voice hitched, his eyes burned, and he took a long breath to even himself out. Ran a hand over his face. “Sorry. My, uh, sister told me about this weird town where people like you and me might be okay or…or be able to figure ourselves out and I didn’t know what the hell she meant. Like what, fuckin’ Halloween Town? I had said but she was serious and I didn’t believe her…”
Jackie shook his head and looked at Rory, weary with cautious optimism that his fear and fury humored for the moment. He didn’t think of himself as a good person, but he wasn’t awful on purpose. He didn’t know what he was, if direct or indirect evil made a lick of difference when it came to the scales.
“Thanks. You’re probably not the worst person ever either,” Jackie said with a huff of amusement. “And I know I’m probably not the best…” He hesitated to say the word. “...Thing but I’m here too. If you…y’know but, uh, thanks, Rory. Really. Even just meeting and all, it’s…uh, good to know there are people. I didn’t believe my sister, I was wrong, so…maybe it’ll be okay.”
Even if it was just for a short-lived moon phase, what did it hurt to believe that if the kids were alright, maybe he could be too?
—
Her experience was so much different than Jackie’s, because it wasn’t as if she had been one thing and then was turned to something else as he had. Rory had always been this, even when she hadn’t known it. Her monster had always lived beneath her skin; no one had to tear it free with bloody teeth. And yet, she felt like she had more in common with Jackie than she did with Talia, regardless of how much she liked and respected Talia’s experience as a wolf. Jackie had been at this for far less time than Rory had, technically speaking, and yet his experience felt more like one she could look to. Jackie knew what it was to hate the monster, to wish you could rid yourself of it. She didn’t think Talia could say the same.
Like her, she thought, he probably also found some comfort in the idea that there were people out there who liked what they were. He wasn’t there yet, and neither was Rory. But wasn’t the fact that it was possible, that there was proof of that, like a breath of fresh air? Didn’t it feel like a dangling rope ladder at the bottom of a canyon, promising a way up that was fragile and unsteady but there all the same? Maybe it would be easier to climb if there was someone she could climb with instead of just people waiting for her at the top. She thought of her childhood, of how most of the experiences that came with adolescence didn’t feel as scary to her because she’d already watched six older siblings go through them first. Was it cowardly to want that now, too? To long for an example she could witness before trying the thing for herself? Rory used to think she was brave. She wasn’t sure she believed it now.
“It is promising,” she agreed. “It’s like… I don’t know. It feels better to know there’s a way to… be this and not hate it. And — And maybe a way to be this without hurting anyone, too.” Talia had hurt people. She’d been honest about that, told Rory as much without hesitation. But she’d also said she was choosing not to do that anymore, and wasn’t the existence of a choice the very thing Rory longed for? She didn’t need it to be easy, even if she’d have preferred it if it were. She only needed it to be possible. Maybe that was all Jackie wanted, too.
There was a pang of sympathy as Jackie continued, because Rory could relate to that, too. It had been only a short time since she’d learned the truth about herself, but it felt like an eternity. It felt like she was drowning in it, sometimes, like she’d been stuck at the bottom of a swimming pool for years now, just waiting for someone to pull her back to the surface. Time moved differently during experiences like this; it wasn’t fun for anyone.
She shrugged off his apology, unsure if she deserved it. Her grave was one she’d dug herself, wasn’t it? Sure, she’d been lied to, but she could have figured out the truth sooner, too. The signs had been there from the start. If she’d just let herself read them when her family was still around to ask, wouldn’t it have been better? Wouldn’t it have been easier if they could have explained? There was still truth she was missing, and she didn’t know how to find it. “Everybody leaves home eventually, right?” She asked, trying to pretend like it bothered her less than it did. “It’s how we figure out who we are, or whatever.” Even if Rory felt further from knowing who she was now than she had when she was still living at home.
Jackie’s posture shifted into something that felt a little like relief, and for the first time since she’d shown up on Talia’s porch with a silver bullet in her gut, Rory felt like she’d said something right. The feeling slammed into her hard enough that she almost felt like it could knock her over, though she tried to avoid showing any visible evidence of this. Instead, she only nodded. “Kind of like Halloweentown,” she agreed, smiling faintly. “There are lots of people like us. And… people who aren’t exactly like us, but aren’t exactly human, either. It’s… It’s not a good place to be, for a while.” Not forever, maybe, but for a while.
Oddly, Jackie’s offer — that he was there, too, if she needed him — brought comfort with it. Rory smiled, the expression real and genuine. “Thanks,” she said. “Right back at you. I’m not, like… a great teacher or anything, but… Maybe I can help figure some shit out for you.” And maybe he could do the same for her.
It wasn’t perfect but, fuck, wasn’t it something, at least?
