Dawn Breaks like a Fallen Vase

Rick spent the drive into the woods doing exactly what he should not have been doing, which was imagining what it would be like if it wasn’t like this.

Wolves—real, animal, canine wolves—are not very aggressive creatures. Instances of a wild wolf attacking humans are so overwhelmingly rare that any statistic is by nature an outlier. A wolf in the wild will rarely even be visible to a human traveler. Understanding that what they are looking at is not prey, they stay in the shadows and skulk away, unseen. In captivity or in situations of symbiosis, humans and wolves strike up a rapport quickly. Both are persistence predators, and the only two of the kind on Earth. The convergently similar species click almost seamlessly. Domestication was a process that both halves stumbled into, Rick assumed, essentially willing, as willing as inevitability implies.

It could have been possible for things to be different. He would still be doing this drive into the woods every month with Jean in the passenger seat, but he would be laid-back, dozing in the waning light, not hunched over and brooding. The beams of moonlight would pinch Jean’s skin like a bathrobe and slide it off, and then they would run together, up and down the beech-bearing hills, and when Jean’s greater strength inevitably outpaced Rick’s, he could watch him sprint away from him, careless, joyful, unafraid. He could watch him hunt and feel unashamed. They could curl up together when they had exhausted themselves, by a fire in the winter or laid out on the banks of a stream in the summer, and doze until the sunrise.

It wasn’t like that. Jean sat sullenly, silently, and with an eerie stillness that would make the skin on Rick’s neck prickle even if he didn’t already know something was wrong. An animal in the last stages of rabies, preserving their energy for final attempts to attack, is possessed with the same uncanny stillness; wights in wait as well, holding their breath for decades as they watch for someone to step on the right nearby rock, or look over the right precipice, or fall into the right frigid lake.

The drive was short. They varied exactly where they camped each time, just in case. They never went too far from home. The realities of adult life being what they were, both men would be going to work the next day unless the full moon landed on a lucky weekend night.

Jean got more sleep than Rick did on these nights, but Rick never complained. Not about this.

Jean always took a while to get out of the car after they stopped. He was stiff. He started experiencing slowly growing, circular pains about an hour before sunset. All over, in his muscles, like influenza. Pain medication worked, technically, since the malady was physical, but it dulled a fraction of the intense pain Jean would barely admit was slithering through him.

Jean eventually shoved the door open and got himself outside. He leaned on the side of the car, pulled a cigarette out of his pocket, and lit it.

Rick did not love the cigarettes. They had had the conversation about the cigarettes so many times, and he wasn’t going to try again at a time like this. Not with Jean staring into the sky with a look of pinched discontent, the physical pain steadily increasing and the itch under his skin starting to fray the edges of his thoughts.

The silence with which they enacted their moonly ritual was strategic. They used to talk through it. Rick would compulsively ask Jean how he felt now, and now, and now, trying to perfectly tailor arm’s-length care for a cold-shouldered companion. But the nearer Jean’s transformation approached, the less his words could be trusted. He started to forget words and replace them nearly randomly, or just curse instead. He would say things he inevitably could not remember in the morning; sometimes unkind, sometimes unnerving, sometimes wistful, sometimes simply strange. Rick didn’t want alarming sentences that might mean absolutely nothing clattering around in his head for the next few months, and Jean didn’t want to try to answer for saying something he didn’t remember or even understand when recounted to him. “Dunno,” Rick could remember him saying, stone-faced, faux-nonchalant. “That’s the wolf talking, I guess.”

Rick still did not know where that figure of speech landed on the line between metaphorical and literal. Was that speaker a dusty and unloved part of Jean personified as a wolf, speaking only when the rest of him was too addled to protest? Was it primal nonsense, like the stuff of dreams, drudged up by a psyche approaching the border between human and animal? Was it a literal other entity, the Wolf, using Jean’s mouth to voice its thoughts while it had the chance?

Rick didn’t know. After the moment the car door shut behind them and before the sun rose again in the morning, they didn’t talk beyond what was absolutely necessary. For instance, when Rick returned from a lap around the area and Jean finished with his smoke, said “all clear” to indicate that he was sure there weren’t any people around the thickly wooded hillside, rare campers or evening strollers or suspicious pajama-clad tree-climbers all included. They had had to move quickly a few times, so Rick’s perimeter checks were thorough now.

Jean nodded tightly. He was looking up, to where the white face of the moon had appeared like a ghost at the eastern edge of the still-blue sky.

Rick looked up at it too, for a second, searching for a response and coming up empty. He wished he could dredge up anger, but at what? The moon? The moon in the sky? He got to work constructing a campsite instead.

He had found that, despite his initial concerns, setting up a proper campsite made people more likely to avoid them, rather than less. The area was so settled that people did not stop and ask to sit with them. Instead, the few times people saw their tent or their fire, they quickly went the other way, not wanting to disturb. So, Rick set up a fire pit and a tent he would not be using, except as handy storage. He stocked it with everything he would need for the long night; clean clothes for both of them, blankets, a first aid kit (and his ‘second aid kit’, which was a backpack full of more serious supplies), an electric lantern with replacement batteries and lightbulbs, his books and notebooks to keep him entertained through the night, his several thermoses of coffee and his lunchbox.

By the time everything was set up, the sun was very low. He had timed the process perfectly, but, then again, it had been thirteen years.

…It had been thirteen years.

Half of his life.

Rick, alone on a hillside with no one but Jean, tilted his sunglasses so that they sat on the top of his head and looked at the vivid red sunset with his naked eyes.

Looking at things without his glasses did not work so well anymore. He saw colors, oceans, lineless bodies. The scarlet sky took up most of what he could see, and gently waving, soft green shapes formed the indefinite hilly horizon around him, touched by intangible saffron gleams of light that wavered and jumped like dragonflies.

Jean approached him, which Rick could hear better than see. When he looked at him, he saw familiar darkness, earth-brown and night-black, soft and worn around the well-loved edges. Jean reached up, and, with a swift bump, dropped Rick’s sunglasses back down over his eyes.

The look in Jean’s eyes was clear.

Rick nodded. They both walked over to the front of the tent. Rick sat down, but Jean remained standing. Jean undressed completely, handing Rick the body-warm pieces of his outfit one by one. Rick folded them and set them inside the tent. By the time he was naked, the sun had fully sunk into darkness, but the dwindling light of its rays still illuminated half the sky, struggling to keep it in its rosy clutches.

Jean sat down in front of him.

“Earrings,” Rick said.

Jean responded with a quick tilt of his head, and then reached up to take out his earrings. As time wore on and professionalism made its demands he had become less and less likely to wear them. He had clearly forgotten that he had put the little black studs in today, like he used to, once. He pulled them out and handed all four scattered pieces to Rick. Rick quickly hooked them all together so nothing would get lost and then put them inside of Jean’s left shoe.

The sky was more blue than pink. Jean’s teeth ran over his lower lip.

Rick dipped into spirit trance for a moment, as he found it polite to say hello to Lucifer before he used his powers, no matter how routine the process became.

Naturally, because he was trying to be polite, the first thing Lucifer said was, “Yes, I know.”

The spirit stood inside his laboratory, over a desk made entirely of cold black stone, measuring vials and bottle half-full of darkness against each other. His unerring light marked the folds of great velvet curtains behind him, which undulated, slowly, like waves, over the face of the dark. Around him, the wooded hill was now midwinter-bare, black branches recoiling from an even blacker sky. There was no more grass; stone paths led up the slope to some crumbling tower on the top of the hill, built in the space of moments by unseen hands.

“It’s almost time,” Rick said anyway.

“Naked, aching, about to dive for your throat. Yes, like most nights.”

Rick was not perturbed. “Just wanted to inform you that we’re going to save Mayview from its seventh-grade science teacher for approximately the hundredth time, if that works for you.”

Lucifer told him the exact number of times it had been. Rick didn’t like it. “But I’m also counting the time we stopped him from assaulting your father in broad daylight after spotting him at a local civic event in which the entirety of your local governance was also in attendance.”

Rick grinned broadly. “Ha ha ha.” Yes, that near-disaster would not have been averted without supernatural assistance, but sometimes… sometimes he was sad he had averted it. If he hadn’t been completely focused on not being seen himself he might have made a more fun choice.

“The process is simple,” Lucifer dismissed with a wave of one red hand. “Just tell him to back up a little, he’s too close.”

Rick dropped out of spirit trance. Jean’s eyes were fastened on him, and they were the sort of fathomless dark that Rick could only call animal. Like a horse, or a crow, or.

“Lucifer says you need to back up.”

Jean almost always had a snappy response to Lucifer, but he did not now. He obediently stood to back up a few paces, and then sat back down, exactly the same.

Rick hated this part. More than the rest of it.

It wasn’t the most dangerous part of the evening. It wasn’t the most painful for Jean, either; that was coming soon. But he had gotten used to what came after this part, painful, dangerous, occasionally rewarding. This part happened just before all of that started, when nothing had really happened yet, while Jean was still in control of himself, but not for much longer. Worse than dangerous, it was anticipatory.

Jean just looked at him.

Rick knew that his pain was ramping up, exponentially, as he neared the precipice of the transformation. But he didn’t react, not with so much as a twitch. He stared at Rick with wide and lightless eyes. He hunched slowly and so subtly forward that it always seemed like a trick of Rick’s eyes, a gentle bend like a cat’s haunches rising.

If Rick saw this in the dark, he would know it wasn’t human immediately, and he might not immediately know it was Jean.

Then Jean tipped forward over himself like a marionette cut down. He spasmed. The pain outgrew the unnatural focus and bent him in half.

Rick clenched his knees and waited.

It had taken trial and error to find the right moment to take the moonlight away. It could be done successfully at any point, but there was a small margin in which it was best to do it. Moving too early resulted in an unnecessarily prolonged, painful transformation as Jean would transform, and the moonlight strengthened it. Waiting too long, of course, meant there was a werewolf. Over there. Doing whatever he liked, which was usually some combination of thrashing, biting, lunging, and unholy howling. Rick was waiting to clutch the moment between Jean being fully transformed and him being able to get a full breath of air in his newly-formed lungs.

It was a hard needle to thread, because Jean’s transformation was agonizing, and he was going to scream the second he could.

His hands clenched and clawed at the dirt. His back convulsed. His head pitched forward so that his crown pressed into the ground, and his whole body shook, and grew.

Rick watched as, like a wave, spasms rolled through Jean’s body, grabbing him, contracting, convulsing, and then growing. Fur sprang out of him, in layers, thin and then thick. His head finally lifted off of the ground when it violently reformed, snapping in half so that he could clamp back down with a fang-lined muzzle.

It was almost time—almost. Jean was still stretching and shuddering, struggling to balance himself. Rick watched, slowly, slowly raising his hands into the air, as Jean slowly found his hind legs and planted them on the ground, his tail thrashing behind.

Jean’s throat convulsed.

Rick made a motion like he was drawing aside a curtain—unnecessary, simply somatic, tracing his fingers in the air as if they were running over Jean’s snarling muzzle—and pulled up the moonlight.

Darkness lowered like a curtain over their campsite, as if they were in the shadow of some great, invisible colossus.

Jean lurched forward.

Always forward.

He never tried to dive to the side, or stumble backward.

He always fumbled forward in the dark, toward Rick.

Rick reminded himself that it was because he was approaching the first hot-blooded creature he smelled. He was trying to snatch up the man that took the moonlight away.

Jean stepped forward once, twice, and then three times, with increasingly unsteady steps. Then he collapsed forward, dumped like trash for the second time by the compulsions puppeteering him, so close to Rick that his cracked-open muzzle landed barely inches from his foot.

Rick smiled reflexively, a worn old satisfaction barely kindling in his stomach before immediately dissipating.

His timing had been nearly perfect. The only thing that would make it better would be if Jean wasn’t under a chronic and debilitating curse that caused him intense pain and divorced him mentally from everyone he ever loved, because having one terrible night each moon meant he could never fully trust himself, or change his routine, or go somewhere, to something or someone new, since he was chained perpetually to Rick.

“Sorry,” he said quietly.

Jean wasn’t much for apologizes, giving or receiving. The fact that his memories of these nights were usually between ‘selective’ and ‘completely inaccurate’ had a few small benefits.

Jean wheezed. It was probably meant to be a growl, but he couldn’t even muster the energy. He was still fighting the weight of the dark upon him.

What he did from this point on varied. It depended on how much energy he had to fight, whether he was more feral or more lucid, whether there was weather or wind to distract him, whether foolhardy animals got close enough for him to see. He usually, at some point, mustered the strength to curl up, or perhaps lost the willpower not to. He did, eventually, sleep, but how long that took varied from ‘nearly immediately’ to ‘after hours and fucking hours.’

He could not get up at this point, not without the moonlight. Just maintaining his monstrous form took everything his real body, wrapped inside, could provide. He was stuck at the ground in front of Rick, and Rick was stuck staying awake until dawn, maintaining the darkness.

It didn’t take much effort, which was good, or intent concentration. It did start to waver if he got too distracted, but that was a self-solving problem. Knowing he needed to re-focus on blocking the moonlight every five minutes or so meant that his stomach twisted with nervousness every five minutes or so, prodding him with an unstoppable, biological warning. (He had had terrible insomnia for about a year in his late teens before he learned how to only maintain that vigilance on the right night and shut it off for the others.) It had been years since the last time he had a significant slip, but he still did not drop his vigilance.

Rick reached behind him and grabbed his electric lantern; its imitative glow was no danger to either of them. When he snapped on the light, he saw the snout of the wolf a few feet away from him, and watched his pupils shrink rapidly and his teeth shine.

Jean whined, a high, quiet, canine whine, which would nonetheless convince all small animals in a mile radius to go somewhere else for the night. He scrabbled weakly, and his eyes darted around the hillside.

“It’ll be okay,” Rick promised him. He doubted Jean understood him, but he could at least focus his intent on him instead of whatever innocent creatures crept in the undergrowth. “It’s a bad night. It’ll pass.”

Jean struggled to get up, but couldn’t move anything but the slightest muscle.

“I know. I’m sorry,” Rick told him again. “I’m sorry it’s gotten so messed up. I’m sorry I lost Shrike. Or maybe killed her. I’m sorry I never figured out a way to fix you up. I’m sorry I never found a way to fix us up. I’m sorry we have to do this forever.”

Jean tried to lift his head. Rick could see him sniffing the air frantically. Rick looked over and saw that, though all animals had been smart enough to vacate, a few diaphanous spirits drifted through the trees.

“Just spirits,” he told Jean. “I’ll take care of them if they get too close.”

They were both fortunate that night; Jean was exhausted. Rick had noticed him looking sluggish through the day; he had likely skimped on coffee in the morning or even prevented himself from sleeping long the night before. (He could remember a couple of other sleep-avoiding activities now that he thought about it.) He was awake for about a half-hour, some of it spent fighting it, some of it spent watching and listening.

Like always, he eventually managed to curl up, and then slipped into sleep. His dark, wet eyes closed, his labored breath smoothed out until it came with a low, quiet rattle.

Rick breathed out a sigh of relief. If Jean stayed asleep, then, this would be a pretty easy night of it. Still keeping his eyes on Jean—he had barely fallen asleep, so he was still likely to startle back awake—he reached behind him to grab his first thermos of coffee and a book. He would read until his focus started eluding him, then he would eat, then maybe journal or just watch the stars. The night was long. But the work, in the end, was rewarding.

The one thing he did not do was speak with Lucifer, because it would stretch the time out longer. Once upon a time he had been unable to resist, feeling too crowded by the endless darkness that pressed on him, alone in the woods with a monster. Now, he treasured this part of the nights, the purposeful removal from absolutely everyone, even his own spirit. There was no one but him Jean, who sometimes, on good nights, settled into a peaceful sleep.

--

Dawn rose up behind him, fresh from her journey around the world and ready to say hello again.

The very first rays made the sky pale blue on the edges and stripped the fur from Jean’s body. While turning into a wolf was agonizing, turning back always seemed uncomfortable. He groaned and fussed and shifted with it, but he didn’t thrash and convulse. Eventually, naked inside of a blanket of his own shed fur, which would mark this area as contaminated to both animals and spirits until wind and water dispersed it, there was a man, struggling sluggishly onto his knees.

Rick lifted the darkness, and the rays of the dawn, butter-yellow, tentatively touched the tips of the blades of grass, the rim of his fourth full thermos of coffee, the nearest cheekbone of Jean’s face.

Rick looked at him for a moment as he rose from his hands and knees to sitting on his thighs, his chin pointed up to look at the sky.

Then Rick turned around to pull fresh clothes out of the tent; underwear, sweatpants, a soft t-shirt, a sweater. They had enough time to go home and change into work clothes again, there was no reason to make Jean get into business casual in the woods.

He walked toward Jean, who was still looking into the light. He put the sweater around his shoulders and the coffee into his hands. Jean hadn’t yet looked at him when he wrapped his cold, dry hands around the thermos, and put his lips where Rick’s had just been to drink.

His eyes closed. He tilted it back, drank, and then shook his head. His breath came out in a wet gasp. He swallowed, and said, “Going out on a limb to say that following a big golden bird over a cliff where I fell into a pleasantly warm sea of blood was a dream.”

Rick wrapped a hand around Jean’s shoulder and rubbed it lightly with his thumb. “Dream.”

Jean finally looked at him, blinking as his eyes adjusted. Rick saw him take in his face, down and back up. “Good morning, you solid 5/10,” he grumbled. “Mind telling me why I’m naked in a forest and mostly remember hallucinogenic hellscapes from last night, or would that be information you’d have to kill me for after you told me?”

The glint in his eyes was diffuse but strong, reflecting Rick’s face back at him, swimming as he looked around and took in where he was. The nearly indistinguishable smile on his lips twitched up and down a few times after his comment, and his dirty fingernails idly scratched the metal of the thermos. Rick would never mistake him for anything but human nor anyone but Jean.

Last night’s creature did not resemble him at all.

Rick kissed him on the forehead. “Your accent is adorable,” he said. “Come back with me to my place, I think we’ll get along fine.”

“Whoa,” Jean said tiredly, “Forward. Did something happen last night? Is that why I’m filthy and feel godawful everywhere?”

“Maybe,” Rick responded, while standing up and tugging on Jean’s arm to encourage him to get up himself. “How about you let me dress you in fresh clothes and get in my car, and then I’ll take you to a secondary location where we can talk it over.”

“If we filmed this bit and uploaded it, even once, we would make a fortune,” Jean grunted as he carefully got to his feet. “Every goddamn joint I have wants me dead. Those kids had better be well-behaved today.”

Rick failed to see why their situation would appeal to the viewing masses and had meticulously ignored Jean’s occasional attempts to explain. They had separate computers for a reason. “If we get back with enough time, you can shower,” he promised, and began to hand Jean his clothing, one piece at a time.

Frankly, their early work schedules didn’t give them a lot of wiggle room between dawn and clocking in. Usually, they got home, Jean showered, Rick took a fifteen- or twenty-minute power nap, and then it was already time to individually get ready and drive to school. He had a long workday ahead of him, but that, too, was routine enough that he was prepared for it. The massive amounts of caffeine would take him halfway through the day, he would power-nap again during lunch, and the sharp afternoon downturn had slowly become another contentious relationship with a bitter but familiar friend.

If it was something he could endure, he always enjoyed it, at least a little. He was so proud of his ability to wait it out that the struggle had its own savor.

Jean, fully dressed, cracked his back and then shuddered. “Cold,” he grumbled.

“Fall’s really coming on now,” Rick agreed.

“I hate doing this once there’s snow on the ground,” Jean complained, kneeling down for the final pieces, his socks and shoes. “Waking up bare-assed and shivering while you sit there warm and cozy.”

“You’re too big for any tent we can put in the car. When we tried to squat in a cabin, you smashed a window and busted the rafters. If I put a blanket on you, you throw it off—”

“Ow,” Jean interrupted, with a snarl.

Rick hesitated. He watched him take her left shoes back off, turn it upside down, and then knock something into his hand: his earrings, looped together, left where Rick dropped them last night.

Rick snapped his fingers. “Forgot about that,” he admitted.

Jean whuffed at him in a very canine manner. Rick watched him tilt his head both ways to put the earrings back in.

When they had been boys, and Jean had been the mysterious, dangerous, handsome apprentice of Shrike, their Cousinhood rival with both the power and the willpower tear the Consortium in Mayview apart, it was the little things that had made Rick act like a complete idiot around him. Black studs in his pierced earlobes, the nearly indetectable air of smoky synthetic scent under his buttoned-up shirt, the fact that he was a thirteen-year-old who was willing to drop a few f-bombs into a conversation with adults. Jean had been everything Rick had once envisioned a good ‘bad boy’ would be, before he had met many very bad people. And the cultivation of his appearance, the one or two locks of hair he let fall in front of his sometimes-lined eyes, the occasionally painted nails, had been nearly mesmerizing suggestions that this was someone queer, and Rick had been Mayview’s most closeted adolescent and living in Mayview’s most mandatorily heteronormative household.

If he was being honest, he had developed a crush on Jean immediately, the first moment of the first minute on the first day of meeting him, skulking behind Shrike, looking up and around the rafters of the building, his eyes searching every corner for danger before they finally landed on Rick. That crush was denied sharply and packed into a box, and left to fester, and let back out, and packed away again, constantly waxing and waning as the two of them forever struggled to fit into the roles of being enemies, or rivals, or allies, or friends, or anything. He could remember telling himself he was over that stupid crush on Jean about five times between the ages of thirteen and sixteen (and telling Mina the same, who so thoroughly didn’t believe him it was insulting, despite the fact that she was always right).

Mr. Jean Garcia, twenty-seven years old, was not actually any different from what he had always been. There was no black nail polish and no subtle brown eyeliner he thought that no one would notice, not anymore. Frankly, he had never been less polished in appearance than he was as a working professional, liable to roughly roll up his sleeves or forget to use his piercing-holes for months at a time or grow a rough stubble that he might bother to take care of in a day or two. But Rick had now met quite a few very bad people, including realizing he had always known one or two, and while he could still see the adolescent ‘bad boy’ hidden under Jean’s rough exterior, doing everything he could to appear cool, calm, collected, mature, stronger than those who hated him and unafraid of his own skin, now Rick just adored him.

Rick leaned toward him and, as he always did, paused a half-second while he was half an inch away from his face, just in case. Jean didn’t move, except to slightly, subtly tilt his head. Rick kissed him, not heavily but slowly, lingering on his mouth, pressing in just firmly enough to feel the hardness of his teeth behind his lips. He lifted his hand to his cheek to enjoy that rough, dishabille stubble, and the frayed ends of his unkempt hair.

Jean let Rick break it, too, willing to keep pressing back for as long as Rick pressed forward. When Rick did pull back, Jean huffed a hot, rancid breath onto his face and said, “You’re into guys with dead bugs tangled into their hair and dried sweat caked everywhere, huh?”

“On second thought,” Rick said, now fully aware of how incredibly filthy Jean was, “I’m not, no.”

Jean licked him. Rick screamed, and they fought each other through the entire process of taking down the camp. Jean threw books and empty thermoses at him for Rick to stash in the trunk, Rick did everything in his power to shove Jean in the trunk too, and they both strapped themselves in ten minute later with more bruises than the entire night of lycanthropy had gained them.

Rick always drove home, too, even though he had been up all night. Jean tended to still be disoriented, and despite being sleep-deprived, Rick was still the safer driver.

The drive home felt like it lasted only a fraction of the time the drive there had. Jean did not shut up; he bitched about every little thing in an exhausted monotone, barely deterred by Rick interrupting with an occasional refutation or inspirational quote; he felt like he had a goddamn period, society needed to be completely restructured so he could have more days off work, he would have to go hunting soon because the urge to chomp down on a terrified rabbit was still completely overwhelming and he still had not satisfied it, thanks to someone, he was failing everyone who walked into his classroom today, mark his words.

“And what are you smiling about?” he finally grouched, just as they were turning onto the road that would lead them to the house.

Rick tried to stifle his grin and failed. “I’m thinking about everyone who tried so hard to warn me away from you.”

“What? How many people is that, even?” Jean asked, a shade of intrigue in his voice.

Rick laughed. “Are you joking? Everyone! Before I even met you! From day one, when Master Guerra was rolling his eyes and saying the Cousinhood had recruited some new sneak, and I wasn’t to speak a word to you. He said he was sure you were a plant and a spy.”

“I was. I absolutely was,” Jean confirmed, not that Rick didn’t know that, hadn’t known that a decade ago. “I was literally told to get into your head. They were curious why the Consortium was recruiting kids in Mayview and trying to get intel on that.”

“Day one. Agent Summers telling me to stay away from you, because she could tell you were up to nothing good. Of course, I’m sure she really felt bad for you. Day two, Walker telling me to tread lightly around that Consortium kid, if I had to tread around you at all—”

“I had met him the night before, I’m surprised he didn’t just call me ‘that little freak.’”

“Week one, Dr. Burger asking me if you had said something to me because I looked so freaked out after talking to you, telling me to not pay any more attention to you, you were clearly just mean-spirited; barely a week after that Mina was telling me to just stay away from you—”

“Yeah, she said so to my face, too. Waited for everyone else to leave the room, stomped up to me and told me to leave you alone. Of course, I just asked her ‘why, is he your boyfriend?’ She said no, but she got so flushed that I couldn’t help but be intrigued. Not that I wasn’t already.”

“Anyone and everyone who saw us interact once told me firmly to stay away from you. That and the fact that you were an aspiring homme fatale combined to make it absolutely certain that I had no chance at staying away from you whatsoever,” Rick said, clenching his fist to show how proud he was of his incredibly stupid and consistently gay younger self.

“More like homme minor injuries,” Jean riffed casually, and when Rick glanced at him he saw that there was a curled smile on his face. “Yes, in retrospect, I love that I was very nearly ordered to seduce you at age thirteen. That was normal.”

“Hm. Don’t like that,” Rick decided as he turned the wheel to pull into the driveway and pressed the button to open the garage.

“Well, the boss’ boss said, ‘bring the kid with your to Mayview; we want a closer look at what they’re doing with those spectral children, and someone their age will be able to get more information out of them than an adult can.’ And the boss interpreted that to me as, ‘when we get to Mayview, child who adores me implicitly and consistently overachieves in order to gain my fleeting attention and approval, do whatever you can to make friends with their young recruits, but please be cool about it,’ and because I was thirteen and literally getting hornier every day, I replied, ‘Seduce them. Got it.’ So, I suppose the person who said ‘seduce’ was me.”

“And Shrike just rolled with that?” Rick said, wishing, as he parked the car, that he believed that a little less than he did. The woman that Jean still called ‘boss’ had been… formidable.

“Are you joking? She said ‘good initiative, agent’ and kicked open the car door,” Jean grinned and snapped his own open with a sharp and pointed kick that Rick knew was meant to imitate her heels of steel. He stood up and cracked his back again.

Rick pulled out the key, got out, and walked to the back to unlock the trunk. “How many minutes of knowing Mina did it take to give up attempts to seduce her?” he asked, grinning.

“Ha ha. Ha,” Jean groaned, eyes closed, walking stiffly to the back to stand beside Rick. “Zero. You’re kidding yourself if you don’t think I saw the whole group of you and then immediately rewrote my much better-worded orders into ‘get blondie’ in my head.”

“Oh, I remember this part!” Rick said triumphantly, pulling the lightest bag from the trunk and handing it to Jean. (He would handle the heavy stuff.) “You laid eyes on me and hated me at once.”

“Immediately suffused with the carnal urge to stuff you in a locker,” Jean agreed, accepting the bag. “I’m glad so many trusted adults tried to warn you away from me, I was going to sleep with fantasies of ending your pathetic dork life playing in my head for months. Absolutely embarrassing myself by obsessing over the best way to make a complete loser think I was the coolest. Mina trying to intimidate me to protect you simply sealed your fate.”

Rick tossed the folded blanket at him and Jean caught it. “Everyone caught onto the fact that you rubbed me the wrong way. The doctors thought you were bullying me.”

“I was doing my best to bully you,” Jean promised.

“There is, of course, no other explanation for why I was in a desperate and dizzy red-faced tizzy after every time you spoke to me.”

“Just pounding on that locked closet door until your little fists were bloody,” Jean sighed. “You should thank me.”

“I have,” Rick said sincerely, shouldering the heavy tent-bag, and reaching in to pick up the last thing he hadn’t packed: the electric lantern, which he instinctually held in front of him like a sword.

Jean looked at him, and one of his hands went to his face, like he was holding a cigarette; an unconscious grasp at something comforting. “You have, you weirdo,” Jean agreed.

Jean had told him how that part of the story had ended, once. Over the course of them working together, getting to know each other, Jean continued to hate Rick, with a dislike that grew and grew, but sometimes, all of a sudden, he would like him, and quite a lot. Those feelings would crash into each other, flip over; one would dominate, then the other. Then, when their youths respectively came to a screeching, early, and terrible halt, when Rick first pulled the moonlight away from him and saved him from the wolf inside, Jean realized all at once that he did not hate him, and never had.

He had been jealous from the start, jealous of all the things he thought Rick had that he didn’t: he looked clean, normal, well-fed, wealthy, healthy, and good in a way Jean had never seen in himself. He had never hated the conscientious little boy scout; he wanted to eat him up, to get him inside him. He wanted what Rick had. He wanted to put him in his house, in his stomach, like a bird in a cage, and keep him.

When he woke up on the morning after his first transformation it was with the firm memory of lunging at Rick with his claw outstretched, snapping down his jaws on him and feeling bone crunch, filling his mouth with his blood. He had a complete and visceral memory of literally eating Rick, tip to toes, and right next to it was the terrible realization that all along, he had really wanted to be friends.

But Rick was not dead. He was sitting right beside him, because he had been lying over him with his fists clutched in his fur all through the night. The wolf, like it would for the rest of his life, had lied to Jean. When a completely naked and sweat-soaked Jean pulled Rick into his arms and clung to him he cried, for the first time Rick had ever seen him cry.

He had seen what Rick had been through, and he knew Rick could handle the horror of what had just happened, and that he wouldn’t hate him for crying, and that meant a lot.

…Rick had still been regularly assuring Mina for years after that point that he had gotten over Jean. That closet door had gotten shabby after a while.

“Well! And you’re welcome,” Rick finally said, flipping the house keys out of his pocket and walking toward the front door. “It’s not like you managed to get a guy before I offered myself either.”

Jean watched him walk by with silent offense. “I had girlfriends,” he argued, and followed Rick inside.

They dumped everything haphazardly in the laundry room. Rick would sort it out and clean what needed cleaned when he had a little more time. “Right,” he said. “I’m going to sleep for as long as I can, you go get clean.”

“I’ll clean what I can clean,” Jean grumbled. “Good for dirt and grime, but as for the rot of the soul, the monster inside, etcetera…” he shrugged.

Rick grabbed his shoulder and rubbed it roughly a few times. Jean tried to swallow a smile. “Speaking of old times,” he said.

Jean hummed quizzically.

“I’m feeling a little nostalgic for the eyeliner,” he said, and gleefully ducked a poorly-executed swipe to the top of his head.

He scampered away faster than Jean’s tired pace could catch. Still chuckling, he made his way to the bedroom and, upon falling into bed, sank almost immediately into a quick and dreadfully dark doze to the sound of Jean griping from the other room, and the water gushing out of the shower-head.

He had set the alarm that would wake him in half an hour last night. There was nothing to worry about at all. In half an hour he would wake up, change, brush his teeth, grab a cup of coffee from the pot Jean made after his shower, drive to work, and have a generally bad day of it. Then he would look after the kids during club time and then he would come home, and Jean would be here, complaining, oozing malaise, smelling of smoke, sunk up to his elbows in some gristly or grimy project, like he always was. And then they would both sleep, exhausted out of their heads and unable to stay up even for the sunset, laying close to each other in the light.

The night after the full moon was Rick’s favorite, every time. That was the night he would be dreaming about if he had a worse life, just like he dreamed about the nights some better version of him was having, running wild with Jean under the full moon, unafraid. Some parallel universe Rick who had lost Jean that first night or any night along he way was not even daring to dream about the night he was having now, as a flood of amber light like the glimmer of sunlight on a lake pushed him down into sleep, and the waves lapping in his ears was Jean’s slowly deepening breathing, rasping in and out, so close it prickled at the side of his face.