FIC: Howl (2/?)
Sep. 21st, 2010 04:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nilchanceTitle: Howl
Author:nilchance and beanside
Rating: NC-17 overall
Pairing: Clay/Aisha; ultimately also Cougar/Jensen and Clay/Aisha/Cougar/Jensen
Warning: Violence. Also psychological and physical abuse, suicidal ideation, and a character being falsely identified as dead.
Disclaimer: Characters belong to Andy Diggle and to Jock. No profit made, no lawsuit preferred.
Summary: Werewolf fic. Three years have gone by since Jensen died; Cougar is not all right. When he goes in with Clay and Aisha to kill some vampires, they find someone unexpected.
The fight to access the hive is like every other that Aisha’s fought in the last 10 years. The vampires that survive are cowards, so she stakes them in the back. The martyrs that sacrifice themselves for their masters, they fight hard but stupidly and they die. Some escape her, but she can feel Cougar at her back, so those lucky few earn only minutes of life.
Clay splits from her just past the doorway, but his excitement echoes in the chambers of her heart. If she could see his face, she knows he would be smiling. She doesn’t feel him so keenly when they share a bed, but a hunting ground? Oh yes. Then their blood beats the same.
Clay wants revenge for his dead teammate, for Cougar’s suffering, for his country, for his own wounded pride. Aisha wants revenge for herself.
It’s a purer desire, and that’s why she is the one who finds Max.
She almost doesn’t recognize him, wearing a mask of fear. His eyes dart back and forth through the chaos, cutting a path. He has a suitcase in his hand. Wade is not there, his bodyguards are not there.
His eyes slide across her face, and past. He doesn’t know her.
He sold her. He fed from her. Two years and her father’s death, two years of hunting while grief burned a hole in her belly, and the son of a bitch didn’t recognize her face?
Aisha, Clay snaps at her as if she is one of his men.
Her vision veils red. She drops another vampire without looking at him, and she drags his body with her as a shield. She cuts through the chaos, heading for Max.
The herd of escaping vampires becomes suddenly quicker, more panicked; she glances at the source of this herding and finds an emaciated wraith of a man. He can barely walk, one foot stumbling ahead of the other, blood on his hands and in his matted dirty hair. He is naked and starved. These vampires shouldn’t be afraid of him, not this half-dead man, but he’s a were. He wants blood. And none of these vampires wants to be the one he kills before they can bring him down.
She is reminded of herself.
She drops her shield and shoves power at the wraith, alpha to pack, that this quarry is hers and she‘ll hurt him if he gets in her way. He doesn’t look at her.
Max makes his mistake: he breaks into a run.
They go down in a tangle of limbs, Max and the wraith. The wraith knots its (his) stick-bone fingers in Max’s hair and strikes his head hard into the floor. Again. Again. Max cries out once, his voice eerily like a carrion bird, and then his face hits stone with a wet crack and he says nothing more.
Either the wraith doesn’t notice or doesn’t care, because he continues pounding Max’s head against the floor. Blood splatters from the next impact, and the wraith’s knuckles are skinned to the bone.
Aisha meets Clay’s eyes over the mess, and sees that his frustration matches her own; the kill was to be theirs, not this stranger’s. She sees his fear that she will turn on him right here, over the body, and end him.
Cougar is not here. She could do it quick and be gone. She thinks Clay would have let her, once, but now he would resist for Cougar’s sake. For the child. They had mourned enough.
Clay killed her father; to let him live would be treachery.
Later, she tells him and herself. Later.
Despite everything, the loss of her revenge and the rising charnel-house stench as the wraith grinds Max to nothing, Aisha is stirred by Clay’s naked relief. She stares at him until he looks away first, to the wraith.
Blood sprays across his feet and shins, but Clay doesn’t seem to notice. In that wonderful alpha voice that Aisha has seen bring men and wolves to their knees, Clay says, “He’s dead now, kid.”
The wraith does not stop his savaging of the corpse. Aisha can hear his heart struggling against starvation and whatever trauma Max inflicted, but he doesn’t stop. Aisha isn’t sure he can see them now.
“It’s all right.” Clay leans power behind his voice until Aisha feels a secondhand rush of warmth. The wraith falters in his rhythm, and Clay adds, “You can stop now.”
The wraith blinks, eyes wide and blank in his blood-flecked face. Wary as an animal would be, but almost easing back from the edge. Almost.
Then comes a ripple of pain-surprise through the ties that bind them, Cougar’s emotions bright as a flare. Clay jerks his head up too fast to look at him, too fast-- the wraith snarls and goes for Clay‘s throat.
Her hissed warning is unnecessary, because Clay gets an arm up between himself and the wraith’s teeth. There’s a tussle, Clay’s greater strength against the wraith’s desperation. The wraith’s naked skin is slippery with blood; Clay struggles to hold him off, settling for shoving him back when he gets too close.
Cougar raises the tranq gun, sights, and hesitates on the trigger. Aisha curses and draws her knife, but then the matter is intellectual; Clay catches the wraith around his stomach, spins him and puts a hand on his nape. His power, so close, raises the fine hairs on Aisha‘s skin; the wraith shivers once and goes out, folding over Clay’s arm like a discarded jacket.
“Clay,” Cougar murmurs, high emotion humming beneath his voice. Aisha can’t unwind them all, but they’re loud.
“I know.” Clay eases the wraith down to the floor, still cradling him against his chest. “All this fucking time. Shit. Shit.”
“What are we talking about?” Aisha demands.
Cougar shakes his head, irritated with her or just overwhelmed, and takes a knee in front of Clay. With a shaking hand, Cougar strokes the wraith’s cheek. Even unconscious, the wraith flinches from him.
Cougar’s pain is like a man dying from a belly-wound. He withdraws his hand.
“Cougs,” Clay says. His voice is not gentle, and Cougar doesn’t see the look in his eyes. “I need you to get his legs.”
Cougar nods, shrugging out of his jacket and handing it to Clay. It’s small comfort, it won’t help-- Aisha has been this wraith, kneeling in her master’s blood, and she knows it might be kinder to leave him to quietly die here. But one look at them and she knows not to suggest that.
“Who is he?” she asks them, as Clay wraps the jacket around the wraith’s hips. The modesty is a mockery, considering that she can count the wraith‘s bones.
Clay tells her, not looking up, “It’s Jensen.”
Aisha blinks, her eyes sliding to Cougar. To the dogtag tattoo, and the grief it represents. Cougar holds the wraith up by the back of his knees, his jaw set hard enough to crack his teeth.
She says, “I will cover you.”
They leave the hive.
****
Jensen is alive.
It’s all Clay can think. His body is still in motion, helping Cougar to lift Jensen into the back of the bus, settling Jensen onto the mattress. Jensen feels like a schoolroom skeleton, strung together with rubber bands; his fear spills out his skin and floods the closed interior of the bus.
Clay’s wolf stirs and shows its teeth. It doesn’t know Jensen, it shouldn’t give a damn that this stranger is terrified and half-dead, and yet. The alpha wants to curl around Jensen and help him.
Which is a good sign, because Clay’s going to need its help. Jensen’s pulse is getting more erratic every minute that passes.
The bus engine turns over, and Aisha begins driving in her typical crazy-person manner.
Cougar is in full medic mode, retrieving his supplies from their storage bin under the mattress. His expression is all business, emotions buried, which he’ll pay for later; he always does. But for now, he’s solid as he starts the IV fluids on both Jensen’s arms. He works around the knots of scar tissue, unflinching.
Even with Clay leaning enough power on him to light Shanghai, Jensen jerks when the IV punctures skin. Cougar grabs him before he can hurt himself.
And then Jensen’s pulse bottoms out.
They all feel it. Aisha curses and swerves a little before straightening out; Cougar stills before saying, in that mild voice he uses when he’s terrified, “Clay?”
Clay puts his hand on Jensen’s chest, over his heart, and tries to jolt it back into rhythm. Nothing-- he can feel Jensen retreating deeper, like he’s running down a hallway. Escaping now that he’s got the chance.
How many times did Max go too far and kill him, only to bring him back?
“Aisha,” Clay says, “pull over.”
The bus swerves to a stop, knocking hard against a curb.
Help me out here, Cujo, Clay thinks to his wolf. It’s been a year since he made anyone pack, since Jolene, but the power surges eagerly to him like it’s been no time at all. He reaches out to twine it with Jensen’s power, to loan him enough strength to keep him going.
Jensen fights him. Doesn’t want to come back down the hall. His fear pounds on Clay like a riptide, trying to make him let go. Clay feels his own heart stutter in protest.
No. The hell he’s letting go now.
The wolf tells him loud and clear, mate.
Clay can count on one hand the number of times his wolf has spoken to him in words, all of them life-changing. It’s not just pointing out the obvious to the idiot human, as it did when he met Aisha and the wolf growled mine mine mine the whole time. Clay asked for its help; this is the answer. A mating bond would tie Jensen to his body, and allow Clay’s strength to keep Jensen alive until he healed.
Bind him or lose him.
Clay says to Aisha, “I need to--”
“Then do it,” she answers, because she knows. He loves her fiercely.
Holding Jensen where he is, half-alive, hurts like a bonfire behind Clay’s eyes. he can’t do this forever, he’ll just stroke out. But he does it for long enough to pull his boot-knife and open a burning cut down his forearm.
He reads the situation in flashes, distracted by pain and by keeping Jensen from sinking any deeper: Aisha is climbing over the driver’s seat, Cougar is forcing open Jensen’s mouth for Clay’s blood and rubbing his throat to make him swallow. Jensen stiffens all at once when the blood reaches him, jerky tension as if he’s being electrocuted. When Clay withdraws, Jensen slumps.
Jensen is mostly covered in filth, two clean patches where Cougar put each IV. Clay takes the knife and makes a tiny shallow cut on the left clean patch. The blood that wells sluggishly up is too pale, tainted with venom from long-term exposure to vampire blood. Cougar hisses through his teeth. Clay’s stomach rolls, but he bends and licks the wound.
Almost all he can taste is Max, sickly-sweet blood that’s drug and poison both. Deep beneath that, buried, there’s the earthiness of werewolf blood. Clay concentrates on that, and swallows without gagging.
The mating bond snaps into place like a bone setting. Clay puts his hand over Jensen’s heart and steadies it. It’s the most power he’s ever used in one day, let alone a few hours. He’s going to crash out later, a mandatory blackout. Reboot, Diana would say.
God, he doesn’t know what they’ll tell the kid.
The fatigue has already ground the edge off Clay’s instincts; Aisha reaches out and takes the blade from his hand with him only half-aware. Clay’s mind turns over the idea that she’ll just slit his throat and run, with Cougar too wrapped up in Jensen to chase her. He sees her consider it for a moment.
Mouth curving, Aisha turns the blade over in her hand and cuts herself. She is more aware of where she can safely cut, where the tendons and veins hide. She doesn’t hover above Jensen’s mouth, even though it’s still smeared with Clay’s blood. Instead, she presses her forearm to his lips, sealing herself to him, moving with him when he tries to turn away.
“Drink,” she tells him, voice husky and alpha-rich. Then, in rapid-fire Spanish as if she doesn‘t want to be caught, she adds, “Esta fuerte ahora.“
Jensen’s eyes move behind their closed lids, but he doesn’t swallow until Cougar massages his throat again. Jensen repeats the tension-relaxation response, the back of his head grinding into the mattress. A thin trickle escapes the corner of Jensen’s mouth as Aisha withdraws her arm. Aisha shifts like she wants to clean it, but Cougar gets there first; he dams the trickle with his thumb and smears it back up past Jensen’s lower lip.
The awful tenderness in Cougar’s eyes makes Clay want to look away. He doesn’t. He’s not sure he can ever look away from Jensen again, this unexpected gift, this second chance.
Aisha passes Cougar the knife. Cougar’s fingers are sticky on the hilt. Blood fills the rear of the bus with scent and heat; Clay can feel himself breathing faster, Jensen’s jack-rabbit heart beating stronger with each new bond.
Cougar opens his arm with the knife and feeds Jensen his blood, painstakingly gentle. He starts to reach for Jensen’s throat to make him swallow, but Jensen takes Cougar’s blood without a fight. He doesn’t seize; he tenses and relaxes in slower waves, his body almost undulating against the grubby mattress.
Clay can recognize Jensen as off limits, unconscious and too hurt, but his wolf stirs with half-lidded interest. Cujo wants to rub against Jensen’s skin, drench him in power, curl around him and warm him with its thick fur. Clay shoves the wolf down, focusing on the horrifying jut of Jensen’s hipbones and spines until it kills any desire.
Aisha bends down to the wound on Jensen’s arm and licks up his sluggish blood. Immediately, Clay feels the snap-impact of the mating tie, like getting hit in the chest with a rubber band. He tastes the venom again, bitter on his tongue. Aisha’s face screws up with disgust, and she coughs into her elbow.
Cougar has finished bleeding into Jensen; he retrieves the bottle of whiskey they keep for stitches and bullet wounds, and gives it to Aisha to wash her mouth out. Then it’s Cougar’s turn to lean over Jensen; he touches his thumb to the IV, checking it, evaluating the small necessary wounds.
“Don’t take too much,” Clay says, his voice startling against the quiet. Jensen twitches away from him, trying to curl up until Clay hits him with another dose of power. It’s getting harder to keep him under.
Cougar gives him a scouring look through his eyelashes. It needed saying, though, stubborn as Cougar is and as much as he’s grieved Jensen; Clay doesn’t apologize, and Cougar is the first one to look away.
When Cougar bends down to Jensen‘s arm, his hair slips from behind his ear to curtain his face. It doesn’t mask the sudden deep kick of their mating, its intimate rightness. Aisha rubs her cheek across Cougar’s back, like she’s scent-marking her territory, and rises.
“Driving now,” she says. “I’ll call Pooch and Jolene, if you want.”
She sounds so calm, as if the last few minutes were status quo. As if she can’t feel this new heartbeat in herself, a raw new set of information in her body and in her head. As if it wasn’t disorienting enough to have Max dead and no endgame spread before them, only… peace.
Clay’s never been any good at peace.
“No,” he tells her. “I ought to do it.”
Her eyes slide over his, a thin furrow between her eyebrows; he feels her touch the ties that bind them. He touches her back, thinks, I’ll be fine.
She’s concerned about him, and yet she’ll still kill him. Jensen used to say something about holding two contrary things in your mind being a mark of intelligence, and so Aisha must be a fucking genius.
She stumbles getting over the front seat, which makes Clay feel a little better about everything.
The engine turns over, and the bus starts to rock into motion. Lulling, as it turns out; Clay’s getting too old for this shit, because he wants to curl up nose to tail and sleep for the next few years.
He looks at Cougar, who still has his head down and his face hidden. Clay can hear him whispering, lo siento repeated over and over until it’s one long smear of sound.
Max had him for three years. Clay doesn’t want to think about that, or that all the information they’ve got on Max says that he can (could) crack a man apart in three days. He doesn’t want to wonder how long Jensen could’ve lasted, thinking they were coming for him, and how long after he knew they weren’t.
He doesn’t want to think about the fact that, when he pushed Jensen unconscious, he hadn’t felt him there in the darkness. That Jensen hadn’t tried to kill Max in a clever way, or an efficient way, or any way but chasing him down and beating him messily into the ground. No smart remarks, no attempts to run from them and parkour his merry way out of reach. Just animal violence.
Yeah. Clay has concerns. He buries them, too, to let his hindbrain roll them over and soften their edges into possible solutions. Army shrinks always told him he was excellent at compartmentalizing.
Clay stretches out and puts his hand on Cougar’s back, unsurprised to feel him flinch. After a moment, Cougar raises his head. His eyes are too bright. He keeps one hand on Jensen’s arm, stroking with his thumb. He’s trying so hard to keep his shit together that it makes Clay’s chest hurt a little.
“He’s alive,” Cougar says.
“Yeah,” Clay says. “He really is.”
It’s a quiet drive home. They’re both satisfied listening to Jensen breathe.
****
They rented a cabin, like they always do on hunts, as a precaution. It’s by Clay’s insistence, in case they end up taking back a stash of weapons they need to distribute or venom to destroy. Or in case one of them gets bitten, since the screaming and the delirium are too much to deal with inside the back of a bus.
Most times the cabins stay unseen, accustomed as they all are to sleeping in the van. Clay books them, Aisha pays, and Cougar tries to make sure they don’t have to use it.
The cabin is in Texas hill country, outside of San Antonio but not so close to any type of civilization that they’ll be noticed. The plan had been for them to enjoy a few days off post-hive, to rest in the sun-burnt places where Cougar grew up; this and the fact that they find Jensen within spitting distance of his abuelita‘s grave, tells him he’ll have to think about his faith again when this is over.
The cabin is off the main road, and there are several bumpy excruciating minutes Cougar wants to wipe away. It ends with Aisha cursing in Farsi, Clay looking pinched and Jensen making awful hurt sounds in his throat.
“I can’t keep him out much longer,” Clay says.
Once, years ago, the team went almost two weeks without any sleep for mission reasons. Clay may have looked that exhausted, then, but Cougar doubts it.
Aisha doesn’t bother answering, just turns the bus off and gets out. She probably looks around, too, to see if two people hauling a naked filthy half-starved man will catch any attention. Presumably not, because the back doors open.
Aisha tosses Clay a set of keys. At his raised eyebrow she says, “You’re going to have enough trouble carrying you.”
With a grunt, Clay hauls himself painfully out of the bus. Aisha looks after him, with more warmth than she would admit, then reaches for Jensen.
“Careful,” Cougar tells her, because he has to say it.
To her credit, Aisha does not laugh at his protectiveness; she says, “Of course,” as if it’s only rational.
It’s painful to see how easily Aisha lifts Jensen, like a child or a doll. It’s painful to feel every bone beneath his hands when Cougar hauls Jensen’s top half out of the bus. He could probably carry Jensen himself, despite Jensen’s height.
All that hard-won muscle Jensen carried is gone; any fat, gone; his glasses and affectations, gone. Cougar could murder Max again for turning Jensen into this, this brittle stick-boned shadow.
There is nothing to pad Jensen against their grip, and Cougar knows it must hurt. He murmurs in Jensen’s ear, nonsense Spanish he heard as a sick child. Funny that it’s him now trying to offer comfort to Jensen through his voice in the dark.
Clay returns from walking the cabin perimeter, his gun drawn but held low. Only for a moment, he’s distracted.
It only takes a moment for Jensen to snap back awake. He always was a light sleeper.
Before they feel him tense, Jensen drives his knee into Aisha’s stomach. She grunts and holds him tighter; he cracks his head back into Cougar’s collarbone hard enough to break either of their bones. Neither of them drop him, but Jensen fights harder.
He’s naked, and he’s desperate, and nobody is eager to hurt him to put him down. Jensen’s got the advantage, and he was always good at the quick exit.
Cougar feels Clay try to muscle through his exhaustion, his power like a bullet cutting through air, and then he smells blood. He darts a look at Clay, sees him bleeding from the nose and still reaching, and snaps, “Stop, boss.”
Jensen flinches from him, and it stills him for a second. Aisha nearly drops him.
Clay is alpha, but they’re all mated. So Cougar puts his hand on Jensen’s forehead and tries to push him back under, tries to think about safety and food and clean water.
Jensen turns his head and bites Cougar, his teeth to the wrist bone, which is about what Cougar deserves for trying it. Cougar hisses through his teeth but doesn’t let him go. He can feel Jensen’s thoughts passing like a lover’s shadow against a shower curtain, his feral panic and his run, run, run.
Jensen opens his eyes, he sees Cougar’s face, and they’re connected so tightly that Cougar knows that Jensen doesn’t recognize him at all.
Cool as anything, Aisha reaches between them and pulls Cougar’s tranquilizer gun. “Sorry,” she says, and puts three in Cougar’s thigh.
Cougar understands the idea, that Jensen is too sick to be drugged safely and that the sedation will pass between them like a shotgunned joint. Doing it three times seems unnecessary.
The drug burns. Jensen makes a wounded noise, kicks Aisha a few last times, and passes out. Cougar gives it a minute, until his own sight is weaving, then bends to pick the darts out of his leg. He gives Aisha a disgruntled look; she raises her eyebrows, unrepentant.
Clay touches Cougar’s back, trying to shuffle him aside. There’s smeared blood across Clay’s upper lip, and part of Cougar wants to lick it away. Jensen’s hunger, or Aisha’s; it’s getting difficult for him to keep their edges distinct.
Then again, it’s not as if Cougar has never thought about Clay’s mouth.
He lets Clay take Jensen’s weight, but doesn’t go more than three steps ahead. He won’t let Jensen out of his sight. If they have to carry him inside, too, then it won’t be the worst thing to happen today.
As they wobble across the threshold of the cabin, like some bizarre newlyweds, it occurs to Cougar to tell Clay, “He doesn’t remember who we are.”
Clay’s mouth draws thin. He says, “Then we tell him until it sticks.”
Author:
nilchance and beansideRating: NC-17 overall
Pairing: Clay/Aisha; ultimately also Cougar/Jensen and Clay/Aisha/Cougar/Jensen
Warning: Violence. Also psychological and physical abuse, suicidal ideation, and a character being falsely identified as dead.
Disclaimer: Characters belong to Andy Diggle and to Jock. No profit made, no lawsuit preferred.
Summary: Werewolf fic. Three years have gone by since Jensen died; Cougar is not all right. When he goes in with Clay and Aisha to kill some vampires, they find someone unexpected.
The fight to access the hive is like every other that Aisha’s fought in the last 10 years. The vampires that survive are cowards, so she stakes them in the back. The martyrs that sacrifice themselves for their masters, they fight hard but stupidly and they die. Some escape her, but she can feel Cougar at her back, so those lucky few earn only minutes of life.
Clay splits from her just past the doorway, but his excitement echoes in the chambers of her heart. If she could see his face, she knows he would be smiling. She doesn’t feel him so keenly when they share a bed, but a hunting ground? Oh yes. Then their blood beats the same.
Clay wants revenge for his dead teammate, for Cougar’s suffering, for his country, for his own wounded pride. Aisha wants revenge for herself.
It’s a purer desire, and that’s why she is the one who finds Max.
She almost doesn’t recognize him, wearing a mask of fear. His eyes dart back and forth through the chaos, cutting a path. He has a suitcase in his hand. Wade is not there, his bodyguards are not there.
His eyes slide across her face, and past. He doesn’t know her.
He sold her. He fed from her. Two years and her father’s death, two years of hunting while grief burned a hole in her belly, and the son of a bitch didn’t recognize her face?
Aisha, Clay snaps at her as if she is one of his men.
Her vision veils red. She drops another vampire without looking at him, and she drags his body with her as a shield. She cuts through the chaos, heading for Max.
The herd of escaping vampires becomes suddenly quicker, more panicked; she glances at the source of this herding and finds an emaciated wraith of a man. He can barely walk, one foot stumbling ahead of the other, blood on his hands and in his matted dirty hair. He is naked and starved. These vampires shouldn’t be afraid of him, not this half-dead man, but he’s a were. He wants blood. And none of these vampires wants to be the one he kills before they can bring him down.
She is reminded of herself.
She drops her shield and shoves power at the wraith, alpha to pack, that this quarry is hers and she‘ll hurt him if he gets in her way. He doesn’t look at her.
Max makes his mistake: he breaks into a run.
They go down in a tangle of limbs, Max and the wraith. The wraith knots its (his) stick-bone fingers in Max’s hair and strikes his head hard into the floor. Again. Again. Max cries out once, his voice eerily like a carrion bird, and then his face hits stone with a wet crack and he says nothing more.
Either the wraith doesn’t notice or doesn’t care, because he continues pounding Max’s head against the floor. Blood splatters from the next impact, and the wraith’s knuckles are skinned to the bone.
Aisha meets Clay’s eyes over the mess, and sees that his frustration matches her own; the kill was to be theirs, not this stranger’s. She sees his fear that she will turn on him right here, over the body, and end him.
Cougar is not here. She could do it quick and be gone. She thinks Clay would have let her, once, but now he would resist for Cougar’s sake. For the child. They had mourned enough.
Clay killed her father; to let him live would be treachery.
Later, she tells him and herself. Later.
Despite everything, the loss of her revenge and the rising charnel-house stench as the wraith grinds Max to nothing, Aisha is stirred by Clay’s naked relief. She stares at him until he looks away first, to the wraith.
Blood sprays across his feet and shins, but Clay doesn’t seem to notice. In that wonderful alpha voice that Aisha has seen bring men and wolves to their knees, Clay says, “He’s dead now, kid.”
The wraith does not stop his savaging of the corpse. Aisha can hear his heart struggling against starvation and whatever trauma Max inflicted, but he doesn’t stop. Aisha isn’t sure he can see them now.
“It’s all right.” Clay leans power behind his voice until Aisha feels a secondhand rush of warmth. The wraith falters in his rhythm, and Clay adds, “You can stop now.”
The wraith blinks, eyes wide and blank in his blood-flecked face. Wary as an animal would be, but almost easing back from the edge. Almost.
Then comes a ripple of pain-surprise through the ties that bind them, Cougar’s emotions bright as a flare. Clay jerks his head up too fast to look at him, too fast-- the wraith snarls and goes for Clay‘s throat.
Her hissed warning is unnecessary, because Clay gets an arm up between himself and the wraith’s teeth. There’s a tussle, Clay’s greater strength against the wraith’s desperation. The wraith’s naked skin is slippery with blood; Clay struggles to hold him off, settling for shoving him back when he gets too close.
Cougar raises the tranq gun, sights, and hesitates on the trigger. Aisha curses and draws her knife, but then the matter is intellectual; Clay catches the wraith around his stomach, spins him and puts a hand on his nape. His power, so close, raises the fine hairs on Aisha‘s skin; the wraith shivers once and goes out, folding over Clay’s arm like a discarded jacket.
“Clay,” Cougar murmurs, high emotion humming beneath his voice. Aisha can’t unwind them all, but they’re loud.
“I know.” Clay eases the wraith down to the floor, still cradling him against his chest. “All this fucking time. Shit. Shit.”
“What are we talking about?” Aisha demands.
Cougar shakes his head, irritated with her or just overwhelmed, and takes a knee in front of Clay. With a shaking hand, Cougar strokes the wraith’s cheek. Even unconscious, the wraith flinches from him.
Cougar’s pain is like a man dying from a belly-wound. He withdraws his hand.
“Cougs,” Clay says. His voice is not gentle, and Cougar doesn’t see the look in his eyes. “I need you to get his legs.”
Cougar nods, shrugging out of his jacket and handing it to Clay. It’s small comfort, it won’t help-- Aisha has been this wraith, kneeling in her master’s blood, and she knows it might be kinder to leave him to quietly die here. But one look at them and she knows not to suggest that.
“Who is he?” she asks them, as Clay wraps the jacket around the wraith’s hips. The modesty is a mockery, considering that she can count the wraith‘s bones.
Clay tells her, not looking up, “It’s Jensen.”
Aisha blinks, her eyes sliding to Cougar. To the dogtag tattoo, and the grief it represents. Cougar holds the wraith up by the back of his knees, his jaw set hard enough to crack his teeth.
She says, “I will cover you.”
They leave the hive.
****
Jensen is alive.
It’s all Clay can think. His body is still in motion, helping Cougar to lift Jensen into the back of the bus, settling Jensen onto the mattress. Jensen feels like a schoolroom skeleton, strung together with rubber bands; his fear spills out his skin and floods the closed interior of the bus.
Clay’s wolf stirs and shows its teeth. It doesn’t know Jensen, it shouldn’t give a damn that this stranger is terrified and half-dead, and yet. The alpha wants to curl around Jensen and help him.
Which is a good sign, because Clay’s going to need its help. Jensen’s pulse is getting more erratic every minute that passes.
The bus engine turns over, and Aisha begins driving in her typical crazy-person manner.
Cougar is in full medic mode, retrieving his supplies from their storage bin under the mattress. His expression is all business, emotions buried, which he’ll pay for later; he always does. But for now, he’s solid as he starts the IV fluids on both Jensen’s arms. He works around the knots of scar tissue, unflinching.
Even with Clay leaning enough power on him to light Shanghai, Jensen jerks when the IV punctures skin. Cougar grabs him before he can hurt himself.
And then Jensen’s pulse bottoms out.
They all feel it. Aisha curses and swerves a little before straightening out; Cougar stills before saying, in that mild voice he uses when he’s terrified, “Clay?”
Clay puts his hand on Jensen’s chest, over his heart, and tries to jolt it back into rhythm. Nothing-- he can feel Jensen retreating deeper, like he’s running down a hallway. Escaping now that he’s got the chance.
How many times did Max go too far and kill him, only to bring him back?
“Aisha,” Clay says, “pull over.”
The bus swerves to a stop, knocking hard against a curb.
Help me out here, Cujo, Clay thinks to his wolf. It’s been a year since he made anyone pack, since Jolene, but the power surges eagerly to him like it’s been no time at all. He reaches out to twine it with Jensen’s power, to loan him enough strength to keep him going.
Jensen fights him. Doesn’t want to come back down the hall. His fear pounds on Clay like a riptide, trying to make him let go. Clay feels his own heart stutter in protest.
No. The hell he’s letting go now.
The wolf tells him loud and clear, mate.
Clay can count on one hand the number of times his wolf has spoken to him in words, all of them life-changing. It’s not just pointing out the obvious to the idiot human, as it did when he met Aisha and the wolf growled mine mine mine the whole time. Clay asked for its help; this is the answer. A mating bond would tie Jensen to his body, and allow Clay’s strength to keep Jensen alive until he healed.
Bind him or lose him.
Clay says to Aisha, “I need to--”
“Then do it,” she answers, because she knows. He loves her fiercely.
Holding Jensen where he is, half-alive, hurts like a bonfire behind Clay’s eyes. he can’t do this forever, he’ll just stroke out. But he does it for long enough to pull his boot-knife and open a burning cut down his forearm.
He reads the situation in flashes, distracted by pain and by keeping Jensen from sinking any deeper: Aisha is climbing over the driver’s seat, Cougar is forcing open Jensen’s mouth for Clay’s blood and rubbing his throat to make him swallow. Jensen stiffens all at once when the blood reaches him, jerky tension as if he’s being electrocuted. When Clay withdraws, Jensen slumps.
Jensen is mostly covered in filth, two clean patches where Cougar put each IV. Clay takes the knife and makes a tiny shallow cut on the left clean patch. The blood that wells sluggishly up is too pale, tainted with venom from long-term exposure to vampire blood. Cougar hisses through his teeth. Clay’s stomach rolls, but he bends and licks the wound.
Almost all he can taste is Max, sickly-sweet blood that’s drug and poison both. Deep beneath that, buried, there’s the earthiness of werewolf blood. Clay concentrates on that, and swallows without gagging.
The mating bond snaps into place like a bone setting. Clay puts his hand over Jensen’s heart and steadies it. It’s the most power he’s ever used in one day, let alone a few hours. He’s going to crash out later, a mandatory blackout. Reboot, Diana would say.
God, he doesn’t know what they’ll tell the kid.
The fatigue has already ground the edge off Clay’s instincts; Aisha reaches out and takes the blade from his hand with him only half-aware. Clay’s mind turns over the idea that she’ll just slit his throat and run, with Cougar too wrapped up in Jensen to chase her. He sees her consider it for a moment.
Mouth curving, Aisha turns the blade over in her hand and cuts herself. She is more aware of where she can safely cut, where the tendons and veins hide. She doesn’t hover above Jensen’s mouth, even though it’s still smeared with Clay’s blood. Instead, she presses her forearm to his lips, sealing herself to him, moving with him when he tries to turn away.
“Drink,” she tells him, voice husky and alpha-rich. Then, in rapid-fire Spanish as if she doesn‘t want to be caught, she adds, “Esta fuerte ahora.“
Jensen’s eyes move behind their closed lids, but he doesn’t swallow until Cougar massages his throat again. Jensen repeats the tension-relaxation response, the back of his head grinding into the mattress. A thin trickle escapes the corner of Jensen’s mouth as Aisha withdraws her arm. Aisha shifts like she wants to clean it, but Cougar gets there first; he dams the trickle with his thumb and smears it back up past Jensen’s lower lip.
The awful tenderness in Cougar’s eyes makes Clay want to look away. He doesn’t. He’s not sure he can ever look away from Jensen again, this unexpected gift, this second chance.
Aisha passes Cougar the knife. Cougar’s fingers are sticky on the hilt. Blood fills the rear of the bus with scent and heat; Clay can feel himself breathing faster, Jensen’s jack-rabbit heart beating stronger with each new bond.
Cougar opens his arm with the knife and feeds Jensen his blood, painstakingly gentle. He starts to reach for Jensen’s throat to make him swallow, but Jensen takes Cougar’s blood without a fight. He doesn’t seize; he tenses and relaxes in slower waves, his body almost undulating against the grubby mattress.
Clay can recognize Jensen as off limits, unconscious and too hurt, but his wolf stirs with half-lidded interest. Cujo wants to rub against Jensen’s skin, drench him in power, curl around him and warm him with its thick fur. Clay shoves the wolf down, focusing on the horrifying jut of Jensen’s hipbones and spines until it kills any desire.
Aisha bends down to the wound on Jensen’s arm and licks up his sluggish blood. Immediately, Clay feels the snap-impact of the mating tie, like getting hit in the chest with a rubber band. He tastes the venom again, bitter on his tongue. Aisha’s face screws up with disgust, and she coughs into her elbow.
Cougar has finished bleeding into Jensen; he retrieves the bottle of whiskey they keep for stitches and bullet wounds, and gives it to Aisha to wash her mouth out. Then it’s Cougar’s turn to lean over Jensen; he touches his thumb to the IV, checking it, evaluating the small necessary wounds.
“Don’t take too much,” Clay says, his voice startling against the quiet. Jensen twitches away from him, trying to curl up until Clay hits him with another dose of power. It’s getting harder to keep him under.
Cougar gives him a scouring look through his eyelashes. It needed saying, though, stubborn as Cougar is and as much as he’s grieved Jensen; Clay doesn’t apologize, and Cougar is the first one to look away.
When Cougar bends down to Jensen‘s arm, his hair slips from behind his ear to curtain his face. It doesn’t mask the sudden deep kick of their mating, its intimate rightness. Aisha rubs her cheek across Cougar’s back, like she’s scent-marking her territory, and rises.
“Driving now,” she says. “I’ll call Pooch and Jolene, if you want.”
She sounds so calm, as if the last few minutes were status quo. As if she can’t feel this new heartbeat in herself, a raw new set of information in her body and in her head. As if it wasn’t disorienting enough to have Max dead and no endgame spread before them, only… peace.
Clay’s never been any good at peace.
“No,” he tells her. “I ought to do it.”
Her eyes slide over his, a thin furrow between her eyebrows; he feels her touch the ties that bind them. He touches her back, thinks, I’ll be fine.
She’s concerned about him, and yet she’ll still kill him. Jensen used to say something about holding two contrary things in your mind being a mark of intelligence, and so Aisha must be a fucking genius.
She stumbles getting over the front seat, which makes Clay feel a little better about everything.
The engine turns over, and the bus starts to rock into motion. Lulling, as it turns out; Clay’s getting too old for this shit, because he wants to curl up nose to tail and sleep for the next few years.
He looks at Cougar, who still has his head down and his face hidden. Clay can hear him whispering, lo siento repeated over and over until it’s one long smear of sound.
Max had him for three years. Clay doesn’t want to think about that, or that all the information they’ve got on Max says that he can (could) crack a man apart in three days. He doesn’t want to wonder how long Jensen could’ve lasted, thinking they were coming for him, and how long after he knew they weren’t.
He doesn’t want to think about the fact that, when he pushed Jensen unconscious, he hadn’t felt him there in the darkness. That Jensen hadn’t tried to kill Max in a clever way, or an efficient way, or any way but chasing him down and beating him messily into the ground. No smart remarks, no attempts to run from them and parkour his merry way out of reach. Just animal violence.
Yeah. Clay has concerns. He buries them, too, to let his hindbrain roll them over and soften their edges into possible solutions. Army shrinks always told him he was excellent at compartmentalizing.
Clay stretches out and puts his hand on Cougar’s back, unsurprised to feel him flinch. After a moment, Cougar raises his head. His eyes are too bright. He keeps one hand on Jensen’s arm, stroking with his thumb. He’s trying so hard to keep his shit together that it makes Clay’s chest hurt a little.
“He’s alive,” Cougar says.
“Yeah,” Clay says. “He really is.”
It’s a quiet drive home. They’re both satisfied listening to Jensen breathe.
****
They rented a cabin, like they always do on hunts, as a precaution. It’s by Clay’s insistence, in case they end up taking back a stash of weapons they need to distribute or venom to destroy. Or in case one of them gets bitten, since the screaming and the delirium are too much to deal with inside the back of a bus.
Most times the cabins stay unseen, accustomed as they all are to sleeping in the van. Clay books them, Aisha pays, and Cougar tries to make sure they don’t have to use it.
The cabin is in Texas hill country, outside of San Antonio but not so close to any type of civilization that they’ll be noticed. The plan had been for them to enjoy a few days off post-hive, to rest in the sun-burnt places where Cougar grew up; this and the fact that they find Jensen within spitting distance of his abuelita‘s grave, tells him he’ll have to think about his faith again when this is over.
The cabin is off the main road, and there are several bumpy excruciating minutes Cougar wants to wipe away. It ends with Aisha cursing in Farsi, Clay looking pinched and Jensen making awful hurt sounds in his throat.
“I can’t keep him out much longer,” Clay says.
Once, years ago, the team went almost two weeks without any sleep for mission reasons. Clay may have looked that exhausted, then, but Cougar doubts it.
Aisha doesn’t bother answering, just turns the bus off and gets out. She probably looks around, too, to see if two people hauling a naked filthy half-starved man will catch any attention. Presumably not, because the back doors open.
Aisha tosses Clay a set of keys. At his raised eyebrow she says, “You’re going to have enough trouble carrying you.”
With a grunt, Clay hauls himself painfully out of the bus. Aisha looks after him, with more warmth than she would admit, then reaches for Jensen.
“Careful,” Cougar tells her, because he has to say it.
To her credit, Aisha does not laugh at his protectiveness; she says, “Of course,” as if it’s only rational.
It’s painful to see how easily Aisha lifts Jensen, like a child or a doll. It’s painful to feel every bone beneath his hands when Cougar hauls Jensen’s top half out of the bus. He could probably carry Jensen himself, despite Jensen’s height.
All that hard-won muscle Jensen carried is gone; any fat, gone; his glasses and affectations, gone. Cougar could murder Max again for turning Jensen into this, this brittle stick-boned shadow.
There is nothing to pad Jensen against their grip, and Cougar knows it must hurt. He murmurs in Jensen’s ear, nonsense Spanish he heard as a sick child. Funny that it’s him now trying to offer comfort to Jensen through his voice in the dark.
Clay returns from walking the cabin perimeter, his gun drawn but held low. Only for a moment, he’s distracted.
It only takes a moment for Jensen to snap back awake. He always was a light sleeper.
Before they feel him tense, Jensen drives his knee into Aisha’s stomach. She grunts and holds him tighter; he cracks his head back into Cougar’s collarbone hard enough to break either of their bones. Neither of them drop him, but Jensen fights harder.
He’s naked, and he’s desperate, and nobody is eager to hurt him to put him down. Jensen’s got the advantage, and he was always good at the quick exit.
Cougar feels Clay try to muscle through his exhaustion, his power like a bullet cutting through air, and then he smells blood. He darts a look at Clay, sees him bleeding from the nose and still reaching, and snaps, “Stop, boss.”
Jensen flinches from him, and it stills him for a second. Aisha nearly drops him.
Clay is alpha, but they’re all mated. So Cougar puts his hand on Jensen’s forehead and tries to push him back under, tries to think about safety and food and clean water.
Jensen turns his head and bites Cougar, his teeth to the wrist bone, which is about what Cougar deserves for trying it. Cougar hisses through his teeth but doesn’t let him go. He can feel Jensen’s thoughts passing like a lover’s shadow against a shower curtain, his feral panic and his run, run, run.
Jensen opens his eyes, he sees Cougar’s face, and they’re connected so tightly that Cougar knows that Jensen doesn’t recognize him at all.
Cool as anything, Aisha reaches between them and pulls Cougar’s tranquilizer gun. “Sorry,” she says, and puts three in Cougar’s thigh.
Cougar understands the idea, that Jensen is too sick to be drugged safely and that the sedation will pass between them like a shotgunned joint. Doing it three times seems unnecessary.
The drug burns. Jensen makes a wounded noise, kicks Aisha a few last times, and passes out. Cougar gives it a minute, until his own sight is weaving, then bends to pick the darts out of his leg. He gives Aisha a disgruntled look; she raises her eyebrows, unrepentant.
Clay touches Cougar’s back, trying to shuffle him aside. There’s smeared blood across Clay’s upper lip, and part of Cougar wants to lick it away. Jensen’s hunger, or Aisha’s; it’s getting difficult for him to keep their edges distinct.
Then again, it’s not as if Cougar has never thought about Clay’s mouth.
He lets Clay take Jensen’s weight, but doesn’t go more than three steps ahead. He won’t let Jensen out of his sight. If they have to carry him inside, too, then it won’t be the worst thing to happen today.
As they wobble across the threshold of the cabin, like some bizarre newlyweds, it occurs to Cougar to tell Clay, “He doesn’t remember who we are.”
Clay’s mouth draws thin. He says, “Then we tell him until it sticks.”
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Date: 2010-09-21 10:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-22 08:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-22 01:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-22 09:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-23 12:20 am (UTC)I love this story. It's visceral and painful and gut-wrenching and powerful--and tender, in a very primal sort of way. I can't wait for more.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-22 03:05 am (UTC)thank you so much for sharing
no subject
Date: 2010-09-22 09:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-22 02:58 am (UTC)You are genius.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-22 01:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-22 03:14 am (UTC)I was so tense reading this, wanting the next flow of words but dreading them at the same time because each word meant I was closer to the end.
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Date: 2010-09-22 02:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-22 04:25 am (UTC)And I love Cougar thinking that three tranq darts just seems unnecessary.
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Date: 2010-09-22 02:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-22 09:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-22 02:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-22 11:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-22 02:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-23 11:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-23 06:41 am (UTC)love this love this love this and think you should have a big shiny gold star and good vibes! x
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Date: 2010-09-23 12:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-23 10:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-25 03:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-25 11:51 pm (UTC)This is just awesome! So, SO good!
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Date: 2010-09-26 08:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-19 07:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-21 01:19 pm (UTC)