Instinctual

Chapter 9

The old hunting cabin was in pretty good shape, all things considered. The Fen pack had only moved here in the past year, but Liz had always liked exploring, and Kobi had always liked working with his hands – so the former had found the place and the latter had been working on it off and on to patch it up. There had been quite a few jokes about the dating pair making a ‘love-nest.’

As Declan stepped inside the door and finally brought himself and Marcus out of the rain, he decided that the cabin wasn’t quite up to the standards of a decent love-nest, but at least Kobi had sealed it against mice and weather. He remembered when Kobi had driven the truck out here, depositing the worn futon that was now one of the few pieces of furniture within the place.  It smelled of Kobi and Liz and warm happiness, getting Declan to relax even as he tightened his arms around Marcus and wished he could impart some of that feeling to him.  The little Omega had barely moved since Declan had picked him up, besides constantly shivering. In fact, Declan was pretty sure that if he hadn’t walked carefully, Marcus wouldn’t have even bothered to shift his snout out of the way of passing branches; he was passive in a way that was unsettling.

Pushing the door shut on the rain, a gentle kick of his heel doing the job, Declan glanced around with relief to see that there was also a blanket or three as well as chopped wood sitting dry and ready by the small fire-place.

“I’m going to put you down, okay, Marcus?” he gave the Omega plenty of warning before slowly bending over to deposit him on the floor between the futon and the hearth. He kind of missed the feeling of soft (but wet) white fur against his hands as soon as he let go, and was pretty sure that Marcus missed it, too, if only because he had to stand under his own power now.  He didn’t seem to have either the will or strength for it, and only wobbled on his four paws for a moment before crumpling to the ground.  Sighing, knowing that there wasn’t anything he could do about that yet, Declan turned away from the small white wolf he was now sharing space with, instead turning his attention to getting a fire started.  He glanced back frequently while finding matches and wadded up newspaper to breathe life into a warm blaze, watching as white paws were tucked carefully beneath a trembling body, tail coiled so close against the wolf’s rump that it looked honestly like he didn’t have one.  Stunning blue eyes were nearly closed, and focused off to the side, with a sort of strained deference that made Declan feel unaccountably like he was a horrible person – once again, the Omega was doing everything he could to appear submissive and non-threatening, even when Declan had never demanded the former from any Omega, and as for the latter…

There was just no possible way that Declan could be afraid of a young man who was obviously so scared, regardless of whether he had fangs and claws at his disposal right now.

“You don’t have to do that, you know,” Declan said awkwardly as the fire began to devour the paper, hungrily blackening it before reaching for a more stable food-source in the form of a small stick.  Declan began to slowly feed it larger and larger logs. “You don’t have to make yourself small and inconspicuous just so I’ll… so I’ll tolerate you.” The words tasted so wrong in his mouth that the Alpha couldn’t help but grimace.

He got no answer, of course, because Marcus seemed reluctant to change back, and the telepathy appeared to have been a fluke.  Declan was still confused as to how their minds had linked up in the first place, although he thought it had something to do with just how furious and disgusted he was with Clarissa, the pack’s native Omega, at the moment – he also liked to think that it was because he sincerely cared about Marcus’s wellbeing by this point, and wanted to help him regardless of whether he was packless or not.  “If you change back, we’ll get you dried off, and then you can tell me your story,” the Alpha finally said calmly, still watching the fire.  It was throwing off a pleasant and powerful heat now, but he wished he could find easy answers in its fickle, leaping flames.

The sounds of straining, snapping bones heralded Marcus’s willingness to follow this plan.  Declan was very proud of himself for remembering the Omega’s particular weakness to commands, and there hadn’t been a hint of it in his voice so far.  He turned as he heard a throat being carefully cleared, and a soft voice saying, “I have your coat.”

Like the sweatpants and bandages, Declan’s jacket had been close enough to Marcus’s skin to undergo the transformation with him.  Now it was once again draped over lean shoulders, but Marcus was quick to slide it off and proffer it in one long-fingered hand. Without the jacket, various scars were all-too-visible against the skin of his chest, shoulders, belly, and arms, the firelight not quite managing to soften them.  When Declan didn’t take the coat fast enough – caught staring instead – Marcus lost his courage and simply leaned forward to drop it between them. Eyes downcast but body tense from something other than shivering, the smaller young man withdrew again, until he was sitting with his back against the edge of the futon.

Declan had hoped that he’d say something more, but sighed in resignation when Marcus instead just reverted to what he’d been doing previously, as a wolf: keeping his eyes down and doing his best not to exist.

Projecting his movements so as not to startle the fragile Werewolf unnecessarily, Declan got up, grabbing one of the blankets folded not far from the fire. It smelled a little musty, but was clean and dry.  Shaking it out a moment to gather his thoughts, Declan made up his mind on what he wanted to do before coming up to Marcus. He had to ignore the way the little Wolf sidled away from him, pressing one shoulder a bit more firmly against the couch while trying not to appear like he was avoiding anything. Sharp fear ignited in blue eyes that were focused somewhere off towards the sparse little kitchen.

“Shhh, shhh,” Declan hushed, gentling his tone, “I’m not going to hurt you. I know you don’t believe me, but I’ve been doing pretty well lately, right?” The Alpha squatted down by the shoulder Marcus had turned to him (the term ‘turning a cold shoulder’ came rather literally to his mind), blanket draped across his hands as he did his best to catch Marcus’s eyes – if only so Marcus could see that he was smiling, and not angry or defensive. “I just want to dry you off.” Doubting that he’d get any sort of permission – either verbal or gestural – Declan waited a few moments before beginning to run his blanket-covered hands as gently as he could over Marcus’s wet, cold skin.

The little Omega immediately closed his eyes and let out a little sigh, something resembling a whine threading through the breath, so quiet that Declan almost didn’t hear it.  The Alpha thought for a frightened moment that he actually had hurt Marcus, but then the shivering torso leaned into his hands a little bit.  Marcus hunched his shoulders as if ashamed a moment later, straining the injury on the side of his neck, no doubt, but ducking his head and turning further away nonetheless.

Slowly, Declan began to understand.

“It’s all right, Marcus,” he whispered, stroking the impromptu towel down Marcus’s back, which was scarred like the hide of a street mutt, or a fighting dog. Soft skin like this shouldn’t have been so roughened up.  “You haven’t had an Alpha in a long time, have you?”

Marcus cleared his throat again, and though he didn’t turn back to Declan, the Alpha could hear how thick the smaller man’s voice was, “Not in four years.”

The length of time startled Declan, but at least Marcus had his back to him now, and therefore wasn’t watching to see his gold-brown eyes widen. He continued to dry Marcus off, beginning to understand just why the Omega was letting him instead of taking the blanket for himself – and also understanding what had driven Marcus to inhale deeply of the scent of Declan’s coat.

Liz and Kobi (and, once upon a time, even occasionally his aunt and Rob) came to Declan for comfort, drawing a natural sense of tranquility from his presence and scent. Marcus hadn’t had anything like that in four years, and had definitely been in circumstances that would cry out for an Alpha’s natural sense of security.  He was enjoying that sense of safety vicariously now, stealing calmness and safety from an Alpha that wasn’t his, and felt so clearly guilty that Declan could detect it in nearly all of his senses.

And even pick it up, as a vague sort of sound, telepathically. It sounded like rejoicing and crying at the same time, heard from the other side of a bolted door.

Feeling his heart stretching and tearing, Declan swallowed the lump building in his throat and draped the blanket over Rushton’s soaked head, which bowed beneath the weight without protest as Declan began to dry that, too. Hidden by the fall of the blanket, Marcus cried; Declan could hear it in the soft whines and painfully hitched breaths.  Declan also took the opportunity to move just a little bit closer, though, kneeling up so that there was barely half a foot between them, and he didn’t miss the way Marcus started to lean back but then stopped himself, muscles quaking with the effort it took to hold still.

‘…None of this is mine,’ Declan just picked up in his head before the telepathic link broke and faded again.

“I… I should get out of these wet pants,” Marcus said, voice stiff and unnatural as he tried to accomplish a detached tone of voice. Declan lowered the blanket off him, wishing he could see that tousled head of damp hair in other circumstances – it would look adorable.  “Do you…? I mean, are there any dry clothes here I could change into?” he asked apprehensively.

“I hope so, because I’m soaked to the bone, too,” Declan tried to inject normalcy and cheer into his voice, and thought that he had almost managed it as he pushed to his feet. He left the blanket. He also pretended not to notice when Marcus scooped it up hesitantly and carefully, and then bundled it around himself.  The wet portion was turned outwards, the dry side that had been touching Declan’s hands and forearms was pressed up against Marcus’s nose and face.

Marcus hadn’t moved from that pose by the time Declan returned a few moments later, glad that Liz and Kobi probably were fooling around in the privacy of this little cabin, because it meant there were a few changes of clothes stashed away in the small bathroom.  He’d gone ahead and changed in there, and felt rather triumphant as he now padded out with one more set of clothes for Marcus.  He didn’t expect the Omega to speak: “I’m broken.”  There was a little pause during which Declan froze, bewildered, and Marcus didn’t open his eyes.  His voice was a bit muffled by the blanket, because he still had his mouth and nose buried in it. “Omegas… aren’t supposed to live on their own.  I think it’s like a sickness that eats away as us… at me.  Or else I’m going insane.”

“What are you talking about, Marcus?”

Squirming in place for a moment, Marcus rubbed his face back and forth, and Declan caught the brief, agonized grimace that twisted the smaller man’s mouth downwards and beetled his brows.  “I can’t tune things out sometimes.”  He sounded close to crying again, but was holding onto control with threadbare tenacity. “A lot of the time. Smell is the worst, but…” And now he broke: a sob shook his shoulders and cracked his words in half.  Marcus hunched his knees up beneath the blanket and buried himself entirely in it, except for his ridiculously tousled, still-damp hair. “…But the smell of a f*****g Alpha makes it better!” he finished in furious helplessness, and everything fell into place.

Ignoring the swearing – Declan wasn’t so soft as to be offended by something like that, and he no longer felt even the vaguest impulse to be angry at every little thing the packless Omega did – Declan padded forward with a soft, sad sigh. Marcus was crying hard even as he obviously fought not to, all of the stress and strain clearly catching up to him. And it must have been a lot of stress and strain, because his small body was absolutely shaking with it, curled in on itself like something imploding, the blanket providing a pathetic façade of privacy.

Hooking the new pair of sweatpants and T-shirt over his shoulder, Declan bent down and carefully gripped Marcus’s elbows, drawing him upwards as his last sob became a painful keen.  He’d noticed that Marcus sounded more wolf-like than nearly any Werewolf he’d ever met, while still wearing his human skin.  It was as if he were a little bit feral.  “Let’s get you into some dry clothes, Marcus,” the Alpha said with soft compassion, no judgment in his voice, and even though he wasn’t being ordered anywhere, Marcus let the blanket drop and scrubbed at his teary eyes with one hand before letting Declan lead him closer to the warm fire and gently strip him.

~^~

“You must think I’m pathetic.”  Marcus’s voice, now that he’d cried himself out, was toneless and weary. He was sitting back on the couch now, head against the arm-rest and body stretched halfway across it. The Omega could have taken up more space, as Declan was only sitting on the far fourth of it, but Marcus kept his legs bent and tucked in anyway, now sans bandages but with the left leg of his new sweatpants rolled up to avoid more blood. Because of the torn stitches and Marcus’s compromised ability to heal himself, the bite-wound on his calf would likely scar. The soaked bandages on his neck and arm had been removed, too, but they merely looked painful and red – no torn stitches. It all looked very stark against the oversized black T-shirt the Omega was now wearing, a color that wasn’t flattering when his skin was so pale, not to mention blotchy from crying. Marcus fisted his hand reflexively where his injured arm was laid over his stomach.

Still a little bit shell-shocked from all this, although still maintaining a steady, calm demeanor, Declan turned his attention from the lessening rain back to Marcus.  “No, I don’t,” he replied.

Marcus’s disbelief was palpable, but he didn’t address it. “I said that I’d tell you my story, and I may as well start.  This can hardly get any worse.”

“Marcus…”

“I said I’d tell you, and I want to!” the Omega raised his voice suddenly to almost a shout, but then backed off.  Had he been in lupine form, his ears would have laid back on his head and his tail would have tucked. “Sorry, it’s…”

“It’s hard. I understand,” Declan hurried to mollify him.

But the Omega just wrapped both arms around his middle and huddled his knees in closer, like a barricade to hide behind as he stared up at the ceiling. “It’s not, really. It’s actually quite simple,” he began, in a shaky voice that came as if from far away – or like heartbreak locked beneath a layer of fragile ice, “I got in an argument with my Alpha over something stupid. A disagreement between myself and someone else – he’d sided with Melissa, and I thought I was right.” Marcus paused, rubbing at one of the scars on his forearm, and now his eyes were barren and dry as he stared at the ceiling but watched something else. “I got mad; we yelled. Mostly I yelled. God, I was so childish… Then I stormed out.” He finished with a clinical detachedness that sounded desperately wrong, especially when Declan could smell his pain and sorrow as clearly as if it were the stench of ammonia and sulfur, “And when I came back, they were all dead.”

“So what happened?” Declan pressed after a moment spent processing that. He didn’t know what he’d imagined… but this wasn’t it.  Somehow, the truth right out of Marcus’s mouth was more violent than a sledgehammer, even if Marcus was somehow managing to tell the story with a flat, dead tone instead of an emotional one.

Shockingly, Marcus’s answer was simple: “I don’t know.  I don’t remember.  I have a vague memory of leaving the house to go to a bar some of my friends frequented, but it’s all fuzzy.  It was like I closed my eyes a few blocks from my house, and opened them again as I stepped into the house to see…”  He choked, swallowed, but continued like the martyr he was right now, “…To see the bodies of my family all over the floor.  I…I tried to revive them.  I was told that I didn’t call an ambulance until it was too late, though, but everything was so fuzzy…!”

Marcus had to stop because his voice had been rising hysterically, his brittle calm shattering. While Declan just stared, horrified as he pictured all of this, Marcus covered his face with his hands and cried again.

But, stubbornly, he forced himself to speak once more. By this point, Declan just wanted to tell him to stop, but the Alpha was stunned, and Marcus had promised to rip himself open if only to give one person the truth as he remembered it.  Or, rather, as he didn’t.   “I think… I think that they were dead even before I got home, but people have said that that’s a lie, or wishful thinking. When the ambulance and police arrived, I was whisked away so fast that…” His voice dropped to a whisper, and his hands were still over his eyes. “If they had still been alive at all, and died later, I…I never knew.  No one told me. No one let me stay with them. I just wanted to stay with them…”

Another long, tormented pause.  Declan wanted to reach out and touch, but Marcus had pulled his feet back as far as he could, and looked as fragile as glass that already had cracks fissured all through it.

“I told everyone that I didn’t remember, but there were no drugs in my system to corroborate that story,” Marcus continued, gaining some measure of control now that he’d gotten the worst of the story out.  That didn’t mean it wasn’t painful.  “There were no fingerprints in the house to indicate a stranger, and there was no sign of a break-in, so they told me that it must have been me who did it. Me.” Abruptly, Marcus got up. He didn’t go far, and he limped horribly with his one rolled-up pant-leg riding level with his left knee. Nonetheless, he staggered back and forth, pacing furiously with his knuckles pressed against his eyesockets, and forced the words out like fishhooks pulled from his throat, “It’s hard to kill a whole pack like that so cleanly, they said!  Only someone they knew could have accomplished it, they said! They said more things that I can’t remember, because I was grieving!” By now, Marcus was screaming again, as if none of this had had a chance to come out before – and maybe it hadn’t. “I just wanted to be with… with them. Even if they were… I just wanted to see them. My last memory of my entire pack is of them…!”

Marcus stopped pacing to just stand hunched by the fire, staring into it with his arms dropping to his sides.  His voice came out as a little mewl, so tiny and so lost, “Is of them covered in blood, strewn across the house like something thought they were trash.” When Marcus unexpectedly turned to meet Declan’s eyes, his blue gaze was glistening with tears, tracks running silently down his face, which looked terribly young and open at that moment, making Declan’s heart seize.  “My own family won’t even see me, you know?  My birth-family.  My uncle is the Omega of that pack, so I moved to another when I turned seventeen, but we still talked on the phone and they visited.  But then the lawyers and the police officers said that neighbors had heard me yelling profanities at my Alpha, and all of the facts did… do… point to me. My family disowned me officially just a week after my pack was murdered.”

The bottom fell out of Declan’s stomach, and he thought he was going to be sick. The picture being painted before him in vivid, gory brush-strokes was almost more than he knew how to comprehend. From what he knew of Marcus, he had a hard time believing that he really was capable of m*********r, but regardless of the truth, no one should have had to undergo what Marcus did afterwards: torn from his slaughtered pack without closure, immediately tossed into a judicial whirlwind while the grief was still fresh, then pounded with allegations that he’d done all of this and it was his fault.  On top of all that, his family had believed the opposing side, and had abandoned him.

Marcus dropped his eyes to look at the floor, his weight shifting over to his good leg just as the other threatened to give out on him. He shook everywhere, despite the way the fire had heated up the small cabin.  “I ran away about a week later,” he whispered, “They were moving me to another jail-cell from the one I’d been sleeping in since everything happened-” Declan flinched again at the callousness of that act alone – if he’d just lost his entire pack, he wouldn’t have wanted to cope with that alone in a cell. “-and someone neglected to cuff me. I guess I’m not very physically intimidating.”  Marcus made a dry noise in his throat as if he were trying to laugh, but failing miserably. He shook his head. “I know how this all sounds. With my own Alpha dead, there’s no one to be able to tell if I’m telling the truth either – I was told that that was awfully convenient.” Marcus flinched but went on, “And I know that running away only makes me seem more guilty – believe me, I know that. But… at the moment, it’d seemed like the only option.”  He locked his arms tight around his middle again, looking small and breakable as he gripped his own ribs.  “I just wanted to get away and grieve,” he said in a pitch that Declan was probably not meant to hear. It was made of nothing but heartbreak. “I just wanted to grieve.”

After a long silence – stretched out like the edges of a wound, nerve-endings screaming – Marcus sagged again, sighing as if the wind had been punched out of him. His head lifted, but his eyes were still closed, as if he didn’t care to see anymore of the world, or of Declan’s reaction.  He looked haggard and drawn, exhausted in a way that went beyond mere physical fatigue. It looked like a kind of tiredness that Marcus had been carrying for four whole years. “There.  That’s my story. The rest you know: I’ve been living on my own, doing my best to avoid anything and everyone, and moving when that doesn’t work. I would have left this town, too, except Rob trashed my entire house,” he finished without any particular inflection.

That got Declan to focus past his own shock.  “He did what?!”

“I figured you didn’t know,” Marcus merely sighed, as if this didn’t surprise him. Or as if he expected no better. “On the same day that your Omega went after me, Rob tore my apartment to shreds.  I was already leaving with that little I had left, but Clarissa destroyed that, too.  Plus, by now my landlord or neighbors must have noticed something, so they’re probably looking for me to pay damages.  And I’ve missed enough work that I’m probably fired.”  Head tipped back, eyes still closed, Marcus let out a giggle that was pure insanity. “You know what? Things really can’t get worse for once.”

“Why didn’t you tell me all this?!” Declan exclaimed, breathless because now he felt like the one with all the wind knocked out of him.  It was as if he’d been running around with sunglasses this whole time, blind to the light of truth waiting all around him, but now he was seeing clearly.

Marcus finally cracked his eyes open and looked at him, sadly. “You’re not my Alpha. You’re their Alpha. And I’ve already been told that I’m not a reliable source.”

“That’s without facts to back yourself up,” Declan argued, frustrated but managing his temper, “Here, there are facts! If Rob broke into your apartment and ransacked the place, his scent would have to be everywhere.”

“You wouldn’t have punished him.”

Declan’s voice dropped to a nearly deadly octave.  “What?”

Coming slowly out of the painful fog he’d been in, telling his story, Marcus caught the tone enough for his eyes to widen.  He flinched physically, reverting somewhat to the fearful young man he’d been before. “Nothing,” he said, hurriedly, “Nothing at all.  I didn’t say anything.” But he took a step back nonetheless and nearly stumbled on his bad leg.

Declan was already berating himself for forgetting how easily Marcus felt threatened when the Omega apparently made up his mind that he’d been through enough already, and transformed with a painful snap.  He was fighting his way free of Kobi’s oversized clothes a moment later, before scurrying off so fast that Declan was barely given time to react. Thankfully, the cabin had only one door, and Declan was in the way of that. Still, Marcus’s skinny, white-furred form made a dash for somewhere safe and quiet, which turned out to be the tiny bedroom just off the main room.

Swearing to himself (but silently, because he had a feeling that Marcus would hear and misinterpret the focus of his ire otherwise), Declan got up quickly and followed. He had only looked into the bedroom briefly, seeing that Kobi had found time to buy a mattress for the bedframe, but there were no sheets at the moment.

Marcus was under the bed.  He’d dashed under there like a fox into its den, and Declan had to get down on his hands and knees to see him in the back corner, curled up tight.  For a second, blue eyes met tawny ones, but then Marcus closed them and hid them behind his slightly-matted tail, as if the world would go away if he just didn’t look at it.  He whined, and throbbing beneath it, garbled but comprehensible, Declan heard human words in his head: ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that! …I was hurting.  I am hurting.  I do terrible things when I’m hurting.’  Suddenly Marcus’s whole body flinched, the whine ratcheting up to a tortured noise that the telepathic link translated without warning, ‘God, last time I was angry and hurting, did I kill them…?!’

“No, Marcus,” Declan found himself saying firmly, “No, you didn’t do that – you didn’t hurt your pack.”  Now that he’d started talking, Declan felt at once ridiculous, and like he had to continue, so he grasped at words like they were straws, “I’m not your Alpha, and I can’t sense if you’re lying, but from everything I’ve seen… Marcus, you’re nearly a pacifist! I saw.  You wouldn’t even bite back at Clarissa, and god knows I wanted to take a chunk out of her.”

Perhaps hearing that Declan was actually angry at his own Omega for her actions made Marcus feel a bit safer, because he opened his eyes again. When his tail unfurled from around his nose, Declan dared to reach forward and grab it, just at the tip. More softly, as he felt fur beneath his fingers that would have probably been so soft if it were better taken care of, the Alpha added, “And you’ve got plenty of reason to bite me or claw me now, and before now, but you haven’t even bared a fang.  Please, Marcus… You told me what happened to you, and I listened…”  Declan spent a moment thinking, going over everything, wanting his next words to be the truth. He thought they were as he flattened himself onto his chest, which allowed him to reach forward a bit more to just stroke his fingertips over Marcus’s cold, quivering nose, “And I believe you.”