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Your old self dies on a cool night in early spring, on the street outside Konishi Liquors.
"Relax," Souji says, his voice as deep and calm as a still pond in the forest. You want to sink yourself into it, cool yourself in the water, forget the pain itching down into the bones of your arm from the new violation of the bite, soothe the spreading putrefaction of your flesh. "Relax, I'm right here. I've got you. You've had a terrible trouble, but I'm here now. You're home."
The world throbs red and black, black and red, and the last thing you feel is his strong arms holding your broken body to his chest, cradling you like a child, fragile and new. The last thing you see is his eyes, golden like the moon.
---
You slough off your other self like a raft of dead skin. It comes apart in waves and starts over the next month, revelations bubbling up through the warm tar that is the base of your mind, uncontrollable twitches of your limbs and lips and fingers, a voice that sounds like your voice scraped raw echoing off the cloisters of your skull. You wanted excitement , it whispers, crooning your own thoughts mockingly back to you. You wanted to be special, didn't you? It was all so ordinary. You were only looking for an excuse .
The words aren't wrong: they can't be, they're yours. But they aren't the entire story, either, and Souji tells you that you must accept that, too.
With your head in his lap, cheek pressed hot and embarrassed but somehow soul-deep satisfied to the solid meat of his thigh, he brushes a hand cool as river stone across your feverish forehead, stroking sweat-matted strands of hair from your eyes. "It gets better," he says, "when you know yourself. When you see every facet, you can choose to not to act in kind with the parts you don't like. You can choose , with full knowledge, to be better than your bestial self. But it has to be an honest choice."
You nod, whining and wordless, and press your eyes shut petulantly tight as you nuzzle your nose and cheek against the scratchy fabric of his jeans. "It hurts," you say. "I thought I already was better."
His hand is a great weight on the crown of your head. It holds you steady. "Everyone always does."
---
The less that can be said or remembered about that first full moon, the better.
That first hateful, burning moon, its excoriating eye searing over every inch of your skin even through wood and plaster and lacquer roofing tile, nowhere to hide, nowhere to shelter yourself from the pain that rips and tears and pulls long, bloody strips of yourself away in shreds. Souji's change is almost obscene in comparison, or rather it makes your ordeal seem so much more unholy and perverse to watch him slide down to knees and then four legs as easily as pulling on a heavy fur coat.
You, on the other hand, are twisting. Warping. There is the strain of impending fracture on every long bone like a stick held at both ends, bent inward almost to the point of snapping. A horrible, anxious potential energy radiates out of every cell, humming in every muscle and fiber, boiling your blood. Your stomach is an empty cavern, filled with poisonous, compressing nothing, and your mouth fills up with foamy saliva, spilling from your slack jaw and unfurling tongue, between cracked teeth. Your vision blurs from color to dull grayscale monochrome, and even then-- even then you can see the gold in his eyes, watching you, and the moon, watching you, and the disgusting weight of the world's judgment bites like a sword at the back of your neck.
You are a wet, warped thing, naked, half-born, spine twisted to splay your canine hind legs out to the side while you press your human palms to the baseboards and bow your head, forcing out gulping sounds that might be howls, might be sobs of horrendous confusion. Every horrible thought you've ever had is screeching inside your mind: every moment of guilt, every hunger, every hatred, every lust. Every small and petty thought that made you small and petty as a whole.
I want to get out.
It's not fair that other people have what I don't.
I want Saki-senpai.
I want her.
Souji stands before you. He pads over on soft, quiet paws and presses his snout against your tear-tracked cheek, rubbing sleek short fur against your raw skin, and the cacophony quiets too. You are plunged from shrieking madness, from flayed open pain, into a dead and gentle calm. Your flesh still bubbles and bulges, your bones reshaping, skin splitting and peeling apart, fur forcing itself up through muscle, but you feel... normal.
Human.
When you can, you press your muzzle to his and close your eyes, and let Souji and the moon hold you in their arms.
---
The voices don't start their hateful susurrus again until you meet Kanji Tatsumi.
Kanji's wolf is stronger than yours. It has more to cry about. And in the same way that one dog barking at midnight in the neighborhood will set them all off into a discordant chorus of yips and yelps and joyous, enraged howling, Kanji's id-fueled secrets bring out the same in you. You can hear them in your head as he changes, as you both struggle forth out of the cocoons of your old, human shells.
Please, somebody, anybody, want me.
Want me for who I am.
Even if I like cute shit. Even if I like men. What the fuck does it matter?
You disguise the wave of panic as revulsion, at first, though the idea of being disgusted by anything external when you have seen yourself mutated and bleeding on the floor of your own bedroom is pathetic to an extreme. You pretend to yourself that it's because you're afraid: of Kanji touching you, getting too close, infecting you with another desire, but werewolves aren't good at pretending, and it whispers a truth in your ear that drags down your spine like a discharge of frantic static electricity.
You’re not afraid of Kanji touching you. You're afraid of liking it.
Your slobbering tongue feels thick in your mouth. The tingling flows through you from your hindbrain to the base of your tail, a heavy pressure in the pit of your stomach, a hot warm mass. The innocent memory of Souji's muzzle rubbed against yours to mix and mingle your scent, his broad furry side pressed to you as you panted and breathed in hard until the spongecake lining of your lungs blistered after your first run together, every small touch becomes imagining the weight of his body above your back, bending you, teeth fixed harmless and firm in your scruff. You imagine the brush of his hand against yours passing you back a stack of worksheets in class that morning and somehow the sensation transmogrifies into his rough, callused hands curled possessive around the nape of your neck, gripping your shoulder, holding you.
His mouth hot and wet and messy on yours. His blunt teeth in your shoulder. His presence near you, in your space, the warmth of his skin inches from your skin without quite touching.
Every atom of you rebels. No , you snarl at yourself. You can feel Kanji wanting the same things, similar things, and Souji is letting him weakly, hesitantly push his cold wet nose into the ruff of thick silver fur at his neck anyway in deference and respect and love, and the confusion twists your guts into a series of slick knots inside you, shivering under your skin. All the fur is standing pin-straight on your shoulders, raised along the back of your neck, and your thin black lips have pulled up over sharp, dangerous teeth.
The noise burbling in the back of your throat is not human. Not approximating anything like it. 'No' is carved from every part and portion of you, your lupine body posed in a monument to the negative. Repulsed, attracted, you careen into Kanji's side and the two of you go rolling off your feet, down the slope of the floodplain, tumbling and twisting with the stars overhead and the skree of dirt and small stones beneath, a kaleidoscope of shifting absence of color, head over paws over tail. Kanji snarls back, wounded and loud, a big baritone voice as he twists in your grip, trying to bite back, trying to kick at your soft belly with his hind paws and spill all your entrails out and open to be pored over, as though you could divine anything there other than sickness and shame.
And all the time, the voices shouting over each other, echoing in your pulped-up mind:
I'm not gay. I'm normal, damn it.
I don't want this.
I want him. He's mine. He was mine first, mine always, my partner. My mate!
Kanji is bigger than you, and heavier, and the differences are magnified tenfold by the change. You end with his jaws around your neck, clamped over your throat, rumbling a thunderous warning. You lay still, sad, ashamed, on your side, cheek in the dirt and the mud, looking up to the top of the embankment where Souji stands proud with Chie and Yukiko milling about behind him, the distant disc of the moon framed between the tall points of his ears.
He turns from you, tail up, and you close your eyes against the world, limp as a scrap of sodden cloth. Kanji remains, even after his fangs have come away from your neck, sitting awkwardly but respectfully a few feet away from you, watching the river.
The voices are not quiet. But all the same, there's an acceptance there. After a long while he shifts a few feet closer, and you allow him, frightened only of yourself.
---
On a fine clear evening, you meet Souji at the top of the hill overlooking Inaba. It's gone midsummer now, and the air smells dusty and dry but somehow sweet as it ruffles the leaves and brushes against the tall, drooping grasses. Inaba looks small from up high, like a miniature set. You remember seeing a documentary once about the meticulous crafting that went into building Tokyo to 1/20th scale for models of Godzilla to trash on film, and it seems a similar principle. It's only a trick of perspective that ever makes anything look big, or small. It's only a matter of where you stand.
It is a dark, dark night, with only the million pinprick stars letting in light from elsewhere, and the dim reflected galaxy of man-made illumination down below to guide your sight. The moon has waned to a thin sliver of a crescent over the few nights, and now to nothing, to an empty hole hanging in emptiness that takes with it, at last, the voices. The whispering. The second guessing, the uncertainty. "Hey," you say to him as he approaches up the hill, and Souji smiles. That alone is enough to bring a star of warmth bursting to light beneath your breast.
He leans against the decaying wooden railing looking out over the precipice with you, and lets the rising wind card its fingers through the fringe of his starlit hair. You tell him, slowly and methodically, what you thought of this place, once. You tell him what you think of it now.
"I've got family here," you say, mouth dry. "Friends. ...You. It's my place now, you know? I want to protect it."
Souji lets his eyes slip shut, a gesture you have come to recognize as an animal's sign of absolute trust, and hums happily. "It's your territory," he says. "Really yours, now." And then, abruptly: "Have you made your choice?"
With embers burning beneath your ribs, you look from Souji to the city and back. You rub sheepishly at your neck, feeling the imprint of fangs there, feeling hands on your shoulders and hips, mouth on your lips, the weight of all the world on your back. There are some things you just can't say, it's too direct.
Fortunately, the Japanese language has been built around this concept. There is a way to express anything, even circuitous and vaguely, if you understand enough.
"Yeah, I have.” You put your hand over his over the railing. “T-the moon is beautiful tonight, isn’t it?"
Souji opens his eyes.