Chapter Text
Crying, mused Basilton Pitch remotely as he scrubbed another damn tear from the bruise on his cheekbone, was pointless. Undignified. Ignoble. Quite possibly it had been invented to humiliate him – or people like him, at least. The sharpest, boldest, most learned magicians. The guardians of power. Some anarchic trickster god with a Robin Hood complex must have decided that it was all too much, and cursed them with running noses and facial spasms to teach them humility.
Baz sniffed, mouth crumpling, then clenched his jaw painfully back into that aloof look he was still trying to make as convincing as his father’s.
He did not intend to be taught.
It was enough that he still spent every day in a school run by a draconian Guardian reader who thought his mother had been the Devil’s croquet partner. It was more than enough that he had to share his room with a self-righteous oaf who almost got the whole school blown up five times a week, and then blamed him for six. It was, frankly, rather heavy-handed that he was spending his evening hunched over in this foul, dingy, rot-reeking cavern, bloodstained and cursed and fucking flammable. A Pitch. Flammable. Just tasteless. He would have hoped that whichever Fate was in charge of injecting cruel irony into his life could have had a little more subtlety.
And this, right now – this was where he drew the line. As hateful as his affliction was, there was no reason for a fifteen year old to weep every time he had to kill a few rats. They were ugly, dirty little creatures, and they deserved ugly, dirty little deaths. Their panicked squeaks and that awful snap shouldn’t have felt like the worst part of his curse – if anything, he was doing the world a favour.
A tiny corpse stared accusingly at Baz from the floor, its head twisted round at a sickening angle. He buried his face in his arms.
He hadn’t meant for things to get messy tonight. (He never meant for it to get messy; he was a monster, not an animal.) But he’d been tired, and agitated, and his jaw was bruised, and his night vision still blinked out at inopportune moments. So now there was blood on his hands. And all down his front. And in his hair. Even when he’d first done this three months ago, starving and terrified and cutting his lips on his fangs, he didn’t think he’d got blood in his hair. How would it get above his forehead?
He didn’t dare imagine what he looked like. Or what might happen if someone found him like this.
So, naturally, not thirty seconds after he thought that, something heavy barrelled into him from out of the dark.
Baz yelped, scrambling backwards, as Something scrabbled at his chest with blunt-clawed paws. He tried to push it off, but it jumped back up, shoving its snout in his face, a hairy, chaotic mess of long limbs and bad breath and lolling tongue-
Something licked Baz’s face, and he squawked indignantly.
It was a dog.
It got in a few more alarmingly enthusiastic licks before Baz managed to push it off, holding it at an arm’s length where it tried valiantly to slobber on his hands and forearms instead, its tail thumping against Baz’s foot.
“Bad dog- bad!” he managed, a little hoarsely. Its tall ears pricked up, but somehow between Baz’s mouth and the dog’s brain, the message seemed to become ‘I love you, please chew on my cuffs’. The dog accepted.
Baz stared at the animal, catching his breath. It wasn’t that it… looked odd. It was an unusual breed, certainly, something dark and spindly and borzoi-ish that he hadn’t seen before, but there was nothing obviously wrong with its appearance. It looked like a dog. But considering that it had come hurtling out of the dark of the catacombs and seemed very interested in having its mouth and yellowed teeth near him, he might have preferred if it had had a forked tail or glowing red eyes. This just made him wonder what it had to hide.
Normal animals didn’t like Baz. Cats hissed, rats fled, and four different horses had tried to throw him before his family had decided that perhaps riding wasn’t an essential life-skill after all. There was something very wrong with this dog.
Carefully, he extracted his unchewed arm from the dog’s fur, scratching its neck with the other as a distraction. Then he lit a fire in his palm and thrust it forward.
The dog yelped and disappeared.
Baz slumped back, winding the flame through his fingers automatically. So he’d been right, the dog was magickal. He was probably lucky that it hadn’t torn off his arm for that, but it felt anticlimactic somehow. At least an attack would have been a distraction.
He wondered for a second if he might have killed it - had its disappearance happened with a puff of smoke? - then dug his nails into the back of his neck and imagined his father’s coldest look. His stepmother’s most disappointed. His aunt’s most scornful.
It was a feral creature that lived down among the rats and the spiders and the decay. It was probably dark, and judging from the way it had trusted him, utterly stupid. And cowardly. And he didn’t even know if it was dead. He was not going to cry over it.
Something wet poked at the hand on his neck, and he jumped and scrambled around.
The dog was standing behind him, ears pinned back.
With a hiss of frustration, he stood up and swept his fire in a circle, trying to drive it away. The dog skittered a few steps back, then vanished again. Baz sighed and let his fire go out, hand drifting back to his neck. A second later, something was pawing at the back of his legs.
He stepped away, only half turning this time, and gazed at it tiredly.
“What do you want?” he muttered. “I don’t have any food. Or… souls.”
The dog pawed at his leg again, then jumped up, claws catching on the shoulders of Baz’s red school jumper. Baz had always made a point of being tall for his age, but on its hind legs this dog was easily eye level with him. He did not approve.
He took hold of its paws, preparing to push it off again, but it had been investigating his face again and so when it whined, the sound – and its breath – tickled horribly right in his ear. He squirmed and let go.
“Fine,” he muttered. “Fine. If shoving your nose in my hair is that important to you, who am I to object? Certainly no-one compared to an undergrown hellhound that’s emerged from Crowley knows where to sniff out some shampoo it- argh!”
He recoiled, shoving the dog off again, and fell to his knees. He scrabbled in his jacket for his wand with the wrong hand, while the other clamped itself protectively over the shallow scratches on his neck. The broken, bleeding skin that this dog had just licked.
He gave up on his wand and made a few wild, undignified attempts to beat the dog back with his free arm, all of which were ducked. He screamed at it (get away, get away, don’t you dare-), but his voice was weak and unstable, his throat raw. His shoulders shook, and he fell back, drawing his knees up to his chest in a ball.
His other hand found its way to his neck too, hovering over his scar.
The dog whined again, and turned in a tight circle, tail stiff between its legs, before padding softly back towards Baz.
Baz narrowed his eyes and looked away, chin tucked to his shoulder. Whatever this creature was, it didn’t seem violent, but he was not naive enough to let something slyly drink his blood just because it had big sad eyes. He knew how that story ended. He would not be foolish enough to feel sorry for a monster.
The creature nudged him hesitantly, then pushed its way into his lap. He didn’t bother to stop it. He ignored it as it settled there, clumsily half-curled, as it looked up at him with its ears still folded back.
It nosed at the arm guarding his scar, and he stiffened, but it didn’t bite or pull it away. It just gave a few small, gentle, apologetic licks, then rested its head against him, a warm weight on the centre of his chest. The ache that took hold when he was upset and the cold that never quite seemed to leave any more receded slightly.
Baz looked at the dog out of the corner of his eye, mind whirring.
It was still a dark creature. He wouldn’t trust it. Wouldn’t let his guard down. But he was one too now, every bit as unnatural and unsettling as it, and he was starting to remember having read something about pack animals licking each other’s wounds.
It was possible, he thought reluctantly, that this monster felt sorry for him.
And damn it, it was solid and warm and soft and friendly and sitting right there in his lap. It had already found him, even tasted his blood – how much more damage could he really do?
He didn’t think that it would hurt when he laid a hand on its back and smoothed its long, wispy hair. And it didn’t seem like a risk when he pulled it into his arms and hid his face in its fur. Not when it was relaxing, ears straightening, tail whacking his foot again. It was just a dog, a stupid, cowardly, compassionate dog, a gangly, ghostly, kindly monster that for some reason seemed to care if he was hurting, and with it there, it almost didn’t feel like a failure when his chin trembled and he started once again to cry.
