Work Text:
Owen doesn’t see the shot coming.
As he crumples to the ground he decides this is a stupid thing to think, because no one ever sees the shot that gets them, not if they’re good at what they do. Owen likes to imagine he’s good at what he does, although perhaps he needs to reevaluate that status. Someone of his reputation and skill level probably shouldn’t have gotten shot through the kidney.
Ah well. Better luck next time.
His knees hit the concrete with a painful jolt, and he just barely manages to turn his head to avoid breaking his nose as the rest of his body follows suit. The wound in his side is burning, shock wave rippling out into his abdomen, bullet hole dragging him down like an anchor. Blood pools on the floor around him. Through the piercing whine and the static in his brain, Owen vaguely remembers Curt.
Curt.
Groaning, Owen does his best to angle himself toward the continuing firefight, but his head is swimming and his vision is streaked and blurred, a wash of watercolor and viscera. Specks of light—muzzle flashes, Owen presumes—briefly permeate the haze of red, strobing and blinking in an out as quickly as his racing heart. He tries to pick out Curt amongst the chaos, to make sure he’s alright, that he’s still fighting, but he can’t seem to process the picture in front of him.
A guttural roar echoes through the warehouse.
Clapping his hands to his ears, no doubt leaving bloody prints across his face, Owen instinctively cowers from the sound, even though it feels like it may as well be inside of him with how deeply it rumbles in his chest. He might be screaming. The hapless henchmen certainly are, if the suddenly increased cacophony is anything to go by.
Cracking his eyes open, Owen hazards another peek.
He has to be dreaming. Either that, or this is some sort of blood loss induced hallucination, because what he sees makes no goddamn sense.
It’s... a wolf.
A big one, too, standing not five feet from Owen and snarling with a ferocity that makes him glad he may as well be dead already. The goons are emptying their clips into the thing, and it’s shrugging off the bullets as fast as they can fire them, barking and clawing at the ground as though daring them to come closer.
As Owen slips into a creeping unconsciousness, darkness settling in his limbs, the last thing he sees is the wolf’s jaws closing around its opponent’s throat.
When Owen wakes up, he’s in a hospital room with an IV in his arm and a thick girdle of bandages wrapped around his midsection. He groans, letting his head roll limply to one side. It's dark, must be night shift, but his gaze still lands on the fuzzy form of his partner, stuffed awkwardly inside a plastic chair with his canvas jacket draped over his torso. In the silence, Owen can almost hear his snoring.
He has half a mind to call out, but sleep tugs insistently at his eyelids, and Owen sees no reason to argue. But before he drifts off completely, something catches his attention. In the low light, he’d almost missed it, but…
Curt’s jacket is torn, split roughly at the armscye seams and scarred by four parallel rips down the back. Owen doesn’t have time to think about what that means before his body yanks him back into the depths of slumber.
After that, Owen finds himself split in two. The first, more rational part of himself does its best to ignore that night in the warehouse, dismissing it as nothing but the addled conjurations of a nearly-dying man’s mind. It’s certainly the easier side to favor, because the alternative he’s presented with requires more suspension of disbelief than Owen has ever been willing to give. But the smaller, more insistent voice in his head prevents him from dismissing the idea entirely.
So he watches.
He keeps closer tabs on Curt on their following missions, carefully brings up what happened to him after he passed out, studies his reactions. Owen doesn’t love feeling like Curt is his target, per se, but he knows he has to gather more information before deciding to broach the subject, if he ever brings it up at all.
Everything comes to him in brief glimpses. Shutter-quick moments when he thinks Curt’s eyes shine gold, or his teeth are just a bit too sharp, or his body blurs like the edges of a mirage. Everything is uncertain, everything could too easily be dismissed. Owen knows better than anyone to never build a case on circumstantial evidence, but he’s in too deep to quit now.
Whenever Owen asks about himself, about what happened to him, Curt is amiable, but in a way that rings distinctly of deflection. The details are always vague, obfuscated by layers of joviality that Owen feels would be rude to dampen. He watches, and he watches, and Curt is always Curt. For better or worse, he is always Curt.
It’s bad this time.
Not that it hasn’t been bad before, but Owen can see this time is particularly bad, what with him hauling his partner’s leaden body through the door of one of his oft-cited-rarely-visited safe houses. In his arms, Curt is moaning, delirious, and bleeding profusely from a gunshot to the shoulder, and Owen is doing his best to just keep it together until he can perform some impromptu surgery on the site.
While he works, Owen mutters reassurances that certainly fall on deaf ears. Curt had fainted the moment his hand had come away streaked with red, but Owen still can’t help repeating various encouragements while he lays Curt out on the dining table. Issuing a rushed apology to the absent Mrs. Mega for staining her crocheted runner, Owen snatches a pair of food scissors from a kitchen drawer and swiftly cuts the sleeve of Curt’s shirt away.
The wound is, for lack of a better term, a nasty motherfucker.
Owen marks the point of entry as just above Curt’s collarbone, and deduces the bullet must still be buried somewhere inside him. He can only pray to his mother’s god that the bone remains intact. It all looks fairly rote, at first blush, but there’s something about the gore that sticks out like a sore thumb.
A spiderweb of poisonous black has blossomed outward from the bullet hole, clawing its way up Curt’s neck and down into his bicep.
Suppressing a wave of nausea, Owen grits his teeth and grabs his tools.
Curt wakes up fairly early in the process, and Owen presses a bottle of whiskey into his hand with a practiced motion, watching Curt knock it back with trembling fingers. They’ve done this countless times before, but it’s never any easier to watch the tendons in his neck pull taught as he bites back a scream. To make matters worse, the bullet’s in deep, and it takes Owen longer than he’d like to dig all the fragments out.
When he finally works the slug free, he nearly drops it in surprise. It’s almost flattened beyond recognition, but the gleaming metal under the crusted blood confirms his suspicions.
It’s a silver bullet.
Sparing a glance at Curt, Owen breathes a sigh of relief to see he’s out cold.
After disinfecting the wound, he carefully stitches the skin back together and watches as the black slowly releases its stranglehold on Curt’s body. If Owen doesn’t think about it too hard, he could almost make himself believe Curt was sleeping.
Owen wants nothing more than to crawl under some blankets and never leave, but before he lets himself get too lost in thought, he deftly bandages Curt’s arm and hoists him up, toting him upstairs to his childhood bedroom and arranging him on the mattress. He briefly considers trying to help Curt change into something other than his work clothes, but settles on leaving a t-shirt and a pair of loose shorts on the pillow next to him and pulling his quilt over him.
He’ll wash his tools in the morning. Mrs. Mega isn’t there to yell at him anyway.
With the adrenaline wearing off, Owen realizes he needs to find a bed stat, or else his body will make the floor into one without his consent. He has just enough presence of mind left to turn the lights off and fish out his set of spare pajamas from the guest room bureau before crashing into goose down heaven.
Owen is asleep before his head hits the pillow.
The clock reads 3:52 when Owen blearily flicks the lamp back on.
He’s long since passed the stage of panicking waking up in Curt’s guest room. At this point, it’s almost a second home to him, or maybe even a first, given that he doesn’t really have a place he’d call home of his own. That still doesn’t make waking up at some godawful hour of the morning any more pleasant. Insomnia is insomnia, no matter how familiar the house.
Owen groans, scrubbing at his eyes with his forearm, when a noise on the other side of the wall piques his interest.
At first, he’s almost convinced he imagined it, but then he hears it again. A soft whimper, coming from Curt’s bedroom.
Without thinking, Owen’s on his feet in an instant, because either Curt’s having a nightmare or he’s rolled over onto his wound, and both of those scenarios means he’s hurting and Owen should be helping him, and then he’s at Curt’s door.
The noises are even more plaintive this close, and Owen doesn’t even bother to knock before he turns the knob and shoves the door open.
What he sees is... not entirely unexpected, if he’s being honest with himself, but he can still feel his heart plummet into his stomach with a sickening lurch.
There’s no denying it this time, no hypovolemic shock to blame the sight before him on. Somehow, Owen thinks that should be a comfort, but isn’t quite sure he’s there yet.
Curt is gone. In his place, what can only be described as a beast is curled up on his bed. Its chest heaves with shuddering breaths, clearly the source of the whimpering Owen had heard before, and it’s kneading its paws in the quilt, thrashing its tail in obvious distress. Blood is caked in the fur of its left front leg. It doesn’t seem to have noticed Owen yet.
Owen blinks. Hard. Swallows.
“Hello, Curt,” he says softly.
And then promptly faints.
He comes to with a headache and a taste in his mouth reminiscent of old carpet, before he notices that it is, in fact, old carpet he’s fallen onto. For a moment, Owen’s mind whirls, trying to recall what got him in this situation in the first place, but then he feels a wet tongue on his cheek and the memories come rushing back.
Curt. Wolf. Curt is a wolf. That thing.
Owen grimaces. He can’t be bothered to deal with this so early in the morning. All he wants to do is roll over and stay there til the sun comes up, but then something shoves against his shoulder.
It’s Curt, wedging his head under Owen’s chest. Pushing him toward the bed, it looks like. Owen’s not sure he could stand, even if he wanted to, but then Curt takes a mouthful of Owen’s t-shirt and tugs him upward, darting behind him to support him before he falls again.
Somehow, Curt manages to haul Owen into his bed, draping the tattered remains of the quilt over him before he jumps up onto the covers too, tucking himself into Owen’s side and curling his tail over Owen’s legs.
With the large wolf wrapped around him, Owen doesn’t think he could even attempt to leave, but if he’s being honest with himself, Curt is soft and he’s comfortable and Owen is so, so tired. Turning his head, Owen pushes his head into Curt’s neck, burying his face in the thick fur that smells strangely of home.
Whatever results from this freak turn of events in the morning can wait, Owen decides. Right now, he can just accept this, and trust that Curt will keep him safe.
For the first time in recent memory, Owen dreams of nothing at all.