Archive of Our Own ^beta

Dogs are not hit for drawing blood.

That is a lie, they are hit all the time for such mistakes.

A good dog is forever loved.

Wrong. One day all of the memories of it will fade from the minds of everyone who has ever known, met or spoken about it.

A dog takes no responsibility for anything.

A dog can’t take responsibility, but it can still suffer consequences.

No, it just does. It just moves. A good dog is good from to beginning to end, even if its maw is forever soaked in red—it will never understand the signifier given to it, only that it is alive and praised for being so in the fleeting moment.

And you are okay with this?

How can you not be?

Because life has to have more meaning than this. What benefits can come from living as if one has no soul when it has known all the joys of one since birth?

Because a soul brings pain, a soul brings death. A death higher than the one brought on by age—it is a death of the self, an accumulation of pain that forever leaves a scar and cannot be washed away.

Such is the cost of living. To idealize about a world where one is not hurt is pointless. Even animals remember their injuries; don’t delude yourself otherwise.

And what makes you so certain you’re right about all of this?

...Excuse me?

You’re not a fucking philosopher.

I’m not but I speak to what I feel.

And how can feelings give us any certainty on a matter as worldly as this? A dog can remember where it’s been hurt, it can learn to distrust people—but it lacks the consciousness upon which to manifest those pains into deeper wounds. It isn’t even aware of what pain is as a concept.

This blissful ignorance will get you nowhere.

Maybe so. But all I know right now is that I want the pain to stop, and to have never had the potential for it to have existed in the first place.

Fool.

Call me a fool, but don’t you want to be a good dog?

...

Where there is nothing but a basal instinct from birth to death? Nothing higher, nothing greater than that?

I do. The dog will never understand. It will simply keep on marching forever until it dies with no sense of such things as a soul. No matter how many people it kills, it cannot be held responsible—no matter how many people fear it, it will never know their fright. It will die neither blissfully nor honorably, ignorant of both these things by no virtue or decision of its own.

The dog does not understand why it is being led out to the back of the shed, only that the hand that it trails has fed it since birth.

And even if there was no such hand, it would not linger in misery. The pain stops at death. It is a true, pure, final release.

This is the most peaceful way to be, is it not?

Werewolf snaps awake with warm blood all over his hands.

The scent of blood wafts heavily in the air, warm and wet despite the frost.

He cannot remember when this deer died. This small, bleeding creature so viciously torn apart with little left to indicate itself aside from battered feet torn asunder. Crimson streams leak out plainly onto the snow, in a way almost offensive to nature as if it could judge such an act. As if it would judge such an act as offensive of all things in the death that it experienced on a daily basis.

As if a human isn’t just another animal, as if Werewolf is any different from the rest of them.

...What is it about his own claws that makes him so blasphemous?

He doesn’t finish his meal. That’s perhaps another offense in itself, but he can’t stand its flesh on his tongue. Acrid iron pulsates between his teeth and gums, once savory morsels turning bitter as he peels them out without any self-preservation. His feet stumble against the ground, and more warmth is spilled casually as he stumbles, gray claws digging into the permafrost. Without a word he gargles, and soon spits everything out with a gross snarl.

It’s all an offense again.

A stark and battering reminder of his true place in the world, and he turns his back on it before he can think about what that means.

The forest has no eyes. The trees have no ears.

He gags knowing that its liver and intestine are somewhere in his stomach by now. The snow makes it so easy to hide things that one could be mistaken for thinking that something deeper lurked within it. And perhaps they were right. The white surrounding him is as hostile as he feels, as bleached and stripped of definition as something can get while still having a name. It’s cold, unending, featureless, perfectly defiant and perfectly piercing, and it eats up the corpse without any hesitancy or difficulty, without any shred of guilt at all. It’s a miracle he’ll be able to find his way back in all of this, it’s a miracle he’s survived here despite everything.

...He does not want to think about what’s he’s buried before. The deer is small enough to remind him of someone. Several someones. Its legs are the perfect size of innocent arms, its eyes the perfect size for unfortunate circumstances.

There are many bodies that have been left to freeze like this.

He backs up more, stumbling, trying to get those faces out of his head.

Many of them died cold, alone, or worse, by gray teeth and claws.

Claws that belonged to...?

...?

...He does not look back.

The snow is silent as his feet hit the permafrost. His eyes burn and his coat whips up flurries as he tries to sheath every part of himself that can be.

The falling white will bury them plenty. It will not bury him, much to his chagrin, but if he ripped out what made him whole and human and so alive right now in this vast expanse, he’s not sure he’d do with it. He’s not sure what he’d become, what he is, or what he’d even be tearing out.

Memories cling like dogs, and where there is a home to think back on to there is only the soft reminder of a beast lingering at the door.

Everything and nothing, everything and nothing, too many thoughts, too much blood, there is a scream that doesn’t exist, someone is grabbing him and now he’s—!

There is only a tightness in his chest, a sense of wrongness in his head. He has to get rid of this before they, before they before they—

The deer is the size of them.

It is the size of them back then, that dog, that person, that child.

The blood does not drip down his face fast enough as he reaches the house. It does not freeze fast enough to stop the scent from turning vomit in his throat. Fur prickles the back of his neck as he climbs up that small hill, his hands shaking with unsteady teeth and his entire being ready to collapse.

He throws the door open quietly, letting the cold air in. It bites at his ears and gnaws at his lips, coating the rug he steps into just as the change in scenery is enough to kill his train of thought. The fire is warm, flickering light across the room and there is food being cooked, its wafting scent sticking to these old walls like resin.

Wet hands leave behind drops of viscera as his hands leave that delicate thing, bending down to avoid the top of the its frame like it’s second nature. Everything stills for just a brief moment as it closes with a gentle creak, a sound so silent that he flinches, barely thinking, despite the house not registering as a house, as something he’s been in before. It pricks something for a second, a distant memory of another just like it, coming from hands much smaller than his, but a voice cleaves that in two again just as he remembers, just as his body throws another dog onto the pile.

“...Werewolf?”

That voice. It sounds like them, but it’s not. He will never hear their voice again, and perhaps that’s for the better.

“You’re back already? I didn’t think you’d get in until nightfall.”

Dark Choco looks up from dinner and waves at him gingerly.

He perks up at that gentle smile, standing tall, almost alert. Tail wagging just the smallest bit. It’s at that moment, staring at them for a bit longer than he should, that everything resumes again.

“Y-Yeah,” he replies hesitantly, nearly stammering over his words. “I’m back. Did...Did you miss me?”

They smile wider. It’s still small, but it’s their best effort. The fire is crackling warmly despite its warmth being leeched through an open door, and they beckon him to close it.

He does, whimpering quietly. He should have slammed it.

“Yes,” they say simply, voice flat and exhausted from yet another day of living. “I did. I’m glad you made it back safely.”

The smile fades as they resume back to their task, Werewolf wondering when the last time they did it was. They’ve started smiling more ever since they left the castle, but it was not hard for him to see the cracks creeping through it. Without a weapon in their hand they seem to be much happier, less burdened by everything, able to be tired and express being tired more openly and plainly without the fear of...whoever they used to work for. They still don’t talk about that.

...Were they the ones involved with the sword?

He always wants to ask but the thought dies in his throat every time. There’s never a good time to bring it up, because when his own head is clear it’s too exhausting to dredge up something so venomous.

Without another word he sits down on the floor next to a flame that smells vaguely of burnt oil and wool. It’s a foul smell, yet so familiar that it’s comforting, reminding him of those old days back before he knew what pain was. Back when that friend of his was...

...Don’t think about that again now.

He pulls his legs in, listening to Dark Choco humming in the kitchen. They’re stirring up the fire in there, and it smells better than the one out here. The evergreen trees around of this part of the kingdom were prized for their smoke before everything fell apart, something Werewolf was always keenly aware of by the number of people he met in these forests when he traveled alone.

Which included them, at one point.

It’s nice that the woods still hold a good memory. He remembers even now them in their white princely outfit, cape fluttering without a care in the world.

Ignorant of what the future held as they held an axe in their hands, a pine tree downed by their own strength but not of their own will, not of their own desire. They were terribly allergic to their tar back then, mere brushes against the wood being enough to cause them to break out into hives.

Werewolf knows what resin smells like. It makes slaughtered lambs smell like candles, deified for a brief second so carelessly before meeting oblivion.

...He doesn’t know what his future is. It might as well be served up like some kind of butchered calf for all he cares and knows. Thinking about such things isn’t good for him, because inevitably his mind will encounter that nameless desire, that bottomless pit at the end of all that confused thought and blood that is shaped almost exactly like a canine.

He turns back to the flames wordlessly, hoping they haven’t noticed his staring. It was hard not to get lost in them, hard for him to resist the idea of someone else’s past to reminisce about.

Could one call that stolen nostalgia?

No, dogs do not steal.

The fire flickers.

Werewolf watches aimlessly the flames crawling over a wool blanket, too rotten be used for comfort but just enough to be worthwhile kindling. The flames crackle and pop with every mothball and half pupated caterpillar its mouth runs over. He wonders if they can feel that pain, what it must be like.

There are chairs next him on the way to suffering the same fate, old rocking things they managed to grab from a broken trading wagon a few miles out. They smell like old linen despite their time in the snow, splintering at the joints in a few places but good enough for now, their sturdy oak shafts hopefully enough to stave off collapse until they can leave this cabin.

He doesn’t use them. He doesn’t like chairs. They hurt his back but he never feels dignified enough to sit in one. The floor will do as it always has, but he appreciates their attempts to make this ghostly place feel more lived in.

Werewolf eyes those things silently.

They also smell like...good dogs. Despite everything he can make out bite marks in the arm rests from what must have been young puppies learning to play. Either that or just a really rambunctious herder, fed up with being kept inside for some maybe special occasion of the sort.

He whimpers, putting his head into his knees.

Do not think of dogs, do not let your heart yearn for the kind of love they receive.

His mind wanders to those in the fields he used to steal from.

Cherished even when the sheep were gone.

“Did you see anyone while you were out?” Dark Choco calls out to him.

Werewolf jumps, almost barking. He nearly knocks over the chair, standing to shoulder with it even sitting down, but he composes himself enough that he doesn’t let it smash to pieces because he knows there wouldn’t be any forgiveness for that.

“Ah...! Um...I...n-no,” he replies. Way too quietly for the display he just put up. “W-Was I supposed to...?”

“I would have been surprised if you did,” they say turning back to him from the meager little kitchen set up against the back wall. Somehow, that didn’t startle them. “I was just curious. I was hoping we’d be able to find who that wagon belonged to, in case they were still alive...but I guess not.”

“You really want to find more people out here?” Werewolf asks cautiously, ears flattened down. “Wouldn’t that be...dangerous?”

“...Probably. They might have stuff though, or directions. As much as I hate to say it, it’s hard for even me to know we’re supposed to be going now. We’re lucky to have found this place, but getting out of the kingdom from here still isn’t...a straight shot.”

He whimpers.

“W-Will...will we be okay...?”

His tail flicks between his legs. It’s not visible under his cloak.

“...We’ve survived this long...” they say so solemnly. “...So I imagine so.”

Werewolf whimpers again and Dark Choco sighs, waving gently and trying to smile again. He doesn’t notice, only thinking about his stomach growling and the subtle pangs of hunger creeping up his back, something he hopes and prays they can’t hear.

They don’t.

He should have eaten that entire deer. He hasn’t had a full meal in weeks. Nothing goes down smoothly anymore, not even prepared meals.

They stop when he doesn’t notice, smile fading slowly before it’s interrupted by a shrieking pot. With a gentle gasp they whip around, their knees cracking and their joints popping into place as they pour out the excess water into a little jar besides them.

Werewolf hears it all. He snaps out of himself again for a second to watch them wrestle again with their mortal body, with afflictions inherited from birth and all their capacity to exist.

He hears every little wince, every little labored gasp falling from their mouth when they move. Not just now, but in general. They have bad knees, bad ones from standing for so long, bad ones from having to have run so much during their time under that witch, all complemented by a body in pain several decades older than they are. Those long treks they were trained to be able to sustain as a prince were finally catching up to them, sloughing off whatever glorious and valorous vigor they had from those days. Those precious days, all that time ago.

It wears so clearly to Werewolf looking at them like this that he will inevitably outlive all of this before he’ll have to worry about his own decrepit body.

...No, no. Now is not the time to be thinking about that.

Dogs don’t outlive people.

Werewolf straightens out his posture before looking back on their own, sniffling and whimpering once again. He knows only one of them should be in pain if they wanted to survive the winter better than they both went into it.

“...Did you catch anything?” they finally ask once everything’s under control, cutting the silence like a knife.

“...”

“...Werewolf?”

Flames crackle gingerly under their pot again. Werewolf is staring into that fire, watching the way it licks the iron with less than zero hesitation. It’s hard to look away from those eyes as piercing and as blue as they are, sharp enough to maim and pale enough to kill, and Dark Choco doesn’t for a few moments.

“...Ah!” they say as soon as they forget again. “The rice...!”

“Huh—? Did you—?!”

His ears perk up immediately when they lift the lid up. Thick steams swells to meet the ceiling and he relaxes back into slouching, watching them stir it again before adding some more water and salt.

“No,” they say turning back around to the pot. “I just...it’s almost done, but I keep forgetting about it.”

“Oh...” he replies with almost a half smile. A snickering reflex. It’s cute watching them do stuff like this, so much so he forgets how many teeth he has when he smiles. He almost wants to ask how someone can forget in a place like this.

“Well I wouldn’t have minded if you overcooked it a little bit.”

“I would have,” they reply firmly. “I hate mushy rice. It‘s got this awful texture like raw meat does, like that...tartare stuff we ate once with one of my father’s friends. Putrid stuff truly.”

“Haha, well...that’s sort of what I’ve been eating for most of my life. I’d say it’s pretty decent. And...don’t you eat hwe anyway?”

“I never said I liked it. That’s the kind of thing he made me eat. Even now I still find the texture repulsive...and I never want to see it again.”

Werewolf laughs finally. A small break creeping in among many other cracks. It’s another reflex, killed just as quickly as it breathes before it encroaches too deeply into something he doesn’t mean.

“What I wouldn’t give for some raw fish right now honestly...”

Dark Choco looks back to him, smiling again and putting the pot lid back on. The scent of rice has faded now, but it’s mixing in with everything so naturally that it’s hard to let worry stain the air anymore. There’s not a lot of food to eat, but what they have is edible enough to be grateful, and flavorful enough to make this abandoned place feel like a home again. The stalwart ghost that once lived here out of asceticism fades away like snow melting on a brick wall.

They bring the question back up again once everything settles.

“Did you catch anything while you were out?”

Werewolf misses it again. Lost in the smell of the kitchen completely now, so reminiscent of that house they stayed in back in that village. There’s no soup being made but it feels like there is regardless, helped on by a pile of spring onions painting the air alongside the rice. They always popped around this time of year, and if cooked down enough they won’t bother his stomach. That’s what they were doing now.

They repeat the question again.

“...Werewolf?” they ask plainly.

This time he’s lucid enough.

“Did you catch anything? When you went out hunting?”

It’s a question that smothers the smell of food with blood when he realizes it hanging in the air.

Werewolf freezes, eyes falling down to the stone upon which the rice pot lay. He wishes he wasn’t on the floor so he could tuck his tail in between his legs more than he already was but he’s been standing up for long enough today. His body hurts, and his mind hurts worse, and it’s all going to get even worse when he opens his mouth and the truth falls out inevitably. Because dogs don’t lie.

He waits.

They turn around to look at him.

They only have one eye but it is as red as the blood staining his hands. He hides them in his coat before he does anything, says anything, thinks anything.

There is still some red staining his face.

“...No.”

Bad dog.

He clutches his claws into himself as he waits for everything to fall apart, hoping he’ll draw blood. That’ll make his lie less convincing.

But Dark Choco just stares. Blankly. Silently. Almost surprised, even.

“Are...Are you sure...?”

They cock their head and Werewolf retreats into his collar. Feet scrape the floorboards as the wordlessness between them swells, mostly on his end, unable to be touched even by the ambience of everything between them.

Scarlet flecks dryly off his cheeks as he turns them away, pushing deeper into his knees and red stains deeper into his clothes. Gray claws scrape the floorboards once again, dragging small splinters with them even though the soles of his feet have long ago stopped being able to feel such things, and he whimpers.

He whimpers once more as the fire crackles.

How disgusting of him to have blood on his face as if he didn’t know about it, that was something beasts did. That was something dogs did. Bad dogs, anyway. The bad ones who came home empty handed after having merely fought with the badger instead of killing it. Cowards. Weaklings. Or worse, both.

Werewolf says nothing. He stifles the noises he wants to make, not thinking about anything but the moment, anything except the floor, anything except their face and the blood and the lie and just—

Their eyes fall to the floor as they sigh nervously, a breath taken in apprehension of something, and they turn back to the kitchen. Almost as if scanning what they’ve got for the day. But that must have been hard to do in a sound mind when a shadow was growing in the living room, when the teeth of hounds seemed ripe at the door despite rotting, starving, broken and bleeding.

Werewolf braces for something. For what he doesn’t know. This feels like the wait between when the village suspects a changeling child among the children who play near the forest’s edge.

The end of that waiting is red as this moment in his mind. It forces his claws more into the floor, the images of their dogs going after the thing. (The beast.)

The both of them are extremely lucky they’ve never encountered such a thing. The both of them are extremely lucky just in general, so much so neither can really understand or believe it—they just kept going, kept thanking each other. They kept thanking each other in the downed wagons on their way here, in the fact what caused their demise escaped both rationale and in practice. They didn’t think about it on the way here, and he can tell from the way they’re shaking their head looking down at their food that they don’t want to think about it now.

They don’t want to think about the idea that to survive they might just keep having to get lucky.

That to survive he shouldn’t have to rely on a failed dog.

...He shouldn’t have taken that peek.

This is all his fault.

This is all his fault they’re both suffering tonight.

His blood trails along his pants. His claws are past the skin now, burrowing just barely into muscle. It’s painful. It hurts. It burns so badly but he deserves it. This is what bad hounds must suffer when the entire flock of sheep get stolen away in the night.

Neither of them should have gotten so lucky, neither of them deserves a safety net in times of their own weakness. They needed to work together to weather the winter out of the continent, out of the harsh forests and frozen corpses of those just as worn and tired as they were but not nearly as unfortunate as to be blessed with the inability to give up.

If he fails them then they could be—

“...I’m sorry,” Wereworlf stutters. “I-I...I...”

“It’s alright,” Dark Choco says briskly. Almost so against what his mind is running with. Their stare is filled with a hundred things and every one Werewolf reads into it is wrong.

“There’s plenty of food here for dinner.”

They don’t look at him anymore, instead quietly tending to the other food they’ve got going. This house was remarkably furnished for being so abandoned, despite having belonged once to that someone so familial. Someone responsible for the bitter etiquette that mandated failure to cut bone, to sever tendon and veins like metal did to flesh.

Someone who knew no differently, unlike the two of them would.

Werewolf freezes. He freezes absolutely, claws letting up just the smallest bit. The blood finally drips down to his ankles, and yet the pain does nothing to stop anything.

“...I have to ask though,” they say taking out small jars and opening them on the counter. “Did...Did something happen? You look like something...is frightening you.”

The smell wafts in like some kind of sword. Werewolf’s nose puckers from the aroma even imploding on himself like this, the scent of salt, vinegar as burning to his wounds as the real thing. He lets up his claws as Dark Choco takes a deep breath of both, relaxing again and going back to the pot of rice.

“N...No...” he gasps out, the fur on his neck prickling again. He stops watching them and returns back to the fire. His shadow extends now to all four walls.

“Are...Are you sure? You seem a bit upset at something. You sure you aren’t hurt? That you didn’t see anything...?”

He quivers again. He wants to freeze solid, but he knows there are eyes on him even when theirs isn’t. The fire stirs the smells from the kitchen into both their bodies and both their wounds, but in its orange light he can only see his own.

Vegetal scents are still unusual to him. But the experience is enough to drag him down, if only for a little bit. Silver claws unsheathe from pliable skin, the marks they leave bleeding and gushing yet somehow barely there at all. There are no scars when he does this to himself, no torn up records of whatever harm he inflicts upon his own being. He’s never understood this, he’s never understood why, but he stopping questioning it long ago. He stopped questioning why he couldn’t tear himself up, why it was only the marks of others that were allowed to remain on him.

The marks of those who...

Even as a child when he was living with human parents, the smell of their kitchen was greasy, damp almost. Charred by brick and firewood from oak trees too old to be considered saints. Parents he would later find out were not his own, a fact he did not consider to be contradictory to anything until they drove him out for wearing a human skin.

When it was obvious he was a dog pretending to be one of them, a frightening amalgamation of the innards of both with none of the kindness that came with either.

He was nine years old then.

At least according to his friend. He was just barely shorter than they were. It all happened so quickly after. The bear came, and then his teeth, and before he knew it everything he had ever known was shot right out of the sky onto a burning fire for his innards to boil open and burst over.

His mother left that scar on his face. She was always good with a knife.

Werewolf shudders. The thought lingers like rust in his mouth as his chest stiffens again, trying to pretend the kitchen doesn’t smell like knives and doesn’t smell like parents. He gets closer to the fire in tandem to remind himself of what cruelty is like, because dogs know. They know because they are designed to be cruel, designed to become cruel. They do not think about it, they do not react. The teeth of flames have always been comforting to him even if he can only get singed by their efforts, even if there’s something about him that just can’t be burned unlike mortals can.

Unlike the good boys back in the village.

Burning wool is noxious. It rises to the roof of Werewolf’s nose as he tries to decompress in the silence, find something to say to them. The insects boiling over in its fibers don’t help.

But as it crawls over each popping body, each spray of miniature, undeveloped guts, he sees something else as he tries to run away from the house and into the forest. As his face sinks down into his hands, his pupils becoming small and narrow.

There was a dog in the village he once loved, the beloved companion of his friend. It was a black dog, pure and unsullied, good at rounding up sheep until one day there was a lump in its stomach nobody could make smaller.

It was taken outside and fed something from the adults’ cabinets he was told never to touch, never to eat, and fell unconscious in its sleep. He knew what it was anyway, but figured nothing of it when he thought it was less than it took to kill a deer.

They wrapped it in a wool blanket and threw it on the fire as remembrance for its service.

Perhaps it was when he understood its pain as it died, its suffocated barks and sputtering screeches that he should have figured out he was never going to belong.

That he was never human, never a good boy, never meant to exist anywhere except in perpetual agony and eternal isolation.

Good dogs did not deserve such fates. And the beasts should not be so adamant against what is their ultimate destiny.

His fangs sink into his own wrist.

“...Werewolf?”

Dark Choco is behind him now. He bolts upright and knocks them back with his hand, blood spraying from his mouth and onto the wood.

He stumbles backward. Nothing registers until it‘s too late, until they’re getting to their feet again and their eyes trail from the floor to the source of that unholy stain and finally to—

Dark Choco looks him in the eyes for the time since his youth and trembles.

Werewolf whines, wanting to plunge his claws into his own skull.

Everything finally breaks. Course hair gushes out the back of his neck and streaks towards his face, blanketing him in an oppressive grey as his blue eyes become a pinpoint in an otherwise unrecognizable being. He stands up quickly, towering over them as he shakes, his claws covering his emerging muzzle in an ugly, dripping shadow.

He takes a step back. His teeth pierce the fingers he is shoving into his own mouth.

Is that blood theirs? Did he feel their flesh against his hand?

“Y...You...”

That’s their voice. It is quivering, it is weak.

Blood drips down loudly onto the floorboard. It is his, it is a dog’s, it is something worse.

He backs up closer to the fire.

Dark Choco says nothing. They just stare at him intensely, almost as if unsure what to even say. They’re clearly off kilter but they still smile at him, breathing deep, eventually relinquishing their staring into his eyes.

“Y-You almost made me spill my dinner. I-I didn’t know I started you that badly, are you o—“

“I’m sorry,” he blurts. His voice doesn’t sound like his own.

Dark Choco blinks. Their smile fades.

Werewolf averts his gaze from theirs, taking his hands off his face to retreat them into his coat. As he does more fur begins to pile on, more teeth begin to show. His shadow is not enough to protect him anymore, but he wants to play pretend for just a little while longer. He has to, for them.

He is a bad dog.

Dusting himself off as if that matters at all, he stiffly offers them one of the rocking chairs, pushing it closer to the fire. Its feet scrape against the floor, wood to wood, splinter to splinter. The hand he move with is both a claw and not, a shaking mess of blossoming fur, gray little knives digging into his skin that beg for the light to do what it does best and snuff them all out in its violent warmth and ambivalent motives.

They stare. Their eye is wide, their other one twitching as if wanting to open.

“...Th-Thank you,” they say, taking the chair nervously, quietly. They hold their bowl a bit lopsidedly, but not enough for the food to slide out. “Y-You...What’s...What’s happening with you...? You’re kind of...of...”

He trembles again. Standing here he should really be at their feet, in the dirt, in the earth, forgotten. He has far outlived his usefulness, far outlived the lifespan of what the beast within him so desperately wants to be loved like.

Werewolf says nothing again, whimpering. Gray ears fall as he looks back to the kitchen, cooling down from use, and then back to them, the ceiling of the cabin just barely tall enough now for him to be comfortable, even if he‘s nowhere near it.

“...I’m...fine...”

He steps back into the dark. The fire is where they belong, in all of its human use and nearly human origin.

Shadows are older than life itself. They are something deeper, something more ancient, something everything has, every thing, thing, thing.

Is a beast a thing?

Can a thing have a soul?

His tail uncurls from his legs, but he keeps shaking. Dark Choco looks to the fire, and he wants so badly for them to validate the ghosts living in his chest by getting up and throwing one of the burning pieces at him. He knows they won’t, he knows they can’t, but his feet are bleeding into the shadows and the floor and the blanket is gone and the fire is almost dying down. Beasts burn well. It does not linger on them in a way they can remember, in a way they can understand. They don’t even understand what understanding is.

He’s supposed to be a beast.

Does he want to be a beast?

The wood burning over the fire is peppered with the shriveled up corpses of dead insect that look like specks of coal.

Did they think as they died? Did it linger, will it linger if they survived?

“...You don’t sound like it.”

Everything lingers. Even him. Even though it’s in moments like this he doesn’t want to, he wants it all to stop.

“I never do.”

Dark Choco turns around, their eye glimmering in the shadows. Theirs is distinctly human, painfully so to them.

“...What are you upset over? Can you tell me? I don’t mind these transformations of yours, if you’re getting upset because you failed your hunt—“

“I didn’t fail,” he snaps. “There is...There is nothing wrong with me right now...please turn away.”

Silence again. Dark Choco looks down to their bowl. The fire’s light seems hesitant to touch them, as if knows the power that once stuck to them like tar.

“...We have enough food to last us for a few days if we stretch everything out,” they say breaking the quiet so firmly. “There’s...There’s no need to get upset over a lost quarry—I’ll be fine. You’ll be fine. We’ll both...we’ll both be fine.”

That’s what everyone said back then. To him and to their dogs. Look at where he was now.

“...You’re lying to me,” he says, growling with trepidation.

“I wouldn’t.”

“You are.”

“I don’t lie. You know I hate that. Even when it’s good for me.”

“...”

“Do you not trust me Werewolf? Even still, even now?”

“I...”

He backs up again.

“I don’t...know...”

They wince.

Werewolf’s ears fall and his eyes finally soften with tears.

“I’m sorry...”

He catches only half of it, half of that empty gaze that glazes over their face when being reminded about something that hurt to think about. There’s no time to ask before they shake their head again and take another bite of food, whatever it is, clearly savoring whatever could coat their mouth as to wash away the thought had just been dredged up.

...Good dogs don’t fail those who love them.

Werewolf stumbles, more fur coursing down his body. His voice is deep now, infected with some kind of blight, wholly unfit to be loved or listened to like that stopped him before from speaking, like he was fearless enough of death to make everything stop for real. (If death really was the way out here of everything).

“I’m s-sorry,” he blurts again with too many teeth in his mouth. His words are wet with drool despite his dry tongue. “I-I...I...I don’t...I didn’t mean...I...”

Good dogs don’t fail hunts.

Good dogs don’t need words to make others happy.

The fact he messes his up at all is proof he is something beneath even them, even the battered and unloved ones rotting away somewhere in squalor.

He whimpers thinking about the dried blood on his face. How he’s so lucky the fire and the food is smothering how dangerous he must smell, what kind of a horrible beast he must be. Monsters smell of musk in the night, of entrails and skin and of viscera and carrion, of their own bodies and their own failings, of everything humans aren’t and everything he wants to be.

None of his failures deserve to go excused. None of what he is, what he feels like, what his wretched, malformed soul must be—deserve such mercy.

Horrible, failed dog, horrible failed creature. Beast, monster, apparition, beneath human, beneath it all. Beneath the earth itself back into something that can’t think and yet is somehow deserving of scorn.

A werewolf is something beneath a human, beneath a dog. There is something sickly about stuck with a curse that is so painfully human it must force you to become anything but in order to truly isolate you, encase your mind. To which does instinct belong to here? To which mind does the fault lie with?

If he is a human must he take blame like one? That hurts, and he doesn’t want to be blamed anymore. But when the beast wearing a dog’s skin comes out, everything still hurts. Everything becomes still becomes too much again as all his anger, all his rage and all his frustration come gushing out of a squelching wound that explodes so violently upon that crucial vein being severed.

If you’re just human enough not to be anymore, then what of the feelings that come with being both at once?

People pity dogs. They do not pity wolves.

People kill monsters. But to those that look like humans they cast them out, inflict a fate worse than death.

A pain he does not want to keep reliving.

Dogs cannot survive alone.

He does not want to keep surviving like he isn’t one, like he isn’t human.

“...Werewolf?”

That voice again.

He snaps at the air and jumps, almost dropping on all fours. Dark Choco flinches, but just halfway, enough to brave themself for something if he really was about to...

Werewolf curls up in himself. His body aches with every second passing by, his bones breaking into a new skeleton as his skin and organs shift around wetly with his own self-hatred.

“S-Sorry,” they say nervously taking another bite of food. Excessive apologies feel unlike either of them, but they know shame all too well. “You’re just doing that thing again.”

“...Thing?”

“...Yeah,” they say as they rock the chair slowly with their feet. Back and forth, back and forth. “That thing you do when you start staring out at something and your pupils get really small. Is that you do when you’re afraid?”

“Afraid...?”

Werewolf whines, cocking his head at them and sitting up down slowly, hands sliding his arms. The scent of blood burns along with the fire, but it is no match for the food, shining above everything despite it all.

“I-I...”

“What?”

He pauses, looking back up at them after a few moments, not surprised they’re looking at the fire again. It wasn’t unusual for Dark Choco to get caught staring at some kind of natural process for hours on end—fires were no exception. They seem want to a way out of this too; he can hear their heart trying to break out of their chest all the way over here. Not to mention their nails digging into the wood, scraping dirt and skin against old splinters.

“...I...I just...”

Why must his voice get so deep when he got like this? It was so disgusting, almost incomprehensible. Part of him wanted to bark and finally run away, stop this ruse and this idea of happiness he’d finally found with them, but wouldn’t that hurt them? Wouldn’t they be scared without a dog by their side, like the hounds that used to be in the citadel?

Why does he want to be a dog around them? Don’t dogs bite too? Dark Choco didn’t fall in love with a dog.

Did they in fact fall in love with something worse?

“I...didn’t know...you liked looking at me...in the eyes,” he finally chokes sheepishly. Trying to calm himself down. His chest is tight, his mind alight with bodies he doesn’t want to recognize. Talking doesn’t even seem real, but he has to answer. He can’t bark. “Is...Is it scary when I...do that?”

How are they not afraid of him?

No, that’s not true. They’re still shaking. Their chest is still tight.

He’s hurting them. He needs to stop. Dogs don’t hurt people. They don’t think about what hurt means in any context. Why can’t he be like that? Why can’t he bark?

Quietly, they take a pause from their food and look up at the ceiling. The warm pottery in their hands matches them like that white armor did once, to the point where they almost seem like a ghost in that chair. As if they really were supposed to be someone else right now with longer hair and a more frozen heart, a closed wall so stalwart that it was everything it wanted to be without looking to the past or the future in the way of existence now.

Werewolf relents from his own pain for a second thinking of him. That ghost, that hand, that voice he heard only once but could see wore forever on their face.

Strength was relative, it seemed.

But weakness for the both of them was absolute.

“...No,” they say quietly. “...You l-look like an animal when you get like that though,” they say with fish in their mouth. Something he never saw or remembered them doing, and it’s something they seem to correct themself on with haste as if that ghost is watching them through the cracks of the house and its door.

“...”

Dark Choco finishes their food without another word, simply looking at the fire.

An in-between moment. Thinking of a past that isn’t his is...grounding, somehow. How pitiful.

“...Animal?” Werewolf asks, lip quivering and his ears twitching.

“...Yes,” Dark Choco says with a hushed tone, barely above the crackling flames. “That’s...That’s not a bad thing though. I-It doesn’t scare me. That’s just what you look like—like a big wolf, or a really large dog.”

Werewolf whines.

“I-I...”

“Hm?”

Dark Choco turns around to him again. That eye stares so plainly at him, rocking that chair back and forth just barely, the fire flickering down as the cabin finally stops smelling like the products of a meal shared together.

All this fuss and he didn’t even realize they had cooked dinner for two.

“...I wish I was a dog sometimes,” he whispers.

Dark Choco stiffens.

It fall out of his mouth so casually that it doesn’t have time to ride the room’s warmth, dying with an achy trill before Dark Choco can question it. Without a word he gets up, bristling, trying not to let what are halfway between paw pads and the soles of his feet make any noise as he carries himself into the kitchen.

The food doesn’t smell like anything anymore. It smells like a lack of, a void where something warm should be, a void of color in the face of effort and handiwork that even be comprehended.

Dogs should always be able to smell food. It is an instinct, and they live by that. Nothing more, nothing less.

Why does that idea keep popping into his head?

He has no idea and he doesn’t want to know. All he knows is that it’s been pitting in his stomach ever since he began traveling with them, and if he looks it in the face too much he loses control of himself unlike the creatures he so idolizes.

They originally meant to part ways at that village, but neither could bear to be apart any longer than they had to. When the sun first rose over that little abode, it was the first time years either one had looked forward to the day, looked forward to living. To call it a monumental change would have been both overselling and underselling it: nothing changed in them so drastic as to call them new people, but there was a potential dumped into their laps now neither one never believed was possible or deserved on their parts.

Running the length of the kingdom was also going to be easier together than alone. For four hands worked quicker than two, and three eyes saw better than one lonely reflection wandering by itself.

Was that when he became aware of it? This thought in his head, this dichotomy between man, beast and dog?

Before he was alone. There was no one to define himself by. No human to cry out his name in the night, no gentle hand to take his own.

The most recognizable thing in the world were the dogs, the beasts, everything else. Some days they were all he had as a last resort to stave off what he thought would be a forever loneliness in an even lonelier, more desolate place than his own heart.

He looks back to them again.

They stare at him unflinchingly, hands clutching a bowl almost as small as they used to feel in the world once. It is white, swirled with the most beautiful shade of black one could create besides the night sky.

It is the same shade of shadow he carried with himself back then, back when they still wore white, and denied the unity of both that ruled over the snow.

What did they say to each other then...? Werewolf wishes he could remember. It’s been so long since those days, almost two decades time. Or maybe it’s been less, maybe it’s been more, he doesn’t know and can barely recall his own name these days if he isn’t being reminded of that by blades and gunshots.

He stands up straight again. He knows he shouldn’t, but tears stream down his face as he does. Pulling his coat together tighter, he leans against the counter covering it in that shadow again, that shadow that followed him everywhere smelling like a beast and carrying like a dog.

...He doesn’t deserve this.

He doesn’t deserve them.

He doesn’t deserve this thing that’s growing between them. He doesn’t deserve this which refuses the cold and the frost for a single, determined germination like spring is coming, like the sun is just behind the clouds.

There were no people here for them to slip into and make a life of. No towns or societies, no outcasts like themselves. Virtually all of the tribes had been starved out by Dark Cacao’s weakness, the Milk tribe having not been nomadic in ages and the Espresso tribe simply gone. Vanished. Taken by something so sudden that their customs of burying their camps in the snow were not seen through.

It was just the snow, the beasts, and the dogs now.

And do good dogs let those who love them fall to monsters in the night?

Do they let them starve in these wastes, a proper death and burial as their humanity begged an unfulfilled desire?

...No, wolves do that. Those dogs who carry themselves like beasts. They will fail every which way as demanded by humanity, and instead live in villainy and wretched obliviousness, blissfully unaware of their infamy yet able to suffer from it all the same.

People like dogs. They do not like wolves.

Is a wolf considered a dog only when it is not loved? Does the gentle hand of the world take pity on wolves? Do they even deserve it?

Dogs do not have a soul, they make no mistakes. Whatever is considered bad can be unlearned, taught against, conditioned into something more productive while they linger alive with no knowledge, no expertise. It’s just simple learning.

Just simple conditioning.

It never seems to work with him. He doesn’t even want to try, because the mere idea seems patronizing. He’s not even sure where to start on the idea his mind wonders like this, no matter how sick and twisted anything is. It’s him, he deserves it. He deserves to be patronized and yet the idea is so appalling as to be rust in his mouth and yet he keeps going back. Keeps going back.

It is a relief to think like a dog, like there is nothing in your head and nothing in your mind.

Like nothing hurts you, like nothing ever will again.

He understands the happy dogs, he understands the satiated beasts. They are the closest happiness he has felt in so long, the most simplest of things he could understand.

If he is a good dog for them, then he will make no mistakes.

If he is a good dog for them, then he will hold no responsibility for their hurt when he fails.

There will be another body tainting him if he fails. Another corpse, lingering taut on his vision. Another body taunting, this time so familiar it will be lethal. So loving as to be crushing, so whole as to be annihilating.

If he found them dead in the woods he would fall over right there and shred himself to pieces. Iron leeching into the snow, bitter frostbite claiming his organs as he so dreamed about on the coldest days, his most painful days.

If he was a dog, he could stop that.

If he was a dog, he could be good for them.

They’d never be threatened by his existence again.

He would be okay to exist once more.

Perfect, adoring, wholesome in every terrible moment.

His emotional transformations, his hesitation at blood—these are human stains he is marred with eternally and would do anything to give up. These are human stains crusted over with bubbling beasts that he does not want to look at. Beasts that circle him every time he thinks a bit too hard about himself, that swarm him as his body shifts from the hominid to the lupine.

He was a beast when he tore that deer apart, he was a beast when he ripped out its heart from its chest and shoved it down his throat. There was no sort of sense in his own mind then, no sort of sense in his heart or his soul then, and it’s so hideously heavy when he returns back to humanity that it makes him want to vomit. To wretch.

All because he’s facing consequences.

He doesn’t deserve to have a mind if he keeps losing control of it.

He doesn’t deserve to have a soul if all it ever feels is pain, pain he so rightfully deserves having maimed and mauled and killed something innocent again, again like he always does, again like he’ll always do, terrifying and abominable and horrible and unlovable—oh so unlovable.

Oh so terrible, a terrible dog, a terrible wolf, a terrible beast.

Undeserving of any name, any mercy, and yet he so desperately craves pity from his malaise because he knows that’s the best someone like him can do. It’s all he can ever realistically hope for, because there is no cure for someone like him.

Is it possible to be born as someone meant to die?

So against the good of nature and others that there is no hope except in death, in nonexistence, where the weight of actions no matter how accidental have no chance of ever tasting like thorns?

The rabid dog is laid to rest with a gun. With sweet words, family tears, and an acknowledgment of its passing. In blissful naivete towards the foxes it’s slain it will be celebrated, it will be laid into a shallow grave, it will be given honors like it ever understood such things and given a eulogy like it ever even knew how to speak. Cries dripped over its carcass at a muggy funerary procession will take their course like a river until its time for the kids to go home, for the cattle to be tended to again, for everyone in the family to move on peacefully only remembering their beloved pet as a ghost, because that’s all it is now, there’s no deceiving oneself that it was anything less. It was a good boy from start to finish, a good dog from death to birth, a good dog to be savored until the day it is gone from their memory, something ephemeral enough to not leave behind rot as it fades into silent obscurity.

He wants to be a good dog.

He wants to be a good boy.

Everything starts boiling. Werewolf doesn’t understand. He wants anything and everything in that moment as grey claws crawl up his arms and his eyes peel over with tears.

He backs up away from them snarling as everything seems to snag in his head. Further into the kitchen, into the corner. His coat trails like a haunt, stripping all words away from either of them that they never had for these kinds of moments. They were never going to.

It’s all boiling again, those fires, that dog. Those insects, the deer between his teeth. Death. Dog, beast, human, child, be a dog, be a person, be there for them, die. Just die already, end it all, what will even happen to him when he goes? Is there a soul in him? Is it a dog’s or a beast’s? Is it something else entirely?

Why all of this, everything everywhere all at once?

All of those dogs, all of those fires, all of those angry faces?

Heavy claws drag achingly into splinters, but he dares not wince. They push into the wood with heavy, labored movements, bloodied footprints left behind with each effort, but it’s not enough. He can’t feel anything. He can’t smell. He deserves this all of this, he deserves every last bit of harm and scent of comfort.

If he is bleeding, let him bleed—if his blood is to trail, then let it do so. Let him be weak, let him die from an infection this way.

That would be perhaps the easiest way to let Dark Choco down. Not many Cacaoian warriors died that way after all. That would be honorable, that would be good. They wouldn’t hate him in death that way.

Let him go just like that dog. Even in all its pain it still died loved by the village instead of thrown out from it.

How can he live knowing he’s going to fail? That he’s going to fail everything, Gail being human, fail being a beast, fail being a dog in all the mud-smeared ideas and dreams he can even call such?

If he can’t be a human, what is he?

If he can’t think like a dog, how will he be loved for his mistakes?

And if he isn’t a beast, then why does he look like one?

“Werewolf?”

He jumps. Dark Choco nearly puts a hand on his shoulder but he backs away with shining teeth.

“Ah! Hey, what are you—“

“Stay away from me!”

He growls again. Dark Choco staggers a little bit, clearly accustomed to a heavy object being able to brave their movements.

Werewolf backs up fully into the corner.

“Huh...?” They ask, voice wavering between seriousness and concern. “What do you...What do you mean...?”

“Stay away from me,” he growls again, hiding in himself as he slinks to the floor. His claws cannot be sheathed anymore, and they are as black and silver as a knife and the night.

They do not retreat.

“Are...Are you okay?”

He whines. They wince. He can’t shake his head to respond–it’s swimming, so vaguely swimming, turning his stomach over in knots. He wants to say no but that would be dragging this curse out into the open, and they don’t deserve that. They’ve got enough on their plate already. Gods forbid Werewolf burden this poor soul with more of him. The beast is killed for making their hunger the shepherd’s problem.

Dark Choco backs up.

But they quietly retread their steps when he seems want to drag his claws through his skin watching them so intently. So shaking and shivering like a whipped pup in a kennel. Those blue eyes can pierce anything, so with a quiet hand they reach out and try to touch his shoulder before he tears up too much and rips them away.

They yelp. Werewolf whines, and the bowl they forgot in their hand comes crashing to the floor.

It’s so sudden as to startle, so sudden as to send them to their knees from the ringing it brings to their ears. He barks before realizing that is worsening matters, and barks again out of instinct before he freezes for a terrible moment, watching them cover their ears harder.

Now he really is a bad dog.

He seizes and bites his own shoulder, ripping out a chunk of flesh before bolting for the living room. Blood gushes, and trails his paws as he knocks every which thing on his way, the wound squelching with every movement. Bright red muscle pulsates against torn chunks of pale flesh and fur that somehow glisten even more horrifically by the fire’s familiar light.

Embers sizzle. The blood dries quickly and seems to evaporate. The flames lick the sprayed red and they seem to recoil as if being driven out, as if being devoured.

It is a painful sight neither can comprehend until they feel the aftermath, all that exists between them for a single minute being their shadows sidling across the walls as if they’ve done this before with other people.

They haven’t.

The embers burn hot. Blood burns like it smells—badly.

“...Werewolf...?”

He snarls, but not at them. The cabin is small, too small for him. He is so much larger than he was a few minutes ago, ears pulled back hard and ragged tail curled around him.

“...Don’t...come...near...”

He grunts and scrapes his head down against the corner. The house shakes and the wood rakes across his skin with splitting whines, this being the only pain that he wants to exist now.

The wound from before is gone. It has closed up like he knew it always would.

“I don’t...understand...” Dark Choco says quietly, finally, face glimmering naively in the soft orange light. Both fires are coming close to dying out, so they throw a few broken splinters from the house into the one occupying the hearth. It feels so against its nature, he can tell that from their face, but it ripples to life so cleanly that they focus straight and narrow onto him again.

“What...what is happening...? Are...Are you...? I don’t get it, please tell me...!”

He pulls back his head and looks to them with defeated eyes, pale like dead snow.

He is transformed.

Those are not a person’s eyes, they are a werewolf’s eyes.

He has at last become the beast he truly is. That unlovable creature, no long caught in the in between of the in-between.

Or so he wants to believe. Fur inches across his face in small patches, oversized canines wet with haphazard drool. A muzzle snaps, and large eyes narrow, yet despite his size there are arms and sinewed fat instead of canid legs and muscle. Cold claws gnash at cracked palms, blisters popping with puckered stings that drip and smear onto what little remains of his human clothing. It’s difficult to tell where that begins and his fur ends so transformed like this, made all the more challenging by the way he hunches over to stop his head from hitting the ceiling. He’s even on all fours.

Even now he cannot commit.

Bad werewolf.

“Leave...me alone...” he says again with a growl. “Go away....I will...hurt you...”

“Wh-What?” they stammer hesitantly, approaching slowly. It looks like they want to say something else, but it also looks like they want to cry, so nothing comes out.

“Why...? What’s going on, I don’t...I don’t understand...please, you have to tell me...”

Werewolf whines again.

He is not close enough to the real wolf he can deign himself to be if he hates himself enough to let go, but he is humanoid enough to speak. Human enough to understand himself, to mull over himself.

His voice sounds like gravel in a blender, booming like an army’s trumpet.

“...I...I don’t know...” he murmurs, trying not to be heard. “I...just feel...like I’ve been...something bad...”

“Bad...?”

They take another step towards him, the coat he usually donned now completely gone. No longer is he cloaked in shadowy smears, but instead the earthly rags of himself and whatever can cling to him. The light finally breaks.

Dark Choco pulls their own cloak in. The way they stand in the flickering blends the dark where he once stood, as if refusing to play along with their silhouette as he wants it to. The light is cruel, callous, all exposing and unforgiving, but it is also warmth, it is also life. Just as the dark hides, conceals, and keeps isolated, and yet there one cannot see how far they have fallen. Comfort is derived from its totality, its unchanging self.

They’re a beautiful image, so mesmerizing that it takes less than a moment for Werewolf to recoil. His beastly eyes are less accustomed to color; everything is a shade of yellow and blue.

“...Don’t...come...any closer,” he growls again miserably.

“Why...?” they too ask ask once more. It’s much more tired, much more sullen. Not from him, but from just everything. He knows they don’t have the strength to hold anything in anymore, so it tends to wear all on their voice and movements. Almost like a dying clock, if he wanted to be morbid thinking about it, likening them to something from their old life. Dark Choco had grown into a horrible sense of time from their youth.

“...I told you. I am dangerous. Go away.”

“Dangerous...? How?” they ask almost stuttering. “Are...Are you going to hurt me...?”

“...I could.”

“Will you?”

He whines again.

“Will you?”

Werewolf cowers once again in the corner.

If he really wanted to, he could rush out the door right now. Nothing was stopping him, and it would probably be more beneficial. Let this old place belie only one tortured soul, let it only have to suffer the burden of one damned mire residing within its walls. He was a beast after all, not fit for a house, even if invited in.

A dog is invited in and loved. He has never been. He has never been invited in because he is not a good dog. He is a beast. Perhaps something lower. Perhaps something worse.

There are those thoughts again.

He is thinking more with them. That he realizes now, cowering and bestial and ashamed like an inflamed gut. He is rising above the hazy instinct he has lived in for so long, and it is snapping back at everything he has survived with up until this point.

Those shadows that look like dogs.

He scratches pathetically at the ground as they lean down to meet him at eye level. By now the fur is crawling completely over his face, and he is growing bigger still somehow. How nauseating. He is growing ugly, he is growing talons. Not claws, talons. Ugly black talons that will only kill, ugly black talons that will only eviscerate.

How can he just keep getting worse? Every time he scrapes the bottom of the barrel, the earth beneath seems to welcome him into more rotting wood.

He sobs.

Battered skin crawls slowly up the wooden walls as what remained left inside of him finally gnashes its way to the surface. As large as he was before, standing human at nearly seven feet tall, he has become incomprehensible, something towering to the actual ceiling of the cabin despite having a spine only capable of contorting three quarters up.

It’s moments like this when he forgets that he can still speak, moments like this when he forgets he still has a voice. His own throat burns as he pushes against the cabin wall again, shaking the entire house.

“...W-Werewolf?”

There’s that name again. They seem struggling to stay calm.

Either that or they have truly seen worse. He does not want to know what worse could mean to someone like them.

He whines again. Slobbering, tearing up.

If he speaks now his voice will come out incomprehensibly deep. It will be a menace to their ears, an assault on their senses. It will be a hideous bark and he will be a bad dog again, deserving of being put down, of being punished.

Their father yelled at them like that. Yelled at them and brought them to their knees in his noise.

He does not want to be like that. They deserve nothing but a gentle quiet.

“What...What’s happening to you...? Please, say something to me, I don’t...I don’t understand what’s happening...!”

They approach slowly. Werewolf tries to back up but he remembers quickly that he can destroy this place if he wants to.

He whines again, taking a defensive stance. Growling halfway and trying to pace the side of the room he lowers his head to the ground too, as if trying to really ward them off.

It works for a second.

Dark Choco backs up.

Werewolf cowers again, whimpering.

Something spills out of his mouth watching them tremble and move so...stiffly. He’s seen that only once before, only once when they were just a bit older than their first meeting, a time when they truly thought their father had lost his mind.

Above all else, Dark Choco remembers what fear is like.

That aching, familial fear that burns like a snake, a fear that lives in your house and follows you wherever you go because it is only by leaving the house behind that you escape it.

A dog is scary when it is in the house, a wolf is scary when it roams.

He finally breaks and speaks from the torment of that gaze.

“Failure...”

Hard to hear him. Dark Choco prickles, but Werewolf repeats it again despite himself.

“Failure...dog, beast...human...sorry...”

Drool drips from his mouth. They take a few deep breaths, their nervous hands calming down, and they approach.

“...No, you aren’t,” they say quietly. Closer. “What brought this on...?”

Werewolf says nothing again. He knows he shouldn’t, but their eye only makes it worse. Somehow the softest gazes cut the worst.

“I...I don’t get it,” they start again. “Did you...encounter any villagers while you were out...? Did you have your kill stolen...? Did someone hurt you...?”

They shouldn’t be questioning this.

They should be running away. They should be cowering. Cowering away. Like everyone else does. Like the master’s child does when the dog goes rabid and bites one of the sheep.

Instead they extend out a hand. Their face is warmer with more concern now than it has ever been in the past decade.

Good dogs do not bite hands.

Werewolf cries. The fact he thinks that even now, even here of all places, watching them so scared and vulnerable and trying to help must mean he is something unlovable. Something unknowable, unforgivable. Good dogs do not think, good dogs do not want anything. He is broken beyond repair, broken before the yoke was even roped into him, broken before he even realized he had a soul and consciousness because that is what he is doomed to, this is the life he is living now. A forever nothing in between, aimlessly shifting beneath being like a beast and then something just barely resembling a human, forcing him to realize he at once both and must be cast out for his insolence.

Does that even make any sense?

Is he even making sense anymore?

He doesn’t want to. Dogs don’t have sense. He is not a dog but something worse, a looking glass of fatal humanity, a mirror at the edge of the world reflecting back a cacophony of ideas and desires and bestial urges.

The fire crackles.

Dark Choco looks calm. Or well, calmer. They are clearly fighting something, but he doesn’t want to say anything.

He whines and pants and whimpers, scratching up the floor and squirming like a maggot.

When Dark Choco leans in further, he bolts again. How lucky of them to always leave an opening. In a flurry of fur and dust he makes a dash for the other corner, the one furtherest away from the fire. There he knows the darkness will hide him, there he knows his sins as a dog will be covered and laid to rest so that he’ll never hurt anyone again.

If he’s lucky, they’ll realize.

If he’s lucky, they’ll learn.

They don’t. There’s just more footsteps shuffling after him. Another extended hand, a face rolling downhill more concerned than ever before.

“I don’t understand...” they say more tentatively than they’ve ever said anything before. “Failure...? What are you talking about? You haven’t...failed at anything...and look at you, you’ve become...!”

They gesture to all of him.

He growls at them softly, flashing teeth. This time they don’t back up, and he doesn’t know what to feel in that moment.

Is he satisfied with this?

The look in their eyes stings him, and he whimpers again.

It is more determined than it has ever been, more alive than they knew themselves capable of.

No, good dogs do not growl. He knows this because of them. That other them. That one soul, that one lonely soul he used to know, that soul that looks like him right now in the flickering of the fire’s light.

That gentle little soul that only wanted the best for him, who only wanted to herd sheep and live their life quietly.

...

Werewolf whimpers again and curls up into himself. He wants something to happen, but he doesn’t know what. All at once, he wants to be a dog, wants to be a pariah, wants to be a wolf, wants to be a human.

There’s something so disgusting about his indecisiveness, a warm pulsating vein that bleeds out onto the cottage floor like something rotting, something burning, something that’s been said and thought and dragged around like he knows what words are and knows how to compartmentalize anything about himself and these terrible aches that permeate his being.

He squirms thinking of their face, squirms thinking of his friend, squirms thinking of what question will come to him again when he’s asked what’s going on, what’s happening. Because he doesn’t know, he doesn’t want to, he wants to stay indecisive because there’s a comfort in being this pitiable, a comfort in being broken enough not to make a choice knowing fully you should be executed for remaining so neutral. It’s a comforting sadness, pathetically cushioned, an emotional decision wedged firmly between a rock and a hard place that will inevitably stagnate but by the gods it’s so hard to get out.

So you might as well stay there.

You can convince yourself so easily you can do no better being in that pit.

...

Dark Choco approaches him once again.

They don’t know what to do. It’s obvious in their eyes. Obvious from the way they look at him. Werewolf can tell they’re getting even less of a read on him than they are themself and fear manifests from that like a bloom in the way their hands curl beneath his chin when the moment closes.

Nobody’s ever touched him like this before.

Is it like a dog?

No, Dark Choco did not fall in love with a dog.

They rub his chin as if to convince themself this is real as well.

Slowly, he tilts himself away. Stilting his posture as shattered columns do. It feels good this gentle touch, but...

“...Please,” is all they say again. “Help me...Help me understand...”

He says nothing back but just stops squirming, their piercing eyes a hot blade against the cornered, muggy darkness.

His claws are deep in the wood now. He doesn’t remember how they got there.

Dark Choco hesitates and nearly pulls their hand away, but Werewolf whines as soon as he feels the pressure lift. Shadows seem to slough off like flesh, dying and bursting and sizzling in the fire as the most unthinkable happens.

They curl their fingers underneath his chin a bit more.

This...doesn’t feel threatening. It feels...really good, actually. Somehow he can feel their scars through his fur, every single place they’ve ever cut and injured and maimed themself, the thickest of wounds bubbling over with a black magic that will never wash away.

The magic stings. Werewolf has blisters too, and they scratch one carelessly and bleed open something that stings.

He barks. They yelp. Dark Choco flinches but they grab him again anyway, knees falling down on the wood as they lose their footing, hands sunken deep within fur before he can push them away. They’re not young enough to resist him if he jerks away as quickly again.

He does it anyway. It’s instinct, and he hates it.

“Please!” they yell at last. Just as the half-embrace is broken. It’s the first time they’ve raised their voice since they left the castle.

They both stop.

Dark Choco covers their mouth quietly, bowing their head soon after.

Werewolf wants to bite his shoulder off again, but against his own better judgement, he leans into them. They pause for just a second before relaxing and using the same shoulder he wants to tear apart to stand up again, shaking with his whimpers.

...He’s seen this look before too. They’re wearing a new one now. He saw this one just a few times back then, but it was so distinct as to be burned into his mind like hot coals. That’s the same look his princely self wore when he realized he had talked back at just the most critically wrong of moments.

Now, a sword is supposed to follow.

...

But nothing happens.

Werewolf whimpers again and Dark Choco pulls him in fully.

Or, if one wanted to look at it another way, he finally lets them rest on him, completely and utterly.

The both of them collapse for a short moment. Their hearts are racing, memories and feelings dangling in their minds like wet sandpaper against old steel. How they both can simultaneously complete each other in such a fuzzy, fucked up time like this between them is a mystery they both know but will never unravel completely.

Dark Choco tears up just a little bit. They lean in close to him, holding him like he’s not the one with problems and like he hasn’t just transformed into something he was definitely sure they would be afraid of.

He nuzzles him, his own chest hurting and his head a liquid mixture of sorrow, near-nausea, and adrenaline that never was.

Why they want to hold onto him still he doesn’t know, but he’s not going to question it now.

Several minutes pass. Dark Choco sobs quietly before looking up finally and letting themself out of his fur. The look on their face clinging so closely to him is one of shame at an already shameful state.

Nobody had ever appreciated Werewolf like this, so he’s not sure what to think.

“What...what is happening here...?” they ask finally in a forced hush, almost a nervous knee-jerk laugh.

“You...You have to tell me, I don’t understand. I really don’t...! And I...I don’t want to see you like this, I don’t want to be...I don’t want to...I-I don’t...”

They try for a few seconds to find their words, but they can’t. An eye scans the floor frantically but it finds nothing, nothing personal, nothing to grab on to, nothing to make sense out of the “why not” that hangs in the air.

“...I want to understand...”

As their voice trails, the cabin is silent, save for the dying fire and snow falling outside.

Werewolf stiffens, tearing up. He didn’t know he could do that in this form.

There’s that look again. That face only he’s seen, those breaks only he’s held. He can barely see it and barely understands it, and yet he knows it so perfectly. There’s no words to describe how miserable the mood Dark Choco is slipping into is but somehow Werewolf just understands from the way they sound younger in all the wrong ways.

...He’s the one supposed to be falling apart here. Not them.

Is it his fault they’re like this?

...There are no dogs here. Dark Choco was hurt by a dog, but they will not be anymore.

He whimpers again and cradle them close. They lean in so naturally against him despite everything, despite what he thinks of himself, despite what he’s known before when things like this happen.

He hates seeing them cry, hates seeing them even teetering on the edge of it. Dark Choco did not deserve to cry anymore, they had already lived several lifetimes full of tears.

They streak down his own face as he cradles them into his own body deeper, deeper than instinct tells him is safe and yet it feels natural enough to override everything.

Indeed, dogs don’t exist here.

Dogs don’t exist in this in-between space, this collective of brokenness between people that sometimes both beautifully and painfully intersects. (Most is the time it is not beautiful, but mutual brokenness can appear that way out of desperation).

Neither of them is even really aware of what those concepts are and yet they both lean into one another as if they do, because on some level even crumbling houses want to lean against something. Even crumbling homes want to be a place for dogs and people again, want to be a place for souls to inhabit until they pass, either from travels or from life.

Werewolf knows he is a beast in this form, thick hair coursing through his veins like tar. His claws are surely going to hurt them if he isn’t careful about where he puts them, and his face must surely be too inhuman to find appealing anymore. They liked his face, liked how pretty his nose and eyes looked, how cute his double chin made him look.

And still they cling.

Dark Choco clings harder than he remembers them ever clinging to anything, including those ideals they once had in their youth.

Rough hands trail down an equally scarred back until they settle firmly on the waist (or what could be considered such) muscle and fat working as an anchor until the both of them finally and truly relax. Their dual heartbeats don’t settle for a little while longer, beating in rhythm instead to the grit and noise dripping through their heads as the world outside stills itself for the night.

An owl coos. A vole screes. Their calls barely register and yet the sounds slips in between the both of them and finally relents to them the cue to give up everything.

Werewolf goes first. Like a dog he falls on his back, but unlike one he drags them with him, ignoring the patchy cold seeping in through the wood up and down his back. They’re enough. He doesn’t notice his arms coming back into focus as he brings them to the ground, because all he wants to see is them.

Dark Choco follows suite. They let him take them, let him take everything they have that he dug up. It’s not his fault, it’s not him, it’s not him. It never was, he didn’t mean it he—.

...Silence.

There is nothing between them now, not even the fire. It was dying out anyway, and they don’t want to think about anything except each other.

Gently, Werewolf hoists them up on his waist. Dark Choco says nothing as his furred hands runs over their hair, receding paw pads so warm as to be almost burning. They shiver with every gentle touch, every slow stroke, almost as if wishing to reclaim their armor in such a soft moment.

They bury their head quickly within his chest, finally relinquishing everything, relinquishing all. He catches that reflex, that total collapse of theirs and holds them closer, trying not to think about how large his freak of nature hands must be against their delicate back.

That look on their face is the same one now as their first kiss. The same one now as their first hug, their first more delicate moments with each other. Back then they had never noticed how touch-starved they were, and it was only now they were realizing the truth death of their deprivation.

Werewolf holds them close. He kisses them gently, on the forehead very meekly, very slightly. They pull him in and return the meager gesture, unsure of their form and like a wanderer in the desert drinking water for the first time in days.

“...Are...Are...”

His voice sounds better now.

“Are...you...you...?”

“I’m okay,” they say quickly. Their heartbeat echoes throughout his body but they’re so stiff still.

“...Are...you...sure?”

How he can speak like a person while maintaining a lowly beast’s vocal chords is beyond him. He almost doesn’t want to be able to speak, but humans speak. Dogs cannot. A dog cannot comfort its loved from their tears the same way a spouse can, the same way a tender kiss could.

He kisses them again.

He is still unsure of himself though. Can he really help them like this? Is he doing more harm than good, or is he deluding himself into thinking his choices matter when everything will end with his fangs out anyway?

How deep did he hurt them, did he break something in them that can’t be fixed? It wouldn’t be the first time in his life someone’s done that, but Werewolf doesn’t want to leave that kind of mark. He can create, he believes he can create around them, and he wants to live up that idea no matter how lofty it is.

The thought runs on four legs when Dark Choco finally speaks again.

“...I don’t know,” they say quietly. “I just...felt like I did something wrong, suddenly. Along with a lot...of other things.”

“You...can do...nothing wrong...to me...” Werewolf mutters as gently as his voice will allow him to. Anything less and it will just devolve into sputtering hisses.

“...That is not true,” they reply just as solemnly, nuzzling into his shoulder. “...I am capable of hurting you. Capable of...failing you in all manners of great ways. There is little on this Earth not immune to either my weakness, or my cruelty.”

“...Cruelty...?”

They say nothing. Their eye hasn’t cried yet and it’s certainly not starting now, but Werewolf can feel a weight forming within their words and chest again.

He presses a hand to their back. They lean in, more tired than they knew themself capable of being. Or at least that’s how Werewolf sees it.

“...Yes. Those are the only two states which I can exist in. Everything else feels like some kind of accident, like I’m missing something important nobody else has told me about. Like I’m not doing enough even knowing there is nothing for me to do anymore, as if my freedom is some kind of second curse.”

Their freedom...he wonders which one they are talking about. Neither of them will truly be free from any which malignanity that can be cast upon the self, but they sure can try and imagine a world without.

They both take a deep breath. Dark Choco weighs nothing on top of him, whose claws are shrinking so slowly that he doesn’t notice. Their weight has never mattered to him—he will carry them when they are hurting, he will carry them when they are tired, he will carry them when they’re sick and dying and injured and ill. This continental trek was made much easier after all by how little he needed to sleep as a beast, as a werewolf, as something not even able to be described by those things when he thought about it, if he wanted to at all.

And they slept a lot.

More soundly than he knew anyone to have ever slept in their life, more hours in the day on days when they didn’t do anything than he knew people could.

Werewolf whines again. Dark Choco does not curl up deeper into him but he cannot help holding them closer. Their body makes everything stop within himself, every part of himself screaming and gnashing and biting just that bit less loud and garish to look at.

...Good dog.

No, dogs can’t do this. They can’t enjoy such things.

Does he deserve to enjoy such things?

Their fingers creep up hide sides slowly despite it all. Up and down in soft little waves, so subtle that perhaps he could pretend they weren’t doing it if he really wanted to.

He whimpers gently again, and they start putting their arms into it more. His fur isn’t soft but it’s stiff enough to bounce back, stiff enough to ignite that part of themself that found small joys in such sensory things. He loved that part of them the most when he thought about the things that made them who they were.

“...I’m here...” he says quietly, not realizing his voice is loosening in pitch. “...Do I...Do I make the pain better...?”

Pain. He’s not sure if that’s an appropriate word to call what they just described, but the words “buzzing monotony” just don’t roll his tongue that well when he’s like this. Even the mere phrase feels foreign, and alien to him, like words shouldn’t be able to capture so perfectly something that can’t be seen, only felt and conveyed. And conveyed imprecisely from body to body for how expansive language was.

Dark Choco nods.

“...Yes,” they say uneasily and with a deep breath. “I...I think. Having someone else around...does makes surviving less painful. It makes the snow less hostile. It makes the little things...almost feel like they’re worth acknowledging again, if you get what I mean.”

There’s that preciseness of language again. That regal tongue of theirs. Dark Choco always had a way with words that Werewolf wishes he could put into his own, because the way they see the world is something that feels expressible only in such. A way that feels able to be expressed only between people, never to the environment or to history.

That was the same tongue he saw so vicariously clash with their father, that same tongue that made so many friends and admirers when they still had their youthful strength, the same tongue that had to be regrown again when their heart was shattered into pieces by a conniving curse.

Is that why words are so important to them?

He wonders for a second earlier why they just kept asking what was wrong. Couldn’t they see it was? Something was wrong, something was broken, and yet they just kept asking?

...Perhaps it is for the better they are persistent despite it all. After all, what else did instinct do when cornered?

What else were you supposed to do when understanding failed, when things did not fall into place how you envisioned them and yet something feels so wrong, so trapped with you, so against words?

Their currency in life is in such things, because for so long they had been denied the understanding of such by everyone else. Werewolf doesn’t need to be told this to understand it, it wore plainly now playing back all those memories of them. Of how they talked about their father and the way they both ran around in circles. Argument after argument, misunderstanding after misunderstanding, Dark Choco seemed to want to describe them all with words and wanted to fix everything with words, taught so gingerly by the same person born just like them but too mired in his own walls to understand.

Or perhaps he was just too cruel.

...No, that was not his call to make.

He doesn’t want to hate his father. Dark Choco doesn’t, so he won’t. He’s never had a father, never had any parents even (real ones anyway)—hell, he hardly has friends come to think about it. He knows he shouldn’t judge. He knows he shouldn’t say anything except to answer, except to offer advice when they pop their head up out of the water before they’re swept away again.

“I’m glad...” he says achingly.

It feels nice thinking about someone else besides himself for once. These problems may not be his own, but they are a good enough distraction to fall into.

Werewolf has now since de-transformed, not realizing it until he can feels their body almost one to one upon his own. His face is still stuck in a halfway sort of misfortune, canines not able to fit in his mouth and wolf nose still wet and clearly visible, but they lean into him anyway, almost pressing him to the floor. Pecking his cheek as rustling fur gives way to grey clothes again.

Werewolf keeps them close, returning it all gently. They tear up, shaking, nuzzling him and holding him close.

“...My pain will never end,” they say quietly, fully awash in an ambient orange shadow. “I am just glad you’re here...even with everything you have going on...”

With everything they have going on.

He knows they want to say it but can’t. There’s still some denial they need to work through.

Their red eye glimmers so defiantly, not of its own accord but its own nature. In the light it is a warm treasure, in the darkness a welcome friend. In both worlds it is accepting, in both worlds it loves, in both and all their in-betweens it will meet him wherever he goes and in whatever he becomes, whatever he is.

His transformations aren’t curses, but they make living feel like one.

With them though, there is finally peace between everything.

“I’m sorry,” he finally says, voice fully on the floor now. Not hovering aimlessly in his throat or in a body too big for a dog and a human combined. “I...I didn’t mean to snap at you...I panicked...”

“You...panicked?” they ask nervously, pulling their fingers against the wood. “At...what...?”

Werewolf sits up, taking them with him. The hearth’s fire smolders, the one in the kitchen completely out. The food in the kitchen has gone cold as well, and had he not been so focused on them he would have nearly gagged from the smell of souring kimchi. It was completely inedible to him at this point.

“...Myself,” he mutters. “I...I felt like some kind of...dangerous animal. I wanted you to...get away from me...because I failed you...”

Failed dog. Failed dog. A failed dog who did not bring back the food like it promised, all for a pathetically human reason.

The memory of blood singes at his mind. He winces, pulling his legs in from them and rubbing his eyes. His arms are covered in splinters but he isn’t going to deal with them right now. Or ever. (He’ll deal with them tomorrow).

“...Failed me?”

There’s that look again. It’s softer than before, but Werewolf can tell they’re getting ready to run in circles again, even if it’s only subconsciously, and probably against what they want to feel about them.

“...Yes,” he says plainly. “You...you asked me to bring back food tonight and I...I...I couldn’t...I just couldn’t do it...I failed when I saw...when I saw the blood everywhere all o-over the deer and I...I...”

He tears up, hands rising to his face. Dark Choco sighs, relief flooding their own as they put a hesitant hand to his back. Werewolf quickly pulls him in for a hug, knowing he doesn’t deserve it but he‘ll let his beastly impulses take over just this once. Just this one time.

He cries softly into their chest.

“I don’t want to remind you of bad times...” he whimpers out. “I don’t...I saw that look in your face, it’s the same one...it’s the same one I get when it all becomes too much again...I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I don’t want to be like that...!”

He’s so much bigger than them, so it hurts his neck, but he doesn’t care. He’s tired of hurting. Tired of this dichotomy tugging at his insides, tired of these beasts bubbling up from his chest to confuse him every which way about himself.

He’s tired of the pain, he’s tired of the threat of isolation. It stinks up every which way he moves, every which way his bones scrape against each other.

There’s no deciding here, no winning side between him. It’s just a losing war going on within himself only fought to sustain survival, a war that will inevitably wear him down the longer it goes on. Even that way of describing it feels so much more nebulous than it is, so much less cohesive of the big picture than it ought to be. He’s a messy, messy soul, and this war shouldn’t be defined with only words. It shouldn’t be defined by mere containers of meaning, little things that can only have meaning if assigned to them by the listener, but there’s a freedom in putting himself in a box like this. There’s a freedom in having everything be explained and explored just this once, in everything being so neat.

He doesn’t know if he’s a dog or a person.

He doesn’t know if he wants to be one or the other, or if he should abandon the idea completely.

To be a person is to feel and live, to be conscious and sentient and of a sound mind and body. It is to make decisions, to have the freedom to make such decisions, suffering the natural consequences for them in turn.

To be a dog is to be ignorant, so blissfully ignorant that such concepts don’t even register as things. It is to do as one is told and have everything be laid out for you in full, not being able to physically grasp the bigger picture behind the world or even be fully aware of the realities in it as people defined them.

Whether he is a dog or a person, that doesn’t matter.

Little else matters in their arms, knowing they accept whatever he is, knowing they see him and perhaps understand. That bit earlier about being made of only cruelty and weakness gives him hope.

Maybe someone after all this time truly understands.

Dark Choco pulls him in close. They like to be held, so Werewolf obliges. There’s little else like the subtle joy of feeling another body against yours in a time like this. Such a moment truly defies words.

“...It’s okay,” they say softly. “I...You didn’t mean it. Right?”

“Of course not, I would never.”

They kiss his forehead. It would hurt their knees to do such a thing on the hard wood, but on him it’s wonderful, pleasant.

“Then...I forgive you. I forgive you sincerely, and if you can’t hunt anymore, I will.”

Werewolf’s ears drop like a stone.

“But...you shouldn’t, not for me,” he says breaking the silence and the hug halfway. His eyes are wide, his mouth hanging agape with sharp, snaggled teeth. “You...you already do so much.”

Dark Choco hesitates, gasping when they’re let go so he hugs them again one more time quickly to make up for it. They stay like that for a while, much longer than either anticipated.

“...I don’t mind,” they whisper after it’s done, softer than their voice has ever been before. “You know how to forage for food...you can learn how to cook. I imagine there’s stuff people have buried in the ground you can smell that I can’t. Food in jars we’ve probably missed, winter truffles just starting to come up. You understand me on this?”

He wants to nod, but he hesitates. It shouldn’t be this easy to get away with failure.

“...Werewolf...?”

“...Yes yes,” he mutters softly and quickly. “I uh...yes. I...I understand. Are...Are you sure though...?”

Dark Choco smiles, relaxing again. The smoke from the kitchen fire finally peters out, the one in the hearth slowly trailing its corpse. The glow of their ghosts frames perfectly their still image, their steady silhouette, their nervous smile and their heavy heart.

It is always heavy. Werewolf’s weighs the same.

“...Yes,” they reply almost eagerly, albeit a bit too tired to sound overtly so. “I am not averse...to hunting despite everything. Death is as natural as life is—if I am going to take a life, I prefer it be of my own accord now instead of what...it was like before.”

Another stammer. Werewolf can tell that’s not from their lack of words, but from a desire not to dig deeper into that poisonous soil. The past may be put into words easily, but that does not mean it was not painful to bring into the present.

He shuffles around on the floor for a few moments, breaking contact with them. His tag wags uncertainly a few times beneath his coat, cutely thumping against the floor and rising a few wayward giggles out of them. They both need to sleep.

“...Okay,” he finally says with an uncertain, tone, getting back up on his own two feet like the person he is, standing his ears back up like the dog he was. “And you’re...you’re really okay with that...?”

“I can use a bow,” they say beaming slightly, mouth flatly content, standing up with him. “I was trained in all manners of weapons for a reason.”

Werewolf sniffles, throwing some logs into the fire, kindling and splinters soon after. It’s all done so carefully, so stiffly, as if an aftermath is still lingering; it’s clear he doesn’t want to get on all fours again.

“...Okay,” he says, looking up and them and to the kitchen. The remnants of what happen still cling to his coat and his heart, blue eyes as wide as crystals so delicate under the hammer’s crush. But Dark Choco sees none of this—they sees none of what is happening to him and everything within him. They see none of the storm still brewing within his chest and none of the terrible afterglow lingering around like flies to rot, a feeling of stillness perhaps worse than the actual skirmish because there is a fear within the unknown of the silence. A fear within stillness, within restlessness.

No, that’s not right. They do see it, but they understand in spite of it. Loves in spite of it, even, and that’s perhaps the worst feeling of all for someone like Werewolf to experience.

Trust, above all else, cannot be quantified, and it cannot be expressed so qualitatively either. It is a state of being best left unsaid, a state of being that only grows in the unsaid. It is something that defies both dog and person because both can understand it, but for once they are both equal in how to express it.

What about the beast?

Werewolf doesn’t know. Perhaps it is best he leaves that moniker behind, for the skin it asked him to wear was dehumanizing, less than patronizing. Giving into his anger and his hurt would still be a process, it would be a process of gradually whittling down what he knew was right and wrong, a process of grinding down everything which made him who he was, all for a result in the end that probably wouldn’t even give him what he wanted anyway.

To call a dog a beast is to condemn its upbringing, but to call a human a beast is to condemn its nature. What they have made themself into, what wanton cruelty and ignorance of others they have so cruelly decided to grow into of their own desires.

He does not want to be a beast.

He will not be cruel the way the world so wishes to see him as. There is no love to be found there, no joy with which to enjoy life as he is right now.

“Want to finish the rest of the food?” they ask with a smile, breaking him out of his own thought for the night. “It’s not that warm but I imagine it’s edible enough.”

Werewolf gulps, but nods, taking a step towards the kitchen.

“Sure. Do you have any more fish though...? I’m not...a fan of fermented vegetables...”

“Hm...I think I just might...”

Another smile at him. This time he smiles back, and they laugh.

It is difficult to precisely quantify life, to precisely give feelings a time and a place and a name and a container.

But whether he’s a dog, whether he’s a person, whether he’s both or something lower, there is one thing he knows in the gentle clanking of dishes and the crackling of the fire.

He is loved, despite it all.