Work Text:
It always starts the same way. Doesn’t matter where; doesn’t matter when.
It starts with him, clothes thrown haphazardly in a pile in a corner, pacing the floor restless and weary like a caged tiger hours before the sun had even begun to set. Him, with his teeth gritted together until his jaw jumps and his trigger finger dancing wildly against the air, his other hand balled into a fist so tight it makes his palm bleed. Him, with a beast in his bones that snarls and claws against the inside of his ribs, hungry and impatient for its time to take control.
He slumps himself with his back all up against the basement wall, tips his head back to knock against the crumbled brick and squeezes his eyes closed. There’s a sharp flutter that slithers through his veins like a silent alarm. An omen- pricks his hairs on end and gets him flinching with a twitch of his nose in anticipation before the brunt of it even truly wells up to slap him in the face.
He lifts a hand and rubs it over his forehead, sweat slick and burning. All of him is burning, feels like he’s damn near to boiling alive in his own skin- goddamned heat. Never could outrun it.- and it won’t go away, just builds and builds and builds until his whole body is drenched and his breath comes out of his chest in growling heaves.
Too hot. Too goddamn hot. He’s too fucking hot and his skin is crawling with a firey, aching sting and he knows what’s happening, Christ, he’s been through it more times then he could ever care to count, but his brain can’t make sense of it. Still can’t wrap itself around the incomprehensible- the snapping bones and the gaping jaws and the way his muscles tear and bulge under his flesh. It’s ironic, he’d think if he had the mind to mull it over. Living this shit like it’s the first time all over again every month. Another little hell among a sea of lingering horrors- just one more consequence born of his endless list of sin. Still doesn’t make it hurt any goddamn less.
He slips the hand on his forehead down his face, flicks his tongue out to wet his top lip with his eyes half-lidded staring up at the ceiling, and that’s when the real pain hits.
Knife-edged, it stabs its way through his abdomen and gets a vice grip around his throat; his whole body jerks like he’d been shocked and curls in on itself, and the grit of his jaw clenches down hard enough to snap a back tooth clean in two. He pays it no mind- the sparking kick of an exposed nerve is all but a backdrop to the shit going on with the rest of him, the curdling squirm in his gut when his innards start to move and rearrange themselves. It chokes a strained grunt up and out of his lips, spasms his chest over an inhale and blurs his vision with tears. His hands- curled like claws as they are- shoot up to bury his fingers into the longer mess of hair atop his head, sink nails into flesh until blood beads on his scalp, and he peels his lips back from his teeth and snarls ; a crackling, inhuman noise. A crunch in his hip pushes the air from his lungs and sends him down to his knees with a ‘thud’ and a cut off cry, some morbid facsimile of a beggar man kneeling with a bowed head before his God. But Jax’s god is bloody and rubbed raw and full of a beating rage that burns like fire through him, and he dips his chin to face the floor as a ripple along his spine hunches him forward and surrenders to it, faithful as a lamb led to slaughter.
A femur splits and snaps, a muscle in his back convulses and swells, and he needs to get out . Out of this skin that burns and boils like the sun, that fits a little too tight over his bones until he feels like he’ll suffocate with the squeeze. Out of this goddamn body, this fucking prison, this human cage. His hands slip from their hold on his head down his neck to his shoulder blades, and he creaks his jaw open on a throaty yell as he burrows his fingers into flesh and tears. His whole body shakes with it, shivering against the concrete floor like an old, angry dog, and he tears and tears and rips at himself until his skin sloughs away in bloody chunks, leaves his back glistening with gore and flowing rivers of blood. It’s not enough. It never fucking is. He can shred himself to ribbons and never find an ounce of relief, but the thing in his chest roaring with his mouth for freedom only eggs him on, feeds him a fury he can’t resist until it fucking consumes him. And he lets it, because a part of him wants it to. Foams rabid at the mouth for the excuse.
He hears more than feels when his jaw dislocates itself and snaps forward, and his hands leave his back and come around to scrabble on instinct for purchase on his neck, his collarbones, but their grip is loose and clumsy as his fingers pop and break only to repair themselves- longer, curved. Flesh peeling from around nails that split open with the force of the claws digging their way up and out of his skin. Those talons make for good use against himself, though- slides easy as a blade beneath his skin when he grabs desperately at his chest with a gurgled, gravel-y cry and rips. Black hair sprouts from the grisly mess and marks he leaves behind, pushes up from under the carnage he’s made already stained with blood- a monster’s kind of rebirth.
His spine arches then, crackles and crunches and pushes him forth with his palms flat against the cool ground to keep him upright. His skin does the rest of its own shredding and shedding while he gouges his claws through the concrete and fights back the nauseous urge to puke; his mouth pries itself a little wider open anyway, but it isn’t to spill his guts. His whole body lurches forward on a spasm instead, draws a guttural scream up and out of his lungs accompanied by the sound of teeth clacking by the pair against the ground in a pool of blood. A clotted string of it hangs from his lips when he heaves nothing but air, jerks again as his leg cracks out of place and the skin of his face ruptures away from his growing muzzle.
A shriek, that trades itself for a sob, that shifts its way into a snarl. He slams his forehead down onto the floor and reaches up to grasp white knuckled back at his head, now damp and coarse-haired with the aftermath of his scalp splitting itself open to make something new.
But it’s not new, not really. He doesn’t think it ever has been. A thought, a feeling; sick like sludge in his veins from the day he was born until a needle in his arm made it flesh. It’s as old as he is, and with a ripple of muscle cramping itself through his chest- flaring to fill a bigger frame- and a crack of bones settling themselves into place, it’s born from the ashes of his rage again, lifts its head slow and calculated from the ground with glistening fangs bared at the world and a rolling growl in its throat. Gore and matted, soggy skin drips from its fur as it lifts itself to its feet, slides its eyes- one gleaming with animal hunger, one foggy and dead- across the dark of the room until they land on the exit; all chained and nailed together like that’d do a damn thing to keep it inside. its snout wrinkles with its anger, clawed hand flexing at its sides, before it's throwing its head at the ceiling and letting out a gut deep, shrieking roar. A warning.
Here I am. Hollow and hungry and aching for death. Here I am.
Here I come.