Work Text:
The pain is excruciating. There is no other way to describe it. Sometimes, when asked by Annie or Mitchell how it feels, even excruciating doesn’t even begin to describe it. What happens to my body every month upon the full moon is so… paranormal that many would not believe it.
Who really knows what normal is anyway? I don’t. Annie doesn’t. And Mitchell is a 117-year-old vampire, so he definitely doesn’t either.
When my body transforms, my internal organs shut down and reform. I go through liver and kidney failure and feel every nerve in my body scream out in pain. Fire igniting every single one.
Within me my heart stops and is transforming, shrinking to two thirds of its human size. All my other organs are decrease in size too.
The deafening screams, I scarcely believe are coming from my own mouth, are silenced as my throat and vocal chords tear and rip and reform into things capable of a haunting howl.
By now a gland in my brain should have flooded my body with endorphins to ease the pain, but this, too, has shut down and I experience every nerve ending, each individual one contained an inferno.
My skin rips off my own body leaving behind course hair that covers every single inch of my figure. The pigments in the skin below have also darkened.
My teeth grow unbearably long, and viciously sharp. My teeth grow into fangs. I would enjoy unsedated root canal work more.
My finger and toenails grow into razor sharp claws and my hands and feet extend well beyond any size, abnormal or otherwise, into gigantic paws.
My skull cracks, grows and reforms to create the Wolf’s snout. The skin of my face stretches tight across my new cranium, slow to catch up on the growing and reforming. Meanwhile the spine grows too long for me, the vertebrate down my back protrude from underneath my darkened skin, threatening to burst out in blood, causing a hunch-backed posture for the Wolf.
By this point my eyes have turned from their human green to an animalistic yellow. My mind along with all memory, recognition, thought and empathy has all disintegrated into nothingness. But, if you think about it too much, I guess everything is nothingness in the end. If someone I love got in the way of the Wolf, It would tear them limb from limb, skin tearing, blood pouring as if from a jug, and devour them. And I would have to live with that burden on my conscious, forever.
I undergo all these internal and external changes and at the end of it all The Curse repairs my body, returning it, just as painfully I imagine, to its original form, the form I was always intended as, and leaves me naked, shivering in the middle of nowhere. Filthy, covered in blood, and usually next to the Wolf’s last kill with no money and not a stitch of clothing on me.
I used to regret the night I took a stroll and was scratched by the Curse. But then a part of me believes in fate and destiny. It was the other man who was killed, who had his guts sprawled out on the floor next to me. Not me. So maybe it was my fate to meet Mitchell and for us to rent a house together. Fate to choose the house that we did and, because due to our… abnormalities we could see her, meet Annie. So I can’t bring myself to regret that night, for consequently, I met the best friends anyone could ever have. And we live, being human.