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Awakening to the harsh brightness of the moon centered in the sky, Jack sits up on the log he fell asleep on outside. “Alex?” He calls out, having fallen asleep earlier with him, but getting no response. “Alex?” He repeats, pulling a flashlight out of his pocket, shining it around him, seeing no signs of other people.
He gets up and starts to search in the nearby vicinity of the clearing in the woods they set up in earlier, he wonders if Alex just woke up earlier. “Alex?” He leaves the clearing as there’s no signs within it, and ends up wandering through the woods, under branches and between trees. He pauses periodically to listen for any sounds of other living things, but all he hears within the silence is the occasional owl hooting.
He takes a break to sit on a stump, having lost himself deep in the woods. Whether he finds Alex or not, he’s gonna have to wait til sunrise to get back to the camp, or anywhere familiar. With a sigh, Jack laments his inability to find Alex, worried that something might have happened to him, or perhaps he said something that upset him. He goes through a mental list of everything that happened earlier that night, nothing out of the ordinary, he even remembers Alex laid on him to go to sleep.
“Alex, where are you?” He thinks out loud, waving the flashlight around where he’s sitting to see if there’s anything remarkable around. It’s only when he feels about ready to give up looking when he sees a familiar looking shirt lying in the leaves on the ground. He gets closer to it and brushes the leaves off the top of it, this is the shirt Alex had on earlier, and it’s all torn up. As Jack starts to worry that something bad really did happen to Alex, he spots the rest of his outfit scattered nearby, even down to his shoes and underwear.
Panicked, Jack can feel his heart rate increasing, something bad happened to Alex, but what throws him off, is there’s no signs of blood. If Alex got mauled by a bear or something, surely there’d be signs, and it wouldn't just be his clothes that are left behind, scratched and ripped up. As Jack looks over the clothes, he hears rustling in the nearby bushes. “...Alex?” He doesn’t get a response, but the sound of rustling gets closer.
He starts to back up and away from the clothes, did he wake something up? The rustling gets louder, Jack sees a pair of glowing eyes pop out from behind a bush and lurch towards his direction. “A-Alex…?!” Alex isn’t known for having glowing eyes, Jack is just stressed out and nearly frozen in fear. Only able to back away further into the woods as the glowing eyes creeping towards him reveal a hunched over humanoid silhouette, just below him in height, as the light of his flashlight shows a decidedly canine pair of ears, and a naked body.
Jack’s backing up from the figure has him bump into a tree, and he doesn’t realize until the figure keeps getting closer and closer. He shivers and sweats, expecting his life to end right here and now, assuming that this creature massacred Alex, but just as he’s about to accept his mortal fate, his flashlight reflects off the back of the left hand of the creature, revealing a familiar rose tattoo. “...Alex?”
The creature pins Jack up against the tree and sniffs his face. Jack assumes he smells terrible from all the stress sweating, and while he still fears getting his face eaten, the creature instead…licks him. “Alex…” Jack sighs with relief, not only is he still alive, but somehow, Alex appears to be a werewolf. Jack hesitantly wraps his arms around the creature’s back, unsure if he’s feeling body hair or fur, but he feels, and smells, familiar all the same.
As Jack ponders what werewolf junk looks and feels like, he can just about make out the silhouette of a wagging tail on the creature’s lower back, proving to him definitively, that this werewolf really is his best friend.