Chapter Text
“Michi, I’m not drinking that.”
That was Tuesday.
“It looks like disease in a cup. Not happening.”
That was Thursday. It’s Tuesday again when Ein finally swipes the cup out of her claws and stares down into the styrofoam cauldron that is the soft drink cup she had poured everything from the drink dispenser— and then some— into.
She called this concoction “The Michi” and it was downright unholy. It tasted exactly as it sounded: an overwhelmingly muddled mess gooped over with copious amounts of fake sugar. Michi, the real one, falls into one of her laughter fits. This one being less scratchy than her usual “broken HVAC” screech but higher pitched than her “hamster wheel in desperate need of some WD-40” impression.
“Did you pour a shot in there too?” Ein spits, pouring the rest of the cup out into the drink machine’s drip tray. “You have to pay for those.”
“Who’s gonna call the cops to come get me? You?” Michi’s ear flickers as though to punctuate her sneer. “Local man on parole calls cops to come save him from his own problem. Amazing headline, would read.”
Yeah, he won’t be calling the cops for shit. Not that he would even if he wasn’t on parole.
“Why should you have to be my problem? I could care less for a mangy stray,” he says as he kicks off from where he had been leaning against the counter.
“Mmm last I checked you let me stay here,” Michi pulls another cup from the stack. The machine hisses as it fills the cup again with whatever hell she’s brewing now. Ein doesn’t bother to check.
She’s right though. He would never admit it but he is the one who let her park her busted up Mini Cooper behind the store. He was at a particularly low point when he’d gone to take the trash out late one night and found her car tucked against the far side of the dumpster. She’d panicked and begged him not to make her leave and exhausted, apathetic, and rolling his eyes he’d said “Yeah, whatever.” That was a regrettable two years ago. Now she spends all her time harassing him at work. He laments how a stupid two words got him stuck in court mandated employment at a 7/11 with a flea-ridden leech covered in purple fur.
It’s the time of night where the convenience store is nothing but cold and empty. The only two souls here being himself seated on a rolling chair he’d dragged out of the back office and the girl annoying him further by hopping up onto the register space with her newly stolen drink, kicking her legs to some tune in her head and making a racket every time her heels hit the counter.
The perpetual thudding combined with the incessant cup slurping was beginning to drive him mad. Ein pins his ears back to try and drown it out. Michi keeps hers perked and this is how he knows werewolves have the superior hearing. Either that or she’s deaf and can’t hear the absolute racket she’s making. Another straw slurp reels his thinking around to “she’s doing this on purpose”.
He’s never been so grateful for the repetitive chime of the automatic doors signaling he can put a hand flat on her back and shove her off the counter onto the linoleum. She scowls as the last of what looks like plain sprite spills all over her but other than that she’s used to this usual occurrence. She sulks off so the guy who just came in could buy his cigarettes, ignoring the weird look he gives the two of them.
He leaves and Ein grabs the mop, dragging it over to the snack aisle, deliberately around the Sprite puddle, and jamming it into Michi’s hands. “Go clean up your mess.”
“I don’t even work here.”
“You want to earn your keep don’t you? Even kittens at the pound have to prove they can behave.”
“Even kittens at the pound have to prove they can behave!” Michi mocks like a mosquito. She lashes her tail behind her but goes to mop up the spill anyway, grumbling through the entire task.
The next hour and a half is spent sitting at opposite ends of the store tapping away at their phone screens. Ein could care less what she was up to over there. Probably scamming more people online selling fake graded Pixelmon cards on eBay. He himself had a news app open, scrolling through headline after headline but nothing was grabbing his attention. Something about some actress in a movie, something about a fatal car crash, something about the rising shares of the Lycan Corporation. He closes the app.
Michi on the other hand continues scrolling. Her face is way too close to the screen to be healthy. Maybe she’s blind too. Ein watches her press herself closer to the cool glass of the commercial fridge filled with microwave dinners. It didn’t matter that the sun had been long gone hours ago, June nights were still just as hot and he knew the AC in her car had been broken for a long time.
She sat on an upturned bucket. The same one that usually houses the mop. She must have emptied it before turning it into a stool because there wasn’t any sort of swamp surrounding her. Her tail barely grazes the floor, always flicking up and around in a continuous loop whenever it gets close. There’s a bald spot near the end. It’s patchy. In all the time he’s been stuck with her he’s never seen it fill itself in.
“You need something?” Michi quirks an over-plucked eyebrow, the hair loss there being a choice.
“No. Just looking at your mange.”
She gasps, falsely offended, but jerks her tail out of sight regardless.
“You’re one to talk. Your fur’s frosting,” she pouts her glitter-glossed lips at the long faded dye in his overgrown hair. “Looks so old that all the vets agree putting you down is the right thing to do.”
He’s been out of jail for a while now but hasn’t found the time to redye it. Something in the back of his head chimes that time isn’t the problem, it’s the energy. He bats it away like a disgusting tennis ball.
Really, he isn’t sure who paid his way out. Nobody’s been too keen on giving him anything other than orders. Do this, file that, speak to them, stay in line. Like he’s done anything wrong in the first place. All he knows is he was eligible for parole way earlier than he should have been. It’s a fucking joke is what it is. Insult to injury, his parole officer is the same age as him. Hell, she was in his graduating class. Or would have been, had he actually graduated. He never even considered the GED, figuring at this point for it to be a waste of his time.
“Pooooooooor Ein! He had so many good years. We normally wouldn’t let him eat people food but since he’s dying and all we guess he can have this rotisserie chicken!” Michi continues to wax about this hypothetical euthanasia session. The bucket scrapes across the floor when she stands, kicking it aside to imitate a little kid hellbent on keeping their beloved pet alive despite its suffering. She then carries on to improv a mother telling her son that he’ll only be sent to a farm where he can be free to frolic among the other festering pets.
She keeps this up so long that the alarm he has set to close almost startles him. Almost.
Michi drops the magazine she had been using as a tray, all the little miscellaneous stationery items she had stacked atop it as pretend medical instruments clattering and rolling away. She doesn’t pick them up, instead kicking them under the shelves to be found when the far distant apocalypse comes to claim the place. As for the magazine, she tucks it under her arm, scowling at the outside world beyond the glass behind the magazine stand. Ein pretends he doesn’t see it.
The process of turning off lights and unplugging what needs to be unplugged is monotonous. He may as well be on autopilot until he’s standing at the office laptop to clock out. Michi had already left with her stolen magazine by the time he stepped out to lock the doors. The sweltering air immediately pools into his fur and under his shirt collar. Nimble fingers switch which to the next key over to unlock his car. It’s shitty, but not as shitty as the one parked out back. His AC actually works.
He won’t be back here until the day after tomorrow. He knows the morning guy on the schedule isn’t too fond of Michi. He isn’t either, but he appreciates a good show on a slow day. She’s always all too happy to make a fool of herself in his opinion. Still, it’ll be practically boiling tomorrow. Ein pulls out of the parking lot with little more than a shrug. Sucks to be her.
The apartment he drives back to is damp and humid. Mold dances up from under the building and settles in the cracked concrete walls. Lichen cozied up alongside it. Lately, he’s been deliberately mispronouncing it as “litch-en”. The stairs are sturdy enough in theory but creak with the weight of a thousand pounds should even a mouse decide to skitter up them. He’s met with a few lady beetles struggling their way through his door jam before he’s even opened it. He has half a mind to greet them like family.
The couch he’d dragged in from off the road complains when he drops himself onto it, rummaging around for the tv remote. Netflix takes forever to load up on his shitty internet. He doesn’t pay for it— the Netflix that is. He told Jax to lend him his family’s account back in high school and he still had access. Guess they forgot about him.
A warm beer from the night prior sat abandoned on the plastic storage bin he calls a coffee table. He could get up and get a fresh one, cold and unopened, but what was the point in wasting this one. He’s disappointed to find maybe three sips left in it but doesn’t bother to get a new one, instead putting the can right back where it was in the ring it left behind.
He flips through TV channels like pamphlet pages, the audio or visual nowhere near loaded in before he’s clicking to the next number. It’s just a repetitive click, click and static as those numbers flicker in its corner. He does this until his thumb tires, tossing the remote into the cushions next to him as whatever the hell he landed on begins to play.
Channel roulette seemed to be in his favor today as it landed on some movie channel playing James Cameron’s Avatar. Blue, slightly animalistic people in the forest, he can get behind that. He repositions his own blue, albeit faded, tail behind him as he gets comfier in his spot.
Ein vaguely remembers how long this movie is. Luckily for him he caught it in the middle, somewhere around that big ass tree getting decimated. Some guy dies and the main guy gets hurtled back into his human body. Ein wrinkles his nose at this. The aliens in this movie were so strong and capable. So much better in their form than even the best of humanity. To taste that then have to go back to being human? Ein couldn’t imagine. Should he ever wake up one day to find out he’s lost all that makes him lycanthrope he thinks he’d let Michi hit him with her car.
The battle scenes are as cool as he remembers, all vivid color and wild motion. The general— colonel?— gets shot, falling limp in his overcompensating mech and the woman who shot him leaps into the nearby building to cradle her dying human lover. She looks so happy with him, as though she isn’t settling for less. Ein wouldn’t settle for less.
Some other characters die, there’s a whole thing about how “this isn’t over”, blah blah, Ein could care less. He’s mostly sticking through it so he can get to his favorite part. The part where he relinquishes his humanity and becomes something new, something better.
He’s thought about it before, humans turning to werewolves. But save for some absurd children’s tales about a curse or the practically offensive notion that it can be caught like a disease some erotica novels like to tout, there isn’t a way. Temporarily with a potion, yes. But he yearns for something permanent, at the very least incredibly long lasting. He doubts anyone sane would be taking doses of transmutation potion like a monthly hormone shot. He can dream.
He used to say he would figure it out. Back in high school when he had the drive and passion to sit in his room and pour over possible solutions, he would privately declare he was to solve this problem. He would help people. It was a pipe dream, yet one he still believes in. Lowly, like a simmering pot, it keeps its warmth relegated to a deeper part of his mind. The door isn’t closed but it’s certainly only open by a crack.
The commercials between have ended and the next movie starts up. He’s not sure what this one is. He gets through maybe half an hour of it before rolling over to press his face into the back of the couch, curling up under the thin blanket he dragged over himself. The one that’s usually kept slung over the arm of the couch but this time was found drooped down to the floor.
He doesn’t bother retrieving the remote from where it has undoubtedly lodged itself down into the cushions. He lets the film play as background noise as his breathing evens out. In his dreams the pot heats from a simmer to a boil. The kitchen door of his psyche allows itself to open just a bit more.