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The pain was excruciating; Warwick was used to pain, his continued existence was inherently painful, each stolen breath only made possible through invasive wiring and chemicals that made his blood burn.
But this? This was something else. It was as if he was back at the lab, on the very first day of the experiments. His memories of those days were… Hazy, to say the least. Everything from back then was blurred together in screams and blood in his mind. But he could distinctly remember how the pain had felt. He hadn’t quite acclimated to it by that point. It was like recalling a day at the beach, you may not remember swimming all that well, but the shock of hitting the cold water remained imprinted on your memory.
Warwick opened his eyes and his suspicions were confirmed. The doctor loomed above him scalpel in hand.
Warwick thrashed, screamed, pleaded. Anything, anything to get the doctor to leave him be, he would rather be dead. Please let him die.
The doctor didn’t seem to care.
Then his screaming became shrill and feminine, and suddenly he realized he wasn’t the one screaming at all. Rather he was staring into eyes. Two sets of terrified fearful eyes.
Something nagged at his memory, these people should be familiar to him.
Warwick raised a claw and—
Vander jolted up with a barely contained scream, chest heaving.
A nightmare. Thats all it was, a nightmare. He shivered, soft hands rubbing at hairy forearms. Not furry, the normal amount of hair for a middle aged man.
Warwick— Vander? He’s not sure who or even what he was meant to be now, looked down at his hands. Soft, fleshy, human hands. His fingers were knotted sure, but not gnarled, not grotesque.
The journey from human to monster and back again was a bit like doing a deep clean of the girls’ room. Taking everything out of the mess their toy chest became; laying everything on the ground, rhythmically cleaning each toy individually before setting them back in. Expecting them all to rest in the same exact spots they occupied before the girls had haphazardly taken them out and put them back in. Which of course, was a ridiculous assumption. There was no way to guarantee everything would just go back to the way it was before the mess… But at least their room was clean.
Vand— Warwi— Vander’s skin felt stretched thin around him, as if it was barely keeping his insides contained. As if the wolf monster his girls had worked so hard to banish into the darkness still lurked just beneath the surface. Like they hadn’t gotten rid of it at all, simply willed it back into hiding under the bed.
“Dad?” Vi’s voice, calling up from the bar— that was another thing, since his return they’d been calling him that more often. When they were children it was usually just ‘Vander’, ‘Dad’ was reserved for special occasions, or when they wanted something from him— “You doing alright up there? Can you come down?”
Vander swallowed thickly. “Yeah, I’ll be right down kiddo,” he called back down. Speech was so easy now. Words flowing from his tongue like water, instead of thick and heavy like molasses. It wasn’t that he couldn’t speak before, but the difficulty of forming words with a snout not made for human speech had him picking his words more carefully.
Vander shook his head and tried to clear the last remnants of the nightmare from his mind. A girl screaming echoed around his head, a flash of fearful eyes. Fear he had put there. His girls staring up at him terrified, eyes wide and glassy with unshed tears.
He would never, as long as he lived, forget that feeling. Of his daughters, the left and right ventricles of his very heart, cowering in fear from him. They had every right to be, in the moment he was staving off the bloodlust as best he could… but he knew even that wasn’t enough to guarantee their safety, and that was what hurt him most of all.
He was their father. He promised to always protect them. He promised that he would always be there for them; that no, Vander wasn’t going away like Mama and Papa had.
The metallic taste of blood filled his mouth— Warwick couldn’t be sure if it was from biting down the inside of his cheek or a phantom taste from his memories. In another life it would have driven him mad with bloodlust, now it only made him sick.
Taking a deep steadying breath, Vander rose from his bed, shaking hands running through his hair in a stress tic so human it almost made the nausea worse.
He needed to make his way downstairs.
One step at a time.
Breathe.
Breathe.
This must be how Claggor’s mechanical toy soliders feel, he thought. Or, used to feel.
Finally, he robotically made it down the stairs and into the bar, stopping right in front of the counter he used to practically live behind, where Vi was standing now.
Vi smiled, picked up the cup she was drying and waved it over at him, “Hey old man! Nice of you to finally join us!”
“Fiiinally! What’s with the hold-up?” Powder sped over from the jukebox— a familiar song, their song, and the almost scent of axle grease filled the room— at the other end of the bar, eyes flickering purple as pure shimmer pumped through her veins.
Something twisted in his chest; the doctor had gotten to Powder too. It wasn’t enough to experiment on him— hours upon hours screaming on a lab table, till his voice went hoarse and gave out, every single day for years— he had to drive the knife deeper and do it to his youngest too. It made that all-too familiar rage rear its ugly head once again, thinking of Powder going through even a fraction of what he went through.
“Vander? You alright?” Powder asked nervously, and when he refocused on her all he could see was big, wet, terrified eyes. They were scared, scared of him. He was the monster under the bed. Powder would never feel safe around him again.
Vander wheezed as the breath left his lungs all at once.
Distantly he registered the sound of something heavy hitting the floor and yelling.
It felt like his chest was collapsing in on itself, no matter how hard he breathed no air was getting into his lungs. His brain the same kind of fuzzy-numb as when the doctor picked at it. Tears pricked at his eyes and cascaded uncontrolled down his cheeks.
Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
His heartbeat in his ears drowned out any other sound but he could just barely make out someone saying: “Breathe,” and so Vander tried. For some reason he thought of Violet and Powder, when he first adopted them.
A panic attack: it came to him like a flash of lightning. He’d helped all his kids through their own way back when. Not to mention he’d had a fair share of his own.
Something cold was placed in his palm. He gripped onto it like it was the only thing tying him to his mortal body.
Ice, he realized distantly. They’d learned that trick from him.
“Breathe with me,” Powder was saying. “Inhale,” Vander inhaled, “Exhale,” and Vander exhaled.
Slowly the darkness clouding his vision receded and he saw Vi holding more ice, a hand comfortingly on his shoulder. Then he turned to Powder holding his free hand, still softly telegraphing his breathing.
“Sorry,” he wheezed out “I’m alright.” He could see the way the tension bled out of their shoulders, visibly relaxing. The monster had gone back into hiding after all.
“Geez! Don’t scare us like that, Dad!” Powder teased. Her eyes still looked nervous, shifting around his face in a panic, but her tone was light again.
“You sure you’re okay, Vander? What was that?” Vi, ever perceptive, likely recognized the cagey way he was looking back at them. It was how she looked at him when she was trying to hide her problems.
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay.” It was a lie, but he was at the very least better. Vi didn’t look convinced but she seemed to drop it.
“Did you girls need something?” Vander eased himself up with the girls following soon behind.
“Nah. Just missed you, old man! All that work trying to save you and I saw more of you when you were presumed dead!” Powder had meant it as a lighthearted joke, but it felt like a punch to the gut.
“Jinx!” Vi admonished, looking about as horrified as he felt.
Vander never found out why Vi was calling Powder that. He’d tried to ask Powder directly if Vi was teasing like Mylo had, she’d snorted and told him not to worry about it. That it was something she had chosen for herself. But she also tacked on that he could still call her Powder.
“Lighten up a lil, sis! Dad’s alive and well, life’s good for once!” Powder hopped up onto the countertop and started to swing her legs lazily “soooo, sister of mine… is it done yet?”
Just then a ding he recognized as being from his old cooking timer filled the air. Weird how that had somehow outlived him. Well, not really, he was alive now… He felt like schrödingers cat. Or maybe schrödingers dog was more accurate.
“Yep!” Vi said popping the ‘P’ before pulling a cake out of the oven. Not decorated, most Zaunites were lucky if they had cake at all. Much less the resources to make frosting. “Happy name day, big guy!” Both girls smiled at him, Vi presenting him with a cake he was sure they both had a hand working on. If the fact it was half dyed pink and half dyed blue was anything to go by.
Vander could only stare at them, then down at the cake, and then back up. His birthday. He’d forgotten… How long had it been? Monster’s don’t usually celebrate birthdays. People do, but did he still count as a person? When he could still remember the taste of human flesh between gnashing teeth. “Thanks, girls.” Vander feigned a smile as he finally took a seat at the bar.