Work Text:
Great-Aunt Josephine, Aunt Debbie's mother, takes them in. She's not blood but she is pack. The only blood they have left is Uncle Peter. Aunt Debbie died. Her daughters Sarah and Tina died. Grandma Hale died. Grandma Connor died, and she wasn't even a wolf. Uncle Terry died, and he wasn't a wolf either.
Mom died. Dad died. Brandon died. Cora died. Alyssa died.
He presses his face to the plane window. His eye stares back at him from the double pane. He has such big green eyes.
Laura holds his hand through the whole flight.
*
They skip the rest of the school year. They share the room that used to be Aunt Debbie's. He curls up under his blanket and looks into Laura's glowing eyes across the room.
He still can't sleep until he covers the mirror on the vanity. Laura grumbles and uncovers it in the morning, but he covers it again every time. She tackles him and bites his ear but he keeps doing it. Finally she gives up.
*
He doesn't see a human all summer. Aunt Debbie's brother and his husband and their platonic co-parent (they laugh every time they describe themselves, and then they look at his blank face and stop smiling, and it makes him feel worse, but he can't get the brick off his heart) are all wolves, so their two kids are as well. His step-second cousins. He knows his family tree out to fifth cousins, which encompasses nearly all the born wolves in North America and about a third of Ireland, because these kind of things foster good ties between packs.
It doesn't mean they're any easier to talk to, though. Laura cries but also smiles. She sprouts fangs and chases Joely and Jordan through the trees. She writes down the family recipes with Great-Aunt Jo. She calls around to the cousins and gets copies of pictures of their family and puts a photo album together.
He can't do any of these things. Great-Aunt Jo has forty acres of apple orchard. He walks them all, alone.
*
Laura is an alpha now. She shows him her new shape and asks if he'll be in her pack forever. If you want me, he says, and she takes his hair in her jaws and shakes him. Dummy, she says. You're mine.
You're my beautiful boy.
Sometimes he just can't sleep. On nights like that he turns wolf and sleeps under the porch, wrapped up in a blanket. Usually his cousins find him in the morning and play-pounce on him until he gets up.
He stops showering some time in June. He doesn't smell bad, not really; he just smells feral.
*
Great-Aunt Jo asks him to clean up and go to town with his uncles. When he shakes his head no, she orders him. When he bares his neck and begs, silently, she turns the hose on him and strips him down herself as he gasps from shock. When he's clean, she sits him on the porch and trims his beard to stubble with scissors. She sniffs but leaves his hair long.
She slaps him on the butt and sends him upstairs to get clean clothes on. He goes to town and buys groceries with his uncles. It's a small town. Everyone knows the Grants. Everyone knows Debbie's nephew. A human hugs him and he stands, stiff as a board in her arms, and slowly starts to shake.
Uncle Ned takes him outside and they sit, Ned's arm around his shoulders, until Uncle Rob comes out with the cart.
Ned asks if he wants a haircut while they're in town. Rob says the answer to that is pretty clear. Ned says he's just asking, maybe the answer will be yes some time. Rob asks if he wants a haircut while they're in town.
He twists his hair in his fingers. It's long enough that his bangs fall over his eyes. He can't see his reflection in the car window.
*
At the end of August, he has to go back to school. Aunt Bets drives the four of them into town, to the collection of little pod buildings that hold all the kids, in town, K-12, but he can't, he just can't, even when Joely holds his hand and tells him he shouldn't be afraid, school is fun. His fangs are out and he's huffing for breath against the back of the driver's seat by the time Bets pulls into the drop-off zone.
When she drives back, he's still in the car. He climbs under the porch when he gets home.
Great-Aunt Jo isn't even angry. Laura offers to drop back and repeat junior year to be with him. He doesn't know why they're being so nice. He doesn't know what to say. He doesn't know how to go to school and pay attention and learn things when he's a stud, come on, show me what you've got.
Under the porch, he scratches at his face and smears the blood over his skin before he heals. It makes him feel less human.
Great-Aunt Jo decides she can home school him if he gets a hobby that makes him mix with humans. He has a month to figure out what or she would pick for him.
*
He takes courses in auto repair and starts to restore an old VW Beetle for Great-Aunt Jo. It's not something he's ever done before or even been interested in before. It's new.
Nobody there talks about his looks except the teacher, who tells him to get a damn scrunchy to keep his hair out of his eyes.
*
He takes the GED and passes and then he's an adult. Great-Aunt Jo's whole pack comes to the party she throws. They howl in the woods. He runs with the other betas in the pack and feels animal and alive.
It passes. In the morning, he finds Laura crammed into her twin bed with a beta female and he just feels sick.
He wonders if it's possible to be a wolf full-time. There are packs in Canada that have animal wolves as members and no humans at all. He starts looking them up, but Laura finds him and asks if he'll always be hers, and he says yes without hesitation.
So he stays. His hair grows down past his shoulders. He never wears shoes. He learns to use a cutthroat razor on his beard because he shaves once a month and nothing else can tame it. Laura calls him Swamp Thing, but she's in college now, she's gone.
*
He sneaks into a party. He knows he's being a stupid stereotype, he knows that, but he wants to find out if you can actually drink enough to forget.
He can. He finds and chugs a bottle of vodka and the ice in his stomach finally melts. He feels okay. He thinks he's actually smiling, because when people look at him they smile.
He stands up and he's wobbly, but when he lurches toward a couple of guys, they catch him and hold him up between them to dance. One in front, one in back. He can smell their arousal and doesn't even mind.
He's probably sober by the time they sit down, but he still feels okay. He drinks some water. He finds out the guys are Lolo and Wes and does he want to come home with them? He shakes his head and the ice creeps back into his stomach.
Lolo sighs into his ear and pulls him up to dance again and he goes. The arousal doesn't fade, but Lolo doesn't grab him or try to kiss him. They just dance.
But when they sit back down, Wes calls him a pretty boy and he has to leave. He runs home on all fours, his skin prickling, and lies under the porch for a long time before he sleeps.
*
Aunt Bets combs his hair. She cleans the comb and lets spidery black tumbleweeds blow across the yard.
She hugs him from behind and says she's dating a human, but she doesn't know if he understands her family situation.
He huffs. It's not so hard. His uncles are in love, but they needed a female to bear wolf children for them, so they found her. Packs have done this for millennia. Humans and their hangups are stupid.
But then she asks if he's interested in anyone, and he shudders out of her grasp. She asks what happened. She says she knows it's more than just the fire. She says she knows he's hiding something and they love him and they just want to know and by the time he stops running, he's in Canada and the police pick him up for sleeping, exhausted, in a park he thought was a forest.
He's still a minor. They give him some shoes and call his great-aunt.
*
His punishment for making his great-aunt cross the border is getting a job. Great-Aunt Jo thinks he needs more human time. He finds work at a car dealership detailing.
The salesmen like taking him out and buying him drinks. It's a game to try to get him drunk. The lone female sales associate always ends up helping him call cabs at the end of the night when they're the only two still sober.
Her name is Jane. She's cool and serene. After the third time, since it's only eight o'clock, she invites him back to her house, where he meets her daughter Liv, who's exactly his age.
Liv kicks his ass at Guitar Hero. It's the calmest he's been since the party.
*
He gets better at Guitar Hero. Liv informs him the second time he comes over that she isn't dating until college. He says he doesn't even like girls.
The twentieth time he comes over, two feet of snow have fallen overnight. Liv beckons him into a bubble carved into the drifts at the side of the house. It forms a strange twilight world.
She holds up her pinky and dares him to tell only the truth in the snow globe. It's a kind of magic, with more power than she knows, but he hooks his finger in hers and swears anyway.
"Are you really attracted to boys?" she asks.
"I don't know," he says. "Are you?"
"Yeah. I think so. I just hate them, except you."
"I'm not a boy. I'm a wolf."
She looks at him in the slow light and it doesn't matter if she believes him. "We moved here because my asshole boyfriend raped me."
"We moved here because my family died in a fire."
"The police said there wasn't enough evidence to prosecute and my mom said if she had to see his face around town one more second she was going to cut him in half with a chainsaw."
"My great-aunt would do worse if she knew who killed my aunt."
"Are you sure it's arson?"
"Yes."
"Do you know who did it?"
"Yes."
"Why not tell your great-aunt?"
"Because I love her. She made me love her."
"You have to stop. I didn't tell my mom about my boyfriend until I stopped loving him and realized he was horrible."
"I don't know how."
"You just have to, to bring the wolf. Hate her!" She pushes up on her knees. "I hate him because he hurt me! Come on!"
"I hate her because she hurt me," he tries.
She yells wordlessly and lunges at him on all fours. The snow begins to crumble around her. "I hate him!"
"I hate her because she hurt me."
"I HATE HIM! BECAUSE HE HURT ME!"
"I hate her because she hurt me," he whispers. It reaches inside him, a tiny spark of pain. She hurt him so badly he couldn't even feel the pain until now, he thinks. "She hurt me."
Liv punches up through the snow. The drift collapses around him, a cold pelt over his shoulders. "I HATE him! Because he HURT me!" She thrashes out of the snow and begins throwing snowballs at a tree.
"I HATE HER BECAUSE SHE HURT ME!" he roars. He leaps out of the drift on all fours and tears into the glittering crust. He writhes onto his back, flinging sheaves of snow in all directions. Liv pounces on him.
He holds her up with hands and feet on her shoulders and hips. His eyes are streaming. She reaches out her arms and legs, playing airplane, and he just, he likes her so much. He hadn't even realized. "What do I do now?" he asks.
"Fucking live and be better than them, because they're dicks and they're going to get theirs eventually."
He lets her down. She hugs him.
*
He feels different. He asks Aunt Bets to cut his hair. He says he's sorry for being the way he has been.
Aunt Bets kisses his forehead and tells him they love him. He swallows, keeps his eyes on the ground, and says he loves them too.
*
By the time he's eighteen he can look in the mirror. He's progressed to the maintenance department, taken an apprenticeship, is starting school.
He looks different. He's grown and matured since the last time he saw himself. He's not a pretty boy any more.
It feels better, seeing that change in himself. He starts to work out and build muscle. He gains stamina. He could run from the school to the house without breathing hard. He could run down a car.
Laura grins when she sees him. "Are you my enforcer?"
"Yeah," he says. She has alpha power but not brute strength. He can be her muscle.
She wrestles with him on the full moon. He nearly pins her. It's...fun.
He feels okay.
*
He moves to the city with Laura after she graduates, because she asks him. Liv is in college in Pennsylvania so there's nothing else holding him upstate.
Laura hugs him when he's unpacked. "Do you miss your girlfriend?"
"We aren't like that," he says. "But yeah."
"Are you gay?"
He shrugs. "Maybe?" He hasn't been interested in anyone for as long as he can remember.
"How do you not know?"
"I just don't," he says.
She lets it go.
*
The city is huge but his part of it is small. They're a pack of two and their territory is their apartment building.
He tries not to think about the past. Right now is right now and the past can't affect him. He has some family, even if they're once removed, and he has one good friend, even if she doesn't know who he really is. He has a good if unglamorous job. He knows how to smile at people and make them like him, which is useful when he winds up wolfed in weird places.
"I have to go back to Beacon Hills," Laura says.
"Okay, when? I need a month to schedule time off," he says.
"No, I'm going myself. I'm going to drive it and visit some friends and then I'm checking on Uncle Peter to see if I can move him out here." She knots her hand in his hair. "Will you be okay?"
"I'm a grown man," he says.
"You are my baby brother forever." She kisses his forehead. "I'm leaving the fourth, be back the twenty-second at the latest."
On the twenty-third he still hasn't heard from her and he buys a plane ticket to Beacon Hills. He looks at himself in the mirror in the airport bathroom. "When you are walking through hell, keep walking," he mutters.
And he puts one foot in front of the other until he gets there.
end.