Archive of Our Own

Evan gets bitten in Wyoming. He doesn’t know what it is at the time, he’s walking back to his truck, drunk, when he hears growling. He runs on instinct, and his Jeep is in sight when he goes down, something tearing into his leg.

The next day, he wakes up in the backseat of his Jeep, a hole in his jeans but his leg completely fine, and for a full month he thinks that it was a weird alcohol-induced dream.

On some level, it really starts for him on what seems to be a random Thursday, a few weeks after he’s decided to stop drinking whiskey late at night. It’s a low level headache at first. Evan’s gotten headaches a lot, over the years. Sometimes it seems like everything gets loud at exactly the same moment and his eyes swim and he can feel his pulse in his face somehow. Migraines, WebMD said, the one time he tried to look it up, or maybe a brain tumor. That was years ago now, when he should arguably have texted his sister for a second opinion, because she’d just qualified as a nurse, but also she’d stopped answering his texts reliably.

Whatever.

The point is, he’s had headaches before, but this one is on another level. He wakes up with it, his eyes struggling to adjust to the light level, even though his curtains are still closed in the dingy little motel room he’s been staying in this week. He groans, and it vibrates through his own skull, rattles his brain with it. If he hadn’t quit whiskey, he’d assume that he was hungover, but he was too tired from hauling timber on a construction site yesterday to do anything more than shower off and sleep last night.

He hauls himself out of bed, because he’s supposed to be helping lay the floorboards he’d been carrying yesterday. It’s immediately overwhelming. Has it always been this drafty? The fake wood floors press into his feet, and the sound of the sheets slithering off him and back onto the mattress is so loud. His eyes prickle with tears, because it’s all just so much. This is a migraine, he’s pretty sure. It has to be. It’s like all his senses are dialed up, overwhelming him even more than normal. He picks up his phone, but even the little green screen of his Nokia lighting up is too much to handle, practically blinds him.

It’s a weird, bad day, and it just gets worse. He hasn’t eaten anything all day, because doing anything more than sitting in the corner of the room crying seems to trigger a whole new level of sensory hell that he can’t handle, and his head and nose and throat and eyes all ache from weeping. It’s honestly kind of cathartic, because after Maddie left him with a note and a set of car keys, he’s been trying really hard not to let himself cry, and there’s a chance he actually really needed this. Still, he could have done with it happening for any reason other than wanting to crawl out of his own skin all day. He stumbles over to the sink, and drinks water straight from the tap, refreshing but so cold it makes his teeth ache. He should try to shower, maybe? That’s the way to break a fever, right? This must be a fever at this point, he feels so fucking out of it. He turns the shower on, and staggers into it, still in his pajamas.

It’s. He thought he’d feel better when night fell, because at least the room would get darker, but if anything it’s worse. It’s a shitty motel, and the blinds are pretty trash for keeping light out, which shouldn’t matter so much because it’s night, but it’s still so fucking bright and Evan feels like he’s losing his mind. Like he’s going to vibrate out of his own skin. How is it so bright?

Oh, he thinks dazedly, the sound of the shower hitting the bath around him echoing like gunshots, Must be the full moon.

The rest of the night is a blur. Pain and loneliness and fear fear fear. A desperate hunger, and the small sad whines of a hurt animal. Snapshots, if that, of his motel room from weird angles.

Evan wakes up tangled in the sheet, which he has inexplicably dragged under the bed. He knows this, because when he wakes up he almost immediately hits his head hard on the bed frame directly above him.

Despite the immediate jolt of pain, he feels infinitely better today than he did yesterday. He’s tired still, achy, but that’s probably to be expected from crying all day yesterday and whatever it was he did while feverish last night. The headache’s gone though, he feels about as clear-headed as it’s possible to feel, alert and bright in a way that feels at odds to how exhausted his limbs are.

He wriggles his way out from under the bed, still sort of wrapped up in the blanket, and stops dead after he pushes himself up to sit.

The room is a mess. It looks like a wild animal got in last night, loose brown hairs across the furniture, the faint scratches of claws across the floor. His backpack is completely shredded, seemingly to get at the gas station turkey sub he’d kind of forgotten was buried in the bottom of it. There’s bits of foil scattered in the remains, like whatever animal it was just tore straight through to get to it. Does Wyoming have raccoons? Coyotes??

Evan’s still just kind of taking it all in when he abruptly realized the vaguely soothing background noise is actually the shower which is still fucking running.

He nearly takes himself out, scrambling up to his feet and running to the bathroom, forgetting about the stupid fucking sheet wrapped haphazardly around him. He’s naked, also, which. When did that happen?

He catches himself before he falls, and rips the blanket off of himself, and then continues dashing to the bathroom.

It’s worse than the main room somehow.

There’s water everywhere. He nearly slips again, getting close enough to the bath to turn the shower off, because there’s several giant puddles of water directly in front of it. There’s no steam, presumably because Evan’s blown hot water for literally the entire motel, running the shower overnight, but there’s a light misting of droplets of water on truly every single surface. More than that, the brown hairs from the other room are covering every surface, soaked through and plastered across the bath, the walls, even the sink. It smells like something weird and animal that Evan can’t quite place. If he’d been allowed pets growing up, maybe he’d be more sure, but as it is his best guess is that this is what people mean when they complain about ‘wet dog smell’.

He manages to soak his arm in ice cold water turning the shower off, and literally all the towels are damp. Moving out from under the bed and in here has gotten him with a fine coating of the animal fur too, especially around his feet and ankles, where he’s stepped in it. It feels awful, itchy and distracting. If he had hot water he’d do anything to have a shower right now.

As he looks forlornly at the bath he realizes it’s not draining properly, and then realizes why. Sodden, blocking the drain, are the shredded scraps of the old tee and sweats he’d been wearing as pajamas. Like whatever animal got in tore his clothes to pieces while already in the shower. The clothes he last remembers wearing as he himself got into the shower.

He heads back into the main room in a daze. There are no windows open.

It’s. There’s no way. That’s.

Must be the full moon, echoes around his head again, taunting him. That’s nothing. That’s. It’s not.

It was bright too, that night, during his weird dream. Brighter than it should have been in the wooded little route to where he’d parked his car. A good few weeks ago, for all that it’s kind of shaken him up a little. Could be a month ago, he can’t be sure.

There’s no way.

Evan’s gut instinct, as it is so often, is to call Maddie. For once, he gets as close as actually getting his phone out, and then he realizes that he didn’t think to charge it last night, and it’s finally died.

He paces the room, feeling insane, as it charges. This whole situation is insane, sure, but he’s definitely losing it. To even suspect, for even a second? There’s simply no way, right? If werewolves existed, people would know. He’s being ridiculous.

By the time his phone has charged enough to turn on again, he’s talked himself down. He had a migraine, big deal, they happen to people. Some animal got in while he was curled up recovering from it, probably lured by the scent of his turkey sub. It trashed his room, and got out the same way it got in. Who cares? It’s nothing to call Maddie about, obviously, even if she would pick up, and she won’t.

There’s a pulse, just for a moment, of that feeling from last night. That terrible dreadful loneliness.

Luckily, that’s when the texts and missed calls start coming in.

Evan hadn’t thought to call out sick, or hadn’t been able to is more accurate, maybe. Whichever it is doesn’t really matter, because there’s an extremely loud voicemail from his extremely irate site manager telling him not to bother coming back for the rest of the job.

Shit.

He’s not exactly pay check to pay check right now? He’s got a little wiggle room, can probably stay in this motel for at least two more nights without having to worry too much about where food’s coming from next, but still. Shit.

Maybe stay one more night, and then move on to the next state? He’s burned his bridges here, clearly, and it’s not a big enough town to have that much construction anyway. Once this kitchen extension was over he would be heading on to the next thing anyway, so why not just move the schedule up? Just, not today. He’s too tired to drive for hours today, and besides, he should probably try to clean up this mess even a little. Plus, it would be nice to have a hot shower when the boiler’s finally recovered before he’s in a car for hours. God, and food. He’s not as hungry as he maybe should be, for someone who didn’t eat at all yesterday, but he’s still pretty fucking hungry. Probably the fever, right? They say you should feed those.

He uses a still damp towel to wipe off the stray hairs that he’s managed to pick up, and gets dressed, before heading out to find something to eat.

He never really dials back down, is the thing. It’s not like the day of that migraine, but he’s just more aware than he used to be. Like watching a video in high definition, except it’s his life. Everything is in high definition now/ He gets used to it pretty quickly, but there’s a niggling awareness in the back of his mind that he can see further than he used to, somehow. Hear things crisply that he knows he couldn’t hear before, like that squeak in the Jeep’s brakes; he’d definitely never noticed it before, but suddenly there’s this persistent and ominous squeak every time he so much as brushes on the brakes. He pulls over to the side of the road to open her up and figure out why his brakes were dying on him, but everything just looks normal. The mechanic at the next town over, Belle Fourche, agrees that it’s all good, probably a problem the Jeep’s had for years, so Evan let’s it go. Especially when he gets offered a good week’s work to help out on some huge rig that somehow got stranded at this garage.

He’s also. It sounds dumb, even in his own head, because he’s been alone a lot in his life, and it’s never fun, but he’s pretty used to it. It’s just. He’s been really lonely. Worse than before. Worse than it’s ever been. He didn’t think it could get worse, honestly, than those years after Maddie left for Boston, the echoing halls of his parents’ home, the way he had to fight and beg and bleed for just a minute of their time. He didn’t think it could get worse than those first few weeks after driving out of Pennsylvania, his body a mass of healing bruises and cuts, his passenger seat empty, dashing tears out of his eyes with the heel of his hand before they blurred the road ahead.

Somehow, it really is worse now. A yawning, aching loneliness at the very core of him that seems to radiate out with ever moment he spends alone.

It’s a little better when he's working at the garage, but when the 22 wheeler that absolutely should not have cut through here is fixed, there just isn’t enough work to keep him on. He goes back to his previous system of driving to the nearest medium big city and working construction for as many weeks as he can get work, then driving on.

That’s better, a little. There’s something about the construction sites, bustling with people, working as a team, that helps soothe the ache of loneliness. It's still pretty anonymous. He doesn’t really know these people, he’s only been here a week and a half. He could be anyone. They probably couldn’t even pick him out of a line up. This, it turns out, is probably a good thing.

He wakes up one morning, even more awake and aware than usual. It reminds him of that awful headache, but it’s not so overwhelming. It’s not that big a change from normal, just that bit more dialed in. Like the air itself is a little crisper or something. He shakes it off. Just because he’s had one migraine doesn’t mean that’s what this is. It’s fine.

Work on the construction site is fine, fun even. He feels so energized today, strong even. He volunteers for the heavy lifting, throwing bags of concrete over his shoulder to bring to the mixer without a care in the world, wheeling two loads of bricks in one barrow. If he could always feel this alert, this powerful? Honestly it’s almost funny to think that he nearly bailed on work today because he was worried about a headache that never even came.

Sandeep, one of the people on the project he’s gotten to know a bit better than the others, invites him for drinks with a group of them, and it’s an easy yes. There’s a part of him that’s even more thrilled than usual to be spending time with people, and he can’t help but want to prolong the night as long as possible.

This is, as it happens, a mistake.

He’s not technically legal to drink, but only by like a few months, and the bar they bring him to isn’t the kind of place to card people. Besides, it’s not like he hasn’t known his own limits when it comes to alcohol since he was, like, seventeen.

This is why he’s confused when he starts to feel funny. He’s had a beer and a half, max, and not a single shot, so there's no reason that he should be feeling so weird. It’s not classic drunkenness, with the walls spinning, but everything feels off. He’s not dizzy, not exactly, but his head does feel funny. It’s not the killer migraine of last month, but it’s like his brain isn’t in the right place in his body? It’s. There’s something.

He gets to his feet, staggers a little.

“Buckley’s had too much," someone laughs, and there’s a round of friendly jeering.

“Fresh air,” Evan manages to gasp, “Back in a minute.”

It’s like someone’s zooming in and out really fast over and over again, but with his actual eyes? His feet are a million miles away and then right there, and the floor seems to rock almost.

Have I been roofied? he has the presence of mind to think, and then he bursts out of the front door, staggers to the side of the bar. He's breathing heavy, panting almost, and the brick wall is rough and unyielding under his hand and forehead. It’s kind of amazing actually, full of fissures and cracks, practically a landscape of it's own, marred with ravines, in miniature.

“You alright, Evan?” asks Sandeep’s voice, and Evan lets his forehead roll across the brick to see him out of the side of his vision. Sandeep looks just a little worried, and Evan remembers him saying just once that he has a younger brother. There’s another guy with him. Elliott, he thinks, but he’s never been sure if that’s his first name or his surname. He's lighting up, so maybe he’s not as concerned, but still. Sandeep came to check on him, which is nice.

“Feel funny,” Evan manages, and it comes out weirdly slurred, like his teeth are too big for his mouth, like his tongue’s too long. “Roofied?” he asks, and behind Sandeep, Elliott snorts.

“Think you might not know how to hold your liquor, kid,” he says, and it’s Evan’s turn to laugh, rolling so he’s leaning fully back against the wall.

It leaves him looking at the sky, dark with clouds.

“Been drunk a lot,” he says, “Not like this.”

“Do you have someone you want me to call?” asks Sandeep, taking a step closer. “I think you should probably call it a night.”

Evan looks at him, his big concerned eyes, the anxious pulse in his throat, the faint scent of worry, present even under the cigarette smoke.

“You’re sweet,” he says, and Sandeep rolls his eyes, but he looks a little flustered.

He’s still looking at Sandeep, the faint flush warming his brown cheeks, when the clouds part. There’s this moment, where his blush is so much more visible in the moonlight, where Evan can practically feel the heat of the blood in his cheeks, can almost taste his concern. It's nice, that he’s so concerned, even when he barely knows him.

Something in the air turns, a sour note that spikes, the thud of heartbeats getting faster.

“What the fuck?” says Elliott, high pitches and a little squeaky. “Do you see that? His eyes are glowing, right??”

Sandeep makes a squeaky noise of agreement, and Evan tilts his own head in confusion. The movement makes them both flinch hard, and then freeze silent.

“What’s wrong?” he asks, but his voice comes out lower than he meant it to. His eyes flick up, briefly, and get caught. Hung suspended in the sky, free from cloud cover now, is the moon. It’s big and bright and beautiful. And full, chimes in a little voice he’s trying to ignore. It’s full again.

It’s very full.

“Evan?” Sandeep asks, quietly, like he’s scared of getting a reply, and Evan’s head snaps to attention as quickly as he can. Sandeep flinches again.

“What’s happening?” he asks, and his voice is so low it’s practically a growl.

“I don’t know,” says Sandeep, and his voice is shaking. He’s scared, Evan finally realizes.

“I think I need to go home,” he manages to say, growl, whatever. He can hear the bass in it reverberate, and Elliott swears, drops his cigarette. Sandeep looks just a little sad, under the fear, and that seems weird in itself.

Evan pushes himself off of the wall, and this seems to be what does it. He falls to his knees, or he thinks he does.

“Come on,” he thinks he hears, too focused on his own hands, shaking in front of him. Does he normally have this much hair on the back of his hands? Does he always—

He doubles over at the sudden burst of wrongmovechangewrongwrongwrong. His nails ache in his hands, he can feel his eyeballs in their entirety, he’s so confined he’s so he’s

This time, when he wakes up curled up in a bush next to where he’s parked his Jeep, there's no escaping it.

Werewolves aren’t real, he thinks frantically, but. He’s naked again, his clothes presumably shredded outside that fucking dive bar. His feet and hands both are covered in a layer of dirt, and his Jeep is right there but his keys were in his fucking jeans pockets. He can’t walk across town completely fucking naked if he doesn’t want to get arrested for public indecency, but what’s the other option? Smash his own car window?

Oh god, he’s got work today. How’s he supposed to face Sandeep or Elliott? He honestly just wants to cry, overwhelmed like he hasn’t been since he was a little kid, and knew that he could go to Maddie and she would throw her arms around him and hold him close, and everything would be better.

It’s time to skip town, probably.

He has to smash the back window to get into the car, which gets him a sweater and a pair of basketball shorts. That gets him back to dive bar, where he searches through the mess of fabric on the floor and finds his phone, his motel key card, his jeep keys.

There’s a text from Sandeep which reads:

get home okay? you seemed out of it.

There’s no way of knowing whether he's just being generous, or if he really had left quick enough to not know what happened. He hasn’t had Evan arrested, or locked up by animal control, so honestly, he’s willing to take the win. He hesitates a long while before he replies.

yeah, came down with a fever. going to have stay home and recover

He’s sitting in the middle of his motel room, thankfully not destroyed this time. He’s already showered and packed, and he’s not going to stop driving until he’s at least one state away.

okay. get well soon

Sandeep sends, and Evan can feel his eyes prickle with tears. He’s just. He’s such a nice guy, even when he doesn’t need to be.

thanks for checking in on me

This time, before he can be tempted to wait for a reply, he removes the SIM card and snaps it in half. He throws one half in the bin in his motel room, slides the other half into his jean pocket to throw out of a rolled down window when he’s on the highway, and goes to reception to check out. He knows Maddie’s number off by heart, he can text her someday when he gets a new SIM, just so she knows. Just in case. He can’t tell her about this though.

No wonder he’s been feeling so lonely. He’s going to have to be alone for the rest of his life.

By the time he gets to Montana, he’s actually got something of a routine. He does better when he has a job, when he’s working in a group. If he mentions he gets migraines early on, he can maybe even stay for a full moon or two, as long as he tracks the days, and announces a headache coming on before moonrise.

He spends a lot more time out on the town, too. Picking someone up, and trying to satisfy them enough that they’ll stay, that he can have a warm body night to him through the night. It honestly takes a lot of effort, exhausting people in bed so they’ll just stay. It’s good, though. It’s nice, the closeness. The intimacy of it. It helps the wound in him scab over, even just for a couple of hours.

It’s not what the movies say. He’s not rabid, or violent, or trying to hurt anyone. He’s not even trying to hurt himself. Once a month, without fail, he turns into a wolf. That’s kind of all it is. As time goes by, he remembers more from when he’s a wolf, becomes more aware as it’s happening even. It’s honestly not even very interesting? Maybe if he went out to explore, but that seems like a surefire way to lead to trouble. Who’s going to react well to seeing a random wolf around town? Getting tranquilized seems like the best case scenario, there, and he’d kind of prefer not to, thanks. So lying in a sad little ball in his hotel rooms it is, burying himself under the covers, and trying not to wonder what it would be like if someone pet him.

No one knows. Sometimes he feels like he’s imagining the whole thing, like he’s so sad and so lonely that he’s made it all up, like his brain is eating itself just for something to do, and this is what’s left. It doesn’t take much to remind him it’s all real, though. He can carry weights he never would have been able to manage before, he can hear full conversations from a block away if he tries. His night vision is better than it ever was, and even his sense of smell is better. It’s kind of like a superhero movie, probably. He only ever saw that one X-Men one in cinemas with Maddie, but like, they had special powers. He’s not exactly using it for good, though, he’s just using them to haul more bricks than the next guy.

He thinks about telling Maddie every single day. He can’t, of course. Even if Maddie picked up the phone, what would he say? This isn’t something he can say over postcard. This isn’t something he should say full stop. He can think about superheroes all he wants, but he knows that’s not the genre of movie that werewolves show up in, even if he's never actually seen a horror film.

How do you call your big sister and tell her you became a monster from fairytales?

So, whatever, he won’t tell her. He won't tell anyone. He doesn’t actually have anyone to tell.

By the time he gets to Montana, the endless rotation of construction sites and the constant stream of one night stands aren’t really doing it for him any more. Even surrounded by people, even with someone new in his bed any night that isn’t a full moon, he’s just lonely.

He decides to find something a little more stable. He’s driving towards Wolf Creek as kind of a joke with himself, and stops for gas and a coffee. It’s kind of an impulse, but he sees a poster up in the café for a local dude ranch who need seasonal help, and before he knows it he’s got a surprisingly nice log cabin on the premises, and people who need him to stay put for a full six months.

It’s kind of incredible. It’s kind of terrifying.

There’s a moment on his second official day there, where he suddenly wonders if being part wolf is going to make riding a horse impossible, if it’ll be scared of him. He’s honestly kind of upset, just at the thought. It’s not true, of course, the horse acts normal, and he thinks, Yeah, okay, if all animals reacted weirdly to werewolves that would be part of the mythology. Duh.

Evan is, at this point, kind of an expert in werewolf mythology. He’s spent hours in various libraries and internet cafés across the country at this point, chipping away at every culture that’s ever mentioned shifting into wolves. He even read Twilight, just in case. It hasn’t been super illuminating, but it’s been useful as a starting point. He’s been sort of running little experiments on himself, trying to figure out what is and isn’t true.

The key thing that he discovers on that second day at the ranch, is that other animals don’t see him as a predator, not when he’s human anyway. He should probably avoid the stables when it's a full moon, just to be safe.

It’s fun, once he’s been shown the ropes. He’s good with the horses, sure, but more excitingly than that, he’s good with the kids. They get three different scout troupes, never mind all the families trying to keep their kids off video games for at least a week of summer. Evan’s never really had much opportunity to spend time with children before, except for back when he was one. Maddie’s older, but she’s not thinking about kids any time soon, and they never had any cousins or anything growing up, so why would he have been around children?

It’s just. He didn’t realize, maybe, how sweet they are. They’re so funny, always saying the oddest shit, always in awe of a real life horse, even when they’re old enough that they’re trying to be cool.

He’s always sort of assumed that he’d be a cool uncle one day, presuming Doug lets him actually spend time with his niece or nephew, but he’d never thought about children of his own. It’s crazy, honestly, to be barely twenty-one and broody, but it turns out he absolutely loves kids. Not to brag, but they love him too, he’s the most requested rancher of all the crew by the kids when they want to take a final photo. He rocks a cowboy hat, sure, but that’s not it.

“It’s because they can tell you’re basically still one of them,” jokes Adeem, and Evan rolls his eyes, but then Kylie, a bright-eyed seven year old, calls out to him for advice on getting her horse to speed up, and he races off to help.

He's admittedly not great at helping out with the fishing, gets too bored too quickly, but he’s a surprisingly quick study with a bow and arrow, so it doesn’t take long for him to be running archery classes on his own.

There’s this little kid, Lizzy, who just keeps wandering directly behind the horses. It’s not on purpose, Evan’s pretty sure, she’s just in her own little world, easily distracted. She’ll see a cool plant, or an interesting bug, and go off absentmindedly, and every single time she seems to end up directly behind one of the horses. Her parents never seem to notice, too caught up in trying to wrangle their other kids, not until Evan’s had to pointedly move her out the way and remind the whole group that they can’t stand directly behind the horses.

They’re good horses, well trained, but they're still animals, and the rules are there for a reason. What Evan’s really saying is that it’s kind of a miracle that it takes until her fourth day at the ranch for one of the more nervous horses to spook about her being in his blind spot and kick out. Luckily, he’s been paying attention to her, manages to get in front of her just in time to take a hoof to the chest. It knocks him right off his feet, winds him badly, but better him than her, because that would have been head height on a girl her size.

Lizzy, of course, is distraught, and her parents are extremely apologetic, but Evan waves it off. Natalie, who’d been teaching this group with him, has some basic first aid training, and she doesn’t think he’s punctured a lung or anything. Cracked a rib or two though, maybe. They’re able to continue the lessons, even if Evan stays on the ground instead of mounting back up. Lizzy insists on holding his hand for the rest of the afternoon.

It’s not like the movies, where he’d be healing immediately, that’s for sure. It’s not like Wolverine, bullets bouncing back out of him as he heals. He's definitely hurt, and it’s not instantly fading.

Still, that evening when Natalie makes him take his shirt off to check it again, he’s only lightly bruised. His ribs aren’t cracked after all, she's pretty sure, just jarred, bruised maybe. It’s not enough to freak anyone out, after all they’d only done a really cursory look when it happened, but he thinks maybe he does have some sort of accelerated healing. Nothing on a level with the stories, clearly, and it’s not like only silver will hurt him because it turns out a horse’s kick actually hurt quite a lot, but something. Like his hearing maybe, not actually magical but above average for the normal person these days. A better immune system too, maybe, now that he thinks about it, because he hasn’t had a cold since before Wyoming.

Once upon a time, when he was younger, he would have tested the extent of this healing, methodically seeing what would and wouldn’t heal quickly. These days he has better ways of getting people’s attention, so he simply takes another beer and embellishes the heroics of his saving Lizzy from a hoof to the head to his coworkers.

Three months in, he’s feeling pretty settled. He sent Maddie a postcard telling her about the ranch, complete with a photo of himself. It’s weird, telling her bits and pieces, and holding back the most important things from her. She used to be the person he could always depend upon, but it’s hard to accept that she can want her own life without him in it, that she couldn’t say it to his face, but she was leaving him again. He doesn’t. It’s her life, and he can’t resent that, it’s her business, but god it hurts to remember. Carves the aching loneliness inside him a little wider.

The guys on the ranch are so genuinely cool. They’re kind to him, he’s the youngest by a good five years, so he’s become something of an unofficial kid brother. He doesn’t really know what he’s doing, but they teach him the basics of ranch hand work, and Evan finds that he likes it more than building. There’s something about feeling like he’s helping these animals that just feels good. They bring him line-dancing on Thursdays, and there’s a group meal every Sunday. It’s not as close-knit as he was maybe hoping, but it’s better than being another anonymous on an interchangeable construction site.

Jesse, who owns the ranch, is about thirty, and inherited it from his dad last year. He’s still working through the grief of that, but he’s grounded too, knows his place in the world and is happy with it. Evan can’t help but admire it, admire him. Adeem’s kind of mean, but in the fun way, and he always roots him on whenever Evan gets tipsy enough to try the mechanical bull in their local dive. Martin is kind, with glasses, and fundamentally he doesn’t look like he should be on a ranch of any kind, but he’s the fastest rider that Evan’s ever seen. Natalie is a force to be reckoned with, tiny and seemingly furious with the wider world for it. They’re good fun.

It didn’t take long to realize he’s there to replace someone; there are too many gaps in the conversation, asides that don’t quite land. A ghost at the heart of each conversation.

He pulls Adeem aside at one point, because he’s the kind to people-watch their clients and then whisper all sorts of conjecture about them, so he’s probably the best for gossip.

“Joshua,” Adeem says, with a rueful smile. “He had a bad fall while riding at the end of spring, broke his leg in two places.”

Evan’s indrawn breath hisses through his teeth.

“Yeah,” agrees Adeem. “He’s going to be okay, and he might even ride again, but he’s definitely not up to your cowpoke duties right now.”

“Got it,” says Evan, because, well. He was maybe getting a little too comfortable, so it’s good to have the reminder that this was always going to be for the season only.

“We do take seasonal help in the summers,” says Adeem, “Hell, Natalie only ever joins in the summers, for the rest of the year she teaches law, I think?”

“That actually explains a lot,” laughs Evan, and Adeem cracks one of his slightly mean smiles.

“It does, doesn’t it?” He sobers up quickly though. “You’d have to talk to Jesse, I don’t think we make enough to increase full time staff, but we really do take on at least one, maybe two newbies for summer? For some reason people are more interested in rising horses up and down the mountains in good weather.”

“Crazy,” says Evan wryly. Adeem’s easy to talk to, and funny, so they keep chatting. In the quiet moments over the next few weeks, Evan can’t stop thinking about him. Joshua. The guy who should be here. He’s never been so aware of the space he’s taking up. That he fits badly in the hole left by this guy’s absence. Maybe that’s why he’s still kind of lonely? This isn’t really where he belongs, he’s just borrowing it for the moment.

It was the full moon last week, and he’d spent it curled up in a ball under his bed, doors and windows to his log cabin locked. This is mostly notable because Evan’s looking down at his hands, and his fingers are distinctly claw shaped.

He hadn’t been sleeping well, so he’d decided to go for a nighttime walk up along the mountain. Nothing crazy, but just enough to tire himself out a bit. The moon may be waning, but it’s still pretty gibbous, so it’s not like he’s walking off in the pitch black. Still, it’s not that bright, and he didn’t bring a torch or anything with him, and his phone’s battery is low enough that he doesn’t want to use it.

If only, he thinks kind of wistfully, vaguely remembering how much clearer his vision is on full moon nights, and not just because there’s more moonlight. His night vision’s improved overall, sure, but his human night vision has nothing on his wolf night vision.

He stumbles, just a little, on a tussock, and laughs at himself. If I could shift just my eyes, he thinks absently, and between one step and the next, the world gets sharper, brighter. His eyes ache, stinging like he’s gotten lemon juice in them somehow, across his entire eyeball. He didn’t know your optic nerve could sting. The colors of the mountain ahead, the forest below all shift, less green, more blues and grays. Evan looks down at his own hands, and they’re clearly visible in the low light, his nails sharpened into claws, the hair on the back of each finger noticeably thicker and darker.

He gets his phone out of his back pocket, and aims the camera at his face.

It’s an eerie photo, like when you catch a cat or a dog in dim light, eyes glowing white-yellow like headlights in the middle of a blurry dark picture. Holy shit.

He knows, most of the time, what’s happened to him. He doesn’t have to think about it on a regular basis, quite frankly. He has a new baseline normal, and, sure, it’s above everyone else’s baseline, but honestly Evan's always kind of felt like he’s on a slightly different frequency to everyone else. These days, it’s just that some of that’s positive, instead of negative. Once a month he has to deal with turning, and being out of control and the pain and loneliness dialing up to eleven, and that’s, you know, not ideal. But it’s also only once a month, and Evan’s used to being alone and being in pain and wishing you were neither, so it’s really not that bad. This, on a random Thursday, is a whole new level.

He looks like the monster in a horror movie, in that photo. He looks like the sort of thing that fairytales are made up to warn you about, that little kids have nightmares about. Oh god, he can absolutely never let any of the kids here on the ranch see him like this or they’ll be in therapy forever…

It’s. He looks terrifying in that picture, and presumably in real life, but. He can see the individual blades of grass on the mountain, he can hear the soft rhythm of beating wings, a bird circling high above him. He can smell on the breeze that the pinprick of light on the next mountain over is a campfire, and they’re toasting marshmallows. This is a whole new level of senses. If he can do this outside of the full moon, what does that mean?

Could he learn to do this on purpose? Could he shift fully, outside of the moon? Could he learn not to shift on the full moon? This is huge.

The first thing to do, is to figure out how to get back to normal, so he can get back to his log cabin with no worries.

This, of course, proves harder to do than said. He tries to sort of do the opposite of what he did earlier, but it turns out that it’s harder to wish your vision was worse. He tries imagining himself human, but every time he looks at his hands, he can see sharp claws. His relaxing little walk proves quite stressful, as he sits under a tree and tries to meditate his way back to human, unsuccessfully.

It's hit maybe 2am by the time he pulls his hood up, and skirts his way back to his cabin, hoping against hope that everyone else is in bed. He makes it, thank god, and then spends at least ten minutes staring at himself in the bathroom mirror, trying to wish himself back to normal. He tries washing his face, scrubbing hard at the heavy brow, vaguely lupine brows he’s acquired along with his ridiculous new night vision eyes, the whites entirely swallowed by his irises. He cries in frustration, just a little. There’s no pretending this is normal, so he needs to change back before morning, but he doesn't actually know what he's doing, and it's not like there’s anyone he can ask.

He’s not the only werewolf in the world, he can’t be, because someone made him like this. That’s not very helpful though. He doesn’t remember much of that night, just flashes, there’s a good chance that he could walk past the guy and never know. Did they know, when they did it? Did they know what they did to him and just not care? Just changed his life forever and moved on without a second thought? He’s not let himself think about it too much, but there’s something so devastating about that thought, about the violence of it, of the rejection implicit in it, that gnaws at him. He doesn't mean to fall asleep, curled into a ball on his bed, the loneliness more aware than usual, but he does.

When he wakes up with the first few rays of dawn, his face is back to normal, his claws are fingers once more.

Right, thinks Evan, That’s something to practice. He does not think, with some effort, about whoever turned him, and why. He learned his lesson a long time ago about asking questions when the answer can never satisfy.

By the time six months are up, Evan doesn’t want to leave. Want doesn’t have much to do with it, though. That’s just the nature of seasonal work. It’s always temporary. If Jesse could keep them all on year-round, Evan thinks he would, and honestly that’s kind of enough.

“If this Navy thing doesn’t work out for you,” Jesse says, as Evan’s packing his stuff into the Jeep, “There’s work here for you next summer.”

“Hopefully I won’t need it,” says Evan cheerily, and then turns to face him, more sincere. “Thank you, man, I really. I really needed somewhere to stay, when I got here.”

“Yeah,” says Jesse, wryly, “I figured. We were all better for you being here, Buckley. Don’t be a stranger.”

Evan salutes him, and doesn’t let his smile waver until the ranch has disappeared from his rear view mirror. The longest he’s stayed in one place since leaving Hershey, and he just knows he’ll never see it again.

The SEALs should be a good choice. They basically work like a pack, and that’s what the problem is, right? He’s a pack animal now. No wonder he’s so fucking lonely all the time. Plus, being fast and strong with good reflexes and even better senses? It all seems like an obvious shoe-in for being a good Marine.

He didn’t. He didn’t think about things like not being able to easily take a day off for a migraine, which is part of the problem, but more than that, he didn’t really think about what it would like to be in the military. Evan’s never taken orders particularly well, especially not bad ones, not pointless ones. He’s also never been inclined to suffer a bully. He got in a lot of fights at school, because why not, right? If he stood up to one of the bullies in class, the worst that would happen is he’d get a black eye and his parents would get him ice cream on the way home from school. Plus he’d have helped someone.

Hell Week isn’t hell because it’s exhausting. He has the strength and the stamina, he’s mostly just lucky it doesn’t fall over a full moon. He ends up having to pretend to struggle more than he is, just to keep up appearances. The issue is with everything but the physical.

There are a lot of bullies in the men trying to train them into SEALs. It seems like a bad sign that they’re all in positions of power. He also. Maybe he hasn’t spent as much time in his life watching the news as he should have, but the more of the training he gets through, the more he sees what scenarios they’re trying to deaden him to? The less he thinks he’d actually be doing something that helps anyone.

The final straw comes during an exercise that he ends up getting upbraided over. He’s in line, cold and wet and exhausted, and if he feels that way then he can’t help but wonder what everyone else feels like. The big square-headed commanding officer for the exercise is in front of him, yelling. He’s said a lot of things, called Evan names, tried demeaning him, tried insulting him, tried insulting his family. Like so many of Philip’s lectures over the years, Evan lets himself kind of zone out, wash over him. Then the guy starts in on “acceptable losses” and “collateral damage”, and he just snaps.

He doesn’t actually go full wolf, thank god, because that’s a sure fire way to end up dissected in some military jail somewhere classified, but it’s closer than it should be. He’s so close to it that his yelling back had sounded almost close to growls, his voice far huskier than normal. He definitely shoves the guy back, and sees his eyes widen when Evan moves him three feet with ease.

“I quit,” he manages, breathing heavily, before he storms off to go calm himself down in a base bathroom. Fuck this.

He packs his stuff back into his duffel bag quickly, furiously, and manages to get out before he’s accosted by anyone else.

He sits, just for a moment, in the driver’s seat, parked in the lot.

Back on the road, he thinks, not a little melancholy, Just me and the Jeep. Again.

He wouldn’t mind so much, but he’d really thought that the SEALs might be a good fit for him, and now he doesn’t have a new plan. Maybe there’s no way to get close enough to a pack equivalent to stay. Maybe he’s going to have to spend the rest of his life driving, passing through towns, never truly belonging anywhere.

Wolves are migratory animals, he’s pretty sure.

He needs a change of pace, so he applies for a passport in the evening of his next construction job, and then he drives across the border to Mexico.

He tries all sorts of things as he makes his way down South America. Professional surfer, dancer, tutoring rich teenagers in English, tour guide. Jack of all trades.

He learns to fish in Belize, learns to dance salsa in Colombia.

He figures out what drugs help the loneliness, and which ones makes it worse. He also learns he has a different tolerance for more than just alcohol.

He gets better at handling the change outside of the full moon, though he can still never control it even at all on the full moon itself.

He learns his true limits, going through rainforest alone. He runs as fast as he possibly can, climbs trees and cliff-faces with his claws. He swims deep, and holds his breath until his lungs scream. He walks through the dark, tries to sharpen his night vision even more, tries to navigate by scent and sound. He gets better at changing in and out of his form, pushing through the pain to shift mid-step, mid-jump. On every day but one, he is in complete control of himself.

Mostly, he learns that it’s all not really enough.

He lands in Peru, and gets a job at trashy tourist beach bar. It’s an equivalent he’s found to construction work, there’s always a team of bar staff, always so many customers that he can’t feel too alone. It’s also pretty easy to pick people up after his shift ends, stave off the emptiness for just a little longer.

He sends postcards to Maddie still, even though he has no idea if she’s still getting them. She hasn’t sent him so much as a happy birthday text in over a year. It’s become a ritual though, each location he spends longer than a week in, he’ll grab a postcard and a photo. It’s soothing almost, even if sometimes he feels like he’s writing a story. The alternate universe where he came here, but he hadn’t ever had that one night, years ago now. Where the most that happens on a full moon is that he admires the night sky. Where he’s never tried to claw at himself all night, some part of him still sure that the way to get attention and affection is to be in pain. He writes to Maddie and tells her about his beach bar, the new haircut he’s gotten, the tattoo he’s been thinking about getting. He doesn’t mention that he managed to get out of the room he’d been staying in three months ago, and he’s still being woken up by flashes of being chased by scared, angry people.

The bar is nice, and the tips are shockingly good, and maybe he’s sick of always being on the move. Maybe this is what will stick, at least for a while.

He doesn’t really believe he’s actually done it until he walks in for his first day at the Fire Academy. Not just coming back to the United States, but making this huge new plan for his life based off of an old telenovela on the bar’s tv.

He was wrong about the Marines, sure, but. But this could be really good. This could be like that was going to be, but better. A close-knit team, so he’s less fucking empty inside, a permanent home, a job where he can help people, where his abilities will help him help people. What more could he even ask for?

The people are nice, welcoming. He probably won’t actually work with any of these guys when he’s at a firehouse, but they’re good classmates, and they’d be good colleagues too. He’s Buck, now, which is kind of cool. It’s maybe a little sad, especially for a guy who was on the high school football team, but he’s never really had a nickname before.

He waits until he’s made it three months into the Academy before he texts Maddie.

back in the usa. for good i think.

Then, when there is inevitably no reply, he messages again.

i’ll send a postcard soon. love you mads x

This too gets no reply. Who knows if that’s even still her number. Who knows if she’s even still al— It would just be nice if she could reply, just once.

Instead, his phone buzzes, but when he looks excitedly the message is for Firehose, so he heads off to drown his thoughts in the fleeting intimacy of a quick hook up.

Buck’s never been more nervous than his first day at the 118. He did well enough in his exams that he had a couple of options, but this is the one closest to the place he’s sharing with Connor and the rest of the guys, so it seemed like a no brainer.

Walking through the doors, he’s still nervous, but there’s something else to it, an easy awe. There’s something about a working firehouse. It’s big, clean, bright. It’s full of bustle and laughter, and all these overwhelmingly competent people, all gathered together to help people. It’s kind of amazing. He wants so badly for this to work, and there's part of him that’s so sure that’s obvious on him. His desperation, wafting off of him.

He’s always been too desperate for things, too needy, and it’s only ever led to him losing them. He really needs this to be the exception.

He’s scared right up to the loft, trying to hide it but not sure he’s very successful.

It’s only sitting down, a plate of hot food being passed to him, that he starts to feel settled. It’s been an extremely long time since he’s felt like he’s at home, but this place? This place feels like it could be home, feels like it could be his. What a thought.

It’s so good. It’s better than he ever knew it could be, honestly.

Hen teases him, but she shows him the ropes with a fond smile. Chimney is constantly needling at him, making references to films that Buck’s never seen, but it’s all weirdly affectionate. Like he’s genuinely dismayed that Buck’s never seen The Matrix or Jaws or whatever, and some nights they’ll watch one during the early hours of a shift. Bobby’s nice, even though sometimes he treats Buck like a little kid. Buck definitely pushes, just a little, calling him ‘Pops’, seeing what he can get away with, and nine times out of ten Bobby just smiles kind of wearily, or rolls his eyes, and lets it pass.

He still has to take full moons off, on the occasions he’s scheduled to work them, but he doesn’t exactly need to take any other sick leave ever, so he’s not super worried about it.

The only real problem is that while he’s starting to feel settled at work, he definitely doesn’t feel that way at home, which is a rotating series of house parties and a new frat brother crashing on the couch every weekend. He likes his new coworkers a hell of a lot, but there’s still the unending loneliness, so he still tries to fill the emptiness with casual sex. It’s something deeper than a mere skin-hunger, but he doesn’t have a solution for that, so he’ll make do with what he does have. Which is a series of hookup apps, a good body, and very little shame.

It never occurs to him that in trying to stop himself feeling so lonely that he could threaten what safety he has found, not until Bobby’s standing across from him on a roof, cold with anger, disappointed, unimpressed.

Buck wants to howl with the hurt of it, wants to rend and tear at himself, because he’d really thought this could be it, and he’d still endangered it so easily and so thoughtlessly. He’d thought he’d found a place that he could stay, and he threw it away without even thinking. He clenches his hands into fists and feels the claws bite into his palms, and knows he’s earned this pain.

When Bobby decides to give him a second chance, Buck really has learned his lesson. He’s not going to get in his own way again. He’s going to make himself entirely indispensable, the best probie they’ve ever had, and he’s going to keep this. He has to.

He throws himself into it, desperate to make it work this time, desperate to stay, desperate to be kept.

He loses someone, Devon, because he’s playing it too safe. He’s strong enough that he could easily have lifted him, he should have leaned out further, he should have done more. The crew try to reassure him, but they don’t understand that he’s right to blame himself, that he should be held to a higher standard than the rest of them. What’s the point of having super powers, basically, if you don’t use them properly?

Therapy is worse than helpful. He doesn’t— He can’t—

Abby calls him, on the phone, just to check in. It’s nice, honestly. It’s nice that she cares, that she keeps calling, day after day. It’s nice that he doesn’t have to see her in person, or worry about what might happen, whether she might—

It’s nice. The equilibrium is shattered almost immediately, first with Chimney’s accident, then with Bobby’s near relapse. It’s better, though, when they’ve made it through. They feel like a proper team, like they’ve built something strong and lasting. He meets Abby, goes on a date with her even, and it may not exactly end how he’d want his first ever first date to end, but even then, things are good with them. Abby's sweet, she’s beautiful and clever and kind, and she understands what it is to be loyal to people, even when it hurts you. She could have a real relationship with anyone, and she’s chosen Buck, somehow. He feels sick with nerves over it sometimes, confident he isn’t worth it, that she’s chosen badly.

The only real problem is that she’s so supportive that when he goes to give his usual migraine excuse, she invites him over to her place in response.

“Oh, Buck,” she says, voice honey sweet and caring, “With your frat brother housemates? That must be awful. Come to my apartment, you can just lie down in my room with the lights low, Mom and I won’t bother you. I’m sure Carla would love to check in on you while I’m on shift, if it’s a really bad one. Do you take particular meds for your migraines? You don’t? Well, when this one passes, why don’t we see about helping you with that.”

It’s honestly enough to make Buck almost wish he hadn’t taken sick leave. No one’s been this worried about him since Maddie, and Maddie herself doesn’t actually seem to care these days. How can he lie to this beautiful, kind, caring woman? How can he explain that the real issue is that he’s a creature from stories? He feels like a newly housebroken puppy around Abby anyway, he doesn’t need to tell her that he’s very literally a wild animal at least once a month.

“I think better to stay where I am at this point,” he manages, choked, “Maybe next time? That sounds so nice.”

She makes soothing noises in his ear, and hopes he gets well soon, and it’s soon he knows it’s too soon, but god does he love her.

He’s building a little pack, all humans who don’t, can never, know the truth of him. Abby, Bobby, Hen, and Chimney. Maybe even Athena. For the first time in an extremely long time, he’s sure, now, that he can actually stay put, that he can make a home for himself here. He’s good at being a firefighter, he can see that, and he thinks the others can too, now that he’s not throwing his weight around, not racing off to get whatever intimacy he can from a hookup, not picking fights on a call. He just feels a lot more settled now, more than he has since Wyoming, certainly, maybe more than has since he crossed Pennsylvania state lines.

Of course, this is when Abby leaves. She doesn’t want to, per say, but she does have to. Buck would be a hypocrite of the worst kind if he didn’t understand that, didn’t support it. He hates it, still, a part of him whining and howling all the way to the airport with her. She kisses him goodbye and some stupid animal part of him wants to grab on and not let go. He thinks that it’s a part of him that he was born with, nothing to do with his change.

He settles into her apartment, denning down on the foot of her bed, sleeping in a tightly curled ball of fur more often than he sleeps in it as a human. The days pass into weeks and then into months. Even with his superior sense of smell, he’s starting to lose her scent, it’s being overwritten by his own.

He stays cheerful through determination, as upbeat at the station as he can manage. He gets even closer with Hen, Chimney, and Bobby. They really do feel like what he thinks a family is supposed to feel like, what a pack should probably be. He graduates his probie year, and doesn't think about the fact that Abby’s abroad, or that Maddie’s not acknowledged him in nearly three full years now. He stands on a stage, and the entire 118 is there, and his little table has Hen and her wife and their son, and Chimney, and Bobby and Athena, even though they’re still trying to pretend that they’re not together. Buck’s pretty good, quite frankly, at not acknowledging that he wanted someone to come to something and they didn’t. He had a lot of unused family tickets back when he played football in high school.

It’s probably telling that this is the first time he’s even thought about telling Philip and Margaret about the LAFD, now that he’s already walking across a graduation stage.

He wasn’t sure he’d want to celebrate, when he knew Abby would still be traveling for it, but he’s glad that Bobby mentioned it in the loft, that Chimney and Hen bullied him into a celebration. It hasn’t taken long, but he’s already more invested in the opinions and celebrations of this small group than the vast majority of people in his life. If there are two other women he wishes were here, he wants to include in his ramshackle little pack? Well that’s his business. In the meantime, he’s happy to celebrate.

He gets maybe a month? A month more of teasing from Hen and Chimney, of cooking lessons from Bobby, of shift after shift, falling more and more into a pattern with each other. He gets a month of feeling comfortable, of days where he's so glad to be at the 118 that he almost doesn’t even miss Abby at all. He’s a proper firefighter now, and even Athena seems to like him most days, and he can forget his own stupidity and recklessness back when he started for days at a time. He gets enough time to get used to it, to think he’s going to get to keep it, and then Eddie Diaz walks in.