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honeylikewords · 1 year

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penumbra. (jack russell)

jack and his wife are separated during the full moon. (set in the events of the pregnancy arc!)

(warnings: descriptions of food and eating, non-descript vomiting, scenes of fear and anxiety; first ever attempt at writing slightly angsty, potentially hurt/comfort fic(?), everything works out so don’t worry! word count: 6k.)

“Beaver moon,” Jack says, hands in his pockets. He’s staring at a patch of clouds that are skating rapidly across the icy blue sky, nose high in the air. Smelling the wind for what’s to come.

His eyes flick to the side to catch a glimpse of her as she comes to stand next to him, arms crossed over her waist to brace against the chill, and he extends a hand to invite her to stand closer. She does, and she is instantly met with the radiating warmth of Jack’s feverish body temperature as he pulls her into his side; he rubs a hand along her upper arm in soothing arcs, and the heat of his touch comforts her.

“Beaver moon?”

When he’s distant, lost to her, she’s found that pressing him with innocuous questions can help draw him out. An easy opportunity to explain something can warm him back up to talking, and one hapless conversation may branch into a more expository one, and she hopes that getting him to talk about this will help him talk about that. It’s on the horizon, and, presumably, the driving force behind his shift in mood.

“Yeah,” he breathes. “November’s moon. That’s what they called it in, eh, the Farmer’s Almanac.”

He chuckles a little and shakes his head, gaze returning to the skies, and she watches his face as his eyes wander farther and farther away. His thumb creates slow circles on her elbow as he holds her close, and when he does speak again, he mumbles.

“They re-named all the moons of the year. Borrowed--” --he says the word with some sourness-- “--From the people already here. Made up new names for old things. I remember when they started. But there are names, real ones, that people do use.”

Jack turns to look back at her, and she can see something dark hiding in his bright eyes. She knows the expression that has come to linger all too well, from the severity of the lines between his eyebrows to the way he pulls his lips taut, chewing the inside of his cheek. The crease over the bridge of his nose gets more pronounced, and the darkness under his eyes brings a haggard weight to his gaze. A hardness of muscle, a thinness of blood, a lack of color. He’s afraid of something. She feels the knot of fear growing in her belly, too.

She should be used to it, by now. Sometimes, she feels like she is. But every month, like clockwork, when the atmosphere will become tense, Jack’s anxieties become her own, no matter how much she tries to assuage them.

“This month’s a total lunar eclipse,” he adds.

“A blood moon.”

Jack never tells her exactly where it is he goes, and he insists that she doesn’t tell him where she’s planning to go, either.

“Just make it deep into the city,” he reminds her. “The deeper you go, the harder it will be for me to get there.”

“Jack, you wouldn’t--”

He puts a hand up, firmly halting the conversation, and finishes putting the last of his clothes in the duffel bag. As he zips it up, he glances at her and sees the hurt in her face, a downcast expression coming over his own. They’ve had this conversation before, but repetition it doesn’t make it any easier.

“I’m sorry, bebé. I know. But… we can’t risk it.”

Jack rounds the edge of the bed to come to her side, cupping her face in his hands. Regret and longing shadow him as he pets her cheeks, and she doesn’t like the way he’s studying her face; she’s afraid he’s looking at her for what he believes to be the last time. They’ve done this before, dozens of times, so why does this one feel so different? Shaking off the thoughts, she steels herself and holds his hand to her face, meeting his eyes.

“We have our systems,” she reminds him. “You’ll be alright. You’ll come back, all in one big, hairy piece.”

He wrinkles his nose at that. She can’t tell if he’s trying not to laugh or if he’s just uncomfortable, but whatever the reality, it doesn’t seem that her attempt at a joke broke much of the tension in him at all. Damn.

Instead of replying, Jack pauses, then bends forward and kisses her on the crest of her hairline. As his lips warm her, he draws in a deep breath through his nose, his eyes faltering shut as he takes in her scent. He inhales so deeply that she feels a few of her hairs lift off her head; it tickles, and she can’t help the small bubble of noise that escapes her. After a long moment of him standing completely still, nose pressed to her scalp, she feels Jack shift, turning to rapidly kiss every inch of her face.

“I,” he mumbles, kissing her temple, “love,” a kiss to her nose, “you,” a kiss to her cupid’s bow, “so,” now one on the corner of her jaw, “much.”

He plants another dozen across her cheeks and chin and ears and hair, until she’s certain he’s gotten each individual centimeter of surface area her face has, and then pulls back, hands remaining cupped around her face and keeping her in his view as long as possible.

“I will come back to you.” His voice is low, tired. But the promise is powerful. “And we will be alright.”

“I know,” she replies. “I’m going to miss you.”

“It’s only one night,” shrugs Jack, trying to seem blasé. “You might like the break from me. Get a little ‘you’ time in. Watch something you know I’d hate. Eat something with mushrooms.”

“Sounds fun.” It comes out more mournful than she meant for it to.

Out in the yard, branches snap: the cue. Jack frowns, the lines of his face deeper than ever and she thinks, in that moment, that all the hundreds of years have abruptly caught up to him. Wordless, he sighs, presses his nose to her cheek, and gives her one last, long kiss, savoring the plushness of her lips and the scent of her skin, before pulling away.

He grabs his bag off the bed and then takes her hand, the two of them walking in tandem through the house until they reach the back door, where Jack opens it and sees Ted squatting in the bushes. The massive creature waves sweetly at the two of them, and she waves back.

“Take care of my husband,” she smiles. Ted nods his tentacled head.

Jack hesitates in the doorway. The hand that grasps hers guides their encircled fingers to her belly, and he lets go of her with a trail of his fingers across it. His eyes hold there before he scratches at one ear, surprisingly aggressive, and breaks himself from his reverie.

“I end up having to take care of him, you know,” grumbles Jack, a hint of a smile pulling at his lips.

Ted makes an elephantine grunt and Jack rolls his eyes.

“Ay, I’m coming, man.”

Finally, Jack takes the step to go. He walks across the yard, towards the treeline that leads into the forest, where Ted holds open a gap in the bushes. As he crosses the barrier into the woods, Jack looks back at his wife, and the two of them do their best to be the one to look away first.

It’s only one night.

She breaks first, wiping her eyes on the back of her hand, and when she manages to clear her throat and look back up, both men are long gone.

Paying in cash at the hotel is always extremely embarrassing.

Jack insists, every month, that cards can’t be used-- “They leave a paper trail, querida,” he admonishes-- so he gives her a massive pile of bills to use at her discretion for the night. It always garners looks.

The concierge had raised both eyebrows and quirked his lips to the side before remembering his job and her presence, penitently smiling at her as he counted out the hundreds for the room, and she’d stood at the counter in a haze of discomfort while he made the key card.

She wonders idly if this one would spread rumors of a “lady of the night” or a “woman on the run” in the break room to his coworkers, then continues unpacking her toiletries on the bathroom counter, dismissive. It doesn’t really matter what he says so long as he and all the other people in this city make enough noise and light and stench to keep the wolf at bay.

That was the hope Jack had each month, sending her into the city: the hope that the chaos of human civilization would scare the wolf away from wherever she might be. That their secrecy would keep any memories, even subconscious, out of the wolf’s mind. That he wouldn’t know where to find her, even if he did hunt for her. That was the system.

So far, it has worked.

She does her best to whittle down the hours as sunset begins. Television, phone scrolling, reading, folding and unfolding her clothes for the night and following morning. None of it sufficiently puts to rest the images in her mind; Jack, locked in a cage somewhere, waiting for the agony to begin. Jack, alone. Jack, transformed.

Getting up from the edge of the bed, she moves to sit in the stiff, polyester-upholstered armchair by the window and stares out at the skyline. The city seems to be burning to the ground as the sun sinks between the skyscrapers and streets, dipping lower and lower into the horizon, before being extinguished as moonrise begins. Blue-black night stretches over the land, and thousands of streetlights and windows and signs flare to life, filling the darkness, pushing it back.

The room is too quiet, even with the television running for background noise. She fidgets with a loose thread on the arm of the chair as her stomach churns. She can’t stop thinking about Jack, and how his attitude had been so foreign; he was always withdrawn and anxious before the full moon, but he’d seemed more frightened than usual this time. Her gut contorts when she thinks to herself that he may have been giving her a goodbye, somehow, as if this was the end of something, and all of a sudden--

She bolts up from the chair so violently it rocks over, and rushes to the bathroom, collapsing on her knees in front of the toilet.

“For the love of God,” she moans, voice echoing in the now-full bowl. “Really?”

Nobody answers, but she stands on shaking legs and wipes her mouth with a tissue, flushing the whole affair down the toilet as she brushes her teeth and tongue forcefully. When she’s done, she kicks at the wastebasket in the bathroom and glares at her stomach as it makes a loud, wet growl.

“Seriously? Now you’re hungry?”

The sudden pang, both of pain and hunger, shoots through her and she narrows her eyes further, sighing in frustration and moving to get her coat.

Jack normally instructs her that once the moon is up, she cannot leave wherever it is that she’s hiding. Staying behind doors and walls and out of the open air creates interference, he says, and that interference is key to keeping the beast confused. “If he can’t smell you, he can’t find you.”

Well, wherever he is, she reasons to herself, he’s not going to smell her deep in the heart of the city, much less in the few minutes it will take her to get from her room to the nearby pizza place. The jacket is shrugged on and she opens the suite door, a cold thrill running through her as she breaks one of the rules of the full moon. So much for the system.

She breaks it further still as she leaves the hotel lobby and ambles into the restaurant a block westward, gazing at the menu blearily before ordering two slices: one of her standard order, the second a surprising combination of mushrooms, peppers and pineapple that makes the man behind the counter scoff as he jots it down on the pad. Another fistful of loose bills is tendered, this time to no surprise.

She takes a bite her familiar pizza, first, sitting at a sticky plastic table in the far corner of the restaurant, closer to where the cooking is happening. She figures that if she’s going to break the rules, she might as well balance it out by doing them safely by masking herself in the hot, smelly din of the kitchen. The pizza is a warm meal on an empty stomach, so it tastes better than usual, and she scarfs the first piece down quickly before turning her attention to this new order.

The mushrooms had originally been a little joke-- as one of Jack’s least favorite foods, they seldom turned up in any meals they shared, so she would order them when he was away-- but the other toppings had been ordered on impulse, all of them individually hungered for. Pineapple for its tart sweetness, peppers for their verdant crunch, mushrooms for their earthy meatiness; she piles a massive amount of the tinned parmesan cheese atop her slice and dives in ravenously.

It is a little strange at first, she admits, but scratches an itch she doesn’t quite understand, and she soon finds herself chewing through the crust, the piece decimated and digested. She marvels at herself for housing it that fast and wonders if she might have forgotten to eat earlier today, lost in all the stress of Jack’s departure. Not quite satiated by both pieces, she returns to the counter, orders another slice of the mixed-topping pizza, and takes it to go.

She walks out the front door with the piece in hand, clutched in a slightly oily napkin, and begins to walk through the cold streets of the city, watching through windows as businesses shutter for the night and families turn out the lights in bedrooms and dens. The world is getting ready to sleep, and she feels restless.

Midway across the street that would take her onto the block her hotel sits on, she decides that she can’t go back to the room right now. The stillness is too intimidating, too constricting. She knows that if she locks herself in that suite, she’ll sit, motionless, on the edge of the bed, cycling through the same thoughts that had led her here, making herself sicker and sicker. The mere idea of being in that sterile, dimly home-like room sends a clench through her abdomen, so she chooses to keep breaking the rules.

She takes a left and crosses another street, meandering into the city park that spans multiple blocks. She’d seen it coming in towards the hotel, and knows where the hotel sits in position to it, so she won’t get lost, she figures, passing through the low gates of the park and following the paved paths past a bed of trees and unpetaled rose bushes.

The grass underfoot crunches dryly, almost entirely dead, as she works on her piece of pizza and wanders aimlessly through the park. Now that she’s had about two and a third of these large slices, she’s beginning to feel full, and the remaining two-thirds slice in her hand is becoming less and less appetizing as it gets colder and she thinks more on her worries. She doesn’t want to vomit again, so she decides to give herself a break from it and moves to sit on an empty bench overlooking a glass-smooth pond.

It’s a calming sight: the park is entirely empty, the water features all turned off, and all that she can hear is the wind through the trees and the distant sound of traffic, muffled by the foliage. The night sky is dim, starless thanks to the city’s light pollution, but the moon, enormous and luminous, cuts through the darkness, viciously bright. It glows orange-red, the penumbra of the earth edging in; the blood moon.

She thinks of him as she stares at the moon, mindlessly picking at the food in her hands. The wind gusts a cluster of leaves down from the tree tops and they rain down onto the surface of the pond, sending ripples flowing across the water, reflecting red moonlight in arcs and waves. Somewhere, a dead limb cracks off a tree and falls to the earth with a heavy thud, and she jumps a little, nails digging into the mushroom she’d peeled off the pizza and was ripping apart on the napkin.

It occurs to her, now, that she is a woman alone in a major city, in a park, at night. She checks her surroundings carefully, noting no sign of other people, and tries to remember which way the hotel is; after a moment’s consideration, she decides that it’s to her right and that she’ll follow the path out to the nearest street, which she should be able to cross and get back to the hotel via.

As she begins to stand, another crack issues through the silence of the park, this one less heavy but nearer than the first. It sounded more like something crunching through shrubbery, something with enough mass to disturb leaves and snap branches. Human? Animal? She isn’t sure; do coyotes come this far into the city? She’d heard that they sometimes wandered the suburbs, attacking dogs; now isn’t the time to remember things about coyotes, she thinks. Now is the time to move. Her heart is pounding, dread setting in around her, and she moves as quietly as she can towards the path that leads right, staring at the space she thinks the sound came from. Unfortunately, it works: she sees what she’s looking for.

In the light of the red moon, she sees it.

Something massive, much bigger than any coyote could ever hope to be, rises from a span of bushes a few yards away from the bench, hunkered low but coming up taller and taller and taller. Every inch it rises is another dagger in her heart, her ears slamming with the sound of her blood, and if she had half a wit left in her, she’d scream: scream until whatever it was went deaf, scream until all the city knew where she was, scream until her throat bled. But all she can do is stumble backward, unable to take her eyes off the indistinct thing in the darkness, her body begging her to move back, into the light, into the safety of numbers, into anywhere but here, as everything else shuts down.

She keeps taking rapid, wobbling steps back, faster and faster, eyes transfixed, as the shape pushes out from the bushes and begins moving across the grass, shadowed and faster than anything she’s ever seen before. It races at her as she tries to turn around and run, and she begins scrambling up the path when whatever it is lets out an inhuman screech that crescendoes into an unearthly howl, so loud it rings her ears and makes her start dry-sobbing, trying, still, to run.

Before she can get anywhere close to the edge of the path, the creature is behind her, arms around her chest, yanking her backward into the night, and she finally manages to let out a belting scream before--

She is laying on her back, in the grass, at the side of the pond, and the thing is over her, staring down. Her body is pinned under the creature, with its knees on either side of her abdomen, one of its hands under the backside of her head and the other supporting the small of her back. The arms holding her still must be enormously strong, as she feels that her weight is not resting against the earth, but rather solely in the grasp of the beast.

It tilts its head from side to side as it inspects her closely, and she takes advantage of the moment to do the same. In the full, bright light of the moon, it’s much easier to see what exactly this thing is; it’s certainly humanoid, to be sure. Wide shoulders covered in a dense pelt of fur block out the sky behind it, and its bare chest is similarly hairy, tapering into a manlike waist. It’s all bare, actually, excepting a shredded pair of sweatpants that fit tightly against the creature’s lean legs and that are torn below the knee, making room for its massive calves. The hair seems to be densest around the thing’s face and neck, where it splays out in a dark mane, backlit by the moon to create a halo of red-brown tendrils that shift with every breeze. Its nose is long, flared into a wide, brown snout that clefts into two distinct curves of cartilage; every breath drawn through it rankles its top lip, curling it into a snarl. Twin sets of razor-sharp incisors glint wetly in the light, framed by lips that hang open as it breathes, hard, through its mouth.

Most noticeable, however, are its eyes.

They glow from underneath massive eyebrows, peering at her through the darkness, twin sparks of the aurora borealis. Green. They’re green.

Her own eyes swim with tears and her throat closes up, unable to make any sound but little sore gulps, and the creature bends down to rub its canine nose against her jaw, whimpering in the back of its throat sympathetically.

No, she corrects, not its: his. She would know him anywhere.

Jack pushes his face along the underside of her chin, whining into her neck, and uses the hand cradling her head to push her into the crook of his, rubbing her in. At first, the action confuses her, and she rankles her nose at the strong scent of his sweat against his damp, musky fur, but it dawns on her that the smell is, in fact, the purpose of the gesture: he needs her to smell him as he is smelling her. The wolf wants her to know that she is with her mate, and believes the scent is key to convincing her. She settles for winding her fingers into the matted span hair that covers his back and shoulders and crying, equal parts relieved and frightened, into his pelt.

She shakes and sobs as the wolf presses her to his chest, and Jack lets out pained, short barks, baying and howling pityingly. He pushes her as close to his skin as he can get her, and his skin is so hot it burns her cheeks, already sore from crying; if she didn’t know better, she’d think he was on death’s door with a fatal fever. As her breathing starts to lull and the sobs mellow into hiccups, Jack shifts her weight closer to him, rising to his feet with her in his arms.

The shock sends her scrambling in his hold, gripping onto his shoulders and yelping in fright. Jack lets out a huff and bumps his nose against her temple, a silent attempt to calm her, and he begins moving back towards the trees, seeming intent on going deeper into the park. Tentatively, she puts a hand on his chest and pushes, and he stops, head jerking back in confusion. She watches his huge eyebrows knit together and he bares his teeth; it’s not a threat, but a question, his familiar eyes searching her face for an explanation.

“Jack, we have to get you out of here,” she rasps. “You’re not safe in the city.”

If he understands, he doesn’t show it; Jack decides to keep walking toward the trees, and she has to push again to get him to stop. This time, he lets out a growl, his hold on her tightening, but he does relent and holds still, waiting in the shadow of a tree.

“Where’s Ted? Why aren’t you in your…”

Her voice trails off as she realizes she doesn’t know what to ask, and that even if she did, Jack probably isn’t capable of responding. He cocks his head at her and frowns, again pushing his nose into the side of her face and nuzzling against her skin, and she melts under his touch. For as long as she’s known him, Jack has been firm with her that this part of himself is too hideous, too deadly for her to see, but, now, all she can see is her husband, vulnerable despite the power of his transformation.

She takes a moment to do some mental math, weighing her options. She can’t let Jack out of her sight for the rest of the night, that much she knows, but how she’ll get him to safety is the truly unknown element. Getting back to their house wouldn’t be entirely feasible, as she’d taken a taxi to get here, and getting him back to wherever he chose to hide during his transformations was out, since she both did not know where it was and knew that wherever it was, it was not in any condition to hold him: he’d gotten out, after all.

That left two options: try to sneak Jack out through the city on foot, or…

“Jack? Baby?”

His ears perk and he pulls his face out of her neck, head cocked like a dog listening for instructions. Jack’s pink tongue slips out and wets his lips and teeth and he flashes her something that she tries to interpret as a smile, but that reads more closely to a grimace. It endears her all the same.

“You need to come with me, okay?”

Jack stirs with a groan, his eyes blurry and unfocused. Everything is scaldingly bright, burning his retinas, and he covers his face with a large hand, rubbing at his sore lids and wiping away the crust of a heavy, pained sleep.

“Morning, Puppy,” he hears.

Oh, still dreaming. That’s frustrating. Jack hates it when he dreams that she’s near, only to wake up alone. It’s like barreling headlong into a glass door. He rolls over on his side and throws an arm over his head, snarling through his teeth at the world.

Of course he’d have a dream like this after a night like that. Dream that she’s rubbing his back, dream that she’s pressing her lips to his hands, dream that her scent is wrapped all around him, filling the room.

He tries to burrow his face into the pillow and block out the light, only to find that his pillow is hot. Solid. Not at all fabric, but certainly plush. He growls in frustration, wondering if he fell asleep on top of a deer carcass again: that'd be hell to wash out of his hair. But the pillow smells like her… painfully so. He pushes his face in deep and moans in misery.

"Are you still hurting?"

"Yes," he says, voice rough and cracking. "Everything hurts. Miss you."

"...You miss me?"

Jack opens one eye and stares up at the fuzzy, dark shape hovering at the periphery of his vision. From a certain angle, and with just the right amount of blinked clarity, it does sort of look like her. He figures getting it all out of his system in a dream is as good an option as any, and he rubs his rough-stubbled cheek into his warm, rising and falling pillow, sighing.

"I hate being away from you, amorcita," he rumbles. "Makes me feel like complete shit. I already feel like shit, then I come out of it, and you're not there, and I become, uh, doubleshit."

"Doubleshit?"

"Mm."

"You're not doubleshit," she purrs. A hand strokes the exposed curve of his face and he tilts his chin to meet it; this is certainly one of his more indulgent dreams. Lusciously detailed. It'll be hell to wake up from. "You're alright, now."

Jack wrinkles his brow and scrunches both eyes tightly before reopening them, rolling on his pillow to face upward. His gaze clears and focuses: her face is now visible, looking down on him from above. He squints at her.

“...What are you doing?”

At his question she knits her brow and smiles, shaking her head in amused confusion.

She looks so beautiful that it takes Jack out of his mind and into a purely animal place: all he wants to do is stare at her, at the angles of her face, the slope of her nose, the curvature of her lips. He wants to ingrain this thought in the forefront of his mind and forget everything else; the pain in his body, the ravages of the night before, the wild haze of unclear memories. All that matters is this.

One of her delicate hands reaches down and scritches at his chin, right in his favorite spot, the one that always sends his leg twitching, and he’s too worn to hold back the relieved moan that issues out of him, his whole body oozing into languid comfort. His eyes flutter shut, and he revels in the sensation of her. Oh, she really knows how to get him.

When her nails catch on a rough patch of stubble that tugs a little, it occurs to Jack that he is not, in fact, dreaming. That accidental scrape of nails feels too organic to have been generated by his fuzzy mind; his eyes flash open, staring up at her.

She pulls back briefly, and Jack leans up, cocking his head. This is not a dream. She is there, sitting above him. His mind goes blank.

Jack pushes himself onto his elbows and looks around at his surroundings, bewildered, heart racing. This is not his safe room. These are not concrete walls. They’re wallpapered, with tacky, directionless paintings glued on. He’s laying on a completely destroyed mattress, body between her legs, instead of on the cold floor of his cell. He’d gotten out, somehow, and--

“Jack, baby, it’s okay,” she says, reaching around to wrap her arms about his chest and tug his back flush to her body. He trembles a little in her grasp, feeling her pressing reassuring kisses all along his face and shoulders, but the sound of her voice and the touch of her hands brings him back down to earth, bit by bit. “It’s just me. You’re alright. We made it through the night.”

“We…?”

“You… found me, remember?”

A low series of curses in a mixture of languages seep from his lips as he turns on the bed, taking her face in his hands. He paws at her, tugging clothes aside and pushing her limbs this way and that as he anxiously studies every inch of her, checking her face and body for wounds, bandages, scars: any sign that the wolf had harmed her. He’d gotten loose? And, worse yet, he’d managed to get to wherever she was?

“Did I--”

“You didn’t hurt me, Jack,” she reprimands. His eyes rise up to hers; her gaze is firm, unyielding in its promise. “You were looking for me.”

“I… I don’t know how I got out,” he admits, stroking one of her cheeks. “I’ve never done that, before.”

“Well, it’s certainly a first, but… as far as I can tell, all you did was come to find me. I think you wanted to take me home, actually.”

He looks at the room. This is definitely not home.

“But I, uh, didn’t let that happen.”

Jack frowns. This just keeps getting more and more mystifying.

“You fought the wolf?,” he asks. When she rolls her eyes and shakes her head, he frowns even more deeply and presses further. “Then… what?”

“I just… asked you to follow me. I took you back to the hotel.”

“We’re at a hotel?!”

Reeling, Jack holds onto her shoulder for support and stares out at the room. Of course. Her hotel room. He recognizes all the telltale signs-- the chipped wooden furniture, the clunky black plastic amenities, the pale orange lighting-- but sees all of it in disarray. Claw marks line the overturned armchair by the window. Stuffing leaks out of the loveseat. All the sheets are shredded, the mattress beneath them carved with long, hard gouges. He thinks he sees bite marks on the legs of the writing desk.

The idea that the wolf was in a hotel room at all flummoxes Jack; that he could pass dozens, maybe even hundreds of opportunities to hunt, all sitting quietly in their little, individually-wrapped rooms seems impossible. Surely, he must have left a wake of destruction behind himself... right?

Jack peers down the entryway and notes that the front door of the suite is shut, with the desk chair shoved under the handle at such an angle that the door is, essentially, barricaded. He wonders if she put that there to keep others out, or to keep him in; either way, it seems to have worked. He can’t smell blood, nor decay, though there’s a minor tinge of stomach acid. She must have gotten sick rather recently, at least within the last hour, and Jack lets out a frustrated whimper at the idea of her being ill and his being unable to help her.

He collapses into her, pulling them both down onto the mattress, and exhaustedly moves his head to lay on her body. He isn’t even particularly conscious of his movements, just letting his instincts take over and guide him, and he ends up curled around her, his head firmly pressed into her belly, hands gripping her sides as she pets his hair to comfort him. Everything washes over him in a depleting wave, and he surrenders to her wholly, burrowing his face into her and kissing mindlessly into her tummy.

“This is actually how you slept for most of the night,” she remarks, playing with the patch of hair over his right ear. “Just like this.”

Her belly must have been the pillow he mistook for a deer carcass. If he wasn’t so drained, he might have been a little embarrassed by the error. It doesn’t matter, now. All that matters is getting her home, safe and sound, and making sure that none of this follows them back. Pay all this off. Get out without being seen. Find Ted. Repair and re-structure the safe room. The list keeps growing.

But he’ll straighten all of that out later. In the moment, Jack just wants to lay still and revel in her: it’s the first time he’s woken up from a transformation with her right there, by his side, and it fulfills some emptiness he had only dreamed of easing. She’s here. She’s holding him. He’s safe in her arms. What more could a man ask for?

His hand straggles up and he lays it next to his face on her tummy, tracing intricate patterns into the skin under her shirt. The texture of her skin is so familiar and grounding that he nearly is lulled back to sleep, his eyes drifting shut, palm splayed across her belly, but he manages to fight through and stir himself awake, blinking heavily up at her.

“You’re incredible,” he manages. “I don’t know how you do it, but you’re, you know, just… I love you.”

He’s not quite aware of his words, more cognizant of the feelings behind them than of their actual structure, and relents: maybe he can’t express himself like that right now. Still too frazzled. Instead, he settles for leaning in, and presses a kiss deep and hard into the softness of her belly. She pets the hair at the nape of his neck, mumbling her response distantly.

“I didn’t really do much of anything, I don’t think,” she says. “I just asked. You listened.”

The idea of the wolf listening to anyone should surprise Jack. But instead, he blinks, pensive, and nods into her stomach; if ever there was a voice that could compel him, both halves, wholly and completely, it would be hers.

“And I love you, too. All of you, by the way.”

“I tore apart a mattress,” Jack moans. “You sure you love that part?”

She laughs, the sound softening every line in Jack’s face as he relaxes into her, and she rubs his shoulders with a doting firmness that makes his heart sing.

“I do, actually; it was kind of cute. I think you were just trying to make a bed pile for us.”

“Leave it to you to,” he mumbles, trailing off, “to find something cute in a werewolf.”

“‘S not my fault. You’re the one who’s a cute werewolf. I’m just an impartial observer, making a statement of fact.”

Jack doesn’t have nearly enough energy to play-argue with her, but he has enough that he manages to open his eyes and stare up at her. Something looks different about her, now: a glow to her features, not quite new, but more pronounced. He wonders if she’s just his guardian angel, come to care for him, and that what he’s seeing is her halo; that must be it. Her halo.

Her light outshines the moon; the wolf bays for her, now.

links to previous fics in this series:

cubs.

familia.

thank you for reading! comments and replies are always appreciated, and give me immense motivation to continue these stories! feel free to let me know what you thought and what you’d like to see next!

#werewolf by night #jack russell #jack russell x reader #wwbn #wbn #marvel #jack russel #jack russel x reader #ALRIGHT so. lot to unpack here. Implications of things. Things Yet To Come. Tropes. much to discuss. i will not give it away here tho #i also wanted to post this before the blood moon so >:3 get a load of that #this was all written in less than 24 hrs in just about one sitting without any proof reading or editing from outside sources so.#if you see any spelling or grammar errors no you didnt. you did NOT.#ghdhghgh anyway i hope you all enjoy!!!#i wonder if you guys will be able to Figure Out some of what this is Indicating gkdhgkhg #ANYWAY BYE GO CHECK THE MOON LATER

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