Chapter Text
Wolves in packs perform as family units, rather than categorizing each member into a certain hierarchical box.
There are no lesser members, only ones who cannot perform tasks as well as those designated as their higher ups; those authorities usually being the parental units or the older of the later generations of puppies. Those who are sickly, or have weakened with age, are not worth less—they simply require more protection.
So, with all of this in mind, let’s say that, hypothetically, there was a pup.
A regular, run-of-the-mill pup; paws seemingly always dirtied by mud, coat speckled with black and cool browns overtop warm cream. A small, dark insignia in the middle of their head, a little skinny, a little undone. Gangly and short, fur spread out like tufts of wet cotton in all the wrong places. The runt of the litter, slim pickings.
They will love them anyway.
They’re bright, playful, crunching snow under too-large paws; a little odd, a little too loud, a little too unfocused. But this is no matter to the pack, nor a worry, because they can learn. The night is still young, and they have already caught two mice and a small, rotund sparrow in their jaws, carmine viscera dripping from ebony teeth into shimmering white snow, dulled by nightfall, glowing eyes in a sea of rising birch, ominous pines. Go too deep, and you may drown, but the wolves…they make it work.
“They will learn, and if they don’t, we will love them anyway,” they say.
Some day in the beginning of the autumn season, this pup—this gangly, unkempt pup, a little too rough, a little too forgiving—comes down with the sick. Falls ill in the night; but not all at once. They do not fall to this disease in the blink of an eye.
It is gradual. There is something growing in their bones, wrapping its vines around their ribs and snaking its way through the hollow of their veins and arteries. It makes them slow, it makes them cautious.
It makes them different.
They begin to snap at their siblings, they start to keen and growl at their higher-ups. No one knows what is happening to the once warm pup, and no amount of grooming seems to stave away the chill.
There is something tightening around their neck like a noose. There is something living inside of smooth muscle, cardiac tissue, tendons around joints, pushing organs to the side to make room for something new, and it is slowly killing them.
They will die, come winter. There is no way to stop it. The first snow will be their crux, if this sickness does not subside.
They lag behind the group. Their steps are slower, now. Their eyes are still.
They do not chase geese anymore. They do not disturb the burrow of the sleeping rabbit. They grow used to the sweet nothings whispered in their ear, reverent in a language they need not understand. They grow used to the feeling of their insides twisting, and they grow used to the isolation that comes with being unwelcome in one’s own body.
They do not even let their mother groom them anymore.
Come the morning, a few weeks after the disease made itself known—the one winter is due to fall upon the wood—they are the worst they have ever been. They are sluggish, they are mean. They look like death warmed over, as they approach the clearing.
Despite being their worst, it seems they are to attempt to say hello to that rabbit one last time.
The pack watches on as snowflakes begin to fall from the clouded sky, overcast with the coming flurries. They murmur:
”Mercy killings, mercy killings. Put them out of their misery before it eats them alive.”
There is something waiting in their bones. Something new.
They are in hell.
There is a light layer of snow on the ground when they fall. There are jaws over their throat, over the curve of their belly, but none that any of their peers can see.
Crimson—but it is not crimson to them; no, it is the same color as the grass below the blanket of pure winter, uninfluential in the grand scheme of things—stains the snow below them, from their mouth, from their nose, from everywhere else. They shake and they tremor, and everyone looks on in fear.
They are seizing, everyone thinks.
(They are not.)
Their maw opens wide to take a heaping breath, only to find themselves retching again.
And again.
And again.
It doesn’t stop. No matter how many times they try to suck in a breath through their mouth, their nose, they are always stopped by another wave of extreme, mind boggling nausea and dizziness.
They can’t even pull themselves up from the snow, doomed to watch the sky as they die.
Tears, or something like tears, prick the edges of their eyes. Their coat smells starkly of pennies and iron and whatever you would imagine someone’s insides would smell like; something warm, something unnerving in a confusing, unimaginable you’d-have-to-have-been-there kind of way—the wolves would know, for they have seen the insides of many, many animals, and their noses are some of the best.
They are scared. So, so scared. They want for many things, in this moment.
They didn’t know they could want so much.
In the snow, flurries swirling in open air as if nothing is wrong in the world, they try to call out for their mother, for mama, but the only thing that comes up is more gore in a sickening gurgle.
“They are allergic to themself,” the pack thinks, from the sidelines. “Mercy killings, mercy killings. Gone too soon.”
It is horror, it is viscera. No one comes to lick their face in fear of catching their variant of sick, but the vision is there nonetheless. Ten or more of their loved ones, rough tongues over bloodied maws, loving them anyway.
They do not want to be alone, and yet, it feels like they are in an endless vacuum of space, blood rushing, a quiet day (save for the rustling of a squirrel in a faraway tree, or the sway of the leaves on an elderly maple), snow muffling any sounds of struggle they may have made, and amplifying their agony to a hundred.
It is almost as if they are the only living thing in these woods.
Their heart beats in their soft, tall, rounded ears as they fight to will the nausea away, (to no avail, as they heave again and cry out in a warbled, painfully quiet keen, unable to make a coherent noise over the thickness of the blood in their throat and mouth).
There is something like shame creeping up their neck, bristling their fur with the sting of embarrassment and failure.
They have made a mess of themselves in death.
There is blood on their belly and the bottom of their tail. Strings of saliva and bile and iron-laced liquid are the only things that will tie him to this life, and they are ashamed.
He is ashamed.
They are ashamed of the screaming, of the mess, of how odd they have been as of late.
They had not meant to be.
There is something living in their bloodstream, and in their head. It is not pretty, but it is not evil. It is life itself, and it is death. It is fear and it is wandering in a field of sunflowers, the world warping around them, distorted.
It cannot help its nature.
Nor can he.
They claw at the wall snow beneath them, not noticing that their nails have grown sharp dull and crunched right through the drywall in his desperation for something to tether him to the present, and a plasmatic, viscous casing begins to fold over their paws, already ragged fur receding in chunks.
There is a quiet whisper in the back of their mind telling him ‘everything is okay,’ and to ‘come closer,’ and ‘you’re safe now’.
They don’t know what these words mean, yet. They are confused—they always are, when it speaks.
They feel like they are burning from the inside out.
The pup whines, more blood pouring in bursts out of their mouth and over their maw with a weak retch, the heaving not stopping and their supply of blood seeming eternal as they finger-paint the walls and floor the snow beneath them a sickeningly translucent red, trying to get up, to drag themself the rest of the way to the bathroom because that’s what he was supposed to do, that’s what he was meant to do, there was still time, he could…he could do it, he thought. Just a few more steps… den. They don't want to be out in the cold anymore.
They don’t want to be cold anymore.
Their insides are their outsides, for the most part, and they feel exposed, in more ways than one. They are all watching them, mourning as they succumb to their disease.
”Mercy killings, mercy killings,” they chant, in any way a wolf can chant in the heavy silence. It is almost deafening, this silence. It is lonely and all too much at once.
It is watching him, too. On the other side of the bathroom, as he lay in the belly of the porcelain bathtub brush, opposite the clearing, in the one spot where no living wolf watches his pitfall. It is a color he can see; a bright yellow in the flurries of snow. It looks like him, but…different. Less. Not in worth, but in depth.
It is waiting for something.
”Something wicked this way comes,” someone somewhere says, in words this pup, so small, does not understand. “Mercy killings, mercy killings, for something wicked this way comes.”
They do not want to be remembered this way.
They want her the pack to remember them grinning toothily at sunshine or drawing catching pollywogs in the creek. They do not want to be remembered as the pup who is vomiting his entire supply of blood into the bathtub onto pure white winter and trying to ignore the familiar, increasingly insistent whisper (whine, it was a whine, a keen, a plea, somehow a prayer) far back in his head telling him ‘you’re safe you’re safe you’re safe you’re safe i’ll protect you i’ll protect you you’re safe now.’
Everything is burning, constant, almost steadying, but sheer agony nonetheless. They are on fire, and hell is inside of them, shaking the bars of its cage like a zoochotic animal and they want out.
Their vision is red and white and blurry, their ears ring, their tongue throbs in tune with every beat of their exhausted heart, the fur between their legs is sickeningly warm, and something in their lower gut claws and pushes and tears at them like they are a deer on the side of the road, life taken by a metal monster, they energy transferred to the pack in death through teeth and tongue, begging, screaming, ‘out, out, OUT, let me OUT’.
They are thrashing, now. They are more scared than they have ever been.
They are so lightheaded and they heave so hard that their world explodes into splotches lined and filled with blue, teal, black, red, and orange, like dying stars.
They are a dying star, glowing in the blizzard, in spite of the fact that it is barely snowing.
They try to dissociate from the screams tearing through their throat and their esophagus being ravaged by blood and bile, the acrid smell of that concoction all over them and his bathtub their organs burning, sliding, and writhing, a baby he didn’t want kick, kick, kicking at his insides with its clawed hands and feet and screaming on repeat, like a mantra or a prayer to him or whatever was out there to ‘LET ME OUT, LET ME OUT, LET ME OUT!’.
The thing in their ribs, the vines constricting around their intestines and stomach, start to approach their battered body. Light steps, as if floating above the snow in place of walking.
But it is walking, though they don’t have the capacity at the moment to note that fact.
They twist in an odd direction, and something snaps in their chest. A bone, they think. Their legs begin to contort in odd directions, and suddenly, he was slipping on his blood and falling to the belly of the porcelain tub with a sickening ‘splash’ and ‘thump’ and they are a contortionist on a stage of ceramic for everyone to see they are screaming louder than they ever have—something closer to an elk in tone, no longer canine, and the pack is aware of the difference, now. They are now just as curious as they are concerned and terrified and grieving for their child—as their bones slide on top of each other and snap and splinter and white out their vision completely, eyes wide, wide, wide as they choke on their own fluids, howling in pain, keening at the agony of being them.
He was They are so tired of pain.
The whispering of runes and letters they cannot decipher inches closer and closer, less of a notion and more of a real thing as their bones break and rearrange, whispering those sweet, sweet nothings to them, and him them only. It is so close that they feel its warm breath brushing the back of their head as it insists ‘you’re okay, deep breaths, you’re okay, you’re safe now, let me in. let me in’ through each terrified, horror stricken beat of their faraway heart, like beats of a muffled drum. They don’t know what they are saying. They are scared.
A step closer.
Its voice is so gentle and so sweet and so genuine that, in their terror, they debate a sort of want to let it in, whatever that means.
Another.
They want it all to stop. They want to fall unconscious and keep their blood in their body where it belongs and wake up in a hospital and have the doctors tell him ‘you were very sick, but you were very brave and you’re going to be okay. You were very brave. You were so brave.’ and he wanted to believe it, and they want to go to sleep for a long, long time.
They are tired. So, so tired.
They just want to dream, for a little while.
Only a little while.
It is in front of them now, bowing its muzzle towards them in a question, the snowflakes falling through its translucent head. Their hazel eye darts up to look at it, straining against the bounds of its socket and the nerves connecting it to their skull and brain to do so. A snowflake falls into their pupil, and they breathe harder, whine louder, begging for some kind of understanding, some kind of reprieve from this all-consuming fear.
It takes that as an answer.
And all at once, as he whispered back to that not-so-little-anymore voice in his head that he trusted them and to ‘please, please, make it all go away, it hurts so bad, please Para, make it go away’, he wasn’t just lava and fire and static and blood, he was plasma and the sun and a collapsing star and he begged silently for it all to stop.
He wanted They want to die, as a familiar yellow muzzle and closed eyes touch a soft, unfeeling nose to the bridge of theirs.
And then, they are different.
In a breath, in a blink, they are new.
A child in the woods, surrounded by wolves. Bare bodied, freckled, girlish, sitting up slowly with his palms to the ground and fingertips bitten by the frost of the first snow.
The group of wolves—grey, white, all similar, all different—approach him slowly, and lick away the chill, the blood, the bile, with rough tongues. He lets them, still confused by the world around him and the sudden connections of new pathways in his brain.
He does not have the language to understand them anymore, but the pack murmurs the words “Mercy, mercy. We do not know what has happened to you, but we will love you anyway. You are still ours, and we will love you in this new body anyway. You are ours” and that is the end of it.
…
But this is not how that story goes.
Not really.
In fact, this story goes quite the opposite.
There is a house, in a town, in a country seas away from where the puppy in our spun fiction lives now, where it all starts. Ground zero. Patient zero, if you really want to get into specifics.
There is an undoing; of mind and of soul and of body, and there is new life. There is rebirth.
There is a disease and there is an antidote, and there is a choice.
This tale begins with a boy—a human boy, in a world of superpowered people; a minority in a world of majority—a sickness, an infection, something that resembles the flu…
…and a parasite.