surlywolf (ex_derek569) wrote in expresslogs, @ 2012-08-07 00:50:00 |
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Every moon was a little different. There were some that brought out the urge to run. That was it. Run and run and run, chasing nothing, simply running until his muscles were tired and his legs shook from the effort of holding up his mass and his sides heaved with the force of his deep exhalations. Other moons tended to bring on the need to chase something, hunt it to ground and tear it apart. Those were the ones that came across the most for Derek Hale. He often wondered what it felt like to have different types of moons. Playful moons where he hunted with a friend or chased his family or simply settled down to feel the night moving over his natural skin. There wasn't anything quite like being in the body he was born to have. Humans looked at him and saw only a monster, but Derek? Derek thought his kind were what warriors were meant to look like and there was nothing he'd change about the animal that was his birthright. Wolves were social creatures, Derek thought to himself as he stripped down in his room. He had no desire to leave his clothes outside in the zombie-infested landscape to take on that putrescent odor; that meant he had to take off as much as he could in his room and head out afterwards. Derek had taken a brief stop in the baggage car that morning to search through the bags until he'd found a pair of shorts that would fit him well enough. They were a dark blue and had a stretch band that he'd cinched as tightly as he could, knotting the shower ring from his room into the strings as he did. He thought they might have once been meant for swimming, but it'd been a long time since he'd gone swimming. Walking out of his room, barefoot and in borrowed shorts, Derek ignored the looks he got in the hallway before opening the door to the outside. The moon felt hot on his face and he tilted his head up to accept the comfort its familiar warmth offered him. His only regret as he left the safety of the train behind was that he had to wear borrowed shorts because he never wore boxers. The animal in him didn't want to wear clothes at all, but Derek was willing compromise, he thought as he strode away from the train in slow, even strides until the moon's warm light washed all over him and then he started to run. There were children on the train. It was hard to remember that, but it was true. It was true that there were young, someone else's young, on board that train that was now his temporary home, and Derek ran over the rise, following the paths of destruction until the train was far enough away that he imagined they wouldn't be able to see as his body shifted. He sank into a crouch as the shift contorted his limbs, popped his joints, reformed his body into what he was now meant to be. Derek panted as he flexed his fingers to feel the knuckles crack into place again and dug the claws of his feet into the ground to feel it give way as easily as wet sand. There had been plenty of power in him before, but there was nothing, nothing like being Alpha. It had been less than a week for him since becoming Alpha. Less than a week. Derek could barely believe the amount of power in his body and he couldn't, literally couldn't, wait any longer before launching into motion, clawed feet decimating the ground beneath him as he burst forward with a speed no human could match. His feet ate up the ground as he breathed in the stench of the dead around him to chase the creatures that dared to show themselves under his moon. The moon was for his kind. For the living and the warm-blooded and the wild. It wasn't for the dead. Their tainted smell stuck in his nose, burned as he took it in, and Derek paused on a rise above a shambling group of them to bay loudly, violently, the ululating cry of a lone wolf. The sound faintly vibrated the glass in the seemingly abandoned buildings around him and Derek didn't waste any more time before forgetting the man he was, the orphan, the betrayed lover, and all the other weak human roles he filled every other night of his life. All the Alpha wanted was to taste the flesh of the dead, sink its claws into their throats and tear their heads from their bodies and crush them under foot and claw and rend, rend, rend their rotting meat from their bones. He hit the handful who had triggered his rage with a vengeance and their decay covered his body all over in moments until his fur was matted thick with it, taking on an oily sheen of spoiled blood and gore. Derek spat out a mouthful of something he couldn't let himself identify and ran his tongue over his distended fangs to clean them. His nose was literally burning from the stench of the landscape. Derek clenched and unclenched his clawed fingers over and over and over again uselessly as he realized that he'd crushed in the skulls of the three there and where were the others? He couldn't smell them, couldn't tell, couldn't tell anything except that they weren't there. Howling again in hateful defiance, the Alpha didn't care that it was alone, that he was alone. All the Alpha wanted was more death, more violence, more blood and pain and Derek barely had enough sentience to realize that the animal that he was would have its wish come true before more of the monsters appeared, faster than before, descending on him in pairs that took their own bites of flesh as the battle commenced. If his life had meant more to him, Derek might have panicked under the onslaught. As it was, all Derek allowed himself to think was that it was fine, perfectly fine being in a battle to see who could take more chunks out of the other first because he knew he'd win and if he didn't? There was no one to miss him. No one left to notice or care. Derek would leave no one behind if he died fighting and was there any better way to die? The Alpha didn't think so as it rent limbs from bodies and crushed skulls with fists and feet and elbows and knees, getting down onto the ground with them to roll around in a roiling pile of biting, clawing purely animal destruction. The night couldn't last long enough for the Alpha and Derek was glad to be at one with the beast's desires for the night, possibly the last of his life, because there was an endless supply of death to be had, certainly enough for the beast, possibly enough for even Derek himself to forget his hate, his anger, his anchor of rage in honor of the moon. |