ian clancy . (learningcurves) wrote in exsanguious, @ 2015-11-19 22:10:00 |
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IAN: After three nights of shifting with the full moon, the early morning sunlight of the fourth day was almost a relief. Painfully bright, even as the morning fog was still burning away, but comforting. A reminder that the night was over, and that nearly a month stretched out ahead of Ian before he would have to face the full moon again. As the air started to warm up against his skin and the sun lifted a little higher above the horizon, he held onto that and tried to let all the rest of it go. The fading bruises on his skin, the taste of animal blood on the back of his tongue, the dirt and grime he’d let the water carry away down the shower drain. The ache that lingered in his muscles and in his bones. The way his throat still tightened every time he thought about the change, about letting it wash over him without trying to fight it, about making the wolf a part of himself and letting it take him over. He was tired and sore, he needed sleep more than anything, but it was all a little bit too immediate right now. After every change, every full moon, it was the same. The rest of the pack might brush themselves off, shower and curl up for some much-needed rest, but Ian could still feel the wolf under his skin and it kept him up and moving, trying to shake it off.
Outside, without the walls pressing in on him and the scent of his pack mates on every surface, at least it was a little bit easier. His coffee sat untouched so far on the step beside him, the wooden steps were starting to warm under his bare feet, there were things he could focus on that had nothing to do with the wolf or the change or the fear. Most mornings, that was enough. By nightfall it might be a different story, it might take loud music and cheap alcohol to keep it all pushed away, but right now he could tell himself that this was enough. Maybe he could even tell himself that things were improving, at least for now. Breathing in, Ian tried to let the tension in his aching shoulders relax and let his eyes close against the brightness of the sunlight for a second or two.
JIMMY: Jimmy had been trying to stick around Ian for the last two months, more than aware that the younger wolf was...not having the easiest time adjusting. Maybe it had to do with his past as a hunter -- becoming what you hated, etc etc. Maybe it was just being forced into a life that you'd never asked for and now had to accept no matter what. Jimmy could understand, either way. And there wasn't a lot of comfort to be offered, especially when pack didn't feel like home and the group wasn't able to make the existential pains of transition go away. The physical ones, well. Those you just had to grit your teeth and get used to, really. Their curse.
It was easy to leave the house quietly on a morning like this; normally everyone would be exhausted from what they'd been through, sleeping like the dead. Jimmy had always loved dawn though, hated missing it even when he was tired. And when he'd woken a little earlier, he could feel that something was off; that Ian was separate, once again. He could have moved out onto the porch soundlessly, but opted to let the door speak quietly for him instead of surprising his friend, sitting down on the opposite end of the steps and looking out at the new day before looking to Ian. "Can't sleep?" A question innocuous enough, but his eyes were studying Ian, looking for how bad the problem really was this time.
He hadn't said it, but he was beginning to lose faith that they would be able to keep hold of their once-hunter. Or that Ian in general would be able to survive this life for long.
IAN: It was getting increasingly obvious, harder and harder to hide how near-impossible all this was, and in a way that was strangely comforting. One less secret to keep. One less lie to maintain, if everyone could tell that he wasn’t fine, that he wasn’t getting better. And in truth, it had been a long, long time since he’d been anything close to fine; nobody here, nobody who knew him now at all had even known him the last time he’d been living a life that didn’t have him on the verge of breaking down sometimes. He’d been dragged into a life he’d never wanted years ago, the night his family died, and since then he’d only ever really been trying to survive. When he’d gotten close to adjusting to his new life as a hunter, Alec had been torn open and died in some backwater emergency room; when he’d started to adjust to being alone, he’d lost that new life, too. Now he had one more life he didn’t want, had to find a way to live with anyway, and sometimes it felt like this would be the one he couldn’t make it through. Maybe it was no wonder, after all that, if somebody had noticed that he wasn’t doing well.
He wasn’t really ready to deal with company right now, this soon after the change he never was, but at least it was Jimmy. Someone he knew how to talk to, someone he almost felt like he could be honest with most days. Somehow Jimmy had become just about the closest thing he had to a confidante, when with everyone else there was at least one lie to maintain. Maybe that was why, on mornings like this, Ian could almost feel him assessing and probably coming up with cause for concern. Opening his eyes, he didn’t glance over as he shook his head, squinting a little in the sun.
“Yeah. Can’t shut off.” He flexed the fingers on one hand, curled them into a fist, and his hand wasn’t shaking. Better than six months ago. Just maybe not enough.
JIMMY: Jimmy still thought it was best to come clean about all this, about Ian's past and who he was. The longer they waited, the less they got in front of it, the worse it would look when it finally came out. To say nothing of how it was part of what was eating Jimmy alive from the inside out. Maybe Marcus knew something that they didn't, but if that was the case he wished the Alpha would at least let Jimmy in on it. Maybe it would make some of this all a little easier on him.
He picked Ian's coffee up and handed it over as he took a seat next to the younger wolf. "Yeah." He knew that feeling, all too well. Not just the pain of the shift, although that did become easier to accept with time. But the feeling of not being able to turn your mind off. He and Ian's backgrounds couldn't have been more different, really. But he'd still been there, in a sense. He knew what it was to have your life torn away from you by a war you didn't start, to lose friends, family, to it. To be the one left surviving when you shouldn't have been; and how that alone could make you wish that you hadn't been. He'd wanted this life as a wolf, with Marcus, but that alone hadn't been able to cure things like PTSD (not that it had been diagnosable back then), survivor's guilt, or all the darker thoughts that came along with them.
"Yeah. Takes awhile." An answer he knew that Ian had been given time and again when it came to dealing with everything about what he was now, but still. It as pretty applicable to life in general, he supposed. "This place…. It doesn't help. Doesn't give you any time to get used to anything." You couldn't just lay down and be, at a Hellmouth. If it weren't for the White Wolf giving him the sense that they truly needed to be there, Jimmy would've pushed for them to leave awhile back. Maybe the wolf could help Ian somehow, too. Some part of his mind knew that he was beginning to put too much faith in even the idea of the wolf, but he couldn't help it. He felt like some kind of weird acolyte.
"At least it's another month til the next round, yeah?" 30 days off before we go through breaking bones again, hooray. Take your celebrations where you can find them.
IAN: All that secrecy, all those lies to the people who had taken him in when he hadn’t even really been able to ask, and for what? Delilah had figured it out. Darya, she wouldn’t have waited to be told to dig into his past, she must have known. Nadine had been the one to see him when the change was first taking hold, to see his collection of scars and lose his identity in the system somewhere, she must have seen it too. How many of them were even left to lie to? But then, maybe it wasn’t even the secrecy that was the point, maybe it was the simple fact that Marcus had given him an order and he was pack now, he had to follow it. Maybe that order would stand until Ian stopped questioning it. He could tie himself in knots thinking about it and still be no closer to understanding anything, and he’d worn himself out thinking already, he was just too goddamn tired for it.
Nobody had really acknowledged the way this place was before, the way it just kept throwing things at them without giving them time to recover, and for a moment Ian was surprised to hear it said out loud. The hunters had talked about it. The Hellmouth, the way it drew supernatural violence to it like a magnet -- he hadn’t really heard anyone talk about it since he’d been bitten, although they could all feel it pulling on them. Ian shook his head as he took the coffee cup, wrapping his fingers around its warmth and suppressing a shiver. “Christ, no.” It didn’t help at all. He wasn’t sure if it would have been different anywhere else, if he was just too battered and worn thin to cope with this no matter where he was, but it wasn’t making it easier. It was almost comforting to hear somebody actually say it, in a small way.
With a half-smile that was a bitter echo of the way he used to look when he found something darkly funny, he raised the coffee mug in a toast. “One more month.” Another month to brace himself for the next change, another month to live with the wolf hanging over him. “Better than nothing.”
JIMMY: Marcus had his reasons for what he was doing. Jimmy may have disagreed with them, but he knew that the Alpha didn't make decisions regarding the pack without being sure that it was what he felt was in their best interests. And, given the fact that the last time Jimmy had disagreed he'd been told not to come back and it had taken the White Wolf to reunite them, he wasn't looking to rock the boat even more now. All there really was to do was try and be there for Ian. Which was, truly, easier said than done.
He gave a slight shrug and drank some of his own, letting the quiet sit for a few moments before speaking again. "I'm worried about you." It didn't take supernatural senses to know that something was very, very off with Ian, and that it wasn't getting better. To smell the alcohol and sex on him when he came back from wherever it was that he went, to know that he was trying desperately to run from everything wrong here and was just as desperately losing.
"I'm not sure what to do to make this better for you." Not that he was giving up; not that he would stop going out with Ian, stop talking to him, stop caring. But he was aware that it was only doing so much, and that it wasn't going to be what stopped this from destroying Ian. He hated that feeling, that he was losing someone. The helplessness of not knowing what to do.
IAN: Instinctively he started to say that he was fine, that everything was fine, to start in with the empty reassurances he’d gotten so good at over the years, but there was something about the quiet and the raw-nerve feeling of the morning after a shift that made him stop. He could be honest right now, if he wanted to. He could keep telling lies and ask Jimmy to pretend to believe them, or he could admit that he was worried, too, that he was coming apart at the seams and didn’t know what to do about it. There was something terrifying about that, about having it out in the open even when it had been obvious for months that he wasn’t really okay and nobody really believed him when he said he was. Having that polite fiction taken away. It hurt, and his hands tensed around the cup until his knuckles went bloodless, thin cracks spiderwebbing through the faded glaze on the outside. Ian hesitated for another moment, tried to make himself relax at least a little bit again.
“I’d tell you if I knew.” He’d always hated asking for help, but it was better than this, than the way things had been for the past few months. If he’d known what he needed, what would make this easier, he thought he’d have been able to ask. It was like there was this block in his mind, though, this barrier between him and any kind of way of having a life as a wolf, and since he couldn’t see a solution to work toward, he’d just been trying to escape. Those thin cracks were rough under his fingers now, and he took a few slow breaths before trying to say anything else, and even once he started speaking he wasn’t really sure where it would go. “It’s just -- I can always feel it, you know?” The wolf, the change, this thing that was under his skin with him all the time now. “Like the person I was isn’t even there anymore. Every time I wake up it’s right there, like it’s under my fucking skin, I can’t even get away from it for a second. I can hear people breathing, I can smell if they’re scared, it’s like it’s just taking over, all the time. And I just don’t know how to be like this.” Ian shrugged, the movement sharp and graceless. “I don’t have anything left. I have to just start over from scratch, make some kind of new life or something, and I don’t know if I can.”
It had all come out in a jumble, rushed and inarticulate, and it stopped because he just didn’t know what else to say. Everything he’d had, everything he’d managed to cobble together after losing his family and his old life, was gone. All he had now was the wolf. And that still felt like a threat, still felt like something he should be fighting against as hard as he could. Ian didn’t look over, and the cracks under his fingers were deepening into the ceramic now, his breathing a little too tight and a little too fast.
JIMMY: He was quiet for a long moment, taking in everything that Ian was telling him. Feeling helpless against it, honestly. Any solution that he thought he may have he knew wouldn't really be one. He doubted that there was some way of looking at this, or some method of coping with it, that Ian hadn't already thought of and tried. This was more than that. This was a person in real, dire need of help, on levels both able to be articulated and not.
"You have to. A lot of people...they can't. That's why there's not many of us. We're not born with it, like regular shifters. And there's not really a culture of it, like with the vampires. It drives people crazy sometimes. They'll end it, or the wolf will take over completely and they'll be caught, or they just….go unhinged, end up leaving enough of a trail that someone eventually comes along and puts them out of their misery." A cheery and optimistic outlook on their lives, wasn't it? "It's a death. It's having to accept a death, except it's of yourself. And something else has moved into your body with you. If you can't find a way to make peace with that, with it, then it'll kill you all over again."
He paused for another moment before speaking. "The pack, the runs, all of it. It's to help you accept it into your life. The wolf. To give him what he needs so that he won't gnaw on you so bad. You only find a balance when you learn to feed both sides of yourself, the wolf and the human. That's when they stop fighting each other and become something more...symbiotic."
IAN: And that was the crux of it, that was the simple fact that Ian would never be able to drown out. The wolf was a part of him now. It was with him every second, it breathed whenever he breathed, and he would never be able to change that. No matter how hard he fought against it, when the fight was over, it would still be there. That fact was like a wound, going anywhere near it was painful, but it was still the truth. The wolf would live with him or die with him, but he would never be free of it.
He listened in silence, and it was nothing he hadn’t told himself a hundred times before, but he still made himself take it in. Maybe it would be different, coming from Jimmy. Coming from someone who’d lived through it, who’d been able to find that balance that Ian couldn’t even imagine finding. He didn’t know. But at least it was the truth, ugly and real in the early morning light, at least it was honest. A death of yourself -- that was what he’d felt every full moon, like he was dying, not just the physical pain but the loss of himself as the wolf rose up and took over. It was almost comforting to hear someone else put it in those same terms.
For just a moment, for the first time, he found himself wondering whether when the change reversed, the wolf felt like he was dying, too.
He forced himself to relax his hands, at least enough that the cracks in the ceramic cup stopped their spread, although there was still tension in every line and angle of his body. When he took a breath, it was slow, but that was deliberate and unnatural. “So I stop fighting it, and he stops fighting me, and we just.. coexist.” It sounded so easy, but they both knew it was anything but. He didn’t just have to go against every human instinct he had and embrace the wolf that still, in his nightmares, had his blood on its muzzle. He had to trust the wolf to do the same. And he had to let go of the life that had felt like his only choice, even if it was so far away from what his family would have wanted for him; he had to let himself believe that his life could be more than that, or even just different, and maybe that was the hardest part. After a moment he made himself look over. “I know it’d be better than this. It’s not like I can’t see that. It just scares the shit out of me.”
JIMMY: Another pause. "I don't think you're afraid of death. But I don't think you want to die, either." And he knew that it was just a theoretical situation at the moment, but it was what would happen to Ian, if he kept fighting it like this. He'd end up dead, either by his own hand or by a hunter's. He just hoped that Ian could actually make peace with it before it came to that. He'd heard before that a person wouldn't change until a situation had pushed them to a 10. That they could hit a 9, and it still wouldn't be enough for them to actually change their way of doing things. That they were all a stupid enough species that they really did have to hit rock bottom before they'd willingly make alterations in their lives.
He knew that Ian still had to hit that point. This was an actual change that he would have to go through, one that he was fighting against and didn't want, and for that to actually happen he'd have to hit bottom his own way. Much as Jimmy might want to try and mitigate the circumstances around that, he simply couldn't. He had to wait and let Ian go through it and hope the kid would make it to the finish line, where the others would all be waiting for him.
He gave a half smile, though. "If this is the scariest thing you have to deal with, consider yourself blessed." He could always be being tortured by vampires instead of by his own inner demons.
IAN: “Our own fucked up supernatural version of blessed.” Ian shook his head, looking down at his hands and the cracks in his coffee mug, the corner of his mouth almost turning up in a wry sort of smile. He couldn’t actually argue with it. This wasn’t even the scariest thing he’d had to deal with in his life so far. He’d seen his family torn apart, bled out beside them on the kitchen floor and survived by sheer luck, lived with the nightmares and the guilt and the crushing, all-consuming fear that came after surviving; this was a different kind of fear, one he didn’t know how to deal with, but it didn’t compare. He’d made it through worse. He knew that, objectively, he could hear it and understand it, it was just so much harder to actually live it. When he could feel the wolf rising up in him, sinking its teeth into however much life he still had ahead of him, it was so much harder to remember that he’d survived before and he could survive again.
His coffee had gone cold, and that restless, uneasy energy was finally starting to dissipate, but he would be awake for a while longer. It just wasn’t that easy, one short conversation couldn’t make that much difference. It was comforting, though, not being alone. Ian didn’t often find that much comfort in his pack, he kept his distance more than he should and he kept his guard up, but right now he could feel a little of what he was supposed to be feeling. Maybe that counted for something.