Who: Valerie and Wolf!Connor/Regular!Connor What: Valerie unfortunately looks delicious, and gets chased by a wolf. Where: The parking lot outside a bar, then Bathos. When: This coming Thursday Warnings: None.
Connor thought - thought being the operative word - that he had things under control. But he’d found things more complicated than usual since he’d come back to Seattle. There was another wolf here, someone like him, which was hard enough to wrap his mind around on its own, but it was making the Wolf more restless. As the full moon approached again, the Wolf wanted to go searching. He wanted to find the other one like him again.
So when a mugger came up to him with a knife just two days shy of the full moon, there was no question what sort of reaction would follow. Rage spiralled up in him, immediate and intense, and before he knew what he was doing he had bashed the knife from the man’s hand and was hitting his head against the wall. He only made it to two hits before pain began shooting through his limbs, and all he could think was not again, not here, not outside.
The Wolf shook himself free of what remained of Connor’s clothing, and then padded over to the mugger. The man was unconscious on the ground, easy prey - but boring. Connor tried to distract the Wolf, to turn back for Bathos and somehow get into the safety of the building, but the Wolf was having none of it. This close to the moon his will was almost impossible for Connor to fight, and he began following a bright, pleasant scent that spoke to a young human female. He was hungry, and he had no particular targets to chase, not yet - Connor still hadn’t taken another cheating mate, so a surrogate would have to do.
The scent led him to the parking lot of a bar. The place was nearly empty, and he twined his long black bulk into the shadow of a parked car, watching.
Funnily enough, Valerie was usually the wolf in the sheep’s clothing, not the sheep. She wore a vintage perfume that would have smelled strangely chemical to a wolf, and otherwise she smelled of the building not far away: sweat, flesh, beer, and old wood. Sniff deep enough past the aldehydes and the smell of young female, there was something else: something strangely metallic, like rain coming.
Valerie had had a long night, a night that brought her fleeting pleasure in her music but stole the satisfaction of safety away. She hadn’t changed out of the dress, a long dark blue thing with a slit up the side, but the long gray overcoat was concealing and thick enough to ward off the Seattle fog. She sighed as she looked down at her keys, thumbing past the Bathos key and looking for the car key. There was something wrong with the automatic locks now.
The Wolf came slinking up behind her, following perfume and the hints of a gathering of other humans, none of whom had come out onto the street with her as far as he could see. She was alone, and she looked soft, and her flesh radiated warm waves of scent in the cool night.
He was behind her - twenty feet away, then ten. He padded softly up to her, but his nails clicked on the cement. One could only be so quiet in the city.
She had just gotten the right key to turn the right way (spoiled by automatic locks, obviously, shocking when you remembered what it was like to crank an engine to get it going) when she heard the noise. Nobody was in this parking lot at this late at night, and she had felt safe going in and out of it because the owner and bouncer were still inside and within hearing distance if she screamed. Valerie whirled around to see what made the noise, dropping the keys.
The Wolf leapt forward. He could only clear so much of the distance in a single jump, but he was determined to take as much out of her as he could reach. All it would take was a few small bites, enough to get the blood flowing and slow her down - or, better yet, one big one.
Valerie, being a healthy, sane woman, screamed bloody murder. The thing was huge, and her reaction was to lunge out of the way along the car and frantically swing an arm out to try to get out of the way and scramble around it back toward the bar.
The Wolf gave chase, and now things had become interesting. It would have been nice, of course, if she had gone down quickly, but not much fun at all. Now there could be a chase, and he lunged forward, snapping at her heels and herding her away from the bar and more people, ignoring Connor's attempts to grab control again, like fingers scrabbling against glass for purchase.
Shouts from the bar, shadows in the door, but the wolf--big animal--lunged past her and cut off that retreat. Temporarily mindless with fear and hit with hard adrenaline, Valerie shrieked again and ran, moving through the parked cars with surprising speed considering that she was still on heels.
The Wolf gave chase, mouth open and white teeth showing through the fog and the light from the streetlights, panting and growling behind her like a monster barreling through the mist. He had to slow to make his way between the parked cars, giving her a slight lead, and he knew that there would be humans following from the bar, but that only gave it all the more reason to give chase, away from the threat of better armed humans after his soft, sweet prey.
Valerie wasn’t an idiot. As soon as she realized what was happening--something was after her and she had to run--she got rid of the heels. She stopped once and kicked hard to get rid of the first one, and then kicked again to get rid of the other one. She must have lost her purse somewhere, and she dodged aside, trying to find something to climb to get off the ground.
The Wolf didn't stop. He would chase her until she was bleeding between his teeth, and he was sure he could catch her. Even when she kicked off her shoes he gained, and when she dodged he snapped out again, taking the brief break in the chase to see if he could get her now. If she climbed higher than he could reach, he wouldn't be able to wait for her to come down. Even now, in the distance, he could hear more humans coming. He didn't have long, but he wanted to taste her. She made him give chase, and that only made him want her more.
The soles of her feet tore almost immediately on the unstable pavement, and that harsh metallic smell was suddenly ripe in the air under the tempting scent of blood, unique and utterly Valerie. She wasn’t screaming now, she didn’t have the breath, and she was running for her life, so it made her swift even though her dress tore under her as it snagged on something and she had to wrench free. Finally she saw a truck, a pickup, and next to it was a van. All instinct, she bolted onto the truck bed and scrambled for the roof of the cab.
The Wolf scrabbled after her, jaws snapping at her heels so hard she would be able to hear the click of teeth around the growling and the metallic scrape of claws on metal. He smelled the blood, and it was like a taunt. He leapt up to try to climb onto the cab, but couldn't find purchase along its edge. And so he growled at her, looking up at her with his teeth bared, prowling below. The men would be there soon, and he would not be caught by them, but he couldn't just let this slip of a thing escape him.
From the top of the cab, leaving bloody footprints, Valerie hauled up the dress over her thighs and leapt to the van, which was higher and had sleek sides that would make it impossible for the wolf to get all the way up to her. The landing was bad, however, and her foot slipped an inch short of the antennae and she fell flat, sliding several inches and only catching herself just before she fell.
The Wolf was beneath her as she slipped, watching, gone suddenly eerily silent, and when she didn't fall all the way, he howled in anguish. It went on for what seemed like a long, long stretch, bone chilling and clear. She was safe - she was out of his reach.
Connor, somewhere inside, could not have been more relieved, but the Wolf was furious. It snapped its jaws at her one last time before running around the van and into the closest alley ahead of those pursuing it and coming to Valerie's aid.
Valerie’s coworkers helped her down off the van. The bouncer’s eyes were big as silver dollars and he was talking about the big fucking dog so fast that Valerie wouldn’t have been able to get a word in to tell him to shut up even if she tried. She was shaking and her feet were bleeding but they carried her back to the bar. She refused to go to the hospital, however, and she told Joe to just put her in her car, she would go home and deal with the cuts there. Valerie wanted to be safe, and to be safe she needed to get away from the bar and the parking lot.
There was a lot of arguing, but eventually Valerie got her way, and Joe was kind enough to drive her to the lobby and bitch at her about getting a doctor to look at her feet. It was sweet, and she patted him on the cheek before she limped out toward the front doors.
The Wolf had escaped capture, and once he calmed and began winding his way back toward Bathos, his home base as it was Connor's, Connor was finally able to wrest control back. He ducked into the building through the back door, and hid under the stairwell, where finally, finally, he could change back.
It was difficult enough to get through the change when he had soundproof walls that could absorb the screams, but in the stairwell, a veritable echo chamber, he had to hold in sound, and he almost fell unconscious. He caught himself, tumbling against the wall when it was all over, and threw up in the dark corner beneath the stairs. He could have killed that woman. He could practically still smell her blood, and it took a few long moments of standing there before he could hobble up the back steps, picking up a key from where he'd hidden it the month before, taped under a piece of cardboard in that small space beneath the stairs.
He just managed to duck into his apartment as someone else was coming into the hall, and thankfully avoided anyone telling the press he'd been seen flashing women or running around his building naked or something equally horrific. He stumbled into the flat. All he wanted to do was lay facedown on the couch, but he couldn't. He had to go back there and make sure that woman was alright, that she'd been taken care of. It was completely inadequate, checking in on her emotional state after what the Wolf had put her through, but he had to be sure.
He got dressed (a laborious affair, because every limb was sore) and went down the stairs again. He could remember where the bar was, at least, so it shouldn't be much more than a ten minute cab ride to -
And there she was, walking through the front doors.
He was momentarily paralyzed, and then he rushed forward to hold the door for her. He smelled blood, that metallic sweet smell mingled with something distinctly her, and for an instant he wanted to be sick again, and the wolf turned somewhere in his chest. "Are you alright?" he managed, looking down at her bloody feet, trying not to be mesmerized by them. At least that was all it was.
Valerie had waited until Joe drove away--stubborn man only made this more difficult--and she had half-leaned on the doors before someone opened them and she almost fell inside, or into him, whichever. She caught herself, bending her knees and feeling the torn hem of the dress swirling against the back of her ankles, just before she did. She was still bleeding but it wasn’t extravagant, nothing she could see on the dark tile, and certainly nothing she could smell.
She looked up at him. She didn’t recognize him, not in the least, and that in itself was a good thing. Nobody to hide from. Just nobody. Her carefully applied makeup was smeared, and her eyes burned as she didn’t quite smother a sob. “Oh, sorry,” she said, through a pathetic little shudder of tears, “rough night.” She started to cry in earnest, just because she was in the building and that was safe enough.
Connor reached out to catch Valerie just as she caught herself. He felt a bizarre kind of disconnect with reality as she looked at him, her makeup smeared and the scent of her blood in the air, and she started to cry. He had done this. He had made this happen, because he couldn't beat the Wolf back.
For a moment, he was frozen. Then he asked, quietly, "Did someone hurt you?" He wasn’t even sure if the question was appropriate considering all the things about her rough night he wasn’t supposed to know, but it was the first thing that came to mind. He offered her his arm to help her where ever she was going.
She took his arm, because it would be pretty stupid not to, and the torn dress hissed over the lobby floor as she took advantage of a bench across from the elevators. “No,” she sniffed wetly, unraveled, “you’ll laugh if I tell you.” She sat down on the bench and tried to stop shaking, and when that didn’t work, tried to stop crying. In the end she just sat there shaking and crying and dabbing at her eyes as if her mascara wasn’t puddles under her eyes.
Connor wished he could offer her something - a tissue or perhaps maybe a hug which she seemed like she might need, although that would be entirely inappropriate. What he really wanted was to apologize, but that, of course, was out of the question. How would he even go about framing that? It's so funny you should mention your bad evening, because mine involved turning into a wolf, nearly killing you, and then vomiting in a stairwell, so I sympathize deeply with your tribulations.
"I bet you that you're wrong," he said gently, soft british accent on the words. Connor wasn't much of a matinee idol to begin with by his own standards, and his hair had gone slightly insane as well, poking in all directions after his quick change. He was really the last person one would expect to be turning into a bloodthirsty monster and running down girls in parking lots. He studied her face, and left his arm within her grasp.
Fortunately, after a few minutes Valerie rallied and dug a handkerchief out of her coat pocket. It was a real cloth handkerchief, not a tissue, and it had little bits of faded pink embroidery on the corner. She scraped under her eyes with it, and the cloth came away wet and black. She gave him an uncertain, even disbelieving look sideways, but he looked earnest. “This... this big stray dog came after me in the parking lot outside my work.” She waited for his amusement, which he felt would be inevitable, and failing that expected at least a note of disbelief. Valerie hadn’t seen a wolf except on television, and she wasn’t certain of what she saw.
Connor swallowed. A stray dog was better than a wolf, really, because if she knew what she’d actually been chased by she would likely only be more upset. There was no amusement there, just feeling for her, deeper than she knew. “That’s terrible,” he said. There was a lump in his throat. “Did they catch it? It didn’t bite you, I hope.”
She was grateful that he wasn’t mocking her, so much that her eyes started to water again, and she felt young and helpless in a way she had not for a long time. “No. It caught us with our socks down, and then I couldn’t run back in. So I had to run the other way, through the street, and--” The lump in her throat caught up to her and she fell silent, wiping her eyes again.
Connor wished he could properly comfort her, but he couldn’t. More and more he was starting to wonder if it was even safe for him to be out in public. Nothing should have happened tonight, and if not for the mugger it wouldn’t have, but how many more close calls would there be like this before he did something about it? He had refused a long time ago to let his condition completely rule his life, but was he just being selfish?
“At least you’re safe,” he said, the words as heartfelt as they could be. “And I’m sure...they’ll catch it. You don’t have anything to be afraid of.”
She tried to laugh through her tears and was only moderately successful. “I know,” she said, shaking her head a little and blinking several times to try to get hold of herself. “I know that. But it didn’t feel like--well, it didn’t feel like it would stop coming, even when it did. And now I’m--” she ran out of words to express it and pressed the cloth to her face again for a few seconds.
He raised a hand and carefully rested it on her shoulder. “Animals don’t understand what they’re doing, really. Maybe it was only frightened.” He felt a little hollow. “And you’re safe now. It can’t get you here, and I would bet you anything that you’ll get a call tomorrow and it will be safely in a cage somewhere where it can’t hurt anyone.”
"Maybe you're right." Her smile was watery, but after an uncertain waver, it hung on. It comforted her to think the thing all teeth might be afraid of something. "You're very good at this." She leaned a little into him for reassurance. "I'm sorry I cried all over you, uhm...?" She fished automatically for a name.
The lean eased him a little, and he smiled a touch. It was good to see her calm, reassurance that she would be able to put this whole thing behind her. “Don’t apologize. Connor. Nice to meet you, miss...?”
It took her a second to supply it. “...Anna. Valerie Anna. Just Valerie is fine.” Her smile gained strength and she sat up on her own, filthy bloody feet swinging a little as she regained some energy, dabbing at her face. “I don’t mean to keep you.” From wherever he’d been going. She was embarrassed about her state and gave him a transparent look to demonstrate it.
“I wasn’t going anywhere important,” he said. His true destination was standing right in front of him. “I’ll see you to your door, at least.” He wasn’t sure if he was pushing beyond her comfort level, but she still looked like a mess, and he couldn’t tell how steady she was on those feet. “While I do that, you can tell me what sort of work you do.” It would be best to take her mind off everything sooner rather than later, he felt.
Gratefully, she gained standing with a wince or two, taking advantage of his aid. "I'm on this floor, fortunately," she said, hobbling toward the nearest hallway with an arm on his. "I work at a bar... Well, not really work, it was my night, I'm a singer there a couple nights a week." she gave him a rueful, little smile. "I need a better job, but I haven't found one yet." This was not technically true. Shed been procrastinating.
He braced her as she walked. “You sing?” he asked. “I know that feeling. I manage to make a living by it, but the performing arts do not exactly pay.” There was a sudden neuronal connection, a quickfire click, and he straightened a little. “You know what, if you want, I can at least give you something to do temporarily? I’m supposed to be shooting this film soon, and they need a singer for a nightclub scene. The actress who was supposed to do it dropped out, and they’ve been scrambling since day before yesterday. What do you sing?”
She was hobbling along with some pain, though her feet were only scratched and set upon with pebbles, and she didn't make any more of it than it was. She was at first wary of any perceived temporary benefit, as such job offers tended to include red lights, but she couldn't hide her interest and cautious enthusiasm. "Most anything. You're in pictures?"
‘In pictures’ was an interesting way to put it, fairly outdated by his estimation. He knew well that some Creations were much older than they appeared, since his parents had been that way, and he wondered if Valerie was in the same category. “I am,” he said. “Well I think the part calls for a ballad, something with a sort of blues ballad feel. Would you be game for that? I can talk to the producer, I’m supposed to see him tomorrow anyway.” It was intended to be a brief visit. Even now, he could feel the Wolf scratching at him internally, a sensation so constant that he was almost used to it. It was particularly interested in Valerie, of course, but since it had been out only a half hour before he was almost certain there wouldn’t be any more issues until the full moon came. Still, it bent his attention toward her even more sharply than it would have been otherwise. He was glad that she seemed interested. Even if he hadn’t owed her the favor more than she could possibly know, she seemed like a perfectly nice person, and he would have offered her the role even if there had been nothing else beneath the surface.
"Blues!" Valerie couldn't help but exclaim, teetering a little as she attempted to stop in the hallway just outside her door. "That's what I'm singing now. An introduction would be wonderful." She said it as if she didn't quite believe it, but she smiled hopefully at the chance, and worried a little she wouldn't be able to stand in heels if the audition was too soon. She should try to clean herself up. She dug into her coat pocket for her keys and tried to find her way to the lock with the right one. "Thank you so much for your help."
“It was nothing, really,” he assured her. A drop in the bucket of what he owed her. “I’ll...I don’t know, knock on your door when I know something, I suppose.” He smiled then, maybe a little tentative, but honest. “It was very nice to meet you, Valerie.”
She pressed her palm to his arm. "You too. You've been shockingly tolerant of me... carrying on." She gave him a little smile and stepped awkwardly through her door. "You can talk to me on the forums; I do check them once and again. Now I have reason." She gave him a little nod, as old-fashioned as her unhindered speech, and then she shut her door.