Wolf (wolf_atthedoor) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2010-09-27 04:43:00 |
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Entry tags: | wolf |
Who: Wolf
What: That time of the month.
Where: Hamartia #204
When: July 23, evening of the full moon.
Warnings: Meh. Nothing, though neighbors in the vicinity are liable to get an earful throughout the night.
Tonight.
Tonight, tonight, full moon, autumnal equinox's afterglow. The sun on one end, but oh, the moon sang like it was Ella Fitzgerald and he needed a torch song. First thing Wolf did after crossing over from Musings was to check the calendar. After he recovered from being blitzed with too much noise, lights too bright, the scent of New York's piss and blood crawling down his throat, he gained enough clarity of mind to check the date. It was a perfectly innocuous gesture that go-round; he hadn't thought to assign it significance. Then the full moon hit and he'd damn near crawled out of his own skin. Since then it'd been something of a countdown. Days went by, each a blessing when Wolf made it to the next, when he didn't find himself climbing the walls, ravenous, restless. Living from 24 to 24 remained a nerve-wracking experience, fear of one's own self causing his mask to show cracks in its carefully applied patina.
By week three, he breathed easier. Thought "maybe it was a fluke", figured strange things were bound to happen when crossing over. Maybe it'd just been an interlude to his story, a speed bump in his grand quest. Week four almost felt normal 'til the local hippies started pointing at the sky. Paranoia, already sliding its fingers up his spine, latched on tight. The air went out of him with just days to spare, but with little money, no car and zero familiarity with the territory, Wolf felt locked in. If he was right and the madness was coming back for round two, he wouldn't be able to find the proper amount of nowhere fast enough.
So he went literal. Hamartia didn't have the thickest walls, but they were sturdy enough, and Wolf had the benefit of owning no furniture besides. He used up any sense of together he'd left over in network posts, a visit to the library, trips to diner, pharmacy, hardware store. Innocent enough at first blush 'til it was home again, home again, jiggity jig. The books Wolf checked out were gently wrapped up in his coat with a single-minded reverence, only to be tucked somewhere safe. They'd come later, handy touchstones back to some world, if not necessarily the real one.
He paused to breathe, went deathly still in the middle of his shaggy new living room and listened to the sounds of neighbors living their lives. Voices echoed off the walls, rattled right through his bones; if Wolf noticed the low whine sitting in his throat, he was too busy installing heavy-duty door locks to acknowledge it. Afterward -- after he'd turned the joint into a solitary cell which may as well have included bars on the windows -- came time to self-medicate. There was no exact science. He hadn't gone through this often enough to have expectations involving anything other than anxiety, and as he doped himself on every narcotic he could possibly think to combine, Wolf's whines turned to bared teeth, a scapegrace grin.
He'd blacked out a month ago. A slow burn boiled over to a dead rage before life went dark at the edges, and when he came to hours (and hours and hours) later, all Wolf remembered was looking up at the sky and feeling blessedly alive. Afterward came the realization that he woke up on an empty Brooklyn basketball court, bloodied and filthy and strangely satiated. A month later and exactly what happened remained a mystery.
Wolf thought on that whilst he went through the motion of mixing drink and drug, sat on his scummy kitchen floor and meditated on his newfound life as a lunatic. There was the question, he supposed -- and this is how he knew he'd gone mad -- of whether perhaps he turned into his namesake during the night and went on a violent rampage where no fluffy bunny or virgin girl remained unscathed. As poppy-deep sleep warred with surging adrenaline, Wolf laughed at his own absurdity.
By the time laughter bled over into snarling, then howling, he was long past cognizance. He didn't turn into anything other than a normal, every day monster. But then, he didn't need to.