WHO: Daniel Valiant & Sera D'Onofrio WHERE: Outside of the gas station. WHEN: September 6th. Night. WARNINGS: Maybe language?
Like most evenings around this time of the month, the migraine was almost blinding. Danny could barely function like a human being, let alone someone who could host a radio show for six or seven hours. Danny wasn't the type of person to just call in sick from a migraine but he still had a couple hours to kill before the radio show and while he would have just slept the day away. Danny was more focused on moving around and not wanting to sit still...even for a moment. He couldn't even lay on the sofa and read like he usually would if he couldn't sleep. He just put it to the 'life of an insomniac' but even he knew something was different. Something wasn't right, not even in the least bit. Even as the day went on, Danny felt an anxiety that came over him like a cloud.
He tried to think about different things.
He tried to look at the notes he had written down from his impromptu adventure with Naomi. He sent a couple texts to Daws and Fin with the hopes of a reply that wasn't 'why are you even awake'? But more than that, everything just hurt right at the moment. His shirt clung to him as he started sweating out the fever that had struck him the moment the sun started setting and the moon started peeking over the horizon. Danny had wandered into the gas station to get some ibuprofen as a way to kill the migraine, just earning a slight odd look from one of his coworkers at the shadows under the man's eyes before he felt a tightness in his chest. Danny thought he was going to be sick. He could feel his knees get weak as he stepped out of the gas station before moving to the bathroom they kept behind the building. The man swaying slightly as he stepped into the dimly lit bathroom covered in sharpie graffiti that he'd tried to clean up over the years but it never quite went away. He felt like he was dying as he dropped to his knees in front of the toilet, not bothering to lock the door.
Something was wrong. His rational mind tried to reason everything. The pounding sound of his heart in his ears as he tried to puke whatever it was out, dry heaving into the toilet. The spray of spittle and blood hitting the sides as Danny reached for the wall and his body nearly curled in on itself as he dropped fully to the ground. In conscious memory, he could remember this pain. He remembered it from the last month and the month before that. His blood felt like it was boiling through his veins, as if everything was being pulled apart and Danny could only curl on the cold bathroom floor and lay helpless as the pain ripped through him. Trying to crawl away from the pain before his body cramped up, Danny couldn't help but scream as the arms he was trying to use to pull his useless weight practically felt like they snapped backwards. The body he was in sudden feeling like it was snapping and breaking in all the places it shouldn't. Danny could feel his ribs snap and he could feel blood trailing down his chin -- terror starting to sink in as the room around him started growing hazy and dark.
The darkness began setting in, filled with a man's screams as Danny's sight narrowed and a wolf's howls started reverberating off the walls of the bathroom.
+ + +
The beast shook off what remained of the man's clothes that it was trapped in, the tiny bathroom was now a tiny prison for it. Tinier a prison was the man. The wolf could hear the sound of a car rolling up. The sound of people through the walls and the smell that drove its hunger even more. The smell of blood and flesh. The wolf nearly knocked the door off its hinges when it broke free, circling around the back of the building and keeping in the darkness as it lingered just a couple feet away from the pavement as it watched the shape of the person get out of their car, a low growl as it kept its head close to the ground. Stopping just in the line of a clear sprint towards her, ears pressed its against its head and shifting slightly where it hid in the darkness.
It took a moment. Something that could have been seconds felt like a few minutes before the wolf ran, jetting out of the darkness.