This was, by far, the weirdest 24-hours of Dylan’s life. There wasn’t any question about it. From Abi and Dylan getting attacked in the woods by fucking werewolves to Dylan ending up in an entirely different set if woods, in an entirely different world, where there was magic and people travelled through crystals and then just handed out money and apartments.
It was a lot. It was too much, really. Dylan was pretty sure he was losing his mind. Maybe it was the blood loss from when Ryan cut off his hand. Maybe the stress of werewolf attacks was finally catching up with him: he’d accepted it pretty easily back when they were fighting for their lives, but maybe he’d accepted it too easily and that was just the first sign of madness, and now he was full on hallucinating an entirely different world. They’d asked if there was anyone he might know and he’d given a list of names, starting from his parents and ending with his co-workers, and the lady at the DOA (the DOA. Maybe he’d died after all and this was some sort of after-death hallucination. He’d read of that sort of thing before, and it wasn’t like the DOA was a subtle acronym) said she’d let them know he was here.
And then she’d sent him off to the clinic. As it turned out, amputating your hand with a rusty chainsaw wasn’t the best way to go about it. They’d cleaned up the cut, and then had healed it with magic, and like that, the intense pain that he’d been dealing with for half the night abruptly abated. It still hurt – it felt like his hand, the hand that wasn’t there anymore, was on fire – but it was more tolerable than it had been.
He walked out of the surgery feeling better than he thought he would. He was hungrier than he’d ever been in his life, but better than when he’d walked in there. He was looking at the bandaged stump when he walked out of the room, and then glanced up to see Nick and Abi.
He started, looking from one to the other, at a complete loss for words. The last time he’d seen Nick and Abi, Nick had transformed into a werewolf, separated Abi’s head from her shoulders, and leapt out a window, and the rush of emotions he felt – fear, relief, elation, confusion – was so overwhelming that he couldn’t figure out where one feeling started and the other began.
He managed a shaky smile. “Wow, Abi, I never thought I’d be so glad to see that face of yours again,” he managed. He didn’t know what to say about Nick. Nice to see you not being horrifying didn’t seem right.
“Dylan!” Abi went running across the room to hug him. She knew he wasn’t usually the huggy type, but she was, and she’d missed Dylan in the several months she and Nick had been in Vallo. She’d worried about him, too, even when she heard he’d arrived–in the version of events she recalled, Dylan had been hurt the worst of any of them. Now he was looking more like his old self, if a little rattled and down one hand.
“It’s so good to see you,” she said, and finally let go and stepped back to look at him. “They said they were going to heal you; did that all work out okay?”
Dylan wrapped his arms around Abi. He wasn’t much of a hugger, but this was a good exception: Abi was alive, and she looked happy and was decidedly not headless.
Which… actually didn’t make much sense. Unless his first thought had been right. Maybe he was dead. Kaitlyn had killed Caleb, but that didn’t mean that another werewolf hadn’t like, snuck up behind Dylan and ripped his head off.
His eyes fell on Nick over Abi’s shoulder. The last time he’d seen Nick, he’d been alive. But Laura and Ryan had been going after werewolves. Maybe they’d got Nick too.
“Yeah, I think so. I mean, not quite good as new, but better,” he said, and then took a breath and pulled away. “Okay, you can tell it to me straight: Am I dead? Is this like… Uhm, Heaven? Not that this is how I’d have pictured Heaven, but…”
As soon as Abi had pulled away from Dylan, Nick moved in. He didn’t hug him - instead opting to do that awkward clasping dudebro hand thing backpat that no one enjoyed - but sincerity rained out of his grin all the same. “You’re not dead,” Nick said, “at least, that’s what we think.” They couldn’t be sure, after all - the group had been so separated by the time that the moon had disappeared beneath the treeline. “It’s some other… dimension, apparently? With… magic, and royalty, and… really good food.” The good food seemed important at that moment. Nick had worked Kitchens; he remembered the things Dylan had done to plates of burgers and hot dogs.
“It’s really good to see you, mate,” he added breathlessly, and because he remembered just how terrified he and Abi had been upon their arrival: “It’s… safe enough here. There are monsters and things, but-- also badasses?”
“Badasses who are on our side,” Abi added, in case that wasn’t clear. “Like…Captain America, Captain Marvel, wizards and witches, serious badasses. Nick and I got adopted by a polyamorous quartet of magic warriors who I’m pretty sure would lay waste to the world to keep us safe. Which I realize sounds insane, but…that’s Vallo. Everything here sounds insane when you say it out loud.”
Dylan returned the bro-hug and tried not to grimace too obviously at the sharp jolt of nerve pain when he stupidly bumped his stump against Nick’s back. How was it possible to simultaneously not be able to stop thinking about the fact that he was down a hand and forget that he didn’t have one to do dumb, regular things like pat his friend’s back?
And how was it possible to both be ridiculously pleased to see Nick here, all smiling and normal and familiar in a space where nothing was familiar at all, and also know that just hours ago he’d seen him literally take the head off of Abi? Well, that was easier to understand, he thought. At least a little bit. He knew enough about werewolf lore to know that the things that people did when they were all wolfed out usually didn’t have much bearing on who they were when they were a person. It helped that Abi was… well, here.
“Food sounds great,” Dylan said. “Please, lead the way to magical dimension food. Fair warning though, if it moves I’m out.” He shot Abi a quizzical smile. The DOA had, somewhat, explained that there might be people here that he knew from TV, which would explain Captain America and Captain Marvel, though Dylan was pretty sure it was going to take some serious proof before he believed they were real. But “polyamorous quartet of magical warriors” was a new one. “We could have used a quartet of polyamorous of magical warrior bodyguards back home,” he managed. He attempted a laugh but cut it short at how frantic it sounded.
“They’re great, and I’m sure they’ll be fine with you crashing with us,” Nick said in a tone that brooked no argument. “That’s what we did when we first showed - crashed. We’re still there. They’re family at this point. It’s not like I don’t know how much you mutter in your sleep at this point anyway.”
He was already walking, out the door and toward a cluster of cafes and shops. Nick remembered all too well how overwhelming things had been at first, how unreal Vallo had seemed. “So… did cutting off your hand with a chainsaw really uh… work?” he ventured after a moment, glancing at Dylan. “You’re not infected?” Dylan looked like Dylan, which didn’t mean much because 30 nights out of 31, Nick looked like Nick. “I mean, it’s okay if you are,” he added, a little panicked himself. “It’s… there are a lot of werewolves here? Some are kind of intense. But they’re all… you know. Managed. At the Full Moon. Safe.”
Abi fell in behind with Dylan, giving him a gentle nudge to follow Nick. She was indeed very much here, with her head firmly attached, and not appearing afraid of the werewolf possibilities.
“Safe for them and for everyone else,” Abi added. “And nobody has to worry about hiding anything or people not believing the truth, because the magic stuff is everywhere. So you’re okay no matter what.”
“Oh, no, that would’ve sucked a lot if I cut off my hand and still turned into a werewolf,” Dylan said, falling into step with Nick at Abi’s nudge. “I mean, wow, terrible luck. Even my luck isn’t that bad.” He grimaced. “No offense. Yeah. Yeah, it worked. Infection free. No ripping heads off for this camp councillor. Uhm… sorry, did you, uhm, say that there was a lot of werewolves here?”
He didn’t know how many were at Hackett’s Quarry, but he was pretty sure even that was too many. Way, way too many.
“A lot,” Nick confirmed with a shrug, trying not to dwell on the fact that he didn’t remember anything about head ripping. Organ tearing, sure, but not… head ripping. It was a thought for Another Time, a time when they weren’t about to eat something. “But there’s a lot of everything, so…” He did a half-hearted finger guns pose. “It balances things out? Sort of. I mean, getting kidnapped by extremely organized geese with principles kind of puts things into perspective.” He nudged his girlfriend. “Abi can tell you all about that one.”
“I’ll tell you over dinner,” Abi said. She didn’t mind getting teased a little if it would help Dylan, and he could probably use a dumb distraction story that ended with an invitation to a vampire orgy. She still remembered the first day she and Nick were in Vallo, after all; coming right on the heels of the worst night of their lives, they’d needed the reassurance they were safe, but they’d also needed the fun chitchat and good food to help pull them out of their panic. It would also help, she figured, if whatever food they got didn’t make too much of an issue of Dylan’s missing hand. He had enough going on without throwing in the complications of a knife and fork.
“And to spare you some decision making…pizza or Chinese?” she asked.
“Alright, I will wait until dinner to hear about how this goose abduction, but you’d better tell me literally ev-er-y-thing because that sounds wild.” And potentially wild in a good way. Not wild in ‘some of your friends are dead and others are werewolves and you don’t even know who’s what because you got separated from them throughout the night’ way. “And pizza. Definitely pizza.”