Work Text:
Iceman and Maverick bump into one another at a gas station.
What happens next?
If you want a happy ending, try A.
A
This is Iceman, and he works nights at a gas station that has too much fluorescent light and not enough forgiveness. The cash register sticks. The coffee tastes like regret. The bathroom door drags on the tile because the building settled badly a long time ago and decided not to fix itself.
The customers come in waves. Truckers. Teenagers who do not buy anything. Men who buy cigarettes like they are buying permission to die later.
Tonight there is a full moon, which is merely astronomical weather if you are the kind of person who believes everyone can be only one thing.
A car pulls in too fast and parks too crooked. A man steps out as if he is stepping onto a stage. He is good-looking in the way that demands to be noticed. He carries himself like an argument. He makes eye contact with his own reflection in the cooler doors and approves.
This is Maverick.
He comes in with a grin that says he has never been punished by anything he didn’t enjoy.
“Evening,” he says, meaning: ‘look at me.’
Iceman looks. He does not give him what he wants, at least not yet. That is part of the job.
Maverick’s eyes slide down to the name tag and back up, as if he’s reading instructions. “Iceman,” he says, tasting it. Drawing it out like sinew from a carcass. “That your real name, sweetheart?”
It is not. But it will do. Names are flexible at night. So are bodies. Ice stares at the man. Thinking. Menu planning.
“Bathroom?” Maverick asks, already turning his head toward the back hallway like he owns it.
“Unlocked,” Iceman says. It is true. In this place, locks are mostly for decoration. They keep out honesty, not thieves.
Maverick starts away, then stops, because he has remembered what he came here for besides gas and an audience. He leans on the counter. He lowers his voice, performing intimacy.
“You workin’ alone?” he asks.
Iceman looks at him. He lets the silence go on one breath too long. That is also part of the job.
Maverick smiles wider, pleased with himself for finding what he assumes is a crack.
There is a version of this story where Iceman tells him to get lost. There is a version where Iceman calls the cops. There is a version where Maverick buys gum and drives away and nothing else happens, which sounds comforting until you remember that nothing else happening is not the same as something being resolved.
In this version, Iceman nods once toward the hallway. Not an invitation exactly. More like a door left ajar.
Maverick takes it as permission, because Maverick takes everything that way.
He disappears down the back corridor. Ice disappears, too, much quieter and much more quickly. The bathroom light flickers. The tile is stained. On the broad side of the stall facing the door, in thick marker, someone has written: FULL MOON GLORY HOLE. A curved arrow points to the stall door.
Maverick laughs, because he is a man who thinks filth is funny as long as it is not aimed at him in the wrong way. He reads the words again, like a dare. He does not ask who wrote them. He does not ask why the hole is there. He does not ask what kind of person participates in something that announces itself that plainly.
He enters the stall, finds the promised hole, and knocks on the thin metal around it, because he likes ceremony. He says, “Hello?” because he likes applause.
On the other side of the partition, there is a pause, and then movement. Quiet, controlled. The kind of movement you do not make unless you know exactly what you are doing.
Maverick’s breath changes. His swagger turns into anticipation. He adjusts himself as if preparing a gift.
What happens next is not romantic. It is not even especially intimate. It is transactional in the old sense, like meat and hunger.
Maverick receives pleasure the way he receives compliments. As something he is owed. He braces a hand against the partition and lets his head fall back, grinning, because he cannot help it. He cannot stop being pleased with the universe for arranging him a private experience in a dirty bathroom under a full moon.
He does not notice, because he is not trained to notice, that on the other side of the hole the breathing is steady. Not frantic. Not needy. Patient.
When it is over, Maverick zips up and checks himself in the cracked mirror visible through the too-large slit in the door. He is thinking ahead. He is thinking he’ll slide back up to the counter after taking the long way through the candy aisle, find Iceman ruffled and red-lipped, and deliver a smooth line. Something cordial. Something sleazy. Something that pretends gratitude while reaching for more.
He opens the stall door and pokes his head around to the other side of the glory hole, already shaping the words.
And then he stops.
Because Iceman is behind the partition, where he has been the entire time. Calm. Clean. Hands dry. The same blank expression as before. But he is not the same as he was before.
Maverick’s mouth opens. His brain tries to arrange the pieces into a picture that makes him the center of it.
It fails.
His eyes drop to Iceman’s mouth.
The mouth is different now.
Not in an obvious way, not at first. Just the suggestion of a line that is too long. The suggestion of teeth that do not belong to a man who stocks shelves and wipes counters and says “Have a good one.”
Then the lips part, and the suggestion becomes proof. A set of canine ears sprout between parts of blond hair and swivel in his direction.
Maverick screams.
There are different kinds of screaming. Some are requests. Some are performance. This one is a malfunction.
Iceman feels relief wash through him so cleanly it is almost peace. The charade is finished. The small human mask of patience and politeness falls away like an apron untying itself.
He steps around the partition with ease, because this partition was never a barrier, only a prop. Now there are two sets of feet in the bathroom stall, but what happens next will only be fun for one man, not two.
What happens next is biological in the best way. It is old. It is correct.
Teeth and jaws close around a soft neck, and there is a pull, then another pull, purposeful, until the scream stops behaving like a sound and starts behaving like a broken mechanism. Maverick’s hands fly up to push, to pry, to negotiate. He is good at negotiating. He has negotiated his way out of consequences his whole life.
This is not a thing you can negotiate with.
Iceman’s claws find Maverick’s chest. The fabric gives first, then the skin. There is resistance, then there isn’t. He digs in the way a starving animal digs in, not out of anger but out of certainty. He opens what needs to open. He reaches what needs to be reached. He does not linger on details. He is not sentimental.
Normally.
Something about this man makes him feel sentimental, but Ice does not know why. He does not want to know why. Knowing would be complicated.
For now, there is only this: blood; flesh; heat.
The full moon kill is not delicate. It is not kind. It is not interested in the story Maverick thought he was in.
Ice was made for this. Made to love something so violently that it breaks apart in his hands like an overripe peach. Made to take a heart in his claws and make it his, forever.
After, the store is quiet again. The fluorescent lights continue their thin humming. The coffee pot keeps warming itself for no reason. The register still sticks.
Iceman washes his hands.
He mops the tile.
He throws out what can be thrown out.
He locks the bathroom door, because now it matters. Now there is something to keep in. A body, and the feeling the body gave him that he does not wish to examine further. It is something like loss, and Ice despises it in the way all wolves despise new things.
If you want a happy ending, that is one. I suppose.
Not because anyone is redeemed, or because the world improves, or because a cocksure guy learns a lesson too late. It is happy because Iceman gets exactly what he wanted, and wanting, in stories like this, is most of the plot.
In the end, of course, everyone dies. But not everyone gets to be satisfied first.
If you want the version where Maverick recognizes what he wants, try B.
B
Everything begins the same. The crooked parking job, the grin, the swagger that says the world is a vending machine and he has the exact coins.
Iceman is behind the counter. He watches Maverick like a habit he has not kicked.
Maverick asks for the bathroom without saying please, because he believes charm is a substitute for manners. Iceman lets him go anyway. He lets him read the stall graffiti, lets him laugh at FULL MOON GLORY HOLE, lets him misunderstand what kind of joke he is inside. The moon is patient. So is Ice.
The mouth on the other side of the partition is careful at first, then generous, then unkind in the pleasurable way. Maverick makes sounds that are not dignified. He grips the divider like it is the only solid thing left in his life. When it’s over, he pants and zips and walks out with his chest full of triumph.
He rounds the partition with his line already loaded. Something cordial. Something sleazy. A little bow on the whole transaction.
He sees Iceman.
He sees the teeth.
He sees the eyes, not quite right, too bright under the buzzing bathroom light. He sees the truth, standing there in the cramped space between sinks and paper towels.
This is the moment when the scream is supposed to happen.
Maverick does not scream.
Maverick swallows, as if his body has just remembered a language it speaks fluently.
“Uh…hi,” he says, quietly, and the word is not a greeting so much as an awakening.
Iceman holds still. The wolf in him expects fear. The man in him expects disgust. He has built his whole appetite around those expectations, around the clean snap of it. His head tilts: a predator waiting for the attempted escape.
Instead, Maverick looks at him the way people look at a flame when they’re tired of being cold.
“That was, uh, really good,” Maverick says, dumbly reverent, and then, with a flicker of the old bravado, “You want to finish the job, baby?”
There are shelves outside the bathroom stocked with bright bags and cheap bottles and supplements that promise illegal miracles. There are Takis in colors that do not occur naturally. There are pills that claim to build muscle and erase regret. There is, on the counter up front, a slushy machine that hums like a small engine dreaming.
Iceman backs Maverick into the snack aisle like he is reorganizing inventory. Maverick goes willingly, stumbling on purpose. He grabs at a rack of dubious libido boosters, knocking them to the floor like offerings.
When Iceman’s claws come out, Maverick shudders. When Iceman’s mouth opens, Maverick tips his head back, giving his throat like it is a gift he has been saving. Iceman bites him, not to kill, not yet, just enough to mark the skin and make Maverick moan into the fluorescent air.
Sex, in stories like this, is often treated as a reward.
Here it’s a decision.
Maverick presses his hands to Iceman’s hips, pulls him close, greedy and unembarrassed. Iceman shoves him hard against the shelf so the Takis rattle and the supplements wobble. Maverick laughs once, sharp, like he can’t believe how correct it feels to be handled like something edible.
Iceman fucks him there, fast and filthy and certain, his tail an ecstatic blur, the wolf in him delighted by the lack of resistance, the man in him startled by the fact that he wants to keep going long after the body could call it done. Maverick takes it like a dare he has always been training for. He grips the edge of the shelf until his knuckles go white, then lets go and reaches back to hold Iceman, because he does not want distance. He wants more.
After, they stand at the slushy machine as if this is normal, as if no aisle has been turned into a shrine. Iceman fills an Icee cup with something blue enough to be a threat. Maverick fills his with something red enough to be a warning.
They lean on the counter and drink the purple, sharing the same straw because it feels like belonging.
Outside, the moon keeps shining, uncaring and perfect.
Maverick says, “So…do you live around here?”
Iceman says, “I work here.”
Maverick, very softly, as if making a promise to himself: “Not for long. I’ll treat you right.”
If you want Iceman’s happy ending, this is one. Not the cleanest. Not the simplest. But happy, because he is seen, and still wanted, and he does not have to eat to be satisfied.
Not tonight.
If you want the version where nothing happens, try C.
C
It is a full moon. Maverick comes in loud and bright. He asks for the bathroom like he is ordering the building to obey him. He disappears down the hallway.
Iceman stays behind the counter.
He tells himself he is tired. He tells himself he does not need this. He tells himself that hunger is a childish thing, and he is a man with a job and a name tag and a mop bucket.
Maverick reads the stall door. Maverick laughs. Maverick waits for the joke to become a hand.
Nothing happens.
Maverick finishes with a kind of sulky irritation, the disappointment of a man who expected the universe to flirt back. He comes out and throws a look at Iceman, as if blaming him personally for the absence of entertainment.
“Place is dead,” Maverick says.
Iceman says, “It’s a gas station.”
Maverick buys gum. Maverick leaves. The moon stays. The fluorescent lights keep buzzing like anxious insects.
Iceman’s chest hurts, and he tries to ignore it. He wipes the counter. He restocks the cigarettes. He refills the coffee that nobody drinks.
He goes on like this for a long time, because going on is easy. Going on is what most people do. It requires no courage, only habit.
Sometimes, late at night, he thinks about the stall door. About the stupid words. About how close he was to stepping into the bathroom and letting himself become what he is.
He thinks about it until the ache becomes familiar, like an old injury that flares in cold weather.
Then he dies.
Not dramatically. Not under a full moon. Just the ordinary way, the way most things end. His heart stops working. The fluorescent lights do not care. The store gets a new clerk.
That is the ending where nothing happens, and you can call it safe if you want. Safe is not the same as happy.
If you want the one where Maverick has a reason to be brave, try D.
D
This time Maverick is not only cocky, he is armed with purpose. He wears Ariat boots with dust on them and a cowboy hat that looks like a joke until you notice the magic runes stitched into the band. He buys salt packets, not peanuts. He asks for the bathroom like he is checking the cleverness of a trap.
Iceman watches him and knows, immediately, what he is. A hunter. A man who walks into strange places and expects monsters to be grateful for being found, the evil in them finally destroyed.
Maverick reads FULL MOON GLORY HOLE and smiles like he has seen this move before. He still takes the offered mouth anyway, because hunters are not immune to appetites. The blowjob is, as promised, excellent. It is almost unfair. It makes Maverick’s spine go loose with pleasure and his mind go quiet with it.
After, he rounds the partition and sees the teeth and does not hesitate.
His hand goes to the charmed gun at his belt. His fingers close on the thing that would make Iceman’s heart stop for good.
Then Maverick stops instead.
He looks at Iceman and says, strained, like the words are being dragged out of him by something inconveniently human, “You should run.”
Iceman laughs once, low, because he knows what’s being offered. Mercy from a man who is supposed to kill him. A chance from someone who came here to end him.
“I don’t run from anything, Mitchell,” Iceman says. “Least of all you.”
“You will,” Maverick snaps, and his eyes are bright with anger at himself. “Because I’m letting you.”
This is the point where the story could become righteous. Where Maverick kills the monster and drives away with a clean conscience and a dirty secret. Where Iceman dies in the bathroom of a gas station and the world congratulates itself.
Instead, Iceman steps closer.
He reaches out and touches Maverick’s wrist, right where the watch sits: a gift from a dead father. He feels Maverick’s pulse. He feels the tremor in Maverick’s hand.
“I don’t want your mercy,” Iceman says.
Maverick’s jaw tightens. “Then what do you want?”
Iceman thinks about the moon. About the hunger. About the small human mask he wears to survive.
“I want you,” he says, simply, and the simplicity is what makes it dangerous.
Maverick closes his eyes, like a man choosing treason.
He drops the gun.
They leave together in Maverick’s car. The supernatural war can keep its rules. The moon follows them like a witness. Iceman’s happy ending, here, is not a kill. It’s a defection.
If you want the one where Iceman tries to be good, try E.
E
The mouth happens. Maverick preens afterward, as if pleasure is proof he is winning.
He rounds the partition. He sees Iceman as he really is. The scream begins.
Iceman could end it right there. He could take what the moon insists belongs to him.
Instead, he hears the scream and feels something else rise up under the hunger. Not mercy, exactly. Something like disgust at his own predictability.
“Get out,” he tells Maverick.
Maverick freezes. He can’t compute it. His whole life has trained him to believe predators either devour you or fail.
“Get out,” Iceman repeats, and bares his teeth to make it convincing.
Maverick runs.
Later, Iceman stands behind the counter with the register sticking and the coffee souring and the moon fading. He stares at the door Maverick fled through as if it is a horizon.
He finishes the shift. He turns the sign to CLOSED. He takes off the name tag.
He quits.
Not dramatically. He doesn’t flip the counter or howl at the cameras. He simply leaves and does not come back.
He goes looking for Maverick, because whatever that was, it was not only hunger. It was a choice. It was the first time he has told someone to live and meant it.
If you want a happy ending, this is one of the harder kinds, because it requires time, determination, and the willingness to keep choosing the same person in a world that would rather you didn’t.
If you want the one where shared history makes it worse, try F.
F
Maverick walks into the gas station already annoyed. He wants caffeine and quiet. He gets fluorescent light and a man he knows.
The name tag says ICEMAN.
The face says: I remember the sound your laugh makes when you think you’re invincible. I held you on an aircraft carrier and we felt like gods remaking the world in our image.
Maverick stops so abruptly his shoulder bumps the chip display.
Iceman does not react. He scans a candy bar. He looks up and meets Maverick’s eyes like this is a coincidence, like this is not the universe leaning in to see what they will do.
Maverick says, “What are you doing here?”
Iceman says, with a shrug, “Working.”
Maverick laughs once, helplessly high-pitched, because the alternative is panic. “Since when do you work at gas stations?”
“Since always,” Iceman says, and his mouth does something that is not quite a smile. “Sometimes I need to do something that empties my mind. You know.”
Maverick does not know. His mind is always as full and as empty as it could ever be, and there is nothing he can do about either of those things. But Maverick does go to the bathroom, because he needs distance to react to the thing he has just witnessed. He reads FULL MOON GLORY HOLE and snorts, because the world is still stupid even when it’s being ominous.
The mouth happens. It is the weirdest blowjob Maverick has ever received. Not because of the physical parts—Ice is really good at the physical parts—but everything else. Maverick’s brain tries to find a category. Past. Present. Rival. Friend. Sharp? The mouth does not care about categories.
Afterward, he rounds the partition and sees the teeth.
He does not scream this time, because he recognizes the shape of Iceman’s restraint. He recognizes the control as something he has always both hated and wanted.
Maverick stands there, flushed and rattled, and says the only truthful thing he can manage.
“So,” he says. “Work is going to be really awkward now. You want to just, I dunno, pretend this never happened? You didn’t suck me off, I didn’t find out you’re a werewolf? Goddamn, this is weird. Sorry? I was not trained for this.”
Iceman watches him stammer idiotically for a long moment. The wolf in him wants to eat. The man in him wants to keep Maverick alive long enough to watch him squirm under the weight of a new reality. And then get fucked by him in the back of a sports car sitting on a scenic overlook with the windows down and the parking brake on.
Iceman says, “Yes. For now.”
Maverick leaves with his soda and his shame and a confusing crush that feels like a shotgun blast to the chest.
Iceman’s happy ending is small and sharp. Not a kill. Not love. Just the knowledge that Maverick will be thinking about him every time the moon rises, and every time a cockpit light flickers like the back of a predator’s retina, and every time he tries to pretend he is fearless.
If you want the one where the roles reverse and it feels wrong, try G.
G
This time, Iceman is only a man. Just a clerk. Just a person with tired eyes and a mop bucket and a name tag that lies politely.
Maverick comes in under the full moon and it is Maverick who is not only cocky, but hungry. He smiles at Iceman like he is choosing him from a menu.
The bathroom stall still has the writing. The hole is still there.
Iceman, inexplicably, steps into the bathroom anyway. He kneels on the wrong side of the partition and does what the graffiti asks of him, because sometimes people do what they’re told when they think it will buy them a little closeness.
Maverick receives the mouth like it is tribute. He makes happy, ruined sounds. He grabs the edge of the partition as if it’s holding up the world.
After, Maverick rounds the partition.
Iceman looks up at him, expecting a grin, a joke, a tip.
Maverick’s eyes are not human anymore. The teeth come out like the truth that matters.
Iceman has time for one thought before the world becomes claws and heat.
‘This doesn’t feel right,’ he thinks, calmly, as the bite comes.
Not because he is dying. Not because it hurts.
Because in this ending he understands, too late, what it means to be the one on the wrong side of hunger.
If you want the only authentic ending, try H.
H
You can dress it up any way you like.
You can make Maverick a hunter or a fool or a man who discovers, to his surprise, that he loves the teeth.
You can make Iceman a monster who eats or a monster who abstains. You can give them a shared Icee and a wedding in aisle four. You can give them a road trip, a vow, a future, a house with curtains that never quite close.
The only authentic ending is this one: Iceman and Maverick fall in love. Iceman and Maverick fall in love. Iceman and Maverick fall in love.
And it can be true, for a while, because love is a kind of truth. It changes what you do next. It makes you leave the gas station. It makes you return. It makes you choose mercy. It makes you choose teeth.
But the ending does not change.
In the end, the moon sets.
In the end, the body stops working.
In the end, the fluorescent lights buzz on without caring.
The only real variable is what you do under the full moon while you still can.
And if you want Iceman’s happy ending, the simplest version is still the same.
He is seen.
He is wanted.
He is what he is.
He does not have to apologize for it.