Work Text:
It hadn’t hurt, the day he’d turned into a monster.
Thomas blinked awake. He was in the kitchen. It was pitch black outside. The place was destroyed. There was blood staining into the expensive hardwood floor, and he kept hearing a slow drip drip drip of water running, even though he knew the sink wasn’t on. It didn’t matter. This wasn’t his home.
In fact, he couldn’t quite remember how he got here.
His mind kept trying to grasp onto things that weren’t there. There was a knife missing from a block in the kitchen. The ceiling lights were shattered, and the dim bulb kept struggling on and off in scattered bursts. Someone had been yelling, but they weren’t anymore.
The monster had shut them up.
Thomas struggled to remember what had happened, but his mind was shattering, twisting, and he was tired. So tired. All he could think was this:
It couldn’t be all that bad. Andrew loved monsters. And Thomas loved Andrew. There were a lot of things Thomas would do, to be something Andrew loved.
Once, there was a wolf cub that had lost its way in the woods.
Andrew liked to tell stories, and Thomas liked to draw them. They never talked about anything real, not really, but they didn’t need to. They had their own secret language, their own private code, and that was enough for Thomas. He didn’t want to talk about his parents with Andrew, not when they could do this:
Once, there was a wolf cub that had lost its way in the woods. He had been the runt of the litter, and had spent much of his life fighting for scraps. His mother often went away on hunts and came back with nothing, saying that the game in the forest was too scarce. The rabbits were too fast, the squirrels too clever, and the shadows all too willing to hide the deer. So when the wolf cub got too hungry, he ventured out alone, away from his siblings, away from the safety of his den. What he found was a forest teeming with life. He glutted himself on mushroom caps and tree sap and drank his fill at a river that tasted of blood. When he finally returned to his den, he found it empty save for the bones of his siblings.
Andrew used to write these stories in the margins of his textbooks, the black and blue ink smudging whenever he had to flip between pages. He wrote out the words like they were spilling out of him, like they were blood from a cut in his skin that he didn’t care about closing. He used to toss the textbooks off to the side in his dorm room like the stories themselves didn’t matter, and Thomas would have to dive to the floor and search through pages and pages of history chapters or math problems in order to find them. Then Dove had gotten him a notebook, and Andrew had switched over to that instead, and Thomas could finally stop scavenging for his stories like a racoon in the night.
In return, Thomas had taken to sticking pages of his art in between pages of Andrew’s notebook, like fucked up love letters. Trees that had been cracked open in the center, spilling out sap like blood. Forest deer, several times larger than they should be, with antlers that merged into the canopy of the trees. Mushroom circles and piles of bones and fur and twisting, dark backgrounds that hid screaming faces behind scribbles of ink.
It was hard to talk about the things that hurt him, so he didn’t. It didn’t matter. Andrew knew anyway.
The second summer they had spent apart, Thomas’s parents had left him alone for weeks while they went on a gallery tour that spanned the entire world. Their paintings, or at least the rejects, had accompanied him that entire summer. He stared at them until he thought he would go mad. He thought of the wolf cub, starving in his den. He thought of the forest.
He thought of the empty wolf den.
He had ripped them all apart, his father’s paintings and his mother’s art. He had left for Wickwood Academy before his parents had returned. The forest was where he belonged.
Of course, then the year had been over, and he had returned to his parents’ fury. An entire summer of thrown phones and yelling and grabbing and punishments. They had called him a feral child, a changeling, ungrateful, spiteful, monster.
Last night, they had threatened to ban him from Wickwood Academy. To send him somewhere else for his last year. They were trying to take the forest away from him. They were trying to take Andrew from him.
And that’s when the monster came.
Thomas stood up. He washed his hands in the sink. His sleeves were stained with blood, so he had to scrub at them particularly hard with soap. For some reason, he couldn’t quite get his hands to stop shaking.
A monster. It was fine. Andrew loved monsters.
He packed only the barest of essentials. His sketchbook. His ink pens.
He didn’t check his reflection in the mirror when he left. He didn’t want to look and see a hulking thing with glowing eyes and wolf teeth and red-tipped claws. He didn’t want to know.
Instead, he got on a bus.
In the forest behind Wickwood Academy, a hulking figure peeled away from the tree line. It had long, elongated fingers with too many joints. Its head was a matted, bloody wolf head with scribbles for eyes. It shambled onto the main road and began to walk.
Cars passed by, but no one noticed the thing except for the occasional child in the backseat, who would have nightmares of the forest for weeks.