Chapter Text
He drives.
Irene is safe. Benicio is safe.
Standard is dead.
He will never see any of them again, regardless.
The stab wound in his gut radiates pain, heat searing with something deeper than the burn of bruises, but he doesn’t let that bother him, either. Lets the blood seep out of him, doesn’t let himself choke on the iron smell of it.
The road stretches ahead of him, a pale river in the dark. He’s been driving for hours, is already out in the sticks of California, somewhere. Trees, tall and dense and branching, line his car to either side. They arch over his head, delicate, stars behind and caught in feathered leaves.
There’s barely a few feet of clearance between the treeline and the pavement. The movement of the car makes it into a solid, blurring wall of growth.
His eyes stick on details, every now and then: bark, a boulder, the curve of a boughed trunk, there and gone in long seconds. Always, the road ahead. There are no streetlights. The headlights aren’t on.
If he were human, it would be pitch black.
Eventually, though, the car does run out of gas.
The driver feels it coming long before it does. He knows this car and this engine, has pulled it apart and put it together so many times he could do it with his eyes closed. The gasping hitch of the engine, the way its usual purr devolves into sputters, and the high, increasingly loud whine of it, crying out to him, warn him far ahead of time.
Still, he doesn’t stop. Not until the engine finally locks up.
The road keeps running. Driver just can’t join it, anymore.
He coasts, those last precious seconds, and lets the wheels roll themselves right off the street. The trees envelop him immediately. The smell of rich earth and cooling greenery is almost solid. It’s been a while, since he let himself get so lost in it.
The car comes to a rest in a gully, bone-dry now, covered in an arching canopy of oak.
He listens to the metallic creaks of the engine as it cools. Sits there in the dark, waiting for the last sounds to peter out into nothing, for the rustle of leaves and the dry tang of dust to drown out any remaining signs of mechanical life.
Even after that, Driver opens his mouth, the better to inhale the achingly familiar comfort of smooth leather and grease. He doesn’t want to forget it.
The wound keeps bleeding. It’s already stained the seat and a good portion of the foot well, the viscous drip of it sunk deep into the crevices.
Driver opens the door.
He doesn’t feel anything, when he peels away soaked clothes. The fabric sticks, tacky and already stiff in places, but this is easier than doing it later. It’s a clinical sort of process; Driver won’t really remember it, later.
The terror of the elevator has faded into a high-pitched, pale noiselessness, like the whine of a broken tv. Everything else is buried under it.
White satin, as smooth as silk and cool as ever between his fingers, is what breaks through, a little. There’s a huge tear in the coat. The bottom half is almost black.
It used to smell like the garage, a little like lilies, like all the best parts of his life.
It just smells like blood, now.
Driver doesn’t know how much time he loses, holding it.
He leaves it in the car.
The forest is quiet, when he stumbles his way deeper into it. A ringing, tidal wave of nothingness threatens to overwhelm him, but even that feels oddly distant. This body of his, tall and broken and with all its weight settled in all the wrong places, feels distant, too. It always has, to some degree; the skin he’s worn these past few years never did fit the way it should, the way it seemed to for everyone else.
These two legs he walks on aren’t the right shape, for wandering the wilds at night.
He doesn’t catch himself, next time he trips. But he doesn’t fall on his face, either.
The shift is easy. It always is, this way around.
Thin metacarpals and fluted metatarsals lengthen just as phalanges shorten, the liquid pull of bones sliding into place. Shoulders tilt down, bearing the weight of a longer spine and a heavier skull, as thick fur prickles out in sweeping waves down his back and down his forearms. The skeletons aren’t that unrelated; the change isn’t all that jarring. Driver’s had a lifetime to get used to it. His head is always the strangest part, but Driver welcomes the feel of sharp teeth fitting in a sharper face.
He slips from one shape to another like a glide through water, like a ribbon through loose fingers. For him, the two have never been that far apart.
When he hits the ground, he hits it on four legs. The skin he feels more suited to, all warm fur and too-sharp senses fitted in the body they’re meant for, settles around him the same way a favored coat used to.
He’s never seen himself as one or the other, parts never separate the way they should be, the way that makes him disquieting to be around, but the wolf has always been easier to bear.
It’s easier now, with this narrow chest and lower gravity, to slip through the underbrush like he was made for it. Easy, to disappear again.
All he is is a wild dog of war.
Might as well live like it.