Memory Drabbles

[ukan]

RUTHLESS

Con is as tall as Lark, but built of more muscle, and he's a little younger. He smiles easily, and he's young enough to let in light to every room he enters with the sheer strength of his optimism. The rest of the pack is made up of lawyers closer to Lark's age, or soldiers just back from the war; Con is untouched by the tedium and compromise of the legal system, or the utter hell of fighting for richer, lazier men.

Given a few years though, and a little experience that Lark could generate for him, Con would be one hell of a leader. Despite his innocence, the pack loves him already. So here, now, in Lark's pack, Con is a threat. There are plans that he trips over because he doesn't listen when Lark pushes him away. There are secrets he could expose, and thereby endanger Lark and the rest of the pack.

What Lark does is draw him closer. He teaches him the principles of war, which govern everything as surely as any law of physics. And when Con understands them, when he picks them up just as quickly and naturally as Lark suspected he would, Lark begins to break these principles in small but glaring ways.

What he needs is for Con to believe the pack would be safer under his hand rather than Lark's. It only takes a month. That's how fast a young man can go from mere recruit to thinking he can take whatever he wants if he can justify it with selflessness.

Lark was challenged
that night there was no moon.
The pack had seen and felt it
coming and building.
Lark was a man when it started,
wolf when it ended.
Con tried to cut him with a knife
coming in through the front door
but with perfect liquid grace,
Lark slipped past the weapon's edge
grabbed Con's hand and bent it back.
The blade flew through the Ruscha.
Teeth gleamed bare and sharp...
Con was a man when it started,
he wasn't much by the time it was done.

...

Lark has to have his pack tight.

Poor fucking Con, he was strong and he was proud,
Lark liked him fine but the pack is stronger now,
they're solid.
"Thank you, Con," he thinks to himself
as he puts on cuff links, straightens his tie.

Comments

Pup; cw mention of alcoholism, violence

[ukan]

She is a big part of your life now, the hot days spent working under her careful eye, the humid nights spent in her bed. But she is not the only part.

The pack is seven strong right now, including you. For them, for Tati, this is as good as it's ever been. They have enough hands working on cars and pulling in money (most of it your money, from your high profile job as a litigator) that they relax.

You don't.

On the weekends you take the boys who aren't occupied with Tati or Violet, and you all go into the city and rob pimps. One of the dogs gets shot one night, before the rest of you can help him. He recovers but before he comes thieving with you again, you have to convince him up front and subliminally that it's a moral venture. It doesn't take long; you get along well and the man once wanted to be a cop. He has a white knight complex--which unfortunately is how he ends up dying for you six months later.

But before that, you wake up before dawn every single day and you go to work, where your secretary avoids eye contact. Where even your boss goes silent and tucks his chin when you're around now--protecting his throat without realizing it. You work your ass off. You pulled in 60 hours a week when Brad was alive. Now, with the pack, with this new strength, you pull 80. Then you go home and you run with monsters, and if you're lucky, after you've all eaten your fill, you crawl into bed with your queen. If you're unlucky you lie on the floor with the others and listen to her enjoying someone else.

At work, someone makes a weak joke about burning the candle at both ends because they all think you've switched from Jim Beam to cocaine. He makes a rude sniffing sound and laughs. You give him a single look, and he never says another word in your presence again.

Not that you give him the opportunity. Two months later, you go to his house on four legs and you rip his throat out and keep biting and biting at him as he bleeds out on his expensive white carpet.

You take everything of value in his home, not because you need it, but because fuck him. You don't want any of this shit. You don't want anything anymore but blood and sex and the smell of other people's fear. If you had your freedom, your own pack, maybe it would be different, but you don't.

Tati is the thing that brings you down to earth again, over and over, whether you want him to or not. His eyes are that kind, his teeth are that sharp.

You come in after you've left the body. You give the cash and the expensive watches and the gold and silver to Tati, and even though you've showered since the murder, you reek of blood. You know you do. So does the loot.

You watch him as he looks in the bag and sighs and sets it down. "Where is it? Where's the body?"

"I took care of it."

It's one of the only times you will ever see Tati angry, and despite yourself, it is frightening. "Where is it?"

Too bad for him you can hear the concern in his voice. Too bad for Tati, you know he cares about you. He's waiting out your grief, and he'll be as patient as it takes.

You take him back to that house in the suburbs and you show him what you've done. On the ride down you even tell him why (I felt like it). And you expect Tati to do...something. To be angry again. To punish you. But instead he shows you the ways a lycanthrope can hide all the damning evidence in a crime scene. He's trying to help you, and you can see that.

You just don't care. You can't. Because what you actually got from that bloodied apartment is the name of a bank. Right now it's just a potentially useful scrap, and the first thing you're keeping to yourself since the change.

But someday, it's where you will steal back your mind and your freedom.