Fic: Wolf At Your Door

[csi_sanders1129]

Title: Wolf At Your Door
Chapters: 1/1 (maybe more later)
Author: csi_sanders1129
Genre: Angst. Drama.
Ratings: T
Word Count: 1,854
Pairings/Characters: Jason Morgan
Synopsis: It happens on May 19, 2000.
Comments: Response to gh_unwrapped prompt #109: Werewolves, Vampires & Witches. Actually wrote this a while ago. It’s meant to be part of a longer story, but I dunno when I’ll get around to writing the rest of it, so... yeah. Recognized characters are not mine. Enjoy!



It happens on May 19, 2000.

It is not a dark and stormy night. In fact, it is quite brisk out this evening, and Jason Morgan is just one of many pedestrians out enjoying it. Despite, the crowds in the town’s center, he’s found himself relatively alone on the way back to his apartment.

He’s been living in Berlin for close to three months now, after jumping from place to place for a time before settling on one locale. He’s still not ready to make his return to Port Charles, he’s not sure when that will happen. But, he’s grown comfortable in his new home, away from all of the things he wants to forget about.

“Help!” He hears, the frantic shout immediately capturing his attention. Jason finds himself following the sound to a dark alleyway off of a vacant street. The voice that’s shouting for help is female, and sounds quite in distress. He rushes forward faster. “Someone please!”

He turns the corner, though he doesn’t quite know what he expects to see happening. What he finds, however, is definitely not it.

The large figure looming over the girl, barely a teenager, he would hazard to guess, looks too large and threatening to be human. “Hey!” He shouts at the offender, hoping to scare the guy away so that the girl can escape.

It – and it is an ‘it’, not a ‘he’ or a ‘she’ - turns toward him with a wicked snarl, and it is then that Jason realizes that it doesn’t look human because it is not, in fact, human. It turns out to be a very large wolf.

“Please!” The girl begs, wide, terrified eyes on her would-be rescuer. “Please, you’ve got to help me!” She sobs out in pure terror.

Jason does what he always does – he tries to help. He surges forward into the unlit depths of the alley, and somehow he manages to knock the wall of pure muscle off of the girl and to the ground. His gun, always, always on him, comes out and he fires a shot at the animal.

It yelps but seems otherwise unaffected by the wound. For his efforts, he receives a bite to the shoulder, large teeth sinking in deep, even as Jason struggles to fire off another round. This one, and a couple more for good measure, have similar effects as the first did, but the wolf does release him.

Before Jason can shoot again, the lupine has disappeared into the darkness.

“You okay?” Jason asks the girl, still sobbing a few feet away from him. He’s glad she yelled out for help in English otherwise this conversation might not go so smoothly, he doesn’t know the German translation of ‘attacked by a wolf,’ having never had occasion to use such a statement. He stumbles to his feet, a little off balance due to the bite wound on his shoulder, but more concerned for the girl than for himself. He offers her the hand that doesn’t have blood dripping down it and helps her to her unsteady feet.

Through her sniffles, the girl nods. “I, ugh, yes. Thank you.” She sees his bloodied shirt in the dim lighting. “A-are you?”

“I’ll be fine.” He insists. “What happened?”

“That, that thing came out of nowhere. I was just walking home and it chased me down here and, and… I was so scared…”

Jason hushes her, trying to calm her down so she doesn’t go into full blown hysterics. “It’s okay. You’re okay. Can I take you home or something? Somewhere?” He offers helpfully.

“I… need to get home.” She tells him, looking at the watch that broke in the struggle. “I’m Leah, by the way.”

“Jason.” He answers, leading her toward the mouth of the alley, back to the still-vacant street. “Come on, I’ll make sure you get home safe.”

By the time Jason does finally get the young girl home to her parents that night, and then back to his own place, it’s quite late, and he’s more than ready to just fall into bed and sleep for the next week, but he has to check out his injuries. Surprisingly, he finds that the wound on his shoulder isn’t as bad as he’d thought it would be. He carefully tugs his ruined t-shirt over his head to reveal the fang marks from the wolf, but they don’t seem as deep as they had felt during the attack.

Shrugging it off, and also tired from the worn off effects of a massive adrenaline burst, he showers and then promptly dresses the wound before he climbs into bed. As he drifts off, he offhandedly hopes that it didn’t have rabies.

***

Several days later, and Jason is utterly convinced that the damned wolf had something, though he’s not entirely sure it was something as normal as rabies.

There’d been nothing by way of news reports concerning a wolf in the city anywhere, nothing even about the attack, just the occasional strange death or murder, but none involving wolves. It was as if it had never happened. But, the main issue is the effect that the wolf’s disease is apparently having on Jason. He feels strange, though he isn’t really sure why.

The wound on his shoulder has mostly healed, even though it’s been just a couple of days. Unnerving as that might have been, it’s by far not his strangest symptom. As he nears a week since the attack, he starts smelling things. Things he’d never noticed before – like all the different components of his shampoo, or that the dog three apartments over really needs a bath. The bones in his arms and legs seem to be perpetually sore, as if he’d just been on a long workout – he figures that that one has something to do with fighting off the vicious wolf and doesn’t think much of it. But then the dreams start.

He’ll be running, running faster than he ever has before, faster than should be possible, but then again, dreams don’t actually have to make sense, do they? Running and running and running endlessly, until suddenly he realizes that he’s supposed to be looking for something. Hunting. He’s hunting something. He smells the trail of whatever it is he’s hunting, and picks up his already fast pace. Jason finds his prey in the form of a man with a wicked, maniacal smile and graying hair. He’s laughing hysterically and holding up a bloody knife and Jason has no idea what’s going on. He just knows that the stranger has to pay and suddenly he’s attacking, mauling the stranger with his bare hands.

He wakes with a start, heaving for breath as the terror of the dream’s contents filters through his mind. By the time he stumbles out of bed, he can’t remember any of it.

They happen every night, it seems. Sometimes he’s terrified to go to sleep, and Jason Morgan does not easily terrify.

***

It’s on the evening of June 17th, nearly a month after the attack, when he realizes he’s in serious trouble. The soreness in his bones seems to have returned tenfold and there’s an entirely new pain centering somewhere in his lower back. His teeth hurt, his ears itch like crazy, and he’s hearing strange noises that sound like television fuzz that seem to come from nowhere and everywhere all at once.

Contemplating the idea of going to the hospital, yet another thing that Jason Morgan does not easily do, he’s making his way out of his bedroom when it happens.

He falls to his knees as an unbearable pain swallows him up. He feels bones actually crack and shift under his skin, and muscles pulsing as they, too, shift position. His t-shirt rips for a reason he has yet to fathom, and the rest of his clothes follow a few seconds later.

He’s pretty sure he actually passed out at some point when the pain finally ceases, and he struggles to try to get to his feet only to find that he can’t get beyond the on his knees part of the process. But, he finds that his apparent inability to stand is the least of his problems at the moment. The pain in his bones and mouth may have gone, but in its wake, his stomach grumbles and rolls in protest, as if he hasn’t eaten in days.

Food, he decides. He needs food. And something down the hall smells utterly delicious.

A deep growl comes from somewhere and Jason thinks for a moment that the dreaded wolf has made a return visit to finish what it started, but then he realizes that the sound escaped from his own throat. Before he can put much thought into that strange occurrence, several more appetizing scents flood his senses.

Jason advances without even thinking it, still on his knees as he crawls -and yes, apparently Jason Morgan has resorted to crawling, of all things, something else on the shortening list of things he does not do – out into the hall, the door to his apartment creaking open silently.

The smells are so close, food is so close. The fact that there are wolf-like paws moving him forward and not his own hands registers somewhere in his mind, but its main focus is on foodfoodfood.

Suddenly he’s on the hunt, following his nose without even realizing he’s moving. Smoothly, fluidly, stealthily, he creeps up on the source of the smell. It’s coming from the apartment at the end of the hall, and no one else on the floor appears to be in.

The scent, he doesn’t know what he’s expecting, it turns out, belongs to the gaggle of folks gathered about in the small apartment. It must be a party or something, because most of them Jason doesn’t recognize and he makes a point of knowing who lives close enough to him to be a potential risk.

Before the group members are even aware of his presence, he’s on the attack, singling one out to take down, just as he had done in a few of his dreams. His target, an older man who’d wandered off into the kitchen, never sees it coming.

The guy does get out a good scream before Jason effectively slaughters him, which draws the attention of the rest of the party, unfortunately. And before he can actually enjoy more than a bite of his well-earned meal, he finds that he’s running away from the shocked shouts of the crowd.

He jumps out of a window – an impressive feat on the third floor of the building – and runs off into the shadows.

Jason finds himself a good hiding spot and pointedly forces himself to ignore the pang of hunger that stabs through him every few seconds. He sits, huddled into himself, licking the blood from his fur – since when does he have fur? – and claws – those are new, too. With a startling amount of self-control and restraint, he stays there until he passes out several hours later, knowing that he never, ever, ever wants this to happen to him again.

Comments

Love it!

[kittycrackers.livejournal.com]

Wow! That was awesome. I like how the day started off ordinary. The time stamps are nice as well. The details of the event, the bite of the wolf and how it transformed Jason are just so wonderfully done. Impressive and entertaining work. :-)

[suerum.livejournal.com]

I remember this story or at least most of it, I'm not sure if what happened at the end was in the original piece I read. I thought you were intending this to be a multiple part piece is that still your intention or is this supposed to be a stand alone story? You did an excellent job describing the slow physical and mental changes in Jason after the bite and your imagery utilized in writing his transformation into a werewolf was excellent!