fic: in the morning light (ficuary)

[csi_sanders1129]

Title: in the morning light
Chapters: 1/1
Author:csi_sanders1129
Genre: Drama.
Ratings: T
Word Count: 2285
Pairings/Characters: Jimmy/Bo
Synopsis: In which Jimmy is still a werewolf and the days after transformations are a nightmare.
Comments: Written for Ficuary 2021, Prompt: Hangover. Set post-movie. Pretend the awful werewolves in the movie transform into like actual wolves instead of… that. Comments and kudos would be awesome. Enjoy!

The first time Jimmy transforms after the Werewolf Incident, he's fueled mostly by panic and fear. This time, it hits with very little warning. Not like the symptoms he and Ellie experienced leading up to that first time, but he supposes, he probably should have wondered why the abilities lycanthropy had granted him hadn't really gone away, even if they'd leveled out a bit. When he realizes what is happening to him, he bails on a planned movie night with Bo and Brooke and opts to run wildly around the woods in an attempt to limit any damage he might cause. In the morning, he wakes up naked in his backyard and somehow manages to get himself back into his room without getting the cops called on him.

This isn't happening. Can't be happening. They killed Jake, they stopped it. His boosted senses tell him Ellie is downstairs making breakfast, which means she didn't spend her night the same way he did. Zipper's asleep on his bed and not wildly crashing through doors. That's about when he realizes that he's the only one still afflicted. But why? He wracks his mind for an answer, but that's asking a lot of it at the moment, so it's not surprising that it takes a while to come up with an explanation. And then it hits him…

He bit Jake.

During the fight, he'd clamped his jaws down on Jake's shoulder in some wolfy instinct, to try to keep the man from killing Ellie as she'd driven the silver into his heart. Something about that had to have undone the cure, re-infected Jimmy with no way to undo it.

Shit.

He drags himself into a shower, where he washes off the dirt and blood? and rabbit fur? until the water runs clear again. He drags himself back to bed, curls up under the covers and wills his body to stop hurting, a bone deep ache like the worst kind of flu, wracking chills and too much heat, so exhausted he can't even keep his eyes open while his body desperately tries to recalibrate.

It floors him for a solid three days.

He plays it off like he actually has a bad flu when Ellie calls him down for breakfast and then again when Bo shows up to offer him the usual ride to school. He sort of hopes maybe it was all just some very vivid fever dream, that it didn't really happen at all, that it couldn't have.

Right?

---

When the transformation happens again the next month, Jimmy's a little more prepared for it. Physically, at least, if not mentally. There are no plans to bail on this time because he's tried to keep away from Bo and Brooke as much as possible since last month's surprise change. No sense in letting either of them get too close to him when he's going to turn into a volatile monster every month – he's sure they wouldn't want to be around him if they knew.

He heads out to the woods when the sun is about to set, stashes some spare clothes and emergency supplies somewhere safe and waits for the wolf to take over. Much to Jimmy's dismay, it does, and when he comes back to himself at sunrise, he's jarred at finding a familiar red Camaro idling nearby.

Oh, no.

He's afraid of what the wolf could have done – what he could have done to Bo.

Jimmy makes a slow approach to the car, steadfastly avoids using his wolf senses to feel things out because he's dreading what he'll find there. But, when he finally does get close enough, he only finds Bo there waiting for him. "You ready to go home?" the other boy calmly asks, getting out of the car and leaning back against it like this is no big deal.

Relief floods into him, relief and anger and fear, because he could have killed Bo or turned him into a monster, too, and he wouldn't have been able to stop it in either case "You idiot! What the fuck are you doing here?" he demands, pinning Bo against the car.

"Hey, relax," Bo tells him, even though that's not possible. "I realized why you've been acting so weird lately. I followed you out here last night to see if I was right, and I figured you might need a ride home. I brought coffee?" Bo offers, "And breakfast?"

Coffee and breakfast sound amazing (even though he's reasonably certain the wolf ate most of a deer over the course of the night), and so does the ride home (all the sooner he can get to a shower, get to bed), but his heart's still racing in his chest. "You shouldn't have come out here – I could have…"

But Bo knows where he's going, heads off his concerns. "I waited until sunrise before I came back," he assures him. "I've only been here a few minutes."

That's… better, Jimmy figures. Still not great, given he'd been trying to keep Bo away from all of this, but better. He releases his hold on the other boy and wanders off to grab his bag of supplies. He cleans himself up as much as possible with a towel and a bottle of water, gets dressed and then returns to Bo, still waiting. He climbs into the passenger's seat, where the warmth from the heater helps chase off the chill from the winter morning air. "Thanks," he manages, downing half of his coffee in a single gulp.

"You're my friend, Jimbo," Bo tells him, backing the car back onto the road, "You're not getting rid of me that easily, werewolf or no."

With the adrenaline rush of finding Bo there with him gone, the exhaustion of the transformation hits him hard, and he's sound asleep before Bo even gets them out of the hills.

Bo, obligingly, drags him into the house, up the stairs. Jimmy mumbles something about a shower and Bo helps him with that, too, before he wrangles him down the hall into his room, into fresh clothes, into his bed, and leaves him to sleep off another bout of 'flu'.

---

They go through two more months similarly, with Bo dropping Jimmy off at sunset and picking Jimmy up at sunrise when the wolf is done with him. He keeps a bag of supplies stashed in his trunk, and he always shows up with coffee and breakfast waiting for him. And, while this solves the problem of Jimmy waking up naked in places he shouldn't be, it does not solve the utterly grueling process of recovering from the transformations.

Not long after Bo leaves him for the night of the next full moon, though, something breaks through Jimmy's awareness. His name, shouted from some distance away by someone familiar. The wolf scents the air and Jimmy picks out the familiar smell amidst the cacophony of forest odors – Bo.

Jimmy runs, the wolf for once along for the ride.

He finds Bo on the other side of the woods, and while he's clearly a little stunned by Jimmy's abrupt appearance, the wolf picks up on no indication that the other boy is afraid of him. "I wasn't sure if you'd come or not," Bo says, keeping his voice calm and even, likely unsure if he's actually talking to Jimmy or the wolf. "When I left, I drove by a bunch of hunters going to look for the wolf that's been killing the deer in the woods lately. I figure it's better for you and for them if you don't meet. So, maybe stay here with me tonight?"

He's not sure that's a good idea. He doesn't know how long he can retain this level of awareness before the wolf takes over again – it will want to run, it will want to hunt. But, surprisingly, the wolf doesn't fight. Better safe than sorry, though, so Jimmy nudges the Camaro's back door and Bo opens it for him without question. There's a baseball bat on the floor there, and Jimmy picks it up in powerful jaws, drops it at Bo's feet with a pointed look. It won't be enough to stop him if Jimmy loses control, but it might be able to buy Bo enough time to get in the car and get the hell away from him.

"If you insist," Bo says, taking it in hand. "That a yes, then?"

Jimmy tries to talk, but the words don't come out as anything more than a weird grumble of a growl. He nods his head, instead, and sits.

Bo's still reasonably cautious, faced with a very sizable wolf, but he sits, too. Weirdly, the wolf wants to be closer, so Jimmy warily allows it, lies down at Bo's side beside the car, and finds himself resisting the urge to roll on his side like he's some dog asking for belly rubs.

Jimmy notices that Bo's stopped himself from reaching out to touch him more than once, likely resisting the urge to offer pets just as Jimmy (or the wolf, at least) has been resisting the urge to seek them out. With a huff, he nudges Bo's hand with his nose until he gets the hint. Bo drags his fingers through the shaggy brown fur on his neck for a moment before the wolf lets out a happy groan and flops over, completely unwilling to let Jimmy stop the move any longer.

Bo laughs and continues petting, "some big, bad wolf you are," he teases.

Jimmy offers a disgruntled warning growl, but doesn't move.

He finds the wolf content and cooperative as the night goes on, he finds no urge to run or hunt or even to devour something meaty and bloody and raw, as is usually the case. The wolf seems quite happy to just stay here until sunrise, curled up against Bo's side, head resting on the other boy's leg, Bo's fingers stroking absently through the thick fur on his back until it lulls him to sleep.

When Jimmy shifts back at sunrise, he finds himself still sprawled across Bo's sleeping form. At some point, Bo threw a blanket over him, which he appreciates even if Jimmy has no modesty left where Bo is concerned.

For once, he isn't left with a weird void of lost time. He remembers last night, remembers Bo calling for him, remembers (unfortunately) the petting, remembers how content the wolf was with Bo's presence and the control Jimmy had over the situation.

"Jimbo?" Bo asks, yawning himself awake when Jimmy moves away to fetch his cloths from the trunk. Bo blinks up at him when he reappears, fully dressed, "You don't look nearly as exhausted as you usually do."

It occurs to him then that he doesn't feel nearly as exhausted as he usually does, either. Weird. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that he wasn't sprinting around the woods all night, taking down deer? Or maybe it has something to do with Bo? Maybe both.

"I think something changed," he says, "I think the wolf and I are finally coexisting? I was aware of what was happening for once."

Bo gets to his feet, throws the blanket and the very much unneeded bat back into the backseat. "Good to know you were in there, that you don't just become a bizarrely cuddly wolf in your off time."

"Lucky for you, the wolf likes you," Jimmy counters, fully prepared to face continued teasing for the petting situation.

Bo raises a curious eyebrow, "Only the wolf?"

"No, definitely not just the wolf," Jimmy answers easily. There's a reason Bo's the one who ended up at his side for all the werewolf stuff, there's a reason the wolf likes him as much as it does. He knows better than to think it was the curse that drew Bo to him now – whatever allure it had allegedly given him certainly hadn't drawn anyone else, hadn't kept Brooke around when he started bailing on plans and being weirdly evasive. Just Bo, who's done nothing but try to help at every turn.

Werewolf senses give him a clear advantage here, because he can hear the subtle pick up in Bo's heartbeat as the words register, he can sense the subtle shifts in the way Bo smells, too, buried under the layers of his own scent all over him courtesy of a fair amount of shed wolf fur.

Even without werewolf senses, though, he knows enough from the way the other boy's skin lightly blushes. Bo offers a beaming smile that Jimmy can't resist and asks, just a little bit wary of the answer, "yeah?"

"Yeah," he agrees, grabbing a fistful of Bo's shirt and pulling him across the minimal distance left between them for a sound kiss. Bo fumbles for a second, but promptly joins in, clinging to Jimmy just as desperately as Jimmy is clinging to him. "Sorry it took me so long to figure it out," he says, during a brief break in a series of rapidly escalating kisses.

Bo shrugs, "I think you have plenty of time to make it up to me, Jimbo," he answers.

Jimmy has a feeling he's right about that.

---

It turns out that those rough mornings after wolf nights get a hell of a lot easier when Bo is around. The wolf doesn't insist on burning off quite so much energy when Bo camps out in his car overnight, readily available for snuggling and also for snacks in lieu of chasing down live prey), and Jimmy fairs much better when he and Bo go back to his room to sleep off the long night curled up in bed together.