Lar ||| Buffy & Angel

Tidal
by Lar

Email: HERE
Rating: PG-13
Improv: vanilla, ocean, cotton, sympathy
Author's Notes: Somewhere along the line, this fic went so far south of where it started that I threw away the original and stopped fighting the voice in my head. I've never written this character before. You may read this and see why. But here it is, and perhaps now the voice will stop howling.

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Blood moon.

He could feel it calling the wolf part of him, even now in the last minutes of daylight. He stood, still as the forest around him, and listened to the things it said to him. He was sweating lightly and the breeze tickled the fine hairs on his forearms, made him shiver with a chill that went deeper than he would admit.

Why not let it go, he asked himself. Why not let it have him, let his wolfself be loose and run free? The moon whispered now, as the change tried to take him, and he knew that if he continued to fight, soon the sound would change to a shriek. The ocean of his wolfblood was drawn inexorably to the pull of the moon, and really, what did he have to lose now?

Every reason he had to resist was long gone, far behind him in miles and memories. He used to have love and friends worth protecting, he had had hope. There was a past there that he could only take out and look at once in a while, only when the moon was a thin sliver and the wolf was content to sleep. When he tried to look at other times, the wolf would eat those parts of him that held and bound it tight.

He had a sudden vision of simpler times, and wept. He cried for events ordinary and plain, the reminiscences of a life as sweet and pure as vanilla ice cream, when he had a reason to fight the needs of the wolf. Laughter, music, purpose. Nights spent in carnal worship of female flesh so innocent of the possibilities it presented him. Heart tied to heart. They had been his pack, the humans he loved and who accepted him, and perhaps that had been his salvation. He had been a piece of the whole and the wolf understood that, understood the belonging part and it had been easier to assuage the tide.

He shuddered now all over as the moon pulled him closer. "Alone, alone," it taunted him, beckoning the beast with silvered promises of nights made for running and hunting and eating...and eating. His skin crawled and itched as fur strained to come forth, and bones grew, and joints popped. His whole body *ached* with the change. Yearned and longed to take its true form, to shed the prison of false flesh. To be free.

With a moan that he didn't even hear, he stripped off the shirt and popped the waistband of his pants. Already the dark line of hair on his belly was widening, growing thicker. He pushed the jeans from his hips, the silky fur filling in so quickly he never felt the chill of the air in the darkness that fell all around him. As if the wolf gave him this comfort in final sympathy for the form the boy was sacrificing.

Even the animals around him seemed to wait for it, scurrying and silent and hidden. He dropped to his knees, looking for all the world like a lost boy crying in the eerily silent woods. But as the change charged through him, as he lost his human shape, the image turned from innocent to primordial beast. The only sounds in the forest now were the tearing-cotton echoes of flesh as it stretched and ripped to take new shapes, the growls of the beast as it gained what it sought, and the dying cries of a soul lost to the wilderness of innermost, undeniable urges.

When he howled now, it was to a moon that offered him salvation. "Within me, loup garoux," it murmured, "always within me."

~end



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