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starry-bi-sky · 4 months

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(Part of this post with older brother danyal al ghul)

...Okay, look. Sam knows she's staring. She knows very well that she is staring. And that if she doesn't stop staring it's gonna draw her unwanted attention, and that will only have to make her explain why she's staring. Which she doesn't want to do.

She's trying not to stare, which she thinks she should get brownie points for. She tries to look away, to find a spot on the wall to stare lifelessly at, maybe she can burn holes into some of these annoying socialites' heads. But eventually her eyes drift, and suddenly she's back to staring again.

Can you blame her though? Damian Wayne looks like a very close mini-me of her fucking best friend. Seriously, it's like looking into a mirror to the past. If that mirror to the past had green eyes rather than blue and a distinctive lack of a facial scar.

The first time she sees him when her parents drag her over to Bruce Wayne to butter up to him she has to do a doubletake. Then a triple take. Then a quadruple take, just for good measure that she was seeing what she was actually seeing. She was sure she looked like one of those stress toys that when squeezed had their eyes pop out comically like a Saturday morning cartoon, that's what she certainly felt like anyways.

Look, Danny's come a decent way from being that scowl-y, jerkish little ten year old she first met when he arrived like the wind to Amity Park five years ago (even if he was still occasionally scowl-y and jerkish), but one thing that's stayed the same is how reserved he is about his home life prior to being taken in by the Fentons.

He doesn't talk about it much, and Sam's come to know that he's very good at changing the subject when it gets brought up. Even after being friends for nearly four years, the only thing she and Tuck know for certain is that he has a little brother that he refers to as 'starlight', whom he cares a lot about but left on really bad terms with. And that he's never met his father, but wants to and knows who he is.

He's never told her or Tucker who he was though, and glancing at Bruce Wayne, Sam is realizing why. She can begrudgingly acknowledge all the good he's done for Gotham, but... well, if Danny told her that Bruce Wayne was his dad, she wouldn't have believed him at all.

But she's starting to see the resemblance, as subtle as it is.

And she sees the resemblance to Damian Wayne, her eyes dropping back down to him as he wears a very Danny-like scowl on his face, arms crossed behind his back as his eyes swept around the ballroom. He was five years younger than Danny, and god it was so, so weird.

His eyes turned on to her, and they locked gazes for a moment.

Involuntarily, Sam makes a startled noise and looks away. Fingers tap against her purse, black and purple and unfortunately a clutch that only held her phone and her wallet in it. She would have kept a knife on her, but her parents put their foot down and there was a security detail at the door. Only in Gotham.

Silently, she was hoping that the little Danny-me didn't say anything. Or at least, he hadn't noticed her staring. Which was a tall order if she ever heard one -- and unfortunately, her silent prayers went unanswered as her mother's eyes dropped down onto her.

"Did you say something, Samantha?" She asks in a sickeningly sweet voice, a sound that makes Sam's skin crawl. Her dad and Bruce Wayne's attention also turns onto her, and she glowers at her mom from the corner of her eye.

"I didn't say anything." Sam says, barely keeping her tone polite as she turned her head away. Her mother clucks her tongue, disapproving, but from her peripherals doesn't pester her more

Bruce Wayne, the bastard, takes that time to turn to Sam and grace her with his dime-a-dozen billboard smiles. "I've been talking with your parents this whole time, Miss Manson, you must be terribly bored. How is your schooling going?"

Sam eyes him up and down. On one hand, she immediately wants to be snarky. It's none of his business what her school life is like, she doesn't care for his fucking small talk.

On the other hand, this was Danny's whole father. Someone who she knows that Danny has wanted to meet for, what she's assuming, his whole life. He's never brought it up much, but she remembers that very quiet, solemn conversation she and Tucker had with him where he admits to having never met his dad. But god does he want to.

And... wait. Sam's eyes narrow, and she meets Bruce Wayne's eyes. Does this man even know Danny exists? She drops her gaze down to Damian, who was staring at her suspiciously, and then back up to Bruce, and she alternates between them.

Why was Damian living with Bruce, but not Danny? Why hasn't Bruce done anything to reach out to him - what was going on with Danny's biological family that Danny had to be separated from them, but not Damian? Danny's always been kinda mysterious, but now things weren't adding up.

Was Danny given up? Does Bruce just not want Danny, but wanted Damian? Why the fuck does Bruce Wayne know about Damian but not her best friend -- or does he know and just not care? He's fought for custody for his adoptive kids before, does he just not want to fight for his other biological son? Does he think Danny's not worth it?

She's never cared much about the Wayne family before, other than to hear about the advancements on WE's eco-friendly tech, but Sam thinks she's gonna have to look into why Damian Wayne was living with the Waynes.

Slowly, with a protective anger beginning to burn in her gut and crawl up her throat, a scowl slowly curls at the corner of her lip as she redirects her glare from her mother onto Bruce. "It's going fine," She says curtly, jutting her chin out defiantly. "Me and my friend Danny started a petition to fix the leaky faucets in the girls and boys' bathrooms in order to conserve more water for the rest of the city."

She eyes his face, waiting to see if anything like recognition flashes through it. And- and nothing. Sam breathes in slowly through her nose, trying to quell the red that's blurring the edge of her vision -- does he just, not know where Danny is?

Her parents however, make vaguely displeased expressions. "Our Samantha is... quite passionate about her pet projects." Her dad says, laughing low and nervously, "she's very vocal about silly things like that."

"Her friend Daniel is perhaps even worse than she is sometimes." Her mother adds on, fanning her face with her perfectly manicured hands with a sigh. "I swear, he's the one that keeps dragging her into these things."

Sam's anger turns on its head, and she whirls on her heel like a fire-breathing dragon. "It's Danyal." It rolls out like instinct. Danny's told them both that he hates the Americanized pronunciation of his name, but in a rare moment of restraint, puts up with it for reasons unknown to her. "And Danny doesn't make me do anything, it was my idea."

The name, Danyal, seems to ring some kind of bell in Brucie Wayne's head, because she sees him and Damian quietly perk up like two cats pricking up their ears. Her eyes flick onto him immediately, something dangerous rearing its head. So Bruce Wayne knows about Danny. And he's not reaching out to him. Is he? She's not sure.

She does know that she's gonna rip his throat out if she finds out that he's known about Danny this entire time and has been ignoring him while favoring his little brother. She'll hunt down Aragon herself and steal his dragon-shifting amulet and wreck house on Bruce Wayne if that's the case. Batman and his league of vigilantes be damned. Her parents don't notice her slowly turning head towards Bruce.

But Bruce does, and she makes direct eye contact with him. His smile doesn't falter, he just tilts his head like a curious puppy and looks at Sam's parents. She hopes Bruce can read minds, she hopes he can hear her threatening him.

"Danyal?" He asks, and Sam doesn't know if she hates the fact that he said it correctly or not. She just continues burning holes into him and hoping he might spontaneously combust.

Her mother waves her hand dismissively, tilting her nose up poshly into the air. "Our dear Samantha's little... foster friend from school," she says, not even bothering to hide her disdain, "a creepy little boy with the most garish scar on his face. He's a rude little thing, not good for polite company."

Scratch that, Sam mentally alternates between ripping into her parents and Bruce. She whirls on them. "Do not talk about Danny that way." She all but snarls, and they all but ignore her.

(She's tearing up the upholstery when she gets home. She's going to paint over the fine china. She's going to do something to make them pay for this.)

"Oh yes, he was taken in by that freaky Fenton family a few years ago." Her dad continues in lieu of her mom, and they both shake their heads disapprovingly. "It's just what our city needs, another menace."

"Danny is not a menace." Sam continues, raising her voice while her hands shake with rage. Her parents finally look at her, but she can already tell that they're going to scold her for raising her voice. She bulldozes over them and jabs her black-painted finger at them. "He's got a bigger heart than the both of you combined."

"Samantha, please." her mom says, exasperated. They both give her disapproving looks, Sam thinks about grabbing champagne off the tray of a nearby waiter and throwing it in their faces. "You defend that boy far too much. What do you actually know about him and his family?"

Sam sets her jaw, puffing herself up like a dragon protecting its hoard. She steps into her mom's space. "I know that he loves the stars; you can ask him anything about astronomy and he could give you an entire lecture on the formation, class types, and various gasses that stars are made up of. He can tell you how the Earth was formed, he can tell you about the visible light spectrum and about light curves, and a whole ton of other stuff that I don't really understand. But Danny loves talking about it."

Her face twists and scowls, "I know he cares a ton about the environment and about fixing light pollution, and preserving the forests and natural habitats of animals." She nearly jabs her finger into her mom's chest, "I know he loves dogs, and that there's one he feeds every day on the way to school that he calls Cujo, its a St. Bernard puppy and Danny carries him around whenever he sees him after school, and is in the middle of training him."

It's not a total lie, but it's not the whole truth either. Cujo doesn't need food, but Danny gives him it anyways. "I know he likes spicy food and loves movies but specifically only sci-fi and horror, and he hates most martial arts movies. His favorite superhero is the Martian Manhunter, but Batman comes in at a close second." For reasons to her that were pretty unknown, but it didn't matter.

"I know he loves wordplay and making puns, which I would have never expected from him when we first met, but it's so unbelievably Danny-like that I can't imagine him not making puns." And she smiles a little to herself, she remembers the first time Danny intentionally made a pun once and it got startled laughs out of both her and Tucker.

Her smile suddenly falters, and she swallows. Her lips purse up, wobbling, and she very quickly glances over to Damian Wayne, of whom is watching her with a vaguely bewildered expression alongside Bruce.

She turns her eyes back onto her parents. "And I know that he worries a lot, even if he has a shit way of showing it. I know he had a little brother that he hasn't seen since he was adopted by the Fentons, and he doesn't talk about him often but when he does he he calls him 'starlight'." From the corner of her eye, she sees Damian jerk.

"So- so, so what if he's not 'good for polite company'." Sam's voice, embarrassingly, cracks down the middle. But she's so angry over Danny's behalf that she doesn't really care. "Or that he can be mean, and critical, and stubborn. He's learning, and he's becoming kinder by the day. That's more than I can say about you."

(She remembers when Danny finally admitted to her and Tucker being his 'closest friends'. It was sometime before the portal incident, and it felt like a milestone because beforehand he only really referred to them as his companions or allies.)

(At the time, he'd looked unsure of himself. Skittish like a stray in the back of an alleyway, almost shy in his own way. It had come out stilted, slow, like an infant taking its first steps, and it would have been endearing if it hadn't been heartbreaking.)

Her parents rear back like she'd struck them, and her mother holds a hand against her chest in aghast. Sam doesn't care, she blinks the sting out of her eyes. "Samantha." Her mother starts.

Sam cuts her off, "I don't care what you have to say, you-- you pricks." she snaps, around her, there are gasps. Belatedly, she realizes she's grown an audience, but again she doesn't care. "Danny might be an asshole, but he cares. And I'd rather be around someone whose mean but cares, than someone whose nice but doesn't."

With that, she whirls on her foot and turns on Bruce Wayne, who has been silent the entire time with a surprised expression on his face. He starts to shake out of it when Sam turns to him, but she doesn't give him the chance to speak. "Enjoy your party." She snarls, and then stalks away.

#dpxdc #dp x dc #dp x dc crossover #danny fenton is not the ghost king #dpxdc crossover #dpdc #danyal al ghul au #older brother danny #sam is one protective gal. this scene went differently in my head. way differently. but alas. i am not complaining.#sam: if bruce wayne abandoned my best friend i'm gonna physically transform myself into a dragon and incinerate him. how dare he.#bruce and damian got to watch in real time as a random girl who knows danny suddenly realizes he's related to them. which is comical to me #because she suddenly goes from being disinterested but weirded out by damian. to suddenly looking at bruce like she's gonna kill him #which is very funny to me bc from their pov at first its like this random girl just speedran hating bruce. and then her parents bring up he #friend danny and then she calls him danyal. and suddenly its starting to click into place like 'oh fuck wait we may just have a lead on --#-- finding danyal and his whereabouts.' especially after sam's mom mentions the scar on his face. like wow. what a crazy ten minutes.#not seen but def happened: sam gets her phone out to go text danny in the corner. she's not gonna bring up the bruce thing yet. she needs #a pick me up. related note: danny and tucker know she's gone to some gala thing with her parents but not to a wayne gala. if danny had know #he may have told her that he was related to damian wayne. just to prepare her for that. not so sure on the writing in this one folks #but i also dont wanna go through and edit anything its like half past one in the morning and i also dont wanna wait until morning to post #when i can just do it now. and get instant serotonin. i thought of this scene in various ways. like sam calling damian 'danny' out of shock #and then quickly correcting herself. and then excusing herself very quickly. or her mentioning that damian resembles her friend danny a lot #so she was just thrown off by him. because i def think that could happen if sam has no reason to think that she needs to hide danny from th #waynes. i also thought about her parents mentioning that damian resembles danny a little bit. only for one of them to go 'oh no no couldn't #- be. how insulting to damian since the daniel they know has this horrid scar on his face.' and then go from there. either way i thought #a scene like this would be fun. get to also kinda explore how danny looks like from his friends' povs. of which he is #'our lovable jerk who is an ex-cult member and whom we will maim someone over.'#not a scene that was added but i wanted to: sam mentioning in parenthesis that she and tucker think danny was part of a cult prior to the #fentons. and that sometimes danny will say something alarming and sam and tucker will stare at him until he frowns and goes #“that... isn't normal. is it?” and tucker will clap his shoulder and cheerfully go “no buddy. no it isn't” bc i think the idea is funny.#sam is so focused on the idea that bruce abandoned/ignored/was unaware of danny's existence that she momentarily forgot that bruce may have

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taz-writes · 11 months

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object memories

A fic I wrote as part of my D&D druid’s backstory that I’m in the mood to share. Do you ever write something for the sole purpose of splashing around in your own prose like a dog in a kiddie pool?

TLDR: POV character Hush and her father were held prisoner by a cult for 10 years in solitary confinement, before being ritually sacrificed. Unbeknownst to the cult, Hush wasn’t quite dead and woke up later in the mass grave mortally wounded but alive. As a druid, Hush can shapeshift into animals if she’s seen and studied them before. This fic is about how she 'discovered’ her first four wildshapes in the aftermath of her ordeal, while learning to survive alone in the wilderness and fend off the hunger that threatened to consume her.

~4,600 words; CWs: gore, animal death, take ‘em seriously I’m not kidding around. I feel like there’s also something going on here with the hunger stuff, but I truly don’t know what the fuck to even call that CW. If somebody knows, let me know lol.

The rat was the first.

She doesn’t know exactly when she reached the tipping point, but she grew intimately acquainted with the ways of the rats over the years. She spent an eternity in that dungeon, curled in the corner among her clinking chains, feeling them scurry over her in her sleep. Grew acquainted with how they move, how they think, grew used to fighting them away from what little she had to eat, bartering with them for the space, for help to stay clean, teaching them to bring her things. She watched them for generations, while they nested in the dirty little pallet that she slept on, until they were closer friends than she’d ever had among humans.

She knew them, inside and out, long before she knew how to change into anything. When she awoke in the aftermath and the wildshapes came, the rat was like a second skin. She slipped into the shape like a shield, slick with blood, and slithered out with the last of her breath.

The world outside was big.

She couldn’t heal. The first word she spoke when she took her given shape again was a rattling, empty gasp that sent sticky gore oozing through the feeble scabs over the gash in her neck. It didn’t matter how desperately she grasped for the language, how well she knew the incantation, how crisp and adamant the gestures were that should have saved her. There was no magic without sound. And her angelic heritage did little to help when whatever the source of her limited innate healing, it simply didn’t respond.

She spent the first week or so in the glade on the edge of the forest where she collapsed after running out of time as the rat. The summer heat broiled her skin, even through the shield of the canopy, leaving her parched and aching and crisp like a dead leaf. In the haze of exhaustion, she began to treat her wounds.

The sacrificial shift they’d dressed her in shredded easily. She wound long strips of it carefully around her waist and chest, stomach churning at the horrid sight of the injuries, and tied the rest as tightly as she could across her ragged neck before the pressure made her choke. Every motion left her dizzy and sick. She might have laid there on and off for hours or days or a month, languishing in the softest patch of moss she managed to find and dragging herself back and forth from the clear little stream that burbled a few yards away. As many moments as she could, she hid behind the rat again. The rat wasn’t bleeding. The rat was safe. The rat could forage, devouring whatever it could find, just enough to sustain her.

She learned the rabbits next.

Timid creatures, cautious and quick, they watched her with their wide beaded-bright eyes and darted to safety at the sound of her rattling breaths. While she waited to recover her strength between wildshapes, she watched them back, tracking the little families back and forth among the wild grasses. They were solitary, but not alone—never truly alone.

There was a nest not far from her resting place. She stumbled across the babies on her way to the stream. Their tiny forms huddled together in a depression in the grass and she looked one in the eyes and its little ears trembled, it tucked itself deeper in the shadows, bracing, and a sudden knife twisted in the center left of her stomach.

It took too long to realize it wasn’t the wound this time.

Her sunburnt skin ached desperately, throbbing to the rhythm of a heart that wasn’t hers. She fumbled past to the edge of the water and dipped her face below the surface, where the chill could bring her to her senses, but the soft curves of the current brushed their way along her cheeks like the perfect ghosts of her father’s hands.

Her lungs burned before she came back up for air.

The next time she changed, the new shape was a rescue. She was a stranger but she smelled like the glade, and the other rabbits allowed her there. In the shadowed night they huddled together, warmed by each other’s skin, and her tiny rabbit’s heart began to calm as it hadn’t before in a very long time.

She couldn’t remain forever. She was keenly aware, the longer she lingered, that she was far too close to the cult. Any member could stumble across her here, out on a forage or traveling to the compound, and she wouldn’t get another chance at freedom. She couldn’t risk it. When her stomach sealed enough that the insides of her abdomen didn’t spill to the outside after any major movement, she staggered to her feet like a newborn fawn and began the journey.

She stuck to the woods. Waterdeep was a death trap, anyone could be cult-aligned, anyone could see her and they thought she was dead but she couldn’t know who might know her face. The roads were too much of a risk, populated as they were. Stealth was her only option. The angels guided her when she slept, teaching her how to find north and south in the stars, how to know clean water from stagnant, how to name the leaves and berries around her and tell which ones were safe. She treated her aches with willow bark and bandaged herself with buffers of soft clean leaves. She passed the days in the shelter of her animal forms or huddled in the shade, thinking of anything but the black spots that swarmed intermittent in her vision and the weakness in her limbs. She stayed alive. It was a near thing.

When the berry season faded, and the leaves began to turn, the hunger snarled in her like a wild beast.

She stumbled to the nearest town under cover of night, shielding her body with her arms, following the smell of something delicious she couldn’t name that made her gut twist with starving, nauseous desperation. It was too open, the streets too broad, but every building’s door loomed and narrowed and filled her mouth with the suffocating taste of molding earth until her heart pattered the way it did in the rabbit’s body and the outlines of the structures blurred and blackened before her eyes. A too-cold breeze swirled through the streets and she shuddered from head to toe.

There was a man ahead in dark robes that swirled and her heart moved like rabbit’s feet fleeing in her ribcage. She forced herself to the alley, forced herself back, and bolted into the safety of the sacred darkness.

It was like that at the next few towns, too. There were kind people, here and there. One gave her a soft dark shirt and soft dark pants when she met him in the night, thrust them at her and skittered off when she tried through rattling gasps to ask if he wanted payment; a few innkeepers let her stay the night and gave her meals in the morning that softened the hunger’s brutal edge. But it couldn’t last, because the figures in the alleyways always came back, and names that she remembered from another life haunted her until she fled back to the safety of the trees.

The days grew colder.

The woods were safer further south, deep and dark, filled with birdsong and the golden colors of the waning year, the colors bright as life. She’d taken a sharp rock and cut a stick to hold her weight, easing the pressure on the days when walking was too much. Her breathing was growing easier, and her neck didn’t bleed anymore. But the words that would call magic to her side still couldn’t find their way from her mind out through her lips.

She was losing strength. The angels taught her traps and snares, but her feeble hands couldn’t tie the knots tight enough, and the few beasts she trapped slipped free when she tried to claim them. The herd of deer that once bolted at the sight of her now didn’t even flinch, the great many-pointed stag that led their numbers watching her passively while his mate and children drank at the riverside and foraged from the dying grasses. There was little to forage and less to live by, and some days the wavering mists of exhaustion hardly left her vision.

Sometimes, on the nights the angels didn’t come, she dreamed of the stag instead. Of his glinting eyes in the brush, watching her, unafraid. She murmured prayers in the morning to whatever forces listened.

She met the wolves in the pits of a moonless night, by way of gleaming golden eyes and an uncanny silence sweeping over her resting place, and she knew they’d come for her. She resolved herself to at least go down on her feet.

When the first wolf lunged, she lashed out with her staff, squeezing her eyes shut against the wave of fatigue that swept through her body from head to toe and sent the blood rushing out of her head, and felt herself make contact. The beast yelped, and she blinked spots from her vision just in time to fend off a second, sending it sprawling across the scrubby ground. Her hands shook.

“Please,” she tried to rasp, though nothing but a helpless wheeze came out. The wolves paced. She shifted back, making space, feeling acid adrenaline spread slow like venom down her arms and into her fingertips, biting back the way every motion tore at the scabby flesh of her still-healing abdomen.

The wolves kept pacing. In the dark, they moved like dancers, every footstep intentionally measured. Silent, despite their size, dwarfing her with heavy bodies—direwolves, not just wolves, but their largest and most vicious cousins.

Her stomach growled with a ferocity that nearly sent her to her knees.

The third wolf lunged. She grasped for the little magic she knew, one of the rare spells that remained without her voice, and scared it back with a shard of ice that burst into bitter steam across the pack. Its yelp was piercing and sharp and left her dizzy. Through the haze as she recovered, she watched the wolf pack flee.

She dreamed of the stag that night. She dreamed of blood and the careful steps of hunting beasts, tender in the foliage. She dreamed that she staggered to uncertain feet and the stag was there, his muzzle nudging against her arm, strong and stable, as she found her way upright. She wrapped her arms around him. He was warm and smelled of musk and the gentle decay of the forest floor in fall. He didn’t flee. His fur was soft like the velveteen skin of something whose name she’d forgotten, a precious something she’d loved in another life, beyond her memory, behind the veil of the endless dark. She awoke grasping for it, the name on her lips but not close enough to catch it, even if she’d had the voice to speak.

She dreamed fitfully, in bursts, interrupted by the empty claws of a hollow stomach scratching at the inside of her vessel like nails on slate.

The next day, something whimpered in the bushes when she went to change her bandages at the stream. She braced herself against her staff, and nudged aside the leafy branches, and found the wolf. It was panting, golden eyes glazed grey with pain, curled up defensively with hackles raised. It growled at her approach, but the sound was weak, and tapered to a whimper.

Near its feet, the ground was muddied with black-red blood. She traced the line from its paws to the place in its side where the fur was shaved down to muscle and a thin line of bone. The ghost of a spell and an icy projectile flashed across her memory.

Her hands were shaking again.

She went to the water. This stream ran clear and cold, down from somewhere in the mountains, carrying the mineral taste of glaciers high above. Flakes of mud and blood trailed free from her hands when she dipped them in the current, and she watched them swirl away through the eddies and whorls.

It was all mechanical, in the end. She pried a piece of moss from the bank, hefted it, ran it through the water and watched the dirt run off the roots towards the valley. Washed it clean, squeezed it under the surface and watched it fill with water. Stood and turned back to the forest.

The beast didn’t calm, but it didn’t bite when she pressed the pad of moss as gently as she could against the gash. It snapped, and she looked it in the eye, waiting. Its jaws were wide, teeth yellowed and worn from use. It could tear her to ribbons even now, if it had the nerve. She wouldn’t last long.

She washed the wound, and padded it with clean dry lichen, and flinched when she touched the beast’s side and a warmth filled her fingers that hadn’t answered her since she first returned to consciousness in the grave. She caught it like a soap bubble, soft as a memory. It settled in her chest and the breath that filled her lungs was deeper than she’d had in years.

She’d forgotten how it felt, when the warding darkness at her center answered. When the healing power in her blood responded to her call.

She forgot it again when the hunger returned in a wave of dizzying force, chasing all other thoughts from her mind. The wolf, rising from its rest in the hollow, tilted its head with a calculating glint and watched her. Gold eyes met gold.

It turned to follow the water, limping ever so slightly, and padded off.

She followed.

The pack was waiting in a stony cavern where the stream met a sparkling river. She felt their wary gazes long before she saw them, hidden as they were among the warm grey stone. But they recognized their lost member and pounced on him, tumbling together in a massive joyful bundle over the sandy patch of riverside, and before long it was like they hadn’t even seen her. She found a bright place on a rock by the shore, and waited for the sun to warm her bones more than the hunger chilled them.

Across the river, the bushes rustled. She knew what she’d see there.

The stag disappeared into the brush, and her vision blackened.

She awoke to the hot wet stickiness of a tongue on her face, and flinched, recoiling from the threat. In front of her sat the injured direwolf.

“Hi,” she whispered, bracing herself. “Hi there.” The words stuck in her wound and scraped.

The wolf cocked its head, stood, and licked her face again. It… did not try to bite her head off. This was not a situation she had anticipated. She particularly did not expect to be licked a third time. The wolf’s breath almost made her faint again.

Behind the wounded animal, the packmates slunk forward, watching her. Waiting.

The hunger in their eyes was a mirror of her own, and the shapechange came in its aching wake.

She followed them, that night, in a wolfish skin that matched their own. It wasn’t long before she had to pause, the time limits of her wildshapes forcing her back to rest while the pack moved on, but the howl carried on. They didn’t like to leave their own behind. She learned their faces—the mother the first to lunge, the father the second, the grown pups that followed them with their own faces and minds and hearts. They walked the trails of the forest, and she learned their gait, their stalking dance, their silent patience.

She slept between great warm bodies, and dreamed of blood and meat and the beasts that once wore the bite-marked bones on the floor of the den.

In the days, she jostled with the pups as one of them while she could. When she couldn’t, she rested on the rock by the river, while the echoes gnawing in her stomach dueled the white-hot claws of her bone-deep scars. She scrounged late-season eggs from a duck’s nest and swallowed them raw, on her hands and knees in the riverbank mud, eggshells scraping her gums and spilled yolk staining the ground, and coughed up half what she found when her scarred neck screamed with pain from bending low. It staved off the ache for an hour. She scraped up the spilled remains in her hands and wept.

On the fifth night, she followed the pack to a valley full of marsh-weed, where they found a limping boar. The pack struck in a whirl of fur and fangs, iron-stink staining the water. They fought her back from the bounty until the leaders took their share, but the scraps she claimed sated something, hot and vicious in the pit of her gut.

It was enough for a day.

She dreamed of it after, the blood that dripped from her fangs, the viscera on her tongue, the hot iron taste of it, the texture of muscle rending against her jaw. The heat on her lips and gums, bone crushing and crunching and cracking in her grasp, the relief like a soft warm pelt at the end of a long day’s journey as the soft squishing prey slid down her gullet like a prayer…

She dreamed of it night after night after night, waking with saliva in her mouth, thinking of it between the angels’ words, the ghost of that sensation dancing through her mouth in all her forms. She sat by the river and echoed it, conjuring up the giving resistance of flesh under her teeth, biting her tongue till it bled to remember the taste. She dreamed of nothing but. She dreamed even in her waking hours, as the first autumn frost laced over the land and the pack sat full and happy from the hunt.

She dreamed of it until the dream consumed her, empty of everything but teeth.

She left the den on an ice-bitter evening under ponderous slate skies when the dull weight of the thought hung heavy like an overripe fruit, when she wondered what the wolves would feel like beneath her fangs, if their heavy furs would rip and tear the way that scrap of boar did or if they’d linger in the teeth and scratch and bristle. She slunk up the hill to the north on the pack’s favored trail, filling her muzzle with the scent of heavy musk and petrichor.

The stag was waiting.

His antlers glinted in the cold dead moonlight, graceful as a halo, round as the crescent moon. He turned his head. She met his eyes and lunged.

She tore out the flesh of his neck like pages from a holy book, paper beneath her fangs as his blood ran like wine at a ritual. His stomach opened just as easily, staining the fallen leaves in garish scarlet, and his legs kicked feebly as she tore through the viscera that spilled free, relishing in the iron stench. Mouthful after mouthful, she ate her fill. She tore through muscle and tendon until she finally sank her teeth into his bright-hot heart and swallowed it in shreds. It might have still been beating, or the pulse between her jaws might have been her own, racing and vicious. She felt every piece reach her stomach, filling the void, hot in her chest like a hearthfire, bright as a star, sweet and tangy in the wolf’s senses and prickling in her own.

She hunted the liver down among the mess and swallowed it next, and the kidneys, and parts she knew no name for that glistened red and pink and sickish yellow in the light. She savored the feeling, the soft wet warm of it, the taste of the life that would fuel her own. She pried out the lowest of his ribs and it crackled in her jaws and she chewed out the marrow until there was nothing left of worth.

She didn’t know when he stopped moving, only that eventually, he did. It took too long.

When the wolf’s stomach filled, she lost the shape and scrabbled at the stag with her own weak human-shaped hands, her fingers shaking, nails digging into the slickened meat for purchase and prying up scraps to devour. She shook and shuddered and buried her own face into the stag’s shattered chest, drinking the lifeblood until it dried sticky on the edges of her skin, until she was full, until her aching stomach silenced and stopped and grew bloated with bleeding flesh.

She raised her head and her gaze caught upon his eyes. They were wide, and glassy, and milky with the haze of death.

She turned away from the kill and threw up nothing but bile, choking on the taste of steel.

“Thank you,” she murmured, too hoarse for anyone to hear, shuffling to the side and cradling his head in her lap, the warm blood filling her soft dark pants and seeping through to her skin. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Thank you.”

She leaned over him, wrapped her arms around his neck, curling her fingers into his short soft fur. Velveteen. Buried her face in his, her eyes hot and stinging, she swore she felt the ghosts of hands in her hair as the blood dried sticky on her face and melted down her cheeks. She clutched him tight enough to strain the scabs down her chest and belly, threatening to once again reopen the wounds. And she stayed there, waiting, until nothing came. Her stomach was quiet.

As she rose to her feet, she carefully bent and lifted as much of the stag as her body could manage. He was lighter than seemed fair, even to her haggard limbs.

Her hands didn’t shake.

There were hunters in these woods. The angels had told her, murmurs in the night, between the endless thoughts of hunger. They could help her. She stumbled through the brush, dragging the stag behind her, listening for someone larger than herself.

In the hours before the dawn, she found a young man in the valley, carrying a crossbow and a knife. He stiffened at her approach, and stood there wide-eyed, watching.

The words she spoke to explain herself died in rasping whistles in her throat, but still he watched, rapt, his eyes darting between the stag and her own face.

“You… you killed that?” the man asked, gesturing.

She nodded. Her neck twinged. She felt the man’s gaze skirt over her scarred neck, her hands slick with blood, the wrinkled scabby mess of her stomach where it was visible between the hem of her shirt and her makeshift belt.

“Do you… need to… take it somewhere?” She shook her head. The man swallowed. “That’s a lot of meat for one person. Erm…” He looked around, and she tilted her head. “…Do you know how to treat it? If you’re planning to eat that yourself, you probably want to salt-preserve it, it’ll spoil quickly otherwise. I could… help?”

She shook her head quickly, forcefully, then nodded, please, and the man flinched. But he was true to his word.

He led her to a clearing, his hands fluttering and his soft eyes nervous as she followed like a wraith, and showed her how to lay the stag down and open the rest of its body with a clean sharp knife. How to strip the meat from the bones, careful and keen, and process it into chunks and then lay it in pieces in salt to let it dry. She watched the process with singleminded focus, noting down every last motion, memorizing each flick of the knife.

He let her borrow his blade, so she could clean the carcass and keep that velveteen skin. With a few weeks’ drying and treatment, it would make a good blanket to last the winter through. She stripped the stag to the bones, and kept those as trophies. That night, the angels taught her to sharpen them into knives.

When the man had left, knife and bow in hand, retreating into the shadows, she realized that he never once quite looked her in the eyes.

She kept the skull. Late at night she stared into its face, searching for the glint of the stag’s all-knowing gaze in the depths of his bones, knowing there was nothing on the other side. She stared at him until somewhere deep inside, a part of her became him. Until his eyes became her own.

She took the form of a deer in the morning, wearing the weight of his antlers like a crown. The herd moved by her in the bushes and watched her like a ghost.

She went south. The winter was upon her, and it was time again to travel. The herd had enough to haunt them.

#dnd fic #this is... more gruesome than i usually go in for but it was fun to write #the way this feels like cannibalism when it definitely isn't #but at the same time in some metaphorical sense it kind of is #it's more... killing somebody and then stealing their skin #hush is a creepy forest witch who talks to angels and makes people nervous #and i love that for her #the hunter she met in the woods is just some sad little himbo trying to feed his family and thanking the gods he wasn't murdered by the fey #100% that man thought hush was either a faerie or a demon and feared for his LIFE #i told the DM that someday i would love her to just randomly bump into that guy again #because now that she's healed enough to /talk/ again she wants to thank him and will be all excited to see him #'omg it's my best friend!!!' meanwhile this poor guy is shitting himself 'oh fuck oh no i DID accidentally sell my soul to the fey'#hush is one of those characters i categorize as 'obliviously terrifying'#she is just a gal trying to survive and trying to regain her sense of self after being violently dehumanized for over a decade #she encounters other people and is overwhelmed but tries to be 'normal'#she just... fails to realize that between the aasimar angel traits and the inability to talk and the telepathy she uses to compensate...#she is very scary to other people #but then you talk to her and she is in tears of joy bc she had a fresh baguette this morning and it was really good #and it's like... ah. she's just poorly socialized

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