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TITLE: Paint Stains
AUTHOR: Relala
BETA: lady of scarlet
FANDOM STATUS: Fanon
SPOILERS: For Broken and anything afterwards.
"Kids are blue. And red. And yellow. Jeremy amused. Decide he can give them a bath."
- ElenaMichaels Twitter (Kelley Armstrong)
When he tips his head back in the shower, letting the water burst from the ancient pipe with a metallic moan to stream over his acne-riddled face, Logan Danvers takes comfort in the fact that he can still see the paint colours on the ceiling. Still, after thirteen years, the faded colours remain on the roof, the faded memories inside his mind, hardly noticeable to anyone who didn't seek them out so very desperately. Someone who clung to those little spots of red and yellow and blue as if they were a buoy in the ocean of rough teenage life.
He can still remember that, as a little boy, he used to lie in the warm waters of his bath on Tuesday nights and imagine that those splotches and sprays of paint were the stars placed in a net of decaying wall, pulled down by his mighty Father's hands and mashed into the pieces of the household, blazing within the stones like pieces of sparkling broken glass. He doesn't know why or how he dreamed up this ludicrous idea, but it's always stuck with him.
Colourful stars, shattered glass, placed within solid stone walls. Unable to escape.
Trapped like the souls of mankind. Innocence that has been twisted and tainted by the touch of savage beasts, beautiful souls caged within the fleshly confines of wolves or brutally mangled half-forms. True horrors to be imagined when you close your eyes at bedtime, the boogiemen that will do worse things than crawl from your closet and hack your limbs off with a chainsaw and keep you alive in the process.
Little Logan used to wait with bated breath for the day when he would be "all grown-up" like the other werewolves of his Pack, pretending that he was his Father by stuffing a housecoat belt in the back of his pants and running through the hallways on his five fingered paws, growling at his babysitters and flashing his fangs at his twin sister. One day I'll be a great wolf just like you, Dad, seven-year-old Logan would laugh. And then his Grandfather Jeremy would scoop him up into his arms with a half-smile on his lips and beg him to "behave, please!" or he'd have to clean the grease marks off the wall.
These are faded dreams, however, which went out like red supernovas. Dreams which exploded in his face before they even had a chance to become reality. Supernovas that created a series of catastrophic explosions that rocked his fragile childhood world and sent the debris tumbling down upon his head. For the first time in his life there was a blinding light cast across his world and it revealed the truth.
Werewolfism was a curse.
Logan is a monster, or at least he'll be one soon, a four-footed animal with only half a human mind, a beast not because he'll have claws and a tail but rather because he'll be just as uncontrollable as one of the mutts. He thinks of Katherine, his beloved werewolf twin sister. She had her Change before he did and now she's so happy and so content and so blissfully at ease in her new body, a beautiful snow-white wolf that sparkles like moonlight in between the spaces of green forests and darkness.
Logan wonders if the human man she killed on her first night as a wolf thought that she was beautiful right before he got his throat ripped out. He can't help but picture it inside of his mind. Katherine's deadly white fur coated down in soaking red water as she licked her muzzle afterwards, cleaning away the taste or simply disappointed that there wasn't more meat to be had on the thin body. She's a monster now, Logan knows, and thinks that this is what he will inevitably become.
When the water begins to grow too cold, he shuts off the taps and merely stands there in the shower, droplets of water slowly cascading down his slender body as he shivers in the chilly air, not quite sure if he's cold because of the atmosphere or cold because of his thoughts. Logan's large blue eyes stare up at the ceiling without thought, still fixed on the faded paint stains without meaning to. The reds, the yellows and the blues.
So important, and yet meaning nothing.
THE END
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First draft: 9-11-09
Revisions: 10-16-09