TITLE: Bait and Trap

AUTHOR: Aviatrix

PAIRING: Tommy/Merton, Tommy/other

SUMMARY: Wolves are predators and Tommy doesn't forget that. Dark.

DISCLAIMER: I have no idea who owns the show and characters, but it sure isn't me.

A/N: Tommy's a little OOC, I know. Bear with me here, okay?

xxx

The boy with the wolf inside him is dancing underneath the strobelights, disco-ball-glitter racing across his hands held up in the air (fingers curled like claws). In front of him, like a part of him, is a girl with long black hair and closed eyes, silver jewelry around her wrists.

He can almost hear the blood rushing through her veins, beneath the skin, beneath the silver. Like a mouse-trap: this is the bait, this is the cage. But that's not quite right, because he is the thing that the mice will run from; the teeth of those metal jaws will never close around him.

He whispers something into her ear, and they leave slowly, drifting and weaving through the pushing/pulling throng, hands all over each other as they walk through the back door.

She doesn't notice when he slips the bracelets off her wrists.

xxx

Merton blushes easily, red spreading like a rash on his pale skin. Tommy knows that the lightest bite would raise pink marks, that the slightest scratch from a claw would leave a line like an "I-was-here". He carries that thought with him to bed sometimes, keeps it in his head along with the rest of his memories of black hair and pouty lips. In sleep and under covers, the wolf leers behind his eyes and turns those lines into gashes, those welts into cuts.

He wakes up sometimes with the sound of screaming in his ears.

xxx

They wind up drunk in the club, Merton almost passed out, his head lolling back against his chair. Tommy watches him, fuzzily. The alcohol blurs Merton's hair and face, but the silver ankh that's tied around his neck is in sharp focus. It's reflecting the red light that filters down from the ceiling through the smoky haze, and it's the color of a blush, a fresh scratch. He leans over and (as gently as he can, his fingers fumbling) takes it off and slips it into his pocket.

Take him, his body says. Take him and make him yours.

The boy says no and the wolf says yes, and Tommy's not sure whether he took Merton home and left him alone, or if he led him behind bushes and into alleyways, if that taste of blood in his mouth is real or just imagined.

Maybe it doesn't matter.

He tosses the ankh into a trashcan on his way home.