A teenaged boy kicked morosely at the grassy earth in an inner city park. It was late, and he'd normally be getting back to his foster home – but he couldn't. Not tonight.
They knew he'd be late, and didn't approve of him spending one night every other week out clubbing, but fortunately for him the agency had placed him with an understanding family. They knew it was hard on him, having his mother killed in front of him, and that letting off steam was essential.
They didn't know the half of it, though.
He looked at his watch. It was about half-ten. Good enough.
The boy began to walk, leaving the park and heading east – not towards the part of town where teens enjoyed spending Saturday nights with no school tomorrow, but towards a dilapidated former residential district half taken over by urban decay.
He headed quickly down the closed-in streets, glancing from side to side nervously. There were all kinds of criminals here, using the half-empty apartments for bases, living in them or just as storehouses.
His shoulder blades began to itch. This was dangerous – apart from anything else, he was wearing a clearly expensive jacket. Practically an invitation, here.
Footsteps sounded behind him. He quickened his pace, glancing back for a moment – and saw at least two people closing in behind him.
His heart hammered in his chest. The boy wasn't particularly well-muscled, and the footsteps were heavy. He could smell alcohol coming from behind him.
He broke into a run. So did his pursuers, catching up to him in seconds.
One of them – a burly man with a light beard – took his arm, twisting savagely.
"Right, don't move, hand over your-"
The boy's hand lashed out, hit the other man in the side of the throat, and didn't slow. An arc of blood splattered across half the street.
The first man heard more than saw what happened to his partner – a splash, a sick bubbling sound, and the soft thumps of a large man collapsing.
In shock, his grip loosened – and his intended prey, now the predator, tore out of it before punching the other hand straight into the attacker's heart.
Jacob Pond panted, surveying his handiwork. Both hands were splashed with blood and gore – but he could wash it out, and there wasn't any on the jacket. His claws had done the damage. And by now he was experienced in aiming, so the spray hadn't caught the rest of him.
"There, you bastard." He muttered, dark thoughts running through him for a moment. "Self defence. Monsters don't do self defence, right? That just makes me a freak."
Checking his claws were retracted and licking his fingers mostly clean, he pulled a pair of surgical gloves from his pocket. Filched from the school biology lab, they would make sure he didn't leave too much evidence, and keep his hands clean – well, stop them getting dirtier.
One of them had a knife in his pocket. Good. That was used to cut up through the base of the skulls of each dead man, and carefully excise the pituitary glands.
The first, he swallowed with a face – the taste was glorious, but he constantly reminded himself that it was part of the brain of a human being. He didn't want to become like grandmother had been, a rabid animal in human shape who killed and ate humans for pleasure.
He couldn't be like mother – who hadn't killed a soul until he himself had sickened on a diet of not-quite-fresh-enough brains. But he could hold up her ideals. Leave the innocent, prey on the predators, and get a job in a mortuary as soon as possible once he was mature enough to eat less fresh pituitaries.
The other gland was put in a test tube – again, stolen from school – and stoppered with a rubber cork.
He left the knife at the scene – hopefully it'd look like it was the weapon that had done the killing – and hurried off, no longer the innocent and naïve child he'd appeared but a shadow prowling the night.
Instincts usually sucked, especially for keeping a low profile, but they could be helpful sometimes.
It wasn't more than ten minutes before he entered his "den". A decaying apartment buildings had had the ceiling collapse on the second floor, making one apartment nearly impossible to access.
Jacob stripped off the gloves, pulling each one inside out as he did so, and crumpled them up inside tissue paper. His claws let him climb the pocked inner wall, crawl through the roof space, and come down inside.
There was a still-working freezer. That was the entire point of this safe-house, and he hurried over with his precious cargo.
Once the gland was in the freezer he relaxed a little. If it kept well, that was a good two months before he'd have to hunt again.
The gloves were wrapped into an old sock, still in the now damp and red tissue. It would go into the rubbish somewhere about halfway home, somewhere the bins were being collected the next morning.
After a few minutes, he finally came down from the adrenaline high and his hands shook.
It was worse, far worse, than the first time. Then he'd been wondering desperately what he could do to survive, without his mother's careful supply, and someone had tried to knife him for his wallet and it had all happened so fast.
It was Dean Winchester's fault, he thought. Who did he think he was?
Did he kill threats to humanity? No, because he'd left Jacob alive.
Perhaps he justified it to himself with some sick idea that Jacob wasn't yet a killer, so it wasn't right to kill him. But what did he think would happen, with an obligate carnivore left to fend for himself?
No, Jacob had started to suspect that Dean Winchester's reasoning had more to do with proving something to himself, than anything to do with justice. The Ponds were almost incidental – Dean was demonstrating that he, not Sam, knew best about who to trust.
Which, in the discerning mind of Jacob Pond, was complete bullshit.
Once the shakes subsided, he went over to the small kitchen. Washing his face liberally with water, then rinsing his mouth out, and brushing his teeth for good measure to eradicate every last telltale red fleck.
"The life of an urban fox…" he murmured. "I preferred when mom stole bits from the morgue."
He turned off the light, and snuck back out the same way he'd come in.
There was still enough time to actually go and enjoy himself, tonight, before he had to finish off his homework on Sunday.
AN: I just can't stop coming up with fic ideas...
This one focuses on Jacob Pond, the son of Amy Pond from Supernatural. An underutilized character on here, probably partly because he doesn't have a character tag of his own - and nor does his mother.
Jacob is really left in a horrible position at the end of his only appearance, with a dietary dependency on human brain (fresh, at that) and with the death of his mother at Dean's hands leaving him without the solution she'd been using - the morgue. (He's a kitsune, in case anyone had forgotten or didn't know).
I might well continue this, or I might not. Not sure.