prompt: wyaddison + scars
I have to go, he says, his eyes dark and heavy, his shoulders half-turned towards the mountains already, and the words haunt her for days, weeks, months-
Years. Two years.
She thinks she hears them sometimes in the dead of the night, howls echoing in the still and empty air, all the way to Seabrook. She goes to the den occasionally just to be sure she's imagining the sounds, but it is always empty and cold, and she always walks home alone, the now-familiar trees her only company.
She throws herself into work and cheerleading, and family. She almost goes back to Zed. She tries to forget.
When, lying awake in the dead of night, the window open to catch any kind of cool breeze, she hears a howl echoing louder than she ever has before, she opens her eyes and finds she has never forgotten a moment of her time with him.
She bolts upright, hair flying, eyes searching the world beyond the open window – but of course, all she can see is the stars, and the moon hung full and bright. She sits and watches it uncertainly, until she is almost sure she'd imagined it…and then the howl sounds again, long and mournful and searching, searching, searching. She scrambles from her bed, kicking at her sheets to free her legs, and rushes to the window to look out on-
Her eyes never find the mountains, because they are fixed on the figure slumped under the tree in the garden below.
Please don't leave, she says, and every day he sees her smiling in his mind as he rips and tears and runs and runs and runs.
He thinks he sees her sometimes in the daylight, a flash of white between the trees, a footstep behind him that is light and balanced on its toes, like hers. Once, he sees eyes that he thinks are hers, staring at him from across a clearing, but the blood splatters and the eyes glaze over and he decides not to see her in the forest anymore, for fear of losing her memory out here in the mountains.
It's almost easy to forget her once he does it, to leave her behind with the fire and the ocean and the den, with everything he thought he knew. He throws himself into the work, bloody and bitter, and when his sister grins with sharp teeth and wicked eyes, he smiles back, blood dripping from his claws.
When it's all done, when they run home all red-eyed and exhausted of power, when it's been so many sleepless days and bloody nights that all that fills his head is the forest and the dangers it could hold, he comes across a particular cave in the valley, filled with the ashes of old fires, and something stirs in his memory.
It is something human, something too convoluted to fight through the strength of the moonstone that buzzes in his mind, too tame to register in the thoughts of an untamed beast But it is there and it happens and he remembers – her smile, and the flicker of the fire as it lights up her face, and eyes that are soft and blue as a clear morning sky, and happy and staring and glassy and dead against the-
He blinks, and he's sitting in damp grass under the boughs of her old oak tree, the calls of his pack ringing in the warm night's air.
"Wyatt?" she whispers as she creeps across the grass, and the way she says his name, so soft and questioning, pulls him from his reverie.
"Addison," he whispers, the name sweet like honey upon his tongue, a taste he has been denied for two long years. Emboldened by the sound of his voice, she closes the gap and sits beside him, a smile creeping across her face, the joy shining from her eyes.
"I was starting to think you'd never come home," she says, quiet, like she's embarrassed to admit it. Like he's thought of her every day and she's put him out of her mind. Oh, how the opposite must be true, he thinks, and stares at the grass and the way the moonlight shines silver against it.
A breeze whispers through the night, ruffling the leaves of the trees and running its fingers through the short grass of the lawn. The silver reflections dance and sway, blades of light in the darkness, blood soaking into the dirt-
"Are you okay?" she asks, breaking through the ringing in his ears, and for the first time, he turns and looks at her properly. She is older; there is a different kind of wisdom in her eyes, still youthful but with years behind it she'd never had before, a weariness that only comes from living young and alone in the world. He is older too, but weary in a different way, broken down but not yet built back up, his head filled with awful things and the sharp scent of the forest nearby, the indescribable pull of the mountains and the moonstone that he has been slave to for far too long.
She sits there, shining, perfect, radiant, her lips pressed together in concern, her eyes wide and blue and filled with joy even as she worries over him, and the sight of them makes him smile despite the things that echo in the back of his mind. He's seen her this happy before, of course, many moons ago, but never with these eyes – eyes that are more wolf than human, sharper and keener of sight and meant for spying traps and hunting prey, and yet he still wants to-
He leans closer, a hand curling around her waist, the other tucking back a lock of her hair. His rough thumb brushes the soft skin of her cheek, and he can feel her shiver at the warmth of his skin, at the sharp edge of his claws. "Can I…?" he whispers, but there's no need for the question; before he can find the rest of the words, her lips steal them from between his, kissing him with all the longing of the years he has left her alone.
It almost feels wrong to kiss her back – she is so soft and tender and cautious even as her hand trails down his chest. He is hungry and desperate in response, his mind filled with all the things he had forgotten about her, itching to learn them all again as he leans closer and kisses deeper, his fingers tangled in her soft hair.
Her hands find the hem of his shirt, threadbare and fraying, and slip under, cold on the warm skin of his back. He's too busy kissing her to really notice, to remember what happened, caught in the middle of being a wolf and a person. Her fingers creep upwards, exploring every inch of his skin, and then they find the-
She runs a hand across the scars on his back, long welts of skin, raised and knitted untidily together at the bottom of his ribcage, and he explodes.
Like he's been stung, he rips away from her, scrambling back out of her reach. His eyes are wide and his breath comes in shallow gasps – he's hyperventilating, but he doesn't notice because his head is full of awful things, of dark and light and screeching voices and the quiet, wet sound of flesh splitting open.
He's in the forest, he's climbing the mountains, he's ghosting through the trees on the trail of something with two legs and a stone that beats against its neck, only when he runs and leaps it is not there and the only thing around him is the long, sharp claws that are carving through his flesh, tapered to a point and hard as steel, deep enough that they scrape against his bones.
He screams but maybe no sound comes out, he fights back, but his attackers are nothing, and then they are shadows, and then they are dead at his feet and his sister is grim but satisfied and he is lost in the wild and doesn't remember what a home is or where to find it and blood coats his hands staining his skin forever, forever, forever-
"Wyatt," she says somewhere, close by, and a hand he first thinks is Willa's presses against his knee. "Wyatt!" But he's soaked in blood and he's not sure how to keep his teeth from flashing at anything that moves, and he's about to die but he's the only one that lives, and nothing is safe, nothing is assured. His bone is exposed, his blood runs free, and a knife of pure silver flickers between fingers, reflecting off of yellow eyes…
It fades slowly, the disjointed illusion of battle, the fake memory that never quite becomes the truth. The feeling, perfectly recalled, of split skin and pouring blood and the flash of bone his sister must have seen when she first found him.
He comes back to Addison's soft voice, to her hand on his shoulder and her eyes shining with worry. The joy is gone from her face, and it kills him that he has done that, that he has been the one to ruin it all.
"Sorry," he mumbles in between her whispered nothings. She stops short and stares at him with worried eyes, like she doesn't know if she can trust him or not.
"What was that?" she asks, and she's being careful to move slowly and speak clearly, like he might shy again if she does anything bold. He takes a breath to calm the jitter of his nerves, the shaking of his hands as he folds them in his lap where they can't hurt her.
"It's just a scar," he tells her, because the other answer, the answer she's actually looking for, is too long and too painful to recount.
"Can I see?" she says. He doesn't miss the twist of her lips that means she really wants to ask something else. Instead of answering, he plants his hands on the ground and shifts, turning slowly so that his back is to her.
He sits, shoulders hunched and silent, as she lifts his shirt, just far enough to see the damage, the long slash of claws rendered hard and clear across his back, curving downward from his spine to his hip. Her breath catches in her throat, but she doesn't try to touch them again – just stares, the material of his shirt bunched in her fist and resting gently against his shoulder. He wonders if she will notice the other ones, the smaller scars, the fading blue and black of bruises that still mottle his skin, or if this one would fix her eye, would make her blind to everything else he has suffered. He wonders what she will say, later, when she notices the marks of a blade crisscrossing through his pack mark, the welts of marked and burnt skin across his arms, the small but significant weal of puckered skin where a bullet has torn through his stomach, forever lodged somewhere beneath his skin, unreachable.
She lets go of his shirt, hiding the scars, and creeps back around to face him again, close enough that she can take his hand and all he can see is her eyes, as endless as the ocean and churning with so many thoughts and emotions that he can't keep up. "Will you tell me what happened?" she asks – no, begs, her voice no more than a whisper, her fingers cold but comforting, squeezing at his own. He holds on to her like a lifeline, even as he shakes his head and tries to look away, to see anything but the concern in her eyes.
"No," he says, and it's the first time today that his voice has not wavered. "Not yet."
She considers it, face twisting into an expression he cannot read. For a minute, he's afraid; that she will press him for an explanation, or that she will get up and walk away into that house, that she will scream at him for being gone so long, that she will kick and claw and beat at him until he cries for mercy on the ground (he won't fight back. He'll never fight again).
"Okay," she says eventually, and relaxes, unaware of the way his mind reels, of how he has to stop himself from flinching before he even hears the answer. "One day, maybe." She looks at him, like she expects him to say something, but all he can do is try to still the shaking of his hands and the spiral of his mind, so sure that he is in danger even when he tells himself he is not.
"I still love you, Wyatt," she adds when he can't find anything to say, like she's trying to reassure him. "I've waited every day to tell you that. I don't know what happened out there or if I can help you, but I'm here, if you want me to be."
His eyes snap back to her, wide in disbelief. "What?" he says, and lets the words echo in his head a moment, to be sure he's heard her right. "Of course I want you to be here. I only ever wanted to come home to you."
She smiles, a slow, small thing that creeps onto her lips and lights up her face better than any moon or sun could ever hope to. She lets go of his hand and throws her arms around him before he can stop her, so fast that he flinches and then relaxes when she does not let him go. They sit there like that for a long time; she wants to comfort him, to give him all the things she can't find the words to say, and he cannot find the strength to let go, lost in her arms and the inertia of being home, of trying to find his way back to what he was before.
"I'm sorry," she whispers in his ear, like she's not everything he needs, and a sob rips at his throat, drowning out the sound of his pack howling as they look for him in the woods.