Title: Instinct
Fandom: Wolf's Rain
Length: 533
Characters: Toboe, Tsume, Kiba, Hige, Lira
Pairings: None.
Summary: Although he's been raised a human, Toboe is a wolf. Sometimes it shows.
Notes: Yeah…not too sure where this one came from. I haven't updated in months and months (sorry!) but this one just popped up out of nowhere late one night. Inspired by the proverb, "Instinct is stronger than upbringing."
Only an hour or two after meeting the first of his kind, Toboe gets to talking about his Granny, thinking the scarred wolf would understand. Instead, Tsume insults the both of them, saying she only kept him as a house pet. That hurts, that hurts a lot and Tsume doesn't know what he's talking about! Toboe snarls for the first time, and for the first time anger really rises in him and it's like this older, jaded grey wolf really brings out that nasty part of him he's always ignored.
On the street, Toboe thinks about Tsume and seethes, aggression filling him and giving him the strength to scare off those stupid crows. Then Lira appears and screams, and then she wails about him being a freak and yells at him to stay away.
"Why? Didn't you come here to catch me?" Toboe glares and the smell of her fear fills his nose. He reaches for her angrily, overcome by some instinct he didn't know existed until Lira falls and he realizes what he's doing.
Then, later, when the pack is together and on the ocean of ice, Toboe's puppy legs and endurance aren't quite enough to keep up. Tsume and Hige make their remarks and his limits frustrate him to no end. His arm hurts and he's tired, and then that monster appears.
It knocks Kiba and Tsume aside like they're nothing, and Kiba screams when its tusk impales his leg. Tsume and Hige attack it, but it's like the monster doesn't even feel them through its thick skin.
Kiba makes a noise like a choked off scream behind his clenched teeth, and it all gets to be too much. Toboe's pack mates are in pain, are fighting, and he's so mentally and physically exhausted that he just can't do this anymore. For a moment he just sits there and shakes.
And then Toboe gets angry. He hates this monster that's hurting his pack, the only thing in the world he has left, and something deep inside of him snarls and rages and screams in a voice furious and howling and all he can do is react.
He screams out with the beast inside of him and lunges at the monster, sinking his teeth into its eye and holding on even after it's thrown itself underwater. He holds on through the freezing water, through ice and wind until finally it shakes him off, covered in ice splinters bigger than he is and streaked red with blood. He stares it down, that thing inside him snarling and howling for blood, and after a moment of animalistic intensity it falls down dead.
It takes a few moments before the horrible, raging beast inside of him calms and subsides. Toboe falls to the ground and shakes, horrified…but another, wide-awake part of him is triumphant.
Hige says something and it snaps him out of his stupor. "What got into you?!"
"Something happened," Toboe whispers through his shivers, remembering and trying to forget, "and then…I just…I just—I don't know it was like something deep inside of me just snapped all of a sudden."
He closes his eyes and clenches his fists and doesn't feel human anymore.