A month had passed since the last full moon. School had ended with the typical pomp and circumstance. Teachers that still maintained control of their students had end of the year tests, presentations and projects. Those who had long since lost control of their students in the waning weeks of school, had abdicated their imaginary positions of power. Kurt's own school year had fizzled out into rather unimpressive nothingness.

Today was the first night of the full moon. It would be the first time he had seen his werewolf in a month. That is, if he wanted to see the werewolf. He felt like he had to see him, though. He missed the werewolf and not just the sex, either. The werewolf was sexy and fun to be around and Kurt was certain that the human part of him had to be just as good, if not better, than the wolf part. Kurt was determined to talk the werewolf into sticking around long enough for them to talk, not man to beast, but man to man.

xoxoxo

Wolf waited in the woods outside Kurt's house. Kurt: the human had said his name was Kurt. Wolf approved that name; it was short, simple and most important, it gave him another way to think of him than simply "this human," or "the smaller human" or "fruit basket-scented, scarred-rabbit human."

Wolf waited in the silence of the shadows. Starting at about ten o'clock, one by one, the lights flickered out. Around 11:30, the final light went dark. Moments later, the back patio light came on and Kurt slipped into the night. When Kurt had passed the tree line, Wolf followed him for a few minutes before padding up alongside him and rubbing his flank against Kurt's side.

"You're here. Good." Kurt sounded surprised, though Wolf couldn't fathom why. "The way you left so suddenly last time, I thought maybe you were done with me." Wolf licked at Kurt's hand, trying to be as comforting as he could. How he wished he could make this easy for them both. "Before this goes any further, I need to know. Do you like me? Or is this just about the sex?" Wolf cocked his head to the side. The sex was great, but he liked Kurt too. He felt drawn to Kurt: connected to him somehow, as though they had known each other for years.

Hoping to get his affection towards Kurt out in the open, Wolf, reared back on his hind legs and began furiously grooming Kurt's face. "Stop." Kurt turned his head away from Wolf's licks. "Stop" Kurt pushed at his chest. Wolf could easily overpower him if he wanted and keep licking him, but he relented and stepped back from Kurt, swiping his tongue over Kurt's face one more time for good measure. "Do you want to be my boyfriend?"

Boyfriend? Boyfriend means mate. Mate! Wolf started vibrating he was wagging his tail so vigorously. "So that means 'yes?'" Despite Kurt's earlier protests, Wolf licked at Kurt's face again. "If you and I are going to date, I need you to stick around once in a while. I want to know you as a person."

xoxoxo

The werewolf whimpered, lowering his ears. It was obvious the unhuman was sad about what Kurt had said, but there were any number of reasons that could be the case? Kurt went with what he assumed was the most likely. "Are you in the closet?"

It stared for a few minutes, not looking at Kurt, but not looking at anything else, either. Kurt didn't know what the creature was thinking about, but if he had, he would have been shocked to see the wolf's mind cycling through the sparse memories it had as a human. An imagine of an intense, tan woman with dark hair and scary nails threatening the Human with talks about closets and being forced out of one. An image of the Human staring into a closet, looking at the thick, sturdy beam that ran through it, a heaviness in his chest. He had no idea if the Human was in the closet. He didn't quite understand what that meant, but he would guess 'yes' if pressed to.

The werewolf didn't respond, but he didn't look guilty, so it probably wasn't that. "Do you have another boyfriend?" The werewolf immediately shook his head. Kurt raised an eyebrow. He could answer yes/no questions; that should make things interesting. "Are you too embarrassed for people to know we're together?" Again, the werewolf shook his head. Kurt was running out of yes/no questions to ask him, so he settled for something broad. "Is there a good reason you can't be with me outside of the full moon?" The werewolf leaned in closer to him; Kurt braced himself, expecting to get slobbered on again. Instead, he felt the heavy weight of a forehead pressed against his. "I'll trust you, for now. But someday, I'll need to know you, not just the wolf."

xoxoxo

Each night was the same; Kurt would meet up with the werewolf (who he found out actually liked being called 'Wolf' through a very long game of "Does your name begin with the letter 'A'? Does your name begin with the letter 'B'? Does your name begin with the letter 'C'?"), they would talk, they would play, they would have sex (often many times a night) and Kurt would wake up alone in the morning. During the full moon, it was a great deal; Wolf was a very attentive, loving, caring boyfriend. But, once the full moon was over, Kurt was lonely.

And then things got strange. About a week after Kurt's second full moon with Wolf, he started feeling strange. The tiniest things started making him sad to the point of bawling his eyes out. And not just Sarah McLachlan SPCA commercials. Then his sexy-pants became un-wearable, they were so tight. Then his normal pants. By the time the third full moon came around, everyone in the Hummel-Hudson household was carefully sidestepping the elephant in the room.

xoxoxo

Kurt waited on the back porch as the sun slowly set over the woods in the backyard. It was strange how the light changed as the sun set; sometimes, it felt like it was rapidly getting darker, sometimes it felt as though there were no change in the light. Eventually though, Kurt realized the sun was completely down and had been for some time. He could see Wolf slinking through the bushes that littered the tree line. He seemed to be pacing: agitated that Kurt wasn't coming out to meet him.

Kurt still needed a little bit of time to collect his thoughts. How would Wolf react? Would Wolf be excited? Or would he abandon him? Kurt felt like throwing up and not just from the intermittent nausea he'd been feeling the past week.

xoxoxo

Why isn't he coming? Come on, Kurt! We need to run. Run, run, run! Several times he made eye contact with him and he could see his eyes following him as he moved, so he knew Kurt knew he was here. But why didn't Kurt come? Wolf stuck his head out of the safety of the trees. A single paw followed after but Wolf quickly pulled back into the shadows: recoiling as though he'd been burned. Out in the open was a dangerous place for werewolves to be. Outside of the safety of the Redzone, there were few laws to protect Wolf from violent and scary people that didn't like unhumans.

After what felt like hours, Kurt pushed himself up off the patio steps and walked towards the trees. His shoulders were slumped, but otherwise, he seemed fine. Wolf continued to pace back and forth. The moment Kurt penetrated the woods, Wolf made to lunge at him, but Kurt held up a single hand, stopping Wolf in his tracks. "I need to show you something." Wolf sat back on his haunches, wagging his tail slowly. Kurt slowly unbuttoned his shirt. Unusually, Kurt wore nothing beneath his button-down shirt. Kurt was generally dressed in layer after layer of clothing, teaching Wolf a lot about patience when he was waiting for Kurt to get naked. When Kurt's torso was bared, Wolf could clearly see his mate had put on some weight. Rather than being flat, his stomach bulged slightly.

"I'm pregnant." Not understanding, Wolf leaned forward and sniffed at his mate's stomach. The more he sniffed, the more he realized Kurt's scent was off. Not the fruity soft smells that covered Kurt's scent, but Kurt's scent itself. It was less musky. He couldn't really describe the scent all that well; it wasn't a scent he'd come to associate with Kurt. "It's yours." Wolf still wasn't sure what Kurt was talking about, so he let him talk as he continued to sniff. "We're going to be fathers." Wolf started and backed up to look at Kurt.

Fathers. Was that what pregnant was? Was that what that smell was? His mate had a baby in him. A werepup. This was the most amazing thing he'd ever imagined!

Except…

The Human would be furious if he found out. The Human hated werewolves. The Human dreamed of hurting werewolves. The Human celebrated those that slaughtered werewolves and wanted to be one of those people himself. It was easier for Wolf to see things in the Human's memories when they were related to Wolf or to werewolves or from when they were One instead of Two. He remembered Human watching something on the television. There were images of other humans, humans with guns and knifes and cattle prods, torturing a werewolf. They hurt him bad; his howls and whines and whimpers still rang in Wolf's ears. Wolf didn't know what that wolf had done to deserve such a fate, but Human didn't care; all werewolves deserved that fate to Human.

Wolf whimpered. How could he protect his mate from his Human?

xoxoxo

The sun would be up in not too long. He and Kurt had been up all night together. Wolf was almost nervous he wouldn't be in his cage before the change. That would just make things even worse. He padded softly down the stairs and headed for the large metal box Human locked himself in three times a month. Human's father waited nearby, getting up to shut the basement door after Wolf. Wolf brushed his head against Human's father's hand, getting a gentle pet as he did so. It was hard for him to think of Human's father as his own father. He wasn't even certain if Human's father cared for him at all or simply tolerated the monster his son became during the time of the full moon.

Besides, there was another one he thought of as his father. Human had a human father; Wolf had a Wolf father.

Seven years earlier

The change hadn't been painful, though maybe he was too traumatized to register the feeling of his bones growing and realigning, fur sprouting from his pores, his organs shifting. All he could focus on right now was his mental pain and the uncontrollable anger. He wanted to rip and tear and shred and destroy.

The forest floor felt strange under his paws and he was loathe to admit it, not entirely unpleasant. The pads on his paws were thick and hard, making it easy to traverse broken branches, thorns and nettles. He wasn't sure where he was going, but his feet and nose seemed to know, so he trusted them, as disgusted as it made him.

After hours of travelling, he had passed out of the Redzone and into a "Crisis zone". "Crisis Zone" was one of those strange buzzwords that goes years without usage and then all of a sudden is uttered on the lips of every man, woman and child that watches the news. A Redzone, everyone knew, was a part-time habitat for unhumans. A Crisis Zone was an area where some unhuman had decided to ignore the Redzones: a place where an unhuman killed when and what it wanted. Usually humans.

He had left his home behind several hours ago, trying to find something he couldn't quite name: something he knew he would know when he found it. And he did. He was in the middle of a deep, foreboding forest, at least half an hour from a road in any direction. But here, far away from society, was a lone man, lying in a lawn chair not a dozen yards from a corrugated aluminum shed. He smelled like fresh dirt and metal.

Before the newly created werewolf could even gather his bearings, he had erupted from the bushes and dove at the man, ripping and tearing and shredding and destroying.

Hours later, as he limped, exhausted, back to his home, the change came again. It would be the second most significant change he underwent. As the wolf turned back into a human, One became Two. The Human couldn't understand, and didn't want to understand the horrors it had committed that night, so he forever separated his mind from that other part of himself. Wolf accepted the separation of the two; part of him understood that if the Human couldn't push down that part of himself, deep, deep down into an inaccessible part of his mind, it would destroy him. Or, alternatively, he would intentionally destroy himself.

Ten-year-old David Karofsky was completely oblivious to the fact that he was naked as he trudged through the backyard to his house. All he knew, all he could focus on, was the fact that he had killed someone: someone he didn't know, someone he'd never seen before.

And he'd liked it.

Well, perhaps 'like' wasn't the right word. It wasn't pleasurable; not like ice cream or a game of football. It was more like that sense of relief that came when a long school project was finally finished and handed in. He felt relieved.

…and filthy and disgusting and evil.

There was a light on the lawn, moving slowly back and forth. Over the pounding of his heart in his ears he could hear a voice. He knew that voice. Dad. "David!" His father came running towards him. David stopped walking, too numb inside to move anymore. His dad dropped to his knees and grabbed David's elbow, looking his son over, a look of horror in his eyes. "David? What happened?"

David chewed on his lips to try and stop the tears from coming. "I can taste him in my stomach." With that, David fainted.