Fic: First Bite, Part 1/2
Fic: First Bite, Part 1/2
Author: LMX
Fandom: Leverage
Verse: Werewolf!Alec 'Verse
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Alec/Eliot
Warnings: Strong language frequently
Spoilers: None
AN: For the hc_bingo square "werewolf: first bite", this fic doesn't actually feature the first bite, but covers the fallout (aka hurt) and the comfort, so hopefully it counts! I am playing in merry_gentry's sandbox for this fic, as I would like to think of this as background to THIS FIC.
AN Mark2: This is currently unbetaed, so if it's incomprehensible or unfollow-able, shout at me. If anyone in interested in the beta job, give me a wave.
AN Mark3: As you can tell, I'm working really damn hard on my thesis. ;)
-
Eliot Spencer had been living in the world of the supernatural longer than most people had the good sense to. He'd hunted things worse than any child's horror stories and lost family and friends to the same. When he started retrieving significant artifacts for other hunters he never thought it would be his way out, and he definitely never thought it would lead to a whole new family, or a hacker sharing his bed and slowly breaking through to his heart.
Alec Hardison had been fascinated by the supernatural since he was small, loving the self-sustaining mythology and the ever-expanding and evolving stories. Like most people, he had grown out of believing the stories when he was still young, but the romance and intrigue had remained. He had ribbed Eliot mercilessly when he'd found iron and silver knives in Eliot's collection, but Eliot had just turned it back on him and told him they were for killing 'things that don't go down easy' - teasing bastard.
They'd been together two years now, and Alec was slowly getting used to the idea that he was never going to know everything about his partner, but things like this still bothered him. This morning's paper was laying open on the kitchen counter when he stumbled out of his bed, one half crumpled like Eliot had fisted his hand in it. Eliot himself was in the other room, pacing up and down with a phone that Alec had never seen before pressed to his ear, growling into it. Alec took a seat in front of the paper, stretching out aching muscles and scratching at the fresh bandage high on his arm as he poured a coffee, not even trying to understand what Eliot was muttering about in the background. Eliot had perfected the tone of voice that was incomprehensible if you weren't the one he was talking to.
There were two big stories across the two page spread Eliot had nearly destroyed, along with a whole raft of smaller ads and interest pieces. One page was mostly dedicated to some long-serving local charity fundraiser who'd died and the other to an apparent spate of fatal animal attacks - three in one night - in the centre of the city, not far from their apartment. More details were being released as the police had run into trouble locating the animal. One investigator was suggesting that it might be a person carrying some kind of multi-bladed weapon and using substantial brute force.
Alec wondered if Eliot had known the fund-raising old biddy or the knife-wielding serial killer. One was a far more amusing idea than the other.
Eliot stepped into the kitchen and put his phone down on the table with exaggerated slowness. Alec could see him practically vibrating underneath his tightly held control. He picked up his coffee and stared into it for a bit.
"Don't leave the house after dark for the next few days." he said eventually.
Hardison raised an inquisitive eyebrow. "Problem?"
"Not for us." Eliot replied. "I called some people in, it'll be cleared up in a couple of days."
Alec glanced over the report again and shuddered. Psychos with knives. Yeah, he was staying home tonight. He'd get it out on the 'net as well. No point keeping good advice to himself.
-
It seemed like so long since they'd had a night in together, just them and nothing pressing to do or prepare for. They'd had long enough to eat a decent meal together and relax in front of the game. To enjoy each other's company properly, not just stagger home together, exhausted, and collapse into bed after the job.
They'd had the slowest, sweetest love-making session Alec could ever remember, and that was worth celebrating, if nothing else. Alec was going to be engineering some more nights where Eliot felt it necessary for them to get home early and make sure Alec stayed home, if that was the result.
This morning, though, he ached a little more than was strictly necessary and the bandage on his arm had slipped again. The wound underneath red and hot when he went to re-bandage it. He wondered if he was coming down with something. Or maybe the wound was infected. He followed that to its logical conclusion and headed out into the hall, panicked.
"Eliot!" he called. "My arm's infected! What do I do!? It'll fall off and I won't be able to type properly and you'll have to type everything for me and that'll be horrible because you can't type for shit, man! Fix it!"
Eliot looked up from his phone as Alec burst through the door. He was scowling, and Alec stumbled to a stop. "Yeah." Eliot said into the phone. "That just leaves the one..." Alec watched Eliot's eyes drop to his arm and whatever he was saying to whoever was on the phone trailed off, the hand holding the phone falling to his side, call forgotten.
That was so not a good sign. Alec swallowed hard.
Eliot dropped the phone on the ground and walked over to him. There was no mistaking this for a sexy you-just-got-up-and-look-hot walk. Eliot's gaze was fixed on the mark on his arm, just out of sight for Alec.
"What the hell is that!?" Eliot asked sharply, not meeting Alec's eyes. That wasn't helping his calm any.
"The night you spent at the hospital while they tried to stop you bleeding into your skull?" Alec reminded him. "Some guy grabbed me when I went out for snacks. I showed you when you got home, remember?"
"No, no. I remember that. But you said it was a scratch. I... fuck." Eliot walked over and stood behind Alec, pushing his sleeve aside to get a closer look at the wound. Alec tried to look over his own shoulder awkwardly. Eliot shook his head, running a gentle touch down the side of his arm. "I don't remember it being..."
"I figured." Alec replied, trying to stop his voice quaking. "You were totally doped up, man. Is it infected, though? Eliot? I cleaned it out like you said, and I've been changing the bandage every day."
"There's… fuck." There were tears in Eliot's eyes, honest-to-God tears, and Alec was beyond lost. "I didn't even think. How did I not know?"
"Is it bad?" Hardison gave up trying to make sense of the look on Eliot's face. "What the fuck, man?" he asked urgently.
Eliot seemed completely out of it. "We had nearly a month to get you integrated," he muttered to himself. "Fuck. I could have…"
"Eliot." Alec grabbed his arm hard as he started to turn away. "What…?"
Eliot span back around, face like fury. "That's not a scratch, Alec," he shouted, pointing at the wound. "And it wasn't some bum. It's a bite, and the fucker who bit you…" All the energy went out of him all at once. "He wasn't human," Eliot finished quietly. "Not entirely, not anymore."
It was official, Eliot had lost the plot. Not human? What the fuck? "Eliot, how hard did ya get hit yesterday?" Hardison asked, trying to pitch his voice low and reassuring.
"There was a rogue werewolf." Eliot evaded, and Hardison felt some kind of hysterical laughter bubbling up inside of him. Inappropriate responses to stress were totally gonna get him into trouble one of these days. "He's been going 'round turning people, leaving them to survive their first moon. Make their first kill."
Eliot walked across the room to pick up the morning's paper, and laid it out on the table. Alec followed him, dazed. The front page story was another handful of killings by the escaped bear-come-knife-wielding-psycho, nearly a month after the first attacks.
"That guy still not been caught, huh?" he asked faintly, tiny things connecting together in the back of his mind and making him wonder if he wasn't the crazy one.
"It wasn't one guy." Eliot said, "The first deaths were three different wolves, different size claw marks in each case. All three of those first wolves were picked up last night by the hunters I called in. There were two new sets of claw marks on the bodies last night, two new wolves who were turned between the moon. They've pinned one of them down, planning on making sure she changes tonight before they do anything about it." Eliot swallowed so loud Alec could hear it, and pushed the paper closer to Alec. "That just leaves one wolf."
"Hang on, no. Wait…"
Eliot shook his head. "I heard you coming back in last night, you left without waking me. I couldn't work out where you'd gone to so late, after I'd said it wasn't safe."
"Naw, man." Alec frowned. "I was in bed all night."
"Your shirt is on the bedroom floor, how'd it get torn?" There was some kind of bland emptiness setting into Eliot's voice and Alec didn't like it.
"I… I… Fuck you, I didn't kill anyone. This is fucked, man. Hunters? Werewolves? Nu-uh. Not funny."
"I look like I'm laughing to you?" Eliot growled, pushing away from the table.
"It was just some psycho off the street," he repeated. "I didn't kill anyone."
"There's a way to know for sure." Eliot disappeared into the bathroom, leaving Hardison to follow after him dumbly. He'd lost it, Eliot had completely lost it.
Hardison watched as Eliot pulled a bottle out of the back of the medicine cupboard and put it down on the side. He stared at it for a second and then turned back to Hardison, his face hard and serious.
"This is colloidal silver. It's supposed to be some kind of alternative medicine, it's never been proven to work," he said conversationally. "I'm gonna drink some - show you it ain't dangerous. Then I want you to take some."
Eliot carefully measured out 5 ml into a medicine-measuring cup, and then headed out into the kitchen. Before Alec had time to wonder if he could phone Nate for help handling psycho-Eliot, he was on his way back with a shot glass in hand.
"Hang on, man," Alec started to argue. "How come you get to drink some tiny..."
Eliot poured and downed a shot before Alec could finish voicing his misplaced objection, studying the glass as he swallowed, standing there a moment more as if making a point.
He slammed the glass on the side suddenly and walked away, leaving Alec with the rest. Alec watched him go, and then edged over to the tiny cup on the side. There was an acrid smell to it that got right to the back of his throat and made him want to retch. Eliot hadn't looked like he'd wanted to retch. He'd just swallowed it down.
Alec wanted to stand there and say it again - there's no such thing as werewolves. But there was something about the way Eliot was reacting to all this… Those tears hadn't been fake. That rage and hurt and shock hadn't been fake. Either Eliot was suffering from some serious breakdown here, or he was entirely serious about this whole thing. Which meant Alec had killed someone last night.
That really did make his stomach roll. Wanting it to be wrong, wanting that last piece of his sanity back, Hardison picked up the tiny cup and downed it.
When Alec stopped choking and heaving, and his vision cleared, Eliot was stood in front of him and there was a gun in his hand.
Alec scrambled backwards, ramming his back into the corner of the cabinets hard. His throat was too raw to shout or scream, and he couldn't take his eyes off the alien device in Eliot's hands, but he heard him say, "I don't want this, Alec. I don't want this," and the tears were back and clogging up his voice, and Alec wanted to tell him that he didn't fucking want this either, but it *hurt* and he was coughing again.
He managed to choke out, "Don't." and it was the most important thing in the world to him. "Teach me, man. Stop me hurting people, lock me the fuck up. Don't…"
Eliot slumped back against tiles, his hands shaking in their two-handed grip. "It's not that simple," he said, staring at the gun.
"Make it that fucking simple." Alec retorted, not recognising his own voice in the pained hoarseness.
Eliot let the gun drop to the floor and put his head in his hands, his shoulders shaking with sobs. Alec thought about now he should be trying to console his lover, but with that gun sat between them he couldn't even think to move. He felt slow and sluggish and wondered if that was the silver he'd just drunk, and if that meant he really was a werewolf, then he really had killed someone last night, and should he be stopping Eliot at all?
But fuck it all, he wanted to live.
"Eliot," he snapped, forcing himself forwards and grabbing the hitter's shoulder, shaking him hard. "Make it simple. What do we need to do?"
"Alec, you killed." Eliot said, arms wrapped tight around himself. Some part of Hardison wanted to be amazed that he was the one being calm and rational in this situation. "The pack'll take in a new were', even if they're a victim, so long as they haven't killed. Once they've killed, it's the hunter's job."
"There's a pack? Like… a werewolf pack?" Alec tried to keep the awe out of his voice, but even with everything that's happened… this is still out of the storybooks of his childhood.
"Local wolves, born were', or chose to be infected." Eliot explained blandly. "Victims of violent attack are different. Harder to control. More likely to go wild. More likely to kill."
"How do we stop this, Eliot? I don't want to die. And I sure as fuck don't want to kill anyone…" Alec swallowed hard. "Else." he added, his own voice wavering.
"You think we haven't tried?" Eliot demanded, suddenly animated. "There's a reason I got outta this life, Alec. I ain't a hunter anymore."
Alec felt like he'd been pole axed. "Hunters… You were…" He forced himself back on topic. "What have you tried?"
Eliot sank back against the counter, "I don't…" he started to refuse.
"This is my LIFE, Eliot." Hardison surged forwards, grabbing Eliot's shirt collar. "Tell me what you've tried!"
"We tried locking the victim up during the full moon." Eliot recited flatly, not pulling against Hardison's grip. "We tried having…"
"No, wait," he interrupted again. "Why didn't that work?"
"Please don't make me do this." Eliot whispered, looking everywhere but at Alec's face.
"MY. LIFE." Alec repeated.
"When we lock them up they go crazy, shift when the moon rises, and then beat themselves to death against the cage walls." Eliot said, his voice pointedly bland. Alec felt his stomach turn. "We've tried padding the walls," Eliot continued. "Tying the wolf down, sedating it, knocking it down with a silver drip… The wolf never survives past the second night of the moon."
"Alright." Alec replied weakly. "Not locking me up. Next."
"The pack works like a normal wolf pack. All of the wolves submit to the authority of an alpha male. We've tried having the head alpha of the local pack in with the wolf for their change. If it's already killed outside the alpha's authority the new wolf is rogue, it doesn't submit to his control and they fight. The new wolf generally dies. If the new wolf wins they go rogue."
"Like the one that bit me?" Alec asked, swallowing when Eliot nodded once in reply.
"We've had hunters sit in with the wolf for their first change." Eliot hesitated on this one, closing his eyes and dropping his head back against the wall. When he continued it was with a distinctive roughness to his voice. "We kept them sedated and on enough silver to keep them weak. They tried to ease them into the change, talk them though it, keep them calm enough to stay in control, aware of what's going on."
"That's possible?" Alec asked, feeling like he should be taking notes. A sickening churning in the pit of his stomach reminded him he wasn't just an observer in this. That he'd be the one changing tonight, if he survived that long.
"After the first couple of changes," Eliot hesitated again, cleared his throat. "If they're monitored right, a pack wolf can change at will, even outside the moon. They stay aware all the way through."
"Why can't I do that?" Alec pressed.
Eliot pushing him back into sitting, forcing him to let go of his shirt or rip it. "You haven't been listening," he growled out. "You were made by violence. You were *attacked*. The wolf in you is angry. It knows you don't want it there. It doesn't trust anyone around you enough to give over control of its instincts to your stupid human mind." He emphasised the last by knocking on Alec's forehead. "Most of the hunters killed the wolf before it turned on them. No one but them knows if they jumped the gun. Two hunters were killed by the wolves they were trying to save." Eliot leant back again. "I'd known Matty since before I can remember. When he killed my father I got to kill him."
Alec swallowed hard. "Shit," he muttered.
Eliot didn't look up or meet his eyes. "It doesn't work, Alec." he intoned, voice gone flat and empty again. "It never works."
TBC (ASAP x)
Author: LMX
Fandom: Leverage
Verse: Werewolf!Alec 'Verse
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Alec/Eliot
Warnings: Strong language frequently
Spoilers: None
AN: For the hc_bingo square "werewolf: first bite", this fic doesn't actually feature the first bite, but covers the fallout (aka hurt) and the comfort, so hopefully it counts! I am playing in merry_gentry's sandbox for this fic, as I would like to think of this as background to THIS FIC.
AN Mark2: This is currently unbetaed, so if it's incomprehensible or unfollow-able, shout at me. If anyone in interested in the beta job, give me a wave.
AN Mark3: As you can tell, I'm working really damn hard on my thesis. ;)
-
Eliot Spencer had been living in the world of the supernatural longer than most people had the good sense to. He'd hunted things worse than any child's horror stories and lost family and friends to the same. When he started retrieving significant artifacts for other hunters he never thought it would be his way out, and he definitely never thought it would lead to a whole new family, or a hacker sharing his bed and slowly breaking through to his heart.
Alec Hardison had been fascinated by the supernatural since he was small, loving the self-sustaining mythology and the ever-expanding and evolving stories. Like most people, he had grown out of believing the stories when he was still young, but the romance and intrigue had remained. He had ribbed Eliot mercilessly when he'd found iron and silver knives in Eliot's collection, but Eliot had just turned it back on him and told him they were for killing 'things that don't go down easy' - teasing bastard.
They'd been together two years now, and Alec was slowly getting used to the idea that he was never going to know everything about his partner, but things like this still bothered him. This morning's paper was laying open on the kitchen counter when he stumbled out of his bed, one half crumpled like Eliot had fisted his hand in it. Eliot himself was in the other room, pacing up and down with a phone that Alec had never seen before pressed to his ear, growling into it. Alec took a seat in front of the paper, stretching out aching muscles and scratching at the fresh bandage high on his arm as he poured a coffee, not even trying to understand what Eliot was muttering about in the background. Eliot had perfected the tone of voice that was incomprehensible if you weren't the one he was talking to.
There were two big stories across the two page spread Eliot had nearly destroyed, along with a whole raft of smaller ads and interest pieces. One page was mostly dedicated to some long-serving local charity fundraiser who'd died and the other to an apparent spate of fatal animal attacks - three in one night - in the centre of the city, not far from their apartment. More details were being released as the police had run into trouble locating the animal. One investigator was suggesting that it might be a person carrying some kind of multi-bladed weapon and using substantial brute force.
Alec wondered if Eliot had known the fund-raising old biddy or the knife-wielding serial killer. One was a far more amusing idea than the other.
Eliot stepped into the kitchen and put his phone down on the table with exaggerated slowness. Alec could see him practically vibrating underneath his tightly held control. He picked up his coffee and stared into it for a bit.
"Don't leave the house after dark for the next few days." he said eventually.
Hardison raised an inquisitive eyebrow. "Problem?"
"Not for us." Eliot replied. "I called some people in, it'll be cleared up in a couple of days."
Alec glanced over the report again and shuddered. Psychos with knives. Yeah, he was staying home tonight. He'd get it out on the 'net as well. No point keeping good advice to himself.
-
It seemed like so long since they'd had a night in together, just them and nothing pressing to do or prepare for. They'd had long enough to eat a decent meal together and relax in front of the game. To enjoy each other's company properly, not just stagger home together, exhausted, and collapse into bed after the job.
They'd had the slowest, sweetest love-making session Alec could ever remember, and that was worth celebrating, if nothing else. Alec was going to be engineering some more nights where Eliot felt it necessary for them to get home early and make sure Alec stayed home, if that was the result.
This morning, though, he ached a little more than was strictly necessary and the bandage on his arm had slipped again. The wound underneath red and hot when he went to re-bandage it. He wondered if he was coming down with something. Or maybe the wound was infected. He followed that to its logical conclusion and headed out into the hall, panicked.
"Eliot!" he called. "My arm's infected! What do I do!? It'll fall off and I won't be able to type properly and you'll have to type everything for me and that'll be horrible because you can't type for shit, man! Fix it!"
Eliot looked up from his phone as Alec burst through the door. He was scowling, and Alec stumbled to a stop. "Yeah." Eliot said into the phone. "That just leaves the one..." Alec watched Eliot's eyes drop to his arm and whatever he was saying to whoever was on the phone trailed off, the hand holding the phone falling to his side, call forgotten.
That was so not a good sign. Alec swallowed hard.
Eliot dropped the phone on the ground and walked over to him. There was no mistaking this for a sexy you-just-got-up-and-look-hot walk. Eliot's gaze was fixed on the mark on his arm, just out of sight for Alec.
"What the hell is that!?" Eliot asked sharply, not meeting Alec's eyes. That wasn't helping his calm any.
"The night you spent at the hospital while they tried to stop you bleeding into your skull?" Alec reminded him. "Some guy grabbed me when I went out for snacks. I showed you when you got home, remember?"
"No, no. I remember that. But you said it was a scratch. I... fuck." Eliot walked over and stood behind Alec, pushing his sleeve aside to get a closer look at the wound. Alec tried to look over his own shoulder awkwardly. Eliot shook his head, running a gentle touch down the side of his arm. "I don't remember it being..."
"I figured." Alec replied, trying to stop his voice quaking. "You were totally doped up, man. Is it infected, though? Eliot? I cleaned it out like you said, and I've been changing the bandage every day."
"There's… fuck." There were tears in Eliot's eyes, honest-to-God tears, and Alec was beyond lost. "I didn't even think. How did I not know?"
"Is it bad?" Hardison gave up trying to make sense of the look on Eliot's face. "What the fuck, man?" he asked urgently.
Eliot seemed completely out of it. "We had nearly a month to get you integrated," he muttered to himself. "Fuck. I could have…"
"Eliot." Alec grabbed his arm hard as he started to turn away. "What…?"
Eliot span back around, face like fury. "That's not a scratch, Alec," he shouted, pointing at the wound. "And it wasn't some bum. It's a bite, and the fucker who bit you…" All the energy went out of him all at once. "He wasn't human," Eliot finished quietly. "Not entirely, not anymore."
It was official, Eliot had lost the plot. Not human? What the fuck? "Eliot, how hard did ya get hit yesterday?" Hardison asked, trying to pitch his voice low and reassuring.
"There was a rogue werewolf." Eliot evaded, and Hardison felt some kind of hysterical laughter bubbling up inside of him. Inappropriate responses to stress were totally gonna get him into trouble one of these days. "He's been going 'round turning people, leaving them to survive their first moon. Make their first kill."
Eliot walked across the room to pick up the morning's paper, and laid it out on the table. Alec followed him, dazed. The front page story was another handful of killings by the escaped bear-come-knife-wielding-psycho, nearly a month after the first attacks.
"That guy still not been caught, huh?" he asked faintly, tiny things connecting together in the back of his mind and making him wonder if he wasn't the crazy one.
"It wasn't one guy." Eliot said, "The first deaths were three different wolves, different size claw marks in each case. All three of those first wolves were picked up last night by the hunters I called in. There were two new sets of claw marks on the bodies last night, two new wolves who were turned between the moon. They've pinned one of them down, planning on making sure she changes tonight before they do anything about it." Eliot swallowed so loud Alec could hear it, and pushed the paper closer to Alec. "That just leaves one wolf."
"Hang on, no. Wait…"
Eliot shook his head. "I heard you coming back in last night, you left without waking me. I couldn't work out where you'd gone to so late, after I'd said it wasn't safe."
"Naw, man." Alec frowned. "I was in bed all night."
"Your shirt is on the bedroom floor, how'd it get torn?" There was some kind of bland emptiness setting into Eliot's voice and Alec didn't like it.
"I… I… Fuck you, I didn't kill anyone. This is fucked, man. Hunters? Werewolves? Nu-uh. Not funny."
"I look like I'm laughing to you?" Eliot growled, pushing away from the table.
"It was just some psycho off the street," he repeated. "I didn't kill anyone."
"There's a way to know for sure." Eliot disappeared into the bathroom, leaving Hardison to follow after him dumbly. He'd lost it, Eliot had completely lost it.
Hardison watched as Eliot pulled a bottle out of the back of the medicine cupboard and put it down on the side. He stared at it for a second and then turned back to Hardison, his face hard and serious.
"This is colloidal silver. It's supposed to be some kind of alternative medicine, it's never been proven to work," he said conversationally. "I'm gonna drink some - show you it ain't dangerous. Then I want you to take some."
Eliot carefully measured out 5 ml into a medicine-measuring cup, and then headed out into the kitchen. Before Alec had time to wonder if he could phone Nate for help handling psycho-Eliot, he was on his way back with a shot glass in hand.
"Hang on, man," Alec started to argue. "How come you get to drink some tiny..."
Eliot poured and downed a shot before Alec could finish voicing his misplaced objection, studying the glass as he swallowed, standing there a moment more as if making a point.
He slammed the glass on the side suddenly and walked away, leaving Alec with the rest. Alec watched him go, and then edged over to the tiny cup on the side. There was an acrid smell to it that got right to the back of his throat and made him want to retch. Eliot hadn't looked like he'd wanted to retch. He'd just swallowed it down.
Alec wanted to stand there and say it again - there's no such thing as werewolves. But there was something about the way Eliot was reacting to all this… Those tears hadn't been fake. That rage and hurt and shock hadn't been fake. Either Eliot was suffering from some serious breakdown here, or he was entirely serious about this whole thing. Which meant Alec had killed someone last night.
That really did make his stomach roll. Wanting it to be wrong, wanting that last piece of his sanity back, Hardison picked up the tiny cup and downed it.
When Alec stopped choking and heaving, and his vision cleared, Eliot was stood in front of him and there was a gun in his hand.
Alec scrambled backwards, ramming his back into the corner of the cabinets hard. His throat was too raw to shout or scream, and he couldn't take his eyes off the alien device in Eliot's hands, but he heard him say, "I don't want this, Alec. I don't want this," and the tears were back and clogging up his voice, and Alec wanted to tell him that he didn't fucking want this either, but it *hurt* and he was coughing again.
He managed to choke out, "Don't." and it was the most important thing in the world to him. "Teach me, man. Stop me hurting people, lock me the fuck up. Don't…"
Eliot slumped back against tiles, his hands shaking in their two-handed grip. "It's not that simple," he said, staring at the gun.
"Make it that fucking simple." Alec retorted, not recognising his own voice in the pained hoarseness.
Eliot let the gun drop to the floor and put his head in his hands, his shoulders shaking with sobs. Alec thought about now he should be trying to console his lover, but with that gun sat between them he couldn't even think to move. He felt slow and sluggish and wondered if that was the silver he'd just drunk, and if that meant he really was a werewolf, then he really had killed someone last night, and should he be stopping Eliot at all?
But fuck it all, he wanted to live.
"Eliot," he snapped, forcing himself forwards and grabbing the hitter's shoulder, shaking him hard. "Make it simple. What do we need to do?"
"Alec, you killed." Eliot said, arms wrapped tight around himself. Some part of Hardison wanted to be amazed that he was the one being calm and rational in this situation. "The pack'll take in a new were', even if they're a victim, so long as they haven't killed. Once they've killed, it's the hunter's job."
"There's a pack? Like… a werewolf pack?" Alec tried to keep the awe out of his voice, but even with everything that's happened… this is still out of the storybooks of his childhood.
"Local wolves, born were', or chose to be infected." Eliot explained blandly. "Victims of violent attack are different. Harder to control. More likely to go wild. More likely to kill."
"How do we stop this, Eliot? I don't want to die. And I sure as fuck don't want to kill anyone…" Alec swallowed hard. "Else." he added, his own voice wavering.
"You think we haven't tried?" Eliot demanded, suddenly animated. "There's a reason I got outta this life, Alec. I ain't a hunter anymore."
Alec felt like he'd been pole axed. "Hunters… You were…" He forced himself back on topic. "What have you tried?"
Eliot sank back against the counter, "I don't…" he started to refuse.
"This is my LIFE, Eliot." Hardison surged forwards, grabbing Eliot's shirt collar. "Tell me what you've tried!"
"We tried locking the victim up during the full moon." Eliot recited flatly, not pulling against Hardison's grip. "We tried having…"
"No, wait," he interrupted again. "Why didn't that work?"
"Please don't make me do this." Eliot whispered, looking everywhere but at Alec's face.
"MY. LIFE." Alec repeated.
"When we lock them up they go crazy, shift when the moon rises, and then beat themselves to death against the cage walls." Eliot said, his voice pointedly bland. Alec felt his stomach turn. "We've tried padding the walls," Eliot continued. "Tying the wolf down, sedating it, knocking it down with a silver drip… The wolf never survives past the second night of the moon."
"Alright." Alec replied weakly. "Not locking me up. Next."
"The pack works like a normal wolf pack. All of the wolves submit to the authority of an alpha male. We've tried having the head alpha of the local pack in with the wolf for their change. If it's already killed outside the alpha's authority the new wolf is rogue, it doesn't submit to his control and they fight. The new wolf generally dies. If the new wolf wins they go rogue."
"Like the one that bit me?" Alec asked, swallowing when Eliot nodded once in reply.
"We've had hunters sit in with the wolf for their first change." Eliot hesitated on this one, closing his eyes and dropping his head back against the wall. When he continued it was with a distinctive roughness to his voice. "We kept them sedated and on enough silver to keep them weak. They tried to ease them into the change, talk them though it, keep them calm enough to stay in control, aware of what's going on."
"That's possible?" Alec asked, feeling like he should be taking notes. A sickening churning in the pit of his stomach reminded him he wasn't just an observer in this. That he'd be the one changing tonight, if he survived that long.
"After the first couple of changes," Eliot hesitated again, cleared his throat. "If they're monitored right, a pack wolf can change at will, even outside the moon. They stay aware all the way through."
"Why can't I do that?" Alec pressed.
Eliot pushing him back into sitting, forcing him to let go of his shirt or rip it. "You haven't been listening," he growled out. "You were made by violence. You were *attacked*. The wolf in you is angry. It knows you don't want it there. It doesn't trust anyone around you enough to give over control of its instincts to your stupid human mind." He emphasised the last by knocking on Alec's forehead. "Most of the hunters killed the wolf before it turned on them. No one but them knows if they jumped the gun. Two hunters were killed by the wolves they were trying to save." Eliot leant back again. "I'd known Matty since before I can remember. When he killed my father I got to kill him."
Alec swallowed hard. "Shit," he muttered.
Eliot didn't look up or meet his eyes. "It doesn't work, Alec." he intoned, voice gone flat and empty again. "It never works."
TBC (ASAP x)